By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): The Tarahumara Indians of northwestern Mexico are renowned for their ability to run long distances. The best runners can cover 200 miles in two days. The paths they travel are not paved or smooth, either, but rather the rough canyon trails that stretch between their settlements. Let’s make them your inspirational role models in the coming week, Aries. I’m hoping that you will be as tough and tenacious as they are—that you will pace yourself for the long haul, calling on your instinctual strength to guide you. Read the rest of this entry »

Cinco de Miler post-race party/Photo: Zach Freeman

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Breakdown: If there’s a better way to start off Cinco de Mayo in Chicago, I haven’t found it. Mostly following last year’s five-mile course from a blocked-off Simonds Drive north to Hollywood Avenue and back, this year’s Cinco de Miler kept everything that worked last year and even managed to improve on a few details.

The signature mariachi band was back (with a few additional members this time around) and the finishing chute was a bit more streamlined, curving around a cheering area and directing runners back to the post-race party. RAM Racing knows how to do swag and the race shirts were much improved: last year’s long-sleeve red and white running shirts were replaced with stylish dark gray cotton/polyester blends. The finisher’s drinking mug was replaced with a finisher’s medal that doubles as a bottle-opener (which runners could make use of immediately after the race at the beer tent).

Read the rest of this entry »

The McGroarty-Torres family

By Lisa Applegate

When she stood behind the podium and began reading from her one-page speech, Kathy McGroarty-Torres felt more than just her usual jitters about speaking in public. The paper she held quivered in her hands. Her voice choked and she blinked away tears. She had written this speech late the previous night in her hotel room, anxious to include the most compelling details of her family’s struggle with a largely unknown immigration law. It was a story she had yearned to tell for a decade, ever since she and Ines Torres were newlyweds and learned of the law while waiting at the border in Ciudad Juarez. Now here she was, standing before a television camera and several reporters in a U. S. Congress meeting room.

“We have lived everyday with the fear that our lives could be destroyed by a deportation order. We have two boys, Esteban and Diego, who have no idea that their father’s immigration status could ultimately bring unbelievable heartache to our home.” As Kathy spoke her boys’ names, a thought flashed in her mind: “Oh, there it is. We’re all out now.” She had been encouraged to use their names, to add a human dimension to the law passed by Congress seventeen years ago in an attempt to deter undocumented immigrants. Now she wondered, could this be dangerous for us? Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration: Tony Fitzpatrick

By Tony Fitzpatrick

I’ve made more than a few tributes to the great Chicago writer Nelson Algren. His shadow looms large over how I see the city. Algren, of course, is the steely realist who will not let us bullshit ourselves about who we are. He is also the soft heart who is full of the gambler’s optimism about who we could be. He was a master of the gray; the good in the bad and the bad in the good. He also leavened his often sad and tragic stories with wry humor. He is also aware of Chicago’s propensity for eating its own. He often remarked that Chicago could not “love you back” and went to his grave believing this.

This is why I get pissed when dipshits from somewhere else attempt to tell us who we are. In his lifetime Algren never let us forget our inequities and cruelties—he saw Chicago for what it was—never mind the cheap boosterism or the “swagger.” When the New York Times Book Review ran its hit piece disguised as a book review a couple of weeks ago it sent me searching for writers who lived here, and their testaments to that experience. Algren never went easy on Chicago. Neither did the oral histories of Studs Terkel or the novels of James T. Farrell. Mike Royko certainly cut the city no slack when it came to blowing the whistle on crooked aldermen, shysters and even the mayor. We’ve never wanted for social critics among our own. Though I suppose we should be grateful that an associate professor from DePaul weighs in and lets us know how deluded we are in our little burg. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Are you afraid that you lack a crucial skill or aptitude? Do you have a goal that you’re worried might be impossible to achieve because of this inadequacy? If so, now is a good time to make plans to fill in the gap. If you formulate such an intention, you will attract a benevolent push from the cosmos. Why spend another minute fretting about the consequences of your ignorance when you have more power than usual to correct that ignorance? Read the rest of this entry »

Grant Vitale leads a walkability assessment in Pilsen. Photo courtesy of CLOCC.

“The built environment plays a huge role when it comes to people being able to be physically active,” says Grant Vitale, community programs manager for the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children (CLOCC). The group, based out of the Lurie Children’s Hospital, is an association of many local, statewide and national organizations working to help kids maintain healthy weight levels by encouraging better nutrition, as well as walking, biking and active play.

The rate of childhood obesity in the U.S. has more than tripled over the last three decades, and in 2008 Chicago’s obesity rate for young kids entering school was 22 percent, more than twice the national average. In some neighborhoods, mostly low-income African-American and Latino communities, over half of all children are overweight or obese. These areas tend to have less green space and higher pedestrian crash rates than wealthier neighborhoods, which discourages active transportation and recreation.

Over the last two years, CLOCC has partnered with the Chicago Department of Public Health on a $5.8 million, federally funded anti-obesity campaign called Healthy Places. The program has focused on creating safe streets and parks, as well as creating healthier schools, eliminating food deserts and promoting breast feeding. Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration: Tony Fitzpatrick

By Tony Fitzpatrick

There is a not-very-good movie from the nineties that bears one lovely, elegiac passage about Hollywood Boulevard. It is an otherwise forgettable piece of grade-D chewing gum for the brain called “Jimmy Hollywood.” Luckily the moments of grace are the opening credits in which a blond-wigged Joe Pesci (never has a hair piece been a worse idea) walks the stars on Hollywood Boulevard with his eyes closed. As he stops at each one he says the name of the honored actor or actress under his feet—he knows them by heart—and by this time, without a word of exposition, we know him. He is an actor who never made it and never will and yet, in our hearts, in a weird way we begin to hold out hope for him. It doesn’t hurt that the music in the opening sequence is Robbie Robertson’s lovely “Soap-Box Preacher.” It’s appropriate this song is used: Pesci’s character, Jimmy Alto, is attending his church—Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—and he is practicing his act of faith, his stations of the cross—walking the stars and honoring those entombed in the cement forever. It is heartbreaking and hopeful in the same moment and, for any other film, would have and could have been a departure point for a wonderful story. Not this one though. Like Jimmy Hollywood, it never gets out of the gate.

When I first saw this film I thought it was an innocuous enough flight of whimsy and didn’t realize that, in Los Angeles, guys like Jimmy Hollywood actually exist. On my last visit there, I arranged a show of twenty-nine Chicago artists at East Hollywood’s La Luz de Jesus Gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

Ash, dolled up for the Bike Winter fashion show/Photo: Steven Vance

By John Greenfield

Last week Dottie Brackett, co-author of the excellent Chicago cycle-chic blog LetsGoRideABike.com, put up a post that was completely unrelated to bicycling. While spending several days at home sick, too exhausted to even read books, let alone ride a bike, she found herself watching instructional beauty videos online for hours on end. “I’m not that into makeup,” she wrote. “But listening to these women’s voices was oddly comforting and I felt like I was learning something while using very minimal mental energy.” She linked to videos by some of her favorite beauty experts, like Lisa Eldridge and Sali Hughes.

Dottie’s post jogged my memory about a makeup-centric article that I never got around to writing up, so here it is. Last year I got in a debate with my roommate Meagan, a non-cycling Texan who’s a bit of a Southern belle. She spends about an hour on her hair, makeup and grooming each day, and I was ribbing her about it. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): How we react to the sound of the wind gives clues to our temperament, said philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. The unhappy person thinks of “the fragility of his house and suffers from shallow sleep and violent dreams.” But for the happy person, the wind sings “the song of protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has power over him no longer.” I bring this up to illustrate a point about your life. There will be a strong and vivid influence coming your way that is like the wind as described by Adorno. It’s neither bad nor good in itself, but may seem like one or the other depending on the state of mind you choose to cultivate. Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration: Tony Fitzpatrick

By Tony Fitzpatrick

“We’re bigger than US Steel.” —Hyman Roth to Michael Corleone in “The Godfather, Part II”

There is a scene in the movie “Bugsy,” in which Benjamin Siegel is standing in the middle of the Nevada desert taking a leak and, looks around, reading the landscape. He sees it: his future and the future of the American mob. There is not a goddamn thing out there other than scorpions and sagebrush, but in his mind’s eye, Siegel can see it: a utopia for sinners and gamblers, servicemen in need of relaxation, a neon-lit Sodom and Gomorrah where “we the people” could indulge our darker and more libertine impulses. And to Bugsy Siegel, Moe Dalitz, and other members of the Chicago, Cleveland and Kansas City mob, it was a place about a fundamental American thing—freedom. You want to gamble away the rent? Eat cheap prime rib? Get blown by a showgirl? Welcome sir, your room is ready. Read the rest of this entry »