The Brunettes quite accurately describe themselves as “boy/girl melodrama pop inspired by 70s New York punk and 60s girl groups but created in an Auckland scene of opiate-infused garage rock ‘n’ roll.” That makes my job a little easier, but it still doesn’t capture the magnetic charm of 2004’s Mars Loves Venus (Lil’ Chief). The second full-length from the Kiwi couple–Heather Mansfield and Jonathan Bree–had me at the end of the first track, with its fuck-all two-chord garage riff, gleeful hand claps, twinkling toy sounds, and inspired call-and-response vocals....

Friday 2/6 – Thursday 2/12 “Your average country fan will hate this stuff,” Bloodshot Records cofounder Rob Miller told the Reader in 1995, a year after he, Nan Warshaw, and Eric Babcock joined forces to release what they thought was a one-off: For a Life of Sin, a compilation of tracks by local “insurgent country” bands. Ten years and more than 100 releases later, Bloodshot brings together label stalwarts the Waco Brothers, Rico Bell, Trailer Bride, the Legendary Shack Shakers, and Jon Rauhouse’s Steel Guitar Rodeo (featuring Kelly Hogan and Sally Timms) for Insurgent Visions: Bloodshot Records’ 10th Anniversary Art & Music Show....

Carl Johns can claim any number of titles: leader of Madison’s off-kilter Americana collective Noahjohn; head of the Killdeer label; editor of the late zine Wild Chirp; bearer of the finest handlebar mustache seen in Wisconsin since Rollie Fingers pitched for the Brewers. But it’s as his country-pop avatar, Charlemagne, that he seems poised for his greatest success. Already lavishly praised in the UK, Charlemagne’s eponymously titled LP (on Winterlander) is not just 2004’s most auspicious debut but a strong contender for album of the year, a tremblingly beautiful set that mates midwestern earnestness with sunny California canyon cool....

Julie York Info 800-563-7632 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Julie York’s eight small ceramic works at SOFA (at the Perimeter Gallery booth) have a conceptual edge, playing with perception and juxtaposing the recognizable with the mysterious. Though her pieces look mass-produced–most elements are cast from manufactured objects or fragments of them, then sanded for hours–they’re obviously not functional. One untitled work looks something like a doorknob, fusing a conical shape with a globular one....

As a former editor of Conscious Choice, Chicago, I felt as if I had dodged a career bullet when I saw the October 20 front page Reader headline that read: “Conscious Choice gets a little wacky.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Inside, Michael Miner’s Hot Type column blasted a 9/11 conspiracy story that ran in the September issue. Miner called the article “weird” and quoted the magazine’s new editor, Charles Shaw, as saying: “They booked that article before I came on....

When I saw this Boston metalcore band play at the Fireside a few years back, during a tour in support of their breakthrough album, Jane Doe (Equal Vision), front man Jacob Bannon seemed to be at war with himself–his screams came on like an avalanche, straining against the physical limits of his vocal cords, and he threw his body around like he was trying to tear himself out of it. On Converge’s latest, You Fail Me (their debut for Epitaph, with the vinyl released on Bannon’s Deathwish label), that war seems to be over....

MI & L’AU’s beatific backstory tends to precede them. Mira Romantschuk (aka Mi), a gorgeous waif from Finland conversant in six languages, was working as a model in Paris when she met Laurent Leclere (aka L’au), a sound-track musician. They fell in love, Mi picked up French, and together they moved to a remote cabin outside Helsinki, where they spent four years living simply. They also wrote and recorded songs, 14 of which ended up on their lovely eponymous debut, released last fall on Michael Gira’s Young God label....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In December the Chicago Tribune reported on the sloppy work done by the CIA operatives who allegedly kidnapped an Egyptian-born cleric in Milan in 2003, which helped expose the U.S. program of extraordinary rendition. Among the cited examples of the agents’ insufficiently clandestine activities: they failed to remove the batteries from their cell phones before the abduction, allowing Italian authorities to track their movement along the route from the spot where the cleric was seized to an American air base several hours away; while in Italy during the weeks before the kidnapping they used their phones indiscriminately, apparently making personal calls to friends and family in the U....

I’m a 20-year-old straight girl. For six months I was dating a guy I thought was nice and normal. One way my boyfriend showed he cared (or so I thought) was by massaging my feet after work (I wait tables to pay my tuition). Then he confessed that he has a foot fetish. He wasn’t rubbing my feet to be sweet or tender or considerate, but for his own selfish reasons....

Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture Annalee Newitz (Duke University Press) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, is the culmination of a project that started as her Berkeley dissertation in the 90s. A slim survey of horror in American film and literature, it’s the sort of book that makes you want to both storm the nearest video store in search of Demon Seed and dig out that copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment you never quite made it through....

Last June thousands of Chicagoans descended on Navy Pier for NextFest, Wired magazine’s second annual showcase of cutting-edge technology. Exhibits of hydrogen fuel-cell engines, desalinization processes, and cloned kittens claimed the glamour spots in the pavilion. But to a handful of attendees, the neatest thing wasn’t the robot lobster or the flying car. It was a squat plastic box wearing a shower cap, the EarthBox. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

The performance duo Cupola Bobber, aka Stephen Fiehn and Tyler Myers, began work on their third evening-length piece by asking a simple question: what comes to mind while gazing at the stars? The answers range from the Voyager spacecraft to the transcontinental railroad to the secret recesses of a strange bedroom late at night. The duo’s streamlined texts and lumbering gestures evolve into a poker-faced meditation on the meaning of distance–which can both confer an all-seeing perspective and place people at a chilly, impersonal remove....

A recent article in the New York Times mentioned a bit of civil disobedience that caught my attention: “. . . in the 1670’s . . . the prime minister was killed, and partially eaten, by a mob of angry Dutch. . . .” Would you mind giving out the background behind this incident? And perhaps the contact information for any of the mob’s descendants who might consider consuming a few unruly U....

The title of Roddy Doyle’s play notwithstanding, the pub quiz–a very Irish version of Trivial Pursuit–that’s played in a raucous north Dublin dive is no metaphor for combat. It doesn’t even offer a microcosm of Ireland. It’s just a slice of very loud life, and somehow all the hyperrealism becomes its own reward. It’s also the perfect ensemble opportunity for Karen Kessler’s intricately exuberant 16-member Seanachai Theatre Company cast. The bar scenes are powerfully contrasted with domestic scenes that expose the most ferocious quiz player (a desperately driven Michael Grant) and his long-suffering wife (Sarah Wellington, whose silences speak volumes)....

We were living on Monroe Street with four children and with a landlady downstairs who didn’t like us very much. So we were always looking for a house to buy, but we never had enough for the down payment. And nobody’d rent to us. We’d find places for rent, but nobody’d rent to you with four kids. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Another time we went out to Hinsdale to see a place for $1,500 down....

Breathing is one of those things you probably think you have down cold, but Helena Gudzowski disagrees. “People don’t know how to breathe,” she says. Originally from Poland, Gudzowski passes on the teachings of a New Zealand self-improvement guru named Colin P. Sisson and practices Polynesian massage therapy (in which she uses her forearms almost as much as her hands). She and her husband, Marek, run a storefront business on the northwest side, the Holistic Academy/Aloha–Self Mastery....

Andrew Marin [“His God Doesn’t Hate Fags,” August 18] claims that it would be “theologically sloppy” to hold that homosexuality is not sinful. I suggest the theological sloppiness centers in defending biblical literalism itself. Because the Bible says so little about homosexuality in only a few short, scattered references, perhaps masturbation is a better test case of the sloppiness of biblical literalism. In Genesis 38:9-10, God slays Onan for “spilling his seed upon the ground....

The haters–after all the hype about the singles, they were bound to come out of the woodwork for the first album–say Bonde do Role are irresponsible assholes who happen to be Brazilian, yelling dumb stuff over ripped-off party beats and disrespecting their own musical culture. But the band’s tossed-off hybrid of ghoulish swamp punk, dirty-butt metal, lite baile funk, wacky-pants electro, and foulmouthed favela rap is so buoyant and flip it makes any naysayer sound like a pedant who’s missing the point....

Through the years singers Cathy Irwin and Janet Bean, along with longtime bassist Dave Gay, have added some instrumental variety to their records by bringing in a single player like Jon Spiegel, Brian Dunn, Bob Egan, or Max Johnston. But on their last album, End Time (1999), they brought in a string section and full band, and for their first record in six years, the new Thinking of You (Thrill Jockey), they got some wide-ranging help from key members of Califone....

“This hurricane is long,” says second grader Cecilia to her father, Michael Tisserand, as they survey their devastated New Orleans neighborhood six weeks after Katrina. Tisserand and his family evacuated before the storm hit and now live in Evanston; his new book, Sugarcane Academy, is a thoughtful look at just how long the hurricane continues to last. The title refers to the one-room school started 135 miles from home by Tisserand and a handful of evacuee families....