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obrien.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The article mentions that we’re in a sort of “hibernation” at present, but the truth is that in June of this year the Splinter Group staff and board decided to step back from “main stage” production during the next two seasons, focusing instead on restructuring our internal management, maximizing the profit potential of our popular (but previously underutilized) touring Beckett programs, and organizing the ambitious 20th Century festival....

Life and Nothing More Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Known less accurately as And Life Goes On… (to distinguish it from Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But), this 1992 masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami uses nonprofessional actors to restage real events. Accompanied by his little boy, a film director from Tehran drives into the mountainous region of northern Iran, recently devastated by an earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people....

Magnificent Irreverence: Ladylike Performance Festival 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s nothing ladylike about Stanya Kahn as she performs Delirium–but then that’s the point of the “Ladylike Performance Festival,” to blow the concept to smithereens. In a stocking cap, dark glasses, and a string bikini made of extrawide rubber bands, Kahn lolls in a tiny galvanized tub of water talking to her rubber duckie, somehow suggesting both innocent play and fiendish derangement, her writhing, smeared blue lips recalling Lucille Ball’s red ones, her raspy voice echoing Carol Burnett’s insinuating cadences....

MICHAEL RABINOWITZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bassoonist Michael Rabinowitz named his most recent album, released on the Dutch label Edition Compusic, Rabinowitz in Utopia. While the title doesn’t scan as well as Alice in Wonderland, sharing a Dutch rhythm section with oboist Kathy Halvorson must have made Rabinowitz feel as if he’d stepped through the looking glass and found his mirror image: like him, Halvorson is classically trained but drawn to jazz, and though she’s not at Rabinowitz’s level she too improvises on a temperamental instrument better suited to chamber music....

The Birth of Western Civilization Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To many in Elmhurst, King-Hookham has become a symbol of the positive role art can play in a person’s life. In addition to raising money for the museum, she’s painted and exhibited her own work in galleries around the world and until recently taught weekly art classes in her basement to some 150 men, women, and children....

Terrastock: The Ptolemaic April 25-27 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, as Ken Kesey used to say, you’re either on the bus or off the bus. Thing is, nobody at Terrastock wanted to get on the bus either: the bands, attendees, and sponsors of the festival (officially known as the Ptolemaic Providence Perambulation, after the Ptolemaic Terrascope fanzine it was intended to benefit) all seemed loath to use the word psychedelic to make connections among the many sounds and philosophies in evidence....

Butt-Ugly Booklet Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But what exactly is being promoted? The campaign’s centerpiece is a 24-page booklet that provides a slight overview of what Chicago offers in the way of theater, dance, music, mu-seums, art, shopping, and restaurants. Beginning next month the booklet will be inserted into the New York Times Magazine, Food & Wine, and Travel & Leisure; it will also be mailed to thousands of would-be visitors who have requested information about the city’s cultural attractions....

Do your job and see what happens. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services suffered a 4 percent cut in funding in the new state budget, reports “Fiscal Focus” (July). “The decline…can be attributed to a significant decrease in caseload. The number of children moving to permanent and more appropriate placement through adoption and subsidized guardianship has directly decreased caseloads and reduced the growth of foster care spending.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Friday 6/20 – Thursday 6/26 Betcha didn’t know we’re right smack in the middle of the 20th annual Elvis Week. Now that you’re up-to-date you can pack a peanut butter and banana sandwich, fire up the Lisa Marie, and TCB at the Elvis Summer Festival. After a screening of the 1981 documentary This Is Elvis, Mark “Elvis” Hussman and Rick “Elvis” Saucedo, wearing replicas of the King’s American Eagle and Madison Square Garden jumpsuits, will take the stage and do their impersonating thing to the accompaniment of the Fabulous Ambassadors....

DJ SPOOKY/PLASTILINA MOSH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On his major label debut, Riddim Warfare (Outpost), DJ Spooky comes off less like the “custodian of aural history” he claimed to be in 1996 than a highbrow homeboy digging all the high-profile help corporate bread can buy–and despite his usual aggravating pomposity, it’s his most listenable effort yet. Earlier this year Spooky (aka Paul D....

Dreaming in the Dark: Recent Films From the Avant-Garde Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the films on this program make creative use of some form of manipulated imagery–home processing, optical printing, or animation–to create synthetic fantasy worlds. Scott Stark’s I’ll Walk With God gives an eerie view of an airline stewardess. Dervish Machine, by Bradley Eros and Jeanne Liotta, begins with an abstract whirling wheel; soon we see projector reels, and the title’s reference to whirling dervishes becomes conflated with cinema....

Films by Joseph Cornell Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Outside the cult of cinema buffs (to which he belonged), few people know that box maker and collagist Joseph Cornell also made short experimental films. The Film Center owns prints of several, appropriately enough given the Art Institute’s fine collection of Cornell’s quirky, theatrical boxes; like the films, they re-create a child’s love of the storefront nickelodeon....

Goodbye Stranger But as the play goes on, you begin to see that there’s something refreshingly singular and knightly about Glad: in this dreary milieu, his Panglossian innocence borders on the heroic, which in Luft’s world of vapid, fearful misfits has nothing to do with slaying mysterious knights or searching for the Holy Grail. It means offering an umbrella to a deranged soul crouching in a gutter. It means believing the story a homeless mother tells you and giving her every penny you can....

Jorge Suarez has eaten many different kinds of food. He likes Middle Eastern cooking and has a fondness for Chinese. But Suarez is Colombian and says he knows what food tastes the best. “It’s mine. What I cook. Sometimes I try Cuban or Puerto Rican. I think it’s too much oil. They cook with a lot of oil and a lot of cholesterol, so I don’t like that. The flavor is no good....

FROZEN ASSETS, Shattered Globe Theatre. This British import–powerful stuff when Shattered Globe first detonated it in 1992 and terrific today–combines adventure with a social conscience. In Barrie Keefe’s dark 1978 comedy, a hard-luck teenager is wrongly accused of killing a reform-school officer, then escapes the Borstal and runs for his life, ending up in the ruined dockyards of East London. The play’s sole reality principle, forthright Buddy is a British blend of Holden Caulfield and Huckleberry Finn; Keefe’s big-hearted survivor becomes the standard by which we measure the rogues and Samaritans he encounters, including a hypocritical Labor minister, bullying burglar, hysterical matron, dithering dowager, and pederastic peer....

GZA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Between the ascendance of underground hip-hop and the success of commercial posses like the Ruff Riders, the once-ubiquitous Wu-Tang Clan has been crowded out of the limelight. There have been a few solo efforts since the Wu’s landmark double album Wu-Tang Forever was released a couple years ago–most notably by Method Man and RZA–but recently the group has attracted more attention for the Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s whimsical name changes and numerous arrests than anything else....

Puppets seem to wield a primitive fascination. Part of the brain sees that they’re just creations of paper, wood, or cloth, but another part wants to believe they’re alive. It isn’t Pinocchio who yearns to be a little boy–it’s us, wishing to return through the medium of Pinocchio to the playfulness of childhood. Janie Geiser’s cardboard cutout figures attached to metal rods remind me more of paper dolls than puppets. And the elaborate sets she created for Evidence of Floods, the piece her company is performing here, are reminiscent of the complicated cardboard houses my sister would assemble for her dolls–which after all are just puppets without strings....

Anthony Molinaro was a graduate student at Northwestern University two years ago when his performance at the Naumburg International Piano Competition, which included Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 (the one that sent David Helfgott over the edge), wowed the judges and jump-started his career. It was a performance fueled by a passion for music that sprang from an improbably ordinary basketball-and-tennis boyhood in the south suburbs. Molinaro won the competition and was catapulted into the high-wire and hotel-room grind of the concert novice....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a December report in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, U.S. Representative Dan Burton of Indiana brings his own scissors, comb, and electric razor to a Washington barbershop to have his hair cut. Reporters speculated that Burton is afraid of contracting AIDS, which may be the same reason he no longer orders soup in restaurants and stopped going to the House gym around the time colleague and gym regular Barney Frank revealed he was gay....

Lead Stories In January in Toronto labor activist Dan Craig, 25, accepted a plea bargain that will keep him out of jail. Craig protested layoffs at an aerospace plant by suspending himself from a factory ceiling and playing Amazing Grace on a bagpipe for four hours. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In West Union, Ohio, last winter, Berry Baker, 54, protested the school district’s placing sculptures of the Ten Commandments on school lawns by demanding equal space for statues promoting his “Center for Phallic Worship,” which he said is based on an actual religion....