Chicago still has a lot of blues musicians scuffling in the clubs waiting for their big break, and guitarist Byther Smith may well be the sleeper of the bunch. Smitty can be unpredictable, but when he’s on, his guitar work is vintage early-60s Chicago fire–eccentric arpeggios laid over a base of sustained phrases and aggressive harmonic combinations–and his voice roars as if he’s trying to extinguish the flames of hell through sheer willpower....

Barrett Deems resumed his Tuesday night platform at the Elbo Room a few weeks ago, a month before his 83rd birthday. Surrounded by his 18-piece orchestra, the drummer, who’d been on vacation for six weeks, picked up the microphone and rasped, “It’s great to be back at the Elbo Room, which has been like a third home to me. The first is my home, and the second is the hospital.” He peered into the audience through large, dark-framed glasses....

Sunshine is an overrated virtue,” a young Samuel Beckett darkly quips in Lookingglass Theatre’s Dreaming Lucia, a fictionalized account of the life of James Joyce’s daughter. Beckett much preferred the gloom of a closed room, the better to enjoy to the fullest his daily dark night of the soul. Company, one of his last prose works, is set in such a dark room, where the unnamed protagonist awaits death while an odd voice–not unlike the one that bedevils the poor hero of Beckett’s Eh Jo–reminds him of various minor events from his life....

Dance for Life Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few events offer the opportunity to ogle dozens of beautiful bodies in sexy performances the way Dance for Life does. And it’s for a good cause: the fifth annual AIDS fund-raiser benefits Open Hand Chicago and the Dance for Life Fund, which provides small assistance grants to dancers living with AIDS. Right at the top of the heat index for dances this year are Elaine McLaurin’s Murk Groove, a hip-hop wonderment of undulation and come-on looks performed by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Frank Chaves’s Macarena, which is equally sultry but a bit more polite, performed by River North Dance Company....

THE JEANETTE/GENETTI SHOW: DON’T MISUNDERSTAND MOLASSES Jeanette Welp and Carol Genetti at Link’s Hall, August 26 and 27 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Jeanette/Genetti Show is a variety show, an evening’s worth of disconnected performance bits–solos, duets, and group pieces. None is particularly profound or thought provoking, but all were performed in a genuinely charming, relaxed, off-the-cuff manner–a style not equally suited to all the sketches....

Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) A 48-minute video that’s premiering in Chicago ten years after it was made, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville’s Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) is so far in advance of most films and videos made today about the essential properties of both media that it makes not so much Chicago but contemporary Western culture feel like an intellectual backwater....

GRANDMA DUCK IS DEAD Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As drawer plays go, this early work by the author of The Foreigner and The Nerd about college-buddy bonding is pretty good. The usual treacle about having to grow up and move on is nicely contrasted with some genuinely inventive plotting and some amusing situations. Though Grandma Duck Is Dead won’t blow anyone away with its originality, it’s compelling enough to entertain an audience for 90 minutes....

Composer and alto saxophonist/clarinetist Guillermo Gregorio creates music of spatial and temporal luxury. Born in Buenos Aires 54 years ago, Gregorio has lived all over the world (he currently resides in Michigan City, Indiana) and possesses a broad slate of experience. Though he’s worked with an Argentinean Fluxus group, performed the work of 20th-century composers, and led his own jazz-leaning combos in Argentina and Germany, his studies with saxophonist Warne Marsh and his membership in Swiss trumpeter Franz Koglmann’s Pipetet are the experiences most evident in his bracingly distinctive music....

Henry Rollins’s latter-day career rests on twin pillars of cheesiness. For the first, there’s the onetime Black Flag front man’s “art,” currently equal parts ponderous, strained metal and humorless stand-up comedy–I’m sorry, “spoken-word performance.” The second is his reprehensible work as a tool of advertisers (the Gap, Apple) looking for youth credentials. We’re supposed to appreciate Rollins as a thinking-man’s punk, one whose philosophy of brooding, pumped-up self-reliance can rationalize his ad campaigns and incessant MTV self-promotion....

After minor recession-related setbacks in 1991, the U.S. record industry’s sales swelled mightily in ’92. CD sales went up by nearly 25 percent last year, cassettes 30. The industry pushed almost 900 million CDs, cassettes, albums, singles, and music videos on consumers, parting them from close to ten billion dollars in the process. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To demonstrate their commitment to the concept, the companies are raising catalog prices for steady sellers as well....

Ki ho’alu, or Hawaiian slack key guitar, is rarely heard on the mainland. Unrelated to the more familiar Hawaiian (or steel) guitar, slack key has been traced back to the Spanish and Mexican cowboys brought to the islands in the 1830s to control the growing cattle population. At first you might think you’re listening to a folk virtuoso like John Fahey or Leo Kottke; but using an elaborate and deceptively serene finger-picking style, slack key players perform in a wide variety of unusual tunings....

LOOK BACK IN ANGER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The plot is simple and sordid enough. Working-class but university-educated Jimmy is married to middle-class Alison, and the two of them are sharing a shabby flat with Jimmy’s best buddy, Cliff, who provides companionship for Jimmy and affection for Alison. She returns his playful flirtations, since Jimmy’s communication these days consists of an unending stream of abuse and complaints directed at her, her family, their economic situation, and the world in general....

This is a docudrama about a couple (Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon) whose five-year-old son who has a rare and mysterious degenerative disease called adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). It’s hard to make such a project sound good, but in its own quiet way this is an astonishing film, both as a medical detective story that sustains taut interest over an extended running time and as a piece of cinema combining unusually resourceful acting and direction....

In the cool basement space of the Equator Club, the rhythms of soukous meld with flowing calypso and reggae beats. Jeans and flannel rub against embroidered garments. African dialects blend with American slang. It’s exactly the sort of hodgepodge that owners Adolphus Nnodi and Emmanuel Egwu planned when they opened the club five years ago. “This is supposed to be a meeting place, the equator is the center of the world,” says Egwu....

Lead Story David Bridges, 24, was arrested in Grapevine, Texas, in January and charged with stealing a television set from a home. His getaway had been successful, but he was caught and arrested when he returned to the home to get the remote control. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In separate incidents on the same evening in December in Springfield, Illinois, one pedestrian and one person in a wheelchair were hit by cars, sent to local hospitals, and then ticketed by police for “being in a roadway....

Lead Stories During a Tirane, Albania, divorce hearing in July, in which a man was contending that his wife beat him regularly over the course of their two-year marriage, the wife suddenly leaped at the man and beat him unconscious before she was restrained. The judge quickly granted the divorce. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Self-described “fishing fanatic” Tom Getherall of Long Island, talking to a New York Daily News reporter the day after the crash of TWA Flight 800: “I felt bad when I heard about the wreck, real bad, but to be honest with you, the first thing I wondered was how it would affect the fishing....

Everything you read about Harry Houdini, it seems, is qualified, hedged, comes in different versions: He was born Ehrich Weiss in Appleton, Wisconsin, or in the Jewish ghetto in Pest, across the river from Buda; he met his wife Bess when he performed at her Brooklyn high school or else when they were both playing a Coney Island theater (she was a song and dance artiste); he died on Halloween 1926 from a ruptured appendix or else by drowning during an unsuccessful underwater escape, as Tony Curtis did in the 1953 movie Houdini....

A row of band posters are hanging slightly askew in the living room of Brent Ritzel’s apartment, barely hinting at the twisted philosophy he applies to music. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’m not the kind of person who sits down and listens to music for enjoyment, which is kind of weird,” admits the 27-year-old publisher and editor of Tail Spins, a bimonthly magazine dedicated to the local rock scene....

One of the most endearing and durable flutists in the world, Paula Robison hasn’t performed solo in the Chicago area for more than a decade. Of course, local fans have had the pleasure of her company when she’s toured with comrades such as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. But the chance to witness her pyrotechnics and musicianship unencumbered by other instruments is not to be missed. For this recital, sponsored by the Chicago Flute Club, Robison has put together a historically informed program that should sate the connoisseur’s appetite....

If you’re fed up with restaurants so expensive that it takes as long to pay off the credit card bill as it did to get the reservation, with waiters so solemn you worry you’re being served a ritual sacrifice, and with places so full of suburbanites celebrating special occasions you feel like you’ve crashed a party in Schaumburg, you may have recently dined at a place like Gordon. I did–with a group who’d been going there since it first opened, a group celebrating a very special occasion, a group with a 7:30 PM reservation....