A week ago, on December 14, I went to an artisan market held in a rehabbed industrial building in Chicago West Side’s East Garfield Park neighborhood. And I found myself thinking about something I’ve been pondering a lot in the three years I’ve been writing for Austin Weekly News - the neighborhood's gentrification.

As with much of West Side, East ( Read more... )

Even before late May, I heard that Lifeline Theatre,a respected theater in the Chicago's Rogers Park neighorhood was putting on a play adaptation of officialgaiman's Neverwhere. But thanks to a post on rowandoll's Facebook wall, I found out that they were running a photo contest to go along with it. Since the original TV mini-series was set in the secret world beneath ( Read more... )

Book covers are one of those things that you don't usually notice unless they are either really awful or really effective. smartbitches had plenty of fun with the former with their regular "Cover Snark" feature. In this post, they tackle the later, looking at what works, what doesn't work and the importance of showing intimacy on romance novel covers ( Read more... )

A Russian artist from Moscow who goes by "Candra" on DeviantArt and elsewhere is best known for drawing stereotypically sexy girls (and sexy guys). But a more careful perusal of her gallery shows that she has more range than that. So when this piece came across my DeviantWatch list, my reaction was less "wait - Candra is drawing landscapes" and ( Read more... )

I saw this post by tanjand over on Livejournal Russia's Facebook feed. Since it only has a few words, and the point is really illustrations, I decided to report and translate it in its entirety. And added in some links, for reference.


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On her recent trip to the Latvian resort town of Jūrmala, neferjournal came across something I never would have imagined existed a gallery of paintings that can be seen in a different light - in the most literal way possible.

As always, the translated text is in Italics, and my notes (if any) are in plain text.

If I didn't happen to wind up in Jūrmala, and ( Read more... )

Last week, I came across a bunch of scans from an art book of giant robots from the Super Sentai series.

For those who don't know, the Super Sentai franchise was a long-running Japanese live-action series that, since 1993, has been adopted into Power Rangers. The show uses the Super Sentai giant moster/robot battles, and some the Sentai footage ( Read more... )

Happy Birthday to skybreak_seeker. It may not be the roundest of birthdays, but at least it's indivisible by anything but itself. As always, I hope you achieve more than you expected, that you spent more time in the company of friends, that your hobbies bring more joy than fanwankery and that unpleasant surprises are few and far in between ( Read more... )

So, back on Thursday morning (Chicago time), Curbed Chicago reported something that sounded pretty exciting. The recent demolition of the historic Osborne & Adams Leather Co. building in downtown Chicago exposed a mysterious mural.


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