mottet.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Peter Margasak doesn’t like the latest spinners from the Riptones and the Mighty Blue Kings [Post No Bills, December 5], that’s OK by me. Does he have to entirely bulldoze “Chicago’s small rockabilly scene”(which packs the Deja Vu shoulder to shoulder every month with the Big C Jamboree) in the process? Chicago rockabilly is like a musical cockroach....

After a decade-long procession of new Italian restaurants, we’re seeing one closing after another, while the new tendency is decidedly French. Grappa, Tra Via, and La Risotteria Nord all said ciao for now. Rich Melman, whose trend-spotting talents built a dining empire, shuttered Avanzare and Tucci Milan. He’ll make one French, the other French-Thai. When he sold the Pump Room, it immediately went tres francais. Danilo’s was replaced by Thyme–also French–and Joe Doppes of Francesca’s on Taylor plans an authentic bistro in Old Town....

By Mike Sula During his research Foster came across the poem “A Funerall Elegye In Memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter,” which was privately published in 1612 in honor of a murder victim. “The writer was either imitating or pretending to be Shakespeare, because there were many little grammatical oddities that appear in Shakespeare and rarely anywhere else,” he says. “I spent a long time trying to track down the external evidence, and I wrote my graduate dissertation on it, saying even though this poem doesn’t add anything to Shakespeare’s reputation, there’s a good chance that he wrote it....

The Day Silence Died Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Paolo Agazzi’s enchanting, multilayered fable shows how mass communication corrupts a backward, insular village in the mountains of Bolivia. In the 1950s a self-described “radio operator” arrives in town to install a public loudspeaker system that will broadcast news and music, but this instrument of progress becomes a mouthpiece for the townspeople to air their dirty laundry and secret desires, not to mention an Orwellian control mechanism when the operator begins to censor the news....

While watching a recent interview with Emmylou Harris, I was horrified when a member of the audience asked a rather personal question about Gram Parsons (“Why did Gram Parsons kill himself at such a young age?”). Ms. Harris handled the question gracefully and moved on to other, more pertinent topics (the sad state of commercial country music), but the question got me thinking. I’ve been a fan of Parsons’s music but don’t really know all that much about him as a person, other than he died young and there was some controversy surrounding his death....

Sally Spiegel was marketing rock bands for Sony Music when she designed her first scrapbook. In the industry lingo the books are called “wrap-ups”–collections of artist’s photos, articles, ads. Spiegel had been in the music business for 15 years but had never created a wrap-up, so she asked a coworker to show her how. She wanted her wrap-ups to be exceptional and decorated them from cover to cover: in one a chain of guitars surrounded the sales figures for Chris Whitley’s first CD; in another the band members of Alice in Chains were ogled by cutout characters from Alice in Wonderland....

The tomato soup was delightful. The quail, neither greasy nor dry. Though I preferred the white wine served with the appetizer to the following red–which seemed a bit casky–I wasn’t about to mention this to my host, the ambassador. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jews were the favorite object of public contrition but not the only one. President Clinton gathered the few surviving victims of the infamous Tuskegee experiment and invited them over to the White House so he could look them in the eye and repent from the bottom of his heart....

Mona Hatoum By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Much has been made of Hatoum’s double displacement–displaced by her Lebanese birth, she found herself in London in 1975 at the start of Lebanon’s long civil war, unable to return. And indeed her work has an odd rootlessness; when it refers to place at all, something still seems out of place. The 36 pieces in the MCA exhibition are mostly sculptures and installations, though Hatoum began by doing performances and making videos; the photograph Performance Still in this show documents a 1985 event in which she walked barefoot through the streets of Brixton, a West Indian neighborhood of London....

Happy Together By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are plenty of interesting aspects to this epileptic fresco. There’s the passionate treatment of gay sex and romance by a straight director, featuring two of the hottest stars of Hong Kong cinema (Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, both of whom have worked with Wong before). There’s the charged and ambiguous friendship between Lai (Leung) and Chang (Chang Chen, the 14-year-old hero of Edward Yang’s 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day, who’s since become a big pop star in Taiwan)....

Napalm is the combustible gel you get from mixing, in the preferred variety for flamethrowers, kerosene and diesel. Throughout a lethal performance from Mariana Di Girolamo as the flamethrower-wielding title character in Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s eighth film—his first since Jackie (2016)—we see an individual who is the human equal to napalm, an incinerating force whose power derives from twinned, potent fuels coming together and exploding. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Endzone, Factory Theater Company. Just as the big city was once the land of mystery and monsters for American authors, so the wide-open spaces are strange and wonderful to young playwrights in the last years of the 90s. The setting for Michael Mazzara’s glimpse of bucolic culture is the Great Plains outpost of Crenshaw (“somewhere between Omaha and Springfield”), where a drifter in urban-cowboy drag finds himself among citizens embroiled in “the fever”–an ecstatic obsession with winning fueled by the rivalry between the Crenshaw High School Cougars and the neighboring Fort Olsen Owls....

JAMES KING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Many bluegrass purists these days might as well be animatronic figures on some Disney World ride–instrumentally adept but blandly polite, with squeaky-clean barbershop quartet harmonies. Among the exceptions are Del McCoury, J.D. Crowe, Ricky Skaggs, and now, with his third album, Bed by the Window (Rounder), Virginian James King. King, who did his first recording with the legendary Ralph Stanley back in 1985, is also a member of the all-star group Longview, whose recently released second album, High Lonesome (Rounder), favors collective might over solo hotdogging....

By Neal Pollack The Rush for Mayor Walk for Change, as his campaign was calling it, consisted of Rush, his press secretary, Bess Bezirgan, and a few campaign staffers, followed by about a dozen reporters and cameramen as well as a couple of bodyguards. They left the fruit market and stopped in at Captain Nemo’s, a sandwich shop at the corner of Clark and Jarvis. Rush extended his hand to the man behind the counter....

A few years ago [April 29, 1994] you wrote about the murky origins of the characters in McDonald’s advertising–Mayor McCheese, Hamburglar, Grimace, and so on. Mostly you regurgitated a lot of puffery from the McDonald’s PR department and missed the real story. Check out the uncanny resemblance of the McDonaldland denizens to the characters in the old H.R. Pufnstuf children’s TV show. Can you say “copyright infringement”? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Renato Esquivel at Perimeter, through August 31 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Esquivel’s pairings set up cultural contradictions that his painterly style tends to lessen or render ambiguous. The largest of the three rectangular images in one Still Life (Esquivel often uses the same title for multiple paintings) has a can of Campbell’s soup sitting next to a traditional vase. In shape and color the soup can immediately clashes with the vase....

Au Revoir, Voltaire? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » James Rohrbacher, general manager of the theater and coffeehouse, says the 70-seat theater has been holding its own but the restaurant is losing money. “The restaurant was popular five years ago, but no one wanted to hang out there anymore,” he explains. Over the years he experimented with various menus, but lately nothing seemed to work: “It just wasn’t trendy....

Friday 11/12 – Thursday 11/18 “Jerry’s kids are people in wheelchairs on television raising money to find a way to prevent their ever having been born,” NBC correspondent John Hockenberry has written. “When crips watch the telethon, the words ‘bravery’ and ‘courage’ and ‘heroism’ do not come to mind.” Tonight Hockenberry, who as a student at the University of Chicago was in a car accident that left him with an irreversible spinal cord injury, will show a video of his 1996 one-man play, Spoke Man, which was based on a book he wrote about being wheelchair-bound....

Chicago Underground Film Festival’s Sonic Sampler Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The most ambitious music film on the program, and one of the more successful, is Radiation, the second feature by the husband-and-wife team of Suki Stetson Hawley and Michael Galinsky. A keen set of observations on indie-rock culture worked into a relatively accessible fictional narrative, it’s the story of a cynical, broke fellow named Unai, who’s been booking and managing Spanish tours for American indie bands for more than a decade....

CHOYING DROLMA & STEVE TIBBETTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even someone who’s never left the States can feel familiar with Buddhist spiritual music these days: several domestically released recordings have captured the rarefied melodies, tintinnabulating rhythms, and guttural, multiphonic vocal techniques of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and groups of monks have toured the U.S. in protest of their homeland’s occupation by China. But Minneapolis guitarist Steve Tibbetts developed his interest in Buddhist chant and religious song nearer the source: working in Nepal for the Naropa Institute in 1993, he was “entranced” by the singing of a young Buddhist nun named Choying Drolma, who accompanies him on his current tour, along with three of her fellow nuns and percussionist Marc Anderson....

“Among schools in comparable countries, those in the U.S. on average make the smallest year-to-year gains in academic achievement,” writes Herbert Walberg, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in a recent report analyzing what he calls “the largest, most recent, and most rigorous international achievement surveys,” which were conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. In reading, U.S. students between the ages of nine and fourteen progressed at a rate that was only 78 percent of the rate of the international average student....