The Chef: Dana Cree (Blackbird)The Challenger: Thomas Raquel (Acadia)The Ingredient: Pine sap Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rodrick Markus, however, has been selling pine sap to chefs for three years through his company, Rare Tea Cellar, which specializes in rare and gourmet ingredients. He says he became interested in it after smelling the pine trees in the Oregon woods where his foragers were hunting for matsutake mushrooms....

“Anything that people have done for thousands of years, you can do. It doesn’t mean you can do it well, but you can do it. You can do pottery, you can draw, you can speak, read. Farming is the same way.” —Joe Judd, “How Joe Bought the Farm,” January 17 This was such an awesome surprise—Joe was my patient when I was completing my med-surg clinicals for nursing school. He was a great patient—funny, friendly, and so kind to me as I went about all my student nurse tasks....

The rounded shapes and rolling motions of Molly Shanahan’s new solo piece, My Name Is a Blackbird, remind me of Merce Cunningham—though they bear no resemblance to his spiky, tense forms. Both choreographers create a dreamy, trancelike state, allowing the viewer to zone in and out of the performance, switching between focused perception and meditation. Shanahan’s hour-long piece is improvised, and she allows the parade of thoughts, feelings—whatever it is that informs her dancing—to cross her face, opening herself up completely to the process....

Prepare yourself for Buzzard. I occasionally participate in the weekly critic’s survey over at IndieWire.com. If you aren’t familiar, it’s an informal feature that poses a single question for dozens of film critics and collects the responses in a single post. One of the recent queries, handed down by editor Sam Adams, asked ““What’s your process for making a Top 10?”, meaning a list of the ten best films of the year....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Nella Grassano ruined pizza for Chicago,” says Mike Sula, hastening to explain, “or at least she ruined the notion that even bad pizza is good pizza.” When Grassano, a native of Italy, turned up at Spacca Napoli back in 2006, her wood-fired Neapolitan pizza was a revelation in the land of deep dish and too much cheese. These days the style is ubiquitous, but Grassano, Sula is excited to report, retains her magic with the dough....

First, respect: It takes balls to adapt a book like Ted Kooser’s Local Wonders for the stage—especially as a musical, like Virginia Smith and Paul Amandes have done in this show receiving its local premiere at Chicago Dramatists. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Raising the bar higher for any would-be adapters, Kooser refrains from the bold gestures that give his predecessors their compensatory punch....

People keep saying the news wants to be free. I’m not so sure: the other day I cornered the news and tried to get a straight answer to that $64 question. I called that an outlandish comparison. The vow. Global media mogul Rupert Murdoch this month: “Quality journalism is not cheap. The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites....

Somebody here at the Reader suggested that we run a contest to come up with a new nickname for Chicago. Windy City, Second City, City of the Big Shoulders—they all have a place in our hearts and history, but they don’t resonate like they used to. We need a phrase to reflect our current reality. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s not to be confused with the City of Excess, which would imply waste....

Here’s how old I am—I actually remember when Mary Dempsey took over as commissioner of Chicago’s library system. Or maybe get inseminated. You know, my memory’s not what it used to be. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Give Dempsey credit—she came in swinging. She issued declarations like: “I’m willing to do what it takes to build a world-class library system.” And: “I will fight for more staff....

Amid all the blather about V-shaped and U-shaped economic recoveries, it’s become pretty clear that we don’t have any recovery at all. And that there’s none on the near horizon. It looks, in fact, like we’re screwed. What’s less clear is exactly what happened. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The enabler is our friend technology. Both the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times carried stories this week about how technological innovation is taking jobs away rather than increasing them, as many experts expected....

Would Congress defy Obama? Would Obama defy Congress? Would Assad get away with defying world opinion? At this point Kerry was asked by a reporter in London if there was any way Assad could avoid an American missile strike. In response, Kerry sounded a lot tougher than the U.S. was looking just then. “Sure,” said Kerry. “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week—turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow the full and total accounting....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Linda grew up on a 200 acre farm in Grant County Wisconsin, not far from Prairie du Chien, where her family raised pigs, chickens, and two dozen Guernsey milking cows. The story of her family’s farm is emblematic of family farming in general. As Linda and her siblings grew up and went off to college it became less and less economically viable to to operate a small farm without farmhands....

Zak Mucha has done admirable work as a writer (the novel The Beggar’s Shore, the intro to Andrew Vachss and Frank Caruso’s Heart Transplant, the Reader‘s 2004 Pure Fiction issue) and admirable work at his day job as a counselor providing mental health services in Chicago. But he draws on a previous job—moving furniture—for the framework of his new novel, Heavyweight Champion of Nothing (published by local press Ten Angry Pitbulls)....

Alison Green Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, in front of the three-flat on 17th Street in Pilsen where he lived in 1968 and 1969. “This block was a great microcosm of the city and the country.” “I’m a neighborhoods guy,” Jesus Garcia said last week on Ken Davis’s show Chicago Newsroom. “I represent the average person in the city of Chicago.” And Pilsen initially seemed as frigid as the weather had been his first day....

Lord Mantis I’ve written about Chicago extreme-metal deviants Lord Mantis a couple times already: once last March, when they released their most recent album, Pervertor (Candlelight), and then again for the Reader‘s Best of Chicago issue in June, where I declared them the “Best Band That Sounds Like the Robot Squid From the Matrix Movies.” There’s no new Lord Mantis record just yet, but I’ve found another excuse to revisit them: they’re playing a rare local headlining set tonight, Fri 2/15, at Cobra Lounge....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been a fan of scrappy Scranton emo outfit Tigers Jaw ever since I heard the title track of a 2009 four-song EP called Spirit Desire. As I wrote in a Soundboard preview for the band’s spring show at Beat Kitchen (which I sadly missed), “Spirit Desire” is a slow burner that sounds like a Pinkerton B side with a sturdy reggaeton beat, which does a great job of evoking the nervous energy and intensity of the kind of love that vocalists Ben Walsh and Brianna Collins are keyed in on....

KNOCKED UP sss Judd Apatow is a man who plays well with others: he started out writing for Ben Stiller and Garry Shandling, went on to produce the two funniest Will Ferrell vehicles (Anchorman and Tallageda Nights), and is currently working on projects with Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Owen Wilson, writer-director Jake Kasdan, and the gifted Texas director David Gordon Green. But Apatow’s more personal projects–the cult TV series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, his sleeper hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and now the wonderful Knocked Up–have pulled away from the boys’ club of big gags and blatant stupidity, dealing honestly with lack of understanding between the sexes....

Vigilant Reader readers have probably noticed some changes in the print edition recently, and starting with this issue they’ll see more. Editing always involves making choices, and we continually adjust our content for many and various reasons. The most recent adjustments allow us to serve our readers best by making the smartest possible use of our current resources—financial and human—and the different platforms available to us. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Since launching his career in the mid-90s, dyed-in-the-wool honky-tonk devotee Dale Watson has operated with keen self-­awareness: on his superb 1995 debut, Cheatin’ Heart Attack, he sang, “I’m too country now for country, just like Johnny Cash / Help me, Merle, I’m breaking out in a Nashville rash.” He knew that his stripped-down twang would make him persona non grata in Music City, so he operated from Austin, Texas, a longtime bastion for subversive elements within the country tradition....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In my mind at least, DIY concerts are practically synonymous with art-damaged loft parties and house shows with a half dozen crusty hardcore bands on the bill, but promoters have been working outside the established venue circuit since before the circuit was established. In this week’s B Side cover story, Jake Austen profiles Fletcher “Spoon” Weatherspoon, who’s been putting on shows since 1951 and is one of the last living pillars of the “social club” scene that once formed a robust alternative entertainment market among black Chicagoans....