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The Mother Witkiewicz threw grenades at everything rational, predictable, and conventional. He experimented with narcotics, writing extensively about their effects; he even opened a portrait studio where he painted under their influence–the more expensive the drug, the more expensive the portrait. He paraded about the streets of his native Zakopane in absurd costumes yet delighted in meeting guests at his flat stark naked. And he poured every ounce of his iconoclasm into his plays, believing that the theater could deliver metaphysical truths only through the perversion of forms....

George “My Indian name is He Who Has No Ambition!” –remark overheard on a tour boat in Germany Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Friendless, hopelessly bored, unable or unmotivated to find any sort of romantic attachment, he remains in a monotonous purgatory–the perfect idle soul to climb upon a teeter-totter in the devil’s playground. If this were film noir, Jacques would be the sort of dim-witted schlepp who’d be enticed by the femme fatale into bumping off her husband for the insurance money....

TARWATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tarwater’s Bernd Jestram and Ronald Lippok are both associated with To Rococo Rot, the German instrumental trio whose music levitated the Empty Bottle last weekend, but don’t call their duo a spin-off. The two have worked together on and off since the late 70s, when they were both members of East Berlin’s punk scene. Like To Rococo Rot, Tarwater blends samples with real-time instrumentation, but where the trio restricts itself to looped, pulsing rhythms, Tarwater favors a broader array of sound sources and less linear arrangements....

Barbara Koenen: Buddha at the Hot Dog Stand Some observers, myself included, routinely complain about the one-liner form of current art–jokes you get in an instant but that are presented with little craft. Barbara Koenen’s elegantly made works on paper, “Buddha at the Hot Dog Stand,” at first seem part of this vein. But ultimately her show goes beyond, and even inverts, the one-liner on which it’s based. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Poor Little Knitter on the Road In 1985, LA punks John Doe, Exene Cervenka, and D.J. Bonebrake from X, Dave Alvin from the Blasters, and stand-up bassist Johnny Ray Bartel–all of whom had what in those days and in that scene was considered a literal weakness for country music–formed the Knitters, a band that paid homage to Merle Haggard, the Carter Family, and other country icons for the sheer fun of it, a la the Waco Brothers....

Windy City: Time’s Up “We’ve had this weird relationship,” Baim told me. She can’t recall a single conversation with McCourt between 1987 and last August, when for the second time WCT staffers abandoned McCourt and started a rival. “Since the last coup he’s called me three or four times, just kind of feeling like the old warhorses. We’d put in the time, and the new folks had not.” When she heard last week that McCourt was shutting down, she told him that he’d “had custody of our baby for 13 years” and she didn’t want to see that baby die if there was some way she could keep it going....

In the late 60s and early 70s, I would often go to New York City on vacation from my midwestern college, and my uncles Shaw and Hsiah would take me to Sunday lunch. Those were some of the best Chinese meals I’ve ever had. Call it the warped judgment of a starved kid homesick for the Far East, but Uncle Hsiah did say that the cook was formerly the personal chef to the UN ambassador from China....

ANDREW VOIGT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andrew Voigt is best known as the V in the acronymically named saxophone quartet ROVA, which he cofounded in 1977 with Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, and Bruce Ackley and left almost exactly ten years later. That’s partially because there’s precious little documentation of the work he’s done since he quit: a 1990 duo album with Anthony Braxton (Kol Nidre, on Sound Aspects), a few projects as a sideman, and that’s it....

Friday 10/29 – Thursday 11/4 Alfred Hitchcock made his first cameo appearance in his third movie, The Lodger (1926), a silent thriller based on the Jack the Ripper story. It’ll be shown tonight with organ accompaniment by Jay Warren, who’ll play his original score. Show time is at 8 at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn (773-702-7300). Tickets are $10, $7 for students and seniors. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Peregrine falcons have adapted to city life, but species without the star power are still languishing. Small birds and rodents are learning the hard way that the Cooper’s hawk is back in town. On the brink of extinction a few decades ago, sandhill cranes now descend by the thousands every year on a favorite spot in Indiana. Urban arborist Charlie Miller saves Chicago’s trees from bugs, disease, the weather, and sometimes their owners....

I’ve been speculating in this space over the past couple of weeks that, in spite of the efforts of much of the mainstream press, American isolationism may be declining–at least when it comes to world cinema. The evidence–apart from the impending opening of local art-movie venues and the current Chicago International Film Festival, now in its third and final week–includes the exciting non-American prizewinners at Cannes and Venice, a striking change from past years, bitterly contested or else studiously ignored by our more provincial reviewers, and the announced departure from the New York Times of its first-string film reviewer, Janet Maslin, a prime example of alienated labor when it comes to movies in general....

The sixth Native American Film & Video Festival, presented by Red Path Theater Company, takes place Friday through Sunday, November 19 through 21, at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; and the Field Museum of Natural History, Roosevelt at Lake Shore Drive. Tickets to all programs are $7, except for the Friday morning program at the Field Museum, which is $4, and the Chicago Cultural Center programs, which are free....

RAY ANDERSON LAPIS LAZULI BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In lending it the name of an azure stone, Ray Anderson has given this sassy, inventive, wild-assed blues quartet an oddly elegant air. He’s made a career out of zigzags and contrasts, though, so his band’s name shouldn’t surprise anyone. Anderson started out as a fire-breathing new-music trombonist–he twisted his pliable sound around the sharp corners of Anthony Braxton’s band in the 70s and did notable work with both Roscoe Mitchell and Dutch drum fiend Han Bennink....

UTOPIA CARCRASH 4/3, EMPTY BOTTLE I put on this Chicago quintet’s debut CD, dug a few minutes of pleasantly discordant throb ‘n’ drone, and stepped out for a minute to check the mail. When I came back, the damn thing was bubbling over with some multi-colored Lava-like goo, rather like those monster-factory toys that were all the rage when I was a kid. Guitarist Steve Krakow (aka Plastic Crimewave) is also the publisher of the beautifully illustrated, lovingly hand-lettered underground psychedelia zine Galactic Zoo Dossier, so he’s not afraid to wear his joyful-noise influences (Ash Ra Tempel, Skullflower, the Dead C) on his presumably billowy sleeve....

STEFON HARRIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The jazz world has been waiting for someone like Stefon Harris for the better part of 30 years. The twentysomething Harris plays the vibraphone, an instrument that has added no larger-than-life innovator to its small pantheon of greats since the mid-60s–when Bobby Hutcherson embraced improvisational freedom, making the vibes welcome in avant-garde circles, and the young Gary Burton unveiled his pianistic multiple-mallet technique....

Kwaidan: Three Japanese Ghost Stories Avant-garde theater isn’t generally known for its nostalgia. Alienation from traditional storytelling fuels most postmodernists’ dismantling of cherished cultural traditions as they reveal a bitterly clever sense of humor about the dislocations of the late 20th century. Watching the Wooster Group’s assaultive techno grids or Goat Island’s abstract, precise dance spectacles, we expect the avant-garde to reveal the postmodern cyborg haunting our cultural fantasies. If the question of holiness ever comes up, it’s usually a joke–a sitting duck deconstructed for our viewing pleasure....

The Quiet Room Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If your parents didn’t fight a lot when you were growing up, you might not get into this 1996 minimalist parable about a little girl who stops talking to hers. It takes a while to become engaged by the repetitious and simple narrative–at first things seem too obvious to be interesting. But a voice-over that’s at once unrealistically precocious and amazingly true to the experience of being a young child takes you inside the mind of a girl who’s become mute for both conscious and unconscious reasons–an enigmatic condition that demonstrates a paradox at the core of psychoanalytic interpretations of human behavior....

Fetishes When a director like Alfred Hitchcock makes a cameo appearance in his own film, it’s as a joke, a garnish. Even when Martin Scorsese plays a minor but symbolic character–aiming a spotlight (After Hours), a camera (The Age of Innocence), or a gun (Mean Streets)–it’s still a pretty insignificant part of the film. But when directors of documentaries appear in their own films–typically as narrators, interviewers, or diarists–they assume a meatier role....

VARNALINE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Considering that the songwriting of Anders Parker easily burned a hole through the lo-fi muck on Man of Sin, Varnaline’s guy-in-a-bedroom-with-a-four-track debut (1996), it’s no surprise that when he opted for a real studio the lack of homey ambience didn’t hamper the music. Thanks to a tight working band–brother John on bass and Anders’s Space Needle band mate Jud Ehrbar on drums–on the new Varnaline (Zero Hour) Parker’s moody quality is supported (and buffeted) by substantial firepower....

The Muse With Brooks, Sharon Stone, Andie MacDowell, Jeff Bridges, Mark Feuerstein, Stacey Travis, and Steven Wright. A stupid idea? It’s supposed to be. The Muse is about the stupidity of people making movies in Hollywood–nothing new there. It’s also about the stupidity that drives them, organizes their behavior, and rationalizes their decisions–which is slightly new but not by much. Brooks, as usual, plays a whiner, so a good many laughs are about his whining in response to Sarah’s demands, especially after he becomes jealous of the attention she’s paying his wife, who’s starting to benefit from her services as much as he is....