Mike Sula Buttermilk lemon (upside-down) cake I’ve requested the same simple birthday cake every year since I was teenager. It’s a recipe from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for a buttermilk lemon cake that my mom clipped and slightly modified. It’s nothing elaborate—just a dense yellow cake adorned with lemon glaze that soaks into the crumb over a few days, rendering the outer edges something weirdly akin to a crispy lemon fudge and leaving the interior core dense and moist but still cakelike....

Anytime the subject of morels is on the agenda, attendance at the monthly meetings of the Illinois Mycological Association goes up. That was the case last month when Milan Pelouch, the group’s former foray chairman, came to talk about his book, How to Find Morels, encouragingly subtitled Even as Others Are Coming Back Empty-Handed. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Plenty of books have been written on the spongy, phallic morel, which in Illinois usually makes its annual appearance right about now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was pondering why Amtrak sucks so badly this morning on the Megabus between Indianapolis and Chicago. The musing was inspired by an instance, just this very morning, of Amtrak sucking, and quite badly, though that particular lesson has always proved slippery to me: long-distance train travel always seems like such a great idea, though one whose execution never looks the way you want it to....

The best news of the week so far is that Maroon 5’s unstoppable juggernaut “One More Night” has finally been knocked out of the number one spot on the Hot 100 after holding it for months. The song that replaced it, Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” is the less-than-thrilling lead single from an album that’s about 50 percent filler, but right now it’s just about my favorite song in the world. Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble”—which is currently hanging out down at number 77 in the company of a bunch of other tracks from Red that aren’t “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”—is a much more interesting song....

The last time I wrote about Pilsen’s Chicago Arts District, in August, it was to chronicle the departure of yet another gallery and note the many empty storefronts along the district’s main drag, roughly 1700-2000 S. Halsted. “Everybody’s leaving,” Robin Monique Rios lamented, as she prepared to move her business, 4Art Inc., to the Zhou B Art Center in Bridgeport, where a livelier vibe has been attracting artists and gallerists alike....

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Mark Reitman says. He’s stopped in at Martino’s Italian Beef in Milwaukee to order a quick Polish–American cheese, mustard, pickle on the side–but someone behind the counter has striped the dog with ketchup by mistake. Reitman stares at his lunch. “I never had ketchup on a dog before,” he says. “If I like it, I can’t admit that I do.” Finally he decides to make the best of the offending condiment by eating some fries with every bite of Polish....

When Die Antwoord’s video for “Enter the Ninja” went viral in 2010, the South African group rocketed to Internet superstardom largely on the strength of the LOLs generated by their “zef” image—sort of a Bizarro-world mashup of Hype Williams and Gummo. But after landing a million-dollar contract with Interscope and rereleasing their debut, $O$, with the label’s backing, the trio—vocalists Ninja and Yolandi Vi$$er and beat maker DJ Hi-Tek—revealed themselves to be cunning pranksters with an intensely strange visual aesthetic, refined on the fringes of the South African art world, that works amazingly well with their manic rave-rap....

SSM, CoCoComa, Screaming Yellow Zonkers INFO 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » CoCoComa are garage punk in the best sense of both words. They excel at garage’s three-chord bomp, sweetening it with a hint of pop, but they tear through their songs at punk’s immoderate speeds. In the past year they’ve put out four singles, two of them splits, on four different labels, including Chicago upstart Shit Sandwich and Memphis trash-rock mainstay Goner Records, and sometime in 2007 Goner plans to release the full-length they just finished....

When President Obama took the field last week to throw out the first pitch of the major league all-star game in Saint Louis, he was handed the ball by Stan Musial, heaved it to Albert Pujols, and then shook hands with Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and other Cardinals greats lined up behind home plate. The host team was honoring its living legends. All but one. Now the man who rescued baseball gets a little over 20 percent of the vote each year for the Hall of Fame, nowhere near the 70 percent he needs to be inducted....

Over the years the Chicago jazz scene has displayed amazing resilience, withstanding not just the defection of musicians to other cities but the loss of important venues. This time last year Joe Segal’s venerable JAZZ SHOWCASE was still in search of a new location, but late this spring he reopened in Dearborn Station, and the club will once again host its famous afterfest shows, which typically draw many of the festival’s best and most notable mainstream players....

[Pure Fiction home] Margaret had discovered that “honeymoon time” was just a sugary way of saying that her mother and Colm were doing it every chance they got, so she didn’t bother pointing out that every night for the past three weeks had been a “girls night out,” since the only people Margaret and Ronnie knew in the whole country were each other. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was easy for Laura Canavan to meet men—she was only 36, had a soft, curvy body and clear green eyes fringed in long, mascara-tarred lashes, and she spoke in a gentle, low voice that men leaned in to hear....

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall of Ron Huberman’s office at 11 AM on April 19. Each oversees a community organization that receives funding from local governmental agencies controlled by the mayor. Finney heads the Woodlawn Community Development Corporation, an offshoot of the Woodlawn Organization, which is officially run by his wife, Georgette Greenlee-Finney. The community development corporation has millions of dollars in contracts with the CHA....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m both surprised and not. I’m surprised that he’s caving here specifically, unsurprised that he’s caving on something that will piss off, um, people like me. It’s part of the game, and reasonable people know it’s coming. I think Atrios puts it best with Shorter Many Months of Self Righteousness: “You all thought Obama was liberal Jesus, and I tried to warn you that he’s not!...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There is no official Reader policy stating that people who read our blogs and check out the paper’s online features are better than the ones who only pick up the print edition, but if you look at the direction that publishing’s taking and the rapidly increasing weight advertisers put on online numbers you could be forgiven for (wink wink) “thinking” that you’re “more important” and “literally more valuable” than IRL-onlys....

Charles Coleman, film programmer at Facets Cinematheque, is reading: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The result of this extraordinary journey regarding its impact is incalculable, as the generational legacy detailed in this extraordinary book crosses the entire spectrum of the American experience. The Warmth of Other Suns reads like a novel and Wilkerson’s writing style compels the audience to follow along with keen interest as we share the delight and plight of her subjects....

The National Museum of Public Housing won’t have housing of its own until sometime next year, when it opens in a three-story brick building at 1322 W. Taylor—the last remnant of Chicago’s oldest federal housing project, the Jane Addams Homes. Till then the NMPH is making do with off-site exhibits like this one, an examination of public housing as the “unsung cradle of American music.” With photos and text, “The Sound, the Soul, the Syncopation” looks at how close-knit subsidized communities in Brooklyn, Houston, Detroit, and other cities have helped produce talents like Barbra Streisand, Kenny Rogers, and Diana Ross....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ever since the great Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure released his first albums in the West in the late 80s, much has been made of the link between West African guitar music and the blues, from Toure’s spindly, hypnotic acoustic guitar epics to the churning electric jams of Tinariwen. Naturally it wasn’t long before blues musicians from the West like Corey Harris and Markus James saw an opportunity for some cross-cultural action, jamming with their guitar-playing counterparts (something Ry Cooder did with Toure on the 1994 album Talking Timbuktu)....

Last month Chicago’s Olympic planners announced that they were going to ask Barack Obama and Michael Jordan to court the International Olympic Committee on behalf of the city’s bid to host the 2016 summer games. I have a better idea for our town’s biggest celebrities: forget the Olympics and give Conrad Worrill a call. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So most kids show up for high school without a clue about the finer aspects of the sport....

It probably had a lot to do with the fourth-quarter collapse against the Cornhuskers the week before. Or the giveaway in Happy Valley earlier in the season against what should have been a decimated Penn State team—or perhaps grief was held over from the consecutive crushing losses to Army, Illinois, and Michigan in 2011. But when I visited Ryan Field in Evanston last season on a sunny and brisk late October afternoon to watch the Northwestern Wildcats host the Iowa Hawkeyes, the crowd—including the Reader‘s Mick Dumke, a diehard Cats fan (and author of a 2011 Best of Chicago blurb about Ryan Field: “Best Place to See an Improbable Comeback or Sickening Collapse on the Gridiron“)—was in good spirits but understandably apprehensive....

In this week’s paper I wrote a preview for the Saturday performance by Wheelhouse at Constellation. The trio includes reedist Dave Rempis and, as I explained in my Soundboard item, the concert is in part a celebration of Boss of the Plains, the trio’s excellent debut album. It will soon be released by Aerophonic, the promising new imprint operated by Rempis to circumvent his frustration with farming out the job of getting his work to the public to other labels, as well as to take a more direct role in his commerce....