By Dan O’Shea

Discerning beer drinkers in Chicago tend to lament the fact that our town has played a fairly low-key role thus far in the resurgence of craft beer.
Even with the emergence of at least half a dozen new breweries in Chicago over the last year or so, and the sale of local icon Goose Island as recognition of Chicago’s current brewing community, the pride has been lacking a bit. Local beer drinkers and local beer makers alike have sometimes been too quick to acknowledge that smaller cities like Portland have a better-developed craft beer scene than Chicago.
Will all that change now that fast-growing Petaluma, Calif.-based Lagunitas Brewing Co. has decided to open Chicago’s largest modern brewery on the South Side? In some ways it could help make the local craft beer scene a bit more cohesive, giving the community a truly massive anchor tenant, where it previously has been made up of much smaller, yet ambitious, players.

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Posted on April 11, 2012

Meet Chaz Ortiz

“Growing up in Chicago, Chaz had an itch for skateboarding at a very young age,” KidzWorld once wrote. “When he was just six-years-old, Chad begged his dad to buy him a skateboard. When his dad gave in, Chaz took full advantage practicing tricks day and night. It wasn’t long until the pint-sized skatepark star started making a name for himself around the Windy City and eventually the world.”
Chaz is now 17. Check out this video from sponsor Zoo York.

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Posted on April 9, 2012

Let My People Rock!

Starts at sundown.
1. Passover Rhapsody.

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Posted on April 6, 2012

By Roger Wallenstein

Last in a series. Previously: One, Two, Three.
They call it a carnival, and the school stages three of them a year.
So we made our way over to Oasis Elementary last Thursday evening to find a few hundred students, parents, and teachers socializing in the courtyard amidst booths for food and games.
Principal Dora Flores greeted people from a table where she was selling tickets which could be redeemed for anything from putt-putt golf to tacos to a cold drink.
Once the program began, we were entertained by Ballet Folklorico and lots of songs. Not only were the kids cute, happy, and proud, but the ambiance exuded a sense of community and togetherness where the children were the center of attention. We also felt a personal sense of pride watching a few of our students engaged in activities other than trying to sort out language skills.

Yet, it is those skills on which these young people are most often judged. That is the reality despite the fact that there is so much more to the story.

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Posted on April 5, 2012

By SnakeBytesTV

The North American Reptile Breeders Conference came to Tinley Park in March and returns in October. We catch up with the action via today’s upload from SnakeBytesTV.

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Posted on April 4, 2012

By Dan O’Shea

I spent two recent Saturday mornings shopping for beer at Binny’s on Marcey Street. It’s not that I can only stand to be in that overstuffed section of Lincoln Park at 9 a.m. on a weekend before most of the stores are open – well, okay, that is part of the reason. I went there to collect my first two returns on a recent investment.
Buying beer at 9 a.m. made me feel a bit scandalous until I caught a glimpse of the four or five bums that had gathered at the edge of the Binny’s parking lot, two of them with freshly cracked 20-oz. beers in hand.
I can’t fault them for their choice of packaging. What I had come to collect was a beer about that size – actually a 22 oz. bomber bottle from Pipeworks Brewing Co.
I was one of the “investors” that chipped in $100 via Kickstarter to give a leg up to Pipeworks, one of the newest craft breweries on the Chicago scene.
Like buying stock in the Green Bay Packers, putting $100 into Pipeworks did not give me an ownership stake in anything, but it did allow me to get guaranteed access to new Pipeworks releases (being held at Binny’s until the Pipeworks folks get their own brewery shop up and running).

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Posted on April 3, 2012

The Iconography Of Death

“Welcome to Morbid Curiosity: The Richard Harris Collection,” Explore Chicago announced in January. “This groundbreaking exhibition, one of the Chicago Cultural Center’s largest to date, showcases over five hundred artworks and other artifacts from the personal collection of Chicago-based collector Richard Harris. Amassed over several decades, Harris’s collection explores the iconography of death across cultures and traditions spanning nearly six thousand years, and includes works by some of the greatest artists of our time.
“To help guide your visit, the exhibition is organized into two major sections: The War Room, which deals with the horrors and reactions to war expressed through art; and The Kunstkammer of Death, a play on the traditional European term for a ‘cabinet of curiosities.’ While the subject matter may seem a bit macabre, artists have long derived inspiration from death, mortality, and the impermanence of human existence. This eclectic collection examines these concepts from centuries past to the present day.”
Let’s take a look.
1. The city uploaded this video to YouTube this week:

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Posted on March 30, 2012

By Roger Wallenstein

Third of a four-part series. Previously: Part One, Part Two.
I taught for nine years at Chicago’s Francis Parker, as polar opposite from Oasis Elementary as you can get. It is urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, private vs. public, varied curriculum vs. narrow curriculum, and primarily white vs. Latino. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Parker students enjoy material, monetary and cultural gifts that would be incomprehensible to kids at Oasis. However, I always thought that in addition to meaningful and venerable traditions and rituals at Parker, what set the school apart from most others was what went on once the teacher closed his or her classroom door and went to work.
It matters not how bright, eager, and advantaged the students are, nor how fancy and complete the facilities; learning doesn’t occur unless a competent, dedicated teacher encourages and leads the students on the path to scholarship and enlightenment.
In this regard – despite test scores, lack of funding, and demographics – Oasis does just fine.

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Posted on March 28, 2012

From The Chicago Film Archive’s Margaret Conneely Collection

“Margaret Conneely, an award winning and prolific amateur filmmaker, began making films when she joined a Chicago amateur film club in 1949. She shot and directed 16mm films at a time when most of the women of these clubs were less technically inclined and often delegated to the role of actress or slides manager. Her work is well crafted, clever and subtly subversive.”

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Posted on March 27, 2012

By Roger Wallenstein

Second of a four-part series. Part One is here.
From the day Oasis students first walk in the door, they’re already behind and beginning a lifetime game of catch-up.
“[B]y the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities,” the New York Times reported last month.
For the 698 students at Oasis in grades K-6, that means parents have spent about a half-hour less per night reading to their children before they enter school than parents of means.
Couple that with the fact that English often is not spoken at home. Then consider that just 25 percent of Oasis’s parents have finished high school. Many of these folks spend the day picking strawberries or pruning grape vines. Making dinner and falling into bed just might take precedence over reading to their toddlers at the day’s end.
But Oasis is trying to change that.

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Posted on March 20, 2012