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ART

Art On The Mart Springs Forward

Art On The Mart has announced its spring 2024 session, running April 12-June 5, with a commission by artist Nora Turato, exploring themes of self-optimization and language. Alongside Turato’s work will be the annual Chicago Public Schools projection (May 1-May 12), made in conjunction with the All-City Visual Arts program and featuring artwork by CPS seniors. The 2024 programming will include the inaugural projections from the partnership between curator of digital art Dr. Raphael Gygax and Cynthia Noble, Art On The Mart’s executive director, while showcasing work by national and international artists alongside local talent and institutions. More here.

DESIGN

Chinatown As Chicago Dining Diversity HQ, An Area With A “Century-Long Fight For Power”

“During my frequent jaunts to Chinatown, I observe how the enclave represents the best of our segregated city. I marvel at the age and racial diversity, especially during the summer when the streets teem with activity,” writes Natalie Y. Moore at the Sun-Times. At South Side Weekly, Xuandi Wang writes about how community leaders transformed the neighborhood.

“A Knife Forged In Fire”: Laurence Gonzales Witnesses The Birth Of A Blade

Veteran journalist Laurence Gonzales “wanted a Japanese-style kitchen blade made for him by hand. What he witnessed was a combination of artistry and atomic magic,” Chicago magazine describes his lyrical project. “Some of the things in this sprawling realm of clutter might have come from another galaxy, like the ballistic cartridge for the table saw. If you accidentally touch the blade, it senses electrical conductivity and retracts. It’s gone so fast that it can’t cut you. It’s all part of the magic of this place of transformations.”

Proposed Chicago Ordinance Would Bar Natural Gas In New Builds

“An ordinance that would fight climate change by effectively banning the use of natural gas in most new buildings is headed to the Chicago City Council,” reports the Tribune.

Vandal Plasters Chicago Rat Hole

“Neighbors and fans of the ‘Chicago Rat Hole’ rushed to save the city’s newest attraction after someone tried to cover it up Friday,” reports Block Club. “NBC 5 reported the rat-shaped sidewalk hole near [Roscoe and Damen] was filled in with a ‘concrete-like material.’ … By early afternoon, the hole looked mostly back to normal, though remnants remained of the filling, melted snow and slush.” The Tribune carves its own rat hole beat: “Onlookers Friday morning discovered that the city’s newest tourist attraction—a hole in the sidewalk, with a skinny tail and only three paws—had been filled with a concrete slurry after a week in the spotlight once it went viral on a social media post… by Friday afternoon, a group of people—who declined to be identified, for fear of retribution—[were] trying to clear the hole.” Neighbors say “the spot has been there for nearly twenty years and that the mark was actually left by a squirrel, not a rat.” (Over the weekend, the Chicago Rat Hole hosted at least one proposal as well as a gay wedding.)

Mesirow Extends HQ Lease While Cutting Back On Space

“Mesirow is keeping its headquarters at an office tower in River North with a new long-term lease, but joining the herd of companies reducing their workspace to adapt to the remote work movement,” reports Crain’s.

DINING & DRINKING

Rubes, Beware Of Restaurant Week, Sez Trib

“Given all the impediments thrown in the way of Chicago’s restaurateurs by the city in the last twelve months and the preexisting fragility of the field, we’d say that this annual promotion is a fine way of supporting the kinds of local businesses that make this city a great place to live,” the Trib editorial board avers. “We have only one caveat: Be sure that your destination of choice offers you a true deal. As in past years, a few places mostly have repackaged their regular prices along with their offerings and, given that many folks don’t typically buy all three courses, a night out during Restaurant Week could end up costing you more… We prefer the restaurants that see these two weeks primarily as a chance to introduce themselves to people who will be so awed with their food as to return.”

FAFO Pop-up Hits Lakeview

Late-night pop-up FAFO has debuted in Lakeview, “with dishes like Japanese egg salad mousse with crispy chorizo and steak frites that swap french fries for potato churros dusted in cheddar and Japanese snow crab powder,” reports Eater Chicago. The chefs “are looking to push the limit of what Chicagoans can expect from late-night dining and pop-ups in general… Industry veteran Rafa Esparza and former Kimski sous chef Anthony Baier are embarking on [a run of] five or six months, inside the Little Evette’s location at 2807 North Sheffield. The future of the space depends on the launch’s success.” FAFO Instagram here.

Goose Island Gains “Global Chocolate Innovation” Hub

“Mars Snacking unveils new ‘global chocolate innovation’ hub next to corporate HQ in Goose Island,” reports the Sun-Times. “The Chicago-based candy company opened its 44,000-square-foot Mars Global Research and Development Hub to serve as home to innovation across brands that include Snickers, M&M and Twix.”

Foxtrot Market Lauded For Snack Innovation

“Inside Foxtrot Market’s search for the next big thing in food,” headlines Fast Company: “Why you’ll be craving seaweed snacks, jackfruit chips and Pink Salt on everything… Ever since the first Foxtrot store opened in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood in 2015, the convenience store has stocked its shelves with products that have a local connection or a social-impact component. As a result, it’s become a unique trendsetter in food and snacks.”

FILM & TELEVISION

Remembering Theater Owner And Music Maven Sanford Cohen, Who Was Seventy-Eight

“I’ve been writing about people for more than forty years. It has been a cinematic parade of characters, misfits, rogues and dreamers. Some memories are starting to fade away into a winter horizon. Other figures remain for years, bringing common warmth to a random thought. Sanford Cohen was one of those subjects,” writes Dave Hoekstra in a lengthy remembrance. “From 1977 until 1984 Cohen was the effervescent owner of the Homewood Theatre, 18110 South Dixie Highway in Homewood… I met him in the early 1980s when I wrote a feature on Cohen and his theater for the Suburban Sun-Times. We kept in touch for several years and then we didn’t. The theater closed in 1984 and has since been razed.”

Posts the Pabst Theater Group: “We were notified of the passing of one Sanford Cohen, a true character in the Milwaukee music scene known for marching to the beat of his own drum, making people laugh, and loving live music. You may have met Sanford in the front row of countless shows at Pabst Theater Group venues—and one thing was for sure, he didn’t care if he was the oldest person in the room. Just between 2021 and 2024 alone, he came to fifty-two events at the Pabst Theater Group venues, and we know he attended other shows in town at other venues. So long as there was live music and good conversation, he was there!”

There’s much more from Hoekstra including, “Cohen was a regular P.T. Barnum at the 500-seat Homewood. He would introduce area celebrities such as the local State Farm insurance man and ask customers in the lobby if they wanted to bum a cigarette. ‘I’ll do anything to keep a customer happy,’ Cohen told me during a 1981 visit to his theater. ‘If they don’t like the popcorn, I’ll give them a free box of popcorn. The only problem with this is that I’m too close to it personally.’ Cohen spent every night at the Homewood. He worked from noon until midnight on weekends. During the days he worked as a substitute teacher at several south suburban high schools. Cohen was theater within a theater.”

Pabst Theater Group CEO Gary Witt: “When you host 800 shows a year, you’d think that one person of those 500,000+ people wouldn’t stand out. Sanford stood out. His passion for live music brought him to our venues dozens of times every year. He was a regular at ALL of our venues and ALL of the venues around town and outside of town. He came. He asked lots of questions. He always had suggestions. But he always came… experimenting way beyond the expectation of anyone in their seventies. Metal, Classic Rock, guitar heroes, country. Name it and he was there. He never stopped listening to and discovering music. And he never stopped enjoying it with friends old… and new.”

MEDIA

Podcasts Imperiled By Honest Accounting

“Apple has quietly tightened its reporting of how many people listen to podcasts, sending shock waves through an embattled audio industry still reeling from the end of the COVID-era production bubble,” signals Semafor. The shift “was technical: The dominant podcasting platform had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks… Some of the biggest podcasts in the world saw their official listener numbers drop dramatically.”

“Long-running shows that publish frequently were hit particularly hard. A user who listened to a show like The New York Times’ ‘The Daily’ a few times, subscribed, but stopped listening would continue to count as a download indefinitely. Even better under the old rules: For people who listened to a show, dropped off for a while, but started listening again later, Apple would automatically download every show in between. The arrangement drove big download numbers.”

Media Meltdown: Strike At Los Angeles Times; Sports Illustrated Publisher Firing Everyone; 123-Year-Old Scarsdale Inquirer Suspends Publication

Cutbacks and closures in publishing continue nationwide: the staff of the Los Angeles Times struck for the first time in 142 years, with an unspecified number of firings in store by the billionaire owner.

“The Scarsdale Inquirer, a community newspaper and an institution in Scarsdale, announced that it had suspended publication on January 16,” reports Scarsdale 10583. “The paper has been published weekly for 123 years, since its founding on July 4, 1901. The news was sudden and unexpected by staff and readers.”

Sports Illustrated could close entirely: “The Arena Group, which publishes Sports Illustrated, missed a $3.75 million payment to SI’s license holder, Authentic, leading Authentic to sever the deal,” reports Front Office Sports. “Authentic’s move to terminate Arena’s license and Arena’s eliminating SI’s staff signals a shift in the company that operates SI, weeks after Manoj Bhargava, the founder of 5-Hour Energy, introduced himself to employees of Arena… as their new leader. Since then, Authentic has had exploratory conversations with and reached out to multiple parties about the possibility of taking over Arena’s role with SI.”

“Sports Illustrated’s model was really very simple,” posts sportswriter Leander Alphabet on X/Twitter: “1) Employ 1-4 of the best writers in every sport. 2) Let them cook. 3) Charge people to read what they wrote. It’s insane that the Big Business Brains managed to fuck that up with a half-century of cachet as the industry leader.” The New York Times: “Arena Group’s executives told Sports Illustrated staff members they planned on continuing to publish the magazine and website, despite having their license to operate the publication revoked. But it was not immediately clear how that would work.” Sports Illustrated “once had over three million subscribers, and its writing, reporting and photography were considered the pinnacle of sports journalism.”

The Business Of Money-Losing Conservative Billionaire Media Owners

“The purchase of The Baltimore Sun is further proof that conservative billionaires understand the power of media control,” assays Michael Tomasky at the New Republic. “Why don’t their liberal counterparts get it? … The right-wing media is now the agenda-setting media in this country, and it’s only getting bigger and more influential every year. And how have the country’s politically engaged liberal billionaires responded to this? By doing roughly nothing… I used to say to people: What we need is a full-throated liberal tabloid in Washington—a Washington version of the New York Post that would use its front pages and its news columns to promote embarrassing stories and scandals about Bush administration officials, evangelical grifters and other prominent right-wingers. It would be agenda-setting.”

MUSIC

No Tomorrow For Born Yesterday Records

“Born Yesterday is calling it a day,” announced the Chicago label on X/Twitter. “There are many reasons we have made this decision. Running a record label is very hard. We have not managed to make the connections within the wider industry to grow and further our reach. Big tech companies are siphoning more and more money out of artists’ hands and displacing small labels as a primary source for discovering new music. Music journalism has been… gutted, and it’s harder and harder to find coverage for little guys like us. Bandcamp, a massive source of support and structure in running the label, has been bought, sold, and stripped for parts—twice… The most effective way to reach new listeners is to pour money into the Facebook Ad machine, which feels bad.”

Factors “outside anyone’s control have led to strenuously long lead times for vinyl manufacturing. Sudden inflation made things more expensive, which has an outsized effect on art and the people who choose to support it… These developments have suffocated the flame that drove us to be ‘taken seriously.’ This is sad news, but to be totally honest, we feel at peace ending the label here. We have never put out a bad record. We’ve given a platform for some really incredible artists to grow and do great things, both on and off of our label. We’re incredibly proud of what we have accomplished.” (Born Yesterday’s founders were included in Newcity’s Music 45 2023.)

Music’s Not Helped By Hollowed-Out Pitchfork

“Beyond gutting Pitchfork’s staff, it’s not clear what exactly being brought under the auspices of GQ will mean for the publication. But it feels safe to assume that it will become a smaller, dimmer version of what it was before it became the latest victim of the ongoing implosion of music journalism,” writes Israel Daramola at Defector. “This is a corner of the media industry that has been hit particularly hard by consolidation and downsizing. When I was laid off from Spin in 2018, I was part of a downsizing of a collection of music brands including Vibe and Billboard. The idea was that the brands these publications represented still had value, but that the journalism they produced didn’t, and therefore the sites would be better off as little more than engines for listicles and veiled ad copy. Stereogum ended up having to go the indie route, and now more or less runs off reader support.”

“Meanwhile, throughout the industry, features and reporting and music reviews have taken a backseat as companies push for more social media and video content. What has filled the vacuum left behind by actual music criticism is a loose collection of YouTubers and influencers who feed slop to their younger audiences, and fan communities that engage with music solely through their obsession with a particular pop act. This has all helped produce a mass of music fans who don’t understand the value of criticism and outright detest being told the things they like might suck. Even worse, it has helped destroy what scant opportunities remain for obscure or up-and-coming musicians to find an audience. It’s harder than ever to make it big without a cosign from Drake or Taylor Swift, and stuffing one of the few music publications left that swam against all these currents into GQ’s stuffy environs isn’t going to help things.”

“Condé Nast’s gutting of the esteemed alternative publication and its staff is the latest example of media conglomerates prioritizing capital over culture,” writes Laura Snapes at the Guardian. Writes Parker Molloy: “Back in 2008, I was an editorial intern at this music site called Pitchfork. You may have heard of it. I had a few simple jobs there: I would lug the gigantic buckets of unsolicited CDs that would get sent to our Wicker Park office here in Chicago up from the ground floor yoga studio to our open studio space on the second floor. There, in complete and total silence (virtually no one in the office would speak out loud, instead opting to use AOL Instant Messenger), I would then take on my next task of the day: transcribing interviews reporters had conducted with artists and fact-checking them… I’m not sure what will happen to Pitchfork. There was good. There was bad. A lot of what people are mourning (or celebrating the death of) died long ago. It’s a matter of point of view.”

STAGE

Fired Director Of Cleveland Ballet Launches Her Own Ballet School Next Door

“The delicate dance between Cleveland Ballet and its cofounders made another leap as the company’s former in-house school relaunched itself,” reports Ideastream Public Media. “The Cleveland School of Dance is now Cleveland Ballet Theatre. It was started in 2000 by Gladisa Guadalupe, who subsequently founded Cleveland Ballet in 2015. The two entities later became partners, but are now severing any ties. Earlier this month, Guadalupe dismissed instructors connected to the Cleveland Ballet. The company responded with the announcement of its own in-house school, the Academy of Cleveland Ballet… Cleveland Ballet Theatre lists the same address as the Cleveland School of Dance’s facility—next door to Cleveland Ballet.”

ARTS & CULTURE & ETC.

California Health Officials Cut COVID Isolation Period To Single Day

“California health officials have shortened the COVID-19 isolation guidelines for those who test positive as the department aims to focus more on people who are the most at risk of severe illness while also working to minimize school and workplace disruptions,” reports KTLA. “People who test positive for COVID-19 but have mild symptoms and have been fever-free without the help of medication may return to school or work after one day of isolation. Previously, the recommended guidelines called for five days of isolation.”

College Of DuPage President Retiring At End Of June

“College of DuPage President Brian Caputo will retire when his contract expires at the end of June after five years as the top administrator of the Glen Ellyn-based school,” reports the Daily Herald. “During Caputo’s tenure, the college expanded dual-credit programs with high schools, rolled out diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and recently approved a new, four-year contract with full-time faculty members. Caputo also steered the college through the pandemic.”

Macy’s Firing 2,350 Workers; First Five Store Closures Don’t Include Illinois

“Macy’s, the country’s largest department store operator, told employees Thursday that it was laying off thirteen percent of its corporate work force. The move comes as the company prepares to unveil a new strategy that its incoming chief executive will oversee,” reports the New York Times. “The cuts amount to roughly 2,350 jobs, or about 3.5 percent of the company’s overall work force, which includes employees at the subsidiaries Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury.”

The Faces Behind Artistic Energy In Detroit

“From a groundbreaking exhibition slated to open at DIA to the revitalization of a 110-year old church, activity in Detroit’s art scene is turning all the way up,” reports CultureD. Profiles of five groups and culture leaders follow.

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