Gwen Stefani | The Sweet Escape (Interscope) Anyone who’s been conscious of Top 40 in the last ten years understands No Doubt front woman Gwen Stefani as an icon first and a singer second. For her 2004 solo debut, Love.Angel.Music.Baby., the rude girl in a half shirt underwent a fashion transfiguration, full-bore co-opting the style of Japan’s Harajuku girls and even hiring a gaggle of them to serve as her posse....

After relocating from the Music Box to the Portage last year, this annual 24-hour horror marathon heads west to the beautiful Patio at Austin and Irving Park, where there’s a little more food and drink in the vicinity should you want to take a break from the mayhem. Doors open at 11 AM and features begin at noon, with shorts and trailers interspersed; a ticket lets you come and go as you please....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hunt spent six months mucking around in a warehouse at 115th and Halsted, identifying everything that was stashed there—including at least 250 linear feet of files important enough for preservation—and produced a 65-page report for which the CHA paid him $2,350. That became the starting point for his dissertation, “What Went Wrong With Public Housing in Chicago?,” which morphed into a book called Blueprint for Disaster, published last month by the University of Chicago Press....

Vosges Haut Chocolat doyenne Katrina Markoff hosts a cheese and chocolate tasting party tonight at 7 at the Lincoln Park boutique, 951 W. Armitage. She’s “chosen cheeses from around the world with a bit of acidity and nuttiness to complement the tannic yet sweet flavors of the cacao bean.” Tickets are $30 and include wine, savory appetizers, a “party favor” bag, and 10% off all purchases. She’ll do it again March 22 and 29....

JAZZ | Peter Margasak Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We just really clicked personality-wise and had such a blast playing together, so we thought, why not continue making music together—even with the obvious challenge that none of us lived near each other.” The group has finally released its impressive self-titled debut on Italian label Rudi Records, and it includes compositions by all three members....

Ingrid Hertfelder Jeremy Pelt Over the last five years trumpeter Jeremy Pelt led one of my favorite mainstream groups in all of jazz, a sleek quintet clearly modeled on the powerful Miles Davis-led five-piece from the 60s with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Ron Carter. Over the course of four stellar albums released between 2008 and last year, Pelt maintained the same strong lineup and honed an increasingly heightened group rapport....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This is the best week of the year in Chicago. Summer is officially upon us and pot is soon to be decriminalized (if only in small amounts), but what makes this week so special is that, as of today, Chicago is an open book. We’ve assembled everything you need to know about a city you already know so well, from the best eastern European afternoon snack to the alderman most likely to crowd-surf to the rap DJ who literally illustrates those conspiracy theories about Kanye and Jay-Z being in the Illuminati....

When perturbed property owner Amy Little identified herself as an environmentalist, I urged her to think twice about RedPlum/Local Values, the pink-wrapped ad rag she abominates and has now gone to court to be rid of. Surely you have tenants who welcome the coupons and news of weekend sales that RedPlum brings them each Wednesday, I said. “I would be willing to bet no one reads those things—no one,” said Little....

Andrea Bauer Heavenly (warm too) In 2011, when I first headed to Pierogi Heaven, it was new, the weather was cold, and the line ran back to the door. Not that we minded much—standing in the steamy little storefront was itself a cure for frozen feet. The Polish gents behind the counter tend multiple cauldrons of boiling dumplings, and while the pierogi are frozen rather than made on-site, that doesn’t seem to matter much either....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At first blush it seems a little weird that Street Songs of Love (Fantasy), the latest album by Austin scene kingpin Alejandro Escovedo, includes cameo appearances by former Mott the Hoople front man Ian Hunter, whose voice has not aged well, and Bruce Springsteen, who—dare I blaspheme?—never had much of a voice to begin with. In most ways these guys are paragons of classic rock, but Escovedo was one of the earliest U....

Del Close is perhaps the least famous of the great comedy maestros of the latter half of the 20th century. The performers he worked with, directed, or taught at the Compass Players in Saint Louis, the Committee in San Francisco, and Second City and the ImprovOlympic in Chicago constitute a who’s who—Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Shelly Berman, Fred Willard, Joe Flaherty, John Belushi, John Candy, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Vince Vaughn, Tina Fey, and Stephen Colbert, to name only a handful....

With his trilogy “The Brother/Sister Plays,” Tarell Alvin McCraney announced himself as a talented young writer wielding a big vision. He also staked out a territory. The Plays—which Steppenwolf Theatre Company staged, beautifully, in 2010—are set in the Louisiana bayou country, among black folk who live on land easily mistaken for water, and who survive at the pleasure of hurricanes. Perhaps more important, they map out a spiritual homeland—gritty, even sordid, yet mythic in its resonances....

Dedicated to all things emerald, the fourth annual Irish Books Art and Music celebration—aka IBAM—packs a heavy schedule of panels, performances, readings, screenings, and even live mural painting into a single weekend hosted by the Irish American Heritage Center. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The festivities begin with a sneak preview of an exhibit on James Joyce imported from the National Library of Ireland....

The crime thrillers of Hong Kong director Johnny To are not only action packed but smart, and this 2004 feature about a botched heist is full of vibrant and intriguing characters. Beginning with one fluid, uninterrupted shot nearly seven minutes long, cinematographer Cheung Siu-keung follows the crooks up and down streets and in and out of buildings. Badly outnumbered by police, they take hostages in an apartment mid-rise, and as the no-nonsense police commander (Kelly Chen) tangles with a maverick detective (Nick Cheung), the cocky ringleader (Richie Ren) uses the Internet to sabotage the commander’s carefully orchestrated press coverage....

Accounts of the history of punk in Chicago tend to overlook Los Crudos, who arrived on the scene during a period when the most of the attention being paid to the city’s musical culture was focused on more commercially appealing indie rock acts, and whose aggressive identity politics could alienate even the largely white, supposedly radical-left hardcore community of the time. (I remember hearing punks at the Fireside Bowl complaining that they couldn’t understand front man Martin Sorrondeguy’s lyrics because they were in Spanish....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are some artists who can never be disentangled from their geographic reality—artists whose aesthetic eventually becomes synonymous with a certain emotional topography. Think of Toulouse-Lautrec and the rotting splendor of Montmartre, or the vapid expanse of Ed Ruscha’s Southern California. For me, this phenomenon has always seemed particularly pronounced in artists from the midwest; I think that’s because artists tend to reflect what I find pronounced in people from the midwest....

On January 2, the indie music blog Brooklyn Vegan posted a set of photos from a December 30 show that Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings had played at Brooklyn Bowl. Based in New York, they’re at the forefront of a widespread vintage-soul revival that also includes the Budos Band, Mayer Hawthorne, Eli “Paperboy” Reed, Kings Go Forth, and Nicole Willis—and of all the artists involved, only Amy Winehouse, whom the Dap-Kings have backed in the studio and on the road, is better known....

Best Bets Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unnaturally colored hair and studded belts have been fully embraced by the mainstream, but the bands and fans that flock to the three-year-old Riot Fest rock punk signifiers like they never came into style. About 37 acts play over three days at four venues, among them ska-punk popularizers the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, pop-punk granddaddies ALL, reunited hardcore vets Reagan Youth, Danish psychobillies the Horrorpops, Naked Raygun descendants the Bomb, garage-punk freakazoid Jay Reatard, and the Ramonesy Teenage Bottlerockets....

Rouch (left) with fellow ethnographer Edgar Morin in In this concluding segment of my three-part interview with Gordon Quinn and Judy Hoffman—cofounder and longtime board member, respectively, of Chicago’s Kartemquin Films—we discuss how French ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch influenced various projects they pursued over the years. Hoffman served as Rouch’s assistant in the early 1970s when he attended the ninth annual Congress on Anthropological and Ethnographic Sciences in Chicago and later worked with him on an aborted film about the city’s jazz scene....

The Chef: Ben Sheagren (Hopleaf)The Challenger: Ray Stanis (Nellcote)The Ingredient: Coffee They also react differently to cooking. “Bitterness in beer tends to be accentuated,” Sheagren said. With coffee, “you’re going to have the same level of bitterness. It’s a fairly predictable ingredient.” Video by Michael Gebert/Sky Full of Bacon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not surprisingly, Sheagren ended up using beer as well as coffee—Red Eye coffee porter from Two Brothers....