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Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Poll shows that more than a third of likely Democratic gubernatorial primary voters are undecided Democratic gubernatorial front-runner J.B. Pritzker still has the most support among his rivals, according to a new poll from We Ask America. Of 811 likely Democratic voters sampled between January 29 and 30, 29.79 percent support Pritzker, 17.43 percent support state senator Daniel Biss, and 11.5 percent support Chris Kennedy, the Sun-Times reports, with the rest of the candidates polling at less than 2 percent....

Four thousand years ago, when I was a college sophomore, I was sitting around my dorm room, playing air guitar to Jimi Hendrix. This was 1974, and Mikva was relatively new to Evanston, having made his name as a state representative and congressman from Hyde Park. Pardon me for the partisanship. But that’s how many people from my mother’s generation viewed the world. ‘Cause my mom was right: Mikva needed every vote he got to scrape by Samuel Young and become the first Democratic congressman out of Evanston....

Fifty Shades of Grey, the movie adaptation of E.L. James’s best-selling porn novel, screened for the press last week at Showplace ICON, in a room jammed with feverish women. But I wanted to see it again in IMAX, on a seven-story screen, because I was curious whether the movie could be blown up any bigger than it already has been. Every opinion writer in America has something to say about Fifty Shades—Newsweek has even published a special issue, “Fifty Shades Phenomenon: Exploring the Sexual Revolution,” which promises to take readers inside the secret world of BDSM....

If you didn’t know Kate Berlant was a professional comedian, you might think she’s just an eccentric audience member who wandered into the comedy club to spout her thoughts on cosmetic theft. “I believe 100 percent that women have the right to steal cosmetics, because women upon birth are forced into an economy where you have to pay for your own subjectivity constantly,” Berlant says in a typical bit. “So if you don’t have certain creams or lotions, the state won’t recognize you....

On Friday, March 20, music site Bandcamp waived its revenue share for all sales through its website. When Bandcamp announced that it would take this step, COVID-19 had only begun to upend the music industry’s fragile economic ecosystem—the first wave of Chicago concert cancellations, for instance, had arrived in mid-March. Bandcamp’s gesture was hardly enough to make everyone solvent, but it did help many independent artists and labels who use its services—not least because the surrounding surge of publicity encouraged fans to target that Friday with their purchases....

Who hasn’t had a weekend of drunken debauchery in Edinburgh? For those who haven’t, Midsummer (A Play With Songs) by David Greig, directed by Randy White and produced here by Greenhouse Theater Center and Proxy Theatre, is a fast-paced, funny look at love, life, and the ache of aging. It is the story of Helena and Bob, how they met, got drunk, and the crazy weekend that followed—basically Before Sunrise meets Once....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. In the early 70s, Bishop began gigging as a singer-songwriter (though he’s no fan of the term) in Urbana-Champaign, including at the folk festivals the Red Herring presented each fall and spring. The artists who participated could get their songs included on the aforementioned LPs, and Bishop contributed “White Lines and Road Signs” and “Kissed You Again” to the two volumes of Folk and Music From the Red Herring compiled in fall 1971....

In 2014 the Onion ran a headline that describes watching Orange Is the New Black all too well: “Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show.” With its vivid discussions of race, gender, and sexuality, Orange Is the New Black might not seem like it requires this kind of cognitive dissonance from feminists, but the fourth season had me in a pickle. This kind of TV should be hard to watch, but the outlandish pacing of season four seems to value trauma for the sake of drama and comes at the experiences of abused women from a gossipy, sensationalistic angle....

The Glass Shield Each Friday, we recommend seven Old Movies to Watch Now, all of which come recommended by one of our critics and can currently be screened online. Read the review, watch the movie, feel accomplished. • I’ve Always Loved You, Frank Borzage’s 1946 color melodrama.

In a sense, New Orleans brass band music is much like acappella doo-wop. The better practitioners of either style can make you forget you’re listening to a wordless art form where the music does the talking. On the Louisiana home turf of the Rebirth Brass Band, that legacy is something to be taken seriously. You might ham it up for the partiers and tourists, but you can’t sleepwalk through the standards—and the competition is fierce to keep the style evolving....

So far 2016 has been pretty brutal when it comes to important musicians dying: Paul Bley, Pierre Boulez, David Bowie. On Friday one of Chicago’s greatest soul and gospel singers, Otis Clay, suffered a fatal heart attack at age 73. The Mississippi native got his start singing gospel, and his gritty, expressive hard-soul style conveyed inextricable links to the church. Clay achieved some of his most lasting fame in the early 70s, working with Memphis institution Hi Records, for which he waxed indelible hits such as “Trying to Live My Life Without You....

I’ve been whinging about the balkanization of Chicago’s Koreatown for years. Most of the good old mom-and-pop places have closed shop or moved out to burbs like Niles and Mount Prospect. And yet next-generation restaurants, while not centralized, are doing their own thing in the city, and doing it reasonably well. Taking into account the groundbreaking work of places like Parachute, Bill Kim’s mini empire, and Mott St, to say nothing of BopNGrill, Crisp, and other fast-casual options, it’s safe to say that hallyu, or “the Korean Wave,” has pretty thoroughly drenched us, culinarily speaking....

Yesterday the Jazz Institute of Chicago announced that Heather Ireland Robinson, director of the Beverly Arts Center from 2014 till 2017, will take the helm of the venerable jazz-advocacy organization on Thursday, March 1. She replaces outgoing JIC executive director Lauren Deutsch, who’s held the position since 1996. Tomeka Reid: She later gave me an opportunity to intern at the Jazz Institute when I had just finished college. There wasn’t a formal internship program, but she worked with me to create a position in the education department of JIC to work under Diane Chandler-Marshall....

Big news. Dramatic news. Michael Ferro, majority owner of the Sun-Times and the Reader, now owns more of Tribune Publishing than anyone else. He’s bought 5.2 million shares for $44.4 million. His new title is nonexecutive chairman of the Tribune Publishing board. But he’s now a silent partner in Wrapports, the holding company that bought the Sun-Times and Reader. The new chairman is investor John Canning, while Bruce Sagan becomes chairman of a new entity, Sun-Times Holdings....

The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smoky haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the current Chicago races—ward-level and, of course, mayoral. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past? Let Ben and Maya talk you through it....

Last night’s Democratic gubernatorial debate brought me face-to-face with the horrifying realization that Illinois Dems spent the better part of the last decade behaving like Republicans. The message was reinforced even after the debate when I discovered several e-mails from the campaigns essentially carrying on the same attacks. Meaning—they don’t mind paying for the public schools their kids attend, but don’t like paying taxes for the other kids. And it came just a few weeks after Mayor Rahm arm-twisted the city council into unanimously voting to close mental health clinics in some of our poorest, most high-crime communities....

At this stage in our nearly year-long exile from cinemas, the text emblazoned on the stairs of the Gene Siskel Film Center now reads like a prophetic asservation: “Just a few more steps to great movies.” We spoke via Zoom after Fons had completed a long day at her current—and soon-to-be concurrent—job as director of programming at FilmScene in Iowa City, where she attended the University of Iowa as an undergraduate; she’ll continue to work at FilmScene until she becomes full-time at the Film Center....

Salsa macha, you might know, is the nutty, crunchy, toasty Mexican chili oil that has mysterious transformative powers, able to turn an average plate of food into something extraordinary, and an average cook into one to be reckoned with. If there’s one thing the pandemic hasn’t slowed down it’s my chronic Condiment Acquisition Disorder (CAD). Right now my dangerously overcrowded fridge is home to several kinds of hometown salsas macha, like La Lupita Salsa Diabla, from venerable Archer Heights masa makers La Guadalupana (available at your friendly neighborhood Cermak Produce)....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Nonsun, Black Snow Desert Ukrainian duo Nonsun made their full-length debut in January with an arid sprawl of hypnotizing instrumental doom. This stark, pitch-black music drapes crawling drones atop distorted chords as huge as hills, while icy arpeggiated guitars meander in and out of phase with tolling bass and tumbling drums. Fried desert-­rock riffs and clip-­clopping percussion give the darkness a vaguely rustic flavor, but the album’s eerie ambient passages and eruptions of distant thunder mostly bring to mind vast un­­inhabited spaces—the kind that make you think about how far away the wind comes from....

Elevator Lucki Ecks Between the surprise release of Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s Surf last Thursday and Lil Durk’s eagerly awaited major-label debut (Remember My Name) landing in stores yesterday it might’ve been easy to miss Lucki Ecks‘s third mixtape, X (Vol. 1), which came out Saturday. On X the local MC-producer continues to rap like someone who sounds like they’re just barely awake—and he continues to make it sound interesting, teasing out a subtle tension in his cool, lackadaisical flow....