Plus: Giving The Gifts Of Literacy, Life & Comics
1. Tolton Transforming Lives.
“At age 57, Tina Wellington is starting over,” Robert McCoppin writes for the Tribune.
“Growing up on Chicago’s West Side, Wellington only reached a fifth-grade reading level. In years past she got caught up in alcohol, drugs, prostitution and jail. Now she’s trying to turn her life around, hoping to work in child development and eventually run her own restaurant, with help from the Tolton Adult & Family Literacy Center.
“I’ve got a second chance,” she said. “It’s like being a child in an adult’s body. I’m excited to get to school.”
“As part of De La Salle Institute, a Catholic high school on the South Side, the Tolton Center specializes in turn-around stories like Wellington, people who have taken a wrong turn and are now trying to make up for it.”
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2. Reading With Pictures.
“This is the season of giving when people are running around trying to find the perfect present for family and friends,” Shari Schmidt writes on her Oh My Books blog.
“This year, while you’re searching for something to wrap, consider adding a comic book to your in store or online shopping cart. Reading with Pictures is coordinating a comic book drive benefiting Comer Children’s Hospital.
“This is the second comic book drive Reading with Pictures has spearheaded. Last year after the tragedy of Sandy Hook, Reading With Pictures launched an emergency comic book drive to donate family friendly comic books to the families of that community. The organization was able to coordinate over 500 unique donations toward this drive.”
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3. Chicago-Dentist Known As Dr. Fate Selling Valuable Childhood Comic Book Collection As He Struggles With Rare, Incurable Disease.
4. Astro Belt.
“As Houston hip-hop’s stature has grown, so has its mystique – and the resulting curiosity about what these artists are ‘really’ like is a huge part of the reason the new photo book Houston Rap,” Leor Galil writes for the Reader.
“Of course H-Town has also touched Chicago. In the late 90s the Geto Boys’ label, Rap-a-Lot Records, released music from Do or Die, one of the most important rap groups in Windy City history. And the legacy of the Geto Boys’ pioneering gangsta rap makes itself felt in the dead-eyed, brutally narcissistic street-life rhymes of Chief Keef, Fredo Santana, and other drill MCs. UGK have clearly influenced Kanye West, coloring his music with the particular way they drawled their lyrics and deployed their samples of soul and R&B – and at the BET Hip-Hop Awards in 2007, when West took the stage to accept the Video of the Year prize for ‘Stronger,’ he gave it to UGK on the spot for ‘International Players Anthem (I Choose You).’ ‘I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to win an award that I felt like I shouldn’t win so I could tell y’all that,’ he said. ‘Really, this is just my opinion, that I’m just a fan.'”
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5. Coalition Of Scholars In Pagan Studies Petitions Chicago Manual Of Style To Capitalize “Pagan.”
6. Appeals Court Upholds Dismissal Of Coach Who Wrote Sex Book.
7. Chicago Zine Fest Registration!
8. Excerpt: Excommunication.
From the University of Chicago Press Blog:
“The field of media studies today generally understands media along two interconnected axes: devices and determinacy. On the one hand, media are understood as synonymous with media devices, technological apparatuses of mediation such as the phone, the file, or the printing press. And yet such technological devices are imbued with the irresistible force of their own determinacy. Media either determine a given social, cultural, or political dimension, or media are themselves determined by the social, cultural, or political. Media makers affect media consumers and thus establish hierarchical relationships with them, or media-savvy individuals express their own desires by way of the tools and machines that extend their will. For media studies generally, media are, in short, determinative devices, and they are thus evaluated normatively as either good influencers or bad influencers.”
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9. U.S. Federal Reserve Beige Book – Chicago District.
10. Shalom Chicago.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on December 5, 2013