Les Tetes Brulees take pains to point out that despite the seeming raw unself-consciousness of their “bikutsi rock”–which draws heavily on traditional dance music from the western rain-forest regions of Cameroon–their music is actually a conscious reaction to the slick, flashy makossa style that has held sway in their country since the ascendancy of Manu Dibango in the 1970s. Led by Jean-Marie Ahanda, a former music critic with the Cameroon Tribune, Les Tetes Brulees have mastered a hyperkinetic yet loose and swinging style that affords the kind of held-breath thrill you get from watching stock-car racing....

Dr. Madlow is under the impression that I have been using the cloister complex as a means of controlling my environment and that I could stand to exercise more of an effort to share myself with the outside world if there is to be any real headway. Cloister complex my ass. Madlow is perfectly one-sided on this and continues to instigate one battle of wills after another. Why must he fight me?...

Friday, October 13 *Postman: One of the most striking recent works from China’s sixth generation filmmakers, He Jianjun’s Postman recalls the films of Robert Bresson, Pickpocket especially, in both its subject and its gorgeously austere manner. Xiao Dou, the film’s young protagonist, is chosen to replace a postman fired for reading the letters he handles and immediately begins repeating his predecessor’s transgression. While at first it seems this behavior may simply be a way for the shy loner to share in other lives, the film carefully avoids endorsing that interpretation or any other, leaving us to puzzle over why this voyeuristic obsession becomes an end in itself, a duplicate existence that Xiao prefers to any authentic one....

Where the buffalo may soon roam. Marianne L. Hahn in Natural Area Notes (Spring): “Thirty-seven miles of chain link fence [will] permit reintroduction of bison” in the 43-square-mile Joliet Arsenal if a plan to turn it over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is approved. “To erect the fence at today’s costs would run about $4 million. Who would spend that much in today’s economic climate to restore bison to a reconstructed prairie?...

According to the attached article, AIDS activists are concerned about unsafe sex at a gathering of eunuchs in India. Could you please elaborate on what sexual abilities eunuchs have? –F.T., Danbury, Connecticut Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A bizarre story made even more bizarre by a mistranslation: the festival in question is not a gathering of eunuchs, strictly speaking, but of “hijras,” as they’re called in India....

Among pop’s more casual listeners (and even among some clueless musicians) exists the common misconception that it’s the drummer’s job to keep time so the rest of the band can sort of follow along. Rhythmically savvy musicians understand, however, that keeping time is everyone’s job. And nowhere is this more crucial than in the exacting art of funky dance music, where even a trombone player with a flat-footed time sense can make a crack rhythm section sound sloppy....

A HOLIDAY SPIN, Bailiwick Repertory. An aggressively jolly Yuletide celebration, this 75-minute off-night potpourri of seasonal songs and stories, conceived and written by Jonathan Abarbanel and director/choreographer Scott Ferguson, cleverly controls the spontaneity built into it: audience members whirl a roulette wheel decorated with a wreath to determine what happens on any given night. The pointer’s position tells the energetic four-member ensemble to perform a song or story, or an audience member to share a holiday memory or receive a surprise (an Etch-A-Sketch, bingo game, or cookies left over from before the show)....

AND GOD SAID TO ABRAHAM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Turner (who also wrote Dates Without Chicks and FYT) here reworks, often hilariously, the Old Testament tale of Abraham and Sarah. The script initially parallels that childless couple’s delight when God grants them a son, Isaac, and their panic when the same inscrutable God orders Abraham to sacrifice him. Turner sets his story in a contemporary backwoods burg where the pioneering Knight family are near extinction....

Hidden Theatre, at the Greenview Arts Center. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The most dangerous sort of radical is the one who acts in accordance with a personal vision. Tahereh, the 19th-century Irani poet whose life and teachings helped found the Baha’i faith, was such a revolutionary. Ezzat Goushegir’s Behind the Curtains paints a heroic portrait of the young woman whose father broke with Islamic tradition to give her an education, even allowing her to study the Koran, only to find himself the father of a full-blown crusader....

By Cara Jepsen Tonight’s Reggae Under the Stars fund-raiser benefits Glad Tidings for All’s adopt-a-family holiday fund and features the music of local reggae band Gizzae. The event is from 7 to midnight on Navy Pier’s rooftop deck, 600 E. Grand. The $30 ticket includes all you can eat and drink and must be purchased in advance; guests are asked to bring a children’s book to donate to this year’s holiday effort....

With its inimitable blend of great music, profound emotions, and honest humor, Richard Wagner’s greatest opera, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, is considered by some to be the pinnacle of Western civilization. But you don’t have to engage in Wagner worship to enjoy this monumental (in every sense) work. Demanding a huge and high-caliber cast, chorus, and orchestra, this is a show that doesn’t make it to the Civic Opera House often enough, so the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s concert version is welcome indeed....

Concerts like this–an ambitious-sounding tribute to both Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane (who played for a brief but illuminating period in Monk’s late-50s quartet)–fall into the “anyone’s guess” category: it might turn out great, it might be a train wreck. Plans call for an opening set by a quintet steeped in Coltrane-iana, featuring the mysterious Rashied Ali (the drummer who replaced Elvin Jones in Coltrane’s band of the mid-60s); the mercurial trumpeter Freddie Hubbard (who played on Coltrane’s controversial Ascension album); and saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, the honoree’s talented son....

The vote was taken by congressmen in Washington, but the blow was felt by Keith Hamilton, a teenage high school dropout from Cabrini-Green. “The federal government does not determine who gets the money,” says Jackson. “It’s decided on the local level.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The city funds Prologue to work with dropouts between the ages of 16 and 21. “You have to be a dropout to get into Prologue,” says Jackson....

SINS OF THE SAINTS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A poetry professor of mine used to say that an image is its own best container of meaning, an idea Chicago theater artists would do well to study. Too much of Chicago theater–notably among the smaller companies–remains in the stranglehold of the 20-year-old kitchen-sink aesthetic, which sees lurid displays of emotion as the beginning and end of drama....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » New Yorker Films is charged with renting only 16-millimeter and 35-millimeter prints of [Ousmane] Sembene’s work and no video. He’s right, and this is a pity. I have been after Semebene for years to put his works out on video. He refuses to cooperate–and I cannot do it without his cooperation, let alone his approval–because he simply loathes video and does not want to see his films in the marketplace in video....

ODILON REDON: PRINCE OF DREAMS But as anyone who has covered their eyes in terror knows, it doesn’t work; and many of Redon’s noirs depict the demons of the mind’s eye. Menacing profiles hide in rocks; flowers display strange faces; creatures seem part plant, part animal. In Primitive Being (c. 1875), a nude youth standing in a road bends to touch the severed head of a giant. In Cactus Man (1881), a head with long thorns all over it sprouts from a square box, apparently growing like a plant....

The Last Romantic: As befits a romantic, F. Scott Fitzgerald died young–or youngish. Ravaged by years of alcoholism, he was 44 when his heart gave out in a Hollywood bungalow in 1940. His books were out of print. His money was gone. His glittering, beloved schizophrenic wife was back east in an insane asylum. Still, Fitzgerald kept writing, turning out short stories (which were not as good as the ones he wrote in his best years, before the Crash of ’29) and screenplays; he even contributed material to Gone With the Wind....

River North is really fun, the way it’s fun to go to a party or club and dance with a lot of people to a lot of different kinds of music. Because variety–within limits–is definitely part of the troupe’s appeal. Founder Sherry Zunker Dow has a flair for choreographing to vocal music, whether pop or gospel, which gives her work an MTV accessibility and gut-level impact: she’s best known for Reality of a Dreamer, with its masochistic sense of surrender; but even her piece about angels (at least I think it’s about angels), Glimpse, is sexy....

Bleeding Clear If experience is the best teacher, Shea Nangle and Johnnie Morello have earned their doctorates. Judging from their new one-man shows at Cafe Voltaire, both have taken big, juicy bites out of life–though in Nangle’s case it seems he’s tasted little but gall–and both have learned to distill their personal stories to the engrossing essentials. In a city full of freshly graduated twenty-something actors seemingly un-marked by their existence, these well-worn veterans bring a weighty presence to the stage that no amount of collegiate theatrical training can duplicate....

PEEP 1/5, METRO On this combo’s debut EP, Ghost Circus (Mockingbird), vocalist Jeff Rawwin’s quavery, melodramatic lump of sensitive-guy pretension is so irritating that the bland backing behind his tortured crooning becomes even more innocuous. From the 4AD-knockoff artwork on their album’s cover to the cringe-inducing grandeur of their plodding music, Peep make clear they’re a decade too late. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » PAUL CEBAR & THE MILWAUKEEANS, MARLEE MacLEOD 1/6, SCHUBAS Paul Cebar has excellent taste....