B12 Solipsism

Local high profile designed Maria Pinto (we’ve discussed her store before) is closing down her boutique, located at 135 N. Jefferson St in the West Loop.

All of the praise for Michelle Obama’s grape- and tomato-colored sheaths couldn’t bear enough fruit to spare their Chicago-based designer — Maria Pinto — from the recession’s blight.

Pinto, whose work has been worn by not only the country’s first lady but also queen-of-talk Oprah Winfrey, will open her West Loop boutique for five final days starting Tuesday. Her daywear, eveningwear, wraps and one-of-a-kind accessories will be liquidated at 50 percent to 70 percent off their original prices.

In January, Pinto arrived at the decision to close her shop and cease wholesale operations, she said. A fashion designer for 20 years who previously worked for Geoffrey Beene, Pinto launched her own line in 1991. Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys New York and Takashimaya in New York, as well as high-end boutiques across the country, carried her pieces.

[Click to continue reading Maria Pinto: Chicago designer Maria Pinto liquidating boutique - chicagotribune.com]

I’ve glanced at her store window a few times, and I didn’t see any item that entranced me. Perhaps her best work was customized to particular customers, and not for display on a clothing rack.

And this statement mostly sounds true:

“In the general scheme of things, our store was doing very well. But our other retailers are paring down their open-to-buys (merchandise purchases) and looking to build sales through trunk shows,” she said. “It’s difficult because it makes your forecasted cash flow challenging. You’re waiting for the show to happen, waiting for things to happen. Before, the stores were committed to larger inventories.”

Any avid shopper can see the shift, she said.

“Walk through the stores and see how the stores are buying very differently. Saks had blast-out sales going in November 2008. November this year, there was very little in stores that was on sale. What was left was bottom-of-the-barrel. Everyone is having to reposition themselves.”

For 2009, total U.S. apparel sales fell 5.2 percent to $188.5 billion, market research firm NPD Group reported last month.

Mayor Daley’s budget is in deficit, municipal projects don’t get funded, schools don’t get funded, yet developers can get as much TIF money¹ as they need, no matter what. No consequences, no strings. Just plain ole corporate welfare.

A city panel approved another major increase in financial assistance for planned Loop apartment development that has struggled to get off the ground because of rising costs and the tough lending climate.

The Community Development Commission signed off Tuesday on a $34-million tax-increment financing subsidy to help pay for the conversion of a vintage Loop office tower at 188 W. Randolph St. into a 310-unit apartment building.

That’s more than four times the $8 million in TIF funds the city initially approved for the development back in 2006, when its total cost was estimated at $79 million.

But the projected cost had soared to $139 million in 2008, and the project’s developer, Village Green Cos., went back for more. The city complied by hiking the subsidy to $20 million.

[Click to continue reading Loop project poised to get another big TIF boost - Chicago Real Estate Daily]

Via Lynn Becker, who adds:

When, in 2006, a developer announced plans to rehab Vitzhum & Burns Steuben Club Building at 188 W. Randolph, an $8 million dollars contribution from the massive Central Loop TIF was going to kick in about 10% of the $79 million cost.

…

But wait – there’s more! The project is also getting $40 million dollars in tax-exempt bonds from the state, plus $37 million in tax credits. You, lucky taxpayer, kick in almost half of the project cost and the private developer gets the building. Socialism, Chicago style.

When Draconian cutbacks are effecting everything in Chicago from the CTA, to the schools, to 4th of July Fireworks, the city is diverting another $26 million in tax revenues to an economically unsustainable development.

[Click to continue reading ArchitectureChicago PLUS: Welfare Queen]

Really disgusting. The Vitzthum & Burns Steuben Club Building is not a cookie-cutter square box, but it isn’t in the upper echelon of Chicago architecture either.

from a CBS Chicago report (presumedly based on the press release from Village Green Companies)

The Community Development Commission approved a plan to redevelop the vacant and historic Randolph Tower at 188 W. Randolph St. into 310 apartments, retail and commercial space, according to a release from the CDC.

The action recommends the designation of Village Green Companies as the developer for the proposed $145 million renovation.

Plans call for the mixed-use building, formerly known as the Steuben Club Building, to be converted into 168 studios, 98 one-bedroom and 44 two-bedroom units, the release said. Sixty-two of the residential units will be made affordable to households at or below 50 percent of median area income.

Village Green bought the 45-story office building out of bankruptcy in 2005 and will convert the 80-year-old structure into apartments. Plans also include 9,500 square feet of ground floor restaurant and retail space. Village Green will occupy 11,400 square feet on the second floor as its Chicago regional office.

Amenities will include a fitness center, swimming pool and spa. A social club will be located on the 38th and 39th floors, offering 360-degree views of the skyline and Lake Michigan, the release said.

The Gothic-style building will have extensive work done to preserve its historic terra cotta façade and other ornamental details and a gut rehabilitation of the interior.

The CDC also approved a redevelopment plan for the proposed Randolph/Wells tax increment financing district. Creation of the district will support the renovation of Randolph Tower and help redevelop other underutilized and vacant buildings in the area.

[Click to continue reading
City OK's Rehab Of Loop Tower, Home For Teen Mothers On West Side - cbs2chicago.com
]

Hey, build for the future, right? Demand for new condos might be low now, but in twenty years…

Via EveryBlock’s hyperlocal news

1. tax increment financing [↩]

Edit ∆ (delta) IL Connect Four, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

or whatever that says (Oil? Delta IL?). Pretty cryptic.

Kinzie Street and the stairway leading up to Orleans St.

Embiggen

from last spring

“One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko” (Mike Royko)

Factoid I did not know, Mike Royko, one of the famed Billy Goat denizens, coined the long-lasting epithet for Jerry Brown.

For the uninitiated, ‘Governor Moonbeam’ became Mr. Brown’s intractable sobriquet, dating back to his days as governor between 1975 and 1983, when his state led the nation in pretty much everything — its economy, environmental awareness and, yes, class-A eccentrics.

The nickname was coined by Mike Royko, the famed Chicago columnist, who in 1976 said that Mr. Brown appeared to be attracting “the moonbeam vote,” which in Chicago political parlance meant young, idealistic and nontraditional.

The term had a nice California feel, and Mr. Royko eventually began applying it when he wrote about the Golden State’s young, idealistic and nontraditional chief executive. He found endless amusement — and sometimes outright agita — in California’s oddities, calling the state “the world’s largest outdoor mental asylum.”

“If it babbles and its eyeballs are glazed,” he noted in April 1979, “it probably comes from California.”

[Click to continue reading How Jerry Brown Became ‘Governor Moonbeam’ - NYTimes.com]

Of course, Mike Royko eventually came to be a Moonbeam supporter, and hated that the nickname stuck:

All of which made Mr. Royko’s epiphany even more striking. It came in 1980, at the Democratic National Convention, where Mr. Royko said that the best speech had come from — you guessed it — Governor Moonbeam.

“I have to admit I gave him that unhappy label,” Mr. Royko wrote. “Because the more I see of Brown, the more I am convinced that he has been the only Democrat in this year’s politics who understands what this country will be up against.”

Dragon Skull, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

at least that’s what it looked like to me.
Lake Michigan

Roger’s Park, Chicago, or perhaps Evanston (border is a bit amorphous right here)

Embiggen

I’m sure there is an equation (Thermodynamics, perhaps?) that describes how this ice formation is created with waves, but I leave that as an exercise for you, the reader.

Intellectual Amnesia, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

slightly punched up in Photoshop (Velvia)

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from 2008

It’s a Blue Light Special, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Red Light, Blue Light, all semantics anyway

[view large: www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=129 ]

down the street from me

A few interesting links collected February 25th through March 1st:

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• Where is The Best Bloody Mary in DC? « brunch and the city – image by swanksalot on Flickr

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• R.J. Cutler: What I Learned From Anna Wintour – Lesson 1: Keep Meetings ShortI work in the film business, where schmoozing is an art form, lunch hour lasts from 12:30 until 3, and every meeting takes an hour whether there’s an hour’s worth of business or not. Not so at Vogue, where meetings are long if they go more than seven minutes and everyone knows to show up on time, prepared and ready to dive in. In Anna’s world, meetings often start a few minutes before they’re scheduled. If you arrive five minutes late, chances are you’ll have missed it entirely. Imagine the hours of time that are saved every day by not wasting so much of it in meetings. It’s not by accident that during the final scene of The September Issue, Anna Wintour is in her office alone, waiting for a meeting to begin, and we hear her voice call out, “Is anyone coming to this run-through except for me?”
• Haymarket Pub & Brewery Opening this Summer in the West Loop — Grub Street Chicago – Once Extra Virgin, then Bar Louie, now Haymarket Brewery Photo: swanksalot/Flickr

[sticker reads, "Lets beat the fuck out of Anthony Abbate"]

A former Chicago police officer convicted of a bar beating seen around the world violated his probation by failing a drug test last month, Cook County prosecutors alleged today.

Anthony Abbate, 41, tested positive last month for opiates, prosecutors said. Circuit Judge Arthur Hill Jr. set a hearing on the allegations for March 12. Prosecutors could seek to have him imprisoned for up to five years if the judge finds he violated his probation.

…

The burly Abbate was convicted in June of aggravated battery for the 2007 off-duty beating of Karolina Obrycka, a bartender at Jesse’s Short Stop Inn. The attack was caught on video and circulated on the Internet.

…

Jesus Reyes, acting head of the Cook County Adult Probation Department, said test results do not specify the type of opiate for which Abbate tested positive, but the test screens for opium, heroin, morphine, codeine and a number of medications.

[Click to continue reading Ex-cop in bar beating fails drug test, authorities say - Chicago Breaking News]

Abbate gives regular hard-working police a bad name, yet the Chicago justice system seems intent upon letting Abbate stand as a mascot for the CPD.

Merchandise Mart Sonnet 2628, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

yet another shot of the Merchandise Mart at night

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a little noisier¹ than I would like, but…

1. ie, digital noise from low light [↩]

Oh, that’s rich. And how much is tuition at Northwestern? Something like six figures, I think. It’s fucking golden…

Even if Northwestern University has used the title for a literature course, “The Death of Irony” must be revived for next week’s campus appearance by the former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich.

Mr. Blagojevich is scheduled to speak at a gathering called “Ethics in Politics: An Evening with Former Governor R. Blagojevich.”

Many people gagged for all the obvious reasons. His alleged misdeeds, cavalier ways, narcissism, favor-swapping pragmatism and seeming belief that he’ll be just fine if he corrals the news media to his side make him an atypical choice for presumably idealistic souls spending a king’s ransom for four years in Evanston.

“But the problem goes deeper,” said Rushworth Kidder, president of the Institute of Global Ethics. “In a sense, he’s the logical and inevitable outcome of a society that has refused to educate the next generation about values, ethics and character. As such, he’s the perfect outcome of our ethical indifference and a role model for the next generation.”

[Click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative - Now at Northwestern, Ethics 101, Taught by, Well, Go Figure - NYTimes.com]

But there was a contrarian view from Larry Miller, a comic who occasionally writes about politics.

“There are so many shatteringly immoral thieves and cutthroats in government today, yesterday and tomorrow, so many in Chicago and Illinois and New York and Texas and Montana, so many galloping egomaniacs who just haven’t been caught yet, so many roaches zipping around the kitchen floor before someone turns out the light, why not Blagojevich,” said Mr. Miller, who recently appeared in Las Vegas with his chum Jerry Seinfeld.

…

“You and I don’t want to live like this, but it’s not too cynical to say, ‘They are all like this.’ In theory, O.K., there’s one guy here, and one woman there, who are actually trustworthy. But isn’t it axiomatic that as soon as one of these horrible egomaniacs first decides to run for something, anything, that it’s irrefutable proof-positive the guy’s a complete lunatic and thug?”

His grand finale: “Why not Blagojevich speaking on ethics? At least that has humor. Is it not far worse and creepy to have Hugo Chávez or Ahmadinejad welcome at the United Nations? These are seriously bad people, and we all stand and applaud and nod as if we were about to listen to U Thant,” the former U.N. secretary general.

More on the Illinois budget woes we mentioned earlier.

So are Illinois residents taxed at a higher rate than other states would tax? Always a bit hard to measure, because there are so many kinds of taxes, and some apply to residents and some to businesses. And more importantly, would companies move away from Illinois if the taxes increased?

Illinois could raise about $6 billion, covering roughly half the expected 2011 budget deficit, by increasing the Illinois income tax rate on individuals to 5 percent, from the current 3 percent, and raising the corporate tax rate to 6.4 percent, from 4.8 percent, the Civic Federation’s said.

But higher taxes also affect how employers view the state’s business climate, a calculation that factors in state and local taxes on retail sales and business income, too. The Tax Foundation, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that measures federal and state taxes, said Illinois’s business climate suffers because low income tax rates are offset by the high rates on retail sales and property transactions.

As of September 2009, Illinois’s combined state and local sales taxes averaged 8.4 percent, making the state the sixth-biggest taxer, just ahead of New York, said Justin Higgenbottom, a Tax Foundation analyst. Illinois’s high taxes on property earn it sixth place in that category.

In addition to the corporate rate of 4.8 percent, other taxes bring the effective Illinois corporate rate to 7.3 percent, Mr. Higgenbottom said. That means the Civic Federation proposal would in effect take the state’s top corporate rate in Illinois to 8.9 percent.

Once the analysts add it all up, the Tax Foundation said Illinois’s state and local taxes in the 2008 fiscal year represented 9.3 percent of the state’s income. That ranks Illinois below the national average of 9.7 percent and roughly the same as surrounding states except Wisconsin, which is higher.

[Click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative - Looking to Taxes as Solution to a Crisis - NYTimes.com]

Will facts be compelling enough to convince Illinois legislators to push tax increases? Depends if fear of being labelled a tax-and-spender in the next election cycle trumps being fiscally responsible. I’d be surprised mightily, if the corporate tax rate went up, and moderately surprised if the income tax rate went up.

It is a bit of a problem: Illinois is not exactly flush with cash, and either services have to be cut, or taxes raised. Neither is politically viable, but ignoring the deficit is not good long-term strategy. Of course, just like in Washington, D.C., deferring decisions until later is a bi-partisan sport.

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has proposed cutting spending and raising taxes to deal with one of the biggest state budget crises in the nation, but his plan will likely be unpopular with some voters and lawmakers during a tough election year.

Illinois’s deficit through mid-2011 is estimated at $11 billion to $13 billion—close to 50% of the expected $26.7 billion in available revenue for the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1. That is among the worst such percentages among states. Health-care and social-service agencies routinely wait three months or more for the state to pay its bills.

The state pension system also is the worst-funded in the U.S. Illinois borrowed nearly $3.5 billion last year to make its annual pension payment. State auditors estimate that the pension systems are underfunded by $62 billion.

Warning residents that the state faces a fiscal crisis, Mr. Quinn’s office on Wednesday posted his proposals, along with preliminary budget figures, on a state Web site. He isn’t set to deliver his formal budget speech—which kicks off the legislative process—until March 10. Law

[Click to continue reading Illinois Airs Plan on Deficit - WSJ.com]

and even cutting the obvious fat from the budget is not enough

The problem is that Illinois needs billions, not millions, of dollars in increased revenue, lowered spending or both. Many citizen suggestions are prohibited by state or federal law, or make no meaningful dent in the deficit.

In fact, Mr. Quinn’s proposed cuts and revenue increases, if passed, wouldn’t fully resolve the deficit. The governor also wants the state to borrow more and to request more federal assistance. States have been using federal stimulus money to prop up their budgets, particularly in education and health care, but that funding is set to largely disappear by the end of the year.

One of these days the accounting trickery will have to end, both in Illinois, and other similarly strapped for cash states, and on the federal level. But not this year presumedly.

Mr. Quinn and research groups that have analyzed Illinois’s budget say the state consistently spends more than it collects in revenue. For years, lawmakers and governors have relied on borrowing and one-time accounting moves to make up the difference.

but as James O’Shea reports in the NYT:

With a fiscal crisis looming in Illinois, some influential people concerned about the dismal condition of the state’s finances are proposing that lawmakers increase the individual income tax rate by two-thirds and the corporate rate by one-third.

Taxes are a hot political issue. Illinois has the lowest income tax rate of the 41 states that tax wage income, so the low rate on income makes the tax a juicy target during a tough budget fight. But since governments also impose taxes on sales, property and other transactions, getting a handle on where Illinois stands is not simple.

[Click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative - Looking to Taxes as Solution to a Crisis - NYTimes.com]

Alien Hoopsters 6 on 6, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Sculpture found somewhere near Northwestern Hospital (aka Chicago Memorial, if you’ve ever seen the movie, The Fugitive). Flipped around in Photoshop because they wanted to play full court.
Note: aliens use multiple balls/goals, so their game is faster moving than the NBA. Sort of like 3-D chess as played on Star Trek.

embiggen:
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from my archives, circa 2005

A few interesting links collected February 23rd through February 24th:

• Gapers Block: Rearview – Wednesday, February 24 2010 – photo by Seth Anderson – whoo hoo

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• Steny Hoyer Passes Public Option Hot Potato Back to Senate, Obama – The White House and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have been engaged in a game of kill the public option hot potato for awhile. Now, there seems to be some efforts to possibly blame the failure of the public option on the House Democrats. Clearly, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer wants no part of the blame, and has passed the hot potato right back to the White House and Senate Democrats. After all, the House did pass the public option once already

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• MagicJack dials wrong number in legal attack on Boing Boing Boing Boing – Gadget maker MagicJack recently lost a defamation lawsuit that it filed against Boing Boing. The judge dismissed its case and ordered it to pay us more than $50,000 in legal costs.

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