Gym owner, Willie Davila, 53, pumps a little iron at Rock Hard.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

Rock Hard Gym is not a sleek and shiny temple of sweat, coaxing in patrons with air-conditioning, lap pools and rock-climbing walls. No, Rock Hard Gym is a dump. (more…)

U.S. Senate candidate LeAlan M. Jones of Chicago speaks during the Illinois Green Party convention.
Bonnie Trafelet/Chicago News Cooperative

As a boy growing up in the long shadow of the Ida B. Wells public housing development, LeAlan Jones, the Illinois Green Party candidate for the United States Senate, learned at an early age to ignore naysayers. (more…)

Evelyn, left, views the sculpture of participant Frank, center, posing as 'doubt' during a session of 'The Memory Ensemble' at Prentice Women's Hospital.
Bonnie Trafelet/Chicago News Cooperative

Five of the six members of the Memory Ensemble were gathered in a nondescript conference room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, ready to begin their weekly improvisational acting workshop.

“Where’s Irv? We need Irv,” one said.

“Oh, he’s always late,” said another. “He’s very dependable that way.”
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Days Off plays the second set at the Fireside Bowl Tuesday, July, 20, 2010.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

To most of its patrons, the Fireside Bowl is simply a bowling alley in Logan Square, but not that long ago it was arguably the best punk-rock club in Chicago. (more…)

Polish-American vocalist and composer Grazyna Auguscik at the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative

Concerts worldwide are celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of the Polish composer Fredric Chopin, but until this weekend none has involved an American jazz vocalist, a Polish accordionist, and an international trombone choir, spiced with harmonica and oud. (more…)

Writer Libby Hellmann started The Outfit, an online collective of crime/mystery/thriller writers from Chicago that blog, to promote books. Hellmann works from home.
Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative

Authors these days know it’s not enough just to write well. Or often. Eventually, unless you are Stephen King — or have somehow ensured a steady stream of cash will flow into your publisher’s coffers — you are going to have to get out there and sell your book.
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Sasha Hemon, recipient of a MacArthur Genius grant for writing and the soccer columnist for The New Republic, watches the World Cup game between Germany and Spain at his home in Chicago.
Sally Ryan/Chicago News Cooperative

From Nelson Algren to Saul Bellow, Chicago has produced a succession of writers who found their muse in the city’s boisterous neighborhoods, its rich cast of characters, its nervy, urgent energy.

Aleksandar Hemon may be next in this distinguished line. He has already won a MacArthur “genius” award, and his most recent novel, “The Lazarus Project,” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008. When critics search for comparisons to him, they routinely invoke Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov — Eastern Europeans who, like Mr. Hemon, came to English as a second language.

Mr. Hemon is grateful for the accolades, but on Wednesday afternoon, he was infinitely more interested in the outcome of the titanic struggle between Germany and Spain in a World Cup semifinal game. (more…)

There was no bar quite like Blackhawk V.F.W. Post 7975, where $3 bought a drink and a tale from Bill Nowlin, the post’s commander — burp guns, Korean rice paddies, firefights, hand-to-hand combat. For $5, Joe Makowski, the quartermaster, blended a concoction of rum and fresh fruit, adorned with a paper parrot tethered to a straw.

This Veterans of Foreign Wars post was undoubtedly the sacred watering hole for Noble Square residents and one of the most unassuming joints in town.

Once nestled among residences in an unmarked building at 1344 North Greenview Avenue, a space more akin to a home basement than a conventional watering hole, the underground bar was shut down by the city in late March after the authorities found its license registered to a previous address. It is expected to reopen in a few days, completely legal, at 1000 North Milwaukee Avenue.
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The passing of Fred Anderson, the Chicago tenor saxophonist who died Thursday at 81, casts a pall over jazz musicians as far away as New York and Europe, which Mr. Anderson frequently visited to play in festivals. But it has especially darkened the scene in Chicago, his base of operations since the 1950s, and for good reason. (more…)

Some people’s stories emerge organically — around a dinner table, on a long car trip or on a rainy afternoon. But most of us need a bit of a nudge before we will face down the Big Questions: Who are we? What do we believe? Who do we love? Why?
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