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The black string bands of the 1920s and ’30s fused folk and blues roots with popular music, blazing the trail for bluegrass, western swing, and eventually rockabilly and rock and roll. Multi-instrumentalist Howard Armstrong is one of that era’s few survivors. Armstrong began his career more than 65 years ago as a songster, playing folk, blues, spirituals, and pop tunes on fiddle and mandolin. A few years later, alongside bassist Carl Martin and guitarist Ted Bogan, he became renowned as a member of one of the most accomplished string bands....

The extrovert trumpeter returns to town a scant two weeks after his high-flying jazz-fest appearance with Dizzy Gillespie–and if you heard him then, you don’t need much more from me by way of recommendation. Faddis is something of a throwback, capable of recasting the horn in its historical role as an instrument of raw power; like Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Cat Anderson, and Maynard Ferguson, Faddis is the high-note trumpet man of his generation....

Lead Story In Tampa, Florida, in July, Michael Riley asked a 16-year-old girl several times when she would be finished with her call at a pay phone. Finally, exasperated, the girl grabbed a bottle, broke it off at the neck, and slashed Riley three times on the arm. Riley clutched his wound and calmly responded, “Now we have an assault here,” whereupon the girl grabbed the bottle again and stabbed him in the stomach....

Possessed, suddenly, for reasons I’ll go into below, of a brand-new copy of Strunk and White’s freshman-English perennial, The Elements of Style, I creased it open and my eyes fell on this paragraph from chapter four, “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused”: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I expected similar shenanigans from Plotnik’s The Elements of Editing, but it turned out to be a first-rate, extremely rational guide....

PUMP UP THE VOLUME It’s hard to talk seriously about the 60s today, because TV and a lot of assholes have almost ruined it. When I taught film courses in southern California in the mid-80s, I was appalled to discover that college students thought of the 60s as a traumatic, troubled period–a time characterized by young people losing their way, freaking out on bad acid trips, denouncing their parents, getting killed in Vietnam, and protesting the way American society was being run and abjectly failing at it....

MY COUSIN VINNY With Joe Pesci, Marisa Tomei, Ralph Macchio, Mitchell Whitfield, Fred Gwynne, Lane Smith, and Austin Pendleton. “Why is this film so popular?” Michael Sragow asked a little plaintively about My Cousin Vinny in the New Yorker last week. Then he suggested an answer: “Perhaps because it gives Pesci a chance to combine his commercial signature, pop scabrousness, with old-fashioned virtues like ‘heart.’” This hypothesis implies that audiences go to comedies for highly esoteric reasons–just like some film critics....

“These fellas down here can get you some leaf for ten,” she said. Leaf? I looked at her face and then at my companion’s. He didn’t seem to know what it was either. We were two ignorant white guys sitting in a parked car somewhere off Chicago Avenue in the deep dark black of west-side Chicago. Our contact was a black-woman-who-could-be-trusted-and-knew-her-way-around. We followed her car off the Stevenson onto Central and traveled north to Chicago Avenue, through neighborhoods of burnt-out buildings freshly boarded up with a sloppy finality that let you know nothing was going to be built there for a long time to come....

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong, Earl Boen, and Joe Morton. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This time it’s a little different. A resurrected version of the Terminator, now working for the human resistance forces of 2029, returns to the past to protect Sarah’s 12-year-old son John (Edward Furlong), now living with foster parents while Sarah is in a mental ward, diagnosed as schizophrenic because of her statements about the future....

The case now before the Illinois Supreme Court is called United Citizens of Chicago and Illinois v. Coalition to Let the People Decide in 1989, but it really should be called Sawyer v. Evans, round three. The prime statutory culprit is the mayoral vacancy law in the Illinois Municipal Code. It provides that “if a vacancy occurs in the office of the mayor of a city with a four-year term, and there remains an unexpired portion of the term of at least 28 months, and the vacancy occurs at least 130 days before the general municipal election next scheduled under the general election law, the vacancy shall be filled at that general municipal election....

It may sound hard to believe, but for almost a year residents of Lincoln Park have been waging a bitter little turf war over dogs. “We were in Trebes Park having a picnic and planning our annual garden walk,” says Tom Lawson, who lives about a block from the park. “But there was this dog owner with three dogs running loose in the park. The dogs kept getting into our food....

Chicago has always been a great big “Joe’s Place.” In our youth it seemed Joes were everywhere–on both sides of the street and on both sides of the family. My dad’s Uncle Joe taught me how to play whist and pour beer down the side of a glass. My Grandpa Joe taught me how to throw a curveball and insult all ethnic groups. My mom’s Uncle Joe, a Chicago police detective, taught me that the crime syndicate was “just another business” and that politicians and policemen had much more in common than the first three letters of their job titles....

ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN HUAC’s targets were invariably nonconformists with a buried leftist past or a desire to upset the status quo–union leaders, actors, intellectuals, artists. These dupes, the committee proclaimed, were fellow travelers who hoped to use the entertainment industry to persuade God-fearing American citizens to love Joe Stalin (one of HUAC’s first targets in 1938 was ten-year-old Shirley Temple). Best of Chicago voting is live now....

CHICAGO DANCE MEDIUM It would come as no surprise to Isadora Duncan that these third- to fifth-graders–like all youngsters–display an innate gift for expression through movement. The kids’ hearing impairments (which vary in degree) are never apparent as they perform with the company in A Falling Piece, a Piece Falling. On the contrary, they exhibit an impressive sense of timing and equanimity, responding to their cues like pros. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

By almost all accounts the Lawrence Avenue Development Corporation has done an outstanding job advising local merchants on how to start, sustain, or expand their companies. Yet earlier this year LADCOR lost $25,000 in funds when the state reorganized its small but effective Illinois Small Business Development Center Network. At issue is how best to finance and operate the Network, which recently emerged as a modest success story for the state....

Like Chicago, Manitowoc shares its name with a river that divides the town into northern and southern parts. Manitowoc also has a Lincoln Park Zoo on its north side, a Division Street, a State Street, and a parkway along the lakefront. But the similarities end there. The Manitowoc River runs out of town in a hurry, and so do most thrill-seeking visitors. Indeed, as you come into town (take I-43 north from Milwaukee about 75 miles to exit 149), winding past the Penquin Drive-In and the Wal-Mart on Calumet Avenue (highway 151), you don’t realize you’re in a city until Calumet spills into Washington Street....

For the photographers who worked for the federal government’s Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and ’40s, life was never easy. Charged with traveling around the country and documenting poverty and the New Deal policies being implemented to ameliorate it, they spent months every year on the road, staying in cheap hotels, eating bad food, spending evenings writing captions for the photographs they’d taken. During the day, they had to contend with the suspicion many people harbored toward outsiders–especially those with cameras....

We live in America, where all sorts of miscreants and rapscallions run free. Religious mountebanks walk unchallenged on the streets of our major cities; newspaper editors are unlicensed and in some cases allowed to raise children; and it’s possible for publicists, many lawyers, and Paula Abdul to go through life and never be gifted with a pie in the face. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So cut Trip Shakespeare some slack....

ROSEBUD WAS THE SLED, OR SUNDAY IN THE INDUSTRIAL PARK WITH GEORGE So a safe, mildly entertaining show with quite good actors, like Second City Northwest’s Rosebud Was the Sled, or Sunday in the Industrial Park With George, is a disappointment. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rosebud Was the Sled follows the Second City formula, of course. There’s a nice blend of high comedy and touching, semiserious work....

“Do you support the arts, sir?” Michael Blackwell asked a businessman with hunched-up shoulders on Michigan Avenue. The day was sunny and crisp, and Blackwell and the man were a study in contrasts: Blackwell, wearing a green cap made of artificial turf, was loose-limbed and dressed in de rigueur artist black; the man, trying to resist the windy cold, was stiff in his blue business suit and yellow power tie....

Percentage of Bush and Clinton supporters who showed a “strong” level of commitment to their candidate in a June survey by the Chicago firm Market Facts: 25-30. Percentage of people who showed a “strong” level of commitment to their preferred brand of deodorant: 62 (Harper’s, September). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Who drops out of Chicago Public Schools? According to data published in the Chicago Reporter (July), between 40 and 45 percent of Latino, black, and white students drop out, compared to just 20 percent of Asian students....