Chet Witek bought his first piece of Indonesian art before he had even been to Indonesia. The wonderfully bizarre mask from Bali has huge fierce eyes painted in concentric circles, with long tufts of hair attached to strings hanging below. “It was a wonderful discovery–something new to my eyes,” he says. Soon Witek, a sculptor, collage maker, and professor of interior design at the College of DuPage, was traveling regularly to Indonesia....

MARXMAN Dear Miss Harkness, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you know, I have written on the question of women (see my book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State), and while “All About Eve” takes a somewhat more liberal and less materialist view of the condition of women than it should, we nonetheless find ourselves in some agreement with Marxman here....

JOE HENRY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Country rocker Joe Henry has taken a bold step away from the sweet, soulful twang of his past with his new album Trampoline (Mammoth/ Atlantic). Though the soothing cool of his voice remains, the baroque instrumental flourishes–like pretty piano figures and pedal-steel embel-lishments–marking previous efforts, such as 1993’s terrific Kindness of the World, have largely been replaced by something more slippery....

Ornette Coleman By Peter Margasak Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Coleman’s harmolodic theory has never been clearly elucidated–he’s been promising the definitive explanation in book form for decades–but it comes down to all the players in a group focusing exclusively on melody. The written composition serves as a root for independent strands of simultaneous improvisation. Coleman’s epochal Free Jazz (1960) hinted at truly free playing, but there are several tunes on the new albums that actually deliver it....

INSECTS OF ROCK: FRANKLIN BRUNO, COBRA VERDE, PRISONSHAKE, GUIDED BY VOICES Opening act Franklin Bruno was the evening’s odd man out. He was the only solo performer in a night of rock bands and the only Californian on a bill full of Ohioans, but the real difference lay in what he does with his influences. Bruno plays complicated, multisegmented songs, and his wordplay recalls that of dedicated pop craftsmen like Elvis Costello and the Go-Betweens....

Telling stories to the beat of a drum is an age-old bonding rite that’s existed in many cultures. With the improvisational new-music works titled “Five Drum Percussion Piece With Poetry” and “Composition for Five Performance Poets, Five Percussion Players and Conductor,” veteran local poet Effie Mihopoulos has created Cagean homages to the ritual with the help of some Poets on a Pedestal–an ad hoc name for a core collective of 12 poets....

Is Symphony of the Shores’ programming the way of the future? In an effort to reach a younger crowd, SOS comes up with some of the most unorthodox mixes I know of. Yet as a result its identity is hard to pinpoint. Is it a classical orchestra, a pop group, a big jazz band, or a combination of all of the above? The jury is still out on that, but in terms of playing the ensemble (under the guidance of founder Steven Martyn Zike) has proved to be consistently excellent....

President Clinton’s proposal for revising the Clean Water Act, announced on February 1, included what could be a dramatic breakthrough in U.S. environmental policy. It called for a two-and-a-half-year study to develop a national strategy to “substitute, reduce, or prohibit the use of chlorine and chlorinated compounds.” This new national policy has its roots in the Great Lakes region and in the battles fought by the area’s environmentalists. Heading the charge against chlorine for the past five years has been Jack Weinberg, a legendary figure from the 60s student movement who’s now working for Greenpeace in Chicago....

Voice Transplant at the Sun-Times Any newspaper worth its salt carries a resident curmudgeon, a world-weary cynic who inside each bright new bottle can make out the same old rotgut. Ray Coffey will now preach this timeless wisdom four days a week on page three of the Sun-Times. We hope page three is well served by these changes. The editorial pages should be. Hornung spent his first full day at the Sun-Times last Friday; on Monday he told us, “I feel there isn’t an energy level here that there is at the rest of the paper....

Susanna Coffey at Lyons-Wier & Ginsberg Gallery, through June 1 Susanna Coffey makes self-portrait paintings and drawings, and for the last six years that’s all she’s made. The 12 works at Lyons-Wier & Ginsberg are drawings in water-based media–watercolor, gouache, casein, pencil–on sheets that are about eight by ten inches. Most depict her head and shoulders against a pale background–her rendering of her studio’s wall–using shades of blue-gray and tannish orange or brown....

Though I liked his criticism for Cahiers du Cinema in the 60s, on the basis of five of his early films I haven’t been a big fan of Andre Techine. But this wonderful and masterful feature (1994), his 12th, suggests that maybe he’d just been tooling up. It’s one of the best movies from an excellent French television series of fiction features on teenagers of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, and it’s the first to be released in the U....

Decked out in a purple corduroy suit, a leather beret perched on his close-shaven head, Field Marshal is headed out. It’s a balmy, rainy Saturday night in February, and Marshal, who deejays WHPK radio’s weekend dancehall program, sees cruising the growing local dancehall scene as part of his job. “Sound systems cost on the average about $12,000 to put together,” says Johnny Mega. Mega Sounds, like most systems, advertises for the parties with fliers, mostly at West Indian restaurants and bakeries....

An Artist Versus Amoco The wall at the rear of the Amoco station on the far eastern edge of Oak Park was streaked with graffiti. So station co-owner Johnnie Mason brought in artist Tia Jones to cover the wall with a mural, and things haven’t been the same since. “They don’t understand the way an artist works–they don’t understand the hard work and preparation I put into this mural,” says Jones....

A few years ago I wouldn’t have written a critic’s choice on Bobby “Blue” Bland. He sounded as if he’d abused his pipes past the point of no return; his trademark gospel squall had degenerated into an obscene snort; and he might have phoned in his performances for all the emotional commitment he showed. Recently, though, Bland has shown signs of rejuvenation. His easygoing intimacy can still warm up a room, and despite the toll the years have taken on his voice, (the squall should be put out to pasture, but it sounds as if its already there), few modern blues singers can wrap themselves around a ballad of such a masterful combination of confidence and vulnerability....

Friday 22 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The characters in Friends With Fire Arms: A Farewell to Feminism are played by collaborators Paula Killen, coming off her recent show, The State I’m In: A Travelogue; award-winning filmmaker Katy Maguire, who directed Liz Phair’s Never Said video; and composer Miriam Sturm, who’s been repeatedly nominated for Jeffs for her scores for Goodman productions including The Baltimore Waltz and Black Snow....

Luscious Jackson The lawn-mower theory can apply to just about anything we associate with one gender–who hasn’t been mesmerized watching a man comfort a child in public? Traditional gender roles haven’t been eroded so far that you see that every day. It can be applied to rock bands, especially in a live setting. Female musicians (and I mean those that play their own instruments) are about the only ones who can get me to force my way up to the stage anymore, even when they’re borrowing from the same tired rock conventions as men....

Sean O’Hagan and Cathal Coughlan’s early-80s band Microdisney crossed sophisticated, mellifluous songwriting and Coughlan’s crooning baritone with sneeringly antisocial lyrics. Over time the lyrics grew increasingly bilious while the music got sweeter. When the band broke up, O’Hagan made a solo record and joined Stereolab, while Coughlan formed Fatima Mansions. That band’s 1991 American debut, Viva Dead Ponies (Radioactive/MCA), opened with the song “Angel’s Delight,” in which sighing electric piano chords and a tinkling glockenspiel dreamily reverberated as Coughlan liltingly intoned images of urban unrest and dead cops....

Honor Among Broadcasters Here’s one: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your reaction to the above might well be, Of course nobody would run that! If so, ask yourself why. Because it’s one-sided, negative advertising? Just now, an election season, you’re hearing nothing but. Because it asks the public to swear off the opposition? So does almost every other commercial on the airwaves. Because it’s what the industry likes to call “issue oriented”?...

My father promised a work permit for my 16th birthday. He always did have a warped sense of humor, but this time he wasn’t kidding. Thanks to his small-town connections I found myself employed by the Blue Island Publishing Corporation of Blue Island, Illinois. Sweeping floors. Washing presses. Carrying out the trash. I was a printer’s devil. Hemingway tells of lying awake at night, fishing his way through the streams of the past, marking each turn and rock and dark place where the big trout lie, and I have found the same trick can be done with printing....

Vampyros Lesbos Sexadelic Dance Party (Rhino) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part of rock ‘n’ roll’s appeal, over classical music, say, or jazz, is the myth that anybody can play it. Punk claimed that rock began with “do it yourself”; the business and egos came later. But the truth is, a band can go only so far with undisciplined, formless jamming. It’s easy to make like Blues Traveler–choose three chords to play over and over, have every band member jam really fast for a while, then figure out how to end the song half an hour later....