By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19):  This would be an excellent week to head down to Pucón, Chile and hire a daredevil to fly you in a helicopter into the caldera of the active Villarrica volcano, whereupon you would bungee-jump out of the copter down to within 700 feet of the molten lava. If that’s too extreme or expensive for your tastes, I urge you to come up with a milder adventure that will still bring you a close encounter with primal heat and light—and maybe even some divine fire. Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration: Lucy Knisley

We suspect that much of the joy seeped out of the season right about the time that Christmas shopping became about crack-of-dawn post-Thanksgiving treks to the mall to act like Stepford Wives following a script beamed into our brains by a television media that, coincidentally, was funded by big national retailers. And Cyber Monday? You’ve got to be kidding. It’s not only easy to shop local, it’s fun. And it keeps mom-and-pops alive and money in the local economy. So this year, think before you shop. (Brian Hieggelke) Read the rest of this entry »

By Sarah Louise Klose

Gayety’s Chocolate and Ice Cream Company

Dashing through the snow, to Chicago’s Soldier Field, over Lake Shore Drive we go, with a football that looks real! But don’t throw a pass with this delectable delight—it’s molded from pure chocolate melted in cast iron kettles. Toffee, almond clusters and pecan caramel candy fill the hollow football right up to the laces. The Chicago Bears and Northwestern Wildcats have been known to stock their box seats with this chocolate “Pro Football.” Read the rest of this entry »

Kit Kittredge

Here is my holiday advice for the Occupy Chicago protesters. On Black Friday, hike up Michigan Avenue and block the entrance to American Girl Place at Water Tower. Such a bold move would really get the media’s attention. And more importantly, you’d be doing me a personal favor.

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, my two daughters and I wander into the store. “It’s a wonderland,” says the seven-year-old. She clutches the Kit Kittredge doll Santa brought her last year. My thirteen-year-old shoots her the stink eye. The store is crowded with excited girls of all ages, many smartly dressed in stockings and bows. Most are accompanied by mothers who share a look a friend calls “North Shore constipated.” Read the rest of this entry »

Candy Cane Truffles from Wisconsinmade.com

Despite my significant domestic shortcomings, I like to give homemade Christmas gifts. Something about avoiding the mall prompts me to abandon my usual refusal to do anything creative and try, for example, to make snowmen out of marshmallows—one year’s disaster. Though the results have been uneven, I press on.

That year, I steadily crunched candy canes with the back of a knife onto a plastic cutting board in preparation for candy cane truffles that the “Edible Gifts Cookbook” assured me would be both festive and tasty. I was elbow deep in candy cane dust, knife in hand, when I heard the regular sounds of my husband returning from work: garage door opening, car door shutting, back door opening… Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing,” said rocket scientist Werner von Braun. I think it’s an excellent time for you to plunge into that kind of basic research, Aries. You’re overdue to wander around frontiers you didn’t even realize you needed to investigate. You’re ready to soak up insights from outside the boundaries of your understanding. In fact, I think it’s your sacred duty to expose yourself to raw truths and unexpected vistas that have been beyond your imagination’s power to envision. Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration: Zeke Danielson

By Michael Workman

In America, there is no more terrifying a ghoul than the threat of sustained, cripplingly high unemployment. We hear about it all the time. Have maybe even decided just to tune it out or maybe the ubiquity of the bloodless discussion of it has just inured us to the subject. It’s just numbers, right? It’ll get better eventually. Figure it out. After all, it’s hard to get a sense of what’s happening from those chatterboxes in the news, those talking heads feeding us an endless tickertape of statistics, empty percentages; high here, low there. We treat it like the weather. Numbers. Never any stories. Why does it always have to be numbers? Maybe it’s too much, what’s happening. Too garish, what’s happening to them, how the poor behave. How low.

Ask yourself. What actually are the effects on a family slipping below the poverty line, of losing their home in a foreclosure, of a family unable to afford gas, utility bills, clothes? Its effects aren’t just felt for a month or two, or something you get past in a year. There’s a price. And it’s one paid almost entirely by the less fortunate. And that’s what defines our society: how we treat our less fortunate and what price they pay for other’s prosperity. And if we’re a privileged society, maybe all that means is that the privileged get to ignore the silent anguish of the poor. But the cost of it doesn’t go away, ever. It stays with us as a people, changes and defines us psychologically and emotionally, and sometimes we lose one. But surviving it doesn’t fucking make you stronger, it scars and mutilates. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): If you go into a major art museum that displays Europe’s great oil paintings, you’ll find that virtually every masterpiece is surrounded by an ornate wooden frame, often painted gold. Why? To me, the enclosure is distracting and unnecessary. Why can’t I just enjoy the arresting composition on the naked canvas, unburdened by the overwrought excess? I urge you to take my approach in the coming weeks, Aries. Push and even fight to get the goodies exactly as they are, free of all the irrelevant filler, extraneous buffers and pretentious puffery. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Erica Weitzel

By Monica Westin

1. “Grant Park: three years later” was the initial vision for this article—a snapshot of the stark difference in Chicago’s political and emotional temperature between the downtown celebration of Barack Obama’s election night in 2008 and the Grant Park arrests in mid-October of this year. But this comparison doesn’t begin to get at what’s interesting about Occupy. Because of what I will call its “aesthetics” as well as its size (at last count, more than seventy American cities have an Occupy protest, not counting the strength and scope of related protests abroad), the protest, or movement, depending on how you look at it, is very much that—an amorphous, sprawling political form that looks different from every angle and every subject position, like Wallace Stevens’ blackbird. That American mainstream media is unable to cover Occupy in any kind of coherent, proficient way is well-documented, but even as a single observer it was nearly impossible for me to take any kind of clearly articulated position about Occupy Chicago without immediately realizing I could make a strong case for an opposite view of the phenomenon (and usually I had heard someone do so in an interview). Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): The title of this week’s movie is “Uproar of Love,” starring the Fantasy Kid and The Most Feeling Machine In The World. It blends romance and science fiction, with overtones of espionage and undertones of revolution for the hell of it. Comic touches will slip in at unexpected moments. When you’re not up to your jowls in archetypes, you might be able to muster the clarity to gorge yourself on the earthly delights that are spread from here to the edge of the abyss. Read the rest of this entry »