What has happened to 50-cent pieces? I suppose the collectors are hoarding all the silver ones, but what has happened to the cheap imitations? Nobody talks about this. Another cover-up conspiracy? –Bill Mitchell, Berkeley, California Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Time to appoint another special prosecutor. Not that she’d get very far–trying to establish why coins don’t circulate involves a search for first causes on a par with proofs of the existence of God....

Ennio Morricone But considering music’s importance to film, it’s hardly surprising that some significant partnerships have developed over the art form’s history. A few immediately come to mind: Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, and the Italian duo Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone. In fact, the work of these composers is largely responsible for film music being taken seriously as an art form in its own right rather than serving merely as a background element....

It’s nice to see critics accepting Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 commercial flop as a masterpiece; when I first saw it more than 30 years ago it was a neglected film cited by Pauline Kael as a junky Hitchcock demonstrating the absurdity of auteurism. But masterpiece it is: I can think of no film that makes romance more palpable and affecting. As Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) follows Madeleine (Kim Novak), the wife of a wealthy acquaintance who has hired him to help unravel the mystery of her wanderings around San Francisco, the city’s hilly topography, a redwood forest, and the seacoast all become metaphors for the illusion of romantic infatuation....

There are only a few great jazz documentaries, and each has a style all its own. This one-hour 1994 dissection of a 1958 group photograph of 57 key jazz musicians, one of the opening attractions of the four-day Silver Images Film Festival, is special both as oral history and as a survey of the art. If you wanted to introduce someone to what jazz is all about, this would be an ideal place to start, a labor of love by jazz enthusiast and former Chicago journalist Jean Bach, who did an awesome job of tracking down the surviving participants in and witnesses to the picture taking, even locating some silent home-movie footage by bassist Milt Hinton and his wife....

Jackie Mason: Politically Incorrect at Link’s Hall, December 1, 2, 8, and 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Mason asked someone in the front row “Are you a homosexual person?” the audience roared. He looked out at us innocently–or at least as innocently as a wrinkled, baggy-eyed gnome with dyed red brown hair can look. He explained to us that “there are a lot of homosexuals–crowds....

A showcase for generally unknown pro, semipro, and student directors, this monthlong event features productions ranging from established classical and contemporary selections to untested material, all in the service of what Bailiwick press materials proclaim “a new world vision.” Bailiwick Repertory, Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, 883-1090. Through October 26: Mondays-Thursdays, 7:30 PM. $8 per program; each program features two or three one-acts packaged under a single title. In addition, a Halloween costume sale takes place at the theater Saturday, October 14, from noon to 5 PM....

12-PLAY KEITH SWEAT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The rise of this slow jam has led to a proliferation of male vocal groups such as Boyz II Men, Shai, Silk, and Jodeci–and a variety of distaff counterparts, like SWV, Jade, and Blackgirl–many of whom have gold or platinum discs to show for their efforts. But, as is often the case, the artistic accomplishment of these groups–particularly the guy groups–has lagged well behind their commercial success....

When critic Arlene Croce published a review in the New Yorker of Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here without seeing the dance, a scandal ignited. Jones, who is HIV-positive, led workshops in ten cities for people living with terminal illnesses, and their words and video images are part of the piece. Croce wrote that Jones’s pity mongering makes objective criticism impossible, and that Still/Here is the result of years of foundation funding that favors social relevance over quality....

Dido and Aeneas Mark Morris has co-opted Western Civ. He’s subverted the Dead White Guys using one of them–Englishman Henry Purcell–and his classic early opera Dido and Aeneas. In his choreographed staging Morris plays the two female leads himself, and it doesn’t matter that men played the women’s roles in 1689–in our time it’s transgressive. Too bad the news about Morris is six years old: he first presented this work in 1989, when he was director of dance at Belgium’s Theatre Royal de la Monnaie....

Friday 16 Milu–the fashion design team of Miriam Kaufman and Luisa Gasiewski–have been wowing ’em in New York with their elegant peasant-influenced creations. “As cool, calm, and collected as fashion gets,” adjudged the New York Times. The pair are being feted from 11 to 7 today at Toshiro, a clothing store at 3309 N. Clark, where you can check out their full fall line and munch on Great Harvest Bakery bread and jam....

CHAVEZ Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s a wonder to encounter a band that manages to be striking without doing much that you’d call innovative. New York’s Chavez–a foursome of indie-rock vets–blends well-worn elements from a variety of rock styles into a cohesive, engaging whole. On the new Ride the Fader (Matador), singer-guitarist Matt Sweeney (ex-Skunk), guitarist Clay Tarver (ex-Bullet LaVolta), drummer James Lo (ex-Live Skull), and bassist Scott Masciarelli (aka Scott Marshall, son of Garry) weave together the threads of their pasts as both musicians and fans....

Percussionist and composer Damon Short has been an active part of the local jazz community since settling here in the late 80s, and before that he participated from the relative proximity of Rock Island, where he was born. Under his own steam Short recorded a set of sessions in 1990 with a group that included guest star Paul Smoker, the onetime Iowan trumpeter, but these terrific studio dates, which finally came out late last year as All of the Above, were passed over by likely labels worldwide....

LATER LIFE But more than just sexual frustration, Gurney’s theme is emotional impotence: this failed fling embodies a lifetime of psychic sterility, a subject that has inspired some of his finest, most elegant writing–and some of his funniest, too. But though this short one-act is an inviting vehicle for lean, sophisticated acting and supports a thoughtful, finely crafted production, finally it suffers from the same aloofness as its hero. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Frank Zappa Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before he passed away he arranged to have his wife sell his massive catalog, a deal that reportedly brought in $44 million from the pioneering CD-only label Rykodisc. Much of Zappa’s work had been previously issued on the label in conjunction with Zappa Records, but this year Rykodisc has reissued 53 newly remastered and repackaged Zappa CDs....

Nine species of birds nest in my neighborhood. Three are the usual urban aliens: pigeon, starling, and house sparrow. A fourth is the semialien house finch, a bird native to the western U.S. that entered Chicago from the east after being accidentally introduced onto Long Island 50 years ago. The other five are native birds: common nighthawk, chimney swift, mourning dove, American robin, and northern cardinal. Mostly, we have apartments– lots of four-story buildings, some dating from the 20s and some four-plus-ones built circa 1970....

When Kay George Roberts embarked on her career in the mid-60s the odds were overwhelmingly against her. Being a black woman, she encountered stiff though polite resistance in her native Nashville; after all, blacks had traditionally been allowed to play only in their own orchestras. But Roberts slowly forged ahead, and her violin skills won her a spot in the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, one of its youngest members ever. In 1976 she made her podium debut with the same orchestra–the first black woman to do so in the south....

Screeching Weasel Louder Than Hell Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t get me wrong: Some of my favorite albums this year are the product of the popular postmodern approach, including the funk-trip-hop-boho-soul-rock of Luscious Jackson’s Fever In Fever Out, the psychedelic-lo-fi-ork pop of the Olivia Tremor Control’s Music From the Unrealized Film Script “Dusk at Cubist Castle”, and the hip-hop-musique concrete-rock of Beck’s Odelay....

Roger Sharpe has two children, an executive office, and a 40 percent accuracy rate with an Uzi. Today he’s even shouldering the artillery to prove it, his long mustache bristling with excitement as he walks into his company’s game room. Five minutes later the video screen he’s been firing at flashes “game over,” and a scantily clad screen seductress blows Sharpe a kiss. The licensing manager for Midway Manufacturing looks at his 41,000 bonus score and smiles....

Monologuist Todd Alcott grew up in an affluent subdivision in Crystal Lake. His dad worked in the Loop in the ad biz; his mother taught in the Evanston school district. “The assumption was that everything would be fine,” Alcott says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He opened his own commuter airline. “They had lots of stock certificates but no planes,” Alcott says. Then he wrote a screenplay called Baa Baa, Black Sheep, based on the memoirs of WWII flying ace Pappy Boyington and his Black Sheep Squadron....

In recent years nature writing has undergone a renaissance. Several anthologies of classic and contemporary writing about nature have been published, and a number of writers–Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Charles Bowden, John McPhee, Diane Ackerman, and others–have gained critical acclaim and popular support as interpreters of the natural world. He gave himself the time to do so. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least–and it is commonly more than that–sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements,” he wrote in “Walking,” the summation of his philosophy of nature written shortly before his death....