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Not only is 2020 the Year of Chicago Music, it’s also the 35th year for the nonprofit Arts & Business Council of Chicago (A&BC), which provides business expertise and training to creatives and their organizations citywide. To celebrate, the A&BC has launched the #ChiMusic35 campaign at ChiMusic35.com. It includes a public poll to determine the consensus 35 greatest moments in Chicago music history (the Reader will publish the results on July 23) and a raffle to benefit the A&BC’s work supporting creative communities struggling with the impact of COVID-19 in the city’s disinvested neighborhoods....

Gloria Estefan’s got one. So do the Four Seasons. Carole King’s got a really good one. Even Motown’s got one, and that’s a record company. I guess Cher figured it was her turn for a biographical Broadway musical—though I don’t understand why, since she was never all that interesting or good, and she doesn’t qualify as a phenomenon except insofar as she’s been able to parlay her not-that-goodness into a remarkably durable career....

There’s a lot to be said for the pleasures of cheap instant ramen. In fact there’s a whole genre of cookbooks devoted to pimping Momofuku Ando’s revolutionary flash-fried dorm room staple. But ever since the founder of Top Ramen and Cup Noodles launched it in 1958, instant ramen has more or less obscured to the world outside of Japan what real ramen actually was: a working-class street food—and what it evolved into: a craft that inspires obsession among chefs and eaters alike....

The city hopes the Loop Link bus rapid transit corridor, a bold reconfiguration of street space, will double the speed of buses crossing the central business district from the previous glacial rush-hour pace of 3 mph. The $41 million project was designed to provide an express route for buses traveling between Michigan Avenue and the West Loop. I overheard several commuters complaining about the new system. A couple of them strategized about different bus lines they could take to avoid the BRT corridor....

In retelling Charles Dickens’s perennial holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, playwright Maya Malan-Gonzalez performs the theatrical equivalent of completely gutting a building, keeping the foundation and outer walls, but changing everything else. Her A Xmas Cuento Remix, set in a contemporary urban area, concerns a sour Christmas-hating Scrooge of a woman, Dolores, successful in business but mean to her employees and estranged from the only family she has left, her niece’s family....

On a recent Monday afternoon, members of a group called Concerned Citizens of Riot Fest in Douglas Park guided a visitor around the west-side green space they say was disfigured by the three-day music festival last fall. Eight months after the fest, the south end of Douglas Park—bounded by Ogden, Albany, 19th, and California and occupied by soccer and baseball fields—still displays tire ruts and wide, muddy areas where heavy foot traffic from 135,000 festgoers tore up the turf....

Texas Tiki Disco sounds more like word salad than a plausible nightlife concept. But the temporary takeover of Lost Lake by Houston’s Anvil Bar & Refuge—during a week when the bar’s usual honcho, Paul McGee, and his staff are on a research trip to Martinique—is quite charming and not at all desultory. On Monday night, the bartenders and servers donned cowboy hats and aloha shirts. A mirrored ball dangled from the ceiling next to taxidermied blowfish....

Near the end of the first act of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, the cast delivers a blazing cover of the real-life Cambodian-American rock band Dengue Fever’s “One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula.” It’s the kind of music that makes your syn­apses light up like firecrackers sparking over a riptide of endorphins. It’s April 1974. We are in Cambodia. The band is called Cyclos, and its members know exactly how good they are....

Sebastian Vargo doesn’t want to come off like a snake oil salesman, but he is very much an evangelist for the power of pickling. Vargo received an early fermentation indoctrination growing up in suburban Detroit, where his mother led regular forays to the area’s classic Jewish delis. “It was too much meat for me as a kid,” he says. “It was these stacked high sandwiches and these half and full sours....

The story of 42 Grams is a somewhat unlikely one. Chef Jake Bickelhaupt had experience in top-notch kitchens (Alinea, Charlie Trotter’s, Schwa) but had never run his own before, aside from the underground dinners he and his wife, Alexa Welsh, had been hosting in their apartment. The elaborate 15-course meals Bickelhaupt was producing at that “guestaurant,” which he called Sous Rising, intrigued filmmaker Jack C. Newell. After attending one, he started filming Bickelhaupt’s food prep and presentation, not entirely sure at the time if anything would come of it....

I don’t relate to a lot of foodie culture. I approached [the Midwestern Diner] from the perspective of looking at the craftsmanship of food in a more artistic way. I saw a parallel between running a contemporary restaurant and running a film set. You can make a film that’s just a series of iPhone videos cut together. A chef can do a pop-up dinner where you get 16 people in a room, cook the whole thing yourself, bust your ass, and you’ve got a wonderful dinner....

On Friday, Bandcamp will pass along its usual cut of sales to artists and labels for a 24-hour period—the ninth time it’s done so since March, when COVID-19 destroyed live music. This “Bandcamp Friday” follows Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday, all of them highly publicized drives to get people to part with their money. 79rs Gang, Expect the Unexpected Beabadoobee, Fake It Flowers Cell Phones, Battery Lower Dark Buddha Rising, Mathreyata...

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Joanna Klonsky @joannaklonsky Joanna Klonsky does for the City Council’s 11-member progressive caucus what it takes Mayor Emanuel’s two dozen flacks to do—get the word out. Hey, Mr. Mayor, hire Klonsky, so you can cut your PR budget and spend the savings on schools! Born in Chicago, Klonsky graduated from Oak Park River Forest High School and Bard College. In 2011 she was the spokeswoman for Miguel del Valle’s mayoral campaign before Alderman Rick Munoz recruited her to work for the progressives....

George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Renisha McBride, Atatiana Jefferson, Jordan Edwards, Botham Jean. The space of this article could solely consist of the names of those Black lives who are no longer with us due to police brutality. Police murder. Yet this is an article about theater, which in the shadow of death feels extremely small and insignificant. BTC began in 2016, and Hodge-Dallaway’s initial intention was to find a way to share her extensive play library....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, July 25, 2016. White Sox clubhouse drama: pitcher cuts up throwback jerseys White Sox star pitcher Chris Sale was all over the national news this weekend for reportedly cutting up all of the team’s 1976 throwback jerseys Saturday. It was a brutally hot and humid evening for a baseball game, and he reportedly thought the collared jerseys would make it even harder to play and that “PR and jersey sales” were more important to the team than winning....

Just about a year ago Logan Square’s Osteria Langhe emerged as a unique specimen among an overwhelming and frequently confounding menagerie of Italian restaurants. Scottish-born chef Cameron Grant lived and trained in Piedmont, where he absorbed the traditions of that particular hallowed regional cuisine, and put those values on display at Osteria Langhe with excellent product, proper portioning, restrained saucing, and rigorous pasta making, tempered with an impulse to innovate that very rarely overreaches....

My 88-year-old grandfather Jose Garcia only has two pictures from his childhood. Both are with his older cousin Carlos, whom he affectionately calls his brother. Born in Mexico in 1930, my grandfather never met his father, and, when he was still very young, his mother left him in the care of her sister. His Aunt Margarita raised him, but it was Carlos who made sure he stayed in school and out of trouble....