New to my Old Town neighborhood is The Blanchard, a French restaurant I return to again and again. Odd, because the menu is heavily skewed towards meat, and while I eat it, I’m more a fish and greens person. Four kinds of foie gras are served nightly (again, not my thing) but for me there’s a perfectly composed frisee aux lardons, moules marniers, steak frites, and a burger so thick the chef said he’d pay for our meal if my rail-thin sister could finish it. (She couldn’t.) Service is formal and typically excellent. I like the separate bar, too, a moody spot to start or end a meal. Word has it they’ll have outdoor seating this summer, which would liven the area’s under-used plaza.
Kudos to Restoration Hardware, the national retailer that brought new life to The Three Arts Club, a 1920s Gold Coast building in need of it. There’s four floors of merchandise, a roof deck, a central glass-domed dining room and bar that’s both elegant and casual. Limited menu and hours.
Another Chicago highlight: the Chicago Athletic Association is dazzlyingly reborn as a hotel with eateries and varied spaces to drink, lounge, gaze, play.
Movies! I’d read Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn and wanted to see the film, though I wasn’t expecting to be so deeply moved. Seasickness, homesickness, despair, the head-to-toe joy of being loved, guidance, kindness, mean girls, the past, the future: I hung on every scene. Its happy ending seemed to speak for all 
immigrants.
I was indifferent about Spotlight but my friend Julie and I had a movie date and Carol was not yet playing in Chicago. Wow. I am so glad to have seen Spotlight on the big screen. Riveting. The sad but true story of The Boston Globe journalists whose investigative work uncovers a systemic pattern of Catholic Church hierarchy protecting pederast priests. Bravo to its ensemble of stars: Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci, Liev Schreiber, Terrence Slattery.
More and more I’m hopping on the el at the end of a work day and 
catching an evening film at Gene Siskel Film Center. A Wim Wenders festival brought the usual and one I’d never seen, Kings of the Road, a black and white film from 1976 that’s both dreary and dreamy, as two men travel together through Eastern Germany repairing movie equipment.
Bunny Lake is Missing, by Otto Preminger, was another black and white treat, from 1965. A thriller set in London, a mother reports her child missing, but increasingly it seems the child doesn’t exist. Laurence Olivier plays the detective. Dark and delicious.
More recently I saw The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the 
Revolution, a 2015 documentary about the rise and fall of the Black Panther party fifty years ago. I learned a ton, loved the leather and big-hair fashions and understood clearly that complaints then are the same now: the Black Panthers sought the end of police brutality and murder of black people, decent housing, employment, education. Equality.
Books! I am pleased to make the acquaintance of Barbara Comyns (1907 -1992), an English writer whose Our Spoons Came from Woolworths reads like a 20th century Jane Eyre. I’d been reading the surgeon Atul Gawande’s work in the New Yorker for years; his Being Mortal is an important read for anyone (all of us?) concerned with dying well. I’m enjoying the work of newspaper columnists Meghan Daum and Neil Steinberg, both of whom think and write uncomfortable truths.
I am savoring Lauren Redniss’s Thunder & Lightning, a visual 
history of weather, and Titian Peale’s (1799 – 1885) Butterflies of North America, published for the first time.
More about books: during the Chicago Humanities Festival ‎it was interesting to hear from Booker Prize winner Marlon James that he had to throw out novel writing rules to 
create A Brief History of Seven Killings. Work led me to the writing of Joe Meno, whose Marvel and a Wonder is one of my favorite reads of the year. Jeff Hobbs’ The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is a masterpiece of nonfiction. Too, I liked Peter Nichols’ On the Rocks, a smart beach read set on Mallorca. I consumed Moby Dick the book (ahhhh, so satisfying) and Moby Dick the play. I was happy to see T. C. Boyle’s The Harder they Come make The New York Times Best Books list, a good one.