If you say somebody’s new album is way more gay than the last one, it’s hardly ever a compliment. But Indigo Girl AMY RAY has dedicated her second solo disc, Prom (Daemon), entirely to questions of queer identity–and this record isn’t just gay, it’s fiercely, fantastically gay. It’s about the drama and tumult of high school and coming out, and its narratives are set in rural and suburban Georgia, deep in the Bible Belt, at about the time Ray first fell in love with another woman....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » UCLA law prof Eugene Volokh spends some serious time with the question of “whether people have some sort of good-manners obligation to abandon ‘disabled’ for ‘handicapped,’ ‘American Indian’ for ‘Native American,’ ‘black’ for ‘African American,’ and so on. I think the answer is generally no, unless the old term is so commonly used as a pejorative that listeners can reasonably infer that your use of it is pejorative, or possibly if the old term is so rarely used and thus archaic that listeners can reasonably wonder ‘what does he mean by that?...

After a hiatus, a rumored breakup, and a label jump, Belle & Sebastian have reunited with Matador and delivered their sixth proper album, The Life Pursuit. The band has been so cultishly adored and comfortingly consistent since its inception that just its name–a virtual synonym for youngsters with little band buttons, cardigans, and precious regard for all things twee–can serve as a punch line. But the jokes aren’t going to come so easy now that singer Stuart Murdoch sounds like a dead ringer for Marc Bolan, rather than the loneliest boy in Brigadoon, and the music has started to sound more like 10cc....

Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto Almost 60 years later, segregation is apparently still the will of the people–just look at any demographic map of Chicago. And that’s despite the fact that for the last 40-odd years the city has been the site of a landmark federal desegregation case. Filed in 1967, Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority–widely considered the Brown v. Board of Education of housing law–has to date accomplished only one-quarter of its goal, though in the process it has spun off enough bewildering subplots to program a whole cable channel....

If you’re looking for signs that the world is changing (or possibly ending), consider this: Joe Segal, the notoriously territorial proprietor of Jazz Showcase, has opened his doors to a series of benefit performances for a rival club. Of course, Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge–an integral part of Chicago’s new-jazz resurgence in the past decade–doesn’t exactly compete with Segal’s club, a longtime bastion of mainstream jazz. And besides, these two old lions, both now in their mid-70s, have something in common: Anderson’s astonishing longevity as a vital tenor saxophonist (strong on the scene since the early 60s) rivals Segal’s hardscrabble persistence as a promoter (booking jazz at various venues since the late 40s)....

Cache (Hidden) Cache, the best new fiction feature I saw last year, opens with what seems like a standard establishing shot: a stationary view of the front of an upscale home. It lasts for three minutes, with very little movement in the frame–but then the footage is abruptly rewound and replayed. A cutaway reveals a nervous middle-class couple watching this scene on video. It’s their house on the screen–the tape was left anonymously on their doorstep and it’s impossible to regard it as anything other than threatening....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a July report released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, undercover investigators set up a fake West Virginia company (using only a phone, a fax machine, and a P.O. box at Mail Boxes Etc.) and applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to buy radioactive materials. Weeks later the NRC granted the license without a face-to-face interview or on-site inspection, and soon the investigators had ordered enough americium and cesium to power a dirty bomb....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The police department is the last place the City Council is going to look to trim–even criticizing “a few bad apples” in the police department is generally considered a dumb political move. In this tough budget year, the mayor has proposed hiring 50 more officers, and aldermen have griped that they need to find money to hire more....

A few years ago, impressed by Dave Eggers’s novel You Shall Know Our Velocity, choreographer Rachel Thorne Germond set out to make a dance on the emotional aspect of moving at high speeds. The result is now the final section of Our Velocity, an antic segment performed by five dancers at breakneck speed to anxious, feverishly rapid harpsichord music by Henryk Gorecki. From there Germond began to create the other sections: an odd opening that isolates various emotions in snapshots of bodily and vocal language, slow sequences in unison on the floor to ominous harpsichord, a solo whose phrases are separated by the sound of a bell....

Who the hell wears swim caps anymore? I haven’t seen a swim cap in years. That question in your column last week from the swim-cap fetishist getting off on his visits to public pools was bullshit. I would think you, of all people, could see through it. –Sexy Saint Louis Girl Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am happily married to a girl in her mid-20s....

Clipse | Hell Hath No Fury (Re-up Gang Records/Star Trak/Jive) Clipse | Hell Hath No Fury Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first single, “Mr. Me Too,” is terse and tense. Producers the Neptunes retool half the beat from “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” slow it to a somnambulant tempo, and pit it against an ominous tone burst that fades away like an exhalation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you have the sort of mind that enjoys contemplating the square root of minus one and similar irrationalities, may I suggest the Tribune‘s lead editorial Friday. The subject was Michael Mukasey, the president’s nominee for attorney general. The Tribune called Mukasey a “brilliant jurist” who “deserves to be confirmed.” Yet Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee “are threatening to kill the nomination ....

Pink Mountaintops The Pink Mountaintops’ self-titled debut, which came out in 2004, doesn’t try to hide a thing–it’s a nonstop fuckfest. A concept album dreamed up by Stephen McBean–also the leader of Vancouver indie-scuzz quintet Black Mountain, who’ve benefited from the recent vogue for Canadian bands and last year toured with Coldplay–Pink Mountaintops abandons itself to carnality with the same completeness that a Pentecostal preacher abandons himself to the Holy Spirit....

Friday 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » MEGAN REILLY For her second album, the new Let Your Ghost Go (Carrot Top), Memphis-raised singer Megan Reilly is backed again by a band filled with heavyweights like drummer Steve Goulding (Mekons), bassist Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu), and guitarist Tim Foljahn (Two Dollar Guitar). But the players don’t draw attention to themselves, showing an admirable restraint around Reilly’s breathy, delicate voice and letting the songs reveal their charms softly....

The innovative cuisine at Alinea, Grant Achatz’s forward-looking “food lab,” is meant to appeal to all five senses. Each element of the restaurant, down to the block it’s located on, has been handpicked for its contribution to the total dining experience. So Achatz wasn’t going to be content loading up on salad bowls and silverware at a local restaurant supply store. Instead he turned to designer Martin Kastner and his studio, Crucial Detail, to create a unique line of innovative serviceware with a simple purpose–the enjoyment of delicious food....

Think You’re Safe From the Boot? Think Again. According to Beth, on the morning of June 28 she parked her car as usual near the Metra station in Rogers Park, boarded the train, and went to work. When she returned around 5:30 she saw a big orange sticker on the driver’s side front window. “As soon as I saw that sticker,” she says, “I knew I got the boot.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Trained as a musician, English writer-director Sally Potter (The Tango Lesson) still thinks like one. All the dialogue in her timely masterpiece–a passionate post-9/11 love story about an unhappily married Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen) and a younger Lebanese chef (Simon Abkarian) set in London, Belfast, Beirut, and Havana–is written in rhyming iambic pentameter. Beautifully composed and deftly delivered, it becomes the libretto to Potter’s visual music, creating a remarkable lyricism and emotional directness....

Czech puppet animator Jan Svankmajer began making shorts in 1964, but not until 1988 was he able to realize his dream of a feature adapting Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The world on the other side of Svankmajer’s looking glass is hilariously macabre: taxidermy is the controlling metaphor, as a live-action Alice (Kristyna Kohoutova) descends an elevatorlike rabbit hole following a white rabbit that’s broken out of its glass display case....

I gave this Florida crew’s debut, And Now . . . (6 Hole), the number-eight spot on my 2005 top-ten list, but I should’ve put it higher up–maybe even above Kanye and all his Grammys. It’s the best feel-good hip-hop to come out in the past couple years–less a get-up-and-shake-it record than the kind of thing you’d want to sit down and listen to a couple times through, preferably after you’ve lit a fatty....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But earlier this month I was rhapsodizing about the country hams my friends and I brought back from Cadiz, Kentucky. Last Saturday we ate them, and I don’t think there’s a better way to convey their exquisiteness than by posting this photo of a tissue-thin slice of Douglas Freeman’s ham (courtesy of Ron Kaplan). We ate this one like prosciutto, and though it was a lot saltier it had great depth of flavor and nuttiness to it....