LeBron James, whose net worth was recently valuated north of $1 billion by Forbes, has made it known for years that he plans to own an NBA team when he is finished playing.

Now that vision has a location.

“I want a team in Vegas,” James said in a clip from the latest episode of his talk show, “The Shop,” which will debut Friday. “I want the team in Vegas.”

James, who is already a part-owner of Liverpool FC and the Boston Red Sox, said last season that his “goal is to own an NBA franchise,” adding, “and it will be sooner than later.”

James, 37, will enter his 20th NBA season in the fall when Los Angeles Lakers training camp opens up. He would have to be finished playing before he could purchase a team and he would have to figure out an ownership group to aid in the bid — the most recent NBA team to go on the market, the Minnesota Timberwolves, fetched $1.5 billion in 2021.

James would also need the league to expand to Las Vegas. During his annual NBA Finals news conference last week, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said there are no current plans for expansion beyond the league’s 30 teams.

“We are not discussing that at this time,” Silver said. “As I said before, at some point, this league invariably will expand, but it’s not at this moment that we are discussing it.”

However, when asked specifically about Seattle and Las Vegas as potential expansion locations, Silver endorsed both locations.

“Those are wonderful markets,” Silver said. “We were in Seattle. I’m sorry we are no longer there. We have a WNBA team in Seattle in an almost brand-new building that’s doing spectacular. And Las Vegas, where we will be at our summer league in July, has shown itself to be a great sports market as well.”

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Midsommarfest takes place June 10-12

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and Andersonville is just one of the neighborhoods nestled on its north side. First established as a farming community in the 1850s, the retail district we know today began as an enclave of small businesses started by Swedish immigrants who moved north to escape the ravages of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. 

Today, Andersonville is notable for its quaint facades, its diverse population, and its preponderance of unique, locally owned businesses. Steeped in its Swedish roots and anchored by the Swedish American Museum, Andersonville has celebrated the traditional Swedish holiday of Midsommar in the form of Midsommarfest for more than 55 years. Midsommarfest is Andersonville’s signature festival, and one of the largest and oldest street fests in the city of Chicago. 

This year Midsommarfest takes place June 10-12 on Clark from Foster to Catalpa. At a special ceremony at noon on Saturday, June 11 on the Swedish Stage (at Clark and Foster), crowns of summer flowers will don heads as celebrants dance and sing around the maypole. 

Midsommarfest is a celebration of summer. It is also a celebration of community. Join us for five stages of music showcasing more than 50 artists, and shop among 100 vendors, including local merchants and artisans. 

Donations are encouraged at the gates. Spend your weekend shopping and reaping the rewards of discounted beverages at our booths, and know that your dollars support Chamber programming throughout the year and more than 10 non-profit organizations. 

New for Midsommarfest 2022 is our Flower Crown Portrait series featuring the unique and beautiful faces of Andersonville. As you take in each photo, you might be looking at a shopkeeper, an activist, a politician, a therapist, a woodworker, a professional, a bookseller, a comedian, a tavern owner, or an altruist who brings their unique identity and adds to the culture of Andersonville. 

As we enter mid-June, we are excited to hear the buzz of Pride in the air throughout the community. It’s hard to not feel joy walking down Clark and noticing just how many LGBTQIA2+ businesses we have the honor of celebrating. Andersonville has been a safe haven for Chicago’s LGBTQIA2+ community since the early 90s, but while it’s easy to celebrate being one of the queerest areas of the city, we also want to acknowledge that not everyone feels safe in our neighborhood. 

This Pride month (and every month), under the guidance of the Chamber’s DEI Committee, we continue the pursuit of becoming an organization that acknowledges our privilege and strives to be more equitable to our BIPOC partners and members. We strongly believe that Andersonville should be a place where everyone can feel proud of themselves, and a place where all can safely say “gay” every day.

The Midsommarfest lineup

This sponsored content is paid for by Andersonville Chamber of Commerce.

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Midsommarfest takes place June 10-12

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and Andersonville is just one of the neighborhoods nestled on its north side. First established as a farming community in the 1850s, the retail district we know today began as an enclave of small businesses started by Swedish immigrants who moved north to escape the ravages of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. 

Today, Andersonville is notable for its quaint facades, its diverse population, and its preponderance of unique, locally owned businesses. Steeped in its Swedish roots and anchored by the Swedish American Museum, Andersonville has celebrated the traditional Swedish holiday of Midsommar in the form of Midsommarfest for more than 55 years. Midsommarfest is Andersonville’s signature festival, and one of the largest and oldest street fests in the city of Chicago. 

This year Midsommarfest takes place June 10-12 on Clark from Foster to Catalpa. At a special ceremony at noon on Saturday, June 11 on the Swedish Stage (at Clark and Foster), crowns of summer flowers will don heads as celebrants dance and sing around the maypole. 

Midsommarfest is a celebration of summer. It is also a celebration of community. Join us for five stages of music showcasing more than 50 artists, and shop among 100 vendors, including local merchants and artisans. 

Donations are encouraged at the gates. Spend your weekend shopping and reaping the rewards of discounted beverages at our booths, and know that your dollars support Chamber programming throughout the year and more than 10 non-profit organizations. 

New for Midsommarfest 2022 is our Flower Crown Portrait series featuring the unique and beautiful faces of Andersonville. As you take in each photo, you might be looking at a shopkeeper, an activist, a politician, a therapist, a woodworker, a professional, a bookseller, a comedian, a tavern owner, or an altruist who brings their unique identity and adds to the culture of Andersonville. 

As we enter mid-June, we are excited to hear the buzz of Pride in the air throughout the community. It’s hard to not feel joy walking down Clark and noticing just how many LGBTQIA2+ businesses we have the honor of celebrating. Andersonville has been a safe haven for Chicago’s LGBTQIA2+ community since the early 90s, but while it’s easy to celebrate being one of the queerest areas of the city, we also want to acknowledge that not everyone feels safe in our neighborhood. 

This Pride month (and every month), under the guidance of the Chamber’s DEI Committee, we continue the pursuit of becoming an organization that acknowledges our privilege and strives to be more equitable to our BIPOC partners and members. We strongly believe that Andersonville should be a place where everyone can feel proud of themselves, and a place where all can safely say “gay” every day.

The Midsommarfest lineup

This sponsored content is paid for by Andersonville Chamber of Commerce.

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An incredible thing about humans is our ability to shoulder and navigate trauma while opening ourselves up to new possibilities. The journey may be rocky, but with luck we can come out the other side with new strength or knowledge. That’s a fitting starting point for Angel Olsen’s new sixth record, Big Time. She wrote these country-flecked songs after losing both her parents within weeks of each other, so you might expect them to be drenched in grief and despair. But that dark period was also a time of self-discovery and acceptance for the Asheville-based singer-songwriter: shortly before her parents’ deaths, she’d come out to them at age 34, after struggling to work through past traumas to accept her queerness. Big Time is marked by transformation in all its highs and lows, a gorgeous mix of songs that takes an honest look at the complexities of love and loss and the breadth of emotions and experience in between. With its waltzing rhythms, the title track (cowritten by Olsen’s partner, Beau Thibodeaux) is as bright, tender, and catchy as anything you’ll hear this year, in contrast with the following tune, “Dream Time,” a somber ballad that touches on broken connections and irreconcilable relationships. Olsen deepens the album’s shifting moods with a variety of textures and arrangements, as well as with her pliable vocals: “All the Flowers” dips into the haunting melancholy of her early recordings, while “Right Now” starts out sparse and straightforward before building into a showstopping glam-country stomper. Among the album’s highest points is “Through the Fire,” a sepia-tone torch song that feels like it could’ve been written at any time in the past century. 

The day before the album’s release in early June, Olsen premiered a short film (also called Big Time) directed by Kimberly Stuckwisch and hosted by Amazon Music. The film consists of a string of music videos held together by a loose story line based on one of Olsen’s dreams (as well as the experiences and mindset that informed the songs). It delves into the sometimes hallucinatory feelings and anxieties that can come with compounding traumas and lack of sleep, when it seems like you’re trapped in a time warp where past, present, and future feel impossible to parse. It’s sensitive and beautiful, and it provides more context for the album as it underscores its triumphs.

Angel Olsen’s Big Time is available through Bandcamp.

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For LGBTQ+ audiences and their allies who may not want to spend all of their Pride weekend on the north side, the arts collective TRQPITECA offers an alternative.

TRQPITECA, formed in 2015, consists of Chicago DJs and producers Natalie Murillo, aka La Spacer, and Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, aka CQQCHIFRUIT. Murillo and Guerrero curate nightlife and festival performances that bring together installation art, videos, dance music, and live performances. On June 26, they will host the second Queer Pride celebration at Ping Tom Park, 300 West 19th.

“We want to have two stages,” Murillo says. “We’ll be having a better sound system—not that we had a bad sound system the last time, but [worrying about sound] is my curse—there will be more queer artists performing and DJing.”

TRQPITECA Queer Pride 2022
Sun 6/26, 3-10 PM, Ping Tom Park, 300 W. 19th (near pagoda and playground), chicagoparkdistrict.com, free.

The first Queer Pride celebration at Ping Tom Park took place in 2019, when a storm closed down the Pride Parade on the north side. Pride celebrations across the city were canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic in both 2020 and 2021.

“In 2019, the rain started at about 3:30 or 4 o’clock,” Murillo recalls. “It did go away within 45 minutes, but a lot of people didn’t end up going because of the rain. I’m expecting a bigger turnout, unless there’s some rain.”

Guerrero and Murillo conceived of TRQPITECA as a way to join their disparate musical backgrounds. Murillo, a Chicago native who grew up in Little Village, was steeped in the city’s house culture. Guerrero, who is from Miami, had a repertoire with origins in Cuban and tropical sounds. Their tagline is “the oasis at the crossroads between paradise and the underground.”

They met each other in the worlds “of art and dance,” Guerrero says, at an event where Murillo was doing the music and Guerrero was dancing.

“We DJed at a fundraiser event together and decided that we should do something regularly,” Guerrero says. “We did try something on the north side too, at Logan Square, and it was horrible. We decided that we needed to go where more of our people are.”

They now take pride in bringing diverse sounds to diverse audiences, and don’t want to fall back on current hits or dance staples. 

“We are part of underground artists and communities,” Guerrero says. “But I think it’s important for us to uplift what’s going on through emerging artists and a variety of voices, not just what you hear on the radio or gets lots of the airtime.”

Guerrero credits Murillo with conceiving TRQPITECA’s name. They first combined “tropical” and “discoteca,” with the “-teca” suffix conveniently also evoking techno music. But Guerrero suggested, “Let’s throw a q in it to make it queer.”   

Guerrero started as a DJ because, “I love to dance. I really want to share what moves me with other people and play around. I was part of the Chances Dances collective for years, and they taught me how to DJ.”

Guerrero had numerous inspirations for their repertoire. Initially they were committed to putting forth music by women and queer artists. But as they evolved as a DJ, they noticed a throughline of “diaspora, connecting communities, and connecting music of different geographic regions . . . making relationships between genres and artists through the mixes and the music.”

Murillo collected music on CDs, and says they could flourish as a DJ thanks to the iPod, which allowed their collection to become portable. When a DJ friend gave them an iPod mixer as a high school graduation present they were subsequently invited to play house parties—and on a float for the 2008 Pride Parade.

“They knew the music wasn’t going to skip” on the float, they say. 

Like Guerrero, Murillo focuses on music that has long “brought me lots of joy—house music, dance music, techno, and everything in between. As I kept growing and learning, I realized that music was a universal language. I could play this, connect, and bring some type of joy and release.”

TRQPITECA had two selling points when it originated in January 2015, Murillo says. An early show was in Pilsen, a neighborhood where queer audiences at the time needed more regular entertainment gatherings, while the warmth evoked by Guerrero’s tropical-inflected sounds provided a welcome respite from the harsh Chicago winter. 

Murillo recalls asking themself: “’Why do I have to go north every weekend? What if I want to do something in this neighborhood?’ I knew that there were other creative queers in this area.”    

The founders think of TRQPITECA as “a space where queer artists, and women and nonbinary artists could come together” in ways that have been eschewed by more mainstream LGBTQ+ communities, Guerrero says. Those communities “had not always felt like welcoming places.” 

Murillo recalls the city’s house scene as being a boys’ club: “At first it was like a joke: ‘You’re trying to be a DJ? You’re trying to be an artist? You’re a girl. You can’t do that.’ I would also get the compliment: ‘You’re good for a girl.’”

Even their DJing with an iPod seemingly sparked the bullying. “Older DJs would say, ‘That’s not real DJing. You’re DJing with an iPod. This was all pre-laptop [for DJing], so, looking back on it now, I was really pioneering playing with MP3s and being portable.”

But the bullying inspired Murillo to develop “a hard shell,” they say, noting that they had experienced that misogyny since they began playing music as a child.

“Even being in school band and orchestra, I dealt with that misogyny from boys. They’d say: ‘You’re a percussionist. That’s for boys. You should go play the flute or the violin.’”

Guerrero adds, “I got that a lot as well, even before I started DJing. I started to check out more queer parties, like Chances Dances and things like that. I got off the Boystown strip and decided, I’m not going to subject myself to this.”

They look forward to connecting at Queer Pride with what is likely to be an even broader audience. 

“We do work in nightlife and a lot of the events we do are at night,” Murillo says. “We have met a lot of young people who are under 21, or are people who have children [who want to attend a performance]. . . . We thought that, if this was a free event, and we could compensate all the artists and it would be for all ages, it was definitely something we wanted to do.”   

“I want to allow people the space to dance and be themselves,” Guerrero adds.

Read More

An incredible thing about humans is our ability to shoulder and navigate trauma while opening ourselves up to new possibilities. The journey may be rocky, but with luck we can come out the other side with new strength or knowledge. That’s a fitting starting point for Angel Olsen’s new sixth record, Big Time. She wrote these country-flecked songs after losing both her parents within weeks of each other, so you might expect them to be drenched in grief and despair. But that dark period was also a time of self-discovery and acceptance for the Asheville-based singer-songwriter: shortly before her parents’ deaths, she’d come out to them at age 34, after struggling to work through past traumas to accept her queerness. Big Time is marked by transformation in all its highs and lows, a gorgeous mix of songs that takes an honest look at the complexities of love and loss and the breadth of emotions and experience in between. With its waltzing rhythms, the title track (cowritten by Olsen’s partner, Beau Thibodeaux) is as bright, tender, and catchy as anything you’ll hear this year, in contrast with the following tune, “Dream Time,” a somber ballad that touches on broken connections and irreconcilable relationships. Olsen deepens the album’s shifting moods with a variety of textures and arrangements, as well as with her pliable vocals: “All the Flowers” dips into the haunting melancholy of her early recordings, while “Right Now” starts out sparse and straightforward before building into a showstopping glam-country stomper. Among the album’s highest points is “Through the Fire,” a sepia-tone torch song that feels like it could’ve been written at any time in the past century. 

The day before the album’s release in early June, Olsen premiered a short film (also called Big Time) directed by Kimberly Stuckwisch and hosted by Amazon Music. The film consists of a string of music videos held together by a loose story line based on one of Olsen’s dreams (as well as the experiences and mindset that informed the songs). It delves into the sometimes hallucinatory feelings and anxieties that can come with compounding traumas and lack of sleep, when it seems like you’re trapped in a time warp where past, present, and future feel impossible to parse. It’s sensitive and beautiful, and it provides more context for the album as it underscores its triumphs.

Angel Olsen’s Big Time is available through Bandcamp.

Read More

For LGBTQ+ audiences and their allies who may not want to spend all of their Pride weekend on the north side, the arts collective TRQPITECA offers an alternative.

TRQPITECA, formed in 2015, consists of Chicago DJs and producers Natalie Murillo, aka La Spacer, and Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, aka CQQCHIFRUIT. Murillo and Guerrero curate nightlife and festival performances that bring together installation art, videos, dance music, and live performances. On June 26, they will host the second Queer Pride celebration at Ping Tom Park, 300 West 19th.

“We want to have two stages,” Murillo says. “We’ll be having a better sound system—not that we had a bad sound system the last time, but [worrying about sound] is my curse—there will be more queer artists performing and DJing.”

TRQPITECA Queer Pride 2022
Sun 6/26, 3-10 PM, Ping Tom Park, 300 W. 19th (near pagoda and playground), chicagoparkdistrict.com, free.

The first Queer Pride celebration at Ping Tom Park took place in 2019, when a storm closed down the Pride Parade on the north side. Pride celebrations across the city were canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic in both 2020 and 2021.

“In 2019, the rain started at about 3:30 or 4 o’clock,” Murillo recalls. “It did go away within 45 minutes, but a lot of people didn’t end up going because of the rain. I’m expecting a bigger turnout, unless there’s some rain.”

Guerrero and Murillo conceived of TRQPITECA as a way to join their disparate musical backgrounds. Murillo, a Chicago native who grew up in Little Village, was steeped in the city’s house culture. Guerrero, who is from Miami, had a repertoire with origins in Cuban and tropical sounds. Their tagline is “the oasis at the crossroads between paradise and the underground.”

They met each other in the worlds “of art and dance,” Guerrero says, at an event where Murillo was doing the music and Guerrero was dancing.

“We DJed at a fundraiser event together and decided that we should do something regularly,” Guerrero says. “We did try something on the north side too, at Logan Square, and it was horrible. We decided that we needed to go where more of our people are.”

They now take pride in bringing diverse sounds to diverse audiences, and don’t want to fall back on current hits or dance staples. 

“We are part of underground artists and communities,” Guerrero says. “But I think it’s important for us to uplift what’s going on through emerging artists and a variety of voices, not just what you hear on the radio or gets lots of the airtime.”

Guerrero credits Murillo with conceiving TRQPITECA’s name. They first combined “tropical” and “discoteca,” with the “-teca” suffix conveniently also evoking techno music. But Guerrero suggested, “Let’s throw a q in it to make it queer.”   

Guerrero started as a DJ because, “I love to dance. I really want to share what moves me with other people and play around. I was part of the Chances Dances collective for years, and they taught me how to DJ.”

Guerrero had numerous inspirations for their repertoire. Initially they were committed to putting forth music by women and queer artists. But as they evolved as a DJ, they noticed a throughline of “diaspora, connecting communities, and connecting music of different geographic regions . . . making relationships between genres and artists through the mixes and the music.”

Murillo collected music on CDs, and says they could flourish as a DJ thanks to the iPod, which allowed their collection to become portable. When a DJ friend gave them an iPod mixer as a high school graduation present they were subsequently invited to play house parties—and on a float for the 2008 Pride Parade.

“They knew the music wasn’t going to skip” on the float, they say. 

Like Guerrero, Murillo focuses on music that has long “brought me lots of joy—house music, dance music, techno, and everything in between. As I kept growing and learning, I realized that music was a universal language. I could play this, connect, and bring some type of joy and release.”

TRQPITECA had two selling points when it originated in January 2015, Murillo says. An early show was in Pilsen, a neighborhood where queer audiences at the time needed more regular entertainment gatherings, while the warmth evoked by Guerrero’s tropical-inflected sounds provided a welcome respite from the harsh Chicago winter. 

Murillo recalls asking themself: “’Why do I have to go north every weekend? What if I want to do something in this neighborhood?’ I knew that there were other creative queers in this area.”    

The founders think of TRQPITECA as “a space where queer artists, and women and nonbinary artists could come together” in ways that have been eschewed by more mainstream LGBTQ+ communities, Guerrero says. Those communities “had not always felt like welcoming places.” 

Murillo recalls the city’s house scene as being a boys’ club: “At first it was like a joke: ‘You’re trying to be a DJ? You’re trying to be an artist? You’re a girl. You can’t do that.’ I would also get the compliment: ‘You’re good for a girl.’”

Even their DJing with an iPod seemingly sparked the bullying. “Older DJs would say, ‘That’s not real DJing. You’re DJing with an iPod. This was all pre-laptop [for DJing], so, looking back on it now, I was really pioneering playing with MP3s and being portable.”

But the bullying inspired Murillo to develop “a hard shell,” they say, noting that they had experienced that misogyny since they began playing music as a child.

“Even being in school band and orchestra, I dealt with that misogyny from boys. They’d say: ‘You’re a percussionist. That’s for boys. You should go play the flute or the violin.’”

Guerrero adds, “I got that a lot as well, even before I started DJing. I started to check out more queer parties, like Chances Dances and things like that. I got off the Boystown strip and decided, I’m not going to subject myself to this.”

They look forward to connecting at Queer Pride with what is likely to be an even broader audience. 

“We do work in nightlife and a lot of the events we do are at night,” Murillo says. “We have met a lot of young people who are under 21, or are people who have children [who want to attend a performance]. . . . We thought that, if this was a free event, and we could compensate all the artists and it would be for all ages, it was definitely something we wanted to do.”   

“I want to allow people the space to dance and be themselves,” Guerrero adds.

Read More