A look at the honor boxes on any busy streetcorner shows Chicago’s stuffed with printed matter, from the society rag CS, a local project that expanded to other cities, to the nightlife guide UR Chicago to the green living Conscious Choice. Factor in Time Out Chicago, the local edition of an international chain, glossy monthlies like Chicago magazine, and neighborhood pubs like the salmon-colored Chicago Journal and it would appear the town is covered from Rogers Park to South Shore. But there’s more to local media than immediately meets the eye.
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Chicago’s home to a clutch of nationally distributed indies. Punk Planet–now with a new and improved Web site (punkplanet.com) –focuses on punk and DIY culture. The new issue, titled “The Revenge of Print 2,” includes a Harvey Pekar retrospective and interviews with musician and writer Ian Svenonius (whose The Psychic Soviet was just published by the local record label and publisher Drag City) and queer authors Michelle Tea and T Cooper. The gynocentric Venus Zine (venuszine.com), founded in 1995 in editor Amy Schroeder’s Michigan State dorm room, is now a thriving showcase for coverage of women’s indie culture; the fall 2006 issue includes an interview with designer Anna Sui, an over-the-top homage to the late, lamented Sleater-Kinney, and a thoughtful exploration of the weird world of pro-anorexia Web sites and blogs. The mag recently got an infusion of energy (and cash) from new publishers and is poised for a redesign and expanded distro. Rounding out this trifecta is Stop Smiling (stopsmilingonline.com), a glossy lifestyle mag published approximately every couple of months out of a Wicker Park storefront that doubles as an event space called “The Syndicate.” Stop Smiling bills itself as “the magazine for high-minded lowlifes,” with each issue organized around a theme. In practice that means–as in the recent “Ode to the Midwest” issue–features on an eclectic range of cultural producers, from Garrison Keillor to Dave Eggers to the founders of Steppenwolf Theatre. If the features tend to be a little puffy the organization as a whole appears to be thriving–at least if their jam-packed parties are any indication.
Online, at the three-year-old Gapers Block (gapersblock.com), Andrew Huff and crew maintain an events calendar, blog about local news, and provide original content including sports commentary, a cooking column, and analysis of local politics. Of similar scope, if more scattershot and boosterish in tone, is Chicagoist (chicagoist.com), part of the national family of urban “ist” Web sites that began with New York’s popular Gothamist.
