Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, April 28, 2017. Rahm slams Trump’s corporate and personal tax-cut plan Mayor Rahm Emanuel slammed President Donald Trump’s new plan to cut corporate and personal taxes. “Part of what is in that proposal is the elimination of the deduction of state and local taxes,” Emanuel, a former member of the House Ways and Means committee, said. “And that would penalize Illinois and Chicago residents dramatically....

It’s been more than two years since Mayor Rahm Emanuel ignited protests around the city by closing six mental health clinics in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods. He didn’t hold any hearings before he proposed the closures. He didn’t initiate a study or put together a task force. And let’s face it: people who depend on public mental health clinics—because they’re too broke to pay for private service—aren’t exactly movers and shakers in this city....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, March 22, 2017. Police search for men who allegedly gang-raped teen girl on Facebook Live The Chicago Police Department is searching for a group of men who allegedly sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl and streamed it on Facebook Live, according to USA Today. One suspect is in custody, and police believe the attackers are minors who knew the victim, alderman Michael Scott Jr....

Dogville Lars von Trier’s two-part epic Nymphomaniac can finally be viewed in proper now that both volumes are in theaters and on VOD. As is usually the case with a new Von Trier movie, the film’s reputation preceded it, arousing controversy for the unsimulated and graphic sex that was to take place onscreen. (And who could forget about this guy?) As the conclusion to his supposed “Depression Trilogy,” which also includes Antichrist and Melancholia, the film is yet another patented Von Trier provocation, the latest in a long line of films that concurrently infuriate and fascinate audiences and critics....

Under the name Cuco, LA-area bedroom-pop artist Omar Banos makes pop music of the future. Since the age of 16, he’s been crafting unassuming, easygoing songs that juggle the sounds of hip-hop, Muzak, yacht rock, indie rock, and shards of other genres as if they’d always been meant to be experienced together in such a fashion. Now 20, Banos has two self-released albums and an EP to his name, and his ability to handle every aspect of the creation process while molding his sound to his collaborators suggests he could be a one-man hit factory....

Q: I’m a hetero guy in need of advice. Back in college, I met this girl. Suffice it to say she was into me but I had some shit to work through. So we ended up being a missed connection, romantically. Despite that, we still became fast friends. I’m less awkward now, in large part because our friendship changed my life. We each married other people, and everything worked out great....

In 1949, Maurice Chevalier was the first member of the Friars Club to be roasted. The tradition began as a raucous and sometimes obscene way of honoring members of the entertainer fraternity—by making them the butt of the joke. In the 1960s it evolved into a spectacle broadcast as part of The Dean Martin Show, and more recently it became a staple of Comedy Central. The events are no longer contained exclusively within the walls of the Friars Club in New York City or limited just to men, as the club was until the late date of 1988....

In 2001, guitarist Dan Phillips moved to Bangkok, where he now works as a music professor, but the six years he spent on the Chicago jazz scene prior to his relocation made a profound impact upon him. Last year, during one of his regular visits home (he grew up in the area), he convened with some of the most important players at work in the late-90s free-jazz scene to form a new band called the Chicago Edge Ensemble and create the recent album Decaying Orbit (released by Silpakorn University, where he teaches)....

Unless you’re a connoisseur of small literary magazines, you won’t just stumble across any stories by Jac Jemc, a Chicagoan who’s also the author of the 2013 novel My Only Wife. And that’s a damned shame. Jemc’s stories bear very little resemblance to the early-20th-century classics you may remember studying in junior high in preparation for the greater challenges of the novel, with their tidy situation-conflict-climax/epiphany-denouement structure and neatly isolated literary elements....

Cave has been one of my favorite Chicago rock bands during the last half-decade or so, a combo made up primarily of Columbia, Missouri, transplants who create hypnotic instrumental jams that I never want to end. Unfortunately, the band doesn’t play live very often these days. Guitarist Jeremy Freeze, who replaced keyboardist Rotten Milk a few years ago, remains in Columbia, and guitarist and keyboardist Cooper Crain is increasingly busy with his trio Bitchin Bajas, to say nothing of his work as a producer (Circuit des Yeux, Paperhead, ONO, Ryley Walker, et cetera)....

This weekend local musicians Ted Sweeney and Omar Gonzalez will be celebrating the release of their book, Negative Papers, with Night of Broken Pages, a launch party in Pilsen. Sweeney, a power electronics noise musician, and Gonzalez, drummer for hateful noisecore band Rectal Hygienics and proprietor of DIY space Club Rectum, are no strangers to extreme and confrontational aesthetics, and now the two have collaborated on a collection of 38 dark and violent collages for the book....

On a recent episode of the improv podcast Spontaneanation with Paul F. Tompkins, comedian Tawny Newsome aired some grievances about her time at Second City in Chicago. She said that up until at least 2012, the final year she was a part of the ensemble, female performers were required to wear dresses. That was difficult because improv is all about moving around, losing yourself in a scene, not worrying if a skirt will fly up, showing off bits you might not want to show off....

Deanna Isaacs Erika Rothenberg, Greetings IV, 1992 (detail) The art may be pricey, but the humor was free at Expo Chicago—and the more than 30,000 people who attended this year saw plenty of it. Among the notables: onetime University of Chicago student Erika Rothenberg’s fearlessly sardonic “greeting cards,” at the Zolla/Lieberman Gallery booth. Created in the 1990s and still relevant, they go for about $4,000 each (framed), so you probably won’t be mailing them off to casual friends on birthdays....

AP Photo/M. Spencer Green Governor Pat Quinn pushed for tax hikes despite the political risks. “Bigger government means more corruption,” Bruce Rauner says. Rauner’s not as clever, but he certainly endorses the Reagan sentiment. Which is: government—bad. Illinois has another major problem besides its budget: great and growing wealth inequality. A report earlier this year by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that the average household income for the wealthiest 20 percent in Illinois is more than eight times the income for the poorest 20 percent, tying the state for the eighth worst disparity nationally....

This post has been updated. Later Monday, 26-year-old Rogers Park resident Milton Anderson and a neighbor he knew through work presented themselves at 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore’s office. Anderson confessed to the robbery (but not to the assault), and Moore escorted him to the Area One police station at Belmont and Western, where Anderson turned himself in. On Tuesday police charged Anderson with two felony counts, one for robbery and one for sexual assault, both with a firearm, and Moore posted the story on his website....

The cold open of With Bob and David contains a line that reminds us to rid ourselves of all expectation: “This ain’t no show, mister.” But as Bob Odenkirk and David Cross’s four-episode Netflix sketch special continues, it’s hard to shake the warm, fuzzy feeling that Mr. Show is indeed back. From the cast of past featured players to the absurd concepts to the seamless transitions, it’s everything we loved from Bob and David when they first appeared onscreen together 20 years ago....

Maja Komorowska and Leslie Caron in Zanussi’s The Contract (1980) Read part one of this interview. Well, the censorship was very tough [in Soviet bloc countries] on that subject matter. In The Constant Factor, the censors wanted to cut the story about the death of the [hero’s] mother [from cancer], because she was pronouncing a concept that is in fact only Christian, that suffering might make sense. In other religions, people think about how to avoid suffering....

Leor Galil: Rosh Hashanah technically didn’t start till sundown—about the time I saw Jimmy Cliff wrap up “The Harder They Come” with a spry air kick—but that didn’t stop me from finding a little quiet time in the afternoon to call my grandma and wish her a happy new year. I don’t think “listen to scummy hardcore songs” is what my grandma had in mind when she wished me a sweet new year, but once I hung up with her I watched Dwarves tear through all of Blood, Guts & Pussy (with assistance from former Queens of the Stone Age bassist Nick Oliveri)....

We have a tendency to romanticize cramped, chaotic used bookstores (for an example, see last year’s critics’ pick). Organization and cleanliness just seem so—corporate. But maybe that’s what’s helped After-Words thrive in ultracorporate River North. And, frankly, space to breathe and browse inside a bookstore is totally underrated. At 8,000 square feet, the Illinois Street store isn’t as gargantuan as a Barnes & Noble, thank god, but it’s well lit, spacious, and downright airy compared to many of its contemporaries....

“In sickness and in health, until death do us part.” The stock vow had a heightened meaning last November during the marriage ceremony of Vernita Gray and Pat Ewert, who made history as the first gay couple to tie the knot in Illinois. A longtime advocate of LGBTQ rights, Gray had terminal cancer and was not expected to survive the seven months until June 1, when Illinois’s same-sex marriage law would take effect....