All jokes aside, Poland is not the first place you think of when you think of fine dining. That’s mainly because most Polish restaurants in town serve up a basic kind of grub, and good and hearty though it may be, it’s more peasant food than cuisine. You know: sausages, pierogi, potato pancakes, sauerkraut, fruit-laden pastries. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All of which is a long time and a long way from the late, late 20th century and the northwest side of Chicago, where a few spots offer upscale settings and some interesting variations on their native cooking, in the culinary idiom known as “continental....

RIDING THE DOLPHIN at Strawdog Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Riding the Dolphin gives us a young schizophrenic named Tiffani who is hyperaware of her condition and the absurdities of her own behavior but often powerless to do anything about them. Her real name is Mary Alice, a name she rejects because “names are just a label–they obscure the real person.” Yet when she finds herself in a group home for the mentally ill, the occupants introduce themselves by giving their illnesses rather than their names....

Chance Dance Fest Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Becoming centered requires years of practice. Martha Graham’s signature movement, a contraction, is an exercise for finding one’s center–for pulling the body’s power into one point so that it can be sent in another direction. One of Graham’s dancers, Dan Wagoner, described it as passing through a black hole–letting your body be pulled into a point of fantastic mass and compression, then passing through that point into an exploding universe full of movement and light....

Hey, I can’t find the clutch on this thing. Piano rebuilder Paul Revenko-Jones of Music of the Spheres Pianoworks (Chicago Industrial Bulletin, May/June): “There are 11,000 to 12,000 parts in a piano. That’s more parts than there are in a car.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We support the circulator. We have always supported the circulator. Dennis Constant in Taxnews (Summer): “In 1947, the Chicago Tribune, which editorialized against trolley systems on page one, quoted George W....

Illinois’ largest predator appears to be flourishing, according to researchers Ed Heske and Marty Miller in the Illinois Natural History Survey’s newsletter Reports (July/August). “As recently as the 1950s, coyotes were considered uncommon in Illinois; now there are probably over 30,000 living in the state,” they write, perhaps because competing predators like gray and red wolves no longer are. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “A person with a disability may encounter a handicap in one environment, but not in another,” according to the Chicago Behavior Consultants, Inc....

Uncle Tupelo plays a convincing New Depression country rock that makes similar attempts, even by worthy competitors like the Jayhawks, seem a little superficial. Dominated by the ragged, road-hardened voices of singers and songwriters Jeff Tweedy and Jay Fararr, the band blasted about punkily for a couple of albums before finding a bleak and nuanced voice in the acoustic song cycle they called March 16-20. Now they’ve backed up a bit to craft a guitar-fueled folk on their new Anodyne, the title of which glosses accurately enough as “a cure for all your ills....

A FIELD GATHERING Choreographers just don’t come across as the bad boys and girls of the arts, but though what dance says may not be revolutionary, its way of saying things is often radical. Just as abstract artists challenge our culture by producing works that are nonliteral and nonrepresentational, choreographers and dancers challenge our heavily verbal culture by making art that’s nonverbal. Dance takes circuitous, underground routes; it uses a rhetoric barely worthy of the name, creating impressions as fleeting as wind on water....

D’Angelo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Recalling Al Green in his heyday, D’Angelo wound his voice around the lyrics like taffy, silkily scatting while the crowd rushed the dance floor. Fans similarly responded to “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker,” his reinterpretation of the salacious 70s. A belligerent tale of betrayal and murder, the song throws rolling rhythms and Prince-like growling together with wrenching, threatening lyrics. “Why are you sleeping with my woman?...

Clarinetist John Bruce Yeh may be the busiest musician in town. A longtime member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra–which he joined in 1977 right out of the Julliard School–he often guest solos with other ensembles in town and pursues a side career as a chamber recitalist, most notably with the Chicago Pro Musica, the Grammy-winning group he helped found. (And he also teaches at DePaul University.) Three CDs featuring his performances are due out next month....

The dangers of compost, according to Mary Phelan and Art Plotnik, quoted in Chicagoland Gardening (September/October): “When you see how beautifully it breaks down one type of waste, you start looking at everything you don’t like.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Doctor, do you have a problem with my skin? “What is most striking about this multitude of studies is the consistency of the findings” showing that whites receive better medical care than blacks, writes H....

At long last I’ve made it to Argonne. The 1,700-acre national laboratory has been an enigma to me ever since I started exploring the forest preserves around it ten years ago. There’s something about the way it’s tucked into the bottom-right-hand corner of Du Page County on my Tribune-McNally Chicagoland map, about the way it’s colored the shade of pink mapmakers use for industrial areas and medical centers, about the way the lab grounds form a large, misshapen watermelon encircled by the green rind of the Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve....

FURRY THINGS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although its debut album, The Big Saturday Illusion (Trance Syndicate), catches Furry Things in thrall to My Bloody Valentine, live this Austin foursome tears up greener sonic turf. On record the group’s frail but affecting melodies are bruised by violent swirls of wah-wah, feedback, and fuzzed-out distortion, the vocals of bassist Cathy Shive and guitarist-keyboardist Ken Gibson tentative amid the onslaught....

What do Congressman Mel Reynolds and Joseph Stalin have in common? A predilection for teenage girls, if you believe the state’s attorney and a new book on the wives and mistresses of Soviet leaders. Kremlin Wives, by Russian poet and feminist Larissa Vasilieva, explores a topic taboo under despots like Stalin, when wives and lovers were best known for their anonymity. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Under the communist regime Vasilieva herself led an obscure life....

Our image of a dancer is of a young, lithe, healthy, beautiful animal–an image of perfect youth. When a dancer grows old, she cannot move like a young animal anymore, and she is often pushed behind the scenes into other roles. This tragedy echoes the everyday tragedy of many middle-aged women, who in their youth were prized for beauty and vivacity but with their diminished energies might be found spending the evening alone in a cluttered apartment....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not long ago I was in a line of cars waiting at a red light on Wabash to turn left onto Congress. As the light changed, a shiny new Mercedes coupe tried to beat the rest of us to the turn by swerving to the left of the el support posts. As he was just about to pass everyone, a dilapidated Nissan Sentra cut him off in the middle of the intersection....

Eugene von Bruenchenhein: Looking Beyond the Mirror at Phyllis Kind Gallery, Von Bruenchenhein’s work shares much with 20th-century “high” art: a visionary near abstraction, the use of natural forms, a restless experimentation with diverse materials, the use of multiple media to create an encompassing environment (his home). But because von Bruenchenhein lived in a very different world from the one most of us inhabit and saw connections everywhere, in his oeuvre media as different as photography, painting, and sculpture don’t have the ontological differences they usually have in mainstream art....

A Time to Shill Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But for whom? None of the bands has exactly burned up the charts, and it seems unlikely that shilling for Calvin Klein will do much to alter their fortunes. It does seem like a surefire way to surrender whatever street cred they might have. These guys ought to take a hint from the Wu-Tang Clan: if you’re going to use your music to sell lifestyle accessories, why not use it to sell your own?...

Over the years Lane Tech High School has produced outstanding athletes and high-scoring academics but few, if any, social activists. For better or worse, it’s just not the kind of school that breeds outspokenness; at Lane, when a kid steps out of line for whatever cause, the principal usually pushes him back in. “Around here they don’t like people who speak out–they call you an enemy of Lane,” says Jim Parker, a member of Lane’s local school council....

Around the Coyote Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Reader lists festival schedules (which are subject to last-minute change) on a week-by-week basis; following is the schedule of theater and performance offerings for September 4 and 5. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 An evening of “intimate and dark theater.” 7 PM: Chapman. Timothy Hiatt plays John Lennon’s assassin in Silken World Productions’ one-man show, set in New York during the days prior to the December 8, 1980, killing....

As with 1994’s Bonsai Superstar the new Brainiac album, Hissing Prigs in Static Couture (their first for Touch & Go), is pretty good, but for this Dayton quartet music is only a part of the equation. Borrowing liberally from Ohio’s famous 70s futuristic art-punks Devo and Pere Ubu, Brainiac’s music is defiantly simple–more often than not it can be reduced to a mere Neanderthal stomp. But gussied up with all manner of weird sonic ephemera–mostly antiquated synthesizers and quaint devices to contort the ecstatic vocals of Timmy Taylor–the group’s sound takes on larger-than-life proportions....