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Anthony Braxton inspires some listeners to heights of aesthetic ecstasy and utterly mystifies others. As a mutlisaxophonist and multiclarinetist, he ranges from exhilarating reinvestigations of bop repertoire to unaccompanied, distant abstraction. He’s also a composer–of songs for jazz combos, of huge symphonic works, of extended, flowing, lyrical pieces, and of some of the most thorny amalgams of orchestration and controlled improvisation ever conceived. He once called his music “post-Ayler, post-Webern,” and if that’s wide territory, it’s still the narrowest categorization of his work possible; moreover, there’s nothing merely fashionable about his range of adventures–they’re all distinctive creations of a bold, immensely skillful, iconoclastic artist....

The sign next to her table reads boldly, “Condom Pins: $10,” and then in smaller print, “No, they’re not used.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brennan smokes Marlboro Menthols, and the box complements her green paint-stained shirt and her closely cropped dyed-purple hair. “I like bright colors,” she says. Her favorite artist is Vincent van Gogh because, she says, she is a colorist too....

CLARENCE DARROW IN HELL This is precisely the idea that has gripped the damned in Clarence Darrow in Hell. The authors, Kenan Heise and his son Dan Heise, have adapted the “Inferno,” the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, but reversed Dante’s point of view on hell. In the “Inferno” Dante is given a tour of the underworld by the poet Virgil, who shows him how perfectly God’s punishments fit the sinners’ crimes....

One of the most delightful things about Dr. John is the way he combines rowdiness with an encyclopedic knowledge and respect for New Orleans R & B and blues tradition. His show is a flamboyant pastiche of savory tidbits ranging from Crescent City classics by the likes of James Booker and Professor Longhair to Tin Pan Alley ballads to his own distinctive creations. References to indigenous New Orleans history are woven effortlessly through everything: “I Walk on Gilded Splinters” has its roots in a traditional voodoo chant (originally sung by women, incidentally), and “Iko, Iko” includes colorful Creole patois as well as imagery drawn from the rich folk culture of the Mardi Gras Indians....

CHANGING NIGHTLY The three plays are all about speech and its relation to thought and emotion. Stanley Elkin’s novella The Making of Ashenden is performed in a story-theater adaptation, with the author’s prose largely preserved in the hero’s first-person narrative. Denis Diderot’s philosophical dialogue Rameau’s Nephew, adapted by Andrei Belgrader and Shelley Berc, is delivered pretty much as it was written in the 18th century: one man asking questions, another responding....

DESPOILED SHORE/ It may be too early in the year to say, but if you’re going to see one completely obscure avant-garde treatment of a classical myth this year, this could be the one! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have, however, apprehended the basics. The main characters are Jason and Medea. The phlegmatic Jason wants to marry Creon’s daughter. This makes Medea very jealous and (in this production) exceedingly strident....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since Mr. Hansen took over as chief executive, Cook County Hospital has been without a heart surgery program, not an insignificant problem for a patient population with one of the highest incidences of heart diseases, heart valve infections and chest trauma in the Midwest. (We have already had an abortive cooperative cardiac surgery venture with one hospital and are in the middle of a second expensive cooperative agreement....

ROGER & ME The story of how Michael Moore, a journalist from Flint with no prior filmmaking experience, financed his first feature is an American success story with an inspirational value all its own. Moore sold his house and furnishings, organized local bingo games, invested his settlement from a wrongful-discharge lawsuit against Mother Jones (where he briefly served as editor), and collected hundreds of small investments from Michigan residents to raise his $160,000 budget....

At 14th Place, just off Halsted, a crooked street-sign arrow that would direct traffic to South Water Market if it were straight points instead to the absence of light in the western sky. At four in the morning, the streets surrounding Chicago’s oldest and busiest wholesale produce market are dark. Only the glowing headlights and idling engines of refrigerated trucks suggest the presence of life. They line up in long convoys, rumbling in the dark, encircling the dirty, rubble-filled lots that on Sunday will fill with carts and people and become the Maxwell Street bazaar....

In August of 1908, mobs of white people attempted to drive the African American citizens of Springfield, Illinois, from that city during two days of murder, arson, and beatings. Outraged that such assaults should take place in the hometown of the Great Emancipator, reformer Oswald Garrison Villard urged like-minded people to find ways to change what historian Roberta Senechal calls in a new book “America’s dismal racial status quo.” The eventual result of that plea was the founding in 1910 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which offered a program of organized dissent to the discrimination and violence aimed at African Americans....

SURRENDER One minute Surrender is autobiography (we think); the next it’s semiautobiography (we think–the program lists Bales as ‘Ted,’ the quotation marks suggesting a persona rather than an actual person); and then it’s parody (with what seem to be aspects of ‘Ted’ splitting off to become an Italian sex kitten and a clownlike drunk). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bales takes a couple of lame pokes at Vietnam-war protesters, women’s liberationists, the homeless, and other groups outside of the mainstream....

TALES FROM HOLLYWOOD The more I talked, the more elitist I sounded, and the less convinced I became of my position. Don’t artists want to be popular, too? Can’t commercial producers operate out of a genuine love for theater? By the time I finished, I had almost convinced myself that serious theater artists are also pandering–they just appeal to a more educated segment of the market. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“A breathtaking and serene piece of architecture which exudes the total integration of structure with the original architectural concepts”–that’s how the awards jury of the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois sees 181 W. Madison, which it named the “best structure” of 1991. According to the SEAOI Bulletin (September), the 50-story tower is “the tallest combination concrete core/perimeter steel building in Chicago.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Mike told me in no uncertain terms that he did not ‘do’ books....

STRAPLESS Early in his stage career, I’m told, Hare was a firebrand, a proletarian dramatist zinging poisoned darts at the upper classes. But his films–including his screenplay for Plenty, which was at least elegantly directed by Fred Schepisi–are posh, posturingly politicized updatings of what used to be called “women’s pictures.” His female protagonists (the men are largely stick figures) are blocked women forced by will or circumstance to attempt to liberate themselves....

When your city plays host to the All-Star Game, it becomes the capital of baseball for a few days. And, like any capital, it becomes a willing victim of pomp and pageantry, of events inflated to overshadow their utter lack of importance. The All-Star Game just played at Wrigley Field offered nothing profound and nothing of any real meaning. The game’s return, under the lights, after a 28-year banishment from Wrigley should have been a primer of how the game has changed with the dominance of television–how it’s become the tool of the medium, and not the other way around –but, aside from the rain delay being dragged out to accommodate network replacement programming and a small but irritating incident involving a Minicam crew atop a neighboring building (the light was a distraction to batters, halting play during the fourth inning), that was not the case....

TOM TILER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom Tiler was written anonymously and performed very early in the reign of Elizabeth I–a good 20 years before the flowering of Elizabethan drama brought us, among others, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and, of course, William Shakespeare. It concerns a hapless tiler–one who attaches and repairs roofing tiles–and his marriage to a shrewish woman named Strife. He can’t tame her; she tames him....

A JOY FOREVER Mattie, who emerges as a frightened, pathetic rabbit, not the dotty lady we’re supposed to love, leads the fight to save the endangered road, which connects her and the Grizzles with the world. Their enemy is a venal county commissioner who wants to close the road to protect the privacy of several proposed river estates. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mattie’s been morbidly out to lunch ever since her parents were killed in an auto accident and she saw shrouds on the furniture....

GOODFELLAS With Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Robert De Niro, Paul Sorvino, Chuck Low, Frank Sivero, and Debi Mazar. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The film proceeds like a continuous set piece, broken in flow only by a series of strategically placed freeze-frames–13 by my count–which are clustered mainly around the opening and closing portions of the film. (The first seven carry us through the party following Henry and Karen’s wedding; the last six chart some of the murders, betrayals, and disillusionments that occur over the last 15 years in the story, beginning with the murder whose final stages are first shown in the opening scene of the film....

Ballpark Requiem “Yes,” Bukowski said mournfully. “It’s an abomination. Approximately half the seats in the new stadium are further away from the action than the last row of seats in the old ballpark. I want to know why that’s better, just because there’s not a post somewhere in the proximity. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Imagine if Monet had done a series of Comiskey Park studies,” he muses in the entry dated June 13....

CAVE LIFE The play revolves around Charleston Silvers, a sweet, psychotic tour guide for a museum of natural history. Charleston’s psychosis comes out in her hallucinations–well, actually she has just one hallucination, but it’s a doozy. A Neanderthal man named Enki appears whenever Charleston is in turmoil; mostly he wants to make love to her. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Rappoport’s wild world, however, Enki doesn’t seem so very unusual....