WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

For several years, the Fulcrum Point New Music Project produced a concert series exploring music having to do with Earth, Wind, Water, and Fire.

When we consider the future of the Chicago region, planners and architects can't help but have an eye on the element of earth, particularly that which stands vacant. That's the topic, in fact, of the book Terra Incognita: Vacant Land and Urban Strategies.

Now, if there's one classical element that most shapes the essential character of the Chicago region, it's probably water. A couple years ago, Chicago architects Sarah Dunn and Martin Felsen came up with an idea to protect the city's water supply.

In 2005, WBEZ's Tony Sarabia profiled the Bloomington, Illinois-based band Backyard Tire Fire. The trio had just released their second studio album, Bar Room Semantics. The band's latest release is called The Places We Lived.

Rather than a natural force tamed into a means of transport, here, air is the absence of something solid, the ether through which limbs thrash. And when I say something solid, I mean of course, a guitar. Those thrashing limbs? Well, they are in the service of the art, or sport, of air guitar.

Air and water combine in this story for an exhilarating and necessarily visceral experience for one of our longtime contributors. Beth Finke lost her sight when she was 26 years old, but that hasn't stopped her from trying things that plenty of sighted people shy away from.

It was a confluence of elements that made the evening of October 8th, 1871 devastating for the City of Chicago. A fire that erupted in a barn just southwest of Chicago's Loop spread quickly. The story of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 has been told and retold countless times over the years.