I was noodling around at the library a while back, delving among the catalogs and inventories of the earliest precursors of modern museums, the so-called “wonder cabinets” of the 16th and 17th centuries–just why I happened to be doing that: don’t even get me started–when I came upon what seemed like my umpteenth eyewitness account of an actual human horn. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Indeed, any such inventory quickly affords a clue as to the principal force behind the unprecedented eruption of this taste for astonishment that characterized the 16th and 17th centuries, a hankering that hadn’t been there 100 years earlier and would fade within another 50, as the imperatives of a more rigorous scientific method gradually took hold: it was all that new stuff suddenly coming in over the European transom as a result of the concurrent voyages of discovery–America was blowing Europe’s mind with its moose antlers and purple macaw plumes and Aztec sacrificial urns....

To celebrate its tenth anniversary the Opera Factory is venturing out of its well-respected niche of reviving the zarzuela, Spain’s national folk-operetta genre, and offering a welcome Manuel de Falla double bill. Arguably the most inventive Spanish composer of this century, Falla did dabble in the zarzuela in his youth, but it was the 1905 La vida breve (“The Short Life”) that launched his career. An emotionally powerful lyrical drama rooted in populist sentimentality, the two-act opera shows Falla’s innate talent at work before it was influenced by Ravel, Debussy, and other impressionists....

About the closest thing we adults have to an oral tradition is chewing things over at the local tavern, the days of camp-fire story telling having long since passed. And Pretzelrod Productions’ collection of monologues, Sweat Dreams, under the direction of Dorothy Milne, is like one of the best such nights you can imagine, swapping stories between rounds of Rolling Rock. One by one the seven Pretzelrod women deliver autobiographical, almost confessional monologues that are at once brutally honest and dazzlingly hilarious, touching frankly on anxiety over aging parents, the workaday miseries of motherhood, and the pleasures of masturbation....

Sweet defined the silly edge of glam rock in the early 70s, playing a cheesy but hooky power-chorded bubble gum that made Gary Glitter seem profound, Slade heavy. The band supposedly had a certain naughty undertone–the history books tell us that some unspecified onstage bawdiness got them banned from certain British halls for a time–but this may be hype: in the recorded legacy, only “Little Willy,” a rather infantile ode to priapism, and “Wig-Wam Bam,” a nursery-rhymey fuck song, support the claim....

TED SIROTA’S REBEL SOULS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While hard-bopping neotraditionalists continue to rule the roost in the new jazz mainstream, Chicago–which has spawned the AACM, Hal Russell, and the Ken Vandermark axis–finds itself in the midst of yet another free-jazz revolution. Even some of the city’s hard-bop mainstays, like trumpeter Rob Mazurek and saxist Ron Dewar, can now be heard playing freer, more exciting music....

Can I get one autographed by Paul Sereno? For the person who has everything: a California company is selling fossilized dinosaur dung at $11.95 a poop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why Daley will win, according to Salim Muwakkil in In These Times (October 31): “Few black leaders in this city are willing to contest the argument that an African-American candidate must be fielded....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Art Jones [“Bigot for Hire,” July 22] is a friend of mine. I would trust him with my life. I doubt if Grant Pick knows anyone he can say that about. Art and I agree that the United States has been irreparably harmed by the rise of multiracialism, the end of the hegemony of the white race here....

Green Day Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the 20th anniversary of the birth of punk, the Summer of Hate, looms, this problem circles in on itself one more time. What do you call punks who look nostalgically back at an era that looked nostalgically back at yet another? Can you take them seriously? Or are latter-day punkers merely the 90s version of, say, rockabilly boys (and girls), wearing the costume and walking the walk as banners of allegiance to a lost and simpler time?...

BERNARD HAITINK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the head of the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam between 1964 and ’88, Bernard Haitink worked methodically to rebuild the orchestra made great by Willem Mengelberg, the legendary champion of Mahler and Richard Strauss. Without much fanfare, he succeeded; under him as under Mengelberg, the orchestral playing had a warmth and discipline that added gloss to its heavily Austro-Germanic sound....

The title of Cube’s latest offering, “North and South of the Border,” could just as easily be “A Showcase of Exotic Instrumentation.” First comes the oboe d’amore, teamed up with viola and percussion as accompaniment for the singer in Patricia Morehead’s A Chantar (1993). Morehead, a transplanted Canadian, has taken a troubadour tune as her motif and poetry by the medieval French court musician Beatritz, Contessa de Dia, as her text in this inventive update of Renaissance polyphony....

The Dodo Bird In Fried’s play, set in a midwestern industrial town, the Dodo Bird is fortunate to work as a millwright’s helper, due to the kindness of millwright Russ Nowark, who keeps him on despite frequent hospital visits for the d.t.’s; the job is just enough to get by on. The story of how this particular human being reached this point of desperation and isolation is revealed during one evening in a bar across from the foundry, where the Dodo Bird is sober, washed, and waiting for a visit from his estranged daughter....

For the 12 years I’ve known her my friend Edie Farwell has been an enthusiastic proponent of a type of oven powered by sunlight. She’s on the board of Solar Cookers International, an organization that’s been promoting the use of homemade solar ovens as a way to save fuel, reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, and cook great food since the 1970s. These cookers are particularly important in third-world countries where firewood is scarce and heat from the sun abundant....

The tercentenary of Henry Purcell’s death has already yielded a bumper crop of concerts celebrating the achievement of one of England’s most remarkable composers, and happily quite a few explore the obscure corners of his prodigious oeuvre. Such is the case with this collaboration between two crackerjack local groups, His Majestie’s Clerkes and the Chicago Baroque Ensemble, which focuses on the verse anthems Purcell wrote between 1680 and his death in 1695 at age 36....

JIMMY HEATH & the JAZZ MEMBERS BIG BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When you consider his history, saxophonist and composer Jimmy Heath certainly belongs in Chicago during Jazz Showcase’s Charlie Parker Month. After all, as a diminutive young man in the 40s, leading a big band in his native Philadelphia, Heath played alto with enough power and finesse to earn the local nickname “Little Bird”–and this was in a musical milieu that included the young John Coltrane, Heath’s contemporary and friend....

This miniretrospective of Shulamit Ran’s chamber work by the Lark Quartet and friends is evidence of her growing stature. At 45 she’s still young for a composer, and as a Pulitzer winner she enjoys unprecedented institutional support in this city. She’s composer-in-residence at both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera and holds an endowed professorship at the University of Chicago. She also wields clout as an arbiter of new music....

RED RED MEAT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s hard to think of a more moribund, cliche-ridden style than blues rock, but Red Red Meat breathe new life into the corpse by putting it to sleep. The quintet builds on then undermines genre staples, like heartbroken singing, lazy slide guitars, and great chugging riffs like the Stones wish they still wrote. Bandleader Tim Rutili’s lyrics are full of non sequiturs, and the riffs flirt unpredictably with entropic collapse....

The five founders of the new group X-Film Chicago are recalling their perplexed first encounters with experimental films. Martin Rumsby says he saw a film from Oklahoma–David McCullough’s Four Possible Variations–about 20 years ago in his native New Zealand. “A static camera viewed four bowls, and the same cracker was put into different types of soup and slowly absorbed,” he explains. “We saw these crackers disappear at differing rates. I thought it was pretty interesting,” though, he allows, a bit “impractical....

Return of the Ivanhoe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past five years Bragan, who has been busy producing theater for high school audiences and the Off-Off Loop Theater Festival, has leased his theater to Michael Leavitt and Fox Theatricals, who changed the name to the Wellington Theater and have had mixed success there. Now that he is about to regain control of the building, Bragan intends to add a 200-seat second stage and offer a four-show subscription for $63....

At Ben Pao I was issued a pager, the kind that vibrates instead of beeps, to alert me when my , table was ready. “We want to have that total harmony thing,” explained the hostess. When mine went off it shuddered across the bar in a none-too-harmonic fashion. Not that it was any competition for the fire trucks roaring in and out of the station across the street. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Will Missing Persons Survive? The fate of Missing Persons, an hour-long weekly ABC television series inspired by the activities of missing-persons investigators in the Chicago Police Department, is up in the air. ABC programming brass are expected to decide by November 15 whether to kill Missing Persons or order more than the 15 segments they’ve already paid for, which would keep it on the air through the end of the year....