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When I think back on my childhood, what first comes to mind are buildings that no one seems to care about. My mom would drive up and down Lake Shore Drive, ferrying me to the few places I went when I wasn’t home. She’d get off at the Belmont exit and I’d fixate on the kooky tapioca-colored high-rise on the corner of Belmont and Lake Shore Drive; she would coast on Marine Drive, two blocks north of Irving Park, and I’d consider the strangely narrow apartment building with a disproportionately large white stone awning; she’d take LSD all the way up to Hollywood, turn right on Sheridan, and glide past the shoreline towers with their ostensibly gauche, outdated designs, and ridiculous, escapist names—the Tiara, El Lago—then turn onto Devon and proceed right into the heart of the assembly-line two-flats where my Orthodox Jewish psychologist still lives....

Lots of cultures find beauty in burnt rice. In Spain it’s socarrat, the crispy layer of bomba that adheres to the paella pan. In Persia it’s tahdig, the saffron-stained crust of basmati that scrapes up from the bottom of the pot. In Senegal, the chef treats herself to the xoon, the dark matrix of broken rice that lurks beneath her thiebu djeun, the national dish of fish and rice. It’s rare to come across a specialist, so when I hear of one I investigate....

Lana Del Rey is smiling more these days. Sometimes she’s smiling through tears, like she does in a hazy shot from the recent video for “Fuck It I Love You,” but she’s smiling all the same—a sign of a new level of nuance from an artist who made a name for herself peddling dreamy, depressing cliches about heartbreak and self-destruction. On her fifth studio album, 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Del Rey harnesses the world’s perceptions of her—in the January single “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have—but I Have It,” she reflects those perceptions back at the world, calling herself a “24/7 Sylvia Plath....

As a child, the High Holidays—Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)—were marked with reluctant trips to our family synagogue where the tone was somber and reflective. The gloomy music was as uncomfortable as the blue blazer I reserved only for services and bar mitzvahs. When I was not trying to decipher the purpose of the holiday through incomprehensible liturgy, I was making faces at friends or wandering out to the hallway to meet other wayward Jews, usually the parents of my friends who volunteered as ushers to avoid sitting through services....

Before the shutdown of live music this past March, if you’d asked tour manager Kat Lewis what she expected to be doing in February 2021, she would’ve been able to describe her workdays right down to the bands she’d be having wake-up coffee with. After nearly 20 years of booking and managing music events such as Warped Tour and West Fest Chicago, her life had settled into an unusual but predictable rhythm: she’d schedule commitments two years in advance that would require her to work in clusters of long days, starting around 2 PM and ending just as the sun came up....

The clavichord is an odd little keyboard popular in Europe from the 16th till the 18th century. It was designed as a practice instrument, and it didn’t produce enough volume for the typical concert experience. Its sound isn’t far from that of a harpsichord: little metal blades called tangents strike strings of either brass or iron. Most folks have heard a modern iteration of the clavichord called the Clavinet, popular in 70s pop music, that used a magnetic pickup to amplify the sounds....

When Gossip Wolf first heard Chicago singer-songwriter Phillip-Michael Scales a few years back, the nephew of blues great B.B. King was making thumping, tuneful folk-rock as Briar Rabbit. On Scales’s new EP, Sinner-Songwriter, he’s embraced a more soul-inflected sound, swirling with bluesy alt-rock riffs. In the moody video for the EP’s first single, “Lover, Let Me Be,” a man and a woman circle each other warily around a swimming pool. On Thursday, June 21, Scales celebrates the EP with a set at Emporium in Wicker Park with Mutts and Forks of Ivy....

If you were celebrating Pride last Sunday night, you may have been forced to cancel your plans and head home early. For the past 48 years, queer people and their allies have commemorated the 1969 Stonewall riots every June with marches, parades, and bar crawls through gay neighborhoods. The riots themselves were a reaction of transgender and gay people to the constant police raids on their bars and are considered the landmark event that sparked the LGBTQ radical liberation movement and its subsequent parades....

The Boystown gay bar Sidetrack always mounts an impressive spectacle in the Pride Parade—you can’t really go wrong with a bunch of scantily clad guys and gals thrusting their pelvises at the crowd from atop a moving platform—but this year, the back of the float was the real attraction: a mock scoreboard celebrated a 5-4 victory in the “Supreme Equality Championship.” Last week’s Supreme Court ruling making marriage equality the law of the land made the thrill of the parade all the more palpable....

On Sunday afternoon, in single-digit temperatures, two groups of protestors faced off across Dearborn Street over abortion rights. On the south side of the street, in Federal Plaza, behind a banner that read “Human Life Has Value,” was the March for Life. On the north side, on the sidewalk beside the Dirksen Federal Building, behind a banner that read “Abortion is Healthcare” was a pro-choice counterprotest. Both groups planned to march the same route through the Loop, up Dearborn to Lake and then back down State Street, past several state and federal buildings and City Hall....

Protest outside R. Kelly’s West Loop studio At a #MuteRKelly rally, activists who gathered to support sexual violence survivors had an unlikely interaction with the singer’s fans.

With the steady upswing in the real estate market—and downtown properties fetching record sales prices—Mayor Emanuel’s getting ready for one of his favorite activities: giving your tax dollars to developers. He’s also proposing to give developers about $17.5 million to rebuild the Lathrop Homes at Diversey and Clybourn. Of course, that’s not its real name. Tony and Rezko—like Richard and Daley—are two words you’ll probably never hear coming from the mouth of Mayor Rahm....

Chorizo verde in Chicago has been one of my white—er, green whales for years now. The vivid emerald-green links of this Toluca specialty hang all over the streets in Mexico City, but for all the splendor of Chicago’s universe of taquerias, it’s been a puzzling rarity here. Taco scholar Titus Ruscitti tells me that up until now he only knew of it being served at Invicto in Naperville and at Restaurant Amatepec on 51st in Gage Park....

Tim Samuelson initially discovered the apartment complex—a modernist skyscraper in Hyde Park with sweeping views of Lake Michigan—the way he learns about most things: by reading about it. Barbara is Barbara Koenen, an artist, budding arts entrepreneur, and recently retired city employee who for years facilitated a range of artist-centered events and initiatives for the Department of Cultural Affairs. She and Samuelson married in 2000, and she moved into his Promontory condo, bringing her own, more maximalist design sensibility....

Join me in chewing over this comment by sportswriter Rick Morrissey in Tuesday’s Sun-Times: What about a little reverse spin? I don’t understand his concern. The next time an athlete says to him, “We’re winning because God’s on our side,” he could follow up by asking, “Why? Why do you suppose God is never on the side of your opponents?” An interesting discussion might ensue. And when Kane said the Hawks were winning because they take games one at a time, did his interrogator then ask if losing teams take games two at a time, or three at a time or four?...

Hours before the New Year, Kanye West dropped a track called “Facts.” It begins with a 26-second sample of “Dirt and Grime,” a soul-funk number by D.C. group Father’s Children. (The tune appears on Who’s Gonna Save the World, recorded in 1973 but unreleased till the Numero Group put it out in 2011.) A shorter sample of “Dirt and Grime” closes “Facts,” but not before Kanye gives a shout-out to Timothy Jones, aka DJ Timbuck2, the Chicago hip-hop linchpin who passed away last month at 34....

Silence settled on City Council chambers Tuesday afternoon as zoning committee members voted narrowly to defeat an embattled proposal to build a new apartment building with 30 units of affordable housing near O’Hare airport. In a vote of seven to five, the committee sided with 41st Ward alderman Anthony Napolitano, who’s been trying to derail the project for the last year. Though it’s a loss for affordable housing advocates and the developer, the decision leaves opens the possibility of a federal court banning Chicago’s age-old practice of “aldermanic prerogative....

Tattoos, because of what they stand for, are more than just skin deep. People are often cautious about what they choose to put on their bodies forever. But that doesn’t stop them from getting inked with creative, fascinating, and sometimes outrageous designs. Last weekend, more than 5,000 tattoo enthusiasts and artists from the U.S., Asia, Europe, and South America gathered in Rosemont for the tenth Chicago Tattoo Arts Convention, which organizers say is the largest event of its kind in the country....

Julia Thiel Making bread has always seemed a little bit intimidating. People talk about how simple it is, and then write recipes with terms like “autolyse” and “preferment.” But several years after the rest of the U.S. caught on to the wonders of no-knead bread, I finally tried it and discovered, like the thousands who’d tried it before me, that it really is simple and delicious. I’ve been making it regularly for a year or so, but hadn’t branched out much beyond that....

It’s just a coincidence that Happy Death Day hit movie theaters not long before Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled his 2018 budget with a big speech before the City Council. The film is a grisly Groundhog Day in which a college student wakes up over and over again to the same day that culminates in her getting murdered. Her challenge is to decipher the murderer’s identity and kill him before he kills her again....