Matching wine to cuisines it isn’t usually drunk with–Caribbean, Latin American, Asian–is the focus of this periodic feature, in which we pick a BYO restaurant, sample a few dishes, and recommend some bottles. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s a long line of Middle Eastern eateries on Kedzie north of Montrose, but this Persian one, run by the Naghavi family, is a standout. Kabobs of marinated chicken, filet mignon, and spiced ground beef come on fluffy mounds of saffron-flecked basmati rice alongside wonderfully charred onions, tomatoes, and green peppers....

I had been teaching second grade at Von Humboldt Elementary in east Humboldt Park for a week when Kevin called me a “punk-ass bitch.” He didn’t say it in anger, but calmly, as if pronouncing judgment. Kevin was the worst-behaved of the 18 kids in my class, which I had taken over a week before spring break, but the same sentiment had already been expressed, in word or deed, by nearly all his classmates....

Scott Short: Beyond the Mundane Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Partly because Short has devised such an extreme method, the results are both fascinating and intentionally frustrating. Untitled (Black) offers an even pattern of what look like elongated cell shapes, yet it’s certainly not organic in feel. Untitled (Red) is much denser at the upper left than in the rest of the painting, but that variation seems to have no emotional or other implications....

Carla Cook Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jazz singer Carla Cook’s 1999 debut, It’s All About Love (MaxJazz), was a revelation: because she didn’t record it till her mid-30s, she sounded at once fresh and fully mature. A Detroit native weaned on Motown and gospel, Cook has a hefty, bluesy timbre, with a honeyed brightness in the upper half of her range. She phrases as naturally as the sun sets, and on ballads and down-tempo standards her blend of sung melody and speech rhythms practically glows; when she scats, it’s not a perfunctory trick but an organic, improvisatory extension of the written line....

Rah rah ROTC. Writing in the Chicago Free Press (April 9), Paul Varnell argues that the military isn’t going to become gay friendly on its own. “The effect of banishing ROTC and military recruiting by the most liberal, gay-accepting colleges and universities was to increase the proportion of recruits and young officers who are less accepting of gays, whose college experience was unlikely to counter negative views of gays, and who do not want gays in the military…....

Dolly Varden’s new album, Forgiven Now (Undertow), like its predecessor, 2000’s The Dumbest Magnets, is largely about learning to enjoy the qualified pleasures of adulthood. Bandleaders Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen have endured their share of commercial disappointments over the years, and in living and working together as husband and wife for 11 years, they’ve no doubt strained their relationship more than many couples ever will. But on “The Lotus Hour,” which could be read as an ode to yoga, Christiansen sings, “It’s time for us to leave / Float above working-class houses and blossoming trees / This is the lotus hour / We are refugees from all the plans we’ve made....

A fine pianist in anyone’s book, over the past few years Jim McNeely has dropped back a little in the ranks of jazz keyboard wizards–not because he’s lost any talent or imaginative drive, but because he’s plowed so much of both into his work as an arranger and composer. On recent albums like Group Therapy (Omnitone) and Lickety Split (New World), McNeely has used large canvases, writing for a tentet and for the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, the resident big band at New York’s Village Vanguard since the demise of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis orchestra (in which McNeely played piano in the 70s and 80s)....

John Mooney has made his name integrating two wildly different styles: declamatory Delta blues and ebullient New Orleans R & B. He was born in New Jersey in 1955 but grew up in Syracuse, New York, where as a teenager he met legendary Delta bluesman Son House, who’d moved there from Mississippi in the 40s. Mooney began studying under House, learning the Delta fretboard style (propulsive strumming pierced by polyrhythmic treble accents and slide patterns) that the elder bluesman had pioneered....

Guitarist Joseph Suchy, from Cologne, is one of several players–along with Chicagoan Kevin Drumm and Austrian Christian Fennesz–who characterize a strong new current flowing between the islands of free improvisation and electronic music. In their hands, tit-for-tat instrumental play, pure noise, and real time laptop manipulation are all equally valid tools to create music on the fly. On a series of recent albums Suchy has isolated some of these approaches; Smi2le (Grob, 2000) is an unholy barrage of guitar-derived noise that progresses by shifts in density, while the brand-new Canoeing Instructional (Whatness), where he improvises on a string instrument fashioned from a wooden canoe by artist Kirsten Pieroth, emphasizes more traditional-sounding acoustic thwacks and twangs....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1997, News of the Weird reported on a lawsuit filed by DSC Communications, Inc., against software engineer Evan Brown, claiming that it owned his idea for converting binary code into high-level source code. Brown had signed a contract granting DSC ownership of any invention or idea he created on the job but argues that he’d actually begun thinking about the source-code solution 12 years before he was hired by DSC....

“I think Poland was the freest country of the East bloc,” says Aneta Prasal, one of the four curators of “In Between: Art From Poland, 1945-2000,” which opens Saturday at the Chicago Cultural Center and is billed as America’s first comprehensive survey of Polish art created since World War II. “Hundreds of Hungarian intellectuals would visit Warsaw or Krakow during the 70s and 80s. When we went to Hungary, we were surprised to find Hungarian artists who had learned Polish just to travel there and read Polish art magazines....

When John Sabraw moved from Saint Louis to the “strange micro subtropical zone” of Athens, Ohio, a year ago he discovered the intriguing changes fog can produce: “Every other morning you wake up and the landscape is re-created for you,” he says. Though his previous work included trompe l’oeil paintings of “cast-off implements, rusty tools, and old medical photographs,” for his new small pieces at Thomas McCormick he began depicting outdoor scenes in morning mist....

With the 2004 election just around the corner, the ire of Illinois pols and pol watchers is zeroing in on U.S. senator Peter Fitzgerald. “A lot of us helped him win his election four years ago,” U.S. congressman Ray LaHood, a Republican, complained late last year to the Sun-Times. “And frankly, we haven’t heard from him since.” LaHood won’t challenge Fitzgerald for the Republican Senate nomination in March 2004, but he hopes someone else will....

Playing Softball Hold Many Pitfalls, Lawrence of Arabia’s Counsel Koppel puts down the Journal. “Not a lot of encouragement in this,” he says. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As they chat, Bush’s knowledge of the Middle East astonishes us, though it’s long been a point of honor among American presidents to steep themselves in the history of every region to which they think of sending U....

The Curious Theatre Branch’s 15th annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe runs through 11/20 at the Curious Theatre Branch, 7001 N. Glenwood. Admission is $12 or “pay what you can”; for information and reservations, call 773-274-6660. It’s not easy to negotiate the subject of motherhood–to chart a course between the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of gleeful attack. Veteran solo artist Jenny Magnus makes the attempt in Cant, a 45-minute monologue (with songs)....

Drive-by Truckers (Billboard Books) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve sat through a great many boozy debates over whether the redneck national anthem is really “Sweet Home Alabama” or “Free Bird”–but still, no one seriously disputes that it’s a Skynyrd song. There’s a lot more to being southern than mere defensiveness, and Skynyrd’s discography captured a good deal of it, with a level of wit few others have approached....

Producers Eric Nadler (Frontline) and John S. Friedman (Marcel Ophuls’s Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie) collaborated on this gripping 2002 video profile of German technician Karl-Heinz Schaab, a bland and complacent nowhere man convicted in 1999 of having sold Iraq blueprints for a supercentrifuge that would allow the manufacture of fissionable uranium 235 (he even traveled to Baghdad to install the first one). Schaab lifted the blueprints from a company that used the technology to enrich nuclear fuel, but Nadler and Friedman trace the centrifuge back to the 40s, when it was developed as part of the Nazis’ nuclear program by the industrial firm Degussa....

In his ninth and latest novel, Drop City, T.C. Boyle tells the story of a 1970 Sonoma commune and its denizens–loners and misfits with names like Star, Pan, and Merry who milk goats, share one another’s beds and dope, and sell “authentic hippie in full hippie regalia” photos to tourists for 25 cents a pop. As would be expected, inadequate toilet facilities, ideological differences, and way too much acid eventually bring bad vibes to paradise, and when the cops visit the ranch after an ugly hit-and-run involving Drop City’s founder and a horse, the commune packs up and heads north to Alaska, “the last truly free place on this whole continent....

Who was the worst Catholic saint? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Be nonexistent. In Christianity’s early days sainthood was a matter of popular acclaim. When the church formalized canonization in the 13th century, the traditional saints were grandfathered in, but later historical review found no reliable information about many of them and some appeared never to have existed at all. One egregious example is Saint Josaphat, who supposedly was the son of an East Indian king who persecuted his Christian subjects....

The Ten Best Albums of 1999 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 3 ICP ORCHESTRA Jubilee Varia (Hatology). For more than 20 years, under the leadership of Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg, this loose ensemble of eight or nine phenomenal musicians has mixed improvisation and composition, prickly noise blasts and finely wrought lyricism, with what might be called nonchalant focus. Mengelberg keeps the players–who include his longtime cohort Han Bennink on drums, reedists Ab Baars and Michael Moore, trombonist Wolter Wierbos, and cellist Tristan Honsinger–on their toes by perpetually juggling the repertoire and allowing any member to change the music’s direction at any time....