A lot will happen in both entertainment and Chicago in 2023

I’ve never made a New Year’s resolution, but I’ve spent a lot of fruitful time revisiting the past year in the first few days of the new year. I was able to discover what I had forgotten.

That’s life, but looking back at the previous year by reading the opinions of your newspaper industry colleagues is never a bad way to start the new year. Their picks for his 2022 favorites give me plenty of items to start filling my reading, listening, and watching lists in 2023. Naturally, I will occasionally reread some of the stuff I wrote in 2022, but this is mostly a way to remember the joys and disasters of the past.

I just reread what Joe Winston wrote about the years-long in-production documentary Harold Washington’s Punch 9.

As I wrote when it premiered on local movie screens in the fall, “In the city’s long and politically colorful history, 56 mayors have been drawn to the job for a variety of reasons. Few people, I would argue, are more attractive and important than Harold Washington.

The movie isn’t available to stream yet, but should be later this year. In the meantime, similar kinds of entertainment are coming soon as the election approaches.

Many people are running for seats on the city council. The City Council, made up of her fifty men and women of varying degrees of intelligence, power and effectiveness, forms Chicago’s legislative body. They meet at least once a month to discuss and vote on all sorts of matters important to the way the city operates. On a more intimate level, we also oversee the needs, concerns and complaints of an average of 55,000 people on each ward.

In 2022, I wrote about one of the people running for office, Sam Royko, son of columnist Mike Royko. He is running for Alderman in the First Ward and realizes that his late father held aldermen in low regard. Most of them carefully learned to speak in a whisper. It is more difficult for listening devices to pick up whispers. “

Election day is February 28th, but if the mayoral (or alderman) candidate doesn’t get a majority of the votes (which seems likely at this point, according to various polls and experts) A run-off vote will be held on April 4.

What can you expect?

I’m not in the prediction business, but I hope you’ll be flooded with commercials and examples of the power of television to not only affect the way we live, but change the way we speak. I will tell you.

Listen carefully to TV and radio anchors and reporters over the next few days and weeks. The word “mayor” has been uttered thousands of times, and we can guarantee that it will be consistently mispronounced by the majority of speakers we are taught to trust.

Correct pronunciation emphasizes the first syllable “MAY-or-al”. But with a few proud exceptions — the late John Calloway of WTTW Channel 11 and now Mike Flannery of Fox 32 News — everyone on tube and broadcast knows his second syllable, “May-OR-al ” is emphasized.

Many times before the election, Jessica Williams, then assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago and now professor emeritus at the university, said: It is not an uncommon speech pattern to shift emphasis when a word changes from a noun to an adjective. But I think[this pronunciation]has stuck. This is because this pronunciation is perceived as having a higher-sounding, more refined sound. Of course it bothers me. I don’t like hearing words mispronounced. “

But perhaps less than my colleague Nina Metz, who watches TV more than most people. She recently gave us an amazing Top 10 list for 2022. Yes, we critics sometimes watch more TV than the average person. But there’s no way we see most of what’s out there. “

Of her top shows, I’ve seen two of them. “The Bear” is about “the sweaty, jarring kitchen dynamics of a Mr. Beef-esque Chicago sandwich shop…an unexpectedly rich and endearing portrayal in this dark comedy her drama.” and “Interview with the Vampire,” about the bloodthirsty characters in what the Mets call the series “vividly written, confident in tone, and unexpectedly funny. Yes, it’s funny.”

The rest of her list will be new to me, as are many things that happen in 2023. There will be happiness and there will be sorrow. There was a recent story that captured some of the people and places that left last year.

But that list didn’t include people like Jim Schwall, co-founder of the great Siegel Cheval Band, of whom Corky Siegel said: He was a master guitarist, an artist and a great photographer. He was a poet and a great songwriter. He was also a humanist. great man. Or Susan Nussbaum, the talented actor, author, and passionate disability activist.

While it’s best to get ahead of the uncertainty, joys and sorrows of 2023, we know that Susan Nussbaum’s father, the great actor Mike Nussbaum, turned 99 on December 29, 2022. I’m here.

rkogan@chicagotribun.com