At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. A wedding proposal from Henry Rollins; all of our friends and family are against it. He improbably offers me a giant engagement ring. I’m trying to go to a weird movie theater that happens within several booths in the Swap-o-Rama on Ashland to watch a revival of The Seventh Seal....

Something very interesting happens when a person encounters a Vivian Maier photograph. They stop, look closely, and find themselves asking where Maier was standing when she took this photograph. You start looking for Maier in her photos. Whether it is outside of the picture or inside of it. Often there is a shadow, a reflection, a hand or a finger in the frame if you spend enough time with the image....

Damiane Nickles is a young south-sider who has designed his life around something he’s passionate about: plants. Nickles went to college in New York for painting and later switched to graphic design. Feeling stagnant in his work in corporate branding, he moved to Chicago and began working at Found and the Barn, Evanston restaurants known for their commitment to local sourcing. Found received its microgreens from Closed Loop Farms, located in the sustainably minded compound the Plant, in Back of the Yards....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, October 6, 2017. Chicago adds undercover police for the Bank of America Chicago Marathon The city has decided to increase security for the Bank of America Chicago Marathon Sunday, placing more undercover police officers in the crowd. The changes were made in response to the Las Vegas mass shooting that left 58 dead. “It’s going to be an open event, as it always is,” Anthony Riccio, the chief of the Chicago Police Department’s Organized Crime Bureau, told reporters Thursday....

ARTIST: Ryan Duggan SHOWS: Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile at Rockefeller Chapel, Thalia Hall, and Empty Bottle, 10/26-10/28 MORE INFO: ryanduggan.com

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, educator, and conceptualist Anthony Braxton was born in Chicago on June 4, 1945, and the celebration of his 75th birthday has taken a major hit from the COVID-19 pandemic. At least nine 2020 events have been cancelled so far—the only live performance that hasn’t yet been stricken from the calendar for this year is a concert by Kobe Van Cauwenbergh’s Ghost Trance Septet that’s scheduled for Luxembourg in November....

On Monday afternoon, four black teenage girls, followed by more than 1,000 protesters, shut down traffic in the middle of Chicago in the name of Black Lives Matter. “We grew up reading about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in history books, but what’s happened over the last year has made us realize that this isn’t just history,” says Lewis. “It’s been a shock to our generation. We want to end this so no generation after us has to go through what we did....

Nearly 2,000 demonstrators gathered in front of Trump Tower Wednesday night to protest president-elect Donald Trump. The protest lasted nearly nine hours, ending around 1:30 AM Thursday morning. Reader freelance photographer Carly Ries was on hand, and she captured the best handmade signs expressing the protesters’ dissatisfaction.

Should Chicago posthardcore band Slow Mass be asked to point to the physical place they started, that would be Lincoln Park’s Bourgeois Pig Cafe; bassist-vocalist Mercedes Webb met guitarist Josh Parks there when they worked at the coffee joint in 2014, and Parks later got guitarist-vocalist Dave Collis a gig there as well (the band is rounded out by drummer Josh Sparks, who previously played with Parks in furious punk act Former Thieves)....

Back in the days when one couldn’t possibly keep up with all the restaurants that opened every week in Chicago, I used to get cranky about all the cheffy burgers I was supposed to keep tabs on. The tonnage of terrible barbecue I was obligated to eat drove me into a rage I could barely contain. But now that everybody’s putting out pandemic pizza, I’m actually delighted by the proliferation of pie at nimble operations such as Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream (a collaboration between Eat Free Pizza, Kimski, and Pretty Cool Ice Cream); or Oriole chef Noah Sandoval’s Sicilian slices at Pizza Friendly Pizza; or Milly’s Pizza in the Pan, a Burt’s Place tribute operating out of a Logan Square ghost kitchen....

Andrea Bauer Prints from other Risograph presses from around the world, like Risotto Press in Glascow and Ditto Press in London, hang on the walls. Jerry Seinfeld’s face, blown up and dotted in a half-tone pattern, appears in various spots throughout the pad. The prints are remnants from Hickson’s idea for a Seinfeld-inspired zine. (“It was gonna be called Zinefeld,” he says.) Two hand-printed banners, emblazoned with Hickson’s own illustrations, hang from a living-room wall....

That’s another feature you won’t find at most bars: the draft system allows beer to be stored (and poured) at its optimum serving temperature, so a stout will be served a little warmer than a saison or pale ale. When I was there the selection ranged from classics such as Founders Harvest Ale and Big Sky Moose Drool Brown Ale to the bizarre-sounding Omnipollo Hilma Vanilla Burger & Fries IIPA, described as a “hazy imperial ‘hoppy meal’ IPA....

Michael Gebert Darko Arandjelovic and Xavier Alexander I got a note saying that a relatively new Chicago-based coffee roaster, Metric Coffee in West Town, had won a Good Food Award, an award given in San Francisco to artisan producers in various categories. OK, that’s nice. (Metropolis also won an award for their coffee.) But as I kept reading I discovered that the two guys who own Metric, Darko Arandjelovic (Caffe Streets in West Town) and Xavier Alexander (formerly of Intelligentsia), spent a year restoring a 1960s German coffee roaster to make coffee just the way they wanted it....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. As many protest anthems as we can find

By now, the steeliest of us may by inured to Chinese-style hand-pulled noodles, aka lamian. The absorbing figure eight ballet of arms and dough in the production of tensile wheat soup noodles was, a few years back, a star attraction in Chinatown, where chefs did the dance in full view of their fans at places like Hing Kee and Sing’s Noodle House. That’s to say nothing of the central Asian variant, lagman, produced less visibly at places like Jibek Jolu and Lazzat (now Chayhana)....

An interesting thing happened in Lincoln Square recently. And when it comes to restaurants, that’s a sentence one rarely hears about the neighborhood. The Warbler raises concern just by offering these items—an apparent greatest hits of the banal bar food so many mediocre spots on the strip traffic in. But that’s the menu chef Ken Carter and his business partner, David Breo, have adopted for their more casual, inclusive sophomore restaurant....

Firebrand Theatre, which calls itself “the world’s first Equity musical theatre company committed to employing and empowering women on and off the stage,” closes its inaugural season with an incredibly uplifting and of-the-moment musical comedy based on the 1980 film. Penned by Patricia Resnick, with music and lyrics by Dolly Parton, the show had a short run on Broadway in 2009. Firebrand’s production, under artistic director Harmony France’s direction, makes a stunning first impression with its cast’s gender and racial diversity....

Mike Sula Escolar togarashi, Miku Sushi Bad sushi isn’t like bad pizza. When it’s bad there’s no way to justify it—it’s bad for you, bad for fish, bad for the world. Sushi should be a rare treat, reasoned Jiro Ono, lest we eat it out of existence. That opinion is pretty unpopular in these parts judging by the crowds filling two new sushi bars in Lincoln Square, Miku Sushi and Sushi Tokoro....

Back by popular demand: The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader senior writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smokey haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the 2020 Chicago-area Illinois primary races—local and Cook County-level and, of course, U.S. presidential. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past?...