Four years ago, in the spring of 1999, veteran arts patron Lewis Manilow announced that he and developer Allison Davis of the Davis Group had made the winning $5.85 million bid on adjacent city-owned properties in the South Loop. The Davis Group, the principal bidder, was to build a 39-story condominium tower where the razed Avenue Motel had stood, on the northwest corner of Roosevelt and Michigan. Manilow was to convert the long-shuttered Continental Trailways Bus Terminal, at Roosevelt and Wabash, into a contemporary visual arts center....

I know that this really isn’t the type of thing that is asked about frequently, but I gotta ask. When someone smokes marijuana, they get the much-fabled “munchies.” I know that this occurs, I am just at a loss as to why it does occur. What is the physiological reasons for this to occur? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last time the subject of the munchies came up, in 1977–I’ve been writing this column longer than a lot of you sumbitches have been alive–all I could tell you was that scientists had ruled out dope-induced fluctuations in blood sugar as a cause....

In an area filled with Vietnamese restaurants, the Mandarin SILVER SEAFOOD is something different. The focus here is on fresh seafood; they’ll steam a red snapper or sea bass (or whatever else is swimming in the tank) to order, then delicately top it with wonderfully aromatic herbs and a drizzle of soy sauce. Skip the pot stickers and egg rolls on the English-language menu and ask for the Chinese menu instead, which has English translations and offerings like fried crab claws, braised cuttlefish, and boneless duck web....

Hey editors! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe Jack Helbig, who wrote a story for the Reader several years ago on the disappearance of Chicago filmmaker Allen Ross, does deserve more than a cursory mention in the end credits of Christian Bauer’s new documentary on the same subject. But Deanna Isaacs’s column on the, er, controversy [Culture Club, December 14] seems to suggest that the film is little more than “the article illustrated,” and that Helbig deserves, I don’t know, some sort of screenwriter credit (or maybe a nice fat royalty check) because his story “introduced” “all the major characters” who appear in Bauer’s documentary....

Yasunao Tone is hardly the only guy out there making music out of the imperfections in digital music technology. But while musicians like Markus Popp (Oval), Frank Bretschneider, and Vladislav Delay arrange those errors into accessible patterns, Tone embraces their raw unpredictability. A key figure in Japan’s Fluxus movement in the early 60s, he began experimenting with this stuff in 1985. Most glitch musicians merely scratch the disc so it’s misread, but Tone found a way to disable a disc player’s error-correcting program–he placed a bit of Scotch tape punctured with pinholes on the playing surface of a CD of Debussy’s Preludes, radically altering the pitch and timbre of the playback....

As admirable as Rene Lozano is in his work as an animal control officer [May 9], Josh Schonwald missed an opportunity to educate your readers further, specifically in stating that dog packs are “more likely to threaten cats.” Many otherwise intelligent people believe cats must roam, but the truth is that neither cats nor dogs should be let out unattended. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The negative issues related to feral and supposedly tame cats being out surpass those of canines....

Beds are a recurring motif in Alec Soth’s current exhibit, “Sleeping by the Mississippi,” up through December 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Shot during a series of road trips up and down the storied waterway, the 25-odd images of life in river towns from Minnesota (the photographer’s current home) to Louisiana include lyrical depictions of an old woman sitting on the edge of her mattress, Charles Lindbergh’s boyhood bed, and an abandoned iron frame drowning in the lush foliage of the riverbank....

FEBRUARY 8 SATURDAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1946, Michael Reese Hospital hired its first African-American physician, gastroenterologist Leonidas Berry. One of the nation’s foremost experts on digestive disorders, he invented the Eder-Berry biopsy gastroscope, which was used to obtain tissue samples from the stomach (and is now on display at the Smithsonian), but wasn’t granted full attending physician status until 1964. Some of Berry’s papers can be seen in the exhibit “More Than a Century of Struggle: African-American Achievement in Chicago’s Medical History,” which runs through June 30 at the Carter G....

Even if Jamie Meline, aka rapper El-P, had stepped away from the microphone for good following the demise of his old group, Company Flow, his behind-the-scenes work in the years since would be enough to preserve his status as one of hip-hop’s most vital talents. His Definitive Jux label has released some of the best-received hip-hop albums of the past year–Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, Aesop Rock’s Daylight EP and Labor Days–and his production work on The Cold Vein has drawn nearly as many plaudits as Can Ox’s rhymes....

ERIC BIBB, JOSH WHITE JR. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarist and singer Eric Bibb is a leading light of the blues revivalist movement, largely because he’s not afraid to get his fingerprints all over the folk traditions that some of his peers treat as holy relics. For 1999’s Home to Me, rereleased last year by the EarthBeat! label, Bibb wrote or cowrote ten of the thirteen songs, and his lithe acoustic fingerpicking and honey-lemon vocals are backed by chunky percussion, burbling keyboards, and tubular-toned electric guitar leads....

For fans of vocal jazz–heck, for anyone merely intrigued by it–this one’s a no-brainer. Kurt Elling, who’s topped readers and critics polls in Jazz Times and Down Beat, has brought together his contemporary Kevin Mahogany and the two surviving vocal heroes of the hard-bop 60s, Jon Hendricks and Mark Murphy. The resulting quartet represents not just the alpha and omega of male jazz singing but also the most impressive all-star vocal gathering of any kind in 40 years, since Dave Brubeck played host to Louis Armstrong, Carmen McRae, and the very same Jon Hendricks for his 1961 album The Real Ambassadors....

Funkstorung–Italian Chris de Luca and German Michael Fakesch–haven’t changed much since they began releasing singles on their Musik aus Storm label in the late 90s. Inspired by hip-hop, they pile up herky-jerky electronic beats then sort out the mess with a magical sweep of the hand as ghostly synthesized melodies hang in the background. Over the years they’ve also remixed a wide range of artists. The superb Additional Productions collected rattling treatments of music by Bjork, the Wu-Tang Clan, and the East Flatbush Project, among others; de Luca and Fakesch carefully isolated vocal snippets then used a little melody or brief rhythm as a potent launchpad for stutter-step workouts....

A week before the Ravinia Festival premiere of Rachmaninoff’s opera Francesca da Rimini, director Michael Halberstam wasn’t exactly sure what he had. “We’ve only got two and a half hours of rehearsal time,” the moonlighting artistic director of Glencoe’s Writers’ Theatre said. “You’ve heard of meatball surgery? We won’t know until Friday afternoon when we see it all in place.” The opera will be sung in a concert setting by soprano Marina Mescheriakova, tenor Vinson Cole, and bass Sergei Leiferkus with other soloists and the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus, and played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Christoph Eschenbach....

I just know how this world works. –George W. Bush, first presidential debate Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some of the features portray aspects of more than one foreign culture. Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique, a beautiful, oddly serene reflection on war set and filmed in Sarajevo, counts among its characters the French-Swiss Godard himself, a French-Jewish journalist based in Israel, Algerians, Vietnamese, and even Native Americans....

By the time James Frey was 14, he was a drunk. By 23 he was a crackhead and an indiscriminate ingester of any other controlled substance he could get his hands on. Sheer force of will and dumb luck kept him alive: at the beginning of his new memoir, A Million Little Pieces (Doubleday), he wakes up on a plane covered in blood, piss, and barf, with several of his teeth missing and no idea where he’s headed....

In the latest proof of the city’s enlightened stewardship of the arts, the newly refurbished Loop Theater is hosting a revival of Louis Contey’s riveting Shattered Globe Theatre production. A drama of judges judging judges set in 1948, Abby Mann’s play gets more relevant with every headline: in Nazi Germany, civil rights were sacrificed for the supposed security of the state, national fears outweighed international respect, and secret tribunals dispensed politically motivated punishment....

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, Chicago Theatre Company. Lanie Robertson’s drama with music is a tour de force for the actress capable of meeting its demands–and happily Joyce Faison is up to the challenge. Set in a seedy Philly nightclub in 1959, the show takes the form of a concert performed by jazz great Billie Holiday a few months before her death at age 44. Her career and talent in decline, Holiday’s been hired to sing but would rather talk; resisting her accompanist’s efforts to coax her into another tune, she rambles on about her impoverished childhood, the influence of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith (whose records she heard in the whorehouse where her mother worked), her joy at discovering she could win acceptance by singing, her encounters with racism (including a hilarious anecdote about how she took revenge on a restaurant hostess who refused her use of the ladies’ room), and her passionate but ill-fated romance with the drug addict who got her hooked on heroin....

RM Johnson wanted to be a filmmaker–until he actually tried it at Columbia College a dozen years ago. “It was much more of a collaborative effort than I expected,” says the 35-year-old Beverly native and self-described loner. What Johnson did enjoy was writing a short coming-of-age story for an anthropology assignment. “My professor was the first person who said ‘You’re going to be a successful writer one day.’ That made all the difference in the world....

Lead Stories Susan Smith, a professor of health and safety sciences at the University of Tennessee, found in July that people who use sign language have a risk of hand and wrist injuries up to five times greater than people who don’t. Zoologists at the University of Kerala in India noted in the July Current Science that after eight impotent gerbils had alcohol injected into their eyes to blind them, five of them began to copulate, possibly due to the release of melatonin....

This Happy Breed The family consists of Frank, a World War I vet; his wife, Ethel; son Reg; dutiful daughter Vi; and wild daughter Queenie. Bob Mitchell is a buddy of Frank’s from the trenches; his son, who’s in love with Queenie, joins the navy because there’s so little work. Aunt Sylvia lives with the family because her fiance was killed in the war, and Reg expresses his adolescent rebellion by threatening to join the Communist Party and participating in the 1926 general strike that shut down English industry for nine days....