Since the early 80s, Arizona’s Sun City Girls have done darn near whatever they wanted, exploring whatever musical traditions have captured their interest. That they pull off so many disparate ideas is a credit to their collective technical skills, though the unpolished quality of their records can make it hard to discern just how deep that well of talent really goes. Richard Bishop’s solo guitar albums help clarify matters. On his solo debut, Salvador Kali (Revenant, 1998), he overdubbed guitars and piano to display a typically broad range of approaches, including makeshift Gypsy jazz, Indian ragas, and ragtime....

[snip] The real ownership society. “In 1993, 72 percent of all applications from black home buyers resulted in loans,” writes Kimbriell Kelly in the Chicago Reporter, after surveying federal records for Chicago. “In 2003, just 48 percent did.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » [snip] The price of integration. According to a study of more than 7,000 Arizona teens published in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, Hispanic teenagers for whom Spanish is the primary language are 65 percent less likely to have sex than Hispanic teens whose primary language is English....

The consensus among fans of Steve Wynn, founder of the Dream Syndicate and a central figure in LA’s 80s paisley underground scene, is that he’s been on a serious roll for the better part of a decade. With the new . . . Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick (released on his own Down There label), his creative upswing gets a hydrogen-rocket boost. Wynn and his band, the Miracle 3, have recorded three albums in a row at the same Arizona studio with the same coproducer, and they’ve made the most of that stability: the new disc is the strongest, most live-sounding, most vigorous recording he’s made in years, surpassing even 2003’s remarkable Static Transmission....

Veteran singer Super Percy is a hard-soul belter in the tradition of fellow locals Lee “Shot” Williams and Johnny Sayles: on up-tempo funk-R & B workouts like “Take Me Higher” and “Blues Man,” both from his self-released 2005 CD, Is It Real, his singing is so coarse and blunt it almost feels assaultive. But he tempers that aggression with embellishments like breathy gasps, choked glottal stops, and teary catches in his voice–a little hammy, sure, but somehow those fillips don’t get annoying no matter how often he uses them....

“Jackie is just speeding away / Thought she was James Dean for a day,” sang Lou Reed in “Walk on the Wild Side.” But writer-performer Jackie Curtis, who died of a drug overdose in 1985, was more than some androgynous speed freak; his satiric, sexually ambivalent take on popular culture influenced John Waters, David Bowie, Bette Midler, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This 2004 documentary features clips from Curtis’s movies, footage of his stage productions, and illuminating interviews with such colleagues as Lily Tomlin (who also narrates), Harvey Fierstein, Holly Woodlawn, Joe Dallesandro, Paul Morrissey, and off-off-Broadway producer Ellen Stewart....

Though their subjects are decidedly contemporary, all 47 prints in John Shimon and Julie Lindemann’s exhibit at Wendy Cooper were made using 19th-century processes. Eric (Lunde) With Sun in His Ear, Whitelaw, WI, 2004 is a platinum-palladium print with a gum bichromate emulsion applied to add even darker tones to platinum’s characteristic velvet. The rich textures give the image the gravitas of an old formal portrait or carefully composed landscape: Shimon and Lindemann are inspired by the Photo-Secessionists, turn-of-the-century photographers who aimed to make consciously aesthetic work....

Near the end of the Underground Adventure exhibit at the Field Museum is a small display case with a few Native American artifacts collected in New Mexico in 1950–corncobs, squash seeds, a turkey foot, a muskrat-skin bag, a piece of shell on a cord, a black corrugated pot, a miniature bow and two arrows, a child’s sandal. They’re unassuming things. Yet they’re more than 1,000 years old, part of a larger collection in the museum’s storage rooms that’s one of the best and longest records of a prehistoric culture in North America....

Quarrels make everybody look fallible, and newspaper columnists try to avoid them. There’s not a columnist alive who isn’t a sitting duck from time to time, but a mutual nonaggression pact among columnists protects the general illusion of omniscience. It’s good for the ego and good for business. So the rare moments when columnists have at it bear examining. The week after he was nominated for president at the Republican convention, Ronald Reagan spoke at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Blender magazine/Fark.com site–apparently someone decided that the best partner for a magazine that’s obsessed with Ashlee Simpson’s boobs would be a Web site that’s obsessed with a squirrel’s balls–isn’t where you go to discover whatever British/midwestern/teenage band is going to blow up the internets for the next three days. But it’s usually good for some gossip, or learning what insane thing Michael Jackson is talking about now....

Stephen Fedo and Joyce Piven have created story-theater adaptations of four tales by Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Loeb Peretz, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Simply and eloquently performed in a small space with a minimum of stage effects, they’re enchanting. Even the weakest of them, a cloying look at plucky street kids in a Jewish ghetto, entertains. And the best of the brood, Malamud’s seriocomic tale of a poor rabbinical student searching for a wife, is quite moving thanks to Michael Stock’s sensitive performance....

Technical skill and spontaneity are essential in a strong jazz soloist, but the ability to listen and process information on the fly is just as crucial. Amsterdam’s aptly named ALL EARS embodies this talent: led by pianist Michiel Braam and tenor saxophonist Frans Vermeerssen, the sextet plays from a repertoire of pithy, carefully arranged themes that reference nearly every era of jazz history. The rhythm section (bassist Wilbert de Joode and drummer Michael Vatcher) and the rest of the front line (reedist Frank Gratkowski and trumpeter Herb Robertson) deliver tart counterpoint with precision and snap, sometimes hurtling forward like a hypercharged big band and sometimes swinging with the soulful grace of a tight hard-bop outfit....

Company Colson Whitehead Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Company’s another story. It begins with a new employee, Stephen Jones, starting his first day at the Seattle-based Zephyr Holdings. A fresh-faced lad of above-average intellect and drive, Jones comes into the Training Sales department loaded for bear and looking to make a mark, only to be confronted by a brick wall of bureaucracy. In fact, he doesn’t get any further than the lobby before he’s confronted by the Zephyr mission statement, a nice-sounding paragraph of nonsense that’s fairly standard corporate gobbledygook except for one thing: nowhere does it say what it is that Zephyr makes, or sells, or trades, or traffics....

On a recent Saturday afternoon at the House of Glunz, Stefana Williams hosted a salt tasting. It was the first time the Old Town wine shop had accommodated such a thing in its 118-year history; Williams, the proprietor of a sea-salt company called Lot’s Wyfe and a self-described “salt evangelist,” was eager for an audience, and she’d successfully convinced the shop that its clientele and her salts would be a perfect match....

Bruce Sanford, one of the nation’s best-known First Amendment lawyers, has joined the legal team appealing the $7 million libel verdict for Robert Thomas, chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Sanford is a partner at Baker Hostetler in Washington, D.C., and the author of the 1999 book Don’t Shoot the Messenger: How Our Growing Hatred of the Media Threatens Free Speech for All of Us....

These retrofuturist electro-popsters were long the oddballs in Warp’s hyper-wired IDM lineup, but these days they rank alongside Prefuse 73 as one of the label’s flagship acts. Tender Buttons, the new album from singer Trish Keenan and programmer and multi-instrumentalist James Cargill, lacks the ambitious sweep of their previous disc, Haha Sound, sometimes recalling instead the spectral techno balladry of their first full-length, The Noise Made by People. It’s more cohesive than either, though: Cargill’s delicate, dusty contraption of buzzing, fluttering, tubular synth, flat mechanical drumbeats, and sometimes surprisingly naked electric guitar still sounds like it’s winding in and out of an empty, darkened ballroom, and despite the ever-present balloon of reverb it moves with more bite and swing than ever before, with pale streamers of blown-out, warbling high-end keyboard and twinkling flecks of processed noise trailing behind....

New York’s Claire Daly brings a woman’s touch to the baritone sax–and that statement’s not the sexist no-brainer it sounds like. Gerry Mulligan, the most famous player of the dark and blustery baritone, essentially feminized the instrument in the 50s by softening its attack, refining its timbre, and playing lines then considered more appropriate to lighter horns–but Daly’s style has little in common with his. And of course what counts as “feminine” has changed a lot since the 50s too....

“Framis,” a term coined in the early 20th century, is comedic double-talk that combines sense and nonsense. Mission ImPROVable’s wacky, sexually tinged sketch show does the same. A late-night visitor to a woman’s home turns out to be the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz asking Dorothy if she wants a “roll in the hay.” Snippets from American movies are performed in French; in the famous Risky Business underwear scene, the Tom Cruise character is wearing a beret and carrying a baguette....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Linebrink can pitch, no doubt about it. He came into his own with the San Diego Padres in 2004 with a 2.14 earned-run average, and he improved the following year to a sparkling 1.83. He went on in 2006 to lead the NL in holds — the stat created to reward middle relievers for holding a lead — but his ERA almost doubled to 3....

Writer and bon vivant George Plimpton served as editor of the Paris Review from its inception in 1953 till his death 50 years later, at which point his protege Brigid Hughes took over for a year before being dismissed by the literary journal’s board. This past March the board tapped longtime New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch, author of the award-winning We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda, to right the ship....

It turns out that ruthless tycoons who buy up independent newspapers and turn them into shills for the ruling class are bad. And seasoned journalists who champion truth over political spin are good. Who knew? Veteran British playwrights David Hare and Howard Brenton wrote this facile, seemingly endless semisatire in 1985 as an attack on Thatcherism–but the schematic plot and neat compartmentalization of right and wrong wouldn’t even have ruffled the Iron Lady’s hair....