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HAUNTED BY GOD: THE LIFE OF DOROTHY DAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But I suppose that’s part of her charm. Her influence reaches the halls of the Vatican and the Pentagon, but she remains largely unknown outside a small circle of anarchists, socialists, liberal Catholics, peaceniks, skid-row alcoholics, and homeless people. And she probably wouldn’t mind. Her influence comes from a potent mix of socialist thought and Catholic doctrine that started a small but significant social revolution in the U....

PELLE THE CONQUEROR Immigrant sagas are surefire cinematic material, or at least they ought to be. Immigrants are ordinary people cast into extraordinary circumstances, being forced to cope with a confounding and often unfriendly milieu, whether the case at hand happens to involve Guatemalans in Los Angeles (El norte), Italians in Switzerland (Bread and Chocolate), Moroccans in Munich (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul), or Sicilians (The Godfather, Part II) or Jews (Hester Street) or anyone else you might care to name–including extraterrestrials–in New York....

The 25th Chicago International Film Festival moves into its second full week with a fair number of worthwhile films, including what are probably the two best parts of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue (the grim A Short Film About Killing and the exquisite A Short Film About Love), Maurizio Nichetti’s hilarious The Icicle Thief, several retrospective items, and several other films listed below and indicated by asterisks (*) (those are recommended by our reviewers)....

To those who’ve never heard an authentic jazz tap dancer, the idea seems too preposterous to be on the level. (And don’t bother checking the date–April 1 was weeks ago.) But arcane as it may be, jazz-tap has a long history, enlivened by such virtuosos as Baby Laurence, Honey Coles, Jimmy Slyde, and even Fred Astaire, who recorded several tunes using just his feet in the 1950s (reissued on the DRG label)....

Fifteen years ago, you’d have had trouble convincing most listeners that four saxophonists performing jazz–without any other instrumental accompaniment–was a musical experience worth investigating; these days, it seems you can’t turn around without running into an album by yet another saxophone quartet, from the long-running World and Rova quartets to such new foursomes as England’s Itchy Fingers and the 29th Street Saxophone Quartet. Chicago’s own entry into the SQ Derby is Saxophonitis, soon to release their debut album on Germany’s Sound Aspects label....

STREET GUIDE TO GARY INDIANA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few more than half of the poems Henzel performs concern this elusive character, who at times comes across as a mythical hero of the Paul Bunyan variety. In “The Paper Boys,” for example, Wilson imitates myths about the origin of the moon or the stars to tell how Gary Indiana invented smog and water pollution....

SWITCH In a review of Blake Edwards’s S.O.B. ten years ago, I was skeptical enough about his reputation as a trenchant social satirist that I called him the Perry Como of slapstick. Stylistically I think the comparison still holds–Switch, Edwards’s latest comedy, bears it out with a grim vengeance–but thematically the description may do Edwards’s work less than full justice. However Hollywood-style and boringly upscale the mid-life crises of the self-regarding womanizers in 10, S....

Not one of the burning issues of the day, but something I’ve wondered about on occasion at your fancy restaurants. Why do master chefs wear those tall white hats? Something so silly must have a logical reason for being. –John Rawls, Atlanta Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When you get into these how-did-that-get-started things, John, you realize the formula works like this: silly hat, silly reason; sensible hat, silly reason too....

“So there’s three helicopters riding over the top of the train.” The voice is from a guy coming up the aisle behind me. He talks so loud, so emphatically, it’s impossible to miss a word, even over the sound of the train. “It’s beautiful,” he continues. “One of them lands right on top of the train.” Whack. The guy claps his hands. “That’s when the whole thing blows up!” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

I am sitting in the cab of a shiny red Chevy pickup with my new friend Ira Katz. The back has been enclosed, and the interior is lined with plush burgundy velvet and trimmed with rich inlaid wood paneling. I feel like I’m sitting in a love seat in a high-class New Orleans bordello. Ira says the vehicle is worth $90,000. That’s because it has 1,500 pounds of sound equipment installed for its occupants’ listening pleasure (including six batteries that weigh 75 pounds each)....

To the editors: “Abortion 1990” [September 15] will probably generate many letters both pro and con. Mine will, happily, belong to the latter. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It is interesting that, of the many professionals cited in the article, not a few were Jewish (including the author, Mrs. Levinsohn). Roy Eckhardt, in his book Jews and Christians, has a footnote that states almost 50% of American Jews are affiliated with synagogues; the others, I would assume, are “cultural” Jews who attend a temple only on the High Holy days schizophrenically maintaining their agnostic or atheist positions the rest of the year....

It was an empty bottle of Wild Irish Rose that started us talking. I’d been sitting on a bench at a Rogers Park beach when a short, wiry guy in shabby clothes came wandering out of the north. There was a jumpy, rambunctious air about him even though he had a limp that made him skip a little bit as he walked, as if dogs were snapping at his heels. I wasn’t surprised when he nodded as he passed, but the empty bottle next to me on the bench hooked his eye and he slowed to a stop....

It’ll be a little strange to hear these guys in the elegant confines of a sophisticated Lincoln Park bar–this is one of the bands that rock the Maxwell Street market with blues, soul, and stripped-down R&B on summer Sunday mornings. Ebullient guitarist Willie James adds his trademark length-of-the-fretboard triplet runs to a note-by-note improvisational style that seems to owe equal amounts to laid-back traditionalists like Jimmy Reed and string benders in the B....

The Puttnam Problem Hooray for Broadway Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By and large, it was a year characterized by technological achievements and refinements, particularly the elaborate doubling techniques that yielded two Lily Tomlins and two Bette Midlers on screen at once in Big Business, Jeremy Irons playing a pair of twins in Dead Ringers, Eddie Murphy impersonating a whole group of barbershop regulars in Coming to America, and Bob Hoskins interacting with animated characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit....

It’s the chocolate capital of the Great Lakes region: the Nestle Chocolate Company plant in Burlington, Wisconsin, puts out over 100 million pounds of the stuff every year, in the form of Crunch bars, milk chocolate bars, 100 Grand bars, Oh Henry! bars, Raisinets, Goobers, Nestle Quik, cocoa mix, and Toll House morsels, lots and lots of Toll House morsels–81,000 a minute, 120,000 pounds of them a day. Burlington merits the appellation “Chocolate City USA” as much as Hershey, Pennsylvania, some people might say....

Friday 16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the 70s Richard Hell started in the Voidoids, made a nihilistic call to arms with the album Blank Generation, and did his time as a junkie. Since then he’s written books–Notebooks From the 70s, Soyo, and (with former Television leader Tom Verlaine) Wanna Go Out?–and he’s currently at work on a movie, The Theresa Stern Story....

A street light under the el track went out one night in December, and at dawn Charlie Soo, the mayor of Argyle, was on the phone with city officials demanding that it be fixed. Soo’s not really a mayor. Argyle’s only a street, and Soo’s not even a politician–he’s the director of a two-person operation called the Asian American Small Business Association of Chicago. But he tends to think of the two blocks along Argyle from Broadway to Kenmore as his province....

The nonprofit Experimental Sound Studio, whose mission is to provide noncommercial artists with a noncommercial recording space, moved into its new digs near Paulina and Foster two months ago. The entrance still smells like wet paint, but inside the isolation booth is finished, the engineer’s bench is in place, and rows of neatly coiled patch cords hang from hooks along one wall. As summer flies buzz through the room, a genial repairman fiddles with the studio’s main workhorse, an Otari half-inch eight-track machine....

A musical polymath, David Owen Norris was already well-known in his native England for his piano broadcasts and TV commentaries when he was named last year as the first Gilmore Artist. Valued at $250,000, the award–given by Kalamazoo’s Gilmore Festival–is intended to promote a touring career by subsidizing much of the fees and expenses. Norris is a bit old at 38 to be in the company of precocious winners of international competitions, but his introspective musicianship projects intelligence at the keyboard, and his tastes reveal a fondness for the unconventional and for the much-maligned modern British repertoire....

About 130 species of birds nested in Cook County in the summer of 1992. The dry weather of early summer made it a bad year for wetland species, but populations of some of our forest birds were up. Our most common bird was the ring-billed gull, with more than 11,000 observed. Most of those were from the colony at Lake Calumet, where an estimated 5,000 pairs nested. Starlings took second with 3,599 individuals, and robins were third with 2,561....