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To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If your calendar editor wishes to be equitable, he could comment not only on the Benson and Hedges Blues Festival [October 12] but on the Prix de Martel, “sponsored by the substance implicated in 75% of the domestic violence in this country”; or the numerous events brought to you by the beer companies, “purveyors of the agent responsible for more teen deaths than anything except suicide....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He fails to tell the reader that his wholesale criticisms of the Bible were popularized by (1) the Scottish Realists’ anti-Semitic rhetoric which said that the Jews were incapable of achieving any literary quality, forcing a strict, wooden interpretation of that genre, and (2) the German Higher Criticism of the 19th century, which was for the most part a mutation of Scottish Realism....

What the Writers Saw To tell the truth, we don’t know anyone, either. Do you? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sun-Times editorial page spoke of “halting the plunge of political discourse in this country into anything-goes venality and mendacity.” George Will spoke of a city, Washington, “becoming increasingly carnivorous as it becomes decreasingly serious about governance.” The Tribune’s William Neikirk explained that “the ugly, tawdry nature of Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing flows from an increasingly polluted American political stream that thrives on scandal and personal attack and diverts attention from pressing national problems....

Choreographer Rachael Milder often creates quirky characters who bend their bodies in strange, otherworldly fashion, conjuring up images of animals, space aliens, or something in between. Other times she makes excursions into the distorted world of the psyche. In her new solo Unraveling, about the never-sated hunger to become one with another person, she stretches an “extra skin” around her body, creating startling images that could have come from an Edvard Munch painting....

A New Theater on North Michigan? Talk is hot and heavy on the ritzy dinner-party circuit about a possible new theater space on North Michigan Avenue. It’s only talk at the moment, say theater-industry sources, but the talkers are reportedly business types who could put a lot of money where their mouths are. Were such a new theater to materialize, it would be the first in the area since Tony DeSantis’s Drury Lane at Water Tower Place, which opened shortly after the shopping complex debuted in the mid-70s....

Friday 13 The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation is celebrating the holidays by offering free tours of Wright’s Oak Park residence, 951 Chicago Ave., today and next Saturday. The tours will concentrate more on Victorian holiday customs–the house will be in full Christmas regalia–than on architecture, and they’ll be conducted by local junior high students. You have to pick up the free tickets some time before the tour at the Oak Park Visitors Center, 1558 Forest, open daily from 10 to 5 and at 9 AM on tour days....

Nashville’s Fairfield Four, currently one of the most esteemed close-harmony a cappella gospel groups in the country, was also one of the top gospel draws throughout the south in the 40s and 50s. They disbanded in 1960, but reunited in 1980 and have been together ever since. (Ther are five in the Fairfield Four these days, and in the past there’ve been as many as six, but never mind the niggling....

GOD’S COUNTRY In the trial of a band of white supremacists for racketeering (one of several real events that anchor Dietz’s script), a prosecuting attorney quotes an American hostage whose plane was hijacked by Arabs: “They were a band of thieves, thugs, and murderers who justified their deeds with vows of religious fervor.” And, she declares, that description applies as well to the white supremacists. Is she right? Their actions were, indeed, those of mere thugs; but their words hark back to the elevated, mythically inclined catechisms of medieval knights and ancient conquerors....

The Zagat survey of restaurants, a familiar phenomenon to diners in New York City, arrived in Chicago last year, and 1,200 local foodies volunteered their opinions on the city’s eateries for it. The published compilation of all those opinions, the Zagat Chicago Restaurant Survey, went to three printings, and the publishers are now in the home stretch of polling for the 1989 edition. I caught up with Zagat’s local operative, Carolyn McGuire, in the penthouse party room of the high rise where she lives....

KILLING GAME The symptoms of the plague that is sweeping through the town include swelling and spots (Kaposi’s sarcoma?), and there’s no cure. The deaths are increasing in a “geometrical progression,” and there’s talk of placing all potential carriers in quarantine. Many people believe they belong to a group that will be unaffected by the plague, but the disease keeps dashing such hopes by infecting everyone — rich or poor, male or female, educated or ignorant, virtuous or corrupt....

Friday October 19 Beautiful and tragic, this story of the effects of economic dislocation on a working-class Argentinean family manages to avoid the problems (didacticism, dullness, cheerleading) that plague most social-problem films. If anything, the director (Tristan Bauer, whose first feature film this is) succumbs a bit too much to unmotivated aestheticism (lingering shots whose picturesque composition is their chief virtue, for example). The story–which centers on the self-questioning forced upon 45-year-old Ramon as his factory shuts down, the family moves to a shantytown, and his son is hauled off to jail–is simply told, beautifully photographed, and affectingly acted....

“Political stickering is a fun, effective, and cheap way to promote messages,” advises the Madison, Wisconsin, newsletter Nukewatch Pathfinder (Fall 1991). “Stickers like these [This product causes cancer or this teaches killing] will stick to almost any surface and are small enough to carry in a pocket….The act of stickering is illegal as it defaces property, but prosecution is very unlikely as it is a minor offense and you must be caught red-handed....

Consider, if you will, that classic breakfast cereal, Raisin Bran. A Raisin Bran raisin is heavier than a Raisin Bran flake. Logic dictates that heavy things ought to fall to the bottom of the box. However, when we examine a box of Raisin Bran, we find to our surprise (and delight, of course, because we love raisins) that the raisins are evenly distributed throughout! How so? Are the raisins cunningly charged with mutually repellent magnetic forces so they space themselves uniformly?...

TROUBLE IN MIND at the Red Lion Pub Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wiletta Mayer, an established singer/actress, advises John Nevins, the young educated black lead, to be a yes-man if he really wants to go somewhere in the business. He accuses Wiletta of being an Uncle Tom, but he heeds her advice. But when rehearsals begin, Wiletta begins to regret her words. She starts to see the wrongness in a play that reflects absurd ethnic stereotypes, and she throws a wrench in the rehearsal process by refusing to be quiet about it....

For years, the folks at the Clarence Darrow Community Center complained about the lousy lunches being served by their day-care program. “Well, next thing you know, word gets out that our food is better. And soon we started catering for Henry Booth House, and the Parkway Community House. That’s when we started our business. I got six more contracts. Suddenly we weren’t a little community venture anymore. We became a business....

The shutdown came without warning; one day the old Nortown theater was open, and the next day it was closed. They are a plucky group, but the odds are against them; they are operating at a time when community investment dollars are short and renovation costs high. Their success or failure will measure the ability of city residents everywhere to find the money to rebuild their communities in a period of social-spending cuts and war overseas....

The night bombs started falling in Baghdad Gloria Chevere was going door-to-door asking for votes. Her feet crunching in the snow, her breath shooting steam into the frigid January air, Chevere, running for alderman in the 31st Ward, couldn’t command much attention that night. Through the windows of every home on every block of this mostly Hispanic west-side ward TV sets were flickering with news from the Middle East. On the eve of the elections scheduled for February 26, aldermanic candidates are finding their races overwhelmed by bigger national and international events....

You go about your day-to-day life, and you read about people who climb mountains. Or they reach the pole by dogsled. Or they sail oceans. They are fascinating characters. They sneer at risks. They overcome impossible odds. Occasionally they die, or disappear. You read about them while you take the el to work. Their lives are impossibly removed from yours. Commitment is moored at the far outer rim of Monroe Harbor, as if she were already straining to leave port....

In the Civic Orchestra’s newly revamped agenda, maestro Daniel Barenboim plays a prominent and laudable role as the first CSO leader to take an active interest in the apprentice ensemble since Frederick Stock. Foremost among his teaching tools is having CSO guest conductors rehearse the Civic players, and to inaugurate this mentor program he couldn’t have found a better and more willing coach than his longtime pal Pierre Boulez. One of the most lucid and compelling interpreters of 20th-century music and a trailblazer himself, Boulez is sure to have some helpful pointers for the ensemble as it navigates the dense serial streams that make up Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra (1928)....

Dr. John is the real thing: one of the most requested session men in New Orleans during the R & B glory days of the 50s and early 60s, he studied under the legendary pianist Professor Longhair. The Doctor’s command of over a quarter century of blues and R & B heritage makes his one of the most varied and polished shows anywhere. Any minute he’s liable to break into a gutbucket piano boogie, a sophisticated, Gershwin-like interlude, or a hard-driving New Orleans rhythm-and-blues classic, overlaid with his famous bayou croak and enhanced by his warm, low-key stage demeanor....