If we triple up, most of us can squeeze in. “Units of public housing the federal government plans to demolish by the year 2000: 100,920. Units it plans to construct by then: 24,679” (Harper’s “Index,” October). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The silver lining. “The economic conditions that have been weakening the labor movement . . . have also created the possibility for new coalition building,” Jim Benn of the Chicago-based Federation for Industrial Retention and Renewal tells Janet Hotch in The Neighborhood Works (November/December)....

When Johnny Vegas appears in the doorway of the Cabaret Room at Ka-Boom! nightclub, a dozen pairs of arms shoot into the air. Johnny Vegas saunters through the crowd with a pleased grin; everyone knows him here. He slips on a white disco jacket that reveals his bare, bony chest and slides into white bell-bottoms and black penny loafers. Then Johnny Vegas reaches into one of the duffel bags and pulls out a bottle of cologne....

CHICAGO BAROQUE ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sonatas by two of these composers were featured in the season opener of the CBE, a solid member of the city’s early-music triumvirate (the other two being the Newberry Consort and the Orpheus Band). Both Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768) and Pietro Locatelli (1695-1764) were exceptional violinists and were supposedly pupils of Corelli. In their youth they traveled up and down their native Italy, making frequent stops in Rome, which at the time was still the musical capital of the world....

Labor Pains Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The workers’ decision to push for union representation apparently stemmed from deepening dissatisfaction with low pay and store management. “Here was a company that is growing very quickly, yet Borders seemed to be turning its back on the foundation of the store–their employees,” says staffer Chris Grant, who, along with fellow employee Greg Popek, led the drive to organize....

Metal and Melancholy Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1992, after an almost 20-year absence, Dutch-born director Heddy Honigmann returned to her hometown of Lima, Peru and found a city in economic ruins. Caught between the draconian policies of the rightist government and the terrorism of Shining Path guerrillas, many in the dwindling middle class were struggling to make a living and had turned to moonlighting as taxi drivers....

Three videos by George Kuchar, a master of underground funk in the flaky east-coast film shorts he made with his brother Mike in the 60s and more recently a no less flaky diaristic video artist, now based at San Francisco State. Judging from what I’ve sampled of the hour-long ID Came From Inner Space, it’s closer to his 60s work–deranged and sweaty bargain-basement versions of Hollywood exploitation–than to his more off-the-cuff video diaries....

From the minute Bubba’s motorcade hit Lake Shore Drive last Friday, it was chaos for Gate 16. When the Secret Service closed off seven gates at Soldier Field during the president’s attendance at the World Cup game, Gate 16 got the overflow. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a Gate 16 ticket taker, I saw 13,000-plus ticket holders trying to cram into two lines in 95-degree heat....

SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR: A TRIBUTE TO BILLY STRAYHORN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The towering talent of composer Billy Strayhorn depended on and also suffered from his relationship with Duke Ellington. Both onstage and off, the garrulous, glamorous Ellington easily overshadowed the shy and less ambitious Strayhorn; yet it was through their collaboration that Strayhorn achieved his own lasting fame and happiness. Certainly, Strayhorn’s most famous composition–the precociously sophisticated “Lush Life,” for which he wrote both music and lyrics while in his late teens–would have achieved immortality in any case....

G. LOVE & SPECIAL SAUCE 4/28, LOUNGE AX Self-proclaimed rag moppers G. Love & Special Sauce hit town to try out material from their forthcoming second album, due out this fall. The trio’s 1994 debut offered a sprawling oddball fusion of gutbuckety hip hop rudiments and strangely dissociated bluesy raunch. G. Love’s slurred raps recline naturally over any number of grooves, from Led Zep wallops to slinking vamps. The new stuff ought to demonstrate whether they’re a one-trick novelty or an act with depth to spare....

The Man Who Replaced Siskel and Ebert “There are a lot of fine reviewers in the newspapers, but I don’t think any of them, to the best of my knowledge, has the kind of blend of scholarship and critical intelligence that Dave has,” Christiansen replied. “As you know, he’s an adherent of the auteur theory, and he’s one of the best writers in that vein. I don’t know any other newspaper critic who brings quite that spin, that slant to his perception of the movies....

Set in French-occupied Indochina on the eve of the protracted civil strife that would eventually lead to the Vietnam war, this first feature by Pauline Chan hauntingly evokes an era and a place, depicting this desperate time far more accurately than the 1992 Indochine. At the center of Traps is an unhappy young Australian couple–he’s a business reporter, she’s a photojournalist–who come to embody the outsider’s contradictory attitudes toward the colonized: self-serving indifference followed by bouts of outrage and compassion....

The men are lined up for 30 yards, two across, starting at the entrance of a bar on a North Halsted corner and heading down the sidewalk. Inside, the line continues, snaking along the wall from the front door all the way to the back, where it widens into a pool of men, all in various stages of undress. They double over to pull off their pants, or lean against the wall to put their shoes back on....

“THE DIVINE ONE” (A SARAH VAUGHAN REVUE), Black Ensemble Theater. How do you re-create the essence of a great artist? Playwright Senuwell Smith comes up with an effective technique for showcasing the life and music of jazz legend Sarah Vaughan in this world premiere by telling Sarah’s story through the eyes of her childhood friend, and later gal Friday, Medinah Davis. Rather than try to delve into Vaughan’s mind, Smith makes Davis (played by the charming, energetic Pam Mack) the narrator, commenting on Vaughan so we know we’re getting Sarah’s story secondhand and are willing to play along....

A . . . MY NAME IS ALICE Eta Dorpha Society Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though they’ve compiled the work of several artists, Silver and Boyd have managed to come up with almost consistently hackneyed ballads. In “The Portrait,” by Amanda McBroom, a woman reflects on the differences between herself and her mother, concluding with the dull phrase “I wonder if I’m living partly her dreams, partly mine....

ANTHONY DAVIS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anthony Davis is very much an establishment composer who writes polished music derived squarely from European traditions, though embellished with American vernacular. Educated at Yale, where he now teaches, he’s done teaching stints at other Ivy League schools and received commissions from important ensembles and opera houses on both sides of the Atlantic. His chief claim to fame (and his chief credit with funders) is his 1985 opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which mixes Wagner and jazz in an attempt to create a contemporary American myth....

While nothing major, this soft-core daisy chain of sexual linkages and loosely connected dramatic sketches about life in contemporary Manhattan, written and directed by Temistocles Lopez, is fun, mainly for its cast and playful form. This form has been compared by some critics to La ronde, but more apt cross-references might be The Leopard Man, The Phantom of Liberty, and Slacker. The cast includes Linda Fiorentino, Elias Koteas, Patrick Bauchau, Angel Aviles, Grace Zabriskie, Malcolm McDowell, Jamie Harrold, Tim Guinee, Dewey Weber, Holly Marie Combs, Seymour Cassel, Sabrina Lloyd, Assumpta Serna, and Suzzanne Douglas; the sexual preferences include straight and gay, diverse forms of adultery, bondage, discipline, phone sex, voyeurism, and masturbation....

Chicago a Cappella is the latest addition to the city’s burgeoning collection of excellent unaccompanied choruses. Only three years after its founding this versatile nine-member group is about to release its first CD and plans a subscription season for 1996. Its strengths include well-schooled voices (the roster features respected soprano Carol Loverde, alto Terry Sullivan, and baritone Robert Heitzinger) and a wide range of musical idioms and performing styles. As coached by Jonathan Miller, a musicologist who sings bass, their voices blend to produce an exquisitely unaffected sound....

One highlight of Ravinia’s “Musica Viva” series is this gathering of local musicians and composers, a gesture of commitment to contemporary music from the festival’s management. The instrumentalists–flutist Susan Levitin, violinist David Wolf, cellist Julie Zumsteg, and pianist Gerald Rizzer–are core members of the well-regarded chamber consortium the Chicago Ensemble, and the six vocalists, directed by William Chin, are from the a cappella choir the Oriana Singers. They’ll perform pieces handpicked by American Women Composers-Midwest....

TONO-BUNGAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Tono-Bungay’s music amateurism meets virtuosity and textural exploration meets lockstep rhythms. The NYC-based trio stands apart from other genre-splicing experimentalists who inhabit its hometown: On record the band eschews the split-second slice-and-dice dynamics of John Zorn or Christian Marclay and the throbbing punk-funk underpinning of Carbon or Material in favor of a hazy sprawl more reminiscent of 60s-informed psychedelic rockers like Magic Hour (whose Twisted Village label released Tono-Bungay’s debut long player Rough Music)....

It’s easy, too easy, to make fun of the lowly “corrections” columns in the daily papers. When, for example, the Tribune announces, as it did in July of this year, that “The name of Richard Seaman, vice president of Evanston’s Fourth of July Association, was misspelled in Thursday’s Chicagoland story about fireworks celebrations,” we cannot help but think that this is probably not the first time Dick Seaman has had his name misspelled....