Thinkstock Choppable but not terribly clickable My favorite recent headline is this: The article turned out not to be about misunderstood eggplants. It’s about misunderstood GMOs, or genetically modified organisms. The writer, Cornell researcher Mark Lynas, had a serious case to make about famine and science and so forth. But you know how it is with serious cases. The touch of whimsy was shrewdly deployed.
Once you start talking to Dylan Lipe, Director of Culinary Operations at BBQ Supply Co., it’s clear he knows more about meat and the science of barbecue than perhaps anyone you have ever met before. Yes, you should have paid more attention in chemistry, but why not just enjoy some of the best Texas-style barbecued brisket, ribs, sausage, and pulled pork and chicken you’ll find north of the Longhorn state....
It’s theatrical horticulture 101: In our Zone Five arts environment December is for A Christmas Carol and June is when the festivals start coming into bloom. Here are the first flowers of the 2016 fest season. NBCUniversal Second City Break Out Comedy Festival Tim Meadows hosts a showcase for 25 ethnically diverse local comics, including some—like the Defiant Thomas Brothers and Afro-Futurism veterans Sonia Denis, Felonious Munk, Martin Morrow, Dewayne Perkins, and Dave Helem—whom I’m happy to see even though I wouldn’t have thought they need breaking out....
Laura Jacqmin spent “a solid ten years” (2006 to 2016) in Chicago as a playwright. During that time she developed an admirably eclectic body of work ranging from comedy (Dental Society Midwinter Meeting, about DDS dysfunction at a convention); docudrama (Dead Pile, about exposing conditions in a meatpacking plant); and searing intimate tragicomedy (Look, We Are Breathing, a twist on the dead-kid-grief-porn genre in which the deceased teenage boy at the center of the story, whom we meet through flashbacks, is actually a real jerk)....
Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. Dennis Hastert sexual abuse victim asks for protective order to keep lawsuit details under wraps Individual A, the person who was sexually abused by former U.S. House speaker Dennis Hastert and accused him of reneging on a $3.5 million hush-money pact, is seeking a protective order to keep many details of his lawsuit confidential, according to the Tribune. Attorneys made a brief appearance in court Tuesday morning by Kendall County judge Robert Pilmer, who “delayed imposing the order while both sides hammer out specifics,” the Tribune reports....
The pandemic immediately cut off Patrick Shiroishi from public performance, and even in private it was nearly impossible for the Los Angeles avant-garde musician to perform with other people. This wore him down so much that by summer 2020 he was barely playing his saxophone. “I was really bummed out,” he says. “I didn’t touch my horn for two to three months.” The quartet completed an album, titled Fuubutsushi (風物詩), with impressive speed: the recording was done within two weeks, and Sage released it in late September....
UPDATE Tuesday, March 17: this production has been canceled. Check with box office for refunds. Imagine Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” crossed with a sex-positivity workshop and you’ve got the outlines for Sarah Ruhl’s 2009 In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), now in a revival with Idle Muse Theatre Company under Morgan Manasa’s direction. Catherine Givings (Kristen Alesia), a young doctor’s wife in a New York “spa town” circa the 1880s, wonders what her husband (Joel Thompson) is doing with all those neurasthenic female patients who make interesting noises behind the door....
When I boarded a plane bound for Chicago in Rome earlier this week, I didn’t expect to make it back to the United States. My passport had stamps from travel through Germany, France, Ireland, England, and Italy over the last few weeks, countries from which travel is now banned to the United States. On the departures board, over half of the flights out of the country were flashing “canceled” notices, including flights to India, England, Japan, Russia, and New York among others....
Sunday’s Pride Parade celebrated 50 years since the Stonewall uprising which sparked the modern LGBTQ rights movement and 49 years since Chicago hosted its first Pride Parade on June 27, 1970. It was cut short due to afternoon thunderstorms, but not before photographer Kathleen Hinkel captured a few of the day’s memorable moments. Pride Parade 2019 June 30, 2019
Suburban rock three-piece Liqs have made a home for themselves in Chicago’s young garage scene, a big community with porous borders that’s constantly breeding new bands. As front man Nick Van Horn told Houseshow Magazine, a Medium-based site that focuses on local DIY rock, Liqs started as his solo outlet—the group originally performed under Van Horn’s name. In mid-2o14 they dropped their Eye to Eye EP, and last year they contributed to the first Monster Compilation from tastemaking label Dumpster Tapes, which included tracks by a great mix of older veterans (Mac Blackout) and impressive upstarts (Son of a Gun)....
On Cloud Rat’s October compilation Silk Panic, vocalist Madison Marshall howls, “Sister wolf eats the throat of the jester / Here to fucking perform.” That line might make a fitting mission statement for the Michigan grindcore band, who have been crafting surrealistic political punk-grind for almost a decade—taking the nightmarish lyricism of Pig Destroyer and melding it with the fury born of living in a state that’s full of injustice. The band is not just ferociously articulate; they’re also inventive and unafraid to explore a vast number of styles....
Richard Park’s budtenders go through a one-year training program before they’re allowed to talk, unmonitored, to customers at Andersonville’s Dispensary 33, where he’s a founding partner and director of operations. That’s why pastry chef Mindy Segal suggested he would be a good person to explain the do’s and don’ts of dabbing, or vaporizing cannabis concentrates. The varieties of amorphous blobs that result are sold in appetizing shades of honey, amber, cream, and gold, with names such as shatter, sugar, sauce, budder, batter, crumble, rosin, kief, and good old hash....
Comedian, writer, and actor Dwayne Kennedy is truly a comedian’s comedian. He has appeared on screens and stages since the 80s, getting his start in Chicago at the open mike at Zanies on Wells Street. He’s had guest spots on sitcoms like Seinfeld and Martin, and his TV debut itself wasn’t too shabby: in 1989 he guest starred on the show 227 playing opposite fellow visiting actor Halle Berry. Kennedy grew up both on the south side and in the south suburbs, and frequently works into his comedy the kind of analysis about the city-state and community development that longtime Chicagoans can relate to....
Gossip Wolf has been tearing it up at Chicago clubs to the mixes of legendary DJ Teri Bristol since the mid-90s. Fellow enthusiasts of late-night booty shaking no doubt remember her epic sets at Medusa’s, at Smart Bar, and alongside Psycho-Bitch at Crobar’s Sunday-night G.L.E.E. Club (aka Gay, Lesbian, Everyone’s Equal). In January, Bristol was hospitalized in Tennessee for kidney failure; she’s had surgery and gone on dialysis, and her bills are piling up....
On “Epiphany,” one of the singles from Futuristic’s December album Blessings, the rapper describes his 2016 album As Seen on the Internet as a “garbage” project filled with repetitive hooks and even a Family Guy impression. The 26-year-old Arizona native had gotten trapped in the nerd-rap gimmick he utilized well in a 2015 series of videos for which he donned oversize frames and challenged people on the street to rap battles....
Outside the Auditorium Theatre on Monday shortly before midnight, a few Chicago police officers circled a shaggy middle-aged man gripping an acoustic guitar. Lounging in a chair, the hippie had been performing on the Congress Parkway sidewalk. The cops ordered him to pack up and go. But if Trump’s rally felt like a political Altamont, Sanders’s event just three days later might as well have been Woodstock. I’m not saying that just because notoriously crunchy Jerry Greenfield, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, was in attendance....
Now celebrating its 16th year, the sex-positive film festival CineKink brings to town comedy, drama, documentary, and experimental films ranging from mildly kinky to explicitly sexual and focusing on a wide variety of sexualities and identities. Founded in 2003, with roots in New York City, the annual festival tours to Oakland, Toronto, Portland, and Chicago. Lisa Vandever, one of the cofounders—and a former Rogers Park resident—says she “stumbled into the whole thing” after moving to NYC and becoming involved in the BDSM community....
That’s what he told me anyway, a few months ago when we talked about his second and presumably last cookbook Cooking for Good Times, which hits the market Tuesday in all its full-color glory. “We’re not trying to show you how great of cooks we are,” he says. The book’s fundamental truth, however, comes straight out of a restaurant kitchen: Kahan tells me he’s been cooking a lot of Japanese food up at the cabin, just because there’s not a lot of it around there....
Garth Greenwell, an American poet, critic, and fiction writer, first came to prominence in 2011 with his novella Mitko. The book, a mix of fiction and memoir, is an account of the sexual and romantic relationship between two men: the eponymous Bulgarian male hustler, and the narrator, ostensibly based on the author, who works as a teacher at the American College in Sofia, where Greenwell taught for four years. In his debut novel, What Belongs to You, Greenwell expands Mitko into a 190-page meditation on sex, desire, identity, rejection, humiliation, and what it’s like to navigate these complex subjects in Bulgaria during the early 2010s....
