Through a clear diffuser inside a glass teapot, a dozen jasmine “pearls”–tea leaves rolled tightly into bound balls–suddenly unfurl into long strips. “I did a lot of research on tea and discovered this process, called agonizing the leaves,” says Robert Davis, owner of the six-month-old Unique So Chique clothing store and tea shop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tea is new turf for Davis but retail isn’t....

Preschool teacher Diane Lena, 38, has a fair-size vintage collection–mostly mod–but she likes to mix it up with current pieces from new and independent designers. “I feel like I’m a patron,” she says. She breaks out the more radical stuff after hours, when she plays synth and sings with the electroacoustic rock act Istvan & His Imaginary Band. Here, while she admits the pairing of Undesigned’s black bamboo bubble skirt with a black top from Cyndi Chan’s ORi’EN may seem basic, “on a closer look you’ve got these interesting details,” like a keyhole neckline and gathered hem....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As he awaits sentencing following his guilty plea (and ominous judicial teaser), Michael Vick must wish he’d hooked up with R. Kelly’s publicist. Of course, even if you’ve got a bona fide cultural event ready for release in conjunction with your trial, some indictments better lend themselves to cross-marketing (and humanizing self-parody) than others. And though some of the obligatory high-horse hand-wringing has me wondering how many of the wringers are the good vegetarians you’d hope, the cases just aren’t comparable–statutory water sports kind of pale beside animal torture and execution....

Half Life House Theatre of Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Half Life has a patina of journalistic realism. Bev Spangler’s script is based on Catherine Crouch’s (unproduced) screenplay, which in turn is based on a novel by Tracy Baim, editor of Windy City Times. And as Baim tells us in three extensive program notes, her novel was based on her own reporting. (“I wrote the book as a news story, with lots of quotes,” she says....

The Complete Motown Singles, Volume 1: 1959-1961 (Hip-O Select) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of the 1959-’61 set belies Motown’s reputation for perfection; some of it is actively awful. The Six Sigma-esque fanaticism about quality control that Motown later became famous for evolved slowly–at first, the label was willing to throw anything out there. Berry Gordy Jr. was an experienced songwriter and producer when he launched the label he first called Tamla in 1959, but he was also under pressure to make it profitable quickly–it was funded by his family, reluctantly, with an $800 loan....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you think that way, you probably think you’re in the minority. Actually, the people are with you, but the foreign-policy decision makers often are not. So says The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get, by Northwestern University political scientist Benjamin I. Page and Chicago Council on Foreign Relations president Marshall M. Bouton....

On September 7 Ernesto Cruz was sitting on his parked motorcycle outside his girlfriend’s home in Albany Park when a car pulled up and two men got out. Cruz, a 21-year-old native of Mexico City who came to Chicago with his parents and brother six years ago, says the men were wearing jeans, bulletproof vests, holsters, and green-and-yellow baseball caps that said U.S. Border Patrol. One of them asked if his motorcycle had a license plate....

What can music videos still say about artists and their intent, now that the medium’s so thoroughly saturated with the sticky ooze of marketing? Most are little more than sales pitches for fucking or patriotism, the two hottest-selling commodities nationwide–take for instance the slow-motion grind of pert, oiled ass in hip-hop videos and the three-and-a-half-minute “God ‘n’ my sweet Kentucky home” minidramas that run nonstop on Country Music Television. But it’s a false purism to claim that the taint of commercialism means videos can’t also send a message....

Her first novel, Kamikaze Lust (2000), won Lauren Sanders praise and a Lambda Literary Award for breathing life into the cliche of the 30th-birthday identity crisis. The series of upheavals–sudden unemployment, crumbling family, a first homoerotic crush–that she dumped on her birthday girl could have easily added up to shlock, but her flair for characters carried the plot. In her new book, With or Without You (Akashic), Sanders charges straight into shock-tactic territory....

When this New Orleans lifer takes the stage, for the first few minutes you might think you’re in for a sort of ODB-meets-Lawrence Welk thing–some white dude in a fusty golfer getup saying crazy shit over cream-puff funk. But that’s just the bait in his bait-and-switch routine: Right when you start to get a little comfy, maybe even bored, he starts sounding like drugs. I’m not even sure which drugs. He constricts his vocal cords until he sounds like a cartoon anus, rapping about sucking on “boobie sacks,” and the music takes a sharp left turn–soon he’s growling nonsense over whacked bursts of Drum Buddy, downstairs-neighbor bass bumps, whooshing static, shattered-glass synth ramblings, and what sounds like a snake charmer playing a car horn, while incomprehensible vocals with a tone like some psychedelic brass instrument natter in the background....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The debate over whether Ron Santo belongs in baseball’s Hall of Fame goes on — mainly because the Veterans Committee of his supposed peers hasn’t deemed anyone worthy of joining them the last few times they’ve voted. Bill James long ago pronounced Santo the best player not enshrined at Cooperstown. Last week Santo got more statistical backing from Baseball Prospectus’s Nate Silver in his online column “Lies, Damned Lies....

Violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who catapulted to fame in 1981 after becoming the youngest violinist ever to win the Naumburg competition, is an intensely passionate and gutsy player. She can dig deep with her bow as well as play with a touchingly warm lyricism and delicacy–as she does on her 2000 crossover CD with Sergio and Odair Assad, the Brazilian-born guitar duo. Among the works the three will perform on this eclectic program is Bela Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, a collection of six short pieces based on fiddle tunes he gathered from the regions around Hungary–the hypnotic, scratchy playing of harmonics in the Yugoslavian “Stamping Dance” contrasts with the luscious melody of “Horn Dance....

Lead Story About two dozen committed Christians arrived at Cherokee Lodge, a nudist resort near Crossville, Tennessee, in June for a semiannual retreat called the Christian Nudist Convocation. According to an August story in the Nashville Scene, Christian nudists routinely encounter disapproval not only from other Christians, who see going naked as incompatible with their […] Lead Story In the Pacific archipelago nation of Vanuatu, the government’s drive to develop a Western-style financial system has created difficulties for citizens living in isolated villages, who typically use little or no cash and employ handmade or naturally occurring objects as currency....

James Barnett’s letter [June 2] regarding WBEZ’s abandonment of music is so typical of people who have been musically dumbed down by the record industry, an industry that tells you what’s hip to buy but never dares seek your opinion. He seems to take pride in himself as musically eclectic but won’t take the time to really listen and try to understand America’s only true native art form–jazz. Why, Mr. Barnett, do you think jazz is boring?...

Summing up a year’s worth of music with a short list of albums and singles is like trying to summarize foreign-policy white papers in haiku. A lot of the things that made 2006 worth getting through are hard to communicate in the usual “I like this record” format: hip-hop taking over the Internet, for instance, or music fandom and music making becoming massively parallel, mutually reinforcing phenomena. Here’s some of what I consider to be the best and coolest shit to have happened in the past 12 months....

Most rock bands lose their rawness as they become more accomplished as players, and sometimes that’s a good thing: Sleater-Kinney’s recent, more carefully crafted albums are better on the whole than their early ones. But on their latest, The Woods (Sub Pop), they’ve gotten skilled enough to loosen their grip on the reins, and they sound more ferocious and uncontained than ever. Producer Dave Fridmann has an annoying habit of pushing the sound into the red to simulate orchestral murk and intensity–the first time I heard “Modern Girl” I thought my speakers had blown–but the band doesn’t need his smoke and mirrors....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In February 2005 a grand jury indicted Sorich for devising a scheme to “provide financial benefits, in the form of city jobs and promotions, in exchange for campaign work.” As part of this scheme, it charged, Sorich and other officials “corrupted the city’s personnel process” by awarding “jobs and promotions” to preselected candidates “through sham and rigged interviews.”...

Lumpen and Public Media Institute produce this annual festival, now in its fifth year, focusing on radical art, media, technology, and politics, with an emphasis on work generated by underground and activist communities. This year’s festival runs from Friday, April 21, through Sunday, May 7, in Bridgeport and scattered other locations and includes neighborhood tours, workshops, numerous public art installations and interventions, barbecues, film/video screenings, music, and performances. The Free University series includes workshops, presentations, demos, and lectures....

Montreal’s AIDS Wolf are an immense onslaught of terrorizing chigger-itch guitar and smash-crash-bash drumming, fronted by a woman who screams and whines like she’s channeling all the PMS in the world. Judging from the handful of songs on their MySpace page–the only music they’ve got available so far–their brand of what’s now embarrassingly called “noise punk” is uncut foamy-mouthed straitjacket rock. Out of nowhere the steel-wool intensity of “Panty Mind” stops cold, and it’s like somebody’s tipping back your head and dabbing at your wounds with a psychedelic pastiche of cymbal gusts, keening vocals, and twiddle-and-heave guitars–and then kicking you back out into the wilderness, dizzy and alone, when the pounding and screaming start again....

It didn’t take long for Bob Nanna to spot a pattern. Touring with his group Hey Mercedes, the singer and guitarist has played to throngs of devoted young emo fans over the past few years, supporting scene favorites like Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional. Without fail, after each set some of the kids would want to talk to him–not about Hey Mercedes but about his previous band, Braid. They’d say that Braid had been their favorite group, or that records like The Age of Octeen and Frame & Canvas–released in 1996 and ’98, respectively–had changed their lives....