The Unseen Hand Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sam Shepard wrote his 1969 The Unseen Hand during a manic time in his life–when, he says, he “couldn’t write fast enough to keep up [with] the flow of material running through” his brain. “When I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about it or continuing to ‘write’ in my head.” And certainly this extraordinary sci-fi western about a trio of legendary cowboys resurrected to help a mutant extraterrestrial baboon free his people from slavery feels like the product of a feverish mind....

Clustered together at the corner of State and Oak in a hodgepodge uncharacteristic of the Gold Coast is a corrective-shoe store, a grammar school, and an Italian restaurant. Directly across from the school’s playground stands another Gold Coast oddity: a shop displaying cowrie-shell necklaces, neon-colored embroidered T-shirts, and yellow mudcloth vests and hats. Accented with sleek, clean-lined, black-and-white decor and filled with colorful ethnic clothes and jewelry, Maasai, at 947 N....

Appleton is the town that Harry Houdini left and where Joe McCarthy remains. Its award-winning local candy factory is in a mall complex, some of the sites on the Houdini walking tour are used-to-be-heres, and the locals eat breakfast at a strip-mall deli that serves butter and jam in little packets. But the town does still have flowering trees, Queen Anne-style homes (and some stick style and Italianate), and a hand-operated lock system on the Fox River, which offers vistas worth photographing....

Programming sometimes seems to be a lost art these days; the run-of-the-mill concert slaps together one crowd pleaser, one modern work, and one obscurity with little regard for how they fit together. But Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have come up with a clever theme for this weekend’s Orchestra Hall concerts: “The Shakespearean Muse” will combine Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Berlioz’s The Death of Cleopatra, and Elgar’s “symphonic study” Falstaff....

When it comes to pure artifice, it’s hard to think of a more thorough practitioner than Chris Isaak. From his retro 50s look to his retro 50s sounds, Isaak couldn’t be more fake if he were a Las Vegas act. Yet despite his all-consuming obsession with looking like a pinup guy from the past–this former boxer has been in his fair share of movies too–the immaculate, sometimes gorgeous gloss of his stupid music exudes an undeniable charm....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Adelman’s fantasies about skinhead death squads are too ludicrous to merit reply; even the slightest familiarity with the rich historical work on the Haymarket events disproves his claims that the Haymarket Martyrs ran the gamut from conservative to radical. All were activists in Chicago’s anarchist movement and its affiliated unions (the conservatives had their own unions)....

The piano duo may be a minor chamber form, but many composers, including Bach and Couperin, have written serious pieces for it. Modern composers such as Stravinsky, Bartok, Poulenc, and Milhaud also have made substantial contributions, exploring the percussive sonorities of concert grands played in tandem. Two of the form’s brightest advocates are Ukrainians Alexei Kuznetsoff and Valentina Lisitsa, who met while studying at the Kiev Conservatory in the late 80s....

Hey, Faggot: Phone spankings? No wonder you’re frustrated. Here are a couple of other ideas: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If your choosilessness extends to gender as well as circumstance, a personal ad that began “Sexy straight guy interested in non-sexual spanking scenes” running in gay kink publications, or a gay paper, or the gay personals in a straight paper, would get a couple dozen responses, easy....

Terra Museum Gets Down-to-Earth Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But with the founder’s blessing, it appears, Donnelley is intent on changing things. Other museum executives think Donnelley is just the man for the job, even though he has no experience at art museums. Museum of Contemporary Art CEO Kevin Consey says Donnelley has the political skills necessary to transform the museum “from a private collection into a public institution....

The second annual First Nations Native American Film and Video Festival will be held at Facets Multimedia, 1517 W. Fullerton, on Saturday and Sunday, November 20 and 21. Tickets are $5; $3 for Facets members. For further information call 907-4667 or 784-0808. Gil Cardinal’s Foster Child (1987) follows the filmmaker’s search at age 35 for his natural family; Arlene Bowman’s Navajo Talking Picture (1986) is her attempt to document the traditional life of her Navajo grandmother, who refuses to cooperate....

The dynamic and youthful Vienna Saxophone Quartet’s Chicago connection is its baritone saxophonist, Mark Engebretson, who got his master’s in composition at Northwestern University in the late 80s. So this concert is sort of a homecoming for him, to a campus that boasts one of the most distinguished saxophone faculties in the world. The saxophone, invented around 1840 by Adolphe Sax, took a long time to achieve stardom, and that was in jazz; in the classical realm it has remained a supporting player, often called upon to add a little color to orchestral works....

Seven years ago, when I first saw Tim O’Slynne’s Isosceles Triangle: Conversations From Purgatory, I was appalled by his use of a diapered dancer to represent rebirth. Now I wonder whether I just didn’t get his campy sense of humor. This weekend I can take a second look–a rare opportunity in the ephemeral world of dance–because O’Slynne’s ensemble piece is being remounted by his partner, Brian Jeffery, just a few weeks after Tim’s death from AIDS-related illness....

Having seen the “disturbing” exhibit of German artists Kubiak and Rauch, “German Physiognomy and Palmistry” at Beacon Street Gallery–which in my opinion was one of the best shows this year in Chicago, which dealt with such a controversial theme as neo-Nazism–I was upset to read about its sudden end [Culture Club, November 10]. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I can understand that the exhibit caused some disturbances, especially among staff and clients of the Hull House....

To Hitsville’s mind, no one has yet adequately explained the phenomenon of Beavis and Butt-head. The MTV show featuring a pair of cartoon teenagers who watch videos seems to engender only extreme reactions–either utter devotion or outrage. The appeal for a certain group is obvious: some people will always love a fart joke. But there seems to be something else at work. For explication, Hitsville turns to Dr. Elmer Schadenfreude, noted commentator on popular culture and the author most recently of the paper “Ren, Stimpy, and the Hegemony of the Pathetic Fallacy, Animationwise....

The dissolution of the Pixies–reportedly rooted in some of the other band members’ dislike of leader Black Francis–has produced 1) a profoundly uninteresting solo album by the renamed Frank Black and 2) one of the best albums of the year: Last Splash, from bassist Kim Deal’s side project, the Breeders. The band–which includes Deal’s twin sister Kelley, bassist Josephine Wiggs, and a boy drummer named Jim MacPherson–thoughtfully totes some of the Pixies’ sci-fi sound (nost notably on “S....

Corey Harris is a member of the small but growing coterie of young African American bluesmen who’ve eschewed flash and fashion for the emotionally rich but musically challenging (and commercially risky) subtleties of the acoustic tradition. Harris mixes and matches influences with a genre-jumping abandon that some might find distracting: he’ll punctuate a languorous half-shuffle, half-boogie rhythm with high-treble exclamation marks reminiscent of Charlie Patton, then move into a series of undulating slide whines that invoke Robert Johnson; over the top he’ll moan out his vocals with a phlegmy urgency borrowed from Big Joe Williams, with a hint of Son House’s tormented high-tension balance between the sacred and the profane thrown in....

Simply put, Don Byron is the greatest living jazz clarinetist. But don’t think Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, or Buddy DeFranco; Byron’s a postmodernist on the level of the late pioneer John Carter, emboldening the instrument’s easy grace with a thorough assault on difficult sounds and textures. Like Henry Threadgill, Byron forges new territory as a composer by disassembling, recombining, and assimilating all sorts of different musics under the vague banner called jazz....

Good Men, Good Women Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like its predecessors, the concluding and entirely self-sufficient feature in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s epic trilogy about the history of Taiwan in the 20th century–a landmark in Taiwanese cinema along with Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day–focuses on a specific period and a specific art form. City of Sadness (1989) covers the end of World War II through the retreat of the Kuomintang to Taiwan in 1949 and concentrates on still photography; The Puppet Master (1993) covers the first 36 years (1909-’45) in the life of puppet master Li Tien-lu and showcases his art....

Edwyn Collins Born in 1978 from the ashes of Collins’s college band (the Nusonics, a group of Buzzcocks-obsessed punkers), Orange Juice would spend the next eight years forging their own sound, wedding their love of northern soul and Motown to the do-it-yourself punk ethic. Orange Juice’s first few singles were put out on Postcard Records, a label set up by Collins and cohort Alan Horne. The label also released 45s by Josef K....

The Incident Having the act confirmed by my friends, I then asked one of my friends, Betsy, to call campus security from a phone located in another entrance to the building. There is no doubt that the masturbator could have seen where she was headed, and Anne and I began to fear for an encounter between the two of them, both moving through the same hallways. When she left to make the call, my friend and I watched her; as a result, we did not see the masturbator slip out of the building (from which there are numerous entrances and exits)....