Andrea Bauer A hand-bottled sample of Pareidolia, wrested from its natural habitat and delivered to the Reader offices. Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark’s Parachute didn’t win the James Beard Foundation Award for best new restaurant last night, but it was one of Chicago’s five national nominees on that portion of the slate, alongside Topolobampo, the Violet Hour, Donnie Madia, and Tanya Baker of Boarding House. (Madia and the Violet Hour both won....

Time to plan the most romantic (or depressing) weekend of the year! Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 2/13: At the Lunar New Year Parade floats and lion and dragon dancers make their way through Uptown (starting at 1121 W. Argyle) in celebration of the Year of the Monkey. Neighbors can enjoy face painting and lantern-making. 1 PM

Solange and Claire are sisters and servants, attending to the needs of the young woman known to them as “Madame.” They’re also nuts. What’s made them that way is an interesting question, the answer to which may or may not be embedded in the gambits they act out during The Maids, Jean Genet’s 1947 succes de scandale, getting a less than successful revival now at the Artistic Home. Sartre goes on to suggest that Genet wanted to make a whirligig of gender, too, citing a remark from his Our Lady of the Flowers: “If I were to have a play put on in which women had roles, I would demand that these roles be played by adolescent boys, and I would bring this to the attention of the spectators by means of a placard which would remain nailed to the right or left of the sets during the entire performance....

As cities around the country continue to grapple with the economic and social fallout of decades of racist public policy, a new book by Georgetown University sociologist Eva Rosen offers a compelling ethnography of the Section 8 housing voucher program. Though The Voucher Promise (Princeton University Press) is focused on a low-income Black neighborhood in Baltimore, its insights apply to Chicago and probably every other segregated American city. Meanwhile, vouchers bring less money than landlords in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods would get from market-rate renters, which adds an economic disincentive on top of racial and class biases against voucher holders there....

Salonathon held its last weekly performance at Beauty Bar on February 12. In the weeks since, several artists have mourned the loss of the unique space to experiment and be themselves. “We want to create a space where we can get really weird and have an audience that’s there for the weird, that wants to laugh, and doesn’t want dick jokes unless they’re really weird dick jokes,” Aggarwal says. “The purpose of the show is to be really big and our most expressive selves, be it in your bliss, in your rage, in your hilarity, and then find a way to alchemize that into something that serves you....

Update: The Nate Wooley/Ken Vandermark/Paul Lytton trio have canceled their tour. This show will proceed with Kuzu and a duo of Vandermark and Lytton. Local clarinet and saxophone player Ken Vandermark, Brooklyn-based trumpeter Nate Wooley, and English percussionist Paul Lytton played their only handful of gigs as a trio in 2011, but their collective history stretches back more than 20 years. In 1999 Vandermark and Lytton initiated a partnership through which they’ve explored musical extremes—density and silence, propulsion and stasis—in intimate, totally improvised duos as well as in the larger, more mapped-out environment of Vandermark’s nine-piece Territory Band....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. Elon Musk and his Boring Company will compete with three other firms to build O’Hare Express train The competition to build an express train from downtown to O’Hare International Airport is on. Two firms, Elon Musk’s the Boring Company and Oaktree Capital Management, and two joint ventures, O’Hare Express Train Partners (OHL Infrastructure, Kiewit, Amtrak) and O’Hare Xpress LLC (Meridiam, Antarctica Capital, JLC Infrastructure, Mott MacDonald and First Transit), will compete for the chance to design, construct and operate the train, according to Curbed Chicago....

Kaitlyn McQuaid/Good Food Festival Edible Alchemy presentation at last year’s Good Food Festival If you like the fact that chefs buy directly from farmers, who grow crops from seed banks and also sell to retailers like Whole Foods, one of the things you should thank for that state of affairs is the Good Food Festival, which will have its 11th annual meeting March 19 through 21. The most visible part of the event is Saturday’s public festival, which will host a wide range of vendors including CSAs and local food producers of various kinds, making soaps and jams and local honey and who knows what else....

Can every music festival be held at a museum from now on? The chill yet creative vibe of the Art Institute of Chicago was reflected in the outfits of those who attended the debut of Pitchfork’s Midwinter on February 15 through 17. Some of the most outstanding looks came from singer-songwriter Madison McFerrin, who was spotted strolling around the museum in all her glory between performances. Sal Yvet, McFerrin’s wardrobe stylist, said her Saturday outfit (pictured above) was a romantic-glam mix that was “all about movement....

Amid the furor over Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden, it’s easy to forget that his Republican opponent has been accused of rape. Democrats have to at least pretend to care about the victims. Republicans don’t even pretend—their base clearly worships Trump no matter how many women come forward to say he’s raped, assaulted, groped, assailed, or maligned them. Carroll went public with her rape charges last June, when New York magazine published an excerpt of her book What Do We Need Men For?...

People have been doing the work in Chicago for years. For decades. For entire lifetimes. The city itself was built on activism—it cannot be stated enough that this is nothing new. And in 2020 nothing slowed down. If anything, the year allowed even more people to realize just how angry they were and turn to community stalwarts to finally do something about it. Endless resource sharing on social media gave folks the tools to safely attend protests, call or e-mail representatives, have tough conversations with family members, provide supplies for people in need, and unlearn harmful practices....

Matt York/AP Coach Pete Carroll readies himself for Super Bowl XLIX, aka Super Bowl 49. Credit should go where it’s due, and it’s due any sportswriter who doesn’t write like this: We can live with that, but a paper less emphatic about its writers’ classical educations would simply have written that the Seahawks beat the Broncos “in last year’s Super Bowl.” A pretty good rule of thumb is to write in language it’s possible to read aloud....

In the early weeks of the pandemic I felt like I was thrust to the height of my creative powers, snatching perfect combinations of words and sentences out of thin air and lining them up like ants on a log. Balestreri was doing R&D a few years ago when “a mix of the jazz cabbage and doing something incorrectly” led to inspiration. “I’m from Wisconsin,” he says. “I grew up eating beef jerky as a snack and always thought it would be cool to put it on a menu someday....

This week local underground electronic label Clear released Counter-Factuals, a brooding techno 12-inch from producer Jason Letkiewicz, better known as Steve Summers. Summers made his name pumping out subterranean techno in Brooklyn, but he now lives in Chicago—where he’s collaborating with folks who understand his dark streak. He joined Melvin “Traxx” Oliphant III and Beau Wanzer in Mutant Beat Dance, turning the duo into a trio in time for their sprawling, self-titled 2018 debut....

On July 15, 1957, officers from the Cook County Sheriff’s office, a squad of journalists, and three U.S. Marine sergeants arrived at the banks of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal near Route 83, northeast of Lemont. The Marines were veterans of the Korean War, including one of nine survivors of a 32-man combat team. After four weeks of undercover work involving deputies dressing as hobos, the Cook County Sheriff’s office arrested seven men in September 1949 for cultivating a 25-acre lot not far from the plot the Marines would torch in 1957....

Korean food served cafeteria style isn’t what you’d expect to see at Girl & the Goat, the perpetually popular small-plates restaurant from Stephanie Izard. And most people never will. But on a recent rainy Wednesday afternoon in the West Loop, a couple hours before the doors open to the public, 50-odd cooks, dishwashers, and front-of-house staff from the restaurant, its sister diner Little Goat, as well as some accountants for the Boka Restaurant Group (which has offices upstairs and to which Izard’s spots belong) line up to fill their bowls with smoked pork lettuce wraps with ssamjang sauce, a mixture of red chile paste and bean paste; bibimbap with soy-marinated soft-boiled eggs; and doenjang jjigae, a soup made with fermented soybean paste, shiitake mushrooms, and tofu....

In 1948, college student Allen Ginsberg was masturbating while reading William Blake in his apartment when he heard the English mystic, born 190 years earlier, whisper to his mind a few burning lines of poetry: “For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life,” read one line. Ginsberg sensed the spiritual-erotic encounter was an epiphany—”I’ve seen God!” he yelled from his fire escape in Harlem, and realized he would deliver Blake’s same message of free love to his own generation....

According to Music Box Theatre Technical Director Julian Antos, 70mm films historically had “a heightened sense of being ‘a big thing.’ They were probably movies that cost a bunch of money to make, had big casts and beautiful landscapes. All these pieces were making a more special, more theatrical experience than ‘non-prestige’ films.” The frequency of 70mm showings dissipated, and now—when even a 35mm exhibition is a novelty for cinema goers—they only happen when an influential director such as Quentin Tarantino or Christopher Nolan uses their pull to film in the 70mm gauge or have their film blown up....

In 2016 the World Music Festival runs longer than it has at any time in its 18-year history—it’s spread out across 17 days. But in terms of total number of artists and shows, it’s relatively modest, in keeping with the festival’s past few iterations. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. By mid-­September most music fans have endured an onslaught of overstuffed summer festivals, so the WMF’s approach—giving audiences a chance to sample a rich diversity of concerts at a more civilized pace—is a smart alternative....

The most incredible moment in this Theatre Y production of a nearly-forgotten German avant-garde play by Peter Handke happens outside the venue. The play is presented against a window that has its curtains open to reveal the 4500 block of North Western in Lincoln Square in all its humdrum neon non-glory. The production enters its umpteenth movement of what sounds like one voice, spread across nine performers, incoherently blaming itself for everything it has ever done....