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“An iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Imagine Winston Churchill in his study. Behind him, just visible in the dim evening light, four brocade curtains stand immobilized by their own weight, blocking the windows from floor to ceiling. They hum, gently shimmering, and as Churchill contemplates the world to be, they momentarily transform into iron. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brogger represents social and political arrangements through decorative objects and furniture, and she knows she runs the risk that her audience will be seduced by the decorative aspects of her work and fail to respond to the subtle symbolism....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA We have since learned to share Levine with New York’s Metropolitan Opera (where he has been music director since 1976) and the major podiums and opera houses of the world. Given the game of musical chairs currently being played in the music world, it seems inevitable that his glory days at Ravinia will soon be coming to an end (he is the most obvious candidate to replace Herbert von Karajan in Berlin)....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cecil Adams’s “The Straight Dope” column [February 14] contends that speed reading is not the answer to technical reading overload. Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics agrees. Yet the reading improvement method distilled by Evelyn Wood from her studies years ago provides a key component in a specialized technical reading program offered by Chicago-based American Learning Corporation (ALC)....

When the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter is aligned with Mars, go long oats and sell gold and stocks. Wood said he started watching the planets because his clients were doing it. About a third of his clients were using astrology before they came to him, he said. Practitioners divine market changes by using mathematical calculations based on planetary movements. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Chicagoan Norman Winski is another Indiana native practicing financial astrology....

Some singers knock you down, bowl you over, and pride themselves on leaving you for dead; Shirley Horn blows bittersweet kisses that waft and float en route to intimate targets. Stretching languorously into a snail’s pace ballad –such as “Lazy Afternoon” or “I Thought About You”–her style is unspectacular, almost artless, as she hovers somewhere between singing and talking. But her voice, soft, tiny, but indomitable, is like a slightly built karate expert: neither would be expected to pack the wallop that each of them does....

THE PATH OF ASHES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What the Dreiske ensemble is striving for is no less than a complete severence from all we have ever learned of the 17th-century play called King Lear, and a unilateral reconsideration of the universal themes contained therein, in order to render its material meaningful outside of its superficial cultural limitations. Since its inception in 1975, the Dreiske Performance Company has made its goal the creation of a hybrid theatrical form called by its artistic director, Nicole Dreiske (addressing the Colloquium of Theatre and Life Sciences at the University of Paris in 1984), “symphonic-kinetic theater,” whose object is “to challenge the predictable patterns of the dramatic form by using theme and image rather than narrative as the foundation of the drama,” and by making performance, rather than text, “the aggregation point of multidisciplinary cultural resources such as sociology, anthropology psychology, mythology ....

Ballet Chicago: How to Lose Friends and Discourage Funders Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What Smith glossed over is the irksome fact that Ballet Chicago has performed as much at Jacob’s Pillow as it has in its hometown, which is funding a large part of the company’s expensive operation. Ballet Chicago’s money problems may be linked to economic conditions, as Duell said, but then again it may be that local funders aren’t ready to fork more money over to an organization that has already consumed so much while maintaining such a low local performance profile....

The Chicago Symphony may be on strike, but it’s going through with this free concert in Grant Park celebrating “Daniel Barenboim Day,” named after the maestro charged with the daunting task of keeping the orchestra invigorated for its second century. Billed as the orchestra’s thanks to the people of Chicago for their first century of support, the lengthy program is designed to boost civic pride in the city’s multiethnic heritage with a medley of overtures and dance tunes by Verdi (Italian), Brahms (one of his Hungarian dances), Wagner (German), Dvorak (Czech), Percy Grainger (an Irish melody by the Australian American), Alberto Ginastera (Argentine), Stanislaw Moniuszko (Polish), and Adolphus Hailstork (African American)....

I’m tempted to say that Dawkins & Co. represent the face of the A.A.C.M. today, but that would be misleading: the organization has always made room for music (like theirs) from within the tradition, as well as sounds on the frontier. Yet in this, the A.A.C.M.’s third generation, more Chicago members than ever before have staked out the middle ground, finding it a fertile medium for the sonic, structural, and improvisational exploration that remains the A....

George Bush has decided not to go to the world environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro in June. The meeting is supposed to mark the formal beginning of an unprecedented international effort to deal with the world’s major environmental problems, and many heads of state will be there. The biggest point of contention between the U.S. and the rest of the human race is global warming. If the dire predictions related to the greenhouse effect are close to the truth, coastal cities will soon disappear beneath the seas and we midwestern birdwatchers will be adding cactus wrens and roadrunners to our Chicago-area lists....

When the Cook County Forest Preserve District acquired the Poplar Creek Preserve near Hoffman Estates, most of the property was old cornfields growing up to weeds. The preserve is a big piece of land. It measures about 3.5 miles east to west and about 2.5 miles north to south. Only four roads run through it, two from north to south and two from east to west. Work began in the summer of 1989, when two interns paid by the Nature Conservancy began clearing the invading buckthorn out of the grove....

The place setting is one of H.D. Anderson’s specialties. She knows exactly what every conceivable component on a place mat is for, from the soupspoon to the cold salmon fork. She knows the way to project an appropriate image while eating sorbet. She tells her clients to think of a dinner plate as if it were the face of a clock, and to place different pieces of silverware at different times on the clock face, depending on the piece and what message you want to communicate....

Lead Story In September it was reported that the government of Japan had begun testing silvery, reflective coats and hats for cows, designed by a Tokyo professor to cool them in summer and warm them in winter, making them produce more meat and milk. Australian researcher Dr. Philbert Hausman said earlier this year that milk production could be increased up to 35 percent by playing certain background music while cows are being milked....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In your July 23 advertising supplement on the Taste of Lincoln Avenue there was an informative article on the recycling center at the corner of Wrightwood and Lincoln avenues. There was, however, a major error in listing the materials collected at this site. The error is causing the Resource Center, the nonprofit organization operating the site, and the public a great deal of inconvenience....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A recent issue of the Reader featured Danny Davis [February 8]. The most interesting fact in the article was what Mr. Davis had hanging on his office wall–pictures of Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X; both advocated violence whereas Dr. King did not. Who accomplished more for the poor blacks and other minorities? What you place in your personal space reveals much about yourself–and others....

CONCERTANTE DI CHICAGO “Shostakovich and New Language in Soviet Music” was the title of a recent concert by Concertante di Chicago, the noted conductorless chamber orchestra. Alongside Shostakovich’s 1980 Chamber Symphony on the all-Russian program were works by Sophia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnitke, two of his artistic disciples and spiritual heirs. (The Concertante’s penchant for Russian music is understandable; its cofounder and concertmaster Hilel Kagan hails from Riga, Latvia.) Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Ever wonder what it might have been like if Eric Dolphy met, say, Harold Pinter–at Sun Ra’s house? Then try these guys on for size. First famous as a member of New York darlings the Lounge Lizards, saxophonist Nathanson is also cofounder of and guiding force behind the Jazz Passengers, the sophisticated, roisterous, witty, rough-hewn septet from which his quartet is drawn. This smaller and–could it be?–even grittier unit boasts the measure of theatricality that is a key element of Nathanson’s music....

SANTIAGO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Santiago presents several interwoven stories of love and violence set in the besieged Chilean city. A woman identified only as “She” (Laurie Martinez), married to a government torturer (Michael Ramirez), picks up a stranger (Horacio Sanz) in a movie theater, and after a seemingly obligatory sexual encounter promptly falls in love. It’s clear her lover is in danger, but it’s hard to tell who poses the greater threat: the woman’s jealous husband, who comments offhandedly that he must often revive his victims before he can continue to torture them to their death, or the woman herself, who admits that she staged her own rape at home with a young boy, knowing it would be videotaped by her husband’s surveillance cameras....

The Consecration of the House Overture is one of those near-great works by a major composer that inexplicably escape the attention of conductors. The last of Beethoven’s theatrical preludes–written in 1822 to celebrate the opening of a Viennese theater–it begins with a slow, majestic introduction in C major that segues into a magnificent fugal allegro. Its grandeur recalls handel, for whom Beethoven held deep admiration. paired with it in the golden-oldie section of this concert is another neglected curiosity, Bizet’s Symphony in C....

THE ENORMOUS ROOM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Enormous Room is Cummings’s account of the three months he and a friend, called only B. in the novel, were interned at La Ferte Mace concentration camp during the last days of the First World War. Like many other idealistic men of their generation, Cummings and B. had volunteered for the ambulance corps, expecting the war to be a nonstop adventure....