Carnitas Don Pedro1113 W. 18th | 312-829-4757 $ Mexican | Breakfast, Lunch: Sunday-Wednesday, Friday-Saturday | Closed Thursday | Cash only La Casa del Pueblo1834 S. Blue Island | 312-421-4664 Just north of 18th along Ashland is this tiny, semi-fast-food joint where you place an order at the counter, then wait to pick it up. The extensive menu has mostly a la carte items like gorditas (thick corn tortillas split and stuffed with your choice of filling), sopes (hand-formed masa discs filled with ground beef, chicken, pork, chorizo, or tongue), burritos, and tamales....

Voguing is the subject of Third Swan From the End: Battle Gracefully to Be Legendary. Choreographer Darrell Jones says he’s haunted the sidelines of the scene for 15 years, so he knows the moves and the culture. But after receiving a 2006 grant from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum he began looking into the form intensively, struggling out of bed at 3 AM to attend local balls. A recent transplant to Chicago, Jones is an elegant presence onstage (he’s performed with the Bebe Miller and Ralph Lemon companies, among others)....

Though Kronos Quartet’s world-in-a-blender approach has yielded some dodgy cocktails over the years, you have to give them credit for helping to break down the walls of the classical music ghetto: just about every genre of music on the planet borrows freely from others, so why shouldn’t serious composers have the freedom to do the same? Kronos also paved the way for the New York string quartet Ethel–though there’s no confusing the two ensembles....

Like David Cross, Todd Barry, and Patton Oswalt, Eugene Mirman is at the forefront of a shift away from comedy clubs and toward the career path of the indie band. Russian-born, Boston-bred, and New York-based, Mirman regularly performs in music venues, records for a rock label (Seattle’s Suicide Squeeze), and has opened for the likes of the Shins, Modest Mouse, and Yo La Tengo. But he’s unique among his peers. Less political than Cross, not quite as dry or subtle as Barry, and not as steeped in pop and lit culture as Oswalt, he takes a deeply weird, farcical approach....

Bio: Chemistry II: Esters and Essays (Birthwrite, 2004), a remastered and revamped version of the 2002 debut by local MC PSALM ONE, sometimes sounds less like a cohesive record than a sampler of her abilities. Luckily, her skill set is enormous. An impressive shape-shifter, she can rap in double time, effortlessly dish out complex rhymes (“On and On” pairs “stressed dudes hate me” and “test-tube baby”), and shift moods smoothly–“Joe Mama” is full of braggadocio (“How many heads do I split?...

One of the more idiosyncratic singer-songwriters who got saddled with the “new Dylan” tag in the 70s, John Prine is now more of an anti-Dylan: Mr. Zimmerman has never let go of his cynical, apocalyptic vision, but Prine’s music has become increasingly winsome and wistful since the mid-90s. The new Fair & Square (Oh Boy) is his first album of new material since 1995’s Lost Dogs & Mixed Blessings; in the interim, he’s duetted with his favorite female singers on a collection of country oldies, rerecorded some of his back catalog, and tossed off a couple of live discs....

My brain hurt after this show, but I’ve never felt so good about falling into a state of utter confusion. David Isaacson’s smart, funny script is divided into 26 chronological segments, performed in a different randomly determined order each night. (His scenes–like the holes in an ingeniously designed golf course described in the show–are all “welcoming” enough to be first and dramatic enough to be last.) The characters are three couples: a poet king and psychoanalyst queen, a left-brained detective and her right-brained military husband, and a police superintendent who strives to create order and her mischief-making courtier spouse....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Associated Press reported in May on the ongoing battle between the family of the late Sergeant Patrick Stewart and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Stewart, who was killed last year while serving with the Nevada National Guard in Afghanistan, was a Wiccan, and his family wants a Wiccan symbol–a pentagram inscribed in a circle–to appear on Stewart’s plaque at a veterans’ cemetery in Fernsley, Nevada....

Lead Story Questionable Judgments Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stephen Sodones, 62, was hospitalized in August after being bitten three times on the arm by a copperhead snake that he had picked up in an attempt to help it safely cross Route 23 in Jefferson, New Jersey. (According to a neighbor interviewed in the Newark Star-Ledger, Sodones is a committed animal lover who likes to feed bears and once successfully revived a stunned bumblebee by warming it in his hands....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the previous few weeks, some aldermen had groused that they didn’t have enough time to scrutinize the budget before they had to vote on it. What none wanted to admit publicly is that the budget documents are, frankly, complicated and confusing. The line item sections of the budget–which show some detail about how taxpayer money is spent in each department–are organized by revenue stream rather than overall expenditures....

Susan DeLallo and Stephen Weiner’s new musical breaks no ground and strains credulity, but director Marc Robin’s cast spins the Italian stereotypes in amusing ways. Set in 1956 New Jersey, shy Vinnie secretly loves Angie, but she’s hot for womanizing Rocco, who’s chasing after buxom, neglected Celeste. When Celeste’s mobster husband puts a hit on Rocco, the greaser convinces Vinnie to switch identities (because that always works), under the guise of coaching Vinnie to win Angie’s heart....

Lest I be accused of waging a war on Christmas by the pro-Christmas lobby–oh, whatever would I do if the all-powerful puckerbutts at the American Family Association called for a boycott of Savage Love?–I’m presenting a heartwarming selection of how-I-lost-my-virginity horror stories submitted by my readers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I got my cherry popped when I was 15 years old, by a 22-year-old man....

It’s no surprise that Stanislaw Witkiewicz’s aggressively irrational plays were largely unknown when he committed suicide in 1939 (the Nazis were closing in on his native Poland from one direction, the Russians from another). Not only were his absurd scripts several decades ahead of their time, but the author was dismissed as a madman thanks to his devotion to narcotics, his antisocial personality, and his posture as a bohemian sex addict....

Lost Land In Lost Land as in The Libertine, Malkovich stars as a moody, conflicted aristocrat. Count Kristof is a middle-aged Hungarian–a former hussar and politician–who’s retreated to his isolated castle in the mountains. Famed for having brought his nation’s antiquated railway system into the 20th century, he’s now obsessed with the family business: growing grapes and making Tokay–“the king of wines, the wine of kings,” in the words of Louis XIV....

Friday 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER Ever since her brief flirtation with pop and R & B in the mid-70s, Dee Dee Bridgewater has focused on pure jazz, and who can blame her? She’s a glorious, glamorous diva in the tradition of Sarah Vaughan–like Vaughan’s, her music mixes voluptuous balladry, operatic intonation, hip attitude, and intrepid improvising. A glance at her discography reveals the gamut of material at her command: she’s recorded tributes to composers like Horace Silver and Kurt Weill (the latter on her magnificent 2002 disc, This Is New), a set dedicated to Ella Fitzgerald, and a tribute to French cafe tunes on her most recent album, last year’s J’ai Deux Amours (Universal)....

The experiences of the German women who resisted, evaded, or supported Hitler make for compelling stories, but Shirley Lauro, who also wrote the hankie-wringing Piece of My Heart, doesn’t trust us to comprehend them. In this world premiere by the Chicago Jewish Theatre, Nazi Germany is reduced to one country-bred maiden, three patrician schoolgirls, and a recruiting-poster Reichsfrau whose accent and swagger fall just short of Mel Brooks parody. Under Greg Kolack’s direction, the performers attack their roles with gusto–especially Anna Carini as the hearty country girl (whose faint German accent is only slightly more exotic than the schoolgirls’ straight-English acting-class deliveries)....

While James Teitelbaum was out with Pigface in 1994, playing keyboards on future industrial classics like “Suck,” “Asphole,” and “Fuck It Up,” none of his bandmates had any idea that he was living for the moment he could slip into a Hawaiian shirt and make a beeline for the nearest tiki bar. Teitelbaum, a newbie recording engineer at Chicago Trax who’d been drafted for the tour, had become obsessed with what he calls “the lost relics of Polynesian culture” two years earlier, while studying recording in Florida....

For more than 20 years before he became alderman of the 44th Ward, Tom Tunney worked full-time as a small businessman, running the Ann Sather’s restaurant near the Belmont el station. So you’d figure he’d be sensitive to the needs of other small businessmen in his ward. Yet merchants along Clark between Addison and Roscoe say he didn’t seem to have a clue that their businesses would be hurt when he banned parking at meters outside their stores before, during, and after Cubs games....

The programs in this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival are yoked together under the sober rubric “The Climate of Concern” and are intended to allow for a wide-ranging examination of global warming, ecological disasters, overpopulation, and the just generally problematic interface of civilization and the natural world. Given such grim material, the schedule is surprisingly diverse, and even lighthearted in spots. Of course there are heavy hitters like economist Amartya Sen and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert (Field Notes From a Catastrophe)....

Juan Perdiguero Dogs seem to leap through space at Three Walls. The greyhounds in Juan Perdiguero’s eight large drawings on photo paper combine the cuteness of pets and the sleekness of racers with hints of aggression. Unlike conceptually driven artists, for whom the picture frames might be more important than the rendering, he communicates through exquisite control of his medium, etching ink. Groups of tiny lines convey fur, but a bit more chaotically than in an old master because Perdiguero lays down ink first, then removes it with gloved hand and paper towel....