As a pharmaceutical sales rep in Beijing, Lu Jia attended many a business dinner at which China’s infamously searing baijiu, aka “white liquor,” was consumed in volumes large enough to drop elephants. A few weeks ago Jia walked me down the aisles, offering a baijiu tutorial and pointing out other curiosities like lychee and wolfberry wines and a ginseng-infused California-style red. The space in front of the store was still lined with the elaborate floral arrangements sent by friends and well-wishers for the grand opening party a week earlier....

I’m in Heidi Massa’s Lincoln Park apartment, 31 stories up. It’s 5:45 AM, and we’re looking out at her expansive view. The sun’s not up yet, and the sky and the city are the same misty shade—soft, early-morning gray, spangled with streetlights that mostly have a mellow, golden glow. And then, I see, there’s another. A smaller sign, closer, but still perhaps a mile away, flaring red and white and magenta....

The two founding members of Lazer Crystal, Mikale De Graff and Nicholas Read, didn’t meet under the most auspicious of circumstances. When De Graff moved to Chicago in 2004 his roommate, he recalls, “had some boyfriends, and I would always kind of befriend them and then they’d disappear. So by the time Nick came around I was like, ‘I’m not even going to try and be this guy’s friend, because I’ll never see him again....

Benjamin One of my favorite Chicago projects has always been Benjamin, the superfly R&B alter ego of Ben Pirani, front man for blues-rockers Chicago Stone Lightning Band and hype man for Windy City Soul Club. However, Benjamin only existed in the form of a short-run, two-song cassette release on Priority Male, a hilarious music video, and a shelved collaboration with “wurkstep” pioneers Sich Mang. Pirani has since moved to New York, dyed his hair blond, and hooked up with new Humboldt Park funk and R&B label Cherries Records, who this week released a new Benjamin seven-inch....

FOOD & DRINK Readers’ Choice: Chicago Food Corp Readers’ Choice: Treasure Island Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though it doesn’t scream Latin grocery, Pete’s Fresh Market has inspired chef Dudley Nieto to ferry in Kendall College students on field trips introducing them to the incredible range of ingredients in traditional Mexican cuisine. Pete’s has multiple locations and looks like any other corporate food barn, but what sets this particular outlet apart is the dazzling selection of raw materials: bags of fresh jalapeños and other chiles; several types of Mexican zucchini, chayote, and masa; and huge varieties of corn, beans, and tortillas....

Don’t drink the Cubbie Kool-Aid. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As many Cubs followers have done many times, Smith got caught up in the scene instead of the team. He lingered with a bachelor party less interested in the game than in getting a pair of fake pink testicles signed by every young woman in the bleachers. He befriended bleacher bum Fred Speck, who told Smith, “Winning or losing stopped making me happy or sad years ago—I just love to be here” and also gave him the cover quote: “If they win it all, I’ll cry like a baby and laugh like a hyena for a week....

courtesy of Chris Brown Chris Brown On Thursday Chicago native Chris Brown (no, not that twerp), one of the most fascinating members of the Bay Area creative music scene, makes a rare trip home for a concert at Elastic. Few musicians so easily straddle the divide between improvised music and contemporary composition, but Brown has a knack for both—he’s a restlessly curious and adventurous explorer. Thursday’s event will find him representing both sides of his musical personality....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » • David Leonhardt in the New York Times on how the polling question “Who do you expect to win?” predicts results better than “Who do you support?” (In polls this year that have asked the expectation question, President Obama has dominated.) —Steve Bogira • Where Romney and Obama actually stand on global warming? —Jerome Ludwig • This insane, dexterous, definitive GQ profile of Wu-Tang Clan mastermind and now-film director RZA?...

John Wayne Gacy was executed in 1994 for the murders of 33 young men and boys, but he hasn’t gone away. Gacy made headlines 17 months ago when DNA testing led to the identification of one of his eight victims who’d remained nameless. He made more headlines last year when Tom Dart, sheriff of Cook County, added Gacy’s DNA to a national database to see if it might link him to other murders....

Whoever it was that said academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small got it all wrong: Academic politics are a doll’s tea party compared to the real thing, and they are that way precisely because stakes are so vertiginously high, at least from the perspective of a nontenured academic. I bring this up in connection to an August 24 piece in the New York Times about scholarly experiments in replacing or augmenting peer review with online crowdsourcing....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s the end of the week, which means that you’re probably just about finished getting through the Arcade Fire’s brand-new fourth album, Reflektor (OK, the album isn’t that long but I’ve had trouble getting through it), and you’re eager to listen to more new music. You could check out M.I.A.’s Matangi, which the agitprop pop artist posted on her YouTube-Vevo page earlier today, or you could download the sequel to Action Bronson and Party Supplies’ Blue Chips mixtape....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For last week’s paper I reviewed “Teenie Harris, Photographer,” the new show installed into a first-floor hallway at Harold Washington library. Charles “Teenie” Harris shot pictures for the African-American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier in the mid-20th century, focusing particularly on a neighborhood called the Hill District, which was home to a thriving black middle class. Its members are whom Harris is concerned with—though the social upheavals of the 60s and onward lurk in the background of this show, they’re secondary to Harris’s chronicle of black social life....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Don Terry, a Tribune Magazine writer with a Pulitzer in his background from his years at the New York Times, got a call in the morning from Geoff Brown, associate managing editor for features. Terry: “He said, ‘Are you coming in?’ I said, ‘Yeah, in half an hour.’ He said, ‘Please stop in my office.’ You know what that means....

When Kurt Serpin says he’s cooking Ottoman cuisine, he doesn’t mean the extravagant feasts of the sultans, but he is talking about the traditional Turkish cuisine that evolved from the sultans’ expansive palace kitchens. The menu at Cafe Orchid, his compact Lakeview restaurant, is diverse, covering the expected mezes (hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanoush, falafel), kebabs, and grilled seafood dishes (Serpin is from the Turkish city of Mersin, on the Mediterranean), but also a nice selection of less common items, like the tiny wontonlike pre-Ottoman meat dumplings known as manti, which arrive in a deep bowl of yogurt-tomato sauce....

When former Tribune columnist Anne Keegan died last May her husband, Leonard Aronson, decided to create a journalism award in her memory. The challenge was defining the kind of work the award would honor, in language that would inspire journalists to want to win it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That was the easy part. We won’t be able to judge entries just by counting I‘s and measuring the decibel level of the reporter’s voice....

Arthur Elgort Art Blakey with a very young Benny Green (right) It’s hard to believe pianist Benny Green recently turned 50—it seems like not so long ago he was a fresh-faced young lion, instilled with the hard-bop virtues of Art Blakey, with whom he worked with in the late 80s. But on his terrific new trio album Magic Beans (Sunnyside) he’s still purveying a timeless (if simultaneously time-specific) sound, delivering crisp, hard-swinging jazz in the style of his hard-bop mentors....

Bulle and Pascale Ogier play the game of Paris in Le Pont du Nord Last summer the Gene Siskel Film Center presented a new print of Celine and Julie Go Boating, perhaps the most beloved movie by French director Jacques Rivette. This week the Siskel will present one of Rivette’s lesser-known films, Le Pont du Nord (1981), also from a new print. If you’re unfamiliar with Rivette—likely the most challenging of all the French New Wave directors—this may be a good place to start....

BIG RIVER: THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN Bohemian Theatre Ensemble Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But there’s another reason for the novel’s enduring power: the love story at the tale’s heart, the brotherly bond that evolves between two outcasts, white-trash Huck and escaped slave Jim, who team up to flee fictitious Saint Petersburg, Missouri, by rafting the Mississippi. Jim seeks liberty in the free state of Illinois, and Huck wants to get away from his alcoholic, abusive father and the god-fearing foster mother who intends to “sivilize” him....

In The Long Voyage Home, one of Eugene O’Neill’s early sea plays, a hard-luck Swedish sailor named Olson tells a prostitute, in broken English, “I want to go home this time. I feel homesick for farm and to see my people again. Just like little boy, I feel homesick.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » O’Neill’s first major tragedy, Desire Under the Elms usually attracts comparisons to Euripides’s Hippolytus because of the premise (a young wife’s passion for her much older husband’s son)....

Recently Ian Svenonius, front man for the Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up, and Weird War, among other legendary D.C. bands, and author of the essay collection The Psychic Soviet (Drag City Press), added “talk show host” to his resumé. His show, called Soft Focus, is a project of Vice magazine’s online TV network, VBS, and it has a simple formula: Svenonius, another musician, a couple of chairs, and conversation that gives the usual cookie-cutter promotional-tour chitchat a wide berth, sounding instead like something you’d read in a slightly cosmic version of Maximum Rock‘n’ Roll....