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High Art: Chicago Athenaeum’s New Video Celebrates Skyscrapers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The video was originally produced as part of a traveling exhibit of the same name that features some 175 drawings of Chicago high rises built over the last four years–about 80 towers in all. The exhibit, currently in Warsaw, Poland, has been seen in more than ten European and South American cities....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For starters, no child can identify with fantasy stories such as this, or fit in. I couldn’t understand why Ms. Calhoun thought that stories about the Coast Guard, raccoons, etc. are not better for the children to read, although such things can be easily explained, in fact, should be learned. I’m sure, children know what a guard is (they must have security guards in the buildings they live in), as well as what the coast, freight, and boats are....

The Kronos Quartet, who made an auspicious local debut two seasons ago, are back for a three-recital “Festival of New Music,” sponsored by the forward-looking Chamber Music Chicago. New-wave affectations aside, the Bay Area-based foursome are unquestionably among the best interpreters of 20th-century repertory, often the equal of the Juilliard Quartet in their intensity and probing intelligence and more venturesome than any other classically trained group I can think of. Their growing popularity, ironically perhaps, is due partly to their visual presentation–the color-coordinated space-age costumes and ultrahip mannerisms–which strikes a responsive chord among younger audiences more attuned to the Talking Heads....

LINE Fathomless Performance Concepts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The problem with watching the experimental drama that emerged off-Broadway 20 to 25 years ago is that much of it now seems incredibly dated. Sideburns and dashikis may be back in vogue, but it’s difficult to endure an acid-flashback sequence without sniggering a bit. To alleviate this problem, Wallflower Productions and director David Gips have given Israel Horovitz’s absurd 1967 antiestablishment rant, Line, what they call “a twist for the 90’s,” replacing outdated lines about hi-fis and eight-track tapes with references to CDs and digital audiotape....

Lead Story Latest multiple-personalities excuses: Larry Sanders, dismissed from graduate school at the University of Illinois for plagiarism, filed suit recently for reinstatement, claiming that it was one of his secondary personalities who did it. In an Oklahoma trial, Floyd Allen Medlock, who had confessed to murder, denied that he had had his Miranda rights read to him beforehand, stating that the Miranda warning had been mistakenly administered to one of his secondary personalities....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April the boat of Rolf Backer was found by officials in Key West, Florida, ransacked and bloody on a sandbar three miles from shore, with Backer missing and presumed murdered. His distraught wife failed to pay to have the boat removed quickly, and within three weeks officials had levied her $260,000 in various fines because the boat was an environmental hazard....

OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD You got your quietly courageous pedagogue; your motley bunch of uneducables; your repressive pecking order, enforced by bullies and prigs. You got your tortuous climb toward self-respect. At the end, you got your glimpse of new horizons for the uneducables, your gestures of love and gratitude for the teacher, your fits of apoplexy for the prigs. Gabe Kaplan would recognize the pattern immediately. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

A serious contemporary movie about a serial killer by flashy and talented genre director William Friedkin may sound like a contradiction in terms, and I certainly wouldn’t want to oversell a movie whose distinction largely consists of negative virtues: its refusal to manipulate the viewer, mythologize the subject, or deify the serial killer in the disgusting if effectively Oscar-mongering manner of The Silence of the Lambs. Made several years ago, but held up from release by Dino De Laurentlis’s bankruptcy, this film is a somber investigation of the legal and psychiatric issues surrounding the trial of a serial killer....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While Dr. Thomas Sheehan of Loyola University exhibited an extensive knowledge of exegesis in his interview with Mr. Robert McClory [April 21], Dr. Sheehan dismissed the authenticity of the resurrection story too quickly on the basis of known biblical redaction. Although Shakespeare characterized death as the bourne from which no traveller returns, modern medical research has uncovered evidence of the probability of life after death in interviews with individuals resuscitated from clinical death, defined generally as the cessation of bodily functions....

It was another thrill-packed year in major league baseball, full of milestones, laughers, squeakers, nail-biters, upsets, pier-six brawls, and cliches. How well do you remember the notable stars and moments of 1988? Kenny Williams was the subject of a disastrous experiment, an ill-advised shift from the outfield to third base that caused him to lead the league in errors, drop his batting average from .280 to .159, and spend much of the second half of the season in the minors....

To the editors: If his intention was to provide readers with an update on the fashion of the Medical Examiner’s office, perhaps he should have submitted his article to GQ magazine. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps, since my father is of Italian descent, his swelled belly is linked with lasagna. For the writer to use this is a gross stereotype. My father recently lost 35 pounds....

Kenji Mizoguchi’s first postwar film, made under the censorship pressure of the American occupation, might be interpreted as a story about the director’s own artistic confinement as well as that of the great 18th-century wood-block printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806). (A less offensive and more accurate translation of the title would be Five Women Around Utamaro.) While the film isn’t without its difficulties–a plot with no easy identifications due to a virtual absence of close-ups, a large cast of characters, and a periodic displacement of narrative centers–these are all intimately related to the film’s uncommon achievements....

What Will Become of Quigley North? But the chapel is merely one of Quigley’s four wings. The Very Reverend Thomas Franzman, rector of Quigley, told us that Loyola University across the street wants to buy the seminary and expand into it. But the archdiocese needs lots of money. “Doing other things I’m sure would be financially better than selling it to Loyola,” Franzman said. He said calls from developers who want to do other things have been pouring into the chancery....

Returning, after two years’ hiatus, under the auspices of producer Doug Bragan’s Douglas Theater Corp., this third not-so-annual event features 16 non-Equity companies in as many one-act plays, organized in programs of four. The selections range from experimental drama to camp melodrama to medieval farce to musical comedy to good ol’ American naturalism. “One might select one of the four packages because of a particular play included in it,” says a press release....

A CHORUS OF DISAPPROVAL Guy wasn’t going to be hung, of course–except perhaps in effigy, like his namesake Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century terrorist whose failure to blow up Parliament is celebrated in England with mock executions. Guy’s misdeeds aren’t serious crimes: a little adultery here, a little disingenuity here, a lot of passive aggression all around. But to Ayckbourn, Guy is every bit as immoral as Macheath–and every bit as much a reflection of the pervasive corruption of his society....

I’ve always been drawn to the fanciful illustrations that adorn the covers of sci-fi magazines and books. Better than words, they conjure up images of faraway planets, visions of improbable habitats; the vivid imagination of the artists transforms outer space into a friendlier and curiouser place. “Like last century’s painters of the Wild West, space artists romanticize a new frontier,” says Terry Booth, the mild-mannered owner and curator of the three-year-old Brandywine Fantasy Gallery....

If you consider the ways that most of us experience classic Broadway musicals these days–i.e. in dinner-theater revivals with three-piece orchestras that include synthesizer and ukulele, or in enormous arenas where the singers wear body mikes and the orchestra is heard through tinny amplification–then the notion of an opera company tackling this uniquely American art form makes great sense. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel is hardly an opera (it contains as much spoken dialogue as music), but it has many operatic elements, and this production should benefit substantially from what Chicago Opera Theater can bring to it....

The bandoneon, which is sometimes called the button accordion, is a peculiar instrument–and I’m being charitable. A conventional accordion has that small piano-style keyboard for the right hand and a rack of chord buttons for the left. The bandoneon has no keyboard, and each of its buttons plays only a single note at a time; but since there are 76 buttons, the bandoneon has a range that nearly matches that of a piano....

COLD CHAMBERS In the first one-act, 3814, a depressed and angry couple, Tony and Nell, bicker and pick at each other in an apartment strewn with newspapers. Unemployed and broke, they live in a world that makes the Honeymooners’ lot look like easy street: “Turn on the radio.” “It’s broke.” “Oh, yeah.” They spend their days fighting in the most sterile terms: “Fuck you.” “No, fuck you.” Even when things are quiet between them, their barely repressed hostility and disappointment poison what could be a sweet moment....

BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA With Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Sadie Frost, Tom Waits, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, and Bill Campbell. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider that major European academics such as Umberto Eco and the late Roland Barthes have written about movies for popular newspapers and magazines, but their U.S. counterparts are considered much too esoteric for such exposure–which doesn’t mean that American readers are dumber, only that American editors (and perhaps writers) are more restrictive....