Rogers Park Q & A

This one was sent to my e-mail address: BillMorton.RogersPark@gmail.com



Q: Do you know anything of a hit and run in Rogers Park that concerned a white pickup and a judge riding a yellow bike, or any hit and run that occurred in the last say 5 months in that area?I overheard a neighbor talking, it might be BS but who knows, have contacted police they are disinterested.

Thank You, R. J. Y.



A: R. J. Y., I did hear of a hit and run in the alley behind Sherwin Manor Nursing Center. Here are all of the details I have: http://rp1000.blogspot.com/search?q=hit+and+run . I also spotted a flyer taped to a bus shelter on Sheridan and Chase inquiring if anyone had witnessed a recent hit and run.

Thank you for your question. - Bill Morton, Rogers Park in 1,000 Words




Tags: 60626, 60645, Q and A, Rogers Park

Today in Rogers Park - March 30th, 2013

Today in Rogers Park is a series to inform our community of relevant daily events, including the arts, entertainment, presentations and community meetings. - Bill Morton 


Mayne Stage - Sound Culture presents: lePercolateur CD Release
1328 W. MORSE AVENUE CHICAGO, IL. 60626

WEBSITE | Phone: 773.381.4554

With a nod to the historic past of this grand facility, Mayne Stage features a restaurant (Act One Pub) and performance space that reflects the unique and diverse history of Rogers Park. Mayne Stage is happy to present a variety of terrific acts in its 230-seat multipurpose entertainment venue.
“A sly and surprising gypsy-jazz quintet who apply that idiom to modernistic pop tunes, as well as vintage jazz composition”
– Neil Tesser, Chicago Examiner
Beckoned by the dulcet tones of violin, bass, and the female voice spiraling through the darkness, the stranger was helplessly drawn towards the last lit trailer in camp that seemed to have sprung forth from another time. This chance meeting’s outcome: lePercolateur.
Fueled by coffee black as the night the musicians played ’til the sun began painting the eastern horizon red, and carnival rose ’round them from the ether.
Winding their caravan through the windiest of cities, lePercolateur has spent the time since this fateful night sweeping in to transport concert-goers to a time where music was a liberating and cathartic respite from persecution–where the frenetic energy of struggling to simply ‘be’ coalesced with the unbridled spirit of gypsy music and burgeoned into swing dancing.




Red Line Tap - 312 Presents Michael McDermott / Kevin Mileski 7006 N. GLENWOOD AVENUE CHICAGO, IL 60626

WEBSITE 

The Red Line Tap hosts music up to 7 nights a week featuring local and national acts on stage, from their resident band the Mudflapps, to Micki’s open mic and all sorts of great shows daily, Red Line Tap has something  for everyone!

The anthemic, arena-filling "Scars From Another Life" (from his forthcoming album Hit Me Back) paints the a picture of how far singer-songwriter Michael McDermott has come:  "I was so down... I had completely lost my way / When I hit Broadway I began to realize / That all they are are scars from another life." His life since becoming a recording artistfull of myriad highest highs, gutter-skimming lows, and absolute rock bottoms of the past two decadescould read like a screenplay, but with stories so ridiculously outlandish that they couldn't possibly be true.
All of it.. the addiction, the failed relationships, the financial dramas, the career hurdleshave left plenty of scars, but McDermott's moving on, moving up, and taking charge.  He makes no excuses for his pastit has made him who he is todaybut sings to everyone listening (and to himself):  "Don't run away, they're scars from another life." 
It's been quite a ride since singer/songwriter Michael McDermott unleashed his debut, 620 West Surf, but one might even go so far as to say that his 2012 release, Hit Me Back, represents the work of a new artist:  for the first time in his recording career, McDermott is a father, a philanthropic entrepreneur, and has experienced the loss of an adored parent.  All are major life changes which have found achingly honest expression in his songs. 
 Hit Me Back also exudes McDermott's trademark embrace of faith and hope in the face of adversity.  The lyrics are, as always, uniquely evocative: McDermott sings in poetry; his tunes are literate story-songs.  On the haunting "Ever After," he offers the listener palpable insight into the jarring confusion and doubt felt in the days that followed his mother's passing (in October 2011).  The wryly observed title track puts a new spin on fighting a long-time nemesis, alcohol.  His demon-banishing in the aforementioned "Scars From Another  Life" is echoed in the love-is-redemption refrains of "Let It Go."  The exploration of temptation and bowing to its siren call is explored in the Americana-laced "A Deal With The Devil." Influenced by such musical giants as Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, McDermott exhibited a talent for mature and lyrically dense songwriting that soon caught the eyeand earof then-talent scout Brian Koppelman (now a screenwriter, novelist, director, and producer; best known as the co-writer of "Ocean's Thirteen" and "Rounders"), who immediately signed him to Giant Records.  That first album, 620 West Surf, boasted a Billboard Hot 100 charting single, ("A Wall I Must Climb"). McDermott continued to write introspective, character-driven songs that won him an enduring band of appreciative followers.  In the liner notes for McDermott's self-titled album, bestselling author Stephen King wrote:  "Michael McDermott is one of the best songwriters in the world and possibly the greatest undiscovered rock 'n' roll talent of the last 20 years."
 The recording industry shakeup that marked the mid-1990s left McDermott without a contract, and awash in debt and self-doubt.  "Throughout the years, I had continued to feel like I was on a mission, of sorts, singing spiritual songs," he once said, "but never really feeling good about the other elements of my life."  McDermott released five more albums in the next decade, some with label distribution, others independently.  He also continued playing live shows, and riding a personal rollercoaster of addiction, recovery, and sometimes-misplaced ambition.  
 Having at last become more comfortable in his own skin, scarred but smarter, McDermott has in recent years begun to make more life-affirming choices.  He has launched his own coffee line, with sales from each bag of his two signature blends providing meals for seven children.  Understandably, he's found positive inspiration in his wife, Heather Horton (whom he married during a tour stop in Italy in May 2009), and the birth of their daughter, Rain (in July 2010).  And he's once again a signed artist, this time with New Jersey label, Rock Ridge Music, who will be releasing his forthcoming album.  McDermott and wife Horton (a gifted musician/vocalist), and producer CJ Eiriksson (engineered albums for U2 and Matchbox 20, as well as McDermott's 2007 album Noise From Words) spent a whirlwind eight days in the studio to record Hit Me Back.
Of course, recent positive inspiration doesn't mean he's forgotten his tumultuous past or that he no longer faces present struggles. For McDermott, a performer and storyteller to the depths of his soul, his connection with fans and his uncanny ability to communicate universal truths through his own personal experiences are helping fade the many of the scars that remain.  The demons aren't gone; he's just found a place for them to dwell in peace.  It is coming to terms with those demons and putting them in their place that continues to fuel his art ever further.

HEADS UP

Rogers Park Chamber of Commerce 4 Year Anniversary Celebration.

All Rogers Park businesses, organizations, institutions, community leaders, and residents are invited to meet and greet as the Rogers Park Chamber of Commerce celebrates four years of supporting and unifying Rogers Park businesses.

This event will be hosted at Quest Network Services, 7301 N. Sheridan Road. Guests will be warmly welcomed to short (10-15 minutes) presentations by local businesses and service organizations and served tastes from restaurants and cafes of our neighborhood.

This is a public event on Saturday, April 13th, 2013 from 12 noon - 7pm. RSVP calls to (773) 850-0049 are encouraged. RSVP's to facebook and walk-ins are OK. This is a free community event.
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Car Crash at Sheridan and Chase

At 10:50pm, two cars just collided on Sheridan and Chase in Rogers Park.

We could hear the crash-up from the Parlor Room of Quest.

One vehicles airbags were deployed, and the other hit and run.

A car chased the car that ran from the accident and made it come back to the scene.
Undercover police were on the scene immediately.
Ambulance and Fire truck on the scene a long with the 2 squad cars.

The lady is still inside the vehicle with side curtain airbags that had also deployed.

Update 11:07pm : Lady from recked vehicle is being taken away in an ambulance. Hit and run vehicle was an oldsmobile, driver in handcuffs on hood of car. Northside Performance Towing is now hooking up recked vehicle.



Tags: 49th Ward, 60626, 60645, airbag deployed, car accident, car damage, Rogers Park

Today in Rogers Park - April 11th, 2013

Today in Rogers Park is a series to inform our community of relevant daily events, including the arts, entertainment, presentations and community meetings. - Bill Morton 


Red Line Tap - Fred Eaglesmith & the Travelling Steam Show with James Curley 7006 N. GLENWOOD AVENUE CHICAGO, IL 60626

WEBSITE 

The Red Line Tap hosts music up to 7 nights a week featuring local and national acts on stage, from their resident band the Mudflapps, to Micki’s open mic and all sorts of great shows daily, Red Line Tap has something for everyone!
Acclaimed singer, songwriter and bandleader Fred Eaglesmith is a genuine iconoclast and true original. It’s the natural result of following the cue of his musical career and now 19 albums with the January 2012 release of 6 Volts. The result is one of the most fascinating and musically rewarding careers in contemporary music.
 As he has doggedly gone his own way as an independent musical artist, Eaglesmith has also enjoyed such high profile rewards in recent years as having his songs covered by country superstars Toby Keith, Alan Jackson and Miranda Lambert, among many other accomplishments.
6 Volts is yet another landmark on a journey. The album takes its title from the battery that powered the game-changing transistor radio – introduced in 1954, the same year that rock’n’roll emerged into popular consciousness – and embodies the notion of back to the future. Captured live in the studio with one microphone onto a one-track reel to reel recorder like so many enduring classics, 6 Volts also bristles with contemporary urgency.
By bringing the recording process all the way back home to its technologically basic origins, Eaglesmith succeeds in creating authentic and meaningful music. “There’s still a certain love to it that’s better than multitracking,” he observes. Music doesn’t get any more real than when you can’t overdub, autotune, or fix it in the mix.
6 Volts opens with the memerizing life affirming track “Cemetery Road,” the tragic yet loving “Katie,” and the sparse and meditative “Been a Long Time.” It channels the raw rock’n’roll musical truths of his youth while offering a nod of homage to his country music inspiration on “Johnny Cash.”
“My Dad had an old console radio on top of the clothes dryer, and when Johnny Cash came on, he would put one hand on each side of the radio and really listen to that song. It really meant that much to him,” notes Eaglesmith.
The title song with its classic rock’n’roll strains offers lyrical insights into Eaglesmith’s symbolic and actual yin/yang equation throughout. The shadow side of love and desire lurk on “Dangerous” and the memory fever dream “Cigarette Machine.” He catalogs his musical past on “Betty Oshawa” and “Stars,” portraying the truths of everyday working musicians. He closes out 6 Volts with the resigned yet still determined onward march of the traveling soul on “Trucker Speed.”
The album also draws on the spirit of the era when the transistor radio generation of musical artists and listeners keyed into the electricity of fusing rock’n’roll with country and Southern roots. “That era really felt like that was a powerful place to refer back to,” Eaglesmith notes. “I did not want it to sound like, say, 1963. I wanted it to sound like a record that referenced that but was still made in 2011.”
Throughout the years since his first album in 1980, Eaglesmith has usefully managed to both transcend and blend such genres and categories as rock’n’roll, country, folk, singer-songwriter, Americana, blues and bluegrass to fashion his own distinctive brand of literate, melodic and rhythmic rocking elecro-acoustic North American music. Along the way he has gathered a unique set of accomplishments: a Juno Award for Best Roots & Traditional Album, had his music used in films by Martin Scorsese, James Caan and Toby Keith, wrote a hit #1 on the bluegrass charts (“Thirty Years of Farming,” recorded by James King), wowing David Letterman in his U.S. network debut in 2010, and finding his songs included in the curriculum at two colleges. His followers are so devoted that he is the host and centerpiece of a number of music festivals in the U.S. and Canada. He also inspired the Roots on the Rails rolling music fests and hosts its excursions on scenic railways as well as, last year, at sea. When not writing recording and performing music, Eaglesmith creates visual art that is exhibited in commercial galleries and museums.
In addition to having his compositions featured on best-selling albums by country singers and writers themselves like Keith (“White Rose”), Jackson (“Freight Train”) and Lambert (“Time To Get A Gun”), such fellow songwriting talents as The Cowboy Junkies, Chris Knight, Kasey Chambers, Mary Gauthier, Todd Snider and Dar Williams have all recorded Eaglesmith songs.
One of nine children raised on a farm in Ontario, Eaglesmith remains genuinely tied to the land and the lives, labors, trials, tribulations and triumphs of everyday people that have consistently given his work its enduring emotional resonance. After his family lost its farm, he set out on his own at age 15, hitchhiking and hopping trains across North America and honing his craft as a writer, singer and musical entertainer in hobo camps and for crews of fellow forest firefighters before working his way upward in small clubs and coffeehouses.
These days Eaglesmith is in motion most of the year from show to show in a school bus and RV that have been converted to run on both gas and used cooking oil they get from restaurants and diners along the way. The troupe pulls into campgrounds, RV parks, truckstops and WalMart parking lots to spend the night rather than in hotels, and cooks up their own feasts in the morning for breakfast. “Times are hard and things are tough for people, and we shouldn’t be riding in buses that look like bachelor apartments,” he states. As a result, ”It makes me sound like the truth when I’m up there singing because it is the truth.”
It’s all part and parcel of his mission of delivering a memorable and moving entertainment experience for the masses with his band, the Traveling Steam Show.
In the final analysis, it’s a simple equation. “We just play rock’n’roll,” Eaglesmith asserts. And in the process deliver music based on passion and truth, with an emotional union and a shared sense of fun. “The root of it all is my little bit of creativity, that little ball of fire inside me. I just do what feels like the truth to me. And when it feels like the truth it’s really not that hard to do or hard to listen to".
Eaglesmith concludes. So he’s happily left with a decision made long ago that he continues to follow that delivers essential affirmation with every step of life he takes. “I’m gonna play good, sing good, write good and act good.”

HEADS UP

Rogers Park Chamber of Commerce 4 Year Anniversary Celebration.

All Rogers Park businesses, organizations, institutions, community leaders, and residents are invited to meet and greet as the Rogers Park Chamber of Commerce celebrates four years of supporting and unifying Rogers Park businesses.

This event will be hosted at Quest Network Services, 7301 N. Sheridan Road. Guests will be warmly welcomed to short (10-15 minutes) presentations by local businesses and service organizations and served tastes from restaurants and cafes of our neighborhood.

This is a public event on Saturday, April 13th, 2013 from 12 noon - 7pm. RSVP calls to (773) 850-0049 are encouraged. RSVP's to facebook and walk-ins are OK. This is a free community event.
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Fundraiser for Family of Tsering Dorjee

Tsering Dorjee, Vice President of the Rogers Park Chamber of Commerce was struck and killed by a hit and run driver along Devon Avenue on Nov. 12th. He was a family man, the bread-winner who, is survived by his wife and three children.

The Rogers Park Chamber of Commerce is hoping to raise $2,000.00 in total to assist Tsering Dorjee's family.

"Please join us at Leona's on Wednesday November 28th, 2012 from 6-9pm. We will be visible when you walk in. Cash or checks made payable to the "Tsering Dorjee Memorial Fund" will be accepted". - RPCC

There will be light snacks and casual conversation in memory of Tsering Dorjee.

Come out, order some food, and donate what you can!

Leona's

6935 North Sheridan Road 

Chicago IL 60626

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Hit and Run behind Sherwin Manor

A police officer just inquired if I had witnessed a man being hit with a vehicle behind Sherwin Manor Nursing Center (7350 N Sheridan Rd).

If anyone has any information about this, please contact the Chicago Police Department.

Jaws of Life on Clark Street

Read about it at Loyola Student Dispatch - Cabbie, passenger hurt in hit-and-run.

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