On a recent Wednesday night in the back room of a Lincoln Park bar, a guy standing near the front door with a mike said to the crowd, “And now, please welcome to the stage one of my very best friends–Cayne Collier!” He put down the mike, walked to the stage, sat down on the stool behind the mike stand, and said, “Hey, thanks for coming out!” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Cheryl Hudson-Jackson, Shir-lynn Brown, and Sherita Caesar have been friends for years. Hudson-Jackson and Caesar attended IIT together in the early 80s and met Brown later when she worked with Caesar at Motorola. About three years ago, Caesar, who was working in Atlanta at the time, was to receive a Woman of the Year award from the Technology Association of Georgia. Hudson-Jackson and Brown flew in for the ceremony. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Sooner or later all aspiring composers have to come to terms with J.S. Bach: with his formal rigor and his masterful use of theory to serve emotion, he casts a long shadow. The Art of Fugue, his exhaustive study of counterpoint, sometimes seems as much a hermetic meditation on self-imposed limits (the entire work consists of fugues and canons on a single theme) as a piece of art meant to engage a listener....

No stunt coordinator is credited in the playbill, and the Neo-Futurists are hardly polished gymnasts, so it’s not surprising that this show’s feats tend more toward the contemplative than the spectacular. For a little over an hour, five charming rowdies demonstrate risky ventures great and small–eating highly spiced curry, for example–accompanied by biographical sketches of Knievel wannabes and philosophical discourses on the nature of reckless behavior. Ryan Walters’s show needs some tightening; lengthy setups dilute the impact of genuinely difficult tricks like Dean Evans’s barrel roll and John Pierson’s underwater homage to the immortal Houdini....

The First Nations Film and Video Festival runs Monday, November 14, through Sunday, November 20. For more information call 773-275-5871; a full festival schedule appears at www.fnfvf.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Among this week’s featured documentaries is V. Blackhawk Aamodt’s The Ghost Riders, in which young Lakota Indians honor their ancestors with the Bigfoot Memorial Ride, a 300-mile journey across snow-covered South Dakota (Tue 11/15, 6:30 PM, Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, 2600 Central Park, Evanston)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’re just past the midpoint at this year’s CIFF, but already it’s hard to imagine anything topping Carlos Reygadas‘s Silent Light (Stellet Licht) for sheer ecstatic impact. Which almost seems paradoxical, since the movie’s default emotional setting never rises above stone-cold sober. A very solemn kind of ecstasy then—like Carl Th. Dreyer‘s, from whom Reygadas cops his story’s improbable resolution....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like most other serious Cub people I know, I find that these rare periods of playoff contention occur on an almost theological plane. Cub fandom is fundamentally about hoping for possibilities not seen, such as a glimpse of our team playing when the ivy on the walls at Wrigley has turned to the brown and gold of fall; or the thought that someone besides the Tribune Company really will own and run this operation soon; or the vision of a lineup that doesn’t get shut down in big games by karma, in the form of opposing pitchers who once were in the Cubs organization....

The sole European making rock en espanol who’s matched the success of his Latin American brethren in their own backyards, Manu Chao has done as much as anyone to fuel the growth of the genre. Born in Paris to Spanish parents, he fronted the rock band Mano Negra starting in the mid-80s; the group’s politics and reggae vibe came straight from the Clash, but it also made rap, flamenco, and rai music part of the mix....

I imagine being a Metallica fan at this point is like being a junkie looking for a baggie of heroin in a pile of shit: you know the process is dismal and the end product isn’t good for you, but you just want so badly to find the stuff that makes your existence worthwhile. But not caring much about Metallica gives a person a certain freedom–freedom to enjoy their story as mere folly and foible, a sidesplitter rich with irony, plus a killer sound track....

In Shawn Sheehy’s handcrafted Welcome to the Neighbor-wood: A Pop-Up Book of Animal Architecture, eight paper sculptures of critters that build their own homes come to life in three dimensions with the turn of a page. An artist’s proof of the book and nine white paper models–delicately engineered paper studies of, among others, a snail in its shell, a honeybee in its waxy comb, and a spider in its web–are currently on display at Vespine Gallery, the Pilsen space that Sheehy and three other artists started last year....

You rarely answer questions of etiquette in your column, unlike so many of your advice-giving peers. Here’s one for you: I’ve been in a casual sexual relationship with this girl for about four months. (Two months ago we talked about it, reaffirming that all either of us wanted was the casual sex.) I’ve grown weary of it, though, and am ready to move on. What’s the appropriate way to end this affair?...

Ron Gordon’s black-and-white photos of local cityscapes, endangered buildings, and demolition sites have their roots in a childhood spent playing in the street and building forts in vacant lots. Growing up on the far south side in the 1940s and ’50s, Gordon rarely traveled, even to the Loop. (“I thought of 91st and Commercial as downtown,” he says.) While he was still in high school, his brother began studying architecture at IIT–and for the first time Gordon heard someone talking passionately about his career rather than about cars, girls, or sports....

Sam Fuller’s first and greatest war film (1951), which launches a Fuller retrospective at Block Films, is even better in its terse and minimalist power than the restored version of The Big Red One released last year. The first Hollywood movie about the Korean war, this introduced Gene Evans, the gruff star Fuller was to use many more times, as a crude, bitter, savvy sergeant who, despite his obvious racism, bonds with a South Korean war orphan....

On New Year’s Day the restaurant delivery search engine GrubHub is offering an intriguing if troubling pizza delivery option. Beginning at midnight on January 1, the “New Year’s Eve Drunk Special and New Year’s Day Hangover Cure” will allow customers to plug an address, number of pizzas, and desired toppings into the GrubHub database and, in a HAL-like usurpation of human sovereignty, the service will automatically dispatch the order to the highest-rated and closest (therefore fastest, supposedly) pizzeria in the area....

I’ve learned a few things working with chemotherapy agents in research, such as the vast majority kill cancer cells by the same mechanisms that cause the cancer in the first place. In the lab we use very small amounts and are very careful about our waste disposal, but I was wondering: what happens when patients are on chemotherapy? Many drugs are excreted nonmetabolized, and with so many people taking drugs for all kinds of things these days, should we be worried about what’s going down the john?...

APRIL MAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » American urban photography is the subject of today’s Cities in Focus, a free symposium at Northwestern University. Five half-hour lectures on the history, sociology, technology, and practice of urban photography will be followed by open discussions. On the program are UIC professor Peter Bacon Hales; Northwestern lecturer Pamela Bannos; James Sanders, director of New York’s Center for Urban Experience; former Art Institute photography curator Colin Westerbeck; and Cooper Union professor Maren Stange, who’ll talk about photography and sociology on Chicago’s south side....

Mayor Daley’s so concerned about rogue cops that he got the City Council to put the police department’s Office of Professional Standards under his direct control, and he’s appointed a lawyer from California to run it. “I say we need to take this step and give it time to work,” said the mayor the other day. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The public has a significant interest in monitoring the conduct of its police officers and a right to know how allegations of misconduct are being investigated and handled,” Lefkow reasoned as she granted Kalven’s motion on July 2....

The temptation after the Bears’ playoff loss was to believe their surprising 11-5 season had been a mirage, a fantasy brought on by the NFL’s unbalanced scheduling and emphasis on parity. Their flop after the week off they’d earned as one of the top two teams in the NFC was a rerun of their last playoff appearance in 2001, when they were beaten after a 13-3 season earned them a first-round bye....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Are We Safe Yet? In March the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that 47 out of 58 times last year that people on FBI watch lists of known or suspected members of terrorist groups applied to buy or carry a gun, FBI or state officials approved the application. Though there are a number of automatic disqualifications for obtaining a gun license–being an illegal alien, being “mentally defective”–being a suspected terrorist isn’t one of them....

Batting practice at White Sox Park last Saturday took place under a high, bleached sky–until black clouds suddenly blew in on a wind that howled through the fencing at the back of the upper deck. As the rain came down in sheets–and Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle did belly slides on the tarp like an otter–I went through my notebook, hoping to fix the images there in my head before they washed away....