For much of his career and for a long period after his death in 1963 Paul Hindemith was dismissed by the avant-garde as an archconservative who wrote dry, mechanical, and, worse yet, tonal music that paid homage to older styles. Now that the pendulum of musical taste has swung the other way, Hindemith may yet become fashionable. Certainly the lucidity, grandeur, vitality, and subdued lyricism of his music are to be savored, along with the meticulous craftsmanship whose principles he summarized in the indispensable primers he wrote while teaching at Yale and conservatories in his native Germany....

Sorry, dear, you’ve been replaced. For $120, Hammacher Schlemmer’s fall catalog offers Safe-T-Man, “a life-size companion designed as a visual deterrent to criminals…lead[ing] them to believe you have the protection of a male companion whether he’s seated in the passenger’s seat of your car or near a window in your home.” Other good points: “he” weighs only eight pounds, has a carry bag ($39.95), and discusses relationships just as well as your current model....

Gather round, children, and hear the story of Daniel Hudson Burnham, Chicago’s original man with a plan. Poet of the “livable city” and Albert Speer’s favorite architect. Prophet of the City Beautiful, the Architecture Firm Corporate, and the Lakefront Public. One half of the firm Burnham & Root, which gave Chicago the Rookery, the Monadnock, and the Reliance buildings. Head of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the discovery of the New World by Columbus and marked the discovery of Chicago by everyone else....

MORE COMPLAINTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your explanation of the blow hot/blow cold question is, dare I say it, full of hot air. It’s all in how you blow. Here’s why. When you warm your hands, you blow steadily with your mouth open. This allows a greater volume of warm air to reach your cold hands. But to cool a hot cup of coffee, you first pucker....

What Price Success? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The big changes at the South Shore Cultural Center started approximately 16 months ago with the appointment of Claire Kaplan as director. A Princeton University graduate, the 26-year-old administrator had previously been assistant to John Rogers, president of the Park District’s board of commissioners. Kaplan evidently impressed both Rogers and others at Park District headquarters. Mehrberg asked her to take on the daunting task of running the South Shore Cultural Center....

A Fine Alternative to Ticketmaster While the rock world chafes under the yoke of Ticketmaster, other parts of the entertainment firmament are trying to do something about it. For several years now a group of fine-arts institutions in Chicago have been looking into an alternative ticket-selling network. It’s not clear that the grand designs of the group will ever come together, and it’s interesting to note that they’re not even primarily motivated by frustration with the organization rock fans know and hate....

Henry V In such an aggressive, unreflective, self-congratulatory culture, Henry V can be a dangerous play indeed (just look at Laurence Olivier’s whitewash of Henry in his 1945 propagandistic film adaptation). A superficial reading of the text, which is too often what it gets in our attention-deficited land, would not only justify elevating Reagan or Bush to emperor but grooming Oliver North as heir apparent. Most critics, academics, and theater directors–in other words, those we depend upon to know better–hold Henry aloft as the model Christian king: learned, versed in theology, humble yet courageous, wise, principled, self-sacrificing, and above all inspirational....

In 1988 a young technician at a neighborhood photo lab in Muncie, Indiana, threatened to report Pamela De Marris to the FBI. For months the guy had processed De Marris’s haunting images of her children wearing masks and wrapped in cellophane as they floated in the backyard pool. De Marris says the technician told her, “I can no longer do these, seeing what you’re doing to these children.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Friday 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s Battle of the Saxes time again at the Green Mill. Tonight and tomorrow two local young contenders face off: Eric Alexander placed second in the 1992 Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition and has a couple of records about to be released. Chris Potter was a third-place winner in the 1991 Monk competition and plays around in the Red Rodney Quintet and Paul Motion’s Electric Be-Bop Band....

Dr. David Teplica has a black-and-white photograph on his studio wall of what looks like a humanoid creature struggling to escape a cloth web. “This is a straight young man who’s just entering the dating world and kind of scared. I took him to Hugh Hefner’s bedroom, which I consider the birthplace of the modern sexual revolution. I isolated him inside the fabric and photographed him all alone in the big empty black space....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Robert Schumann, like most cultivated Germans of his day, held in awe the Faust legend as told by Goethe. Its rhetoric of scientific quest for truth, its message of good triumphing over seductive evil, and its appeal for eternal love defined a romantic ideal for which Schumann, throughout his short career, tried to find a musical counterpart....

DeRogatis Defects to Rolling Stone Keith Moerer, the new music editor of Rolling Stone, has asked DeRogatis to join him in New York as senior editor. He’ll run “pretty much the meat of the magazine, except for the feature well.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DeRogatis is going to a shop where, as he puts it, you can “spend a week on the road with Pearl Jam and do the ultimate Ticketmaster story....

Wesley Kimler There’s a church in Venice, the Frari, that contains two Titian altarpieces. One painting is especially sublime–a famous Assumption in which Mary rises dramatically, almost subsumed by the pale light of yellow clouds. Farther back in the church, a 19th-century neoclassical monument to Titian includes stone reliefs of several of his paintings, including the airy Assumption, which can also be glimpsed in the distance. Seeing the two together reveals the absurdity of making a stone relief of this painted depiction of transcendence: what makes the painting great, the interaction between Mary’s implied movement and the sky’s delicate light and colors, is completely lost in stone....

By Michael Miner Mikva lost by four percentage points in ’72, won by two in ’74, and was reelected in ’76 and ’78 with barely over half the vote. Finally Jimmy Carter rescued him from these Sisyphean labors by making him a federal appellate judge. He was last in the public eye as counsel to President Clinton. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Mikva’s last election was 18 years ago....

If there’s one thing James Kelly does, it’s take risks. The partnering in his work is unusually intricate and athletic, and the relationship of the dancing to the often-complex music is never easy or predictable. And he takes on risky subjects, as he did in What’s Your Hand Doing There? a few years ago. This piece for three women and three men addresses sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence. They’re all part of the same package of abuse, especially as Kelly presents them–as endemic physical domination, seen in a male arm thrust between a woman’s legs, a hand slapped on her stomach, a woman set straddled on a man’s thigh like a child and rocked....

Talk all you want about pianist Jodie Christian’s earth-stirring swing, or his unique harmonic adjustments, or the hard-wrought gossamer of his right-hand work, or the inestimable soul he wrings from the keyboard; the real reason he received this year’s Jazz Masters Award (from the advocacy organization Arts Midwest) has to do with his resilient versatility. Christian played hard-bop in the 50s, but he also cofounded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians–free jazz holds no terrors for him–and he excels at virtually everything in between....

Cat’s-Paw I may be in the minority here, but I wanted the Unabomber to make sense, to be an eloquent spokesperson against a society that has become progressively more polluted, inhumane, and mechanical. Though his actions are barbaric and indefensible, if he’d been able to write he might at least have ignited some intelligent debate. But the rambling, 35,000-word screed that found its way into the Washington Post was little more than familiar antitechnological rant laced with dull, bizarre, and bigoted blather about his problems with feminism and the African-American family....

New at the Sun-Times: Troubleshooter or Troublemaker? But what’s said in Canada, Atwood’s homeland, is that not entirely by happenstance Zenia also is sort of like Barbara Amiel. If you place the name it’s because you’ve seen reports that Amiel will soon be a frequent visitor to Chicago. She’ll be stopping by to polish up the Sun-Times, the American jewel in the worldwide string of newspapers collected by her third husband, Conrad Black....

The line on Chicago’s 1993 contributions to the national pop firmament–Liz Phair, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Urge Overkill–is that they’ve in effect agreed to disagree on musical approaches, making for a fractured “scene” with little cohesion. This is true, but their stylistic differences mask the philosophical ground that unites them and seems likely to influence a second wave of bands from Chicago in 1994: an explicit rejection of much of the insularity that increasingly characterizes underground music and the fringes of underground music in America....

An hour before curtain time the kids are already lining up, giggling with delight at the stars and begging them for autographs. It’s a scene not at some huge amphitheater, but at the gymnasium at the Lincoln School in Cicero. And it’s not some rich, nationally marketed teenybopper superstar the kids are squealing to see and touch, but a band of relatively unknown Chicago actors. The company began eight years ago as a collaborative effort between Palidofsky, Howard, and Elbrey Harrell....