Dim the Lights, Chill the Sake Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are eight grades of sake, categorized by brewing method and ingredients. Only futsu-shu–the lowest and most common grade–is best served warm. “Mostly because heat masks an inferior taste,” says Hepler. The taste of inferior sake might be described as overly fermented or yeasty, with a pungent aftertaste that’s increasingly noticeable as it cools....

Hysteria The dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic. —Carl Jung Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Freud’s line about breaking the silence gets a laugh, but it also signifies Johnson’s real purpose. For more than a century much of the world has been waiting for the silence to be broken about one of the most troublesome aspects of Freudian theory....

Last month a member of Governor George Ryan’s delegation in Cuba complained that he’d been bitten on the arm by a prostitute with whom he had struck up a friendly conversation. The Sun-Times reported that he ended up paying the woman $10 to go away. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pulido, who’s 57, says he’s seen an alarming reliance on prostitution before: as a young boy in the days prior to the revolution of 1959, he watched U....

GEORGE GARZONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Listening to the Boston saxophonist George Garzone, one marvels again at the number of excellent musicians who for some reason or another have received relatively little attention outside their home regions (in Chicago, Von Freeman and Eddie Johnson come most immediately to mind). Garzone’s gig as a professor at Boston’s famous Berklee College of Music usually keeps him on the east coast; his inclinations take him to the realm of freely improvised music, which he has performed steadily with the Fringe–a cooperative pianoless trio–since 1972....

Over the winter of 1888-’89, John Montgomery Ward managed and played for a special team of major league baseball players on a worldwide tour. During a game in Italy against the powerful Chicago White Stockings, later nicknamed the Cubs, Ward’s All Americas scored seven runs in the fifth inning. The locals stormed the field, thinking the game was over, and the White Stockings panicked and fled. But Ward, who understood Italian, told his players to stay put and notched a forfeit win....

Candye Kane Turn on MTV or modern-rock radio these days and you can’t escape an emaciated waif named Meredith Brooks crooning, “I’m a bitch / I’m a lover / I’m a child / I’m a mother / I’m a sinner / I’m a saint / I do not feel ashamed.” No doubt she intends this cloying chorus as a statement of self-empowerment–“Take me as I am!”–but it’s just as certain that the guys who program the aforementioned media outlets are getting off on hearing this walking Calvin Klein ad confess that she’s a bitch, the same way they got their jollies from listening to her obvious inspiration Alanis Morissette trill about sucking some guy’s Tootsie Pop at the movies....

Molly Shanahan’s dances are never, ever easy–they tug the mind in one direction, only to abandon that tangent and take up another. Yet somehow they usually coalesce into a mysterious whole. Shanahan’s new solo, Sweet Ruthless, seems to be made up of snapshots or diary entries, memories of a love affair that’s over. Marked by numbered shreds of text (“Number four: a short dress draped for weeks over a bedroom chair”), it’s also defined by repeated movements: a sensuous motion of the hips in a slow-motion walk, a gaze into the palm as the dancer’s foot flips back....

PETER BROTZMANN CHICAGO TENTET PLUS ONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The pioneering, domineering, and often breathtaking German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann deserves a key to the city. He’s forged strong ties with Chicago’s new-music community during a series of visits over the last five years–most significantly with reedist Ken Vandermark, bassist Kent Kessler, and drummer Hamid Drake, who’ve proved exceptionally responsive to Brotzmann’s careening, guttural bluster....

Private Eyes, Apple Tree Theatre. The trouble with Steven Dietz’s intermittently clever jigsaw puzzle is that he seems far less concerned with the pieces than with how they fit together. Forsaking typing paper for graph paper, he’s fashioned an impossibly complex labyrinth around a rather banal, undeveloped love triangle: the relationship of a husband-wife acting team is shaken by the wife’s dalliance with a smarmy British director. Dietz’s adroitly paced play strips away layer after layer of artifice, but it never arrives at any naked truth....

Clark Street was busy on a Friday night with cars vying for parking spaces and pedestrians crisscrossing from galleries to restaurants and back again. I was looking for a hydrant or a loading zone so my friend and I could make a quick stop at the video store. I spotted an open meter right in front, but unfortunately a large SUV seemed to be about to back into it. But it just sat there, and I assumed that it was just another driver with more vehicle than he could handle....

SLEEPY LABEEF Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Honky-tonk legend Sleepy LaBeef never managed to cash in on the 80s rockabilly minirevival–but then, he’s never cashed in on anything in his life. It’s both LaBeef’s blessing and his curse to be saddled with the kind of integrity that’s as difficult to transform into a commodity as it is to squelch. His earliest recordings, in the late 50s, were in-house jobs for radio stations along the Texas-Mexico border; he also cut for obscure southwestern labels like Gulf, Finn, and Crescent....

Daktaris Let’s Get a Groove On But Desco’s best records are not merely tributes to Brown–they’re great funk in their own right, extensions of his achievements. The label’s most ingenious stroke so far is Soul Explosion, a mild departure from strict JB orthodoxy that’s designed to look like a reissue of an early-70s funk album from Nigeria–in other words, it fetishizes the replica that’s part of collector culture rather than the unaffordable original artifact....

The Make-Up Yeah, we have seen it all before–the white-boy soul dressed out with just enough distortion to make it seem relevant, the James Brown tiptoe posturing, the organ pumping, the pegged black pants, and yes, even the gravity-defying do Svenonious is sporting up there onstage. But we like it, and we like Svenonious–one of a handful of visionaries, along with Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Outpunk fanzine’s Matt Wobensmith, to make a real musical and philosophical mark on punk rock in the 90s....

If Alderman Dorothy Tillman were a man, you might think she was the first priest in the Chicago City Council. How else to account for all the time she apparently spends on the dark side of a confessional? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This time it was an ordinance banning tobacco and alcohol advertising on billboards, with some exceptions, such as on signs located in industrial areas....

Is it true that ducks can have one side of their brain sleep while the other side remains awake? And how can I, as a struggling graduate student, learn to do the same thing? –Olivia, via AOL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Birds and aquatic mammals are capable of unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS), which means they can sleep with one eye open and one hemisphere of the brain awake....

By Mark Gauvreau Judge But eventually the conservatives’ failure to embrace a grand vision for the country–such as the procity agenda of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani–and the Orwellian atmosphere of the hunt for Clinton left me feeling enervated. Clinton’s blood in the water had put the right in a senseless frenzy, without an agenda and blind to the damage Ken Starr’s invasions could do to everyone’s privacy. I found myself wondering if capital gains and school uniforms were all there was....

A JAZZY CHANUKAH with BEN SIDRAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you can get past the corny title you should have no trouble appreciating pianist Ben Sidran’s unusual and impressive cross-cultural fusion. To begin with, Sidran has included plenty of great Jewish melodies you’ll never hear at synagogue: the songs of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Sammy Cahn, all of them bar mitzvahed residents of Tin Pan Alley....

What do low-income single mothers say about marriage? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Sacred cows are to be kicked, but they rarely can be killed,” writes Richard Posner, chief judge of the seventh federal circuit in Chicago, in the New Republic (August 16). “This one”–the doctrine of judicial review–“certainly cannot be killed. Although the Constitution does not say explicitly that a court can invalidate a statute or any other official act that violates the Constitution, such a power is implicit in the text, and it has been assumed, affirmed, and exercised for the last two hundred years or so....

An artist is his work. The man dies, the work lives, and we judge his achievement by that. And before we go one step further, no, J. F. Powers did not write that one about patent leather shoes. That was John R. Powers, another case altogether. I didn’t see Powers as a religious writer in those days. I saw him as something close to my heart, a man who wrote about men at work....

Now in its third week, the European Union Film Festival continues Friday through Sunday, February 20 through 22, at the Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson. Admission is $6, $3 for Film Center members. For further information call 312-443-3737. The Unfish Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A modern fairy tale of fabulous complexity, this 1997 Austrian film involves a preserved whale whose interior is outfitted as a tourist attraction in a mountain village....