By  Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the fictional world of the wizard Harry Potter, muggles are people who have no magical powers. Because of their deficiency, certain sights may be literally invisible to them and certain places inaccessible. I’m going to boldly predict that you Aries people will lose at least some of your muggleness in the coming year. A part of your life where you’ve been inept or clueless will begin to wake up. In ways that may feel surprisingly easy, you’ll be able to fill a gap in your skill set or knowledge base. Read the rest of this entry »

By John Greenfield

Christmas is a great time to be in Chicago, even if you’re not a Christian. As a largely nonobservant Jewish person, I make a point of staying in town during the holiday because I always have a blast. It’s the best of both worlds: I get to enjoy the spirit of brotherhood and good cheer that prevails, as well as taking the day off of work, but there’s no pressure to gather with relatives or exchange gifts. For me, Christmas is a chance to spend quality time with members of my family of choice—my longtime Chicago friends. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Jim Moran (1908-1999) called himself a publicist, but I regard him as a pioneer performance artist. At various times in his colorful career, he led a bull through a china shop in New York City, changed horses in midstream in Nevada’s Truckee River and looked for a needle in a haystack until he found it. You might want to draw inspiration from his work in the coming weeks, Aries. You will not only have a knack for mutating cliches and scrambling conventional wisdom. In doing so, you could also pull off feats that might seem improbable. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Steven Vance

By John Greenfield

“Gabe Klein has always viewed his work as a canvas to create a contribution, and is inspired by ventures that give something back to the community, versus strictly producing profit. This is why he only works on projects that invoke his passion.” —From “Gabe Klein’s TreE-House,” gabeklein.com

“True love knows no bargains. It is one-way traffic: giving, giving, giving.” —Swami Satchidananda, Klein’s childhood guru

When forward-thinking Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) Commissioner Gabe Klein reported for work on May 16 as part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new administration, it marked a sea change in the city’s priorities. After spending most of the twentieth century trying to make it easier to drive, City Hall was switching its focus to promoting healthier modes: walking, biking and transit. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life? To answer that question is your first assignment. It’s OK if you can’t decide between the three or four most beautiful things. What’s important is to keep visions of those amazements dancing in the back of your mind for the next few days. Play with them in your imagination. Feel the feelings they rouse in you as you muse about the delights they have given you. Regard them as beacons that will attract other ravishing marvels into your sphere. Now here’s your second assignment: Be alert for and go hunting for a new “most beautiful thing.” Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »