BLEACHER BUMS Confession #3: I still think Bleacher Bums is a dreadful show. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to Forum Theatre’s press materials, this play–conceived by Joe Mantegna and developed by the Organic Theater Company in 1977–is second in popularity only to the works of Neil Simon. Which, if true, says a hell of a lot more about the dire state of commercial theater in America than it does about the play....

Now in his early 70s, Bob Dorough has aged remarkably well, and so has his music–both his performances, few and far between and recorded on a handful of discs, and his compositions, which capture a particular time without becoming dated in the process. Dorough has been hip since it was hep. From his earliest recordings–including his two cult-item favorites, “Blue X-mas” and “Devil-May-Care,” recorded in 1962 with Miles Davis–Dorough has presented an intriguing vocal profile: a pale yet wildly animated voice, slightly built, knowing and boppish, with a poet’s expressiveness and a hint of willing dissolution....

Friday 18 WBEZ outcast Stuart Rosenberg will bring back his recently defunct radio show “The Earth Club” in the form of a live concert this afternoon at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. In the spirit of the broadcast version, The Earth Club Live! will feature a wide range of musical styles performed by 14 locally based acts, including West African dance band Ghanatta, gifted Irish flutist and former Drover Kathleen Keane, folkies Jim Post and Art Thieme, South American ensemble Raices del Ande, and purveyors of eclecticism themselves Maestro Subgum and the Whole....

On last year’s superb Hand Jive (Blue Note) guitarist John Scofield returned to the soul jazz he cut his teeth on. After years of working with jazz giants Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Joe Henderson, and Gerry Mulligan, Scofield settled for most of the 80s on an effects-heavy modern funk fusion style that ingratiated him with guitar geeks and contemporary jazz fans but alienated him from more hard-core jazz aficionados. However, when his affiliation with his current label began in 1990 he underwent a rebirth....

For most north-side residents, the decision to dump several hundred tons of concrete behind the city’s largest public high school ranks among the stupidest ideas to come out of City Hall in a long time. To sum up, last month the Daley administration began allowing an influential out-of-town contractor to dump concrete in a lot a few feet behind Lane Tech’s running track and football stadium and across the street from Clark Park, a strip of grass and trees that winds along the North Branch of the Chicago River....

The alewife population in Lake Michigan has declined by 80 percent in the past 20 years, and the fisheries biologists who have been managing the lake during those two decades don’t know whether to laugh or cry. What worries the biologists is, first, that this entire multibillion-dollar industry depends on the well-being of a dinky little fish that has trouble surviving a cold winter in Lake Michigan. And second, that the biologists are going to have to tell the politicians and the anglers that there may not be as many fish to catch next year as there were last year....

A booking-agent friend recently brought me an ashtray from the George Jones gift shop and museum in Nashville. It’s a ceramic dish embossed with a photo of Jones next to an outline of a naked woman. Stamped next to the images is a matter-of-fact Watch Your Butt. The semiotics of this piece of Americana are manifold, but the ultimate message is one of irony, coming as it does from an artist who seldom heeded his own advice and nearly gutted his career in the process....

Good Timing for the New Guy Lucky G. David Pollick. Last month he was formally inaugurated as the 13th head of the School of the Art Institute at what looks to be one of the most auspicious moments in the school’s 127-year history. Applications are growing in number, the school’s endowment is in reasonably good shape, and the ugliness surrounding the showing of artist David Nelson’s controversial painting of Harold Washington in frilly lingerie is long past if not forgotten....

GRAY’S ANATOMY The historical trajectory of Gray’s connection with his audience is essential–and in fact something like a marriage: initial euphoria (Sex and Death to the Age 14 through A Personal History of the American Theater), occasional disillusionment followed by jubilant rediscovery (Swimming to Cambodia), and sporadic resentments and small joys (Monster in a Box). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gray’s the kind of performer–perhaps even more than other performance artists–whose scripts couldn’t be done by anyone else, not even in parody....

“It truly all started with Barbie,” says clothing designer Leigh DeLeonardo, “pointy boobs, high-heeled feet and all. I have a whole suitcase full of things I designed for my Barbie.” Today, when DeLeonardo sits down to sketch a new pattern, the only trace left of Barbie’s influence is her femininity. “I think in terms of body enhancing and celebrating the female figure. There is no such thing as a figure problem–we’re just all different....

“We can’t remove the pillars, but we’re going to put mirrors on them, like in the old place,” Joe Segal tells me as we walk through the brand-new, about-to-open home of his Jazz Showcase–an empty shell of almost completely raw space–just 12 days before guitarist John Scofield will bring in his sizzling quartet for the official baptism. Two workmen hammer on large pieces of metal ductwork not yet installed. Also not installed is everything else–the service bar, the stage, the microphone and speaker cables, the bathrooms (one flight up), the lobby....

The little black-box auditorium in the Hull House at Belmont and Broadway has hosted some of Chicago’s finest acting–by Mike Nussbaum, for example, in Hull House Theater’s 1960s heyday, and the Steppenwolf ensemble of 15 years ago. Add to that group Larry Neumann Jr. in this one-man play, produced earlier this summer in Cafe Voltaire’s basement and now transferred to reach a wider audience. Not that Judgement is exactly a crowd pleaser–it’s a dark, disturbing portrait (inspired by fact) of a Soviet soldier who survived imprisonment during World War II by resorting to cannibalism....

Lead Story Police in Mineola, New York, filed child-endangerment charges against school bus driver Robert Horton, 22, and his friend in September. Their only offense was telling scary stories to their five- and six-year-old passengers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frank Edward Gould, 48, was jailed in November in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, for 45 days on a DUI charge. A police officer spotted Gould’s truck weaving on the highway, and as Gould pulled into a gas station the officer drove in behind him....

Beyond Rangoon With Patricia Arquette, U Aung Ko, Frances McDormand, Spalding Gray, Tiara Jacquelina, and Victor Slezak. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If, once upon a time, audiences would throw money at artists who threw dead donkeys at them–a trend that, according to some opponents of the National Endowment for the Arts, has survived until fairly recent cutbacks–today we’re prone to praise and reward businesspeople for insulting us, often by throwing remakes at us....

On Saturday mornings two years ago, Chicago filmmaker Kate Wrobel crouched down and asked kids to describe their summer activities. “Saving babies,” the children earnestly testified into her camcorder. These kids weren’t playing; they were protesting outside Milwaukee abortion clinics. Wrobel distilled 16 hours of Hi-8 video into a personal ten-minute report titled How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The children had been enlisted in the antiabortion crusade by their parents....

After years of depending on campy formalism to obscure their lack of songwriting ability, San Diego’s Rocket From the Crypt have emerged with not one but two pretty swell albums. Primarily a singles band–they’ve put out no less than 15 in the last four years–RFTC have long specialized in retooling rock ‘n’ roll cliches with punk-rock energy, but while they’ve intermittently hit on the right combination, for the most part their songs have rested feebly on either a riff sliver or a singsongy chant....

Free improvised music is an ongoing story of encounters between players. Over time, if a particular group works together long enough, it begins to take on an identity that extends beyond that of the individual musicians, and at some point it may even deserve a name of its own. Guitarist, violinist, and cornetist Daniel Scanlan is a member of Liof Munimula–the free trio with percussionist Michael Zerang, and shortwave-radio manipulator Don Meckley–and pianist and synth specialist Jim Baker plays with Caffeine–the improvising threesome with reedman Ken Vandermark and drummer Steve Hunt....

Tight-Lipped on Ticketmaster One of the difficulties in writing about the controversy over Ticketmaster’s escalating service charges–a spate of class-action antitrust suits, as well as Pearl Jam’s ongoing “holy war” against the company–is that most of the local principals won’t talk. Ticketmaster refers inquiries to a publicist who won’t discuss specifics. And some key local organizations–Jam Productions, for example, a major Ticketmaster client–are keeping their mouths shut as well. In Jam’s case, it’s because the company’s caught between a rock band (Pearl Jam) and a hard place (Ticketmaster) that are both officially “good friends....

Witches’ Hammer Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Otakar Vavra apparently made this 1969 Czech film about 17th-century witch trials with modern political trials in mind, but it also made me think of the abuses that have occurred in our asset-forfeiture programs today. The story begins when a choirboy sees an old woman conceal her host at mass; she admits she saved it to help restore the milk from a cow that has run dry, and the existence of such popular superstitions leads to suspicions of witchcraft....

Friday 17 Last year an international beach cleanup led by D.C.’s Center for Marine Conservation saw 150,000 volunteers cleaning up three million pounds of debris. Today, Friends of the Parks is holding a Great Lakes Beach Sweep, and volunteers are needed to clean south-side beaches from 12th Street to 98th Street from 9 to noon, armed with gloves, plastic bags, and notebooks–to document exactly what kind of trash is there. To participate, call the group at 922-3307....