Last summer at Grant Park the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists mounted a fairly successful revival of Peter Brook’s eccentric, abridged version of Bizet’s Carmen. The staging managed to make the most out of the conceit by focusing on the opera’s smouldering passion instead of its social observations; the ensemble singing, for the most part, was excellent and provided a vivid reminder of the importance of the center as a training ground for talented newcomers....

Where does the midwest stop and the south begin? I’m not sure, but it could be at milepost 83 on Interstate 55 south of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where the rolling hills of southern Illinois and Missouri come to an abrupt end. A table-flat plain stretches off to the horizon. “This is it,” says geologist David Stewart. “The last hill before the Gulf of Mexico.” If it were up to him, there would be a big billboard here reading “You are entering the New Madrid seismic zone,” and another one 101 miles south at Blytheville, Arkansas, reading “You are leaving the New Madrid seismic zone....

THE KAY AND CHRISTY SHOW I like to watch dance partly because I like to watch people, and I understand people best when I see them move. Performances give me license to stare. As in any form of people watching, the attraction is difference, so I was grateful for the contrasts between Kay Wendt LaSota and Christy Munch in their joint show at Link’s Hall. LaSota’s like a collage artist, someone who uses found objects and combines them in her own way, while Munch is more the traditional painter, the artist who wants to communicate her own vision in every detail....

In June a wall went up between a park in southwest Evanston and the Skokie Swift tracks, built and whitewashed by a group of neighbors who planned to paint a mural on it. For three weeks while they completed their preparations, the eight-foot-high, 350-foot-long wall stood bare, challenging taggers to defile it with their spray paint. The mural is located in a small, unnamed park at Clyde Avenue and Brummel Street, two blocks north of Howard Street....

Filmmaker Peter Thompson and anthropologist William Hanks met each other swimming in Lakeview’s Gill Park pool in 1986. Four years and thousands of laps later, they ended up in side-by-side hammocks on the edge of the jungle in Mexico’s Yucatan. Their quarters, an eight-by-ten-foot mud hut shared with a Maya family of ten, required some good coping skills. “I think it was our years swimming together,” Hanks says, “that helped us get along so well there....

SKIRT SOLOS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The theater companies that perform at Cafe Voltaire have little money. They could never afford a set like the one for Goodman’s Two Trains Running, which has real glass windows and working lights. Most of the plays I’ve seen at Cafe Voltaire are stripped down to the essentials: actors, a script, and maybe a chair or two....

Guru’s Jazzmatazz Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guru developed a reputation among hip-hoppers as a stylish, truth-telling rapper, though he never received much commercial success. His innovation and his allegiance to musical history–not his lyrics or style–distanced him from his peers. His mellow voice wasn’t as commanding as Chuck D’s or as charismatic as Rakim’s, but his lyrics were always suavely delivered and meaningful, which helped him stand out from such hard talkin’ braggadocios as L....

Born into a life of poverty, Ted Hawkins spent years as a nomad, landing in and out of jail and busking for spare change on Venice Beach before a four-year run with success in England that died away when he returned to the U.S. His music, while certainly not the blues, bristles with the emotionalism associated with that genre. Possessed of a remarkable voice evocative of a grittier Sam Cooke, Hawkins gorgeously blends an unusual twirl of pop and country and laces it with emotions that run from elegant to electric, as on his stop-time cover of the Webb Pierce hit “There Stands the Glass....

“Think of the universe as a loaf of raisin bread,” says U. of C. cosmologist David Schramm in Chronicle (June 9). “And we’re one of the raisins. No matter where that raisin is in the universe of bread, all of the other raisins are moving away from it as the loaf is rising. That’s the expansion of the universe.” And don’t ask how much yeast God put in, OK? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

THE SUBSTANCE OF FIRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just how much you enjoy Apple Tree Theatre’s exceedingly well acted production of Jon Robin Baitz’s drama The Substance of Fire depends a great deal on whether you can accept its premises. The stockholders of an upscale, family-owned New York publishing house are thrown into bitter conflict when Holocaust survivor Isaac Geldhart decides to publish a six-volume work about Nazi atrocities instead of the titillating contemporary novel his pragmatic, business-minded son Aaron favors....

Journalists are, by their very nature, con artists of a sort. When an interviewer nods in acceptance as his or her subject blathers on and on, more ridiculously by the moment, then reports the entire conversation in all its embarrassing detail, that is a small betrayal. When Lloyd Grove profiled Sharon Stone for Vanity Fair, he didn’t have to mention the actress’s opinion that the Welshman Dylan Thomas is her favorite “Irish” writer, or describe in detail how (in his presence) she flattered and bullied a hapless retailer into giving her needlepoint runners at half price....

Zingalamaduni, Arrested Development’s second album, is well on its way to becoming an industry metaphor for failed expectations after an acclaimed debut. But that’s not entirely the record’s fault. For one, it’s been two full years since 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of . . . had its peak, and the perfervid pop environment of the time has only grown in the interim: part of AD’s appeal was its novelty, and it’s no longer new....

I suppose that I shouldn’t be shocked. The celebration of brutality for its own sake is scarcely novel in our “culture.” Compared to the open gloating about the possibility of many of our soldiers coming back in body bags that was so common prior to Desert Storm, this article [“Fight Like a Man,” September 9] was mild. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nevertheless, let us examine what is being celebrated here....

The 12th edition of the annual festival of black independent film continues from Friday, August 13, through Thursday, August 26, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, and at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets are $5 and can be purchased only on the day of the screening. For more information call 649-4855. Mozart Quarter Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s comedy-fantasy charmer from Cameroon follows a young girl who betrays too much curiosity for her age and is transformed by a witch into a man....

Captured at newsgroup misc.fitness.weights thanks Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lots of people go longer than five days; some people report better results from doing the carb-up only once every other week and others have claimed considerable success from doing longer carb-ups (say, four days to a week) at one- to two-month intervals. Though my impression is that this is less common among strength athletes, there are quite a few ketogenic dieters who never carb-up, in some cases literally for decades....

City Lit’s Aprill Bows Out Without the fanfare accorded some of his previous ventures, Arnold Aprill later this month will quietly leave the management ranks of the city’s theater industry. Cofounder and artistic director of City Lit Theater Company since 1979, the 40-year-old Aprill will become director of the newly formed Chicago Arts Education Partnership. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Aprill the Education Partnership, which is backed by Marshall Field’s and a number of large philanthropic organizations, will aim to create closer ties between the city’s arts community and its beleaguered school system....

Whenever the phrase “tenor battle” (or the more imaginative “Battle of the Saxes”) pops up, modern musicians rush to point out that such events are misnamed–that contrary to the old days, when cutting contests actually did find instrumentalists pitted against each other in a fight for dominance, today’s players have moved beyond such considerations and engage in far friendlier collaborations. But Chris Potter and Evanston’s Eric Alexander slugged it out for real in the fall of 1991, when Potter finished third and Alexander second in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition for tenor saxists....

Evgeny Kissin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At 24 the Moscow-born pianist Evgeny Kissin has graduated from enfant terrible precociousness to a probing artistic maturity that bodes well for a long career. Not content to rest on his laurels, Kissin is branching out while solidifying his basic repertoire–like Horowitz and Rubinstein before him, to name a couple of legendary prodigies whose East-to-West trajectories almost parallel his....

Bees were my nemesis when I was growing up. In a bad summer week I might get stung twice; during a good period I could go a couple months without being hit. I’m sure I never went a whole summer sting free, for our house in rural Indiana was purest heaven for bees and wasps. The rough wooden eaves in the barn provided a home for thousands of paper wasps and mud daubers....

Clearly conceived as a companion piece to Broadcast News, another portrait of a few intense individuals in a one-company town, writer-director-coproducer James L. Brooks’s comedy about Hollywood–initially an eccentric musical until the responses of preview audiences led Brooks to eliminate all but one of the numbers–is a fascinating if fairly discontinuous collection of fragments. What’s maddening about Brooks is that he uncritically embraces some of the worst aspects of status quo capitalism (such as ideological manipulation and crippling short-term strategies like test marketing) while turning into an unforgiving moral crusader when it comes to small local infractions (newscaster William Hurt faking tears in Broadcast News, or in this movie studio executive Joely Richardson caving in to group pressure during a casting decision and trashing her own lover, character actor Nick Nolte)....