Logan Square’s Latest Art Gallery: The Blue Line Station
Block Club Chicago reports that the station will be transformed into an art gallery, after publisher Khloe Karova expends $48,000 to rent all its ad spaces. “I really want to make sure that these everyday histories — people’s stories — aren’t ignored.” For Newcity Lit, Brian Hieggelke spoke with Karova about her photo project, “LGNSQ: The Logan Square Book.”
DINING & DRINKING
Steak 48 Sets $100 Floor Per Diner Plus Dress Code
Steak 48’s new dress code includes detailed restrictions, reports Eater Chicago. (Full dress code here.) The steakhouse also stipulates $100-per-person minimum and an eighteen-percent automatic tip for parties of five or more at Chicago and Philadelphia locations. “Social media debate centered over whether the dress code was really an anti-Black dogwhistle, a practice that has plagued restaurants and bars for years. Most recently, now-shuttered bar and restaurant Bottled Blonde went under the microscope four years ago for its policies in River North.”
FILM & TELEVISION
Another Enormous Chicago Film Campus?
Derek Dudley, one of the producers of Showtime’s “The Chi” sees searing demand for Chicago production space and plans a $60 million development to urge South Side economic development in the fifth ward. Reports Crain’s, the “longtime associate of the rapper Common is pushing ahead with plans for a big film studio in South Shore, an operation that could employ several hundred people and give the South Side neighborhood an economic jolt. A venture led by Dudley filed a zoning application with the City Council this week for Regal Mile Studios, a proposed film production campus just around the corner from the historic Avalon Regal Theater.”
Here’s Regal Mile Studio’s presentation deckon the “unique and sensitive development opportunity for the area”: “ID8 Ventures presents a vertically integrated business model which maximizes the Opportunity Zone benefits by incorporating both a Qualified Opportunity Zone Business with an established independent film and television production company… ID8 Ventures has been established by the true believers in the transformational power of the entertainment industry and socially responsible investment. The goal of ID8 is to develop and manage sustainable communities for the greater tomorrow.”
Ryan Ori at the Trib: “Dudley is joined by a well-known name in Chicago business, Loop Capital Chairman and CEO Jim Reynolds. They both grew up near the site and want to… revive the area through development and job creation.” The studio, Regal Mile Studios, would lie on “approximately seven acres of vacant land along South Stony Island Boulevard, East 77th Street and South Chicago Avenue on the city’s South Side.” The multimillion-dollar project “would create six sound studios and offices totaling about 220,000 square feet, in the first phase of what they hope will be followed by additional construction of studios and space for other businesses such as restaurants, shops and hotels.” Echoing a familiar refrain of Cinespace’s majordomo Alex Pissios, Dudley says, “We want to help make Chicago the Hollywood of the Midwest.”
A.V. Club Remains Skeptical Of Moviegoing
Reviews in the past year at the A. V. Club have cautioned readers to consider whether or not to stay home instead of going out, a refrain repeated this weekend. Writes William Hughes: “Great news for those people who have been fully vaccinated… and also just liars as AMC Theaters and other major movie chains” announce “that said patrons will no longer have to wear masks while in their theaters. This is per the Hollywood Reporter, which notes that anyone who has received two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, or who is just cool with lying their ass off and endangering the people around them, is good to de-mask while watching all the summer’s hottest films. This latest move is in line with recent CDC guidelines that state the fully-vaccinated can safely stop wearing masks, and that people who want to lie about their vaccination status will probably also be able to get away with it… Also, per the report: ‘AMC didn’t say that its locations would require proof of vaccination,’ which, can you even imagine the hell of being the theater employee asked to enforce that? You’d spend the rest of your life showing up in Twitter videos, standing mutely while angry suburban assholes screamed spittle on you about their liberties.”
LIT
CQR’s Anthology of Black American Literature Edited by Charles Johnson
A 138-page special issue of Chicago Quarterly Review (volume 33), guest-edited by Charles Johnson, is out June 9. “These have been difficult years—2020 and 2021—for all of us. We have endured, and continue to muddle through, crises thick and threefold,” Johnson begins his introduction. “Through layers of suffering that include an ongoing, mutating global coronavirus pandemic that has, at the time of this writing, caused over five hundred thousand deaths in America alone. Added to which, we endured a contentious presidential election that divided Americans in ways we have not seen since the 1960s and perhaps the Civil War, leading to an assault on the nation’s Capitol on January 6, which resulted in five deaths. And death for Black Americans at the hands of police officers emerged as the central theme of the Black Lives Matter movement, triggered by the killings of George Floyd and others, which drew international attention to centuries of racism and inequality in the United States and around the world. Yet pandemics, racism, and political corruption are not new to human experience. Deaths, plagues, impermanence, and social conflicts have been with us since the beginning of human history. We can expect such experiences in the future. Just as we can expect our writers and artists to continue creating during good times and bad, ‘singing the world,’ to borrow a phrase from philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, especially during troubled times, when we need the gifts of their imagination and insights to help us understand, heal, adapt, and gain the courage to live, grow, prosper, and love. So one has to ask, how did our Black storytellers, poets, essayists, and artists sing the world in the last year and a half ? What kinds of worlds do Black creators sing in the twenty-first century?”
MEDIA
WMAQ-TV Master Producer Joe Howard Was 90
“WMAQ-TV staffers could always tell when a big story was breaking. The bosses would ask: ‘Where’s Joe Howard?’ They trusted the gifted writer-producer to turn a complex story into a concise TV report, pairing it with the best video.” Emmy Award-winning Joseph P. Howard was 90, reports the Sun-Times. “‘He knew what the hell he was doing,’ former anchor Jim Ruddle said. ‘He was never too busy to help, to smile,’ personal finance journalist Terry Savage said.”
STAGE
Artistic Staff Promotions At Aurora’s Paramount Theatre
Paul-Jordan Jansen joins Paramount as new Associate Artistic Producer, the theater announces, with Amber Mak promoted to New Works Development Director and Trent Stork promoted to Artistic Associate and Casting Director. More details here.
ARTS & CULTURE
Lightfoot Announces First Boys & Girls Club In Decades On Campus Of Police And Fire Training Academy
‘The first new Boys & Girls Club of Chicago in a generation is to be built on the proposed 4400 West Chicago campus of $95 million police and fire training academy,” reports the Sun-Times. “Mayor Lightfoot announced that an 18,000-square-foot youth development center would be built on the thirty-four-acre campus of the police and fire training academy on 20,000 square feet of land that the city will lease to the club for one dollar a year. Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) called the decision to co-locate the two projects a ‘bad move'” and “accused the mayor of ‘playing political games.’” The facility “has drawn opposition from Chance the Rapper, college students in Chicago and across the nation and local youth organized under the [hashtag] #NoCopAcademy.”
