We All Went Down to Amsterdam Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » All the characters meditate in some way on the issue of awareness without understanding its application to themselves–which is, of course, the point. In a hilarious soliloquy, Cox trashes It’s a Wonderful Life (“It’s about a white man who owns a bank, so right away I’m awash in sympathy”) and proposes a sequel where Jimmy Stewart sees all the bad things that wouldn’t have happened if he’d never been born–the citizens who wouldn’t have been deprived, the kids who wouldn’t have been traumatized....

Sundays are usually dark at Blackbird, but one recent humid evening saw the chic Randolph Street spot thronged with diners assembled on behalf of the Land Connection, a downstate-based nonprofit devoted to promoting the growth of organic farming. Benefit attendees feasted on a seven-course meal made chiefly from the products of farmers affiliated with the Land Connection and prepared by a team of Chicago chefs: Dean Zanella of 312 Chicago, Bruce Sherman of North Pond, Jason Hammel and Amalea Tshilds of the Logan Square cafe Lula, and Blackbird’s own Paul Kahan....

Goo! C’Est la Vie Drama Group, at WNEP Theater, and Behind the Mustach, Spoog Records and Oink Productions, at WNEP Theater. Billed as “a theatrical sitcom,” Goo! has a Three’s Company-esque premise: three recent college grads planning a kegger are caught in the midst of party prep by their landlord (Paul Jensen, whose awkward mannerisms recall Don Knotts). Trying to appease him, Lance and Joey (Dennis Schnell and Jeremy Harrison as hilarious couch potatoes) say that only Justin’s ex-girlfriends are coming....

Singer-guitarist Jo Jo Murray, a mainstay on the south-side circuit for the better part of 30 years, is known for delivering extended medleys of other people’s hits with uncanny mimicry. But he may finally be developing a voice of his own. On his most recent CD, Do You Remember, a self-produced project that has yet to attract a label or a distributor, he revives the venerable R & B tradition of the male singer who conveys passion and vulnerability by affecting a high-pitched, unabashedly feminine vocal softness....

Dr. Thomas Vescio was reading lab reports in his office at Evanston Hospital early on the morning of Thursday, August 2, when he received an urgent call from the intensive care unit. A woman who’d delivered her first baby by cesarean section two days earlier had developed a high fever Wednesday night, along with pain in her belly. She’d been prescribed a broad-spectrum antibiotic, one effective against a wide range of infections, but she showed no improvement....

Germany’s Marc Behrens creates music out of original field recordings: sometimes he collects ambient sounds from train stations or remote hillsides, and sometimes he makes the noises himself, banging on pipes, shaking trees, or rubbing wooden blocks together. But his electronic manipulation and processing render the sources irrelevant. Like that of an increasing number of European abstract electronic composers–including Bernhard Gunter, Francisco Lopez, and Goem’s Roel Meelkop–Behrens’s work is often extremely quiet....

Guitarists Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar have covered a variety of styles in their 15-year recording partnership: garage psychedelia in Crystalized Movements and Vermonster, instrumental space rock in B.O.R.B., and proggy raga rock in Magic Hour. For the guiding principle behind it all, though, one need only check the name of Magic Hour’s debut LP–No Excess Is Absurd (on the couple’s Twisted Village label). Regardless of what band they’re in, you can be sure that before the night’s out the music will have gone quite out of control....

The city held its official Veterans Day ceremony last Tuesday at the new Soldier Field. It was, city officials proclaimed, a twofer event–a chance to honor vets, and a chance to show off the war memorials that were part of the $680-million project. “Before, Soldier Field was just a name,” 11th Ward alderman James Balcer, a Vietnam vet, told reporters that day. “Now, it’s a memorial to the men and women who have served our nation....

The Encyclopedia of Chicago As coeditor James Grossman told the Sun-Times in September, most readers will start by looking themselves up in the book. I did, and the Reader wasn’t there–nor was any other alternative publication going back to and including the Chicago Seed. No biggie, the mainstream media ignore us all the time. But it did make me wonder what else might be missing. It may seem ill-mannered to crab about what Newberry Library president Charles Cullen has called “our gift to the city....

The 14th annual Polish Film Festival in America, produced by the Society for Arts, continues Saturday and Sunday, November 30 and December 1. Tickets are $9 for screenings at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence, and $7 for screenings at the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. For more information call 773-486-9612. Eden Three soccer documentaries: Tomasz Smokowski’s Korea 2002 in a Frame follows the Polish team to the World Cup in Korea and Japan....

VINCE NEIL 4/28, JOE’S Critics’ darlings may age more gracefully or burn out more heroically, but there’s something to be said for the audacity of endurance beyond decency–even when his own band didn’t want him anymore, Vince Neil kept going. This solo tour, which promises “all the hits,” is most likely an attempt to pump the new Motley Crue autobiography, The Dirt, due out next month from Regan Books. GARY NUMAN 4/28, HOUSE OF BLUES In some ways the story of Gary Numan’s comeback is a heartwarming one....

Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book The nerd in question is Jerry Siegel, the writing half of the teenage team that in the mid-1930s created Superman, the original comic book hero. The primary subject of Men of Tomorrow, Gerard Jones’s new history of the early comic book industry, Siegel is also, for Jones’s purposes, pop culture’s nerd zero. Siegel and Shuster drew up some sample strips and started submitting “The Superman” to the big-time Chicago syndicates, hoping their creation would someday run alongside Dick Tracy or The Phantom in newspapers....

By Susan DeGrane On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy on Hiroshima, killing 150,000. Fat Man, the plutonium bomb that hit Nagasaki, was a more powerful device than Little Boy. But due to weather conditions in Nagasaki and its mountainous terrain, which blocked the blast, Fat Man killed fewer people. The exact number of deaths is unknown; published estimates range from 28,000 to 80,000....

We use to watch the big cars roll west on 47th Street, Lord’s sun shinin off black paint jobs, brighter than it shined against skin. We’d follow um for blocks–Southpark down to where the strip met Indiana Avenue at least. But they didn’t never stop, not for us, not even for the red lights. Just rolled on through, afraid we’d jump on the fenders and take the joyride west, I suppose....

A Finished Book Is Just the Beginning “Not to take anything away from St. Martin’s,” says Harpaz, whom I called in her Brooklyn apartment, “but they have a lot of books to promote. I have one book to promote. I can do it full-time. They can’t. I pretty much spend the day on the Internet and sending out packets and fulfilling whatever commitments I’ve booked. Of course I’ve spent several thousand dollars in postcards and postage, etc....

Beth Bosworth came of age in Teaneck, New Jersey, as it became the first American school district with an all-white board to vote for bus-enforced integration; she had material and chops aplenty to write a memoir without breaking a sweat. But though the plot of her first novel, Tunneling, uses the headline-grabbing events of that time and place as a frame, the narrative revolves around the self-protective fantasy world of a brainy, humorless 12-year-old named Rachel Finch....

By John Conroy In Los Angeles, revelations that suspects were framed, punched, kicked, choked, and beaten by 70 policemen from the Rampart Division has resulted in a systematic reexamination of cases in which the accused cops took part. The review began after LAPD officer Rafael Perez was arrested for stealing cocaine from evidence lockers. Perez admitted committing perjury in hundreds of cases, indicating it was standard procedure in his unit. His confession launched an investigation of approximately 1,000 cases, and so far more than 100 convictions have been thrown out....

Reparations from the briny deep? Kevin Clarke writes in U.S. Catholic (February), “It is estimated that as many as 600 Spanish ships sank in the coastal waters of the Caribbean and America’s Southeast during Spain’s colonial era…. Last summer, a Virginia courthouse turned the world of offshore salvage upside down by declaring Spain the rightful owner of two wrecks that lie just off the U.S. coast near Virginia,” rather than the salvagers who found them....

Drew Heidgerken may be growing out of his punk phase, but the founder of the conservative-punk Web site GOPunk.com is still plenty conservative. His hair, once bright green, has reverted to its natural brown, and he’s traded his combat boots for sensible sneakers. His metal-spiked leather jacket–with “NRA-USA-GOP,” “NEOCON,” and an elephant painted on its sleeves and a big Uncle Sam above the words “I want YOU to vote Republican” on the back–comes out only in cold weather....

Until very recently you wouldn’t find film director Sachi Hamano in the reference books: Japan’s mainstream film industry has historically been more than a little reluctant to allow women behind the camera. The Directors Guild of Japan, for example, counts only 20 women among its 547 members. And in the expanded 1982 edition of their influential 1959 survey The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, writers Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie don’t list a single woman in their chapter on directors....