Rahm On Lucas Museum Loss Welcome To The Most Important Parking Lot In The Country And Other Chicago News

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....

April 13, 2022 · 1 min · 108 words · John Gossett

Rhine Hall And Goose Island Have Made Bierschnaps Using One Of The Most Famous Barrel Aged Beers In The World

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....

April 13, 2022 · 1 min · 180 words · Fernando Clune

In Dark Days You Have To Treasure Every Brilliant Thing

“#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....

April 12, 2022 · 1 min · 164 words · Robert Wolfe

In End Days Post 9 11 Trauma Gets Pixilated

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....

April 12, 2022 · 2 min · 222 words · Cynthia Espitia

In Tanya Saracho S Fade It S Hard To Say Who S Oppressed

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.

April 12, 2022 · 1 min · 51 words · Richard Straton

Listen To The Great 80S Band Game Theory S Indelible Pop Gem 24

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....

April 12, 2022 · 2 min · 394 words · Deborah Blackshire

Llcs Affiliated With Pangea Chicago S Most Frequent Filer Of Eviction Cases

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....

April 12, 2022 · 5 min · 926 words · Stephanie Seals

Mayor Rahm S Great Tif Bamboozle

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....

April 12, 2022 · 2 min · 250 words · Danielle Clack

Money From The Chicago Skyway Sale Will Fund Property Tax Rebate And Other News

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....

April 12, 2022 · 1 min · 142 words · Gerard Anderson

Organic Theater Takes A Bold Stab At The Memo V Clav Havel S Absurdist Satire

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....

April 12, 2022 · 2 min · 290 words · John Horio

Prairie Pothole

April 12, 2022 · 0 min · 0 words · Lela Dawson

Ready For Reform Chicago

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....

April 12, 2022 · 2 min · 215 words · Roger Inciong

Jamie Kalven Honored For Journalistic Valor

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....

April 11, 2022 · 1 min · 206 words · Lillie Greene

Macie Stewart Of Ohmme On A Band To Smile And Dance To

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....

April 11, 2022 · 1 min · 99 words · Jeffrey Ferraro

Melina Duterte Of Jay Som And Ellen Kempner Of Palehound Join Forces As Bachelor

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....

April 11, 2022 · 2 min · 273 words · Edgar Baughman

Print Issue Of February 11 2016

April 11, 2022 · 0 min · 0 words · Jeremy Frasier

Rahm S Latest Wall Street Bond Deal Is A Bad Deal For The City

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!...

April 11, 2022 · 1 min · 113 words · Frederick Charles

Rap That Asks The Right Questions

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....

April 11, 2022 · 2 min · 376 words · Israel Emory

In The World Of Naperville You Can Go Home Again

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....

April 10, 2022 · 1 min · 167 words · Travis Griffin

Local Metal Unit The Atlas Moth Have A Glorious Return To Form On Coma Noir

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....

April 10, 2022 · 2 min · 216 words · Emily Maciasz