Sharon Van Etten’s earliest music was undeniably restrained. Armed with only her haunting voice and an acoustic guitar, she debuted with songs about a cruel breakup. When she made her first appearance in Chicago in September 2009 at the Empty Bottle as part of the Wire magazine’s Adventures in Modern Music festival, supporting her debut, Because I Was in Love (Language of Stone), her music was gentle and reserved, but there was nothing tentative about her talent and emotional intensity....

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....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Naming a Chicago sports franchise does present unique challenges, especially where a women’s team is concerned. If we’re going to name it after Chicago women, then how about the Gun Molls? I know, I know, Mayor Daley is trying to get us all to transcend that old stereotype. So I guess the Everleighs, elegant as it is, ringing of fin de siecle Chicago and the White City of the Columbian Exposition (as well as the punning “ever lays,” befitting the Everleigh sisters’ renowned whorehouse) is out too....

Hoosier Mama Pie Company Paula Haney began jonesing for a pie–good old-fashioned, homemade apple pie–while working in the pastry kitchen at Trio under Grant Achatz, the wunderkind chef who now runs Alinea. Achatz was developing his style of whiz-bang molecular gastronomy, and although Haney loved her job–she calls it both thrilling and terrifying–it deepened her desire for something simple. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She started developing recipes on her own, and in the fall of 2005, after a few years of serious baking and consumption, Haney and her husband, skilled apple peeler Craig Siegelin, founded Hoosier Mama Pie Company, baking at Kitchen Chicago, the shared-use kitchen in Ravenswood Manor....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The acrimony between CCR front man John Fogerty, who wrote nearly all the songs, and the rest of the band is the stuff of legend. After disbanding in 1973 the original lineup reunited only once, in 1980, for rhythm guitarist Tom Fogerty’s wedding. Now and then over the next decade John Fogerty worked informally with an old bandmate or two, but by the time CCR was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993–three years after Tom died from AIDS contracted via blood transfusion–his relationship with the surviving members was such that he refused to play at the ceremony with them, instead hiring session cats to back him....

If Joe Baldwin has his way, a mobile garden will be riding the CTA tracks this spring. A 35-year-old artist who developed the concept in the fall of 2008 as part of his MFA from UIC, Baldwin has secured the go-ahead from the city and is now seeking a corporate partner. The estimated cost of the project is $320,000; the USDA, Harvest Moon, and Midwest Groundcovers have pledged to donate plants....

I could almost taste them—lightly crisped from a quick saute in butter, garnished with caramelized onions, sprinkled with salt and pepper. Nothing sounded more appealing than a plate piled with mushroom and sauerkraut pierogi. Pallid disks of pizza sweated under heat lamps, a log of brisket desiccated on a wooden plank, and limp chunks of zucchini drowned in canola oil. As I surveyed my dining hall’s lackluster dinner options, a craving for the soft, salty dough pouches of my youth rolled over me....

What does “lo-fi” mean these days? There have been crappy-sounding recordings for as long as recording technology has existed, but “lo-fi” usually implies an aesthetic decision distinct from limitations of gear or skill. Dylan’s so-called basement tapes—a series of casual, ramshackle home recordings he made with the Band in 1967, widely bootlegged before a tidied-up selection saw formal release in ’75—are probably pop music’s first canonical example of lo-fi by design....

Soul Food Night INFO 773-755-9870 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His mother died when he was 19, and Atkinson, who’s six-foot-seven, found work at a series of big-and-tall clothing stores. Until several years ago he worked off and on as a bouncer at nightclubs all over the north and south sides. Owners sought him out, he says, not just because he was big but because he was diplomatic....

This hilarious musical comedy revue might offend sticklers for tradition–people who don’t want to see an aged Annie smoking or a drag queen portray Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. But those who enjoy the goring of sacred cows won’t be able to stop laughing. Over 90 minutes, creator Gerard Alessandrini lovingly satirizes Broadway’s revered shows and stars as well as its current trends, including the move to jukebox musicals, the passion for puppetry, and the Disneyfication of the Great White Way....

It’s crow-eating time. A month or so ago, most folks in the ward didn’t even know his name; many of them still don’t know how to pronounce it (A-may-ah Puh-war). He’s a program assistant in the Office of Emergency Management at Northwestern University. He’s only lived in the ward for the last four years. He’s not from Chicago, having grown up in the suburbs. And unlike mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel, he can’t even claim that his relatives hail from Chicago....

“Are customers always right–even if they want their money back after seeing a play?” That’s the question posed by New York Times writer (and former Reader critic) Erik Piepenburg in an article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/theater/01refund.html?_r=1) about the debate over a “money-back guarantee” for tickets to Migdalia Cruz’s El Grito del Bronx, which ran July 15-August 9 at the Goodman. Collaboraction and Teatro Vista, which jointly produced the show, hoped to attract audiences by promising ticket refunds to dissatisfied customers....

The art of Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl (Import Export) often feels closer to still photography than to cinema. He’ll regularly stage an entire scene in a single, static shot, characters and objects arranged in a tableau. His manipulation of natural light is exquisite, conveying a natural beauty that transcends—or at least complicates—his taste for provocative content. (Seidl’s most consistent subjects are antisocial behavior and sexual exploitation, and he’s often been characterized as antihumanist....

Fall Flavors Boka1729 N. Halsted | 312-337-6070 rrr Walking into the airy, elegant Chalkboard space, it’s hard to believe it was formerly the gloomy Tournesol. But classy as the room is, the menu is decidedly friendly, offering dressed-up versions of classic American comfort food. Daily specials are listed on the restaurant’s namesake, a giant chalkboard, but often also on a paper menu that includes chatty asides from chef-owner Gilbert Langlois, a veteran of Rushmore and SushiSamba Rio....

See our previews and photo/video recaps of bands playing on: Friday · Sunday ·Afterparties Lollapalooza main » Planet Hemp1:00-2:00Bud Light Stage The Dixie Chicks derby has heated up this year, but I think Mother (Columbia), the hotly anticipated solo debut from Natalie Maines—which aims for roots-rock crunch with the help of Ben Harper’s band—clearly loses out to Amelita (Columbia), the second album from Court Yard Hounds, aka Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, the two current Dixie Chicks who aren’t Maines....

QI am a 23-year-old woman living with my 25-year-old boyfriend. We have been dating for a little over a year, and for the majority of that time we had a great sex life. Unfortunately, when we decided to move in together we also decided to stop having intercourse until we decide to get married. We made this choice with a couple factors in mind: (1) lots of pressure from religious parents who urged us not to engage in premarital sex, and (2) we aren’t ready to risk having a kid....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As any comic performer will attest, stand-up is a different animal than sketch comedy. So at Saturday night’s sold-out show at the Lakeshore Theatre it was impressive to watch Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter —two-thirds of the popular New York nightclub ensemble Stella, which leveraged its collective insanity into one ecstatically bizarre season on Comedy Central in 2005—reinvent themselves as stand-ups....

Some people have too much energy. People like Jocelyn and Steve Gerard, for instance, who rehab their own homes in their spare time—and then blog about it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I started to feel kind of isolated,” she continues. “Everybody was feeling sorry for me, and I was all excited: look what I did! Nobody related to it. When I started blogging, I didn’t feel so weird....

If you didn’t know that Portuguese writer-director Miguel Gomes wrote film criticism before he started making movies, you’d probably figure it out within the first few minutes of his 2012 drama Tabu, which the Chicago Cinema Society screens this Sunday and Monday at the Patio Theater. The title is a direct reference to F.W. Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), and the movie opens with a ten-minute prologue that invokes the earlier work....

When is an adaptation no longer an adaptation but a whole new work? This question came to me as I was experiencing the Hypocrites’ latest production, described in the program as an adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1878 classic H.M.S. Pinafore and presented in repertory with remounts of The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance. Usually when directors adapt an old chestnut they monkey with the setting, putting Hamlet in 21st-century Japan, say....