Plus: Gangsters & Grifters
“The great Chicago writer Nelson Algren gets the documentary treatment with not just one but two feature-length projects debuting this month: Mark Blottner and Denis Mueller’s 20-years-in-the-making Nelson Algren: The End is Nothing, The Road is All, and Michael Caplan’s Algren,” Reel Chicago reports.
“Blottner and Mueller’s The End is Nothing preview[ed] Oct. 3 in advance of its festival run and Caplan’s Algren has its world premiere Oct. 14 in the 50th Chicago International Film Festival.”
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Here’s the trailer for Nelson Algren: The End is Nothing, The Road is All:
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Here’s the trailer for Algren:
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Gangsters & Grifters
“Al Capone and his criminal legacy are known across America, if not around the world, but how many people know about Joe Aiello or Ruth Steinhagen?” Agate Publishing says in a press release.
“Chicago’s criminal underworld is often discussed in mythical terms, but few books outline the real scene as it existed in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. Gangsters & Grifters: Classic Crime Photos from the Chicago Tribune paints a complete portrait of the gangsters, bootleggers, grifters, hoodlums, bandits, femme fatales, and wiseguys who populated Chicago in the early twentieth century.
“Buried for decades in the Chicago Tribune archives, more than 70 glass-plate negatives and original photos of grisly crime scenes, mugshots, police raids, criminals in repose, and other aspects of Chicago’s seamy underbelly are compiled in this book. Many of the photos in this collection have never before been seen outside of the Tribune. In order to provide historical context, many photos are paired with captions excerpted from contemporary news accounts that appeared in the Tribune.
“Travelers from Chicago know well that the name of their home city often evokes the same reaction wherever they go: a mimed machine-gun burst, or the words ‘mobsters,’ ‘gangsters,’ or just ‘Al Capone.’ The fact that gangland culture, more than 80 years after the end of Prohibition, is still so strongly associated with Chicago is a testament to the public’s enduring fascination with this infamous era.
“Gangsters & Grifters: Classic Crime Photos from the Chicago Tribune is a unique addition to the historical records of organized crime in Chicago.”
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We wonder if a few decades from now the Tribune will publish a coffee-table book titled Vice Lords & Latin Maniac Kings: Classic Crime Photos from the Chicago Tribune.
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Take a look.
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Mmmm, Pig’s Blood
The first 100 copies of Noise In My Head: Voices From the Ugly Australian Underground, the first book release from HoZac Records, “come with pig’s blood hand-numbered butcher wrap.”
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The Want Will Be Very Real
“The Guild Literary Complex, following its enduring aim to foster dialogue through literature and its diverse and emerging voices in Chicago, presents its next free monthly edition of Palabra Pura that takes place on Wednesday, October 15 at La Bruquena Restaurant (2726 West Division Street, upstairs) from 7:30 p.m. – 9 p.m., with an open mic kickoff reading beginning at 7:30.,” the GLC says in a press release.
“This upcoming reading series features three Chicago artists – Bobby Biedrzycki, Adriana Galvan, and Kevin Kane – who will get together during that evening to engage with curator Cyn Vargas‘ suggested theme ‘want.’
“As she clarifies, ‘Want could be a person, thing, words we long to hear, a new place. Want is at the core of what we do and say. It drives us or it stuns us.’
“Winner of the 2013 Guild Literary Complex Prose Award for Fiction, Vargas invites us all to join the Guild Complex for a night filled with fictional stories about ‘narrators wanting something or someone and what they do to try and get it,’ as well as the consequences of their potential failure or success. Come and take part of this evening’s reading during which the ‘want will be very real.'”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on October 7, 2014