“This must be the place,” says a graying man in a business suit. People are lined up and down the stairs and escalators. There must be about 500 of them, all trying to get into the Great Hall of the Congress Hotel. A toothless black man says, “I don’t know. They all look alike.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Inside we’re all handed a booklet with the word “profit” emblazoned in capital letters on the cover six times....

Townes Van Zandt looks and sounds like everyone’s idea of the lonesome cowboy: he’s lanky and slow-moving, with a whispery Texas drawl and a leathery, careworn face. He ambles onto the stage, opens up his set with a mumbled comment and a joke or two–usually a tale that sounds as if it’s going to end tragically but winds down to a hilariously prosaic finish–then without another word picks up his guitar and starts to play....

You can just buy some land and build a forest. We can do it. Chicago can do anything. –Richard M. Daley, December 4, 1991 What would we lose if they did bulldoze these lands out of existence? Twenty years ago, when I first got seriously interested in birding, I used to go to Eggers Woods pretty regularly. Part of it is a low, wet woods, and part of it is an open marsh....

The Grant Park Music Festival concludes its season with an intriguinmg sampler of unjustly neglected works by Latin composers. Brazil is represented by Heitor Villa-Lobos, whose Cello Concerto no. 1 sounds like Tchaikovsky but with a fiery Latin beat. Zesty dances from Alberto Ginastera’s ballet Estancia depict ranch life in Argentina. But the best represented country on the program is Mexico. Jose Pablo Moncayo’s Barren Land opens with a sensuous Ravelian passage that quickly segues into fiestalike delirium....

Recordings aren’t enough: a traditional music is truly alive only as long as somebody somewhere is actually playing it. But just playing it won’t do, either. You have to keep the music moving forward–otherwise it collects dust. Take some pointers from the way Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang dig eagerly into possibilities offered by the various drums and drumming traditions of north Africa and the Middle East. Rather than trying too hard to reexperience the past, they treat the heritage of the def, dumbek, tabla, and other instruments as a thread to be picked up and carried somewhere–anywhere....

For my money, this is funnier than both Naked Guns combined, even down to the final joke-strewn credits. Putatively a parody of Top Gun, it also includes send-ups of Dances With Wolves, Full Metal Jacket, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Superman, and even Gone With the Wind. Directed and cowritten (with Pat Proft) by Jim Abrahams, one of the three writer-directors who launched Airplane!, this shares more with that 1980 laugh getter than an exclamation point and Lloyd Bridges; there’s also much of the same pleasure in milking cliches and ridiculing poker-faced straight men with their own compliance (Charlie Sheen is every bit as well cast here as Leslie Nielsen is in the Naked Gun movies), and the airborne antics are realized with a lovely sense of craft....

Joe Ely, a rockabilly yeller and a sensitive balladeer, looks like a slightly less innocent Gene Vincent (at 41, he should). He came from Lubbock, Texas, played in the Flatlanders, finally got a record deal in 1977, and toured with the Clash and the Kinks. MCA, a pond-scum label, dropped him, cruelly, in 1984: since then, Ely’s made two first-rate records for tiny Hightone in Oakland–for some unfathomable reason, no other major has picked him up....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. DuBrul, in his November 18th letter, obviously read my October 7th letter on differences in black and white use of generalizations through his own special filter. What I said in my October 7th letter was that blacks and whites have different discourse rules (or standards) governing the use of generalizations (of the kind that Jeff Bloom was talking about in his letter “Stereotyping Honkies” 9/16/88)....

Kristin Lems wrote her first song, “Hula Hoop With Your Honey,” at age 11. She didn’t have a honey or know how to hula hoop, but she says the words “had a catching rhythm.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Lems’s early musical training was supervised by her mother, a concert pianist, but, she says, “when you grow up in a classical-music environment, you don’t learn improvisation or self-accompaniment....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An armed robber of Asian descent who did not understand English well memorized his holdup demand phonetically and recited it to the cashier at the Szechuan Delight restaurant in Elmont, New York, in December. However, the cashier did not understand English very well either. After several inquiries, and upon realizing the man’s purpose, the cashier started screaming, frightening the robber, who grabbed a bag on the counter (containing a $15 take-out order) and fled....

To the editors: You heard a rocker letting inertia and a bone-deep laziness and creeping confusion and disaffection block his access to what could be a life force: you stepped forward to call my cop-out while suggesting ways to reconnect. That was cool of you. Better still, our very discourse rocks. Sure this is just a letter about a letter about a letter about a critic about a pop star’s movie, but our ideas matter plenty–in fact, they define rock experience as much as the sound from the speakers....

By the time you get this far south, everybody’s a Cardinals fan and loves to talk about Whitey Herzog. They also love to talk about horseradish. They make Bloody Marys with horseradish. They put it in carrot cake. They put it in hot sauce for crab Rangoon. This is Collinsville, Illinois, self-proclaimed horseradish capital of the world, the town responsible for approximately two-thirds of the country’s entire horseradish supply. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Theresa Dixon still can’t believe the case ended as it did. “It’s unbelievable that this kind of race crime could happen in 1990,” says Dixon. “They invaded my house, damaged my property, and scared the hell out of my family, including my mother. What’s worse is that they got off so lightly. I wasn’t asking for the death penalty; I just wanted the system to show its disapproval by enforcing a harsh penalty....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the flagship of Chicago’s not-for-profit theatres, the Goodman is fairly emblematic of the state of the art in this town. While the Goodman is endowed heavily, it seems difficult for its artistic director to rise above the demands of the enormous subscriber base and take a lot of risks at the end of a season–it’s handy to have a blockbuster running when your telemarketers are busy hustling next year’s subscribers....

Lorene Vilela grew up dancing, singing, and drumming the samba–both in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and at one of the samba schools where thousands rehearse year-round for Brazil’s famous Carnaval. Since marrying an American rock musician and moving to the United States nine years ago, Vilela has made a career of promoting the Afro-Brazilian rhythm. But though she was codirector of the Chicago Samba School and a performer in the band Da Cor do Samba, she didn’t discover the music’s true magic until one evening last September in Wicker Park, of all places....

In 1976 the Chicago String Ensemble opened shop as the midwest’s only professional all-string orchestra. Now, several ups and downs later, it celebrates a milestone anniversary–still the midwest’s one and only string orchestra and one of a handful in the country. Aptly, the ensemble will open its new season reprising the very first program it performed. The program includes Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3. The best bet, however, is likely to be Benjamin Britten’s song cycle Les Illuminations....

Clockwatchers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This impressive first feature by Jill Sprecher, coscripting with her sister Karen, shows that she has an eye and ear all her own. The focus of this subtle and intelligent comedy is the experience of four office temps–played by Toni Collette (Muriel’s Wedding), Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach–who temporarily bond to stave off their alienation and frustration, and each is presented as an individual, not a type....

In the early 80s David Murray brightened the jazz world with his octet, a hot little big band featuring clever arrangements and ingenious interpreters, so it’s promising news that he’s touring with a new octet in 1992. While Murray’s composing doesn’t quite sound like that of the late, volatile Charles Mingus, he does share a good many of the Big M’s interests, virtues, and faults. Like Mingus, Murray dreams up attractive, blues-filled themes, and he has the imagination and orchestrative mastery to make them lovely and colorful; he covers a territory from ballads to finger-popping swingers, and he also does Mingus-like impressions–part tribute, part parody–of past mastersl and his pieces sometimes topple over into a mess of virtuoso effects....

DISTANT FIRES Distant Fires is a good example of this kind of writing. Less than 90 minutes long, it’s utterly simple and plain. Six construction workers–three white and three black–spend a hot summer day in 1971 pouring concrete on the tenth floor of a skyscraper under construction in Ocean City, Maryland. Down below is the beach that’s transforming Ocean City into a popular resort. And in the distance, the workers can see the smoke rising from Cambridge–a black neighborhood that, the night before, erupted in violence....

EURYDICE (LEGEND OF LOVERS) StageCraft Productions Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the original tale Apollo’s son Orpheus, a musician, falls in love with Eurydice. Soon after their marriage, Aristaeus the beekeeper becomes enamored of Eurydice; fleeing him she is killed by a snake. Orpheus journeys to the land of the dead and, through his beautiful music, persuades the gods to release his beloved....