Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, June 22, 2017. Rauner calls for unity on budget, asks legislature to “act for the people” Governor Bruce Rauner gave a televised speech calling for a “compromise budget plan” ten days ahead of the special budget session he’s convened after the Illinois General Assembly under his leadership once again failed to pass a budget before June 30, the end of the fiscal year....

Electra Garrigó When Virgilio Piñera’s brazen, bewildering adaptation of Sophocles’s tragedy premiered in Havana in 1948, the literary establishment responded with contempt and disgust—and Cuban modernism was born. Restaged in 1958, its focus on princess Electra’s struggles against her unreasonable tyrant father, Agamemnon, bolstered pro-Castro sentiments (ironically, Castro would later jail Piñera for being queer). While Piñera fell into obscurity by the end of his life, director Kathi Kaity resurrects this seminal work in a Right Brain Project production that may provoke its own share of contempt....

courtesy of Time No Place Records Fay Fay Davis-Jeffers, the former singer, keyboardist, and guitarist in the quirky Chicago art-rock band Pit Er Pat, recently dropped Deathwatch (Time No Place), the second album under her solo guise Fay. It’s another beguiling effort of minimalist grooves, terse melodic fragments, and spooky vibes, and once again it doesn’t sound like much else out there today. Davis-Jeffers pieces together looped samples and licks played on guitar, keyboards, and percussion—the track “One Last Thing” seems to borrow beats from an Arabic pop record—as well as her own largely wordless vocal snippets into claustrophobic, tightly coiled constellations of sound that, depending on the track, twitch and throb and sometimes billow into murky clouds of dubbed-out refraction....

Earlier this week Baltimore Sun critic Wesley Case wrote a story on DC punk stalwart J. Robbins and his work as a producer and influence on emo—and I was lucky enough to serve as an outside expert for the piece. One of my favorite albums Robbins has produced in recent years is The Distance Is So Big by Buffalo outfit Lemuria, a group that’s clearly influenced by a defunct band Robbins fronted in the 90s, Jawbox....

I’ve watched every season of The Bachelor, give or take a few somewhere in the middle when I thought I’d get into foreign films or read some books instead. That clearly didn’t stick, and for at least the last five consecutive seasons I’ve curled up every Monday it’s aired with a glass (OK, bottle) of wine to watch these groups of “normal” people try to find love. At their core, both The Bachelor and Love are obsessed with the idea of being with a particular someone—not because you really want to but because you think you should....

The days are—imperceptibly—getting shorter. We are officially sliding into the second half of 2017, which means it’s time for our second list of books we can’t wait to read. While I was compiling this list, I happened across an essay by the wise and wonderful Linda Holmes on NPR’s Monkey See blog about how there’s no possible way anyone will be able to read all the books they want to read, let alone watch all the TV shows, listen to all the podcasts, etc....

On its fifth LP, Million Dollars to Kill Me (Epitaph), indie and emo quartet Joyce Manor exhibits less rawness, more melody, and heightened production. And though it’s the band’s catchiest record to date, it didn’t start as a Joyce Manor album but rather as a collaboration between front man Barry Johnson and Impossibles guitarist and vocalist Rory Phillips. Million Dollars eventually transformed into a proper Joyce Manor project, recorded and produced by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou at GodCity Studio, with additional recording by Bad Religion guitarist and Epitaph label head Brett Gurewitz....

“Some families express their love through shouting, some through hugs and kisses,” writes Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins in the introduction to his promising new work, Miss Marx: Or the Involuntary Side Effects of Living. “This family loves through wit.” Yet Dawkins’s script shows little interest in historical accuracy. The play opens in 1883, the year Marx died, as Eleanor performs in a fully staged production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In fact, the play didn’t open in London until 1889, and Eleanor wasn’t in it (though she did once take part in a private reading of the play that included Aveling and George Bernard Shaw)....

Rhiannon Giddens challenges the perceived whiteness of American folk music You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise these days, but folk music isn’t actually just about bearded white dudes who, say, hole themselves up in cabins for months to get in their feels (not to name any names). Black folk artist Rhiannon Giddens, founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, is pushing back against that stereotype on her new solo album, and she has plenty of underrecognized folk history to back her up....

Theater Oobleck turned 25 in 2013, and so did the Neo-Futurists’ signature show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Now Curious Theatre Branch’s Rhinoceros Theater Festival is celebrating its silver anniversary, too. Time for essays on the graying of the Chicago fringe? Well, it would be if Oobleck, TMLMTBGB, and Rhinofest hadn’t managed to pull younger artists—some of them much, much younger—into their unconventional orbits. None of the above companies were even so much as a gleam in the eye of the first Rhinofest....

In its 19th year, Chicago’s World Music Festival is as sprawling as ever—it lasts 17 days, from Friday, September 8, till Sunday, September 24—but because it’s abandoned booking concerts on Mondays and Tuesdays, overall it feels more modest. The WMF has long been less grueling than a typical music festival, both because it spreads out its lineup across so many days and because most of its shows are in cozy venues where you don’t have to compete for elbow room with tens of thousands of people....

Later this week, the Logan Theatre presents a screening of Hong King action filmmaker Lau Kar-leung’s late-period breakout Drunk Master II, released stateside asThe Drunken Master. Lau, who passed away from complications related to lymphoma a couple years ago, was a fight choreographer and later director at Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studio, helping create the look and tone of the popular kung-fu genre. He specialized in mixing traditional martial arts styles with old-school Hollywood showmanship and good-natured humor, and he experimented with staging, characterization, and genre, often bucking trends he helped create....

Local artist Alberto Aguilar often uses cognates—or as he describes them, “words that can be read in English and in Spanish simultaneously”—in his work. He knew he wanted to incorporate them when the National Museum of Mexican Art asked him to participate in its 30th anniversary exhibition, “Memoria Presente: An Artistic Journey.” One of his contributions is the first work visitors encounter, a window sign that reads PORTAL in bright red letters above the entrance....

Thanks to a pair of Bangkok-based record collectors, an awful lot of curious listeners in the west have been introduced to the distinct pleasures of Thai popular music in recent years. Chris Menist and Maft Sai have compiled and produced a series of excellent collections for Soundway, Finders Keepers, Dust-to-Digital, and Zudrangma Records examining luk thung and molam music from the 60s-80s, and judging from another recent collection they put together for the Japanese imprint Em Records there seems to be plenty more to come....

It’s no secret that in today’s world running a big band is a daunting prospect. It’s difficult enough to wrangle 18 musicians together to perform, let alone rehearse complex, harrowing scores, not to mention finding venues with stages large enough to fit the entire ensemble. But saxophonist and composer Brian Krock, a 29-year-old Arlington Heights native, had his sights set on putting together such a group when he first moved to New York nearly a decade ago....

Humans have been observing the winter solstice across cultures and continents for thousands of years. In 1990 two Chicago percussionists, Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang, marked the northern hemisphere’s shortest day with a concert in a dance studio with a view of the el tracks. The idea was to provide a special occasion for a couple dozen friends who might not celebrate the season in any other way. But that concert has grown over the past 25 years into a beloved series of concerts—an annual gathering that transcends Drake and Zerang’s respective social circles and fan bases....

Here’s the most Chicago thing I’ve ever seen: I was driving down Lake Shore Drive, traffic at a near standstill, and in the lane next to mine, a truck was trying to steamroll a small car in front of it: riding its bumper, slamming the horn—general dick moves. I could see the truck driver’s face. He was angry, yelling. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it’s fair to assume it was not nice....

Nearly a year after a Reader investigation revealed that African-Americans make up two-thirds of the Chicago’s open missing persons cases, and that almost a fourth of all missing persons are black girls between the ages of 11 and 21, the City Council’s Public Safety Committee held a hearing to question police officials on the disparity. CPD deputy chief James Jones, commander Thomas Lemmer, and sergeant Jeffrey Coleman were short on explanations, however, and didn’t seem interested in taking up aldermen on offers of help and resources for the department’s missing persons operations....

Hardcore has always had a tenuous relationship with the mainstream. In the 90s, a number of hardcore bands signed to major labels seemed to be at the brink of crossing over to wider audiences, but the results were varied. For every Sick of It All who wound up dropping a classic record on a major label (1994’s Scratch the Surface), there’s an Orange 9mm or a CIV, who both suffered the indignities of alienating their fan bases while also failing to connect with the average music listener....

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s scheme to create expensive express rail service to O’Hare has always been a dubious proposition. Involving tech mogul Elon Musk—of Tesla electric car and SpaceX rocket fame—and his fantasy of digging a new tunnel to the airport for high-speed “electric sled” travel, as the Emanuel administration recently expressed interest in doing, would almost certainly make the project worse. Talk of the O’Hare express took a turn for the weird late last month with news that Musk may get involved....