The pizza’s almost gone here in the Reader newsroom, and you know what that means—election results are starting to come in. Finally!
It’s been a long road, hasn’t it? So many memories. Someday we’ll look back on this time and pine for a text message from Paul Vallas that we definitely never gave out our numbers for. Nostalgic chatter will linger on the question of where Jerry Joyce’s wife got her money. We’ll chuckle upon recall of Toni Preckwinkle’s staff’s latest foibles, musing aloud about the latest Daley to emerge from the sewers of Bridgeport.
Then one day we will stumble across the name Neal Sales-Griffin somewhere online and it will spark nothing. No recognition, no platforms, no endorsements, no memories. “Ah,” you will say to yourself. “That is someone’s name.” And then you will move on, strapping yourself in to Elon Musk’s new citywide jet-pack rental device—a deal at only $780 per minute.
After all, it is not so much the drama of the campaign that matters as the fact that we went through it all together.
Just kidding! The drama of the campaign—who’s tied to Alderman Ed Burke, who’s in support of the new police academy, who’s caught on Solis’s wiretap, and whether anyone can outmoney Daley—this all matters a great deal, and we know it.
So play a couple more rounds of Aldermania! The Board Game while you gird yourself for several more weeks of intensive election coverage. Now that Ben Joravsky is back, this time on the virtual airwaves (livestreamed and via podcast on our very own website!), we’ll be looking more closely at our final mayoral potentials. “That’s going to be a race about issues,” Maya Dukmasova said as a Preckwinkle-Lightfoot runoff started to look feasible. “That will be interesting.”
But that’s for next week. In the meantime, our music feature on Marcus Mixx will remind you of what truly matters about Chicago: amazing people doing amazing things with very few resources. The house legend is still going strong, Leor Galil writes, from his makeshift offices down at the Chicago Cultural Center, and on the airwaves at CAN TV. Photographer Davon Clark introduces us to a thrilling spate of black artists upending the narrative and coming back home to Chicago. Yolanda Perdomo visits a Hyde Park exhibition of painter Nikko Washington, an artist member of the Save Money collective. And Kat Sachs previews the Gene Siskel Film Center’s 60-film-strong Chicago European Union Film Festival.
Let’s face it. No artist can capture the wonder of a surprise text message from Vallas suggesting you should vote for him solely because he’s neither Preckwinkle nor Lightfoot. But after tonight you’ll have to find something else to entertain you.
We’ll have to order more pizza. v