By Michael Miner This sort of influence would exhilarate anyone born to be a wheeler-dealer and embarrass anyone born to be a journalist. But it wasn’t enough influence for Hirschfeld. Unable to resist the temptation to acquire a personal forum, he launched a weekly radio talk show, Ricochet, where his partisan bloviating gained him a reputation as Champaign County’s own Rush Limbaugh. He wrote a newspaper column, “From where I stand…” And on top of all that, he was Chinigo’s personal attorney and the newspaper’s....

Last Sunday I walked to the Cubs’ last home game of the year, taking my usual route: down Lincoln, across Grace, a slight jog down Janssen to Waveland, and then across to the ballpark, trying to keep Wrigley Field itself out of view until the last possible moment. Above, the clouds had that low, gray, heavy, dirty look typical of autumn, but they were spread out enough to avoid being threatening, and the temperature was comfortable....

Paul Peditto has written nearly a play a year for the past 13 years, and all of them reveal a similar urban pessimism. Two of his biggest hits were adaptations of Charles Bukowski and Nelson Algren’s writings, BUK and Never Come Morning, but even his original plays are infused with an unmistakable fatalism. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I was working the day shift, tending bar at a transvestite nightclub in New York City....

WAYNE HANCOCK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the liner notes to his brand-new third album, Wild, Free & Reckless (Ark 21), Austin country hero Wayne Hancock writes, “I am loyal to this music and I will continue to play it till the day I die. If the masses want the industry they can have it. I’m not here for them or their money....

Quick Takes Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A display case at the front of the cheerful and spacious Thai Pastry, a new restaurant on Broadway near Argyle, showcases exquisite pastries created by owner and chef Aumphai (Add) Kusub: colorful pink and green rice vermicelli served with a sweet coconut milk sauce, jewel-toned mini gelatin molds, and a variety of beautiful cakes. Inside, the extensive menu is just as enticing, full of offerings like baby egg rolls with minced shrimp; mee krob, crispy vermicelli in a sweet plum sauce; and kuchai, pillows of freshly rolled rice noodles stuffed with chive greens in a sweet and spicy rice vinegar sauce....

Ann Tyler, who grew up in Champaign, says she didn’t worry much about her safety in public until around 1975. That was when she moved to Chicago after completing a graduate degree in graphic design at the University of Illinois. “With coming out I realized how vulnerable I was because of being different,” she says. “I experienced some street harassment in Chicago, and it made me aware of the potential for heightened harassment or attack....

By Susan Stahl Landmark’s opening night featured the U.S. premiere of High Fidelity, which shared the space with Election, Onegin, Restaurant, The Terrorist, and Winter Sleepers. Elevators, escalators, ramps, steps, and concession areas were packed and chaotic, with crisscrossing lines and people standing as many as five abreast to chat or check out the movie posters. The staff experimented with different methods of directing traffic in the unusual space, many of them using walkie-talkies like production assistants on a film set....

DON BENNETT SEPTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Chicago jazz pianist Don Bennett, every set is equal parts work and play, both an exercise in improvisational art and an onstage party. Bennett’s punchy rhythms stomp and swagger, and though his burly flamboyance remains his greatest strength, he’s also learned to value lacy swirls and a feather touch. He recorded his most recent album, the 1997 trio date Simplexity (Candid), while living in Amsterdam, and the change of scenery clearly did him good: he tactfully integrates showy arpeggios, modal improvising, and a melodicism that borrows from Herbie Hancock’s mid-60s Blue Note dates....

Boxing Joseph Cornell Rachel Rosenthal Company In Boxing Joseph Cornell, performer-directors Greg Allen and Connor Kalista use references to Cornell’s life and work as a frame for their own experiences. The result is a kaleidoscopic series of theatrical boxes that physically and metaphorically shrink even as they’re stuffed with stories, images, and theories about the relationship between art and memory. It’s not surprising that they retell the story of Pandora’s box in the program notes–twice–since what flies out of their box of improvisational games and scripted narratives is entirely unpredictable....

HENRY COWELL’S WHOLE WORLD OF MUSIC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Composer and pianist Henry Cowell, born in California 100 years ago, didn’t just break the rules–he wrote new ones. He forever broadened the role of the piano, treating it as an instrument whose strings could be strummed and plucked as well as struck. He encouraged performers to improvise on his scores, some of which were notated in a system he devised himself....

KOKO TAYLOR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Koko Taylor has done as much as anyone to refute the stereotype of the long-suffering blues chanteuse, battered by life and reduced to reveling in masochism. Even in the early 60s, when producer Willie Dixon sometimes saddled her with overwrought paeans to suffering and hard times, she cut through the bathos with searing power and a steely emotional tautness that allowed her to transform pleading lyrics like “Don’t criticize me, save me / Whatever I am, you made me” into hard-edged demands for justice....

The Khe Sanh Bagman The same local-joke sensibility informs–and ultimately undermines–The Khe Sanh Bagman, an evening of three one-acts by Leigh Johnson now receiving its world premiere at Center Theater. Set in Chicago in the six months leading up to the 1968 convention, these works illustrate our town’s exceptionalist view of itself: rules that hold everywhere else, whether against violent police actions or for honest government, simply don’t apply here. As a toga-clad Richard J....

MAGELLAN STRING QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I first met the young Chinese composer Tan Dun in 1986, while he was pursuing a doctorate at Columbia University under the tutelage of Mario Davidovsky and Chou Wen-chung. He’d emigrated because he found the Chinese cultural bureaucracy stifling, but he’d brought with him part of his native Hunan village: in his studio, he showed me a collection of ceramic bells, chimes, drums, and flutes used in peasant ceremonies like weddings and funerals....

MATTHEW SHIPP TRIO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Early in 1999 pianist Matthew Shipp announced that he was retiring from recording, claiming that most of his musical ideas had already been documented in his sizable discography. But before the year was up, Peter Gordon at Thirsty Ear Records talked Shipp into curating a new jazz imprint, the Blue Series–and the first fruit this arrangement bore was a new Matthew Shipp record....

NERVES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite the title–New Animal–the recent second album by these local garage-punk heroes isn’t a grand departure from the trebly, spastic, one-speed-fits-all attack of their 1998 debut. But under producer Jack Endino, they have throttled back a little to include the occasional keyboard color (courtesy of Thrill Jockey labelmate the Lonesome Organist) or brutal slide-guitar shriek, take a few chances with dynamics (the slow build of the shattering “Die Tonight,” the utter restraint of the queasy ballad “Looking Into Fire”), and reveal influences beyond the Seeds and the Stooges (I hear a lift from Love’s “Little Red Book” on “Red Night” and the primal thud of the Sonics on “Own Religion”)....

The Firebugs For many years Switzer-land–that clean, neat, neutral country nestled in the pristine Alps–seemed exempt from the collective guilt of World War II. The ultimate bourgeois country, a country of bankers and watchmakers and rational businessmen, it had weathered the war without taking sides, providing a safe haven for all comers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one knows how Swiss playwright Max Frisch would have reacted to the news of how badly Swiss bankers treated their Jewish customers–he died in 1991....

To the editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rather than criticize Shiller on issues, Gray sarcastically goes after her looks (which are actually not bad), says she has no conscience (that’s a good one, coming from the likes of Gray), and hints that a so-called Reader endorsement of Shiller was what influenced Michael Miner’s August 20 Hot Type column about Tribune writer Ray Coffey’s incessant Shiller-phobia (though, as far as I know, the Reader has never printed its own endorsement of Shiller or anyone else)....

Chicago Symphony Orchestra This was also a welcome opportunity to hear Adams conduct–until now he’s achieved his notoriety as a composer. He turns out to be not bad: he always had a clear idea of what he wanted and was able to coax the orchestra into delivering it, even when it was obvious, particularly with the Glass piece, that they weren’t all that impressed by what they were playing. He was even better at working the audience....

BURNING AIRLINES 4/30, FIRESIDE BOWL; 5/1, EMPTY BOTTLE This D.C. power trio is a shameless holdout, playing earnest, angular, dynamic punk rock with an emphasis on the rock. Emphasis also on holdout, as opposed to throwback–guitarist J. Robbins and drummer Pete Moffett cut their teeth (and probably some other body parts) in the hardcore juggernaut Government Issue; Moffett went on to form Wool with future Foo Fighter Franz Stahl, and Robbins to front Jawbox with future Burning Airlines bassist Bill Barbot....

DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS 10/6, FIRESIDE BOWL Goddamn, I wish half the bands who do the redneck shtick did it one-tenth as good as the Truckers on their new Alabama Ass Whuppin’ (Seventhheaven.com)–which was actually recorded in Georgia. I could try to break down their formula for hole-in-the-heart soul (three parts loud Neil Young, two parts Sabbath, extract of John Doe, one blazing version of “People Who Died”; simmer in bourbon), but of course the best cooks work by intuition....