ANDY WARHOL: THE FACTORY YEARS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Warhol moved into the Factory, at 231 E. 47th Street in New York, in late 1963 and stayed until early 1968, when he moved downtown to Union Square. Like the rest of the 60s, Warhol’s years at the Factory were full of turmoil, desperation, and brilliance. Every element of his home and studio, from the floor to the toilet handles, was painted silver by Billy Linich; the Factory was part salon, part gallery, part opium den....

A poet in a vest and black stovepipe pants stands in the center of a mostly young, black crowd in the subterranean space of Literary Explosions, the Afrocentric bookstore in a basement at the intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee. His hair is a nest of sprouting baby dreadlocks that point straight up. A skinny Snidely Whiplash mustache covers his pouting mouth, and sunglasses hide his small brown eyes. His head is cocked to one side, and his hand rests on a raised ledge as his quirky voice, slathered with sarcasm, pierces the silence....

Dieter Appelt In the second Self-Portraits Appelt also presses himself against glass, but here he takes a stab at using photography’s transformative powers. We see a nude Appelt in a variety of positions–sideways, upside down–as if he were floating in a tank of water in some otherworldly, disembodied space. In each photo some part of his body–chest, shoulders, buttocks–is flattened against the glass, and we realize that his weightlessness is an illusion: we’re merely looking up at him lying on a piece of glass....

I bought my first ant farm in 1986 on Clark Street in a store that sold a typical New Town assortment of incense, Kenyan candlesticks, seashell night-lights, and refrigerator magnets. Near the cash register, in a display of toys from the 50s and 60s, was an Uncle Milton ant farm. The outside of the package had a picture of a brown ant in a top hat and bow tie holding a sign: “See the LIVE ANTS dig tunnels, build bridges, move mountains....

FLANAGAN’S WAKE Zeitgeist Theater at Improv Institute Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Upon entering the theater (which is in no way dressed up to look like anything other than a theater) the audience understands it is entering the fictional town of Grapplin, County Sligo, which is mourning the death of the beloved and mysterious Flanagan–presumably ensconced in a rough coffin onstage. Ensemble members sporting tweed and broad Irish brogues roam the theater, establishing character while developing an easy rapport with the audience....

With a handful of new tunes, cowritten by Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, Joan Jett’s not just a chick with an electric guitar anymore–now she’s got an electric ax to grind. Although Jett’s hard-edged, stripped-down adolescent rock ‘n’ roll has changed little since her days in the Runaways, current tastes for simplicity and honesty have brought her and her music back into vogue. Reportedly invigorated by a cult of adherents that includes Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland–all of whom took some part in recording her new album–Jett is touring in support of her best record in more than a decade, Pure and Simple (Warner Brothers/Blackheart)....

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN & THE FREE SPIRITS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes it gets a little tough for modern guitar junkies to recall that before Scofield and Metheny and their many musical progeny–even before (God help us) Al Di Meola–there was John McLaughlin. McLaughlin came to the U.S. from his native England in 1969 to perform in Tony Williams’s subversive organ trio, Lifetime, and then caught up with Miles Davis on the pivotal album Bitches Brew....

Loews Theatres’ New Concept: Service In northwest suburban Rolling Meadows, Loews Theatres is quietly constructing a luxury movie theater complex it hopes will lure back the disenchanted moviegoing public. The New York City-based Loews has plans to build similar theaters in at least a few markets in the northeast as well. Some competitors, though, are doubtful that the ambitious construction project will end up generating higher ticket revenues for the company....

RICHARD THOMPSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Upon arriving at Capitol in the late 80s Richard Thompson was positioned for stardom in America. Through Amnesia, Rumor and Sigh, and Mirror Blue, all produced by Mitchell Froom, the label spent more and more money to promote Thompson here, but the scheme never flew, and with the sprawl of the recent You? Me? Us? the campaign has effectively ended; Thompson will remain the quintessential cult figure....

MICHAEL HURLEY, 11/6 & 11/7, QUICKSILVER Michael Hurley is a crotchety old folkie who’s refused to let straightforward narrative or topical muckraking taint his gorgeous, often hilarious songs. With a career that began with an album for Folkways back in the 60s, Hurley remains the quintessential outsider. His reclusive life-style (he currently holes up in remotest Vermont), his earthy humor, and his grumbling persona have kept him far from even marginal popularity....

TAWDRY Joan Dickinson’s “Candid Scenes of Humble People in Relaxed Settings at the Turn of the Century” gave us another look at the world she explored in her recent Link’s Hall presentation, Black Cake: a take on the late-19th-century America of Emily Dickinson and John James Audubon. As a Hawaiian steel guitar played obbligato to a wash of Muzak strings and slide projections of flowery ornamental engravings flashed on the backdrop, Dickinson danced a slow, languid hula, her torso encased in rigid, form-fitting wire mesh....

THE MADMAN AND THE NUN “He dissolved eighteen luminal tablets and two cybalgine tablets in a small pot. . . . Then we said good-bye. . . . Stas began to slit his wrist with a razor, but the blood somehow didn’t flow. He cut the varicose vein on his right leg, but there wasn’t any blood there either. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Witkiewicz, like so many of his fictional protagonists, tried to maintain some dignity and sanity in a hopeless, unpredictable, and almost comically cruel world....

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago O’Day’s choreography suits Hubbard Street, perhaps better than it did the White Oak dancers: what I remember about their performance, despite the work’s romantic overtones, is the confrontation between four strong personalities and athletic, assertive bodies. When Hubbard Street performed it, it was gentler and made more sense psychologically: the four had their own distinct personalities but also communicated a sense of relationship. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

There is a moment in every young person’s life when a door opens revealing a glimpse of the future. For Zirbel, it occurred when he first heard the Beatles. “They woke me up,” he says. “I don’t know how to say it, but what they were doing changed my life. They altered the direction of a Wisconsin Catholic boy. I immediately felt life there and decided to learn how to play the guitar, which I started studying right away....

Evidence that the British are very different from you and me is in fine supply on the Auteurs’ Now I’m a Cowboy. The group managed to get its debut, New Wave, short-listed, as they say, for the British Mercury prize, a fairly prestigious award for album of the year given by an independent group of critics and radio people led by Simon Frith. What’s interesting about the Auteurs (and the Mercury’s eventual winner, Suede) is how the English critical establishment still hangs on to the ideal of the pop-rock band of ages past....

True West Maybe it’s time to retire Sam Shepard for a while. Or at least put his plays on a restricted borrowing list so that everyone won’t be able to get their mitts on them. That way he won’t run the risk of becoming the Neil Simon of young adults, his works so overdone that their merit will be entirely forgotten. Every month or so it seems there’s another fledgling Chicago theater company spawning another bare-bones production of Geography of a Horse Dreamer or Suicide in B-Flat or something else that popped out of Sam’s Smith-Corona in the 70s or 80s that might launch the troupe into cult status....

Night and Day I knew Bob Dole was going to lose when he started attacking the media. Rather, that’s when I knew he knew; resigned to President Clinton’s invulnerability, Dole trained his sights on a popular target, accusing the “liberal” press of trying to steal the election, currying favor with his conservative base. Media bashing always plays well; people love to take out their frustrations with everything that’s going wrong in the world on the industry whose job it is to report everything that’s going wrong in the world–even if, as in Dole’s case, the venting doesn’t do any good....

Last March the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine published an excerpt from When We Were Young: A Baby Boomer Yearbook in which the author described memorable events of the year 1968. But it was the account of neither the infamous Democratic National Convention nor the assassination of Martin Luther King that attracted the notice of Oliver Field, the former director of the American Medical Association’s Bureau of Investigation. It was rather the author’s use of quotation marks in a passing mention of “Dr....

Eighteen months ago, the 22nd Police District on the southwest side became one of five prototypes for CAPS, the city’s new community policing program. No longer would officers be pulled routinely off their beats; instead, they’d stay put while emergencies were answered by roving “rapid response” cars. The beat officers’ duty was to establish and maintain close links with the neighborhoods they protected. The Prestas, who operate a small neighborhood bookstore, concluded that the public wasn’t showing up because handbills advertising the meeting were being poorly distributed by the police....

Fiction or nonfiction? I want to tell this story. It’s about a cop, it’s about a river, it’s about a father, it’s about a boy. When you’re a cop you get to do this, volunteer for additional training, spend eight weeks in a classroom, earn three credit hours from the Chicago City Colleges. As if you were going for a degree. The mothers in these slides don’t just smoke cigarettes, they put them out on their children’s bodies....