Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Donovan Brown, a 26-year-old Democratic nominee for a state legislative seat in central Florida, was forced to take some time off the campaign trail earlier this month when he was confined to a mental health facility in New Port Richey. In a phone interview from the facility, Brown explained to the St. Petersburg Times that the run for office had worsened some existing psychological issues–Republicans had deliberately chosen a candidate who would “unnerve” him, he said–and his mother convinced him to go with her to the hospital....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. . . . Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality.” “This sort of translation, however, is no easy feat. If one maintains that his religion is universal, he may not see how his values are to be regarded as merely ‘religion-specific....

Dear readers: Just in time for Gay Pride Day, advice for 15-year-old fags and dykes from grown-up gays and lesbians. Don’t be ashamed of being sexually inexperienced. It’s way hotter than being prematurely slutty. –K. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wish someone had told me at 15 that I could go for anything in life. In my loneliness I assumed that all kinds of things were off-limits to me: sports, fraternities, genuine friendships, the possibility of raising kids....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Because we do watch,” wrote Klinkenborg. “That’s part of the job. It’s how we come to understand what the meat itself means. And to me, the word ‘meat’ is at the root of the contradictory feelings the pig-killing raises. You can add all the extra value you want—raising heritage breed pigs on pasture with organic grain, all of which we do—and yet somehow the fact that we are doing this for meat, some of which we keep, most of which we trade or sell, makes the whole thing sound like a bad bargain....

Founded in 1975 when its members were students in Budapest, the Takacs remains one of the world’s best string quartets. Their 1998 recording of Bartok’s six quartets received a Gramophone Award and is still the gold standard for these works, and their 2005 set of Beethoven’s late quartets just won a Grammy, as did their 2002 set of his middle quartets. Their last Chicago appearance, at Orchestra Hall in March 2004, was an all-Beethoven concert, and their performance of the op....

Boots Riley is one of those guys who can ferret out the political subtext of just about anything. On the Coup’s Pick a Bigger Weapon (Epitaph), the ostentatiously Afro’d producer and MC returns repeatedly to the notion of sex as an act of protest–a perfectly natural choice given the retooled P-Funk bump he favors, which is crafted by a flesh-and-blood crew of 70s and 80s R & B hands and augmented by the well-placed scratches of his partner, DJ Pam the Funkstress....

No one’s lying down in front of a bulldozer yet, but Friends of the Three Arts Club, an informal group of neighbors, former residents, and supporters of the 94-year-old institution at Dearborn and Goethe, are making a last-ditch effort to halt what they see as an imminent disaster. They say plans the city has approved to “restore” the club by converting its upper floors to apartments and installing a public arts center on the lower levels will destroy both its architectural integrity and its unique mission as a communal residence for women in the arts....

“This is magic,” Larry Kolton says as he lifts a tiny wood sculpture from a display case in his kitchen and holds it gingerly in his palm. “This is a Dayak tun-tun from New Guinea, just a wooden stake to warn passersby that a boar trap lay hidden below ground.” Its finial features an exquisite carving of a human face, complete with eyelashes, brows, lips, teeth, and an intricate necklace. “The Dayak tribe didn’t have TV; their most utilitarian possessions became art,” Kolton says....

This double bill from Theater o’ th’ Absurd and II Roman Senators Productions wouldn’t be so bad if two-thirds of it weren’t eaten up by Pepper Giese’s aimless, self-indulgent, rhapsodically overwritten Tricks of the Labyrinth. No staging could give urgency to this mess of unfocused speechifying as a woman struggles to preserve her independence through her imagination. J.M. Demetrius’s Last of the Dresden Quartet fares better: it has a clumsy charm in Django R....

Midnight Circus founders Jeff Jenkins and Julie Greenberg are up to their old tricks, bursting the bubble of stuffy intellectual theater as they did in the late 90s. Here the targets are B.J. Jones, artistic director of Northlight (who never appears onstage), and actress-singer Alexandra Billings (who does, playing the diva to the hilt). Expert clowns, Jenkins and Greenberg pretty much steal the show, though not because they hog the spotlight: everyone gets time, including the troupe’s aerialists, contortionists, jugglers, and “karate guy....

The Ponys have signed with Matador Records. A new release is due next year. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have no intention of turning this blog into the Reader’s obituary section, but another important musician has passed away. Cuban conguero Miguel “Anga” Diaz died on Wednesday, August 9, at his home in Barcelona. He was only 45. (I have no details on the cause of his death....

The original members of X–Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Billy Zoom, and D.J. Bonebrake–reunited eight years ago, but they’ve toured so sporadically that any appearance is momentous. And why shouldn’t it be? X was perhaps the finest band the California punk scene ever spit out, a live act so phenomenal they could actually get away with releasing multiple live albums. All you could ever want from sung romance is there in Exene and Doe’s duet on “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline,” his quivering, baritone croon bending and half-stepping with her feral yelping....

It goes against my better judgment to recommend any group that performs in tuxedos, as this big band helmed by trombonist and arranger Angel Melendez frequently does, but there’s nothing stiff and formal about the superb debut album Melendez and company released on Latin Street Music last year. Chicago has produced surprisingly few credible Afro-Cuban dance orchestras over the years, but the dynamic 911 Mambo Orchestra is one of the finest I’ve heard this side of New York City; stocked with some of the best musicians in town, including jazzers like trumpeter Tito Carrillo and alto saxophonist Pat Mallinger, it delivers punchy, vibrant readings of old favorites, some convincing originals composed in the classic mode ....

For all the talk about the international reach of hip-hop, Americans rarely get to hear examples of it from different countries; the Senegalese trio Daara J is the first overseas hip-hop act not from England or France that’s made much of a splash here. That makes sense: though their multilingual rhymes are only sprinkled with English, their panache and grace render the music immediately accessible. The best material on Daara J’s debut album, Boomerang (Wrasse), draws from the circular grooves of traditional West African music; Malian singer Rokia Traore wails in the background of “Le cycle,” while the propulsive, stuttering title track glides on a dry, bluesy acoustic guitar loop....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not that I don’t share Mike Miner’s cynical regard for army specialist Patrick Daley’s career move to Iraq (Hot Type, January 14), but there’s an element not considered that can only unsettle those who do actually recall it: about 40 years ago we had another shining political youth, perhaps more shiningly political than even the present Daley scion–Obama-like, in fact, if you can apply that weird notion to the old-line, Daley-run Democratic machine–whose career arc presages eerily what we’re witnessing today....

Measurably more relaxed than their debut, FRANZ FERDINAND’s You Could Have It So Much Better (Domino) is also bigger, beefier, and more authoritative. “Do You Want To” and “Walk Away” flit past the kind of gargantuan hooks that a lesser power-pop band could build a whole career on and head straight for even catchier bits; their dance funk, once charming in its well-intentioned klutziness, no longer feels mechanical. There’s no blast of bi curiosity on the new disc as lip smacking as the debut’s “Michael,” but they’ve integrated their swishy affinities more fully into their overall sensibility now....

This six-piece immigrant whirlwind, based in New York with members from as far away as Israel and Ukraine, plays rock ‘n’ roll that’s been kidnapped by Gypsies. Listening to this stuff I see Tartars swinging swords, Romanian crones hurling curses, Russian mobsters making thinly veiled threats, Soviet machinists belting out Bolshevik work songs, shtetl Jews peeling off some Xtreme Klezmer–it even sounds like there’s a little Jacques Brel and early Clash in there too....

The tone of this whimsical Polish show is about as far from its gruesomely clinical title as it can get. Kuba Pierzchalski and Rachel Karafistan of Cosmino Teatr enact the dynamics of male-female relationships in a wordless 45-minute performance piece that begins with the woman alone in a double bed and ends with the man alone. In between a wife tries to poison, stab, and shoot her husband, though he ends up getting sucked into the TV; a nearly naked Cupid in a red fake-fur loincloth runs shouting through the audience to reach the stage, where he threatens to shoot us with his red-tipped arrows; and the man and woman fight over a chair in a highly choreographed sequence set to tango music....

Lynn Nottage’s award-winning play is like the extravagant corsets created by its protagonist, both sturdily constructed and richly detailed. Set in Manhattan in 1905, it’s based in part on the story of Nottage’s great-grandmother, an African-American seamstress who sold her wares to both society matrons and women of ill repute. In some ways Intimate Apparel is an old-fashioned story about a spinster taking a last chance on love, however ill-advised. But its somewhat predictable arc is fleshed out by director Jessica Thebus and her cast, who focus with warmth and sympathy on each character’s aching need for human touch: this piece is all about the textures....

If the gravelly Chicago voice on the far right end of your AM radio dial suddenly sounds a lot louder, it’s only because the station’s signal just got stronger. Joe Gentile’s delivery, which ranges from a near whisper to not quite a scream, hasn’t changed, but on April 2, WJJG 1530 doubled its power from 760 watts to approximately 1,500. Four days later, the host of the Joe Gentile Morning Show and the owner of the station (the call letters are his initials) has done his usual: spun a little Frank Sinatra, called Dan Rather “a bit pink” (and, worse, bald), and asked for calls on the topics of hazing and education: “Are you pleased with the way your kids are being taught?...