ILLUMINATIONS: A BESTIARY Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig, and Jane Calvin Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Medieval bestiaries were collections of descriptions of or tales about animals that imposed order on the natural world. Animals were ranked according to human qualities–horses were worthy, eagles noble, owls wise, wolves evil–in a system that reflected human values more than the actual natures of the animals....

The seminar leader tells us to turn to page seven in our resource book. He’s drop-dead handsome with a full head of perfectly blow-dried hair. He wears a full frontal smile and a yellow short-sleeve dress shirt under an argyle sweater vest. His name is Troy Campbell. He’s holding a pitching wedge. Troy says it’s a very hard quiz. My team’s question is a baffler about “loose impediments.” True or false: they are “natural objects such as leaves, twigs, branches, stones, worms, and insects, and nests or heaps made by them (provided they are not fixed or growing and are not solidly embedded)....

JEANNE DUNNING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dunning’s strategy often hinges on making her subject look like something it’s not. In this show, tomatoes look like tongues, hearts, or testicles; body parts resemble canyon walls. By humanizing the tomatoes and dehumanizing the body, Dunning puts vegetables and humans on the same plane. Significantly, the tomatoes are of the canned variety. Is she implying that human beings are equally homogenized?...

Smokey Smothers is a gentle, profoundly resilient man with a deep, abiding love for the blues and an ability to overcome personal setbacks that have endeared him to a new generation of blues fans in the 1980s. Featured for some years with his band, the Ice Cream Men, Smokey is currently working in a solo setting that showcases him to his greatest advantage. His Delta-style picking perfectly complements his famous lazy, “mushmouth” vocal style and wryly humorous lyrics, and without the encumbrance of a rhythm section he’s able to indulge his delightfully eccentric ideas about timing and slide work–melodious, Muddy Waters-style crispness one minute, outrageous high-treble, off-the-fretboard screaming the next–in a way that leaves listeners shaking their heads in admiration, bewilderment, and disbelief....

War may still be the world’s most popular team sport, but soccer does better in the TV ratings. In 1986, the global TV audience for the culminating match of the quadrennial World Cup was half a billion people. That’s five times the audience for a Super Bowl, and many times the live audience that watched our invasion of Panama (which resembled the World Cup in many ways). Why have all attempts to build a mass TV audience for the world’s game failed in the U....

It’s mid-morning, and things are a little screwed up here at the Marquette elementary school. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mary Matthews Productions, a small group exotically dressed in burnooses, has just finished a rousing gospel set, and the temperature in the little auditorium has been rising. Gospel great Ed Tucker couldn’t get time off work at Federal Express, so he’s a no-show this morning, and Reverend Darius Brooks (“Simply Darius”) isn’t here yet because he thought the show started at 11, not 10....

TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE: A DIALOGUE WITH FEAR So began the time-arts portion of “Territorial Imperative: A Dialogue With Fear,” an exhibit at Gallery 2. Anderson, Dana Briscoe, Holly L. Hey, and Paula M. Froehle presented widely divergent views on the theme of how women apprehend danger and establish their own territories. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anderson takes an irreverent approach in Hoop La!, which was originally intended to be presented as a ritual in back of the gallery in a vacant lot–until Anderson learned that it would shortly be paved over and turned into a parking lot....

The Chicago Chamber Consortium is a network of seven chamber-music groups (Rookwood, CUBE, the Exsultate Trio, the Burgundian Consort, the Chicago Ensemble, the Chicago String Ensemble, and the American Women Composers, Midwest) that would normally be in competition for audiences and financing. Instead they have banded together to save money on their publicity, management, booking, and grant writing. I recently talked with three women from the consortium about some of the chronic problems of chamber groups: Maria Lagios, a voice teacher and soprano in the Exsultate Trio who’s also known for her roles with Chicago Opera Theater and is president of the consortium; Patricia Morehead, an oboist, composer, and member of CUBE and the American Women Composers, Midwest; and Susan Pellowe, an administrator for the consortium but not a musician....

Dept. of seeing ourselves as others see us. From the Urban Land Institute’s new book Carrots & Sticks: New Zoning Downtown: “When asked which cities are most conducive to building great buildings, architect Eugene Kohn responded, ‘Chicago and Philadelphia.’ …In cities like Chicago…design excellence is already part of the city’s collective unconscious…. Chicago cabbies are just as likely to point out the local architectural landmarks as they are to boast about their baseball teams....

Since the 1960s, when she did brilliant, radical work (Something Different, Daisies, Fruit of Paradise) that arguably made her the most inventive living Czech filmmaker, Vera Chytilova has had a checkered, uneven career. This is in part because, unlike such compatriots as Passer and Forman, she chose to remain in her country, where her work has ranged from bouncy sitcom (The Apple Game) to fairly unabashed state propaganda (Prague) to more ambitious work (Prefab Story)....

If all had gone according to plan, there would have been a ground-breaking ceremony last month for an addition to the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences. The first ceremonial shovel of dirt would have been tossed by the local alderman and civic leaders from the surrounding southwest-side community of Mount Greenwood, who might have praised the school for being one of the city’s best. About 88 percent of the school’s students graduate (compared to a system-wide graduation rate of 43 percent)....

Is it true that cow, sheep, and termite flatulence does more damage to the ozone layer than fluorocarbons? How much damage do human farts do? –Mojo, Washington, D.C. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m glad you wrote, mon ami, because it gives me a chance to rail once again on my favorite topic, namely the unbelievable feebleness of the daily press. You were no doubt inspired to write by a story that appeared last December in the Washington Post headlined “Feed, Animal Flatulence and Atmosphere....

This new musical comedy about a fictional romance between the silent-movie sex goddess and a morality-mongering film censor is brash, goofy, and sweetly comic–and more clearly focused thanks to some judicious postopening trimming by authors Jeff Hochhauser and Robert L. Johnston. Beneath its surface breeziness, Theda Bara also boasts some remarkably subtle and complex music by Johnston. Despite occasional ragtime flourishes (nods to the story’s World War I-era setting), the score is grounded in the pop and rock styles of the last two decades, with a glossy texture, an energetic pulse, and playful melodies that recall the work of such eccentrics as August “Kid Creole” Darnell, Lene Lovich, Wazmo Nariz, and cowboy-music ironist Dan Hicks....

I’m hoping that Billy Bragg’s latest, an EP called The Internationale, is a detour. I know that everyone complains about Bragg’s “political stuff”; he’s like Woody Allen in that people will never let him forget the components of his earliest successes, in Bragg’s case a knack for luminous and complex (and often, truth be told, quite political) love songs. In point of fact, his political stuff is almost always shot through with humor and Bragg’s incandescent humanity....

George Bernard Shaw once said, “The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.” But while it’s true that musically the last century would have been a damned sight poorer without such cooperative efforts as the Hot Fives and Sevens, the Family Stone, and “Ballad of Mott the Hoople,” it’s also true that there have always been musicians who believed that one is not the loneliest number but the onliest number....

In Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage (1935 edition), Emily Post recommends the use of a PPC card as a way to ease the process of leave-taking. A PPC card is simply a personal greeting card with the letters PPC written in the corner. PPC stands for the French phrase pour prendre conge–to take leave. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We don’t ever want to speak for someone who has the disease,” Hayford says....

What time is it on the north pole? I mean, suppose I lived in Texas and I traveled straight north until I reached the north pole. I would look at my watch and determine what time I had arrived. But suppose just as I was mouthing the words, someone from New York arrived and said it was one hour later. And then I spin around and notice someone from California checking her watch, and she says it’s two hours earlier....

“But I always thought,” said I, “that repressed memories had something to do with childhood.” I was there. It felt warm and comfortable and safe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “You must trust me,” the Voice of Therapy Excellence commanded. “Together we will search your subconscious, uncover your unconscious, penetrate your psyche, mesmerize your memory, investigate your id, and explore your hidden wounds. A simple baseball team cannot be the cause of this depression....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Much has been said lately about the virtues of free market economics, with eastern European developments being cited as major evidence. But where is my free market? I ask the question literally. If I want to sell something, where can I go to sell it? I need places like the Maxwell Street market, where I can have thousands of potential buyers instead of perhaps a hundred at very best if I hold a garage sale....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In some ways, our experiences are similar; in others, they are strikingly different. The homeless cannot be lumped together as a “they” and talked about in generalities. For this reason, articles on the subject of homelessness present a real challenge to the writer/reader who must keep reminding themselves that they are writing/reading about some, but not all, of the homeless....