By John Greenfield

Imagine yourself watching—better yet, competing in—a breakneck bicycle race on a gleaming indoor track at the Chicago Velo Campus sports district. It is a freezing winter night outside but sweat pours off the chiseled, Lycra-clad riders as they whiz by and zip around the sloped turns on sleek fixed-gear bikes. The crowd goes wild.

Emanuele Bianchi, businessman, racer and president of the low-profit limited liability corporation Chicago Velo Campus L3C, is working hard to make this vision a reality. The sports district would include a stadium nearly as large as the United Center housing the velodrome (bike racing arena) and many other sports facilities, plus outdoor BMX, mountain bike and cyclocross tracks, at an estimated total cost of $40 to $45 million.

Bianchi, no relation to the Bianchi bicycle company, and his partners want to build the velo campus on the former site of U.S. Steel South Works, a hunk of land on the lakefront between 79th and 92nd Streets. They hope it will be the centerpiece of Lakeside, an ambitious new 500-acre community proposed for the site by real estate developer McCaffery Interests, in partnership with the steel company, which still owns the land. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization,” said George Bernard Shaw more than six decades ago—and it’s still true. It’s very important that you be more discerning than newspapers in the coming weeks, Aries. You can’t afford to confuse a minor mess with a major snafu; it would be a big mistake to treat a small temporary detour as a permanent loss of momentum. Please keep your melodramatic tendencies in check, even as you appreciate the entertainment value of your ever-shifting story. Read the rest of this entry »

This Week’s Biggest Gainers:

1
Derrick Rose
Scored a career-high 42 in leading his team to victory over NBA-leading San Antonio Spurs and became the first Bull to start in the All-Star Game since a certain No. 23.

2
Gery Chico, Miguel del Valle, Carol Moseley Braun
On the eve of the mayoral election, two, maybe three of you are getting more attention than you will again for a long time. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s biggest gainers:

1
Jody Weis
Beleaguered police supe got a last laugh when his controversial gang powwow resulted in a forty percent drop in violent crime in targeted areas.

2
Richard Daley
The retiring mayor stands to command $50K per speech. Maybe he gets a bonus for doing so without fracturing his syntax. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls,” said comedian George Carlin. “There are mornings when your dreams are more real and important than your waking life,” says my favorite dream worker. “There are times when the doctor isn’t feeling well, and only his patient can cure him,” says I. Now it so happens, Aries, that in the upcoming week, your life is likely to pass through an alternate reality where all three of the above conditions will prevail—as well as other similar variants and mutations. Read the rest of this entry »

Seeking respite from winter’s deep freeze, you’ve journeyed on the Red and Orange Lines and the #62 bus to the Garfield Ridge neighborhood west of Midway Airport. At 7050 West Archer, it looms like a beacon in the night: the fifty-foot-high neon sign for the Rainbow Motel/Pink Palace (773-229-0707, rainbowpinkpalace.com).

With its whimsically-themed Jacuzzi rooms, this seventies-era honeymoon hideaway is Chicago’s answer to Japan’s quirky love hotels, a fanciful venue for liaisons licit or otherwise. Or, as the Rainbow’s brochure says, “It’s a year-round paradise and a dream fantasy vacation. A couple’s place to get re-acquainted with the one you love, celebrate life with the one you married or begin a new, exciting relationship.”

The eleven fantasy suites are available for four- and six-hour visits as well as overnight stays. The “Hawaiian Waters” room includes an octagonal waterbed and tiki décor; “Space Walk” has a bed shaped like a lunar lander, surrounded by stars, planets and “friendly spaceships”; “Out to Lunch” features a bed shaped like a giant BLT.

The Rainbow doesn’t take reservations over the phone and when you arrive most of the wackier suites are booked, so you opt for the relatively traditional “Valentine” room. The stoic female receptionist, a recent transplant from Lithuania, hands you a complimentary bottle of cheap spumante wine and shows you to your comfy, if slightly dingy, accommodations. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Before I loved you, nothing was my own,” wrote Pablo Neruda to his lover in one of his sonnets. “It all belonged to someone else—to no one.” Have you ever experienced a sense of being dispossessed like that, Aries? A sense of there being nowhere and nothing in the world that you can call your own? And have you ever fantasized that your emptiness could be remedied by the intimate presence of a special companion? I wish for you to have that consoling experience in the coming week. In fact, I predict it. Happy Valentine Daze! Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s biggest gainers:

1
Rahm Emanuel
The city’s daily newspapers both inked their mayoral endorsements for the Rahmrod.

2
Richard Dent
Bears ’85er’s Hall of Fame nod almost made us forget the Packers won the Super Bowl. Almost. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Kristine Sherred

By Jennifer Kelly Price

I remember smelling my grandpa’s pipes, pulling them one by one from an immaculately polished brown leather box kept on quiet display in his den, lifting the lid and instantly being transported to another era. Though I never saw him smoke them, I remember picturing him young—a dashing soldier in his twenties, courting my grandma, puffing a pipe all gentle-like. I could smell that sweetness in the air and on his skin. The smell of a good pipe strikes a note of palpable nostalgia, even for those without direct associations. It’s almost as though the marriage of sweet tobacco and burning wood sprung forth far enough back in history that it exists in our collective memory. Comforting. Relaxing. Swathed with manliness and class.

That’s what the Iwan Ries family stands for. Iwan Ries, the oldest family-owned tobacconist in the country, has touched three centuries and passed through five generations of one family. A phenomenal boom in the fifties and sixties gave the family-run business the momentum to develop their own brand of tobacco, Three Star Blue. They launched a catalog and mail-order service, and began filling orders worldwide. Ries’ daughter Rosalie married Stanley Levi, and Ries passed the business onto his son-in-law. The current owner, Chuck Levi, joined the business as a young man in the fifties, allowing his father to travel the world and gather pipes never before available to American consumers. His own son Kevin Levi now manages the business. Read the rest of this entry »

“STEP HIGH STOOP LOW LEAVE YOUR DIGNITY OUTSIDE.” That was the sign posted outside Chicago’s legendary “Dil Pickle Club,” a Bohemian club/speakeasy/cabaret/theater that played host to various radicals, artists, anarchists, authors and socialites throughout the twenties. It was a place for self-styled free thinkers and sexual libertines, one of the few public places in the city where it was okay to be openly homosexual. And while the original club faded into memory in the mid-thirties, its message of political and sexual expression and spirit of meeting high culture with lowbrow is gaining resurgence some ninety years later.

“It was a place where you had hobos next to housewives,” says Fred Sasaki, one of the co-founders of the revived Dil Pickle. “You had doctors and lawyers mingling with tramps and prostitutes.”

The fifth installment of this incarnation of the group, entitled “LOVE/DEATH,” takes place February 10 at The Hideout (1354 West Wabansia). More than just a simple art event, the evening promises live music (with the band weaving in and around the crowd, not on stage), a tattoo artist giving out temps, a Day of the Dead shrine complete with group ritual, a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre-themed photo booth, talks on both serial killers and Precious Moments figurines, and algorithm-aided matchmaking. Read the rest of this entry »