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Chicago Bears: Anthony Miller should not return puntsPatrick Sheldonon October 1, 2020 at 6:34 pm

Chicago Bears (Photo by Rob Leiter/Getty Images)
Chicago Bears (Photo by Rob Leiter/Getty Images)

The Chicago Bears should be careful about who returns punts on Sunday.

As you know the Chicago Bears are without Tarik Cohen, who was lost for the season after suffering a torn ACL in the win over the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday. They have signed rookie undrafted free agent Artavis Pierce to the roster to try to replace Cohen’s production in the offense.

However, it’s their likely replacement for Cohen on special teams (Anthony Miller), which is a bit of a head-scratcher for obvious reasons. Cohen has served as the primary punt returner on this team for the last few years. His speed and elusiveness make him a threat for a big return every time he touches the ball.

But so far this year, the results have been, well, non-existent. In three games, he has returned one point for zero yards and has called for a fair catch on three others. So it’s fair to say the punt return game hasn’t done much to set up the offense for success in what is admittedly a limited sample size.

However, even last year, when he was near the top of the league in average punt return yards, he was only netting a little over nine yards per return. Granted nine yards is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you’re talking about starting field position. Yet, it has to be balanced against the prospective risk and cost, especially when you consider Cohen was injured on a punt return.

Speaking of that potential cost, we turn to their likely replacement, the aforementioned Miller. It doesn’t make sense for the Bears to throw Miller back there and risk injury. First of all, he’s too valuable to the offense as their second wide receiver to take the chance — especially with Nick Foles under center. Second, he injured his surgically repaired left shoulder on a kickoff return less than a year ago against the Vikings!

Put another way, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, and here’s what I mean by that. You’ve likely heard of the statistic Wins Above Replacement which tries to assess a baseball player’s value by deciphering how many more wins he’s worth than a replacement player. Along those lines, how many more return yards is Cohen worth than his replacement. Well, Cohen was 6th in the league last year averaging 9.2 yards per return. The 16th ranked punt returner averaged 4.3 yards.

Next: Artavis Pierce could make things awkward for Pace

So the disparity between good and great isn’t all that significant. Are an extra five yards worth the risk of losing Miller for the season too? Not even close — especially when you consider you also have Ted Ginn on the roster who, in his career, has 2,600 total punt return yards. The move makes little sense. Hopefully, it won’t come back to bite the Bears.

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Chicago Bears: Anthony Miller should not return puntsPatrick Sheldonon October 1, 2020 at 6:34 pm Read More »

South Holland firefighter dies during training exerciseDavid Struetton October 1, 2020 at 4:20 pm

The Village of South Holland is mourning the loss of a 29-year-old firefighter who died during a training exercise Wednesday.

Dylan Cunningham of Thornton was transported from Haigh Quarry Lake, Kankakee, to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he died at 10:40 p.m., according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

South Holland Village Administrator J. Wynsma said the south suburb was “deeply saddened to report the tragic loss” of Cunningham, a 9-year department veteran who died after an underwater dive training exercise.

“In the days ahead we will be doing everything we can to support the Cunningham family,” Wynsma said in a statement. “We ask that you keep Dylan’s family and loved ones in your thoughts and prayers.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what caused his death. An autopsy is scheduled in Cook County.

“We know you have many questions, and so do we,” Wynsma said. “Our efforts will bring conclusions that we will share with you in the coming days.”

Cunningham was a part-time firefighter at the department since 2011, and began serving full time in 2018, Wynsma said. He also served in the Illinois National Guard since 2012.

A procession of South Holland fire engines could be seen early Thursday at the medical examiner’s office on the Near West Side.

A procession of South Holland fire engines could be seen early Thursday at the medical examiner's office on the Near West Side.
A procession of South Holland fire engines could be seen early Thursday at the medical examiner’s office on the Near West Side.
Jermaine Nolan/Sun-Times

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South Holland firefighter dies during training exerciseDavid Struetton October 1, 2020 at 4:20 pm Read More »

Time to jump on the Bandcamp stuff you’ve been waiting to buyLeor Galilon September 30, 2020 at 11:00 pm

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If you’ve bought music online during the pandemic, you’ve almost certainly done at least some of your shopping through Bandcamp–and if somehow you haven’t, consider this post a way to address that oversight.

After COVID-19 wiped out live music in mid-March, on the third Friday of that month Bandcamp refrained from taking its usual 10 to 15 percent cut of music and merch sales. The first “Bandcamp day” was a roaring success–in 24 hours, fans spent a total of $4.3 million on the site, 15 times the normal amount for a Friday. In April, Bandcamp announced it would pass along its cut again on the first Fridays in May, June, and July–and it’s continued every month since.

The platform has said it will continue “Bandcamp days” at least through the end of the year, and the next one arrives this Friday, October 2. I imagine Bandcamp will keep this up well into 2021, since the pandemic shows no signs of subsiding in the U.S. and venues are a long way from being able to reopen at capacity.

As I have for the previous six Bandcamp days, I’ve rounded up links to the past month’s Reader coverage of albums, EPs, and singles available through the platform. As the length of my list demonstrates, the Reader‘s music section covers a lot of ground–and our Bandcamp recommendations for March, May, June, July, August, and September are just as deep and varied. I hope these guides help you discover your next favorite artist or album, whether we’ve reviewed it or not–just clicking around Bandcamp with no agenda at all can take you to some fascinating places.

Annihilus, Ghanima

Big Branch, Cliff

Black A.G., Long Live Black A.G.

Geof Bradfield / Ben Goldberg / Dana Hall Trio, General Semantics

Bill Callahan, Gold Record

Matt Christensen, A Swollen Sun

Corolla, “Forget This Song” b/w “Fading”

Deafkids & Petbrick, Deafbrick

Eartheater, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin

Ester, Weak

Exhalants, Atonement

Femdot, Delacreme 2

Fraxiom, Feeling Cool and Normal

Gold Standard Collective, Deli Slice

Li Jianhong, Father, and a Wild Trail Zigzagging Down

Zora Jones, Ten Billion Angels

Judy, Ard Bet

JuJu Exchange, The Eternal Boombox

Le Couleur, Concorde

Frank Leone, Don’t

Necrot, Mortal

Neph, More to Come

Ossemaan, Dream

Kelly Lee Owens, Inner Song

Phew, Vertigo KO

Rezn, Chaotic Divine

Semiratruth & Tre Johnson, Yes!

Serengeti, The Gentle Fall

Sirr TMo Sama, On Dat

Slow Pulp, Moveys

Spektral Quartet, Experiments in Living

Vic Spencer, Spencer for Higher 3

Staring Problem, Eclipse

Straitjacket Fits, Melt

Steve Summers, Counter-Factuals

Thank You, I’m Sorry, I’m Glad We’re Friends

Bethany Thomas, BT/She/Her

Dallas Thomas, Vortex

Throwing Muses, Sun Racket

Sidi Toure, Afrik Toun Me

Ulver, Flowers of Evil

Uniform, Shame

Various artists, Attack of the Chicago Boogie

Various artists, Community Garden

Various artists, Shut It Down: Benefit for the Movement for Black Lives

Vuelveteloca, Contra

Jay Wood, Trackstar v

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Time to jump on the Bandcamp stuff you’ve been waiting to buyLeor Galilon September 30, 2020 at 11:00 pm Read More »

Chicago Beer Weekend, October 2-4Mark McDermotton October 1, 2020 at 4:10 am

The Beeronaut

Chicago Beer Weekend, October 2-4

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Chicago Beer Weekend, October 2-4Mark McDermotton October 1, 2020 at 4:10 am Read More »

Will Silk Road still rise? Will we?Deanna Isaacson September 30, 2020 at 7:15 pm

I’d been thinking about Silk Road Rising, the mission-driven performing arts company founded by Jamil Khoury and Malik Gillani in 2002, before I got an e-mail from Khoury last week.

Since the pandemic shutdown, every arts organization I can think of has been throwing content up online–trying, desperately, to keep a connection going with their audiences. But Silk Road, which moved seriously into online programming a decade ago, had a leg up on that. During a 2011 interview, Khoury had told me that they were intrigued by the dissemination opportunities of the Internet and were aiming to produce video plays that would expand their reach to an international audience. It seemed like an appropriate time to check back in with them.

“Things are good, all things considered,” Khoury said, when he picked up the phone, leaving room for an ocean of trouble.

There’s the macro hit the arts are taking from the pandemic. According to a Brookings Institution study by Creative Class guru Richard Florida and urban planner Michael Seman, the fine and performing arts are among the industries suffering the most COVID-19 damage. In “Lost art: Measuring COVID-19’s devastating impact on America’s creative economy,” they looked at national data from April 1 through July 31 of this year, and estimated that half the jobs in fine and performing arts (including freelance work) are gone, and that we’re in for “a protracted period of restrictions on live performances.”

According to Arts Alliance Illinois (citing a survey by Americans for the Arts), 42 percent of Illinois arts organizations “are not confident they will survive the impacts of COVID-19.”

Like everyone else, Silk Road shut down in March. They were one day away from preview performances of a world-premiere play, My Dear Hussein by Nahal Navidar. But that’s not all they’ve been dealing with:

“In September of 2019, my husband and Silk Road Rising Co-Founder and Co-Executive Artistic Director, Malik Gillani, suffered a heart attack and stroke,” Khoury wrote in an e-mail to the Silk Road community last week.

“The double whammy of heart failure and neurologic damage has reset our journey, particularly as the stroke caused significant impairments to Malik’s expressive abilities.”

If you’ve ever been to Silk Road’s intimate theater in the depths of the historic Chicago Temple, chances are you’ve been greeted by Gillani–a quietly welcoming presence with a smile and a handshake for everyone: the yin to Khoury’s exuberant yang.

On September 13 last year, Khoury told me, Gillani, then 49 years old, collapsed with a heart attack in the 150 N. Michigan Avenue building that houses the Silk Road office, and was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. A week later, still in the hospital, he was hit with a life-threatening stroke that left him unable to use the right side of his body or to speak. After 55 days of hospitalization (at Northwestern and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab), and months of intensive outpatient therapy, a lot of the paralysis is gone and his mind is intact, Khoury says, but the speech will take time to recover.

Gillani made it to one of the last performances of Silk Road’s production of Fouad Teymour’s Twice, Thrice, Frice . . . last year. “The second he walked into the lobby and saw an audience, he kicked into Malik mode, and even though he couldn’t shake hands properly he was shaking people’s hands, greeting people, speaking a kind of unintelligible language,” Khoury says. “I think most people had no idea what was going on, but they just worked with it. Some asked me if he was speaking Urdu or Arabic.” That play is now Jeff-nominated, but for Khoury there’s an ironic edge: “We run a theater that’s about giving voice to people who don’t have a voice, and now he’s lost his voice.”

“It was several months before he could say my name,” Khoury says, but in December he spoke his first full sentence: “I love you.”

Silk Road had to cancel three plays this season, but will survive financially if they’re able to resume live theater production in the fall of 2021, even with reduced capacity, Khoury says. Meanwhile, the videos on their website–all available for free viewing and all with prescient relevance–include Not Quite White, a 2012 documentary with a narrative that describes whiteness as like “an automatic upgrade to first class,” and a flash to an image of Donald Trump.

“We know that the road to recovery is long, arduous, and complicated,” Khoury wrote in his e-mail. He was predicting a positive outcome for his partner, but his words are also apt for these troubled times. v






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Will Silk Road still rise? Will we?Deanna Isaacson September 30, 2020 at 7:15 pm Read More »

The Smart Museum wants you to “Take Care”Annie Howardon September 30, 2020 at 7:20 pm

The need for care has never been so vital–and so exhausting. While a long summer of protest pushed the boundaries of what must happen to make Black Lives Matter, often resulting in violent reprisal, the impending presidential election continues to narrow this open terrain of communal support and anger into the compromised binary of America’s two-party system. Hovering over everything, of course, are the hundreds of thousands of global COVID deaths that cannot be mourned in any traditional way, the very impulse to grieve together a major contributor to the virus’s continuation.

When Smart Museum curators Berit Ness and Jenny Carty began sketching out their plans for “Take Care” in early January, the relevance of their fall exhibit, opening October 1, could only be imagined. Now, as the imperative to give and receive care looms over our lives, the curators hope the exhibit will help materialize the complexities of such necessary but fraught emotions, a needed space for reflection amid irreconcilable harm.

“Something we’ve thought about from the beginning was, how can we display these heavier works alongside moments of levity?” Ness says. “We were really thinking about what it means to care, and how care can be a vehicle for social, political, and environmental justice, but also what it means when care is absent.”

The Smart Museum exhibit reflects the diversity of forms care work assumes. Moreover, the curators have sought to expand the museum space to encompass the care practices of guest curators and visitors through their “Collective Care” series, which will invite people to supply rotating pieces to the exhibit, starting with an intimate photographic series by Song Yongping called My Parents, curated by University of Chicago Assistant Professor of Medicine Brian Callender. The sum total of those items cannot begin to encompass caring’s many forms, but the thoughtful juxtaposition of works in the exhibit still gives definition to the many places caring can emerge.

Throughout their planning, the curators drew from a recent article by Tamara Kneese and Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart called “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times.” As Knesse and Hobart argue in the piece: “Because radical care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures, it can be used to coerce subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor, to make up for institutional neglect, and even to position some groups against others, determining who is worthy of care and who is not.”

For the many underpaid hospital workers, service workers, or in-home nurses most at risk right now, this sense of overburdening will be well-reflected. For example, in Rosalind Solomon’s photograph Mother, Daughter, Maid. Johannesburg, South Africa, 1988-90, the country’s racialized disparities become visible in a single household, as a beaming white mother and child sit together while their Black maid kneels beside them. In other works, unmade beds and hunched-over parents attest to the immense toll that supporting others takes, making it impossible just to keep oneself going.

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Chicago DSS: Division 7, Division 4, Division 2, Division 6 by Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Julian Flavin with the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation, 2019

One work influential to the exhibit’s development was Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969! Written after Ukeles became a mother, it became a foundational work of feminist conceptual art, extolling the virtues of maintenance against the perpetual drive for novelty. As Ukeles wrote, describing the daily acts that constituted her life: “Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.” Ukeles’s manifesto is supplemented by Chicago DSS: Division 7, Division 4, Division 2, Division 6, a film she codirected with Julian Flavin, that depicts Chicago sanitation workers tending the city’s streets, an underappreciated support that makes all city life possible.

“Ukeles’s work is all about this unseen labor taking place to make places thrive,” Ness says. “It helped us think about the ways that this moment has brought forward new kinds of essential labor to keep places going.”

Despite the many burdens placed upon those asked to constantly care without support, the undeniable beauty and tenderness inherent in care’s best moments, even against long odds, are also present in the exhibit. For Hobart and Knesse, “It is precisely from this audacity to produce, apply, and effect care despite dark histories and futures that its radical nature emerges.” Whether it’s the loving embrace of two living room dancers in Kerry James Marshall’s Slow Dance, or the sense of community concern for the under-resourced Englewood neighborhood in Amanda Williams’s Color(ed) Theory series, care expands the boundaries of what’s possible, nourishing us to survive another day. As the pandemic rages on, with no obvious horizon for the kinds of transformations that would make collective life for those most in need of support sustainable, “Take Care” is an invitation to reconsider the many scales at which we can support one another, and the newfound worlds that may emerge should care get its proper due. v

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The Smart Museum wants you to “Take Care”Annie Howardon September 30, 2020 at 7:20 pm Read More »