John Zils watched the World Trade Center burn on a television on the ninth floor of the Santa Fe Building, where the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is headquartered. “I would have never ever dreamed those buildings would have collapsed in their entirety,” says Zils, a structural engineer who, in his 33 years at the firm, has worked on the John Hancock Center, the Sears Tower, the Haj Terminal at King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Saudi Arabia, and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For starters, Armstrong’s review of Gil Mantera’s Party Dream [Section 3, November 19] was spot-on. Hadn’t seen them before, hit that Logan Square show, and, uh, honestly that’s possibly the single best description of the Ohio outfit one could imagine. (Side note to L.S. Auditorium–your drink prices are bullshit.) So if anything, the Reader best consider Liz Armstrong an asset....

Postmodern art may have abandoned the pursuit of the sublime, but its quest for humor can be fun–and even have a point. Since 1993 Micki Tschur has been taking the skin off her Thanksgiving turkeys and using it to create turkey sculptures, all ten of which–she skipped 2002–are on view with photos, drawings, and recipes at Seven Three Split. In part her project is intended to remind us that meat comes from living beings; Tschur, no vegetarian, killed three of the turkeys herself, but the way she’s mounted some of them indicates a desire to resurrect them....

NEW MUSIC MARATHON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A usually misquoted and almost always misattributed line from Friedrich Schelling’s The Philosophy of Art–the one comparing architecture to “frozen music”–will receive an unusually literal interpretation in this six-hour event at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Designed to complement the MCA’s current retrospective of 20th-century architecture, the program features many of the city’s leading new-music lights and several innovative compositions, most of them presented by composer and bass clarinetist Gene Coleman and members of his Ensemble Noamnesia....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a December New York Times dispatch from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, the female marketing director of the Perdu lingerie shop (which is tightly regulated by religious law) estimated that 85 percent of Saudi women wear ill-fitting bras–perhaps because only men are permitted to work as salesmen in shops open to the public. According to the Times, “[W]hile women may be berated for showing a…leg or an arm [on the street], they must ask strange men for help in assessing their bra size....

This neglected Samuel Fuller feature from 1952, a giddy look at New York journalism in the 1880s, was his personal favorite–he financed it himself and lost every penny. A principled cigar smoker (Gene Evans) becomes the hard-hitting editor of a new Manhattan daily, where he competes with his former employer (Mary Welch) in a grudge match loaded with sexual undertones; meanwhile a man jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge trying to become famous, the Statue of Liberty is given to the U....

A photo of Jackie Gleason in The Hustler presides over the billiard parlor where much of this gritty drama transpires. The movie can’t live up to Robert Rossen’s 1961 classic, but with its strong performances, neatly crafted script, and low-budget feel, it comes a lot closer than The Color of Money. Mars Callahan wrote, directed, and stars as a talented young player trying to break away from the coolly manipulative thug (Chazz Palminteri) who’s been backing him since he was a teenager....

Like Yasujiro Ozu’s features with seasonal titles, Alexander Sokurov’s hallucinatory video elegies tend to be so similar, even in their running times, that they blur together in memory. Elegy of a Voyage (2001, 47 min.)–which might be more idiomatically titled Elegy for a Voyage–is a journey, a dream, a first-person narrative (visibly as well as audibly) that evokes the 19th century, and a hypnotic study in textures relating to fog, snow, and water that often entails a breakdown in the usual divisions between color and black and white (as well as fiction and documentary)....

I am a 15-year-old kid who lacks self-esteem, self-confidence, and just plain good looks. I’ve spent my entire life without a kiss from a girl, and even spent a year thinking I was in love with my sister. My right hand is in extreme pain from the amount of whacking I do, and I’m looking for some advice on how to get off my ass and go get that girl. The thing is, girls just don’t seem to want me....

Myron Fox thought he knew his father’s story inside out. He knew, for instance, that Philip Fox had come to America in April 1912, when he was 11, and that he’d sailed from Europe exactly seven days after the sinking of the Titanic. Myron remembers riding around as a kid in his father’s superintendent’s car at Christmastime, delivering chocolates to switchboard operators and hotel receptionists. He remembers his father’s religious devotion, his participation in political debates at Bughouse Square, and the pride he took in his adopted country....

Stuck on You With Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Eva Mendes, Wen Yann Shih, Cher, Seymour Cassel, Griffin Dunne, and Meryl Streep. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The reason isn’t the bad taste or the lowbrow high jinks, both of which are found in abundance in other cultures. It’s the sleight of hand–or sleight of mind–that simultaneously ignores and embraces, denies and seizes upon the condition of being Siamese twins....

Welcome to Heaven,” says the young man at the front desk. It’s Friday night, and Heaven on Seven on Clark is pleasantly full. But just pleasantly full: people waiting for tables aren’t spilling out the door. It isn’t attracting the kind of business its owners are accustomed to. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Set back off a busy stretch of Clark at Cornelia, the restaurant is easy to miss, and cabbies and customers sometimes do....

A bunch of Topless Humans Organized for Natural Genetics crashed a reception for the NanoCommerce 2004 conference at McCormick Place last week. The five guys and four gals from THONG lined up in front of the podium facing the assembled scientists and businesspeople, stripped down to their thongs, and turned around to reveal the slogan painted on each of their backs above a downward pointing arrow: Plenty of Room at This Bottom....

Czech director Vaclav Vorlicek’s black-and-white slapstick fantasy is from 1966, the same year as Vera Chytilova’s Daisies, and it’s hard to think of two more gleefully anarchic comedies made under a communist regime. This one is slighter and more conventional, but its premise is still pretty outrageous. A scientist develops a formula that transforms bad dreams into good. She tests it on a sleeping cow, whose nightmare of being attacked by flies (viewed on a TV monitor) gives way to an idyll of lounging in a hammock....

While indie types like Will Oldham and the Handsome Family self-consciously tap into the raw beauty of American mountain music, the hillbilly sounds on the superb eponymous debut album by the LA trio Young People (released last year on 5 Rue Christine) seem genuinely unstudied, if not totally accidental. Though the catch in her throat may sound like it was cultivated in the Appalachians, Katie Eastburn’s a city girl–she grew up in Nashville and now works with theater and dance companies in LA–and the sweet amateurishness that occasionally marks her singing is all indie rock....

The children of Star Wars don’t all believe in better living through technology, judging by the 51 works by 34 artists, mostly students and recent graduates of the School of the Art Institute, in this provocative and admirably coherent show. Some of the works parody sci-fi imagery: Chris Reilly’s Mega Bot 85,000!! is a wonderfully goofy robot with yellow reflectors for eyes; Taylor Hokanson’s clever Palimpsest, constructed from found machine parts, resembles an antique printer, but it moves slowly and produces absolutely nothing....

The sixth edition of this annual orgy of improvisational comedy brings together performers from around the U.S. and from our allies abroad–think of it as a coalition of the comically willing. (Chicago, of course, is heavily represented.) This year’s festival, the largest yet, is divided into several series–Mainstage, Showcase, Sketch, Solo, Duo, and Fringe–as well as an all-night improv session, an adult-oriented “Blue” show, a series of daytime “Lunchbreak” performances (presented in conjunction with the city’s cultural affairs department), and numerous special events, including forums and workshops....

The last thing this world needed was another cover band, especially one as ugly as the Chicago Sound. But these guys elevate their run-of-the-mill bar-band shittiness with their unabashed high-concept buffoonery. A predetermined set of about eight classic-rock songs that might include anything from Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” to the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold” plays through the monitors so that only the band can hear it. What the audience hears is ten drunk idiots (dressed in spandex pants, pit-stained Journey T-shirts, bandannas, and rocker wigs) jamming along on untuned instruments (mostly guitars) like it’s the good ol’ days, before you could fit a computer in your house....

Psychedelic drugs in Naperville? It’s academic. Educational psychologist Tom Roberts of Northern Illinois University will teach a three-credit class at NIU’s Naperville campus dealing with “entheogens”–mind-altering substances said to enhance or create mystical experiences. According to “Northern Today” (December 3), the course will, among other things, “delve into the Good Friday Experiment of 1962, when 10 theological students took psilocybin in the basement of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel while 10 others took placeboes....

Friday 6/15 – Thursday 6/21 16 SATURDAY Men who worked as Pullman porters were considered “aristocrats” in the African-American community; Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, and Roy Wilkins all held that job at some point. At the same time, however, African-Americans who worked for the railroads–which used slave labor during the expansion era–had to fight racism coming from their customers, their employers, and labor unions. UIC history professor Eric Arnesen examines the relationships among unions, African-American railroad workers, and the civil rights movement in his new book, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality....