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Last Labor Day, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia spent four hours at Karen Lewis’s house, discussing her plan to run against Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Garcia, 58, is a Cook County Board commissioner and a former alderman and state senator; Lewis, 61, is the fiery president of the Chicago Teachers Union. He’s Mexican-American; she’s African-American and Jewish. “We were strategizing her victory path,” Garcia told me recently. “We talked plenty about conditions in the Latino community....

It’s spring cookbook season, and there’s a lot of noteworthy pulp by local authors out and about. You’ve already heard about the wonders of The Kefir Cookbook by Julie Smolyansky. In a week or two I’ll take a look at Korean BBQ by Bill Kim and Plate magazine editor Chandra Ram. There’s also Craft Coffee by Jessica Easto, which actually came out last year (I’ve been sleeping on it). But last weekend I spent some time with Risotto & Beyond by gentleman chef and fennel pollen maestro John Coletta of Quartino fame, along with Monica Kass Rogers and the late Nancy Ross Ryan....

Prolific musician Kahil El’Zabar has hardly gone unnoticed, but I wish every music fan knew about this living legend. The son of a drummer, El’Zabar was born Clifton Blackburn in Chicago in 1953, and raised on the city’s south side. He joined the Association of the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) at age 18, and attended Kennedy-King, Malcolm X, and Lake Forest colleges before traveling to Africa in 1973 to study African music at the University of Ghana....

Chicago has enough hang-ups about hot dogs. The last thing our homegrown dog Nazis need to do is get into Detroit’s business. But that’s precisely what Humboldt Park’s Lola’s Coney Island confronts Chicago with: Detroit-style hot dogs, which were established neither in Detroit nor New York, but more likely in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the home of the oldest operating coney purveyor anywhere. Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island Wiener Stand was opened 106 years ago by Macedonian immigrants who, like many of their kind, trafficked in a hot dog delivery system that featured a mildly spiced natural casing wiener blanketed in a beanless but hearty chili sauce....

To fully appreciate the game Stormy Daniels is playing with Donald Trump, I urge you to watch Foxy Brown, the Pam Grier flick from 1974—or at least, watch her scene with Judge Fenton. Daniels, as you know, is the porn star who says she slept with Trump one time in 2006—hoping he’d cast her in Celebrity Apprentice. (He didn’t.) And then, of course, she went on 60 Minutes to tell Anderson Cooper many, though not all, of the details—leaving much more to the imagination....

Last August, in the wake of the racist violence in Charlottesville, downtown aldermen Sophia King (Second) and Brendan Reilly (42nd) called for renaming Balbo Drive. The street honors Italo Balbo, a leader of the Blackshirts, the paramilitary wing of Italy’s National Fascist Party, who later became Mussolini’s air commander and governor of colonized Libya. The aldermen blasted Balbo as a brutal racist. King and Reilly’s offices didn’t immediately respond to my interview requests this afternoon, but King told the Sun-Times that a major concern was the expense and hassle posed to business owners and residents who would have to change their addresses....

An important aspect of drag that doesn’t readily translate to a mini-challenge on RuPaul’s Drag Race is an artist’s ability to command a stage: whether that means lip-syncing in front of an audience, or marching in the streets. Chicago’s drag community showed up and showed out in 2020 at the crucial moments when we needed their unique perspectives and leadership abilities. In June, when civil unrest and public demonstrations were a consistent daily presence in the city, Black LGBTQ+ community activists organized the Drag March for Change, leading crowds on the “Boystown” strip in Lakeview to protest racial inequity in the neighborhood and beyond....

Summer of Soul (. . . Or When the Revolution Could Not be Televised) could command attention just by virtue of its treasure trove of previously unreleased vintage footage of R&B, soul, gospel, jazz, and blues legends, including Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Max Roach, and Sly and the Family Stone. But the documentary, which spotlights the 1969 Harlem Culture Festival, a six-week series of free performances celebrating Black music and culture in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park), is much more than a standard concert film....

As Wonder Years front man Dan “Soupy” Campbell spoke to the press while his band prepared to drop their sixth album, April’s Sister Cities (Hopeless), he avidly described the new material as a means to seek out and create connectivity. The six-piece group have always wanted to touch people with their music—their catalog emanates empathy, even unto the suburbs they hoped to escape as young men. And hell, their sweet sound is primed for accessibility, though the pop-punk scene they emerged from is divisive among punk and rock fans—remaining one American product that many actively ignore because it’s so sugary....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is . . . Anne Ford! April Abbott, ex-matchmaker: “Women would come in and say, ‘Oh, I’m so attractive, I spend so much time on myself, I’m so well-read, and I work out every day,’ and I would want to say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ” Bettie Luciu, waxer: “If you’re trying to apply the wax to the inner labia, you have to take your finger and move the clit away....

The queendom of drag is vast and diverse: There are comedy queens and look queens and insult queens and pageant queens, goth queens and dancing queens and lip synch assassin queens. And then there is Norwood Park’s Alexis Hex, who has carved out a singular genre as a knitting/crocheting/macrame-ing witch drag queen whose magic often involves transforming yarn into one-of-a-kind creations ranging from wall-hangings to fitted dresses to tiny toy birds....

Q: I was dumped in August by a guy I was seeing for ten months. He told me that he wants to work on himself and “needs to be selfish” right now. Since then, we have spoken every day, shared numerous dinners, and gone on hikes. Our friendship is killing me. With him I hold it together. Away from him I cry all the time. I’ve started seeing a therapist and I’m on medication....

Art Shay moved into the pine-green split-level house in a subdivision in Deerfield in 1958 with his wife, Florence, and the first four of their five children. As the kids grew up and left home, Shay’s collection of his own photos, in print, negative, and slide form, expanded from the basement darkroom to fill the house’s bottom level, then three of the four bedrooms (the fourth, where Shay sleeps, is full of books), and finally to make serious inroads into the living room, dining room, and kitchen....

The Cal-Sag Trail calsagtrail.org, @calsagtrail There’s been a fair amount of gloating lately over the fact that the recently opened Bloomingdale Trail, a 2.7-mile elevated rails-to-trails conversion on the near northwest side, is nearly twice as long as New York’s much-touted High Line. But down in the southwest suburbs, just outside Chicago’s city limits, the longest urban trail project in the midwest is under way. On June 6—the same day the Bloomingdale Trail opened—there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the first half of the Cal-Sag Trail, which currently stretches from Lemont to Alsip....

The number one question CBD Kratom cofounder Dafna Revah hears at her stores is “Will I get high from this?”—and her customers are looking for the answer to be “no.” “No one ever complained that we were a vape shop, but now there’s so many more people interested in coming in and referring people,” Fisher said. “We get a lot more people who are just interested, like ‘Tell me more, I want to understand....

It was plenty warm out when Chicago postpunks Ganser played their noontime set at this year’s Riot Fest, but their dark, thrilling jams still gave Gossip Wolf chills. Maybe it was heat stroke from wearing all black? Anyway, Ganser have long been masters of atmospheric, swirling riffs, and their new EP, You Must Be New Here, is the work of a veteran band at the peak of their powers. Opening cut “Buio” channels the catchy melancholy of Echo & the Bunnymen and Psychedelic Furs, and seems destined for lots of lovelorn mixtapes....

In the wake of last Tuesday’s primary, I’ve decided to take a page from Dr. Freud and put Chicago’s voters on the couch, so to speak. Kennedy was excoriated for his comments, especially in the Tribune, which called the remarks a “divisive fantasy.” Well, if Rahm really was up to such shenanigans, the turnout numbers show he did a lousy job. Only about 29 percent of registered voters turned out to actually vote....

Salon is the word that popped to mind when I first heard about ArtNight Chicago. It used to be a thing. Not the place we go for a haircut (in spite of COVID-19, that’s still a thing), but those wine-fueled conversational forums that got their start in the 17th century and were still going strong in the 19th. Wiki defines them as gatherings, usually in the home of an “inspiring host,” where guests amuse each other and “increase their knowledge,” just by talking....

AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia before the first runoff debate last week. They meet again tonight, with the debate airing on Fox 32 from 9 to 10 PM. From the Fox Chicago News Facebook page: “If you had the opportunity to ask one of Chicago’s mayoral candidates a question, what would it be? Leave yours in the comments below and we’ll do our best to pose it to the candidates during the 2015 Chicago Mayoral Debate Thursday at 9 p....

Kyle Sullivan Primo Mendoza When I first spoke to Primo Mendoza on Monday he couldn’t wait to get out of the hospital. Monday evening the local singer-songwriter, who played in recently defunct duo Desert Soap, was recovering from an angioplasty. Doctors at Mount Sinai inserted a stent in his heart and cleaned out an artery Monday afternoon, and now Mendoza has three stents in his main artery. He was hospitalized January 4 after an accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, and he finally left Thursday afternoon after a follow-up procedure on Wednesday....