Photo: Brett Mohr

By John Greenfield

“On State Street, that great street, I just want to say
They do things they don’t do on Broadway”
—“Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town)” by Fred Fisher

The question is, can Chicago do on State Street what New York City already does successfully, not on Broadway but on Park Avenue; what San Francisco does on Grant Avenue; and what Bogotá, Colombia, does on Calle 11?

After two previous attempts, the Active Transportation Alliance hopes Saturday’s car-free event on State Street will finally convince City Hall to embrace the ciclovia concept.

Born in Bogotá, the “ciclovia” (Spanish for “bike path”) concept closes streets to motorized traffic, creating safe spaces for citizens to bicycle, jog, stroll, play and mingle, encouraging healthy recreation and social interaction. Ciclovias are now popular around the world, and most of America’s bike-friendly major cities are holding successful events, but the model still hasn’t gained a foothold in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): I’ve got a challenging assignment for you. In accordance with your current astrological omens, I am inviting you to cultivate a special kind of receptivity—a rigorously innocent openness to experience that will allow you to be penetrated by life’s beauty with sublime intensity. To understand the exact nature of this receptivity, study Abraham Maslow’s definition of real listening: to listen “without presupposing, classifying, improving, controverting, evaluating, approving or disapproving, without dueling what is being said, without rehearsing the rebuttal in advance, without free-associating to portions of what is being said so that succeeding portions are not heard at all.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “I have a simple philosophy,” said Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a self-described hedonist who lived till the age of ninety-six. “Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.” That’s not an approach I recommend you pursue all the time, Aries, but I think it could be both wise and fun for you to do so in the coming weeks. Given the upcoming astrological omens, you have a mandate to find out where the most interesting action is, and dive in with the intent to generate even more action. The catalysts need another catalyst like you. Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration: Beryl Chung

By Michael Workman

Breaking up is hard to do. It’s made even harder when it happens in the grip of a new social reality. I’m sitting on a window barstool at Café Selmarie on the Lincoln Square strip, where I’ve been summoned via text message through a flash downpour for the bad news, and I’m totally blindsided. How did this happen? It’s absurd, something out of an episode of “Bored to Death”: just three days earlier we were lying in bed discussing plans for a friend’s wedding two months out. I rotate my gaze floor to the ceiling. What did I miss? Everything slows down, then pauses a beat. My clothes are dripping wet, and I’m sitting with (let’s call her) Ramona, who I met through an online dating site called OkCupid. It’s a service I’ve been on for nearly two years now, since my wife and I split up (amicably) and after hundreds of therapy sessions, when I found myself confronted with a dating scene that has changed pretty radically. Read the rest of this entry »

What looks like one of Chicago’s many food trucks is parked among the other artisan tents on the south side of Division near Marion, where a sleek blue glass building home to Prasino, a sustainable new age eatery and lounge of sorts, can still be seen overhead. It’s only half past noon, but it seems clear the crowds at the Ukrainian Village’s Renegade Craft Fair have agreed it is an acceptable time to begin drinking. Lines at the wine and beer vendors begin to form. An influx of new families with strollers, a greyhound, sometimes two, overwhelms the area surrounding Kyle Durrie’s 1982 Chevy step truck—picture a typical ice cream truck—as passersby begin similar mental exercises of trying to discern exactly what this truck is doing at an arts fair.  Read the rest of this entry »

This Week’s Biggest Gainers:

1
Brian Urlacher
Bears linebacker feasted on Falcon meat.

2
Superman
Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a movie star! Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “An awakened Aries would rather err on the side of making a daring, improvisational mistake than cuddle up with passionless peace,” writes astrologer Hunter Reynolds. “He or she knows that creative conflict can be a greater unifying force than superficial harmony.” This is an excellent keynote for you to keep in mind during the coming days. But make sure your motivations are pure and humble, please. If the daring improvisation you launch is fueled by arrogance or the urge to dominate, your efforts to shake things up for the greater good will fail. Fight against what Reynolds calls “terrified niceness”—but do it with fierce compassion, not sneering rage. Read the rest of this entry »

9/11 was a Tuesday.

For anyone who ever worked for or with Newcity, you know Tuesday means one thing: deadline day. On September 11, 2001, we’d been at it more than fifteen years, so it’d become fairly routine. Except this day.

Jan and I were the first ones in early that morning, ensconced in our office in the back of the Newcity space working away at whatever was on our plate that day. We’d taken a big risk with the business we’d built, trying to create a national alternative media portal and network on the internet, and the in-process crash of the internet economy was creating major headaches for us. (They were soon to get far worse.) Although I was editor-in-chief of Newcity, I’d ceded most day-to-day operations to our managing editor, Elaine Richardson. Print, we’d figured out (we thought).

Sometime before 9am, Dave Wilson, one of our senior sales guys, burst into our office. He’d just heard about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. We rushed into the conference room and turned on the television, where we stood, transfixed, as the news unfolded: the second tower hit, the Pentagon hit, the towers collapsed, the plane crash, as staff members continued to arrive at the office and the congregation around the television grew in silent contemplation. Read the rest of this entry »

Vera Lutter, "Ground Zero III, January 15 - 25, 2002"

9/11/01 Was a Tuesday. Anyone who’s ever worked at Newcity knows what that means: deadline day. Starting Friday on this site, you can read about that day at Newcity, and read our resulting coverage. Meanwhile, many civic and arts organizations will be commemorating the tenth anniversary of that dark day in American history this week.

Vera Lutter: Studies for Ground Zero
The Museum of Contemporary Art recently opened this exhibition of Lutter’s work to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11. Lutter transformed a room in a building across the street from Ground Zero into a giant photographic lens to produce large-scale negatives of the site for this memorial display.
Open through September 12 at the MCA. Read the rest of this entry »

This Week’s Biggest Gainers:

1
Don Cornelius
The creator of “Soul—er, Sooooooooooul Train” was feted by the city and the media as he marked forty years since he created the “black ‘American Bandstand’.”

2
Rahm Emanuel
Finished the Chicago Triathlon near the top of his age bracket. Whaddya think, mayor? How about the marathon? Read the rest of this entry »