Happy valentine’s Day! To celebrate our love for you, we got you a LOT of stories about aldermanic campaigns. Our election coverage has been so much fun that even our die-hard music staffers want in on it. Alongside Maya Dukmasova’s look at the 46th Ward, we’re excited to present Leor Galil’s look at the rapper-turned-socialist challenger to alderman Pat O’Connor in the 40th—plus a three-page comics journalism feature from Anya Davidson on what’s going down in the 25th Ward that isn’t an uncomfortable text message from Danny Solis.
We’re thrilled you enjoyed our first-ever mayoral campaign questionnaire last issue. We were excessively pleased with ourselves for pulling it off—at least until we realized we had entirely overlooked OG mayoral candidate Bob Fioretti. How embarrassing! We have almost no excuse! Except that there are SO MANY DAMN CANDIDATES. Fourteen on the ballot! FOUR. TEEN. LA—all of it—only has 15 seats on its entire city council. Oh and it’s so anticlimactic: in a couple weeks we’ll dutifully head to the polls to choose between them to determine who . . . we’ll vote for in the runoff in April. But more on that next week.
Also in our last issue, there were a few misstatements of fact. Ben Sachs’s review of Image Book misidentified the referent of the title of part three. “Those flowers between the rails, in the confused wind of travelers,” comes from a poem by Rilke, not Rimbaud. And Deanna Isaacs’s review of Electra overstated the show’s length by 40 minutes: the opera runs for only 100 minutes. Additionally, our January 31 review of Irving Park cafe Finom misidentified owner Rafael Esparza.
But let’s not let the mistakes of the past ruin our special day. Happy Valentine’s Day, sweethearts. v