Posts

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Alderman Patrick O’Connor One of the mayoral campaign’s more ironic twists comes in the form of mail from Mayor Emanuel that blasts alderman Bob Fioretti for some of the more boneheaded policies of former mayor Richard Daley. This is no trivial matter, as O’Connor—an eight-term north-side powerhouse—is facing a spirited challenge from Dianne Daleiden, a public school math and science teacher who promises a new day of 40th Ward independence should she miraculously win....

This story was originally published by City Bureau on November 9, 2020. One of the people behind the People’s Budget is Paola Aguirre Serrano, the founder of Borderless, an urban research and design studio, and a 2019 cohort fellow at CUE. This year, she designed the People’s Budget bus tour with a focus on community engagement. Thinking of your budget bus tours, what are community members most interested in funding in the budget?...

“There wasn’t a single moment when the chummy, jovial craft beer industry became a battlefield of ‘us versus them,’” Josh Noel writes in Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business (Chicago Review Press, June 1). “It happened slowly. And then, seemingly, all at once.” But John Hall and his son Greg, who became head brewer in 1991 after the first one quit, did take risks....

T his past Monday, April 30, marked 41 years since the first demonstration by the women who became known as Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. On that day in 1977 a dozen or so of them assembled in the square across from Argentina’s pink version of the White House to bear witness on behalf of their children—journalists, students, activists, the hapless—who’d been “disappeared” by the military dictatorship then in power....

President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, an eight-year, $2 trillion infrastructure spending proposal announced on March 31, is refreshingly city-friendly. About a third of that cash would be earmarked for transportation, including generous slices of the pie for public transportation, vehicle electrification, and Amtrak, which will be especially helpful for big cities. Chicago is no exception. But transit analyst and former Chicagoan Yonah Freemark detailed the massive upsides of Biden’s plan for sustainable transportation and addressing climate change in a recent The Hill op-ed....

As part of a late-in-life effort at self-improvement, I’m trying to become a better journalist by studying Robert Caro and Rahm Emanuel. In contrast, Rahm falls into the category of powerful men committing dastardly deeds. And yet in his latest essay in the Atlantic, he offers interview tips to journalists. For the record, this is the second recent series. The first was on the Lincoln Yards TIF deal—aka, the fleecing of Chicago by Mayor Rahm....

Rage, a new thriller playing at this year’s Polish Film Festival in America, feels like a throwback to the cinema of moral anxiety, a movement of the late 1970s and early ’80s that used interpersonal stories to examine social codes and political forces inside Communist Poland. The film centers on an amoral journalist for an ultraconservative cable news network who suffers an attack of conscience over various personal and professional concerns, and Michał Węgrzyn, directing a script he wrote with Marcin Roykiewicz, shows how the journalist’s treatment of people at home and at work mirrors his engagement with the public....

Like the Gospels, this review contains spoilers. With Reverend Toller, Schrader has finally gotten his hands on the real thing, a troubled spiritual seeker who—like the protagonist of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951)—keeps a journal as a form of prayer. As Toller explains to Michael, he served for years as an army chaplain and, over his wife’s objections, persuaded his son to enlist in the wake of 9/11; after the son was killed in Iraq, the minister’s wife left him and he retired from the military....

As the novel coronavirus pandemic rages on, homeless people may be facing bleak prospects in Chicago, but not homeless pets. In the days before Governor J.B. Pritzker issued his stay-at-home order and in the weeks since, local animal shelters have been inundated with demand to foster and adopt dogs, cats, rabbits, lizards, roosters, and every other available critter. The number of available pets has dwindled to historic lows even as animal shelters (deemed by the state to be an essential service) have continued to take in new animals....

Last year around this time, hundreds of gallons of Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout were being distilled at Rhine Hall to make bierschnaps. The spirit originated in Bavaria, where small brewers who owned a still would often distill leftover beer. Despite increasing interest, it’s never really become popular in the U.S. (though several local distilleries, including Koval, Chicago Distilling Company, and CH Distillery, have made spirits from beer). Turning unwanted beer into spirits is a no-brainer; the first step to making whiskey is essentially to make beer, minus the hops....

Walk through the doors of the cavernous 5,500-square-foot YOUmedia space and your senses are overwhelmed immediately by the whirring of 3D printers, the shouts of middle schoolers locked in a tense game of Mario Kart, and ecstatic rhymes in the recording studio from a young artist who, years later, you’ll swear you knew them way back when. On a typical school day afternoon, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it wouldn’t have been unusual to see 100 teens stream into—of all places—the Harold Washington Library downtown....

Q: Gay, thirtysomething male in D.C. My boyfriend of three years has been acting strange—not taking his antidepression meds, says he’s feeling weird. He has withdrawn from me, sleeps 15 hours a day, and has been canceling on commitments to socialize with friends. That I am fine with—he’s blue and I get it. Here’s why I’m writing: He was doing an online crossword, and when he got up, I was going to write a message in it—to be funny and sweet....

Reading through some old columns, I just came across one I wrote in 1994 about an ad touting a sandwich shop that was giving away condoms. The ad was held out of the Evanston Township High School newspaper for the reason—which I called “hoary” even then—that it was a little too raw for “impressionable teenagers.” It was a time, apparently—though did anyone ever actually think this?—when it was supposed that impressionability was something teenagers grew out of as they became adults....

Arnie the Doughnut Can a rainbow-sprinkled doughnut and a rules-loving man find happiness together without one eating the other or without both running afoul of the overzealous condo board president? These are the central questions of Frances Limoncelli’s adaptation of Laurie Keller’s children’s book, and while some of the solutions defy basic logic, who really cares? Doughnuts make everything better! Lifeline’s current production is a delight, from George Howe’s songs to Rachel Sypniewski’s doughnut costumes, and especially Juanita Andersen’s performance as the evil condo board president and the French Cruller....

Welsh singer Cate Le Bon pretty much floored me the first time I heard her music about five years ago, and I’ve been a fan ever since. She masterfully collides a rude rock flair with a refined singing style that’s steeped in British folk and art-pop. Lately she’s fallen in with some of the rougher denizens of the California garage-rock scene (she now lives in LA), and last year she made a raw collaborative record with Tim Presley of White Fence (under the name Drinks) that made me wonder if her old sound had flown the coop....

Enter the Reader giveaway below for a chance to win a free signed copy of Summerdale. Pride season in Chicago usually means celebrations, parades, vendors, and other public displays of LGBTQ freedom. This year, for many reasons, Pride looks different, but staying in quarantine doesn’t have to mean depriving oneself of the Chicago queer community. For those who are extra nostalgic for strolling the rainbow-flag-lined streets of neighborhoods like Boystown and Andersonville this month, local author David Jay Collins has two LGBTQ novels that transport readers precisely there....

Like your neighborhood shaman, the Norwegian choreographer Ingri Fiksdal is prepared to inspire some trippy illusions here in Chicago. Rife with sleek, reflective costumes and floating black orbs, her work Cosmic Body is nothing if not experimental, skewing toward psychedelic. Fiksdal collaborates with four dancers and the electronica/EDM artist Ingvild Langgård and employs visuals from artist Signe Becker to create a “disorientation of the sensorium,” inspired by Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, the stroboscopic device he designed in the late 60s to create artificial hallucinations....

The past decade of Chicago hip-hop would be entirely different without Young Chicago Authors and the Harold Washington Library’s YouMedia lab. Both have served as creative hubs for local teens, and their storied weekly open mikes—YouMedia’s Lyricist Loft and YCA’s WordPlay—have given many beloved Chicago rappers their starts. In the 2020s, a new generation of emerging MCs has already begun building atop the hip-hop ecosystem nurtured and reinforced by the likes of Saba, Noname, Mick Jenkins, and Chance the Rapper....

The past decade of Chicago hip-hop would be entirely different without Young Chicago Authors and the Harold Washington Library’s YouMedia lab. Both have served as creative hubs for local teens, and their storied weekly open mikes—YouMedia’s Lyricist Loft and YCA’s WordPlay—have given many beloved Chicago rappers their starts. In the 2020s, a new generation of emerging MCs has already begun building atop the hip-hop ecosystem nurtured and reinforced by the likes of Saba, Noname, Mick Jenkins, and Chance the Rapper....

Q: I’m a heteroflexible married cis woman in my 40s. I’m also a POS cheater and a catfish. I really fucked up. One year ago, I met an older man in an online fetish forum. He sent me an unsolicited PM, and we have talked for hours every day since then. My husband, whom I’ve been married to for more than 20 years, does not know that I am having an emotional affair....