If the progressive rock of the 70s was a bloated red giant, then the Ruins are the compact, whirling pulsar left behind after the supernova. This bewildering Japanese duo uses only a drum kit and an electric bass to create a frantic, overstuffed conglomeration of dense hyperspeed prog, alien funk, blown-out metal, and batty histrionic art-rock, peppered with blurts of blistering thrash, labyrinthine meterless unison passages, and goofy, catchy melodies that sound like Gypsy music from the planet Kobaia....

Yasujiro Ozu Retrospective These labels don’t apply even remotely to another of his greatest films, the silent Tokyo Chorus (1931), also showing this week. Each of the 9 silent films in the retrospective is being screened only once, each of the 16 sound features twice. This is understandable given the bias against silent pictures and the cost of hiring a pianist (though the accompaniments of David Drazin alone are worth the price of admission)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tuite’s a prominent Chicago defense attorney. Double Deal was written by the late Michael Corbitt, a mobbed-up cop, and San Giancana, godson of the late Chicago don. According to the book, the 77-year-old mob boss Joe Aiuppa, sick and facing federal charges, sent Corbitt to Salt Lake City to pick up a couple duffel bags stuffed with a million dollars, and with that money Aiuppa hired Tuite to get him off....

Castro–just Castro–a 34-year-old clothing and jewelry designer, came to Chicago from Ohio in 2003. Though he prefers to take custom orders, you can find some of his designs at Robin Richman and Art Effect. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Castro: Originally I made the applique and put it on a shirt and I decided that was cool. Then I had an appointment with Barneys and they said they loved it but it was too literal and could I make it more abstract?...

Friday night I found myself in a dingy room with shredded drop-ceiling panels, glue tracks lining the floors, and a crusty gray carpet with piles of paint chips in the corners. I gazed at an ugly fluorescent light that looked like it had collapsed against a dirty wall, gasping for breath. It was missing its protective panel and middle bulb, and I wondered, Is that supposed to be art? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Their music has little in common with the rockabilly stylings of their British namesake band, or with any of its descendants, for that matter. Tuna (guitar), Waldo (drums), and Nachos (toy piano) of the local Rockcats are more closely aligned with the free-jazz tradition. Says conductor and trainer Samantha Martin of Amazing Animals by Samantha, “They play to the beat of their own drummer.” Tuna claws dissonant open chords and repeated low tones on her guitar, young Waldo rattles his double snare and hi-hat, and Nachos pounds paws-down on the piano like a pissed-off McCoy Tyner....

Friday 15 JOHN DOE, SARAH LEE GUTHRIE & JOHNNY IRION Keeping up with X and its assorted members has yielded diminishing returns ever since More Fun in the New World came out in 1983, so I was floored by John Doe’s new solo album, Forever Hasn’t Happened Yet (Yep Roc). He doesn’t sound as if he’s trying very hard, which may be why it’s so good: it’s raw and appealingly loose, and though it’s steeped in the same Americana flavors that have dominated Doe’s and Exene Cervenka’s work since Billy Zoom left X, the new songs aren’t so self-consciously cultivated....

On the third Saturday in July, devotees of unidentified flying objects will gather, as they do every year, to swap stories at Bill Benson’s Hide-A-Way in Dundee, Wisconsin, 50 miles northwest of Milwaukee. UFO Daze founder Bob Kuehn–who started the event in 1991 to give enthusiasts a chance to discuss unidentified phenomena without being ridiculed–will speak, but if you can’t make the party you can hear him give the UFO news in a 15-minute segment every Friday morning on Fond du Lac’s KFIZ....

Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream To research Nickel and Dimed Ehrenreich spent three months undercover in the service industry, with stints as a waitress, a cleaning person, and a Wal-Mart “associate.” Though her project was derided by some as a condescending stunt, I thought it achieved its goals admirably. While you could never quite forget that Ehrenreich was just playing at being poor, she married tales of her own frustrating experience with enough hard data to convey the day-to-day struggles of those who aren’t: the physical toll of manual labor, the petty humiliations of mandatory drug testing and servile rules of conduct....

The Vietnamization of New Jersey Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Christopher Durang’s dark farce The Vietnamization of New Jersey, written in 1976 on commission from Yale Repertory Theatre, was conceived as a satiric bicentennial response to late-60s angst. Alternately mocking and morbid, this portrait of an American family wrestling with the Vietnam war and its aftermath is packed with period references, from the Doublemint jingle to the Watergate scandal....

In the four months since the small San Francisco-based MacAdam/Cage published Audrey Niffenegger’s first novel, the Columbia College professor and visual artist has been on a carnival ride of publicity and acclaim. The Time Traveler’s Wife was selected by the Today show as its book club pick for September, hit number nine on the New York Times best-seller list, and is now under development by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s production company....

It was 9:45 last Saturday night inside a normally abandoned office building on the far west side. An older man in his mid-to-late 60s, dressed in a suit coat and striped shirt, was standing at the front of a rowdy mob gathered outside a room on the third floor. “You must let me in!” he pleaded in a thick eastern European accent. “I pay money! I demand! You let me in!...

Two 9/11 documentaries by Etienne Sauret go beyond the facts to create mournful monuments to the catastrophe. In Collateral Damages (2003, 57 min.) firefighters, their faces haunted, describe seeing rivers of molten steel and each floor of the Twin Towers collapsed into an eight-inch layer, while intercut images of damaged fire trucks being deposited in a landfill offer an appropriate metaphor for their trauma. But Sauret’s brief inclusion of the murderous retaliatory wishes of some of these lionized heroes is troublingly uncritical....

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Its predecessor, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was hyped as bleak and scary, but despite the murder of Harry’s beloved godfather, a little gruesome imagery, and a whole load of caps-locked, ellipses-laden teen angst that made this reader want to give our hero a well-deserved spanking, it really wasn’t all that terrifying: there was nothing in it as horrific as the graveyard scene at the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire....

Troubled Waters (Offshore/Single Cell), the recently released mix by New York’s DJ Clever (ne Brett Cleaver) is the most enjoyable drum ‘n’ bass album I’ve heard in the last five years. That surprises me as much as anyone, since the genre has been mostly barren since the grunting, surly, funkless techstep sound took it hostage in the late 90s. “I Get a Kickback,” a track by Clever’s coheadliner on Sunday, Paradox, has the kind of scowling menace associated with techstep, but the way the track stretches and tenses is as playful as it is hard, and Paradox’s beat programming, particularly with cymbals, is vivid and three-dimensional....

WU-TANG CLAN 8 DIAGRAMS (SRC/UNIVERSAL MOTOWN) GHOSTFACE KILLAH THE BIG DOE REHAB (DEF JAM) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that RZA has his creative juices flowing with all these different projects, it’s inevitable that some of them would leak into his production work on new Wu-Tang material. For 8 Diagrams, the clan’s fifth outing and the first since 1997’s Wu-Tang Forever that RZA has produced with little or no help, the other members have had to adapt to his evolved sensibility—which on too many songs includes not just the distracting extra instruments but nauseating R&B-style singing on the vocal hooks and refrains....

It’s Monday night at a Bucktown bar and the weekly ride of the Peddy Cash moped gang is starting out as always–late. “I have it in a text right here: 8 PM,” says Jackie Kilmer, holding up her phone as proof. It’s 8:27 and less than half the group is here: a handful lounging in the bar’s dark interior, the rest tinkering with their bikes outside. “Curt just texted and said, ‘Meet at 8:30, ride at 9,’” Lauren Walsh announces from her bar stool....

The Olympic Games, weighed down and distorted by corporate sponsorships and television rights fees, offer a cautionary tale for other sports. Yes, commercialism and professionalism have opened up the Olympics to athletes who never would have been able to compete back when Avery Brundage was using amateurism to exclude all but the elite from the Games. But what a cost. Nowadays skiers at the bottom of whatever hill they’ve just raced down can’t get their skis off quick enough to hold them up alongside their faces so their sponsor’s logo can be seen....

With the exception of the time he blew the surprise ending of Twitch of the Death Nerve, I enjoy J.R. Jones’s reviews almost as much as my own. That said, there is one element to his review of Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic [“So Funny You Could Cry,” November 11] that needs to be clarified. In the review he makes a reference that the Chicago Film Critics Association has asked its members to “stop snorting and laughing dismissively during press screenings....

When sculptor Carolyn Ottmers moved here from Austin, Texas, in 1986 to attend grad school at the School of the Art Institute, she was initially impressed by the lake, the architecture, and the industry–particularly the many light manufacturing businesses, a potential resource for sculptors. But by late autumn the skies were gray and her surroundings slushy. She began to miss the gardening and hiking she’d done back home and started looking for “signs of life” in Chicago....