Chicago Daily Observer

If you are not a lover of that most American of art forms, jazz, then kindly skip to the next article.

If you are, then stop reading and walk over to your radio. Turn it to 90.9 on the FM dial and chances are that you’ll hear something wonderful that will help you forget about things like high gas prices and your cholesterol count.

Like television, radio is a vast wasteland unless you know just where to look. Skim the radio dial and you’ll likely encounter the kind of vapidity that now characterizes much of American popular culture.

Fortunately, there’s a fresh wind blowing from the direction of DuPage County. It’s actually been blowing for decades but isn’t well known because, like many things of quality, it’s been overshadowed by louder and more strident voices—or stronger radio signals.

In a City of Big Shoulders known for muscular jazz, it’s the ... Read More...

Whether your name is Barack Obama, David Mamet, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey or whatever, you are a Chicagoan—or from Chicago—and it marks you.

For better or worse, political candidates, entertainers and people in the public eye especially bear the mark of their neighborhood, suburb, city or state.

So do we all!

But how Chicago?

What is this metropolis of ours and what brand does it leave on people’s hearts and minds?

And why?

Is Chicago:
A. A city of rampant crime, political corruption and go-to-hell sin?
B. An over-populated and sprawling inland metropolis with an inferiority complex about its reputation and limitations?
C. A deeply original and creative American city that has disdained many of the blandishments of an East Coast culture that was borrowed from and is imitative of the upper classes of Europe?

Each person anywhere who holds to any one of these viewpoints feels ... Read More...

Through nothing else but the force of habit, I still check the movie directory listings. Regularly, I come away disappointed. This is because I’m in the demographic slot Hollywood doesn’t’ care for. What is it?

. I am an adult.

Consequently this former avid filmgoer, who once went to from four to six movies per month, hardly goes any longer. .

I cannot relate to the juvenile and violent pap that has become t Hollywood productions. Increasingly, I find myself watching dvds and most of the titles that I prefer predate 1970.
That’s an anomaly. Consider: when the studios in Tinsel Town were producing films on a factory assembly line basis and churning out four hundred or more releases per year, the results were far better than today’s multimillion dollar productions.

James Cameron practically ran the table at the 1998 Academy awards with his film “Titanic.” As a movie ... Read More...

I have a few Christmas traditions that are strictly followed. A live tree; I “hide” candy in plain site, say on the roof of the gingerbread house, and see how long it takes for my kids to find it; and from Thanksgiving to Christmas Day, we only watch Christmas movies, and we watch lots of them. That’s probably our most significant tradition of all.

A brief point of disclaimer: though I’m an evangelical, and while I think the move from calling “Christmas” to “the holidays” is as silly and unnecessary as the next person, I’ve long more or less followed the Puritans and I’ve not really thought of Christmas as a religious holiday anyway. (Actually, for a host of reasons many early puritan communities actually forbade its celebration altogether but that’s another column.)

That’s a long way of saying I love having secular fun during the season. And there’s not ... Read More...