Illinois news

• Elton ‘L10MixedIt’ Chueng, recording engineer

  19-01-2022 23:52 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Elton Chueng, 33, began his career as a professional recording engineer with an internship at Classick Studios in 2011. He’s since worked with some of the brightest stars to emerge from Chicago’s hip-hop scene in the past decade, including Saba, Noname, Smino, and Chance the Rapper. In November his contributions to Yebba’s 2021 debut, Dawn, earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.As told to Leor GalilI always loved music growing up. It really wa
  
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• SZA’s Cake Goes Viral As She Celebrates Her Acting Debut: ‘I Got The Part’

  19-01-2022 22:41 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  SZA is taking her talents to the big screen after landing a role, which marks her acting debut. The “I Hate U” singer took to her Instagram Story to celebrate the win and showed off her green, confetti celebration cake that read, “Congrats record breaker and fire actress.” The Grammy nominated singer wrote of the exciting news:
  “I can’t believe I got the part I wanted [watery eyes emoji] she’s an actress.”   
  &nbs
  
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• Drakeo The Ruler’s Girlfriend Honors Her Late ‘Soulmate’ After Tragic Death

  19-01-2022 22:38 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  Drakeo The Ruler‘s girlfriend is breaking her silence following her partner’s sudden passing over the weekend. Noel Bianca took to social media on Sunday to honor her late beau who was stabbed to death before hitting the stage at Once Upon a Time in L.A. music festival on Saturday. Bianca shared in an emotional post:
  “Darrell you knew everything about me and still loved me. I will miss our drunk nights, our arguments over nothing, u singing Sam Smith to me i
  
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• Semiratruth’s Moonlandin’ elevates her music to a new plane

  19-01-2022 22:37 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Semiratruth Garrett remembers the exact day her creative life opened up. It wasn’t the afternoon in 2014 when she first recorded a song at Harold Washington Library’s YouMedia lab, or the day several years later when she rapped her way onto Netflix’s 2019 hip-hop competition, Rhythm + Flow—though both those moments are also burned into her brain. It was in New York City on the evening of July 24, 2021, when Semira went to SummerStage in Central Park to see her friend Tei
  
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• Biden Administration To Distribute 500 Million At-Home Covid-19 Test Kits

  19-01-2022 22:35 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  President Joe Biden on Tuesday (December 21) is expected to announce the government’s rollout of free at-home Covid-19 testing and other measures as millions gear up for the holidays and newest wave of the pandemic.
  According to reports, the US has purchased 500 million at-home rapid test kits and plans to distribute them free of charge to Americans who sign up on a website. The details in how many tests an individual household can order are still being worked out, CNN
  
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• Kid Cudi Could Win An Academy Award This Year Thanks To These Hit Records

  19-01-2022 22:32 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: getty Images
  Kid Cudi has two records on the shortlist to score an Academy Award this year, and the star took to social media to celebrate. Fresh off his appearance on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, the Grammy Award winning star shared the news that “Guns Go Bang” with Jay-Z and “Just Look Up” from the film “Don’t Look Up” are up to score nominations for Best Original Song at the 2021 Academy Awards. Cudi posted the shortlist to his Instagram
  
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• Roel Estanilla makes a very presentable pig

  19-01-2022 22:08 via chicagoreader.com
  
  A lion’s purr revving to a roar. The sound of a crack racing across the bald face of a mountain. Thunder ripping across the sky. All arresting sounds for sure, but the phenomenon of Roel Estanilla breaking into the crispy, copper skin of a roasted cochinillo lechón could drown them all out. That sound is a Pavlovian promise of lip-sticky pigskin armoring a lush, lemongrass-perfumed anatomy of milk-fed pork flesh. The instrument is a whole suckling pig that Estanilla roasts for
  
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• Karrueche Tran Speaks Out On DaBaby and DaniLeigh Drama: ‘I Felt Her Pain’ [watch]

  19-01-2022 21:34 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  Karrueche Tran has had her fair share of high profile relationships and public breakups, so it comes as no surprise that the star felt deeply for DaniLeigh after watching her live drama with DaBaby unfold as the world watched on. The Claws actress caught up with Angie Martinez on Tuesday and shared her thoughts on the domestic debacle, sharing:
  “I felt it in my soul and in my body and when I saw the videos. What he was saying…it just made me want to throw up beca
  
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• Education Reform Expert Talks Social Justice in Education

  19-01-2022 21:26 via chicagodefender.com
  
  As an undergraduate at Morehouse College, Dr. Martin Luther King said,  “At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift an
  
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• Vic Mensa Arrested For Possession Of Mushrooms And LSD At D.C. Airport

  19-01-2022 21:18 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  Vic Mensa was arrested at Washington D.C.’s Dulles International Airport over the weekend after border officials say they found illegal drugs in his luggage, including mushrooms and LSD. According to a statement by the customs and borders protection, the “Down On My Luck” rapper arrived at Dulles on a flight from Ghana on Saturday, and when searched by officials, he was allegedly in possession of 41 grams of liquid Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD), about 124
  
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• Letitia James Seeks To Subpoena Donald Trump In Fraud Investigation

  19-01-2022 21:15 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  The New York Attorney General‘s investigation into Donald Trump‘s business dealings is heating up now that she announced her plan to seek a court order for the former president and his two oldest children to cooperate.
  “We are taking legal action to force Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump to comply with our investigation into the Trump Organization’s financial dealings,” Letitia James tweeted Tuesday night (January 18). “No
  
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• Three Cops Charged In Shooting Death Of 8-Year-Old Black Girl

  19-01-2022 21:11 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: GoFundMe
  Three Pennsylvania police officers have been charged in the shooting death of 8-year-old Fanta Bility, who was killed last year while leaving a high school football game with her family.
  According to The Associated Press, a grand jury recommended Tuesday (January 18) that the Sharon Hill Police officers –– identified as Devon Smith, Sean Dolan, and Brian Devaney –– be charged with manslaughter and reckless endangerment after they opening fire on a crowd of
  
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• Cardi B Will Cover Funeral Costs For Victims Of Fatal Bronx Fire [watch]

  19-01-2022 21:10 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  Cardi B is showing up for hometown in a major way. The Bronx native has offered to pay for the funeral and burial costs of those killed in the building fire that left 17 people dead. The “WAP” rapper told TMZ:
  “I cannot begin to imagine the pain and anguish that the families of the victims are experiencing, but I hope that not having to worry about the costs associated with burying their loved ones will help as they move forward and heal. I send my prayers a
  
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• City Lit stages the OG of Westerns

  19-01-2022 19:49 via chicagoreader.com
  
  City Lit’s original stage adaptation of Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian focuses on the experience of two easterners adjusting to the rough-and-ready way of life in pre-statehood Wyoming in the 1880s. One is “The Virginian” (he has no other name), the foreman on a ranch owned by a wealthy cattle baron. The other is Molly Wood, a genteel schoolteacher from Vermont. Their friendship evolves slowly and shyly into romance, until the Virginian leads a posse to track dow
  
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• Sinister spinsters

  19-01-2022 19:37 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Jen Silverman’s The Moors is a brilliantly executed pastiche of everything from Wuthering Heights (the gloomy insalubrious environs of the title) to Rebecca, complete with a menacing parlor maid/scullery maid named either Marjory or Mallory, and suffering from either an unwanted pregnancy or typhus, depending on what room you catch her in. (Played to perfection in either case by Jennifer Engstrom.) But it’s the underlying tone of isolation and repression that takes both the script a
  
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• A survivor’s tour of Auschwitz

  19-01-2022 19:20 via chicagoreader.com
  
  She didn’t want to talk about it.Fritzie Fritzshall survived Auschwitz, came to Chicago, and built what most of us are lucky enough to think of as a normal life, with work and marriage, a child and a home.    She did it by putting her Auschwitz experience in a mental box and shutting it away. Not denying it, but denying it continued presence in her life. She didn’t want it to define her.Until she did.Fritzshall was born in Czechoslovakia in 1931, and was 13 years
  
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• Local drummer and bandleader Tim Daisy introduces two new bands

  19-01-2022 19:00 via chicagoreader.com
  
  In January 2021, I profiled local percussionist Tim Daisy by detailing his creative response to the limitations imposed by COVID-19. At the time, he had just issued a virtual collaboration with electronic musician Ikue Mori on his own label, Relay Recordings. While Daisy has continued to exploit the potentialities of home recording and technologically facilitated connection, when concerts before audiences became a possibility again, he wasted no time returning to the stage. On February 1, Relay
  
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• Nemanja and Marko Milunovic launch season two of Monday Night Foodball

  19-01-2022 15:57 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Last September Nemanja Milunovic was on a roll. The former fine-dining chef’s pandemic-born Avondale ghost kitchen Kiosk Balkan Street Food had struggled for its first six months, until a positive review in the Tribune blew his business up. Each day he was selling out of the extraordinarily pillowy (and labor intensive) somun that he built his massive cevapcici and lamb sandwiches on. That afforded him the downtime to come to the Kedzie Inn and check out Funeral Potatoes at the Reader&rsq
  
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• End Of COVID Pandemic Phase Might Be In Sight Due To Omicron Spread

  19-01-2022 15:37 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  “Pandemic” may soon become a word of the past.
  While it’s still too early to predict whether Omicron’s global spread will assist in pushing coronavirus from the pandemic phase to the endemic phase, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, per CNN, he’s hopeful.
  “That would only be the case if we don’t get another variant that eludes the immune response to the prior variant,” Fauci told the Davos Agenda, a virtual event this week held by the Worl
  
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• The Problem with Being A Superwoman

  19-01-2022 15:00 via chicagodefender.com
  
  The image of the Black woman in our community is one of strength and resilience.  We are superwomen and proud of it.  We can work full-time while attending school, run a side business, hang out with the girls and still take care of our families. We wear being overextended like a badge of honor.
  But is it an honor to be sick, tired, stressed, and in denial about it all? Should we be proud of literally working ourselves to death? Is being a superwoman worth all that it costs us?
  “T
  
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• Let’s get lit

  19-01-2022 15:00 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Here are some book-related, word-inspired, and otherwise literary Chicago events to help kick off 2022. Each event is open to the public, but registration or tickets might be required (and you’ll want to support the writers by buying their books!). Wed 1/19, 6:30 PM: City Lit Books co-presents its regular Poetry Salon in an online version. This month features poet C. Russell Price, author of the chapbook Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other. Go to Facebook for the Zoom
  
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• Mr. Sonny 1/19/22

  19-01-2022 14:51 via chicagodefender.com
  
  The post Mr. Sonny 1/19/22 appeared first on Chicago Defender.
  
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• 74-Year-Old Woman Exonerated After She Spent 27 Years In Prison

  19-01-2022 14:43 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  Joyce Watkins has been exonerated after fighting for nearly 35 years to clear her name.
  The Tennessee native, who was wrongfully convicted of murdering her great-niece, spent 27 years in prison for the crime
  On June 26, 1987, Watkins, and her boyfriend at the time, Charlie Dunn, went to pick up four-year-old Brandi in Kentucky, CNN reported.
  The next morning, Brandi was found unresponsive. Watkins then took her to Nashville Memorial Hospital where doctors found that Brandi su
  
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• Insecure,’ ‘The Harder They Fall’ Lead NAACP Image Award Nominations

  19-01-2022 14:40 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: HBO
  Nominations for the 53rd NAACP Image Awards have arrived!
  On Tuesday (January 18), nominees for the annual award show were announced during a virtual event hosted by Kyla Pratt, Tinashe, and Marcus Scribner on the NAACP Image Awards’ Instagram account.
  HBO’s Insecure and Netflix’s The Harder They Fall are tied for the lead with 12 nominations in their respective categories. Netflix leads nominations across the motion picture and television categories.
  In the music ca
  
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• Fund For Helping Historic Black Churches Gets $20 Million Donation

  19-01-2022 14:38 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  A fund aimed at helping and preserving historic Black churches has received an enormous gift this week, according to NBC News.
  Lilly Endowment Inc. donated $20 million to the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which will go to the Preserving Black Churches Project, according to an announcement from the National Trust For Historic Preservation on Dr. Martin Luther King Day (January 17).
  St. James AME Church will be getting $100,000 of this funding after it was dec
  
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• André Leon Talley, Legendary ‘Vogue’ Editor, Dead At 73

  19-01-2022 14:35 via chicagodefender.com
  Photo: Getty Images
  André Leon Talley has died at the age of 73.
  According to TMZ, Vogue‘s former creative director and one-time editor-at-large passed away on Tuesday (January 18) at a hospital in White Plains, NY.
  It’s currently unclear why he was in the hospital.
  Talley worked as the Fashion News Director at Vogue from 1983 to 1987, then as Creative Director from 1988 to 1995, and Editor-At-Large from 1998-2013.
  He will be remembered as a trailblazer in the fashion industry
  
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• Lyra Pramuk makes cybernetic Gregorian rave music

  19-01-2022 13:00 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Lyra Pramuk’s music has a sparklingly ethereal, woodland quality—like disco meets Midsommar (minus any residual fascism). The Berlin-based artist was born in Pennsylvania and grew up singing in small-town church choirs. While going through the motions of performing as a boy content to sing religious songs in the round, she developed a rich, private online life where she explored the boundaries of her gender and sexual identity. The sense of creative freedom she found in the digital
  
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• Listen to Olin

  19-01-2022 13:00 via chicagoreader.com
  
  With another disappointing Bears season having finally, mercifully, come to an end, the time has once again come for me to once again ask the burning question . . .No, not who the McCaskeys will hire as coach now that they’ve fired Matt Nagy, about a year after it was obvious he was the wrong person to hire in the first place.And no, not who they will hire to replace general manager Ryan Pace, almost five years after he proved he knew nothing about selecting talent—I mean, Mitch Tru
  
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