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What’s Up at the Loop (Part 1) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Howard Stern spent his first few days on the local airwaves calling Steve Dahl, his new morning competitor, a “big fat pig.” If you were curious, that’s about as clever as Stern gets–and as close to the bone, for that matter. Dahl’s problem isn’t that he’s fat, it’s that he’s witless–though he’s a regular Dick Cavett compared to Stern....

WOMEN AND WATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Women and Water is antigovernment and antiwar, but it’s essentially a search for truth. It begins with the young and idealistic Lydie working as a nurse during a Civil War battle. She has run away from her home in Nantucket because she began to believe she had been drawn into a lie by her adored father and brother after they returned from a whaling trip, and she was unable to confront them....

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL Based on a tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the plot details five serious tricks the characters play on each other (or, more properly, that Shakespeare plays on all of them). Helena, the orphaned daughter of a famous physician, is pining away at the court of Rossillion from a near-hopeless love for the snobbish young Count Bertram. “There is no living, none, if Bertram be away,” she says in a lovely speech that yet reeks of one-sided adoration....

Americans first started experimenting with Louis Daguerre’s new photographic process around 1840, 50 years before Frederick Fargo Church snapped this picture of George Eastman with a Kodak camera on board the S.S. Gallia. The Terra Museum’s current exhibit American Photography: 1839-1900 looks at the development of photography over those years and, through the camera’s eye, documents the period–the Civil War, the Wild West, politicians like Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. The exhibit includes American daguerreotypes, made on silver-coated copper plates; rare samples of paper photography, which had replaced the daguerreotype by the mid-1860s; Edward Muybridge’s sequential split-second studies of animal locomotion; and photos taken in the 1880s with Eastman’s easy-to-use Kodak camera....

Madame Flora, the spiritualist heroine in Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium, cynically fakes seances for a living, but one day something happens during a session that she can’t quite explain–she hears voices and feels cold hands grasping at her throat, ghostly torment that continues until the shocking climax. This one-act, written in 1946, when Menotti had just begun blending Broadway with opera, owes a debt to his favorite composers, Verdi and Puccini....

And now, a calendar that will remember your birthday long after you do: For just $79.99, Hammacher Schlemmer’s winter supplement offers a battery-operated electronic calendar that “can be programmed to remember special dates . . . and uses flashing red LED lights to remind you of them up to three days in advance. Its patented 60-year memory can be programmed with up to 2000 important dates.” Let’s see, put in the 1992 Iowa caucuses right away ....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As originally conceived and carried out, Operation Clean Sweep imposed substantial restrictions on the civil liberties of Chicago’s public housing residents. As described in the article, before the ACLU’s lawsuit was filed Operation Clean Sweep employed CHA personnel and Chicago police officers to conduct indiscriminate, mass searches of the personal property of CHA tenants, including looking through closets, dresser drawers, handbags, bedclothes, etc....

Combining the dark homoeroticism of Jean Genet, the suspensefulness of Hitchcock, and the visceral thrill of Olympic acrobatics, this mostly silent study of sexual longing is exciting cinema, astounding dance, and gripping drama. Featuring a quartet of dancer-actors performing under the name DV8 Physical Theatre, Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men follows the four as they prowl the sexual underground, seeking emotional connection as much as physical gratification but failing to resolve the gap between arousal and alienation....

DOCTOR FAUSTUS An archetype for the expansive Elizabethan era, Dr. John Faustus is the ultimate Machiavellian overreacher; he’s the intellectual equivalent of Drake and Cortez, arrogantly refusing to accept that human achievement or individual glory has bounds. Surely another motivation is Faustus’s barely concealed atheism, which mirrors Marlowe’s own; Faustus is blind to the devil’s power because he doesn’t believe in an afterlife. Both beneficiary and victim of his insatiable aspirations, Faustus sells his immortal soul to Mephistophilis for 24 years of often childishly abused omnipotence....

PLAYWRIGHTS FOR THE 90S Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The late Diane Arbus once stated, “By aiming for the specific, you arrive at the general.” Although she was speaking of photography, this principle may apply to any art that attempts to capture human experience. When an artist sets out to create a character who is to be something of everything, the end product is usually not much of anything....

Fighting Over Cairo Cairo, the hot-then-not nightclub in trendy River North, has new owners and a potential lawsuit on its hands. The new owners are John Abell, a real estate developer, and Dan Pedemonte, proprietor of a Wells Street bar called Burton Place. They’ve apparently won out over nightclub honcho Steve Edelson, who managed Cairo for about a month and tried to buy it before Abell and Pedemonte took control....

Pianist Jimmy Walker, at 84, is probably Chicago’s oldest working bluesman. His musical tenure here goes back at least to the late 20s, when he accompanied guitarist Lonnie Johnson and others at private parties and dances; a few years later he was working places like the Square Deal Club on Division Street, sometimes accompanied by guitarist Homesick James. As befits an elder statesman, Walker has developed a style over the years that’s dignified, gentle-rolling, and tasteful....

The first feature (1978) of the highly talented and singular black filmmaker Charles Burnett, all of whose films (including My Brother’s Wedding and To Sleep With Anger) are based in Watts; this one deals episodically with the life of a slaughterhouse worker (Henry Sanders). Shot on weekends over a year on a minuscule budget (less than $20,000), this remarkable work was recently selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as one of the key works of the American cinema–an ironic and belated form of recognition for a film that still has had virtually no distribution and has seldom been seen....

LUCKY STRIKES! Like most stereotypes, this one is based in some truth but is vastly overdrawn. Traditional southern blues musicians often incorporated vaudeville novelty numbers and hillbilly music into their acts, both to please diverse audiences and to satisfy their own desire for artistic exploration and growth. Plenty of contemporary artists, as well, remain firmly rooted in the blues heritage even as they embellish their music with the inevitable modern influences with which they’ve grown up....

MOSCOW CLASSICAL BALLET As a general rule, touring productions cut back on lavish sets, which are too cumbersome to tote around, and concentrate more on the dance and dancers. This works well, more often than not, but Swan Lake is the cultural icon of Russian classic ballet; it should be total theater, with sumptuous settings and costumes, a pit orchestra capable of doing justice to Tchaikovsky’s gorgeous music, and dancers who can master the ballet’s numerous technical and dramatic demands....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I originally described Alligator Records as “rapidly becoming a major purveyor of quality soul and roots rock vinyl, as well as being the nation’s major independent blues label.” (In other words, Alligator is already the nation’s major independent blues label, and now it’s adding all these other neat things to its resume.) The edited sentence, “....

“Hi. We’re the House Band Remains. We write songs about plays,” says Lloyd King brightly. He’s standing on the stage at Remains Theatre, managing to look not quite out of place. Behind him is the rest of the four-man aggregation, which plays a fluid blend of tarted-up jazz and dressed-down rock. King is the band’s musical director; he plays flute, mostly, but works out on bass and guitar as well. He’s got a thatch of hair that seems perched on his head, a mildly scruffy beard, and he and the rest of the band are dressed to the nines–this is theater, after all....

Lord Byron and I have a bone to pick with history: “I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every age and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one.” Yes, history’s been lounging around, chewing up and spitting out heroes like so many grape skins, and Byron and I think enough is enough....

Among the Herculean tasks in the realm of popular culture, there may be none more daunting than this: making Van Halen look smart. The ponderous heavy-metal-lite band, perennially popular with millions of credulous teens, has not only always acted dumb, but rarely evinced any interest in acting otherwise. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The video, for the song “Right Now,” is built around a conceit of 50 or so mini-videos, each with its own gnomic message in superimposed text....

SLOWDANCE IN ROOM 8-C Both plays are written and directed by Runako Jahi (best known as the author of the TV special Martin Luther King Suite), and both focus on male-female tensions–a theme also expressed in the show’s set (designed by Jahi), which is hot pink and royal blue. Again, Sometime Soon, the evening’s opener, has a barbed comic style that recalls the bitcheries of The Boys in the Band, but the gay, mostly white milieu has become black and mostly heterosexual here....