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Friday, May 22 Inspired by our James Beard award-winning Key Ingredient series, KICO Invites you to taste and vote for nearly two dozen dishes created by Chicago’s most outstanding Chefs using one of five secret ingredients featured in past columns. Must be 21+. VIP Tickets: $125 6:30-11:30PM VIP guests will have access to the event one hour early and can enjoy bites from Dave Beran, Executive Chef at Next, who in 2014 won the James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef: Great Lakes....

Like many millennials, I happen to occupy a demographic that helped drive the nu-metal boom at the end of the 1990s. I never owned a pair of JNCOs, but I devoured every CD that vaguely reminded me of Korn’s Follow the Leader. While I’m embarrassed now to admit that I spent actual money on a Hed PE album (hey, I was young and made mistakes), I still have a soft spot for some of that ol’ caustic, supersize pop-metal....

I didn’t have a list the last time I went grocery shopping without a mask. It was Saturday, March 14, 2020, and I had booked it down the alley between my apartment and the Devon Market to stock up on “the essentials” before a rumoured two-week stay-at-home order began. My cart was half full before I realized something awkward—I didn’t know what the essentials were. So I started over, snaking up and down each aisle, and I ended my trip in the dairy section....

Chance the Rapper’s new Coloring Book is expected to land on the Billboard 200 soon based on streaming plays alone—it’s an Apple Music exclusive for another week or so yet. He’s not the only rising Chicago rapper on the charts, though. South-side native Dreezy has been steadily climbing the Hot 100 (among several others) thanks to the January single “Body.” With her hard raps and sultry singing, she broke out after the February 2014 release of her Schizo mixtape; by the end of the year, she’d collaborated a couple times with Common, lit up a BET Hip-Hop Awards cypher, and landed a deal with Interscope....

Chicagoan Frank Zango possesses something like magic: under the name Zango the Third, he’s able to create oddly soothing, stylistically scrambled outsider-soul songs fast enough to fill several full-lengths a year. In early April, he self-released his second album of 2020, Aunt Ida’s Asteroid Mixtape, where he continues to stretch to the outer edges of his pop proclivities; on “They Ain’t Heavy, That’s My Devil” he warps his warmhearted voice into a high-pitched chirp, and on “Woo!...

Paige Wynne Elastic’s house piano. You have to bring your own candelabra. In early November 2014, the Elastic Arts Foundation ceased operations at 2830 N. Milwaukee, a second-floor space that the 13-year-old nonprofit had occupied since 2006. According to director and cofounder Sam “Samiam” Lewis, the HVAC system had failed, leaving Elastic with no heat or air-conditioning. And because none of the windows in the space would open (the stairwell to the front door provided the only source of ventilation), even the relatively mild summer had been “insufferable,” especially when the main room filled up for a concert, art opening, or other event....

The Yunahon Mixtape, the second full-length by Long Island punk lifer Jade Lilitri, who records and performs as Oso Oso, is about the denizens of a fictional town called Yunahon. It’s also the story of frustration—not necessarily in the creative process, but during the final stages of its birth. After an unsuccessful search for a label, Lilitri uploaded the album to Bandcamp last January as a pay-what-you-want release. Despite its beginnings, the album set a high bar for emo and indie rock that few other 2017 albums have surpassed....

Michael Hernandez de Luna has been designing phony stamps and sticking them on envelopes for more than 20 years. He’s a satirist and provocateur who intentionally courts conflict. Because stamps are legal currency, using one’s own designs could be construed as fraud—but Hernandez de Luna’s creations aren’t counterfeit, so he has never been arrested or prosecuted. And after all, who’s really being deceived? Hernandez de Luna’s unwitting collaborators, the United States Postal Service employees who are in charge of canceling stamps, could be viewed as the butt of the joke....

Chicago residents and visitors who like to “work it work it” show up in droves to the justifiably popular, city-sponsored Summerdance series in Grant Park. Live bands and DJs, and a first hour of dance instruction, make for a lively and free night out in downtown. Unfortunately, Summerdance doesn’t kick off this year until June 27. But there are some other free ways to work your body, stretch out, and discover your inner Aunt Viv before June....

The Lobster, the first English-language feature from Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, takes place in a dystopian world where single people are hunted with tranquilizer darts and, when captured, must secure a suitable mate within 45 days or be transformed into an animal. As the film opens, a paunchy, nearsighted nebbish named David (Colin Farrell), whose wife of 12 years has recently left him for another man, checks into a rural hotel that specializes in matchmaking....

For many years reedist Ken Vandermark was one of the main engines driving Chicago’s improvised-music scene. He played all the time in loads of contexts, and regularly formed new configurations; along with gallerist and Reader contributor John Corbett, he brought to Chicago a seemingly endless stream of national and international musicians who’d never been here before; and he organized many important concert series. For much of the past decade, though, most of his work has been in Europe, and he hasn’t played as much in his hometown....

Members of Chicago’s LGBTQ community have until Thursday, January 31 to participate in an online needs assessment survey, the results of which will be used to make grant-making decisions for organizations that support some of the city’s most vulnerable populations. While her team will be looking at data from the entire community, she says researchers are curious about what issues are prioritized when they control for race, orientation, and gender identity....

“When I first heard Isn’t Anything by MBV, that was probably 1989,” says Scott Cortez, the Chicago-based musician who’s half of Lovesliescrushing. “And I was like, ‘I know what that is! It’s this one patch on this one specific effect.’ I remember people freaking out—’Is there something wrong with my tape? Is there something wrong with my CD?’ And I was like, ‘No, this is amazing! What’s wrong with you? You don’t like warbling guitars?...

It would seem that August Strindberg’s daring 1888 psychological drama Miss Julie, about an illicit, destructive, doomed love between a male servant and his master’s daughter-in a social world built around knowing one’s place-would transpose perfectly to apartheid-era South Africa. Injecting a particularly brutal expression of state-sanctioned antiblack animus into Strindberg’s cutting tale of class, gender, and psychological trauma would surely bring the venerated but to contemporary tastes melodramatic chestnut screaming to life....

The members of west-side collective Pivot Gang have been calling themselves a boy band since long before Brockhampton was a twinkle in Kevin Abstract’s eye. Because Joseph Chilliams, Frsh Waters, MFn Melo, and Saba all rap, this self-description has caused some confusion, but as Pivot Gang see it, there’s not much to differentiate them from, say, the Backstreet Boys. “The only difference is that a label didn’t put us together,” Chilliams told Chicagoist in 2013....

Local rapper Xavier Holliday, aka XVRHLDY, takes to collaboration with aplomb. On his 2014 track with Hurt Everybody’s Supa Bwe, “Every Story Ever Told,” Holliday feeds off his partner in crime and slides in and out of his verses as if the instrumental was built to accommodate his every word. Holliday has struck gold again with “Polaroids,” a collaboration with 16-year-old Wisconsin rapper Trapo. Using a slightly reworked version of a loose, hip-hop-inflected neosoul instrumental by Chris McClenney and Iamnobodi called “Natural,” the pair emphasize the lax feel of the original track....

Before the Lucas Museum came along, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s most visible legacy project was the reinvention of the city’s riverfront. The construction of six new blocks of the Riverwalk would be his sparkling achievement, the Emanuel version of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s Millennium Park. The city has said it intends to pay down the federal loan it used to finance the construction with vendor fees. Last year vendors on the existing stretch of Riverwalk grossed $4....

Ten years ago a friend came down with cholera after eating a malevolent oyster at Katsu. It happens. Despite this unfortunate event, the unassuming sushi bar on an unfashionable far-north-side street—which closes it doors at the end of the month after nearly 30 years in the business—remained in regular rotation among my pal’s favorite restaurants. That’s because Katsu was the best in the city—and I’ll fight anyone who says any different....

Q: When I started dating my husband, he told me he had a low libido. I said I could deal with that. We waited several months before having sex, and then after we started, it was infrequent and impersonal. There was some slow improvement over the three years we dated. Then we got married, and suddenly he had no libido at all. He blamed health problems and assured me he was trying to address them....

A few years ago, in my former neighborhood in Queens, I passed an ornamental column amid the sidewalk trash. Regret prompted me to backtrack and haul the plaster orphan home. It’s since moved with me to Chicago, where, bearing a pothos, it receives many compliments. While Jones was cooped indoors last year, she began thinking about ideologies of whiteness that are baked into everyday domestic life. She bought ornamental columns from local sellers on Craigslist and Facebook, made of cheap materials such as plastic, wood, plaster, or metal....