THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm rings with the same compelling ugliness. Like Carroll, Algren neither romanticizes nor condemns his junkie hero or his street characters, but rather tells their story simply and compassionately. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Man With the Golden Arm is mainly the story of Frankie, who comes home to the Division Street ghetto from World War II with a Purple Heart and a drug addition....

Is there any significance to Italian last names beginning with de, del, or della (“of,” “of the”)? Do they indicate nobility? Someone told me that della is the highest rank. –Thomas Della Fave, Irving, Texas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don’t get your hopes up, your lordship. Once in a while de, della, and the like mean the family was, if not noble, at least a cut above the common herd....

A few weeks ago I got a check for 25 cents from Illinois Bell. The check was drawn on a bank in Lake Lillian, Minnesota. Do you know how obscure Lake Lillian is? (Of course you do. You know everything. I’m just asking rhetorically.) It’s so obscure it’s not in the Minnesota key to my road map book, which includes such metropolises as Dundas, population 422. It’s so obscure the person I talked to at the Minnesota tourism office couldn’t find it on her computer (she said to call back when Jerry gets back from lunch)....

A coffee shop waitress (Susan Sarandon) and a beleaguered housewife (Geena Davis) in the southern sticks take off for a weekend holiday and eventually find themselves fleeing from the law and society in a buoyant and satisfying feminist road movie directed by Ridley Scott from a script by Callie Khouri. Scott, who usually offers a style in search of a subject, makes the most of the southwestern landscapes in handsome ‘Scope framing and shows an uncharacteristic flair for comedy in fleshing out Khouri’s script with a memorable cast of male rednecks (including Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, Stephen Tobolowsky, Brad Pitt, and Timothy Carhart); his eye may get a little fancy and fussy in spots, but this is still his best picture since Blade Runner, and Sarandon and Davis bring a lot of unpredictable verve and nuance to their parts....

TREATMENT Moore seems to think his play is an unconventional work about ideas, pitting the nihilism of the skinheads’ creed against the more hopeful humanism of the British middle class. In fact, the play is a conventional morality tale that could have been lifted from half a dozen social melodramas of the 1950s. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alain St. Borges and Philip R....

ANY BONDS TODAY? They don’t work all that badly now, however, in the USO-1940s musical revue called Any Bonds Today? At the beginning of the first act, I could almost forgive the carelessly contemporary haircuts, clothes, and post-Streisand singing styles. I did forgive the occasional missed note, the sometimes lead-footed dancers, the often underamplified voices–in fact the general amateurishness of the production, intensified by the audience’s unmistakable boosterism–because I was caught up by the idea that these brave, earnest, enthusiastic kids were doing their part to stomp Hitler and bring our boys home....

Brett’s Waveland Cafe, the immensely popular ivy-covered restaurant in a corner of Lincoln Park, is closed now until spring. But if recently adopted rent hikes for park concessionaires are enforced, its winter hibernation may become permanent. For Knobel, it seems a catch-22. And at least two park board commissioners admit that they did not read the guidelines closely before they approved them; they now believe the suggested rents are too high and should never have been adopted....

Burlington, Wisconsin, about 80 miles north of Chicago off I-94 and a comfortable hop from Lake Geneva on Highway 36, is a pleasant city of 9,000 whose chief claim to fame is the big Nestle chocolate factory on Pine Street. Unfortunately, the only time Nestle operates an outlet store for the public is during the annual Chocolate City USA festival, a weekend-long music and pig-out exposition, scheduled in 1991 for May 17 through 19....

Friday 22 AEMMP Records, a nonprofit record company staffed by Columbia College undergrads, was established in 1982 to educate students about the recording industry; the acronym stands for Arts, Entertainment and Media Management Program. Every year students find music to record, promote, and distribute. This year’s pick, the Gloryhounds, is a four-man “psychedelic dance group” with an “eclectic, alternative sound.” There’ll be an AEMMP record-release party for the band tonight at 11 at Lounge Ax, 2438 N....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Paper is not the same as glass, metal, or plastic: it cannot be melted and cast over and over again. To make recycled paper, a huge investment in machinery must be made ($40 million or more), large volumes of water used (inevitably tainted with dangerous chemicals), and the outfall (unrecyclable wastes containing ink, heavy metals, dioxins, et al....

Rumor has it the Chicago Symphony Orchestra requested something short and sweet from the three University of Chicago composers it commissioned to write new works for the centennials of both institutions. Iconoclast Ralph Shapey, characteristically, turned in a monumental score for a full orchestra. The hour-long, four-movement Concerto fantastique–dedicated in part to Paul Fromm, the wine merchant, philanthropist, and unstinting patron of new music who played an important role in bringing Shapey to Chicago 27 years ago–is meant to showcase the CSO’s first-chair musicians....

To the editors: Apparently the Reader feels no responsibility to check the truth and accuracy of the articles it publishes; else it would not have published “Is Nothing Sacred?” in the June 9, 1989 edition. If the article had demonstrated nothing more than the usual verbal idolatry, effete aestheticism, and cranial density of the self-styled Prayer Book Society, I would merely have yawned and let it go without comment. There are, however, overt lies–snide lies–presented in the article....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Where was the Reader’s sense of “responsible journalism”? What was the basis for Zaccor’s suppositions? Do we (teachers) get a chance to refute these allegations? These were some of the questions that ran through my mind. By Monday, Stockton’s “headhunters” (disgruntled teachers, parents, etc . . .) were out watching for Karen Zaccor and any of her cohorts....

To say that Atlanta’s Impotent Sea Snakes traffic in offensiveness is like saying Jimi Hendrix played guitar. The Sea Snakes are searchingly, baroquely, consumingly offensive, whether parading on stage in women’s lingerie, leading the crowd in a sing-along that suggests performing an illegal act on a band member’s mother, or performing “hits” like “Kangaroos (Up the Butt),” “Pope John Paul Can Suck My Dick,” and others whose titles I blush to repeat....

Among the many virtues that distinguish the improvising guitarist James Emery, I admire most his willingness to follow musical ideas wherever they naturally lead; it governs his compositions as well as the formats he finds for presenting his music. He’s best known in the context of the acoustic String Trio of New York (he’s one of the founders), but his latest project has been the electrified Iliad Quartet, in which he uses the guitar synthesizer (in the company of such new-music exemplars as saxist Marty Ehrlich and drummer Gerry Hemingway)....

KID PURPLE This two-act play by Donald Wollner is about Benjamin Schwartz, who was born with a purple head. His upper-middle-class family expect Benjamin to become a lawyer, but because of his lack of brainpower and strange disability he gets sidetracked into a boxing career. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is certainly a workable premise for comedy. The class conflicts between Benjamin’s family and the boxing world have plenty of potential....

This show, billed as a tribute to the late Sammy Lawhorn, features both a contemporary and a student of the legendary guitar master. Louis Myers is best known as the guitarist for the Aces, the jumping little combo that brought swing and sophistication to the driving Chicago blues sound in the early 50s. He’s famous for his keening slide, jazzy jump-blues chording, and the harmonic and melodic sophistication of his leads....

JESUS OF MONTREAL It must have been about 30 years ago that I saw Jules Dassin’s He Who Must Die, a popular art-house movie at the time and one of my first foreign films. Dassin, an American expatriate chased to Europe by the Hollywood blacklist, was a highly skilled film noir director whose best efforts included The Naked City, Thieves’ Highway, and Night and the City. He Who Must Die, set on Crete in 1921, was a French picture based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Greek Passion, concerning the performers in a passion play whose theatrical roles take over their real lives as they suffer from Turkish oppression; the theme was that if Christ came back today, he would be crucified all over again....

On the day of the game, Mark DeCamilli doesn’t eat. He doesn’t drink. He watches a little TV and thinks about the game. “I start thinking about the game in the morning,” he says. “I don’t get really excited, but I’m thinking. I don’t eat ’cause that makes me bloated. You want to be light on the day of the game.” “I really fell in love with hockey in 1980 when Team USA beat the Russians in the Olympics....

Ottawa is a little over an hour southwest of Chicago via interstates 55 and 80. The best approach is to leave I-80 at route 71 and follow that road southwest into town; at the intersection with route 6 you can see on both sides of the road a sort of hilly, strip-mined wasteland. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Large tracts of land along the north bank of the Illinois have been mined either for silica or for coal, but the bluff that now makes up Buffalo Rock State Park was spared; it became a state park after first serving as a home for a religious sect and then as a tuberculosis sanatorium....