Bassist Willie Kent has been a mainstay on the west-side blues circuit for years. Recently he’s been expanding his base of operations, and his no-nonsense brand of muscular, energetic blues is rapidly becoming a citywide attraction. Kent sings with a hard vibrato that sometimes reminds one of the churchier west-side soul men, but his music is boilerplate Chicago blues–a deep shuffle, aggressive tone, and a low-key onstage affability that’s a welcome relief from the abrasive macho some of his contemporaries feel compelled to affect....

On the wall of the bric-a-brac-packed Wrigleyville junk shop created by designer Kevin Snow as the setting for David Mamet’s darkly comic Chicago classic American Buffalo, there is a sign. It says “THINK.” It’s the same sign that dominates countless corporate offices–and it’s ignored as routinely by Mamet’s characters, a trio of small-time con artists, as it usually is by the traders, lawyers, and merger-and-acquisition specialists whose acquisitive aggression this play satirizes....

Like his better songs, Ben Sidran is glib and slangy and considerably more complicated than that description would suggest. His piano style has a narrow focus, but within that range it’s consistently forceful and often inventive; his singing arrives on a breathy, idiosyncratic, and surprisingly malleable baritone; and the songs he writes are so well fitted to the way he sings them that he seems to have uttered them full-formed at the time of their performance....

The seventh edition of the annual festival of black independent films runs from Friday, July 29, through Thursday, August 7, at the DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl., 947-0600, and at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, 443-3737. Tickets are $5, $3 for Blacklight, Film Center, and DuSable Museum members. For more information, call 922-7771. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » ALL NIGHT LONG Basil Dearden’s neglected 1961 British film tells the story of Othello in jazz terms....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the least publicized and best kept secrets is the effect the death penalty has on juries and judges. The Reader gives an example of how one jury was in a hurry to find a man guilty so they could get to a “happy hour” at a local bar. The sad facts are that a number of death penalty jurors will spend a good portion of the rest of their life in bars trying to wash away feelings of remorse over participating in the killing of a fellow man or woman....

COOKIE CRUMB CLUB On this Saturday morning the room was packed with jumpy kids between the ages of three and seven (accompanied by parents), who were also anticipating a birthday party afterward. Since this is a club, each child receives a membership card entitling the bearer to get in at half price forever. Many of the children present seem to have been rendezvousing on Saturdays for most of the 14 months that the Cookie Crumb Club has been in existence....

The compulsively contrapuntal mavens of medley–the droll, slightly bitchy pianist-arranger Robin Field and his younger, cockier Irish-tenor partner Bill “I Don’t Do Keyboards” Daugherty–are back for a limited engagement with their ever-expanding collection of classic songs and original novelty items. What these two do with a tune or two–make that two dozen, or is it 200?–is almost indecently innovative: their highly theatrical rearrangement and juxtaposition of master and minor pieces from the great days of big-band jazz and Broadway shows make for hilarious and often brilliant entertainment....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Glick doesn’t need a new look, just a new outlook [“Paul Glick’s Toughest Make-Over,” August 10]! “Make-over” is a tragic story about a tragic man, obsessed with others’ opinions of himself. Even more tragic, is that this is a man who earned his fortune contaminating his clientele with this kind of sick thinking. As I read the article, I was saddened to think of the thousands of people who have been victimized by a self-taught, self-proclaiming “therapist” who gets his kicks (and his money) by bringing women to tears....

To the editors. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sharon Solwitz, in the 10 June issue of the Reader, wrote an interesting article, “The Gospel According to Gordon Lish.” Gospel is something that doesn’t change. Those of us who work with Gordon know that he is always changing, that he respects most what is unique and different. Sharon Solwitz refers to Lish as a guru, and mentions the “cultish” aspect of Lish followers....

MORE FUN THAN BOWLING The protagonist, Jake Tomlinson, makes his entrance from beneath the soil of a freshly turned grave. He believes he will be assassinated soon, “and when that happens I’m gonna have to live there in that grave for a longer time than I care to think about,” he explains to the audience. “So, I thought I’d try to get the flavor of it so maybe I’d have a better outlook on gettin’ killed....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am writing in response to Michael Miner’s article regarding In These Times’ financial problems. He didn’t talk much about the National Writers Union, but readers should know that to date, the Union has garnered over $13,000 for aggrieved ITT writers. No, we do not want to put ITT out of business. Yes, we want to dispel the notion that writing, be it journalism, fiction, or practical, is something for which payment is optional, an honor and a privilege....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m impressed with a Chicago critic with enough balls to call a spade a spade, and give us accurate reporting about individual voices. As far as I’m concerned, and I’ve personally attended most of the operas that have been reviewed, Polkow accurately reports on the vocal range, power, sound and color of all the important singers in a given production (Julia Parks is a mezzo, however), but also pays close attention to the accuracy of singers with regard to pitch....

Traditional wisdom has it that the great fire of 1871 brought Chicago ruin and redemption. Evidence of ruin was plentiful from the start. Raging for 36 hours, the fire consumed 1,800 buildings, killed 250 people, and left 90,000 of the city’s 330,000 residents homeless. Photographs taken after the fire reveal a panorama of rubble that eerily resembles the bombed remains of Dresden and Hiroshima in 1945. Little wonder that the fire’s survivors, searching for language to describe the event, latched on to biblical images of fury and destruction....

It’s 4:30 on a sweltering late-summer afternoon, and WXRT program director Norm Winer is worrying about everything but programming. He’s just returned from watching a shoot for the station’s second round of TV commercials in a year. The first–an elliptical, gnomic series featuring psychedelic lizards and bowling balls rolling backward, with suggestive slogans like “Think for Yourself” and “Move Someplace Cooler”–was the crown of an extraordinary promotional campaign that has the 18-year-old rock ‘n’ roll station flirting with its highest ratings ever....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyone who can get a hold of a copy of the Amnesty International Report 1991 should turn to pages 242-243, under the entry “United States of America.” There, AI’s now infamous report that “police officers from the Area 2 police station in Chicago, Illinois, had systematically tortured or otherwise ill-treated more than 20 people suspected of killing police officers between 1972 and 1984” (p....

David twists and swivels to the music onstage and whips off his white sleeveless undershirt. Now he’s down to his leather shorts and dog tags. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s probably why David wore shorts, to avoid the embarrassment of ankle block. He pulls them down just low enough to expose his cheeks, then executes a few push-ups. Then he springs to his feet and drops them and they come off in one smooth motion....

“Chances that a first-time cigarette smoker will become addicted,” according to Harper’s “Index” (Nov-ember 1989): “9 in 10. Chances that a first-time user of cocaine will become addicted: 1 in 6.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Increasing education and income [will not] bring about black integration in society,” writes Douglas S. Massey of the U. of C.’s Population Research Center, in a paper presented to the Chicago Community Trust Human Relations Task Force....

Help for the underprivileged. This past winter, according to the Chicago Academy of Sciences newsletter Newscast (Spring 1990), “the Academy presented its Dino-Rama! exhibit at four suburban shopping centers in a cooperative agreement with JMB Properties Urban Company. This special outreach program gave families who may not visit the city’s museums very often a chance to learn about prehistoric life and see the same giant moving, growling dinosaurs that appeared in the Academy’s 1988 Dino-Rama!...

“Not long ago I found myself in the uncomfortable position of needing a dollar to get home,” writes Joshua Henkin in the Chicago-based socialist newsweekly In These Times (September 28-October 4). “Left with no other alternative, I approached a well-dressed, middle-aged woman and explained my predicament. She promptly handed me the money, no questions asked. While there’s no way of proving it, I doubt if I could have gotten the money if I had really been in need....

THE MOUNTAIN The work by Lauri Macklin that I’ve seen–and it’s been regrettably little–has been vibrant, passionate, powerful, and most of all precise. Yet within that precision, Chicago choreographer Macklin discovers a playfulness that makes her self-consciously constrained vocabulary human. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Macklin’s agenda in The Mountain seems to be to reveal the insidious dehumanization demanded by the corporate world. What makes this dehumanization so terrifying is that it is done in the name of “the family....