t can be awfully hard to tell at times if Illinois Treasurer candidate Michael Scott Carter is giving you a TED talk or a stump speech. âWeâre in the process of building a website thatâll be a clearinghouse for innovation,â he says earnestly about his work with the United Nationsâ Leading Group on Innovative Financing […]
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Posted inFeatures, Pilsen, Visual Arts
Printed Matters
ust north of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal is an ashen, defunct funeral parlor. At Oakley and 24th, the nineteenth-century, two-story buildingâstill marked by a sign for âWest Town Funeral Homeââis simple but striking, its stone exterior split by skinny lancet windows.
Posted inEducation, Hyde Park, Politics
Common Concerns
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan liberally sprinkles his points with sports metaphors. Itâs his way, it seems, of constantly alluding to where he started, right here in Hyde Park, playing basketball with local kids when he wasnât in class at the Lab School or helping at his motherâs afterschool program. Phrases like âgetting in the gameâ and âleveling […]
Posted inFeatures, Hyde Park, Music
Keeping Time
Curtis Black and Doug Mitchell canât agree on the exact year when their group began its Sunday night jam sessions at Jimmyâs Woodlawn Tap, a Hyde Park bar on 55th and Woodlawn Avenue. Black, the groupâs trumpeter and a freelance journalist, claims it was 1992. Mitchell, the drummer and an executive editor at the University of Chicago Press, says 1990. […]
Posted inComics
Drawing a Line
Earlier this yearâon May 7, a Tuesday, at 11:04pmânineteen-year-old Kevin Ambrose was gunned down in a drive-by shooting on his way to meet a friend at the 47th Street Green Line station. That friend, Michael Dye, who had told Kevin he didnât need an escort from the station through the neighborhood, heard the shots as […]
Posted inHyde Park, Interviews, Uncategorized, Visual Arts
New Talent
The Renaissance Society, existing quietly and discreetly on the fourth floor of the University of Chicagoâs Cobb Hall, is no stranger to artistic genius. Since its founding in 1915, the non-collecting contemporary art gallery has hosted visionaries that are now household names: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and RĂ©nĂ© Magritte, to name a few.Â
Posted inHyde Park, Visual Arts
Unfurling the Past
Baraka de Soleil scoops the soaking wet fragments of a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem out of the bucket in front of him and solemnly offers them to each of the audience members crouching beside him in the dark. âListen!â he says conspiratorially as he swirls the water in the bucket. âListen!â Soleil was in the […]
Posted inHyde Park, Lit
Kevin Coval and the Loose Canon
When IÂ first read Kevin Covalâs poetry, I was worried that he might be a schmuck. The way he interrogated and explored his Jewish identity in all lowercase on the pages of his new book, âSchtick,â came off as somehow meek. However, when I met Coval at the Seminary Co-Op bookstore thirty minutes before he was […]
Posted inBlurbs, Chinatown
Ping-Pong Diplomacy
Behind an ajar back door, two graying men play Chinese chess on a wooden board. The small room, held by a foam ceiling and walls of propped-up green acrylic boards, is the home of the Chicago Chinese Table Tennis Club, safely tucked away on West 23rd Street.
Posted inPolitics
How the South Side Votes: Business
Chicagoâs South Side aldermen are united in their support for greater economic development in their wards. But substantive differences exist between them on how to achieve that goal. Big-box retailers, the use of tax increment financing, gentrification, and the presence of affordable housing are all among the most contentious areas of the cityâs economic policy. […]