Falstaff By Lee Sandlin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem is that what enchants on paper (or on CD, which lets you keep going back to catch what you missed) doesn’t necessarily charm in performance: transferred to the physicality of the opera house, some of Falstaff’s airiest effects come out smeared. A deeper issue is that Verdi is so uncharacteristically focused on his ornate margins that he neglects the main musical action....

A few days ago a colleague at work asked me, “Does Harley-Davidson have a patent on the sound of their exhaust?” I thought he was kidding. I never heard of the government granting a patent on a particular sound. Then a friend of mine told me H-D won a lawsuit against one of the “rice burner” bike manufacturers because they had (electronically) duplicated the sound of the Harley! What gives? Can you really patent the exhaust sound of an infernal–strike that–internal combustion engine?...

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom A cocksure, hotheaded young man locks horns with a flamboyant, slightly older woman as their mutual friends watch in dismay. This is the premise of a brilliant drama rich in ribald humor and tragic power, presented by a major Chicago theater in a production of impressive stature and moving insight. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But deeper than the artistic disagreements (exacerbated by sexual jealousy, as Levee flirts with Ma’s young lesbian lover) is the musicians’ need for dignity and spiritual authenticity–an elusive goal for black artists in a white-run industry....

Against the Tide Walker differs not only from most blacks–he’s an unabashed Repub-lican–but from many black conservatives as well. He says he’s never been a liberal. Growing up as the eldest of ten children in Troy, Alabama, he was intimately acquainted with the Jim Crow south of the 1950s. His family emphasized hard work and education: Walker’s great-grandfather founded a school for black children in a local church, his father worked in a sawmill, and his mother was a maid and cook....

The Ravinia Festival relies on heavy hitters like Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma to pack its pavilion, but it also has a farm system of sorts: the “Rising Stars” chamber concerts. This decade-old series, which runs from October to April each year, has showcased 144 young musicians; many have gone on to join major orchestras, and a few–such as violinists Gil Shaham and Sarah Chang–really have become stars. For this main-stage Chicago Symphony Orchestra show, conductor Christoph Eschenbach has booked three promising soloists, all alumni of the series, to play classics of the 19th-century Romantic repertoire: cellist Alban Gerhardt, pianist Sergio Tiempo, and violinist Julia Fischer....

Birth of a Nation Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jonas Mekas’s 1997 film of the experimental scene takes its name from D.W. Griffith’s landmark feature because, as Mekas puts it, the independent movement is “a nation in itself,” one that offers an alternative to the industry Griffith helped found. The chief luminaries are here, from Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, and critic P. Adams Sitney to related figures like artist Shigeko Kubota and theater director Richard Foreman, though the sound track is mostly music rather than their voices....

Bone Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A home invasion goes awry in this stingingly provocative 1972 movie about a Beverly Hills TV personality, his wife, and their encounter with a philosophical would-be thief and rapist. Threatened by the stranger, the heavily leveraged couple–who say their son is in Vietnam as if this makes up for their failings–take the opportunity to confront angst they hadn’t realized they had....

Friday 9/15 – Thursday 9/21 16 SATURDAY “Sweatshops are not just operating across the ocean,” says Center for Impact Research deputy director Rebekah Levin. When the CIR conducted a survey of 800 people living in the city’s immigrant and poor communities over the past year, they were surprised to learn that some 36 percent work in local sweatshops–meaning that their employers were routinely in violation of two or more Department of Labor rules....

Another kind of police brutality, with an assist from the media. Former Chicago homicide detective Wayne Johnson, writing in the Chicago Crime Commission’s “Action Alert” (Spring/Summer): “As the case investigator of a specific homicide involving a middle class African American female who was brutally murdered in the rear stairwell of her building in a high crime area, I was reassigned several days later along with three other investigators to the equally brutal murder of a young female white graduate student from a prominent family....

One of America’s greatest visual artists, Joseph Cornell also made a number of films, the best of which recall the otherworldliness of his boxes and collages (a superb collection of which is on view at the Art Institute). The films, most dating from the 50s, are hard to pin down, as he often revised them during his lifetime; several were discovered in his estate and were judged by scholar P. Adams Sitney to be Cornell works even though there’s no record of the artist’s ever having screened them....

For 12 years Reader contributor Marc PoKempner tried to find a publisher for his book of photographs of the Chicago blues scene. “I dressed it up in academic clothes for university presses and was even pitching it as something like ‘wacky fashions of the 70s,’” he says. “It’s beyond my dreams that it’s being published like this–as an art book.” Hot off the presses from German publishers Prestel Verlag, Down at Theresa’s…Chicago Blues features 87 black-and-white prints of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, and other musicians, patrons, and proprietors making the scene between 1969 and the early 90s....

Give You Her Due Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » However, You’s interesting experiences with the Tribune and her stinging comments about the corporatization of the mainstream news media were unfortunately lost in the sexy information about her posing for Playboy and her subsequent work with the Jerry Springer Show. Yeah, she’s beautiful, edgy, and smart, but what she had to say about how “young…reportersare shut down really fast for stepping on toes” underscores exactly what scholarly media critics like Noam Chomsky say about the harmful effects of corporatization on the mainstream media and what Chomsky calls “manufactured consent....

Laura Mazzuca Toops and John W. Toops Jr. met during a heat wave in July 1987 at the legendary northwest-side bar Bucket-o-Suds. “I was picking on one of the customers, verbally sparring, and she joined in,” John says. “Three or four or five of us were goofing around verbally until the place closed and we went off to breakfast, and one thing led to another.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Stephanie Ognar and MSCHarding Jacob Hashimoto: An Infinite Expanse of Sky (10,000 Kites) Flip books have been pop-culture novelties for a long time, but Ognar gives us both the central action, relating to the flip book’s illusion of movement, and quieter moments that offer a sense of the living person behind the woman on display. Flip Book Glance, for example, begins with Ognar turning toward the viewer and looking directly out, then smiling and looking downward....

MRS. CONEY and THE CHRISTMAS SCHOONER, Bailiwick Repertory. These two well-crafted plays, running in rotation, should satisfy audiences seeking fresh yet traditional Christmas entertainment. Mrs. Coney, a premiere written and directed by Belinda Bremner, is a sly, slight story-theater tale of Christmas mountain magic. James, the middle-aged narrator, reminisces about how as a boy in Depression-era Kentucky he freed a rabbit caught in a trap, then came across Mrs. Coney, an ancient hermit also disabled by a leg wound....

Pianist Scott Holman gets up at four in the afternoon, when most of his Glenview neighbors are preparing to leave the office. When he gets home from work, one of his weekly gigs in Palatine and Naperville, his wife and children are just beginning to stir. Appropriately enough, his debut CD is titled Don’t Wake the Kids (Southport). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When you’re addicted to jazz, you’ve always got something playing on your turntable,” says Holman....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A new, baggier condom produced by Mayer Laboratories in Oakland, California, went on sale in the Netherlands in May, but company president David Mayer says it will be at least a year before it gets FDA approval. The condom is tighter at the base but otherwise much looser than other condoms, providing “more sensation,” according to Mayer; it will sell for about twice as much as a standard condom....

Letter to the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The funding for the feature-length documentary Gaylon Emerzian and I are working on comes from German television and ARTE. ARTE is not a “German and French cultural organization,” as Jack describes it, but a television channel which broadcasts simultaneously in two languages both in France and in Germany. We found Allen’s movie camera not in Wyoming, but in Oklahoma City, while checking on the different addresses our private investigators had provided for certain members of the Samaritan Foundation–the group Allen had joined in 1992/93....

wolen.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the health-care provider of Sonja (I am her nurse-practitioner, not her doctor), I want to comment on protease inhibitors and add a few points [“Bitter Pills,” April 25]. First, I thought Justin Hayford drew a sensitive, personal portrait that rang true with the Sonja that I know. Her struggles demonstrate that health-care providers cannot simply tear off scribbled medication orders from the prescription pad and bark out instructions....

Pictures of an Exhibition(ist): Films by Brian Frye The work of Brian Frye, a 23-year-old from northern California recently transplanted to New York, is different. And the six films in his first one-person show–at Chicago Filmmakers tonight, when Frye will be present–represent some of the most original work I’ve seen recently from a new filmmaker. Redefining the relationship between spectator and film, his somewhat hermetic works–mostly silent, all in black and white, and varying in length from two minutes to about half an hour–don’t offer any of the usual moviegoing pleasures: not only are there no plots, but Frye’s images are neither entertaining nor seductive, nor is his editing particularly rhythmic or immediately satisfying....