Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, June 28, 2016. It’s a miracle: Rauner says a partial-year state budget deal is close It’s been a long time coming, but Governor Bruce Rauner and Democratic legislators are close to reaching a deal on a partial-year state budget, Rauner claimed Monday, though there’s apparently still no decision on school funding. The fiscal year ends June 30, and Illinois remains the only U....

Last year around this time, hundreds of gallons of Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout were being distilled at Rhine Hall to make bierschnaps. The spirit originated in Bavaria, where small brewers who owned a still would often distill leftover beer. Despite increasing interest, it’s never really become popular in the U.S. (though several local distilleries, including Koval, Chicago Distilling Company, and CH Distillery, have made spirits from beer). Turning unwanted beer into spirits is a no-brainer; the first step to making whiskey is essentially to make beer, minus the hops....

“#992: Knowing to jangle your keys while walking through the nature preserve so the otters will come out.” That was my spoken contribution to Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing, a solo show about finding reasons to live now in its Chicago premiere at Windy City Playhouse, where the incandescent Rebecca Spence is our tour guide and narrator. Before the play begins, Spence greets us and gives us numbered slips of paper with a reason—when we hear the number, we chime in....

The Steins have been traumatized on an epic level. Until September 11, 2001, father Arthur was a senior vice president at a big Manhattan company with offices in the World Trade Center. Then his job “blew up,” as he phrases it in Deborah Zoe Laufer’s sweet, insufferable End Days. When the towers fell, 65 of his colleagues went with them. Now, two years later, unemployed Arthur occupies an apartment located someplace that’s not New York....

A broken bookshelf puts her in contact with Abel, the night janitor, whose ethnic coding she initially interprets as Mexico Mexican. It takes a very funny, slow­-building bit during which she assails him with Spanish before she realizes she’s wrong: he’s California Mexican, in fact, with a stubborn prole traditionalist streak.

Robert Toren Scott Miller of Game Theory Last week marked the two-year anniversary of the passing of Scott Miller, one of pop music’s most intriguing, talented, and overlooked figures. Known best for fronting Game Theory (1982-1990) and Loud Family (1991-2006), the California singer, songwriter, and author was a true obsessive who had the ability to internalize and assimilate the most minute details of pop-rock history—remaking the past, embracing the present, and looking toward the future in hook-crammed songs....

The following is a list of limited liability companies affiliated with Pangea, the real estate company that files the most eviction cases in Chicago. The Reader compiled this list by examining property records and lawsuits against Pangea over the course of several months. This isn’t an exhaustive list, and not all of the LLCs are active and in good standing, but it represents a sample of the shell companies Pangea has used to purchase and transfer ownership of its buildings....

For the last several weeks, the 13 or so mayoral candidates have been promising to defend Chicago’s already overburdened taxpayers from future hikes to our ever-rising property taxes. All in the name of eradicating blight in low-income communities. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of property tax dollars a year—a number that will rise if Mayor Rahm gets the City Council to create the Cortland/Chicago River and Roosevelt/Clark TIF districts. Together, those two TIFs would siphon off another $1....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, July 20, 2016. UIC alum, Mets star gives back to the community with youth program Blue Island native and New York Mets player Curtis Granderson may be a rival of the Chicago Cubs, but he’s made giving back to the city one of his top priorities. While in town Tuesday to play the Cubs, he held a baseball clinic for local children at his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Chicago....

Despite having one of the most radical and inspiring biographies of any theater artist, playwright-turned- prisoner-turned-Czech president Václav Havel hasn’t seen much time on Chicago stages over the years. The last time I recall watching a translation of one of his works was in 2012 at Trap Door, a company that has maintained a reputation for masterfully interpreting esoteric and deeply political plays, many of them of Slavic origin, for 25 years....

As a sign of my commitment to a new Chicago, I went to Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s inauguration at the DePaul basketball arena, thus breaking my old pledge to never, ever set foot in that place. That funding was approved in the summer of 2013 on a City Council voice vote, hastily gaveled through by the mayor, as though he wanted to sneak it by the council without public debate. Before all was said and done, Rahm spent that $55 million in TIF money, originally intended for the arena, on a project at Navy Pier....

I hadn’t known there was a courage award for journalists, though it’s an attractive idea—many journalists excel mostly because they’ve got plenty of it. But Jamie Kalven, founder and executive director of Chicago’s Invisible Institute, has just been named the winner of this year’s Ridenhour Courage Prize. He was cited for his “central role” in breaking the story of the death of Laquan McDonald at the hands of Chicago police. “In reporting that appeared ten months before the fateful release of the video footage,” says the citation, “he challenged the official account of the shooting by police, having secured the autopsy report that revealed the 17-year-old had been shot sixteen times and located a civilian eyewitness....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Ian Fink, The Order Detroit keyboardist and producer Ian Fink weaves together house, jazz, and boogie using synths, an MPC, and a little live percussion. He gives a lot of life to his minimalist tracks, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the shuffling beat on “Pt. 3.” The YouTube comment section of Thou’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert The Internet continues to prove that it is an unforgiving dumpster fire....

Bands hyped as “supergroups” usually sound cool in theory but often wind up less memorable than the better-known projects of their members. By contrast, the pop rock on Bachelor’s debut, Doomin’ Sun, will stick to your brain like bubblegum on the bottom of your sneaker. Bachelor is the duo of Melina Duterte, a Los Angeles-based songwriter and producer who makes bedroom pop as Jay Som, and Ellen Kempner, who fronts Brooklyn indie-pop trio Palehound....

As a public service to my faithful readers, I’ve plowed through the 492 pages of legalese in Mayor Emanuel’s latest school bond deal to see what in it for us. Let’s get to the nitty gritty on this sucker. By doing this, Emanuel was essentially asking to do what ordinary consumers do when they pay off one credit card with another credit card. So there’s no need to sock it to us with high interest rates, everybody!...

Late in 2017, rapper Davis Blackwell had hit a creative block. Though he’d just earned a BFA in creative writing from Columbia College, even working for the school’s literary magazine, Hair Trigger (which also published some of his pieces), he’d all but stopped writing. “Around that time, I was really disillusioned with my prose shit,” he says. Why? Records showcase featuring Malci, Davis, Joshua Virtue, and Ruby Watson Sun 6/30, 8 PM, Hideout, 1354 W....

To get an idea of how wide the divide between Chicago’s urban denizens and suburbanites can be, just consider the tagline for the Berwyn Development Corporation’s current ad campaign: “Berwyn: Nothing like a suburb.” Really? Nothing? Methinks the west-of-Cicero community doth protest too much. Jeremy Wechsler‘s production showcases some honest, understated scene work between Tepeli and Laura T. Fisher, who plays the mother, and is particularly effective in its depiction of the way parents and their grown children can slip back into old personality patterns when reunited....

On the Atlas Moth’s brand-new Coma Noir, their fourth full-length and first for LA-based Prosthetic Records, the local heavy-metal monsters turn the focus back toward the earth-shaking sludge that defined their early work. In fact, they haven’t sounded this raw and gnarly since they self-released their debut seven-inch a decade ago. With their last record, 2014’s The Old Believer, they ran their tried-and-true stoner metal through the psychedelic ringer, padding songs with spacey synths and soundscapes and almost diluting their impact with ambience and stargazing....