Though I wouldn’t care to think of myself as an habitue of the gothic romance section of the bookstore maybe an occasional visitor, or even a dallier, but certainly not someone with any sort of compulsion in that direction I couldn’t help but notice that Johanna Lindsey has a new book out. This was purely by chance, mind you. I just happened to pass by on my way from psychology to women’s history, so I paused for a minute to thumb through Surrender My Love not without glancing surreptitiously around to make sure no one else was in the aisle....

TRANS AM, IDA 6/7, LOUNGE AX While they revel in a stripped-down version of robotic instrumental prog rock on their eponymous debut album, Trans Am have subsequently concentrated more on the Kraftwerk and Gary Numan synth squiggling that dots the CD. Their current set finds them operating with clinical precision on their complex rock originals, but the highlight is their nerdy electro-funk segment, a low-rent, geek-boy approximation of “Tour de France”–era Kraftwerk that somehow works....

PATIENT A Nomenil Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Blessing’s play, already five years behind the times when it premiered in 1993, attempts to “delve further into the great mystery of AIDS,” as New York Newsday claimed (maybe the Bergalis family commissioned the review as well). But the play simply pays lip service to the larger issues the epidemic raises: the media’s beatification of “innocent victims” such as Ryan White, Arthur Ashe, and Bergalis and its virtual disregard for tens of thousands of “untouchables” who suffered similar fates; the need for sound public health policy in the face of hysteria; the second epidemic of hatred and intolerance that follows in the medical plague’s wake....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “For those of us who care . . . ” That’s an interesting line. Chris Dickinson uses it in her Critic’s Choice concerning the Band’s Park West performance [January 21]. Well Chris, since I care, I thought I’d clear up some of the inaccuracies you based your little article on. First of all, The Last Waltz was Robbie Robertson’s way of severing himself from his past while making the jump to the Los Angeles fast track....

Air Show Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the two decades following the Wright brothers’ first flight, most airports were little more than rudimentary runways in open fields. By the end of the 1920s, however, airplanes had become a more widely accepted form of transportation; in 1931 the Chicago area had 25 airports and airfields, including what’s now known as Midway. The construction of air terminals has changed dramatically since World War II, as jets now carry millions around the globe....

The enclosed ad describes something called The Strecker Memorandum, a video that purports to show that AIDS is a man-made disease. This sounds like the usual AIDS-conspiracy mumbo jumbo, but it’s so well documented it’s made me wonder. Can you get to the bottom of it? –Edna Welthorpe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cecil is reluctant to spend too much time on this, because it seems so obviously nuts, but I’ve gotten a few letters about it and hey, we live to serve....

Tom and Jerry, American Blues Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the theater, however, this likable entertainment comes across as hollow, despite Dexter Bullard’s sharp, clear direction and fine performances from all three cast members. It’s unfortunate, but Cleveland’s main point–that Tom and Jerry are regular guys who just happen to kill for a living–seems obvious after Pulp Fiction. As does the play’s most interesting feature: the touching, funny, remarkably mundane conversations Tom and Jerry indulge in prior to each hit....

“I don’t know why I stopped painting,” says Irene Siegel. “I may have had a feeling of not being appreciated. Who knows? But it isn’t that I went away from painting–I went on to other things.” At one point, the city insisted she stop working on the fresco, and Siegel was forced to leave her paints behind as they closed the doors. “It was like Pompeii,” she said afterward. “I even left my cup of coffee in the room....

Based on several stories by southern folk artists and some from actress Tekki Lomnicki’s own life, this quasi-interactive, multimedia play written by Michael Blackwell, Lomnicki, and Nancy Neven Shelton tells the story of a brave, buoyant woman who battles several demons from her past on a bus ride to New Orleans. Featuring gospel music, slides, masks, and puppets, it’s whimsical, irreverent, and beautifully designed. It premiered last summer at the Blue Rider Theatre, and with major additions to the script, a more coherent musical direction, and more assuredness from Lomnicki, new director Jeffrey Jon Smith’s restaging is even better than its predecessor....

JOHNNY CASH Notwithstanding all the media fuss, American Recordings staggers under its own self-consciousness, starting with the cover photo of the album. Standing in a field against a cloudy sky like some dark Moses, Cash resembles the kind of pretentious icon Charlton Heston became after he made The Ten Commandments and started believing his own myth. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The acoustic guitar Cash strapped on wasn’t just for show....

DAPPLES AND GRAYS Their relationship seems doomed to fail. Brian, who has endured childhood sexual abuse and has had drug and alcohol problems as an adult, is impatient with Gary’s pat, formulaic Christian comforts. Gary perversely wants to save Brian’s soul to redeem himself, wants to prove his own worth as a priest; at one point he howls at Brian, “You’re going to die in grace if I have to kill you for it!...

They started out in 1990 holed up in a basement, where they created and intended to perform their work. Now, with El otro exilio (“The Other Exile”) and its repertory companion Jardin de pulpos (“Octopus Garden”), Mexico City’s relatively unknown Taller del Sotano (“Basement Workshop”) are poised to become the find of this year’s International Theatre Festival. Combining the cool, graceful physicality of France’s Compagnie Patrice Bigel and the explosive despair of Germany’s Pina Bausch with a nonchalant formality uniquely their own, Taller del Sotano create an intellectual and sensual feast in a minimalist style....

Although Hardship Post’s stock-in-trade is pop music, you won’t find any sweeping melodies, rousing choruses, or lush arrangements on their recently released debut LP, Somebody Spoke (Sub Pop). Instead the trio’s songs display a punchy, no-frills guitar-bass-drums attack and a fondness for brittle, bittersweet melodies that recalls the early work of new wavers like Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, and Marshall Crenshaw. There are hooks galore on Somebody Spoke, but they’re more insinuating than extravagant....

Honeyboy Edwards is a living link to the birthplace of the blues: he knew and learned from Delta masters Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson. Edwards never attained either the musical sophistication or the lyrical complexity of his illustrious colleagues, but blues historians Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow have noted that his 1942 Library of Congress recordings “virtually summarized what Delta musicianship of the decade had to offer.” These days Edwards is best showcased on solo electric guitar: his septuagenarian fingers can handle the relaxed action of those strings more easily than they can an acoustic instrument, and there’s no backup band to challenge his notoriously personal sense of timing....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thank you for running Michael Solot’s review (October 15) of Edward Said’s book, Culture and Imperialism. At last a real critic points out that this pseudocritic has no clothes. Said has been publishing pseudo literary criticism for over two decades now and getting away with it, as well as occupying a prestigious chair at an eminent university, because real literary critics have been unwilling to read what he has actually been saying....

The story in the Tribune changed Jess Levine’s life. It was a Chicagoland feature about William Kellogg, a businessman from Wilmette who spent a few hours a week leading a class in literature for inner-city kids. “Jess has taken the Adopt-a-School concept one step further,” says Bob Boone, director of Young Chicago Authors, a creative-writing program for inner-city students. “He has a sharp focus. He’s not just helping kids in math or writing, he’s teaching them responsibility and preparing them for college....

Lead Story In response to a citizen complaint last March, a San Diego Police vice-squad officer persuaded the owner of DeRay’s, a sexy-costume shop that had male mannequins in swimsuits in its window, to remove some of the stuffing in the mannequins’ crotches. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Damon Washington, 25, was arrested in November in San Francisco and charged with shoplifting cassette tapes at a record store....

Chicago Dramatists Workshop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Valentino Heart is Johannes Marlena’s poorly planned, too-casual conversation between a couple of actors, one an idealist, the other a slacker. Though their forced and self-conscious conflicts lead nowhere, at least Pete Kanetis and Sara Devlin, directed by Paul Frellick, suggest a shared history. Evan Blake’s The Sound Called Music is underlong and overwritten, an unfocused look at a May-December relationship founded on loneliness and loud music....

RICHARD STOLTZMAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A charter member in the exclusive club of successful crossover musicians, Grammy-winning clarinetist Richard Stoltzman combines an engaging personality and a marvelous command of technique. He’s remarkably eclectic, performing jazz and classical music with the same conviction and verve, and he seems to appreciate the essence of any music, as shown in the serious, yet relaxed, interpretations of famous movie tunes on his latest CD, Visions (RCA Victor)....

CIV 8/26, HORIZON PARKING LOT On their debut, Set Your Goals (Lava/Atlantic), CIV try to revive the bloody carcass of NYC hardcore circa 1984, coming off as a polished mix of Minor Threat and Kraut, whose “All Twisted” they cover. With pasts in bands like Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of Today, and Bold, the band members possess genuine NYHC pedigrees, but their current mainstream meltdown–“Can’t Wait One Minute More” is an MTV buzz clip–finds them operating without a lick of the fury that characterized the vibe back in the day....