“Welcome to the Federal Job Information Center,” says the muffled, monotone male voice coming from the speaker mounted near George Bush’s head. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He was getting desperate last week when the notice that his unemployment benefits were running out arrived. He’d heard more than once about the Federal Job Information Center at 175 W. Jackson. Its name made it sound pretty impressive, like a bustling board-of-trade pit with bureaucrats, a phone to each ear, shouting out the latest openings and packs of unemployed elbowing for position in front of television monitors listing myriad opportunities....

It’s heartening to see the New York New Music Ensemble, arguably the most skillful and persuasive contemporary music group around, visting the city on a regular basis. Better yet, for the third time in as many years, it plays Ravinia as part of the festival’s effort to introduce new works to conservative-minded North Shore audiences. At this concert the ensemble will perform a brand-new chamber composition by Jacob Druckman, the distinguished elder statesman of American music who recently made the news after the Met canceled his opera commission (Met officials say it was too late, other suspect politics)....

As songwriter for Friends of the Zoo, probably the most intellectually eccentric of Chicago’s improv-style comedy troupes, Mark Nutter demonstrates a singular flair for the logic of illogic. Like the work of Tom Lehrer, Stan Freberg, and Abe Burrows, Nutter’s songs derive their comic infectiousness from the refinement with which he develops their absurd or satiric premises. This extensively revised version of Friends of the Zoo’s 1988 revue showcases 35 tunes from Nutter’s trunk–wonderful send-ups of Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart, with nods to country-western, early 60s do-wop, and the James Bond film scores along the way....

Rescuing the Chicago Theatre, Again. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The partnership’s goals, according to the proposal, would include improving the theater’s programming and management and strengthening its competitive position in the Chicago market. Among the board members named in the proposal are Amy Granat and Jerry Mickelson of Jam, Levy Organization cofounder Larry Levy, Marshall Field’s president Gary Witkin, Nick Pritzker of the Hyatt Corporation, Joseph Gonzales of the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Richard Brown of Illinois Bell....

The San Francisco Mime Troupe, which enjoys an almost cultish following in its own neck of the woods, has also garnered praise from afar, including the Tony Awards. They hit you over the head with leftist philosophy at the same time that they double you over with laughter. I became a dedicated convert after stumbling across one of their shows in a park in Berkeley. Their staging and costumes are elaborately simple, and rousing, raucous, and hilarious songs are part of their signature....

Organist Simon Preston’s visit to Northwestern University last year was such a smash they ivited him back for lengthier stay. This time around, the distinguished and much recorded British musician will offer two concerts during his two-month residency, each highlighting an aspect of his artistry. For the first, a pair of important theatrcial works from late-17th-century-England–the local premiere of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, commonly acknowledged as the first English opera, and a welcome revival of the semi-opera King Arthur by Henry Purcell, who was Blow’s prize student–will be performed by the highly regarded His Majestie’s Clerkes and Orpheus Band (collaborating for the first time) under Preston’s direction....

Words you will not hear uttered by any candidate for governor during the next seven months. Illinois Department of Corrections Director Kenneth McGinnis on the already grossly overcrowded state prisons (25,865 adults in space for 18,734 as of March 30, with a net increase of almost 100 a week): “Obviously, there are not enough construction dollars available to build our way out of the predicament . . . ” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

THE PRIMARY ENGLISH CLASS That is what The Primary English Class is all about, and that is why I found it so funny. The play is a nightmare of misunderstanding. Five students show up for a basic English class. Each one speaks a different language–Italian, French, German, Chinese, and Japanese–and no one understands a word of any other language. (The audience knows what they’re saying because two offstage translators who sound like a couple of language-instruction tapes provide the translations....

The baseball lockout is unique among labor disagreements because at its core it’s not about economics, it’s about power. Unions can become so strong they can practically dictate terms to ownership–at least they used to be able to–but even at this stage most unions can make the argument that they are simply attempting to get the best deal for their workers, so that the average Joe or Jo can bring home a better meal or afford a better place to stay....

A number of my karate cronies and I got into an argument recently about a question I’m sure has been bandied about men’s locker rooms for years. Does sex the evening before an athletic competition decrease one’s performance on the field (or in our case, in the ring)? I say this is an old wives’ tale–i.e., wives tell it to avoid yet another round of boring sex. Please vindicate me. My health depends on it....

ARISTOTLE GEORGIADES: POST-LEISURE Georgiade’s most complex work ingeniously incorporates one of the gallery’s North Avenue windows. Called History Painting, it consists of an elaborately carved but unpainted wood picture frame hung on a free standing partly hollow wall made of several sheets of drywall painted white. In place of a picture, the wall behind the frame has been cut away to reveal a box-shaped area. Through this space a toy train runs backward on a track laid out in a figure eight; small archways cut out of the drywall panels allow the train to wind through the different layers of the wall and around the frame....

I spent election night as I usually do, with my little electronic precinct captain, a portable black-and-white Panasonic. I’ve long since forgotten how the vote totals went, but I am absolutely certain that my old friend Jewel was pushing pasta and finger foods. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Channel Five had problems. Reporter Rich Samuels looked at Ed Vrdolyak and said: “Are we live now?...

Labels on the clay-dusty wooden shelves organize her pieces: Peach bowls. Fish plates. Small glazed tiles. Picture frames. Her medium is clay imbued in its original state with colors from a peaceful palette of pale yellow, green, blue, violet. Most of her work is unglazed, the finish raw and immediate. Some pieces are delicate with graceful flowers and tendrils, others are geometric–small, round dots pressed hard against bigger dots like nuts restraining bolts....

For the past 15 years, as the head of the locally based Chinese Music Society of North America, Shen Sin-yan has been dispelling the impression that the traditional music of his native country is nothing more than quaint exotica. In fact, his expertise and his effort to heighten appreciation of the music’s sophistication have earned him and his “silk-and-bamboo” ensemble trips to Europe, Japan, and even China. Tonight as part of an international music conference taking place in the Palmer House, Shen and his orchestra will offer a lengthy recital highlighting the astonishing variety of genres and regional styles of the Chinese “classical,” or court, tradition, which has continued more or less unbroken for 7,000 years....

David Cronenberg’s finely tuned new feature is a psychological thriller exploring the complex lives of two gynecologists, identical twins (both played by Jeremy Irons) who share everything from their girlfriends to the successful fertility clinic that they jointly run. Their close mutual ties become challenged when they both become attracted to the same actress (Genevieve Bujold). Cronenberg and Norman Snider wrote the script, adapted from a novel by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland....

Chantal Akerman’s greatest film to date–made in 1975, and running 198 minutes–is one of those lucid puzzlers that may drive you up the wall, but will keep you thinking about it for days and weeks afterward. Delphine Seyrig, in one of her greatest performances, plays the eponymous lead, a Belgian woman obsessed with performing her daily rounds of housework and other routines (which include occasional prostitution) in the same flat she occupies with her teenage son....

The Meat Puppets on record are a relaxed, almost indolently accomplished power trio whose first experiments in low-volume thrash went dreamy and lyrical before modulating back into a ZZ Top-with-a-life boogie sensibility. Me, I really like the dreamy stuff: Mirage, a couple albums back, had a languid, space-music feel that still entrances. When I listen to it, I think of dance music for heavy, low-lying animals–turtles, maybe–on a planet without much gravity....

As a gay journalist living in San Francisco in the 1980s, Randy Shilts could have written a book on the AIDS crisis from a very subjective viewpoint, with himself as a central character and his reactions to the deaths of his young friends as the focus of his story. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So when Shilts wrote And the Band Played On, he was startled to find that he had become what one friend at the World Health Organization dubbed “the world’s first AIDS celebrity....

NEWBERRY CONSORT The Parisian music scene in the early 1400s described by the Newberry Consort’s detailed program notes doesn’t seem all that unfamiliar. Theory was debated at the universities; private conservatories, with their rigorous curricula, trained singers and instrumentalists in “serious” religious music; street minstrels, who had organized a guild to ensure professional behavior, concocted lighter fare with a broader appeal; star musicians, despite low social status, hobnobbed with their employers; and the dukes of Burgundy, on whose fortunes the well-being of Paris depended, eagerly stole top singers from the choirs of the royal chapel and the papal seat in Avignon....

For Dorothy Banks, a Sunday without 10:30 mass is an anomaly. “I’m there except if I’m in the hospital or out of town,” she says. “If I do miss, four or five people will call to see where I’ve been. I go to hear the Word, that’s the main thing, and to set an example for my children.” On Sunday, June 9, the newly constructed east site of Saint Benedict’s celebrated its first anniversary....