Chicago isn’t as famous for musical families as New Orleans is, but in recent years we’ve begun to witness the growth of an exciting multigenerational blues scene that bodes well for the future. Guitarist Lurrie Bell, son of harmonica master Carey Bell, inherited his father’s sense of timing and tonality, but like most younger bluesmen he’s also acquired a healthy dose of post-60s rock-funk-fusion adventurism. A few years ago he disappeared from the scene to get his personal life together; since resurfacing he’s been tempering his youthful flamboyance with an increasingly knowing, even world-weary, introspection....

MARVIN’S ROOM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These are flaws of inexperience and immaturity. Marvin’s Room is the work of a young man; if playwright Scott McPherson could return to the script with a few more years’ experience behind him, he might address its shortcomings and come forth with a genuinely first-rate play. But McPherson died last November of AIDS, at the age of 33....

In Lisanne Skyler’s effective if not very enjoyable documentary of South Central Los Angeles two years after the riots, a black-owned pawnshop and currency exchange serves as a metaphor for life in the neighborhood. In repeated shots from behind the counter, people cash checks, look at handguns, pawn jewelry, and borrow such small sums as $25 with six months to repay. These transactions seem to lead nowhere, underlining the hopelessness that many residents feel: a young man would like to work but has a criminal record; business owners describe their difficulties in getting loans; gang members make new graffiti....

Hey, Faggot: A guy who digs chicks with great big tits is free to place personal ads that read “boy seeking big-boobed broads.” Or he can go out on the town and hit on women with big tits. I like guys with big teeth (long story). In a personal ad, I could lay out my dental requirements in advance of a meeting, or I can simply hit on guys with big, sexy teeth....

When Sun Ra died three years ago many feared that his Arkestra, one of the longest-running, most entertaining and adventurous jazz bands in history, would also be relegated to memory. The deaths of vital members June Tyson and John Gilmore made the picture even bleaker. Considering, however, the way the Arkestra operated in its last few decades–living and working commune-style in a house in the Germantown section of Philadelphia–and that for alto saxophonist Marshall Allen there was no other way of life (he’s been in the group for more than four decades), it’s not surprising that after a few years of only sporadic activity the living have chosen to resume full throttle....

Of the great stars of the 1960s still with us today, Lou Reed is the least affected by the passage of time; his problems transcend age. Many of his compatriots from those days are merely ridiculous; those who maintain some semblance of dignity–Neil Young, say–still must define themselves and be defined by others as fighters in an increasingly strained battle against time and irrelevance. As I’ve written before, age plays a unique role in rock....

I get a message on my machine from this woman collecting poems for McDonald’s. She got my name from a friend. The tape is staticky and I have to play it back twice to figure out the friend’s name. I call back. The woman’s voice is throaty, laughy. She’s a poet who’s collecting poems for McDonald’s, and she knows it sounds funny. But McDonald’s is big on the arts, she tells me....

A RESTLESS NIGHT WITH F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Set in a seedy hotel in Hendersonville, North Carolina, where Fitzgerald had retreated after a rest cure in Asheville turned into a summer-long drunk, Tom Webb’s one-man show A Restless Night With F. Scott Fitzgerald catches the writer at one of the lowest points in his career–August 1935. The end of the summer when alcoholism, tuberculosis, neurosis, and a series of personal crises, not the least of which was Zelda’s descent into madness, brought on a complete physical and mental breakdown....

During the annual Bulls playoff frenzy we come under pressure from the youth of our neighborhood to repair our alley’s basketball facilities. A phalanx of neutered backboards flank the alleyway, the rims slam-dunked and hang-timed to twisted wreckage by dreamy-eyed kids working through growth spurts. “Good idea,” I agree. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We set the ladder and haul the backboard up. I mark the holes and chew through the tar paper and wood with a brace and bit....

Sometimes I think that spirituality, animism, and ritual have no place on the concert stage. Then I remember Ralph Lemon’s Sleep, which was excruciatingly spiritual; Swan Lake, in which a woman becoming a bird has tragic and transcendent overtones; and the painstaking placement of pebbles and rocks in Jan Erkert’s ritualistic solo for Suet May Ho, Turn Her White With Stones. I guess it depends on whose rituals they are. Now that everyone has an opinion on what “belongs” onstage–from Arlene Croce’s attempt to banish “victim art” to Ron Athey’s endorsement of public displays of sadomasochism–the issues are especially confused....

DAVE ALVIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe it’s the need to match the scope and size of Alvin’s voice that fuels his music’s great breadth. Since his early-80s days with the Blasters, Alvin’s built his songs on a musical foundation of American roots music that includes everything from blues, country, and rockabilly (his most prevalent influences) to R & B, folk, and gospel....

MASS at the Neo-Futurarium, through March 30 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The CSO could learn a thing or two about visual presentation from MASS (Movement and Sonic Sculpture), a scrappy four-person ensemble whose annual budget probably wouldn’t get all the shoes on the Orchestra Hall stage shined. In the Blue Rider’s homey space, which sports a fresh coat of forest green paint, two mammoth Close long bows (named after MASS member Bill Close, who designed and built them) command the stage, their 25-foot aluminum frames lurking in the shadows like skeletal Viking ships on a peaceful night sea....

Heidi House Indeed, there is much comfort in Heidi House–in terms of emotions and, apparently, material things. Arneson’s character–presumably the young Arneson herself–lives in a house on a lake where idyllic summers and childhood adventures unfold. She has a large TV, her own room, and lots of time to play with the other kids in this affluent suburb. As in Peanuts, adults are disembodied voices that come from the ceiling or the sky, way above Heidi’s head....

CHILDE BYRON, TinFish Productions, at the Greenview Arts Center. It would be difficult to make a piece of theater less visually interesting than TinFish’s production of Romulus Linney’s Childe Byron. First there’s the cramped Greenview Gallery, a basement room tiled with olive and puke-colored linoleum and dominated by a hanging sculpture that resembles a pair of gaping diabetic ulcers. In a corner of this space, designer Charles Richtfort has shoved a wall of featureless powder blue flats, inexplicably smudged on either end with darker blue paint (as though the Jolly Blue Giant had tried to pick them up and left greasy fingerprints)....

For your December 2, 1994, feature article “Searching for the Great Black Hope” I thank you. I am glad I had not read the article til now because of all the ironic situations that have occurred since December 2. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joe Gardner has done absolutely nothing that makes me believe he can run this big city. I found his hugging that thug, Gator Bradley, an insult and an abomination in his trying to push that thing as a participating human being....

KELLER QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since winning a spate of prestigious European prizes in 1990, the Budapest-based Keller Quartet has been riding a well-warranted buzz. Its recordings of string quartets by Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Ravel (all on Erato) reveal a mature ensemble sharp and taut in its playing and resolutely unsentimental and intellectual in its interpretation–unusual qualities for a group that’s been performing together only a decade....

For those hoping to catch up on their theatergoing during the holiday fortnight, Reader critics offer their recommendations on shows running into the New Year. Check listings for addresses, phone numbers, schedules, and prices. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recipe for excellent holiday theater: Take one big dollop of British humorist P.G. Wodehouse’s wit. Add one heaping tablespoon of Mark Richard’s sputtering aristocrat Bertie Wooster and a dash of Page Hearn’s unflappable butler Jeeves....

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) is not only the greatest of all Japanese filmmakers but arguably the director who made more masterpieces than any other film artist in the history of movies. The 17 features included in the Film Center’s stupendous Mizoguchi retrospective between early January and late February aren’t all masterpieces, and a few key works (most notably Shin Heike Monogatari, his second color film) are omitted, but this has still got to be one of the major film events of the year, or any year....

Lindsey Buckingham, you will recall, joined Fleetwood Mac with his then professional and personal partner, Stevie Nicks, in 1975. Their first collaborative album made the band one of the biggest in the world. Buckingham kept pushing, and with a little help from some nice songs from Nicks and Christine McVie and a riot of romantic conflicts within the group created the band’s weird, obsessive, and unapologetically rocking masterpieces, Rumours and Tusk....

Lead Story A 22-year-old, formerly long-haired man was arrested and charged with vandalism in Hengelo, the Netherlands, in December after he allegedly caused $50,000 damage to a barbershop. The man said he’d grown increasingly upset because two weeks before a barber had gone overboard in response to his request for a “slight trim.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Beatings in the news and their provocations: Larry Dean Weaver, 27, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, punched his mother in frustration in February because he couldn’t connect his VCR to his TV set; Jose Archuleta, 32, of San Antonio attacked the driver of an ice cream truck in March because it repeatedly played “Pop!...