It was August 1998. I’d been living in my “garden”-level apartment on the Far North Side of Chicago for only a few months, and I still wasn’t sure that random individuals wouldn’t be trying to climb in through the windows on a regular basis. I…
Stronger Than Dirt Pete Moss
27 Articles
Stronger Than Dirt Pete Moss is one of the many aliases used by a Tom Long of Chicago, Illinois (not to be confused with other Tom Longs of Chicago or elsewhere). Tom was active in xerox zine culture from the late ’80s through the early ’00s under the Colicky Baby Records and Tapes imprint, and several examples of Tom’s mail art periodicals are filed deeply and safely away at the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department in Iowa City and the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York City. Every so often he posts things at http://colicky.blogspot.com.
This may or may not be news to anyone here, but it was news to me. At last night’s Chicago screening of his documentary film, “The Big Uneasy,” during the Q&A after the movie, Harry Shearer provided more detail regarding something he’s been tweeting about…
I know I’m one of the only Chicagoans paying attention to the Stanley Cup finals this year – and maybe one of the few Americans outside of Boston – but I can’t help it. Hockey is the only sport that grabs my full attention anymore….
Barely underway for four hours now, the Insert-Hyperbolic-Name-Here Blizzard of 2011 is already having deleterious effects on both of Chicago’s baseball teams.
On the north side, the Tribune’s “Chicago Weather Center” page reports early damage to the Home of the Cubs:
A section Wrigley Field’s roof was blown off shortly after 6PM. Some of the debris landed in the intersection of Addison and Clark. Police are attempting to clean up the debris.
(To the tune of John Cooper Clarke’s classic, “Evidently Chickentown.”
Warning: Foul Language Ahead.)
On February 28, 2005, almost exactly two blocks from my apartment, two people, a man and a woman, were killed in the basement of a fine, century-old wood-frame house on the North Side of Chicago. Both had sustained .22-caliber bullet wounds to the head. The victims were the husband and the mother of a United States district court judge, who had discovered the bodies upon returning home from work.
It is a scientific fact that every other person under the age of 30 in Chicago (and every server at every restaurant) is a member of an improvisational comedy troupe. Comedy is one of Chicago’s top industries; besides the big dog in town, Second City,…
This is the traditional season for everyone to spend money on things nobody really needs or wants. And I am no exception. Last Friday I electronically transferred $289 from my bank account to that of the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the State of…
Charlie Chaplin made just one motion picture in Chicago, but that was enough to get an auditorium named after him in the main campus building of the small college that occupies the building in which it was produced. That’s where I go to vote, the…
Estragon: I can’t go on like this. Vladimir: That’s what you think. As a professional editor and writer working in an unspecified niche market (to narrow it down a little, I’ll call it “law” and leave it at that), I spend a lot of time…
“Them is Chicago hawks! OK? Them the Blackhawks!”
Peregrine falcons nesting on the (grand old, shuttered, sleeping) Uptown Theatre, plus commentary.
Patrick and I had barely settled in at a table on the far left of the room, with a good view of the stage and a clear path to the john, when the waitress stepped over from the bar. “Hi, guys! What can I get…
I haven’t been to Carol’s Pub for a decade, but it will always be the emotional naval in my personal version of Chicago’s heaving swollen abdomen. So to speak. Carol’s Pub is what snobs would call a “dive bar,” but what I would call a…