Georg Solti hired cellist John Sharp in 1986, when Sharp was only 27, making him one of the youngest musicians ever appointed to a Chicago Symphony Orchestra principal chair. As a soloist with the orchestra he’s performed Dvorak’s Cello Concerto and Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, with Itzhak Perlman and Daniel Barenboim. He consistently plays his section’s solos with elegant phrasing and a gorgeous tone, and he has a remarkable ability to pick up a musical line from an unrelated instrument such as the clarinet and match its sound–all qualities essential to great chamber music making....

Now in its third year, the Mad Decent Block Party has grown alongside the reputation of its founder, globe-trotting DJ and “Paper Planes” producer Diplo, and for the first time it’s big enough to branch out into cities beyond its native Philly. It’s been visiting a different town every Saturday since the end of July, and the fourth and final date on its tour is at the Hideout, where it’s serving as the venue’s 2010 block party....

Early for a jazz concert at the Chicago Cultural Center a couple months ago, I wandered into the Project Onward gallery, met artist Fernando Ramirez, and agreed to come back after the show to sit for a portrait. The starting rate for a single likeness at the gallery is $10, but this was a double of my husband and myself, executed in colored pencil. Inspired by a sample piece that Ramirez had on display, showing President Obama set against iconic images of Hawaii and Chicago, I also paid a little extra to get a skyline in the background....

He nodded toward the back of Pritzker Pavilion across the street. Inside the pavilion Oprah was leading a celebration for a group of Olympic medalists. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Up the block another police officer pointed me toward the action, as it were: a small gazebo on the Aon Center plaza where six students and even more parents sat reading in a quiet circle....

After the live sex demonstration on the Evanston campus last year I figured Northwestern University had gone about as far as it could go on the scale of stunningly stupid behavior. I was wrong. The university’s newly launched public relations campaign to justify blowing Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital off the face of the earth arguably exceeds even the fuck-saw show. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The university plans to construct a research center on the Prentice site, and it hasn’t been deterred by letters like the one from William F....

AP Jonathan Winters Maria Tallchief: The ballet world mourns the death of a prima ballerina and one of Balanchine’s greatest muses. I remember that in 1986 her Chicago City Ballet—a company that collapsed a year later—produced Prokofiev’s Cinderella in the Auditorium Theatre. The children of Chicago tried out for parts; my daughter Molly danced the important role of a ladybug. We had an early, light dinner at the Artist’s Cafe in the Fine Arts Building and then sauntered over to the Auditorium for the performance....

[Pure Fiction home] He shoots. Swish. Seven. Eight. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Victor shot three for 20 at last year’s tournament, but that’s only because the rim he practiced on all summer was the wrong height. Last New Year’s Day, after a few shots of Wild Turkey to ring in 1981, Victor’s Uncle Luca finally admitted what Victor knew all along: he’d never bothered to measure the space between the ground and the rim before he screwed a backboard onto Victor’s garage....

Will Eno’s Pulitzer-nominated play is being billed as a send-up of one-man shows, but that only begins to describe it. Premiering in Chicago after successful runs in Edinburgh and New York, this stream-of-consciousness monologue makes a floppy felt hat of the confessional form, beating the material into numerous conventional shapes, from expressionist fable to romantic elegy to rickety, denial-choked consideration of the whole communicative undertaking. It holds any given shape only for fleeting moments, and trades mightily on the hoarse shadow laughter that trails every “heartfelt” declaration in the Theater of Me....

Lisa Ebright Mary Zimmerman Blame the holiday crunch. Questions I submitted for director and playwright Mary Zimmerman before writing this week’s column didn’t make their way to her—and her responses didn’t get to me—until after deadline. The column is about objections Silk Road Rising artistic director Jamil Khoury raised after reading Zimmerman’s comments in a Chicago magazine interview about her new musical, The Jungle Book. (The play, based on the Disney movie and Rudyard Kipling’s stories, is now running at the Goodman Theatre....

Dinner Parties This year’s Best of Chicago issue featured Toupee, who was Steve “Plastic Crimewave” Krakow’s pick for Best Band With a Front Woman Who Looks Hot Even in a Monster Mask. Toupee, who released their debut LP, Dinner Parties, this spring on Oozing Wound drummer Kyle Reynolds’s Rotted Tooth Recordings label, has been a longtime local favorite of mine as well. In honor of their Best of Chicago pick—and in honor of them just being a killer band—today’s 12 O’Clock Track is “Do the Night Train,” off Dinner Parties....

BLASTED | A RED ORCHID THEATRE WHEN Through 3/4: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM WHERE A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells PRICE $20-$25 INFO 312-943-8722 Also perplexing to theatrical tastemakers was the play’s uneven tone. What starts out as a crisp, quasi-naturalistic relationship study literally explodes midway, turning into an expressionistic nightmare, then subsiding into a somber yet almost beatific ritual of healing. Perhaps most troubling was its portrait of an England overrun by war and anarchy, a view the play’s British detractors regarded as the ranting of a publicity-seeking punk....

Truthful and funny in the style of the BBC series The Office, this indie mockumentary follows four young teachers through nine months at a fictional public high school in Austin, Texas, wickedly satirizing all the problems of the profession: insulting kids, difficult coworkers, crushing workloads. Mike Akel and Chris Mass, improv artists who have both taught in Austin, conjured up the script in 6 AM sessions before the school day kicked in and drew on a lively bunch of students and colleagues to cast the classroom and teachers’ lounge scenes....

Instead, it turns out he bulldozed the little field house at Whittier, a public school in Pilsen, which had become a symbol of resistance to all-powerful mayors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you undoubtedly remember, the field house—nicknamed La Casita—was the subject of a heated showdown about three years ago between Mayor Daley’s school appointees and local activists and parents. In any event, residents staged a 43-day sit-in at the field house until Mayor Daley basically decided, the hell with this crap....

Today I am announcing that I will not seek a thirty-eighth term as Mayor of the city of Chicago. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For many years, I have been a public servant. I was Cook County State’s Attorney before I was Mayor. I was State’s Attorney when one of our fine police lieutenants was supposedly mistreating some of our fine black suspects in one of our police stations on our city’s great south side....

THE WACKNESS sss Written and directed by JONATHAN LEVINE WITH JOSH PECK, BEN KINGSLEY, OLIVIA THIRLBY, FAMKE JANSSEN, JANE ADAMS, AND mETHOD mAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I were Levine reading this I’d probably hang my head, because few filmmakers have been able to crystallize the doubts of a generation the way Mike Nichols did with The Graduate in 1967. Rewatching that film, I was struck by how immediate it seems even after 40 years, whereas The Wackness, set in the summer of 1994 and steeped in the hip-hop sounds of the era, is colored by Levine’s premature nostalgia....

If the daily newspaper disappears—an outcome I’m still unwilling to accept—it won’t have been done in by its eccentricities. “I think the elephant in the room is the concept of having a reporter spend 20 months and 50K words to document whether Scientist A or Scientist B truly deserved credit. I submit it is that kind of thinking that is a big part of why newspapers are in the trouble they’re in today....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the rain wasn’t an issue, navigating the schedule turned out to be tricky. We named our guide “how to make the most of Lollapalooza” because at a festival with eight stages you’re inevitably going to have to make some tough choices and miss some things you want to see. For me the biggest scheduling conflict of the weekend came Friday evening when New Order, Queens of the Stone Age, and Chance the Rapper played overlapping sets....

Charles Mingus, the greatest jazz composer since Ellington, presented his masterwork, Epitaph, only once, during a disastrous 1962 Town Hall performance. When conductor, composer, and musicologist Gunther Schuller sought to reprise the piece in 1989, he had to confront a paper trail of misorganized sheet music that required wholesale reconstruction. What he put together was something like Mingus-as-Mahler, a fantasia of familiar and iconic themes cobbled into a sprawling, two-hour portrait of a busy and messy musical mind....

CAETANO VELOSO | CE (NONESUCH) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first I wondered why Veloso had bothered to tap into this vein at such a late date. But by the end of my first listen through Ce I’d forgotten all about that in my astonishment at his vocal performance. He sings just like he does on the sophisticated, self-consciously adult albums he’s been making since the late 80s, where the music is rooted in samba and bossa nova and borrows freely from all over the world....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary of the death of Rodney Kyles Jr., a philosophy student at Roosevelt and an aspiring MC who rapped under the name In Rod We Lust. Kyles was 19 when he was stabbed to death in Lincoln Park in front of his friend Chancelor Bennett, who is better known as local hip-hop phenom Chance the Rapper....