click to enlarge The cast of the NBC show
Connecting . . . shot their parts on iPhones from their actual homes, peppered with a few props. The laundry room in the show is actor Parvesh Cheena s actual laundry room. The pink kettle in the kitchen is the actual kettle he bought on Amazon. He refers to the downstairs of his townhome as the set, and his bedroom upstairs has served as his dressing room. His partner, Eric, even had a small cameo in the show as a delivery person. His character Pradeep is, mostly, a reflection of Cheena s real life. Right now, I am enjoying the fact that people can just be who they are. And we don t have to talk about how spicy my dosa is or something, he says. This is also the closest character to my real life except I don t have children.
click to enlarge Boudoir photographer Liz Hansen is having a little fun with the pandemic of it all during her shoots. Chicago Boudoir Photography Boudoir photographer Samantha Eppel’s shoot this past October was an intimate affair: just her client, her client s friend, and a dozen North Shore triathletes. The Logan Square-based photographer typically rents hotel rooms or Airbnb properties for her shoots, but like others in her field, she’s had to get creative during the pandemic. In this case, Eppel and her client decided to meet on a secluded stretch of beach in Wilmette early on a weekday morning. They had just started taking photos, using the sunrise as a backdrop, when a group of triathletes inadvertently photobombed the shoot.
The Chicago-born singer-songwriter beat the odds by turning her debut album,
Forever, Ya Girl, into a multidimensional artwork.
Sign up for our newsletters Subscribe Art is what I m meant to do, KeiyaA says. But I also want this to be a way for me to build a strong foundation and legacy that doesn t have to be attached to me working for somebody else. AnAkA for Chicago Reader Polyester! KeiyaA says, laughing. The uniforms were so thick and dense. We re in what she calls the studio room of her Bushwick apartment, reminiscing about singing in the Chicago Children s Choir. Hanging on the wall behind her is a white pegboard adorned with an assortment of audio cables. KeiyaA, 28, was in the choir till she was 12, but she tells me she doesn t remember much besides the red vests of their performance uniforms and the dimly lit church (First U
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Judas and the Black Messiah ★★★★ Dir. Shaka King, 126 min. HBO Max
Warning: This review contains spoilers. As the same argument about reform plays in a loop,
Judas and the Black Messiah is a reminder that there is no such thing as patient protest and that to combat targeted, intentional systems of oppression, it takes a revolution. Because as the real Fred Hampton so famously explained in a commonly quoted 1968 speech, it’s the revolution that lasts. “You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail a revolution,” he said about Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale, who was beaten, bound, and gagged while on trial for a conspiracy with men he’d never met. “You might run a liberator like [BPP minister of information/spokesperson] Eldridge Cleaver out of the country, but you can t run liberation out of the country. You might murder a freedom fighter like [BPP treasurer] Bobby Hutton, but you can t murder freed