It has been a horrible spring season in Chicago. Last week was cold and we had snow. It stayed cold all week and this just after our first squirt of warm had fattened the buds on the trees. Many had already begun to split open, showing slivers of white flower or pink, and I studied them every morning to see if they had been killed yet. The hyacinth turned brown, the water in their capillary tubes frozen solid. The tulips wilted and fell. My hopes for a glorious spring faded. It snowed on Easter Sunday, the day the Sun is supposed to come back to the earth, to bring the green. A week later, on my birthday, Sunday, April 15th, I paid out $1,500 in taxes, the freelancer's curse. The Lakota say that there are four universal hardships in life. When your mother dies. When someone in your family dies out of order of age. When you are surrounded by your enemy. And when there is a long winter...

A few months back I sat in a coffee shop with my friend Masahiro Sugano, writer and director of Second Moon , and watched him layout the storyboard for his next feature film idea. The plot followed a Korean-American kid, the child of immigrants, who wakes up one day and shoots his parents dead in their kitchen. He has decided, rationally, that the only way to free himself from the illusions of the world is to confront each of them by killing someone who represents them. He starts with his parents and works his way through local authority symbols, finally liberating his girlfriend, who is a street girl, from her rough set of manhandlers, and then the two of them ride West, out of town, on the lam, like an Asian Bonnie and Clyde...

If you had walked into the Old Town School of Folk Music this past Wednesday night at 10pm, you would have come through the double doors of the concert hall and run straight into a crowded dance floor. The dancers ranged in age from 18-65, ranged in description from mentally handicapped adults to college kids on the party to Rastafarians to Polish middle-agers. The energy that supplied the dancing legs for this diverse group of hip-shakers was the sound of the Hot 8 Brass Band , a nine-piece New Orleans outfit who came to Old Town as the last act in its month-long AfroFolk series. The AfroFolk series has featured music from the African Diaspora, the acts coming from Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica. The Hot 8 Brass Band was the first act in the series to play a uniquely American brand of music, and the first act to fill the dance floor. To understand why the concert was so lively on a Wednesday night during Chicago's wet, grey, and frozen spring, you have to understand where New Orleans brass band music comes from. You have to start thinking about what New Orleans is and why, when a brass band plays, the audience has to move its feet.

Having blogged the first leg of the Champions' League quarterfinal between Roma and Manchester United, a 2-1 victory for the Romans that amounted to a draw on the aggregate score sheet, I expected a really bloody battle in the second leg played Tuesday at Old Trafford. To that end my friend Scott and I swiped the freelancer's card and snuck over to the Drum and Monkey, the nearest thing to an English pub on Chicago's south side, to watch the game. We were shocked and dismayed to find the door to that establishment locked, its lights out. Kickoff was two minutes away, so we walked to a sports bar called Hawkeyes on Taylor St.