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Guitarist Lonnie Brooks’s Louisiana roots are usually more hinted at than proclaimed these days–a droning harmony, deceptively propulsive slow shuffle, or a long shimmering phrase reminiscent of Guitar Slim. Mostly, he’s a hard-driving contemporary bluesman, with a distinctive, high-pitched voice and a penchant for meticulous arrangements and well-crafted lyrics. Brooks used to play country music, and an element of country’s romantic longing remains in his style: even when he’s rocking the house down there’s a starkness to his sound, and on slower numbers his voice can modulate from loving to desolate....

ROUGHING IT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No, the drag comes in the telling. Not the whole telling, mind you (you’ll notice I’m being very namby-pamby here: I want you to know I like this show despite its flaws), but in certain important aspects of it. Roughing It is still just a little too rough to relax with. Adapted by Goodman Theatre dramaturge Tom Creamer from Twain’s book about his frontier adventures, Roughing It builds a series of picaresque vignettes around young Sam Clemens’s attempt to strike it rich in Nevada....

SYDNEY: DUMMY AT LARGE The most interesting moment in Sydney: Dummy at Large occurs at the top of the show, when we see the set for the first time: a tiny (one-third scale or so) hospital room with a single bed. In the bed is a ventriloquist’s dummy, hooked up to an IV, his face partly worn away. This is Sydney. In the chair next to him is another ventriloquist’s dummy, this one dressed in a military uniform, with the hard, tired, cynical look of someone who has done too much, seen too much, but can’t afford to retire just yet....

If my political vision is as acute as I fancy it is, 1992 will go down in American history as the year of the most significant signing since the Declaration of Independence: the signing of Ryne Sandberg’s baseball contract. Despite predictions that their golden goose, TV, will not roll out golden eggs indefinitely, the owners ask for more eggs. Guess what. TV won’t yield. Nor will the hiking of ticket prices dam the flood of expenses from rising salary levels....

Which Restaurants Rake It In? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These are not the best of times for Chicago restaurateurs. Most are struggling to attract customers by adjusting their menus and lowering prices. Even so, some spots are doing millions of dollars worth of business In fact, eight Chicago-area establishments wound up on Restaurants & Institutions magazine’s 1990 list of the nation’s 100 highest-grossing restaurants....

ALFREDO JAAR: GEOGRAPHY WAR Paul Van Blum of the University of California wrote recently that “much art criticism reacts to the contentless nature of art, so the criticism is very formalistic with content considerations insignificant. Mentioning content is heretical . . . and it lacks academic credibility.” Van Blum overstates the point a bit. Feminists, multiculturalists, and Marxists have spoken forcefully against continuing to view subject matter as an issue separate from quality....

A Visit to America’s Bar Yeah, I could get into a place where the Woodstock spirit reigned. “Those gym shoes,” he said, staring at my feet. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, they weren’t gym shoes. They were New Balance running shoes–with a few miles on them, admittedly, but running shoes nonetheless. Shoes that, in the American tradition, cost me too much. The type of shoes more than a few Americans wear in pursuing fitness regimens; the kind of shoes, I daresay, that retired Chicago Bear Walter Payton–coowner of America’s Bar–might have put on once or twice in his life....

Friday 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gone, which has extended its run at Theater Oobleck through January 25, is a loud and fast-moving melange of a whole lot of things: Philip K. Dick, Giles Goat-Boy, and Dickens, for starters. In the play’s bizarre cosmology, humans are all students in an inescapable two-dimensional “university” whose administration is unreachable. (OK, that part’s not so bizarre....

Friday 15 Fans of P.G. Wodehouse will remember Bertie Wooster’s fascination with felines: “It wasn’t my fault, Jeeves,” he might expostulate to his valet. “It was a, a, a whatyoumaycallit of circumstances.” “Excuse me, Sir?” “You know the word, Jeeves. Cats enter into it.” “A concatenation of circumstances, Sir?” “That’s it!” Cats also enter into the Cats Chicago Charity Cat Show today and tomorrow at the Chicago South Expo Center, 17040 S....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I never meant to write about this because I know that good talent is in short supply. A little background: I fell in love with your mag while visiting in Chicago on numerous occasions, and the main reason I subscribed was David Kehr. His movie reviews were, without doubt, the best being written anywhere by anyone....

Long admired for its boss tenors, Chicago has rarely boasted a bumper crop of alto saxophonists–which makes the recent emergence of Jeff Newell all the more satisfying. It’s not that Newell just showed up; in fact, he’s been a regular presence on the local scene throughout most of the 80s, starring in groups led by Marshall Vente and Charles Earland, just to name two. But in the last year Newell’s playing has achieved a new focus, and simultaneously acquired a strength that was only hinted at before....

KATHLEEN SUPOVE The first-generation piano, an amalgam of dulcimer and clavichord features with a four-octave range, was introduced around the time of Bach. It quickly became an all-purpose instrument and an indispensable tool for composers. Its versatility also helped usher in the age of the virtuosos. Mozart first gained fame as a keyboard prodigy. Concertgoers paid dearly to see Beethoven and Brahms pounding heroically on the most modern (and sturdy) pianos....

Ray Bradbury appears to be the presiding influence over this nostalgic fantasy-thriller about childhood and ghosts, written, directed, produced, and scored by Frank LaLoggia (Fear No Evil). Set in a small town in the early 60s, the plot centers on an apparition of a little girl seen by the ten-year-old hero (Lukas Haas) while locked in his school’s cloakroom during Halloween. Although the results are a bit overextended, the film is still something of a rarity nowadays: an evocative, poetic horror film without a trace of gore (and in this respect, closer to a Val Lewton film of the 40s like The Curse of the Cat People than any contemporary models)....

Evenings during the last springtime of the last great war, after what seemed to me our happy suppers–gravy, fresh vegetables, plate clatter, talk–my father doffed the jacket to his tailor- made suit and read the paper while Black Mary and my mother cleared dishes. My mother plucked up the white tablecloth by its four corners and carried it out the back door. The sun by then was down, the grass spinach green and shadows purple....

No Place for a Writer To test Adler’s assertion of colliding sensibilities, we made a quick and dirty study. Here are the cover stories of Chicago’s last six issues: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meanwhile, Adler was reflecting on the Annoyance Theatre, the death of Theater Oobleck, the state of the musical, sexual Darwinism in Chicago theater, the transcendence of saints Catherine and Therese as contemplated in a Lookingglass Theatre Company production, the focus on black issues in recent Chicago theater, and the vapid local version of Six Degrees of Separation, a play that had moved him to tears in New York....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As an avid reader of books by Whitley Strieber and Brad Steiger, I can’t see how anyone could compare our space brothers to barbarian hordes. As Strieber wrote in Transformation: “I have learned much about the value and sense of communion with the visitors. The whole point of it seems to me to involve strengthening the soul....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although written with a good deal of affection, Miner’s article clearly illuminated the basic flaw in Tom’s approach to his work, a flaw which eventually sunk both him and the theater which he was hired to guide. It is a flaw that was also apparent two days after his arrival in Chicago when he told the Page 10 section of the Sun-Times that Chicago theater lacked ambition and churned out mediocrity–an opinion he was able to offer without the benefit of having seen much, if any, local work....

Like C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, the southwest tip of Michigan is an accessible escapeland, just an hour and a half from the city yet worlds apart. And unlike other getaway places popular among Chicagoans–Galena and Lake Geneva, to name a couple–this one has a varied personality: it has beaches and beach people, forests and forest people, farms and farmers. Also artists, architects, antique collectors, gardeners, and hobbyists of all sorts. It offers hang gliding, boating, fishing, wind surfing, biking, and cross-country skiing....

Barbara Mojonnier, doing her weekly volunteer work at the hospital, pushed her book cart into a room and was surprised to find an acquaintance from her church. “What are you doing here–malingering?” she asked cheerfully. “Oh, I’ve just had a mastectomy,” came the response. It was typical of Kim: she never told many people when she was going to the hospital, and she never made a big deal about her treatments....

Art Expo: Local Dealers Exhibit Their Discontent Quiet no more, Chicago art dealers are raising their voices in the hope they can keep the prestigious Chicago International Art Exposition from losing its luster. Last week gallery owner Carl Hammer, president of the 40-member Chicago Art Dealers Association, said he had met with Art Expo executives to seek assurance that local dealers will have a significant say in planning future Art Expos....