Guitarist Eddy Clearwater is widely known as a purveyor of Chuck Berry-style rock-blues, but his roots go much deeper than that stereotype suggests. Clearwater, born Eddie Harrington, is a member of the same Bell-Harrington clan that boasts Lovie Lee, Carey Bell, Vernon Harrington, and Lurrie Bell. He began his Chicago career in the early 50s, absorbing both Berry’s revolutionary innovations and the straight-ahead blues intensity of west-side legend Magic Sam. Virtually unknown outside of Chicago until the 1970s, Clearwater established a reputation as one of the city’s most flamboyant entertainers, capable of an unexpectedly deep blend of bluesy melancholy and modern pop flash....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But De Mille was not quite right to cast that ancient Jewish writer as a historian. Philo of Alexandria was a Platonic philosopher. It was not additional historical facts that he brought to the Bible, as De Mille implied, but imaginative allegories that wed Judaism to Platonism. Yet I expect De Mille was right to credit Philo’s thought with a role in the film....

Gourmet Gossip: Ann Gerber Eats Her Words The five commandments of column writing: (4) Know when to keep your mouth shut. Remember the magic words, “My column speaks for itself.” The Rumor appeared under the heading “Gourmet Gossip.” No one else in town has “Gourmet Gossip,” says Gerber proudly. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite Ann Gerber’s craft, Oprah Winfrey saw fit to express dismay....

Hollywood by the Board: Royal George for Sale Again Sources familiar with the effort to transform the Royal George Theatre complex at 1641 N. Halsted into “Hollywood by the Lake” say the investor group has withdrawn its bid to purchase the property. Barry Schain, front man for the group, admitted there was a “snag in the deal,” and Chris Hansen, an asset manager at First National Bank of Chicago, which owns the property with its subsidiary First Chicago Bank of Ravenswood, declined to comment....

Delta blues veteran David “Honeyboy” Edwards has remained utterly true to his roots throughout a career that began in Mississippi in the 1930s and has spanned nearly 60 years. These days he’s playing mostly solo electric guitar, and it suits him perfectly: his voice is rough and intense in the great tradition of Charlie Patton, and eccentric timing and phrasing–showing the influence of Big Joe Williams and Tommy McClennan, among others–bring an added sense of immediacy to his creations....

Kroch’s Moves to Used Books Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rickman says he got the idea from Mike Powell, head of the successful Powell’s bookstore chain, which specializes in buying and selling used books. The Portland, Oregon-based Powell’s operates several stores on the west coast as well as three in Chicago. The key to success in the used-book business, according to Rickman, is knowing which books to buy: “It’s important to be selective....

No Rest for the Righteous We’d say the book’s fascination with these JDs accounts for much of its appeal. By ignoring 90 percent of what went on back then (all those little marching people, and the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King as distinct from the one of Huey Newton), and reducing the Movement to the shenanigans of such nihilist luminaries as George Jackson and Bernardine Dohrn, Destructive Generation recapitulates the era as a sort of hysterical rock concert climaxing in the self-obliteration of its superstars....

The piano trio literature, which contains some of the most felicitous music ever written, is neglected relative to its importance as a chief conveyor of the classical style. That’s why the launching of a new performing trio is welcome news indeed. The North Park Trio is pianist Elizabeth Buccheri, violinist Alison Dalton, and cellist Julie Zumsteg, frequent partners in the past few years. All three are on the faculty of North Park College, and they’re well known in Chicago for other affiliations: Buccheri serves as a rehearsal conductor at the Lyric Opera; Dalton is a Chicago Symphony Orchestra member; and Zumsteg is a principal in the Chicago String Ensemble....

The day, which had begun overcast, cold, and threatening, had suddenly brightened and warmed, so that when my two-and-a-half-year-old wanted to go to the park I agreed. Our first stop, as always, was at the swings. Having abruptly abandoned her fear of them, Louisa now requires long and vigorous pushings. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We had the park nearly to ourselves. The big kids were in school, and most of the other little kids must have been napping....

If he ever runs for public office, the cop knows they’re going to bring it up. Police brutality. How harsh this sounds! He checks his image in the mirror. Tall, slender, gray, a mild man, a gentle man. Brutal? Moi? The cop has this little speech he uses. It goes like this: And Sir picks right up on it. He was already unfriendly. Now he’s downright hostile. Then he makes his big mistake....

The six string quartets of Bela Bartok, composed over the span of three decades between 1908 and 1939, are among this century’s seminal works of art. Not only do they convey the essence of Bartok the man, but they also chart his growth and maturity as an artist and a humanist. As a set, these quartets represent the last of the line for the Classical style of quartet writing and are worthy to stand with the great quartet cycles of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven....

THE LUCKY SPOT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This will not be easy. For one thing, the Lucky Spot, as Hooker has christened his venture, is located a full 60 miles from New Orleans. For another, a local businessman named Whitt Carmichael exhibits a strong, almost obsessive interest in gaining ownership of the property. There is also the matter of Cassidy’s advanced pregnancy–the father is Hooker–which she accepts with serenity only because she believes that he will marry her once he has divorced his wife, Sue Jack....

THE MAGIC BARREL AND OTHER STORIES The least successful of the three is Stanley Elkin’s “Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers.” In it, Jake Greenspahn, a south-side grocery-store owner, comes to terms with the loss of his 23-year-old son Harold, who has just died. For Jake life can’t just go on; his dammed-up grief over the son he idealizes poisons everything around him. Constantly on edge, he’s furious that life continues just as before....

What is the difference between MasterCard and Visa? –Jay, Evanston, Illinois Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t get me wrong. Visa and MasterCard are separate firms and they do compete after a fashion. But they’re not like Pepsi and Coke. One Pepsi is pretty much the same as any other Pepsi, but a Visa card is not necesssarily the same as any other Visa card....

It’s very rare to hear two musicians who play together with the care and sensitivity of saxophonist Urs Leimgruber and drummer Fritz Hauser. They’re musicians with big ears: they listen carefully and respond quickly to each other’s changing thrusts in dynamics, sound, and momentum. Theirs is a flowing, carefully crafted music, full of detail, whether wholly improvised or predesigned (Among the delights on their Hart Art CD L’enigmatique is a startlingly rich sequel to Ellington’s railroad-train songs)....

Finland hasn’t figured very prominently in the last decade’s explosion of interest in “world music,” but maybe Varttina can change that. At home the nine-piece group has spearheaded a revival of popular interest in folk music; its 1991 Oi Dai was the first folk album to go gold in Finland in 20 years. The group is trying to repeat the trick abroad on its first complete North American tour. The core of Varttina’s sound is its four female vocalists: they sing exclusively in Finnish, a rich-sounding language replete with rolling Rs and nasal vowel sounds that bears little resemblance to other European tongues (most are in the Indo-European family, while Finnish is more closely related to Basque and Mongolian)....

PARENTS With Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, Bryan Madorsky, Sandy Dennis, Juno Mills-Cockell, Kathryn Grody, Deborah Rush, and Graham Jarvis. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the clear benefits of this background is his deft handling of actors–not only professionals like Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, and Sandy Dennis, but the inexperienced Bryan Madorsky, who plays the movie’s ten-year-old hero, Michael, and the only partially experienced Juno Mills-Cockell, who plays his best friend....

At seven o’clock on a dark and cold January morning, the only people walking around the Davis Street el station in Evanston are early risers and lunatics. “Why are you running?” “Edwin, please–I can’t even hear about this stuff until I’ve had some coffee.” But then no other north-side Democrat is as wealthy, confident, or well-connected as Edwin Eisendrath. Mike’s son, Eisendrath’s grandfather, was Harold, who “did his damnedest to raise money for Israel,” Eisendrath recalls....

A LITTLE STIFF Minimalism seems to be getting a bad rep in some quarters these days, mainly from critics who identify that movement with the 70s and think that artistic styles should be up-to-date. But what if the artists themselves don’t identify with the overstuffed and unwieldy smorgasbords of 80s and 90s postmodernism? It seems to me that any serious assessment of minimalism has to consider what it manages to include as well as what it leaves out....

PERFORMANCE CHICAGO Paula Killen and Sharon Evans, the two Chicago artists featured in the first weekend of “Performance Chicago,” have widely varying styles and diametrically opposed theatrical agendas. Killen wants to confront and at times shock her audience, ripping her way through an unsettlingly intimate monologue. Evans uses a quieter approach, presenting a series of thematically linked images and ideas in a rather formal, emotionally detached manner, asking her audiences to make their own inferences....