At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, takes effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff—and our pets—are spending our time. “Simon Pegg and Nick Frost give coronavirus advice in Shaun of the Dead spoof” (Reuters) v v
Brooklyn rapper Young M.A is a star on the rise thanks to his snarling single “Ooouuu,” with its wafting, dreamlike synth and its sparse (and sparsely deployed) beats. The YouTube video for “Ooouuu” has accumulated more than 25 million views since it was uploaded in May, and other rappers have contributed to the song’s popularity by recording their own versions—among them Nicki Minaj and A$AP Ferg. Meek Mill used the track to dis LA rapper the Game (who also released his own take on the song), and last week Calumet City native Tink put her own spin on “Ooouuu....
Kymberli DeLost uses doenjang at home in ramen, sauces, and marinades, she says, but she’s never experimented with the Korean fermented bean paste at the Gage, Acanto, or the Dawson, the three Billy Lawless restaurants where she runs the pastry programs. At least, she hadn’t until David Park (Hanbun) challenged her to create a dish with doenjang. The bean paste is similar to miso (both are made from soybeans), DeLost says, but with more fermented flavor and less sweetness....
Q: The outside shape of mammals is symmetrical: limbs, eyes, ears, and nostrils arranged on either side of a central axis. Why are the contents of the abdomen arranged asymmetrically? —Emy Amstein Cecil replies: Take a look at a car sometime, Emy. As seen from the sidewalk, nearly all the elements are laid out symmetrically, but pop the hood and it’s a free-for-all in there. And to an overwhelming degree, animal physiology has shaken out the same way....
There is a distinction to be drawn between adaptation and dramatization. Dramatizations are lovely. They are almost as nice as reading the book yourself. Audiences ideally come away from a dramatization with a sense of accomplishment at having sat all the way through most of the famous scenes in an important literary classic, all without dozing off more than a handful of times. Adaptation is a different can of beans. It ought to require just as much ingenuity, moral acumen, and sleight of hand to retool fictional characters for stage presentation as it took for the author to fashion them....
As we at the Reader head into 2020, a spirit of transformation and renewal prevails. In keeping with that spirit, we’re publishing what as far as anyone here knows is the first music critics’ poll in the paper’s nearly 50-year history. Initially the brainchild of Reader senior staff writer Leor Galil, it quickly grew to involve nearly half the editorial department and dozens upon dozens of outside contributors. Everyone chose their ten favorite Chicago albums of the past ten years, and we compiled all those picks into a ranked list of several hundred releases....
This feature was reported as a part of Borderless Magazine‘s Asylum City series on immigration and sanctuary in Chicago and made possible thanks to support from the International Women’s Media Foundation and Kickstarter supporters. v
Q: I could really use your advice. I recently found my boyfriend’s HIV meds while I was house-sitting for him and went into his cupboard for a multivitamin. We’ve been dating for a year and I had assumed he was negative. I’m negative myself and on PrEP and he is undetectable, so I know there is essentially zero risk of me getting infected, but we agreed to some degree of “openness” at the start of the relationship—having threesomes together—and I recently found a guy we’d like to invite over....
Last week the folks at the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) sent out a letter announcing they were permanently closing their venues for both performances and classes in New York City. (This on top of announcing in March they were laying off all their employees at their theater spaces in NYC and LA, in response to the pandemic.) The letter was signed “Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh, Founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade....
Tribune Publishing has just replaced Elizabeth Fenner, the editor of Chicago magazine, with Susanna Homan, creator and publisher of Splash. Just the other day, Fenner and Chicago political writer Carol Felsenthal had lunch and discussed Felsenthal’s future projects. Friday afternoon Fenner called to tell her she’d been axed. LRT: grateful to @bethfenner for her tremendous support and the freedom she gave me. the mag has been excellent under her care....
Imagine if the CTA, a public transportation system that’s subsidized by taxpayer dollars, were mostly serving wealthy white folks. That would be bullshit, right? To its credit, CDOT has recently taken steps to address Divvy’s equity problem. When the system added 175 more stations last summer, many of them went to low-to-moderate-income, predominantly African-American and Latino communities on the south and west sides. Last week I took out one of the big blue bikes and set out for the heavily African-American communities of West Garfield Park and Austin, the first neighborhoods to get docks in this round of installations....
Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photos Jonathan Toews gets blocked by a duck. As seventh games loom in both East and West, hockey fans can consider the possibilities: There’s a lot at stake.
Q: I am a twentysomething, straight, cis-female expat. How long do I have to wait to ask my German lover, who is übersensitive about the Holocaust, to indulge me in my greatest—and, until now, unrealized—fantasy: Nazi role-play? He is very delicate around me because I am a secular Jew and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. (Even though I’ve instructed him to watch The Believer, starring Ryan Gosling as a Jewish neo-Nazi, to get a better grasp on my relationship with Judaism....
If you learn anything from reading romance novels, it’s that true love happens unexpectedly. For Sonali Dev, it happened about ten years ago, when she was sick in bed with a 102-degree fever and nothing to read. She asked her husband, Manoj Thatte, to pick something up for her when he took their kids to the library. He came back with a cheap paperback with the title stamped on the cover in gold foil....
For much of its length, Stony Island Avenue is basically an expressway with stoplights. Located on the southeast side between 56th and 130th, it generally has eight travel lanes, the same number as Lake Shore Drive, although it carries half as many vehicles per day—35,000 versus 70,000. Due to this excess lane capacity, speeding is rampant. The complex intersection of Stony Island, 79th, and South Chicago, a diagonal street, is particularly problematic....
Avengers: Age of Ultron is on my mind today—partially because I just took in the joyless spectacle last night, partially because it’s especially indicative of the diminishing returns of superhero movies of the past few years. Like Ben Sachs, I’ve found the Marvel movies of late to be, well, lacking, but I inevitably wind up at the theater out of a sense of obligation: to participate in a cultural phenomenon that the younger me—the one who amassed a dresser drawer full of Marvel comics—could only imagine making it to the big screen....
There’s something about the walking tacos at Lincoln Square’s Taco in a Bag that invites comparison to Patton Oswalt’s “failure pile in a sadness bowl” rant about KFC. Owned and operated by champion gurgitators Pat “Deep Dish” Bertoletti and Tim “Gravy” Brown, aka Glutton Force Five, Taco in a Bag traffics in an undeniably alluring sort of drunk/stoner fuel that can result in a different kind of crapulence. It may soften your hangover, but the shame might make you feel worse....
When the Awakening formed in the early 1970s, they combined veterans of Chicago’s R&B sessions and jazz players affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The sextet drew on these diverse sources for its 1972 debut album, Hear, Sense and Feel, which is being reissued domestically this month as part of Real Gone Music’s new pressings of the California-based Black Jazz catalog (which also includes influential 70s LPs from multi-instrumentalist Doug Carn and pianist Walter Bishop Jr....
Wong Ping’s Vimeo page features a box containing key information about the artist, including this short—and, for those expecting something befitting a moving-image maker, perplexing—bio: “A comedian based in Hong Kong.” This isn’t meant facetiously: the 37-year-old animator views himself not as a serious artist whose audacious, excessively colorful renderings represent grotesque truths about society, but rather as something of a stand-up comedian, whose irreverent jokes, rendered via said vulgarities, accomplish that task just as well....
