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AP Photo/The State Journal-Register, David Spencer Protesters have already told state representatives what they don’t want cut from the budget. If you’re in the mood for talk that isn’t as tough as it wants to be, turn to the op-ed page of Tuesday’s Sun-Times and read the essay there by Madeleine Doubek, chief operating officer of Reboot Illinois. Illinois needs to trim the state budget to something it can afford, she says, so let’s get to it!...

Trumpeter Marquis Hill left his native Chicago for New York two years ago, right around the time he won the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. Countless local musicians have made that move over the decades, relocating their bases of operations to the center of the jazz business, where there’s more competition but greater potential for success. Hill has maintained such a strong presence in Chicago since then, however, that you could be forgiven for not even noticing that he’d left....

Last year Dirty Projectors released a tortured breakup album, Dirty Projectors, that chronicled the acrimonious 2016 split between band mastermind David Longstreth and singer-guitarist Amber Coffman. Its heavy-handed retelling was from Longstreth’s point of view, since Coffman had quit the group—joining Angel Deradoorian and Olga Bell on the list of crucial members who’ve left Dirty Projectors since 2012. Most of the songs feature vocal cameos, from folks as disparate as the sisters in Haim, Odd Future’s Syd, and the team of Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes) and Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend)....

As 2015 came to a close, prolific local MC Chris Crack dropped Jacked Tape Too: Jimi Hendrix of Rap as part of his freestyle mixtape series. It includes “Bamboo in the Treehouse,” which lifts its sloshed-sounding soul instrumental from “Lumber in the Condo” on Vic Spencer‘s great 2015 album The Cost of Victory. Before launching into his freestyle, Crack makes a few passing shout-outs, including one to Spencer: “Vic, what up....

When I saw the press release from the Chicago Teachers Union announcing that city treasurer Kurt Summer had endorsed their litigation against big banks and interest-rate swaps, I thought it was a joke. But this is no joke. “To be honest, there are some folks on my team who were worried by the optics of this,” says Summers. “My perspective is consistent. The issue is fiduciary. It’s important to the well being of the city....

This Friday and Saturday at midnight, the Music Box Theatre will screen Lips of Blood (1975), the first in a three-film series devoted to French exploitation director Jean Rollin (1938-2010). Upcoming are The Iron Rose (1973) on March 9 and 10, and Fascination (1979) on March 30 and 31. All three films come highly recommended to purveyors of the macabre, sexploitation freaks, and fans of Jacques Rivette, another French director who specialized in opaque, dreamlike narratives....

Imagine a world to come when mysterious green people subject whites to Jim Crow segregation and a multiracial duo of time travelers launches an uprising. Or conjure a view of the 1960s when race riots became the source of children’s inventions or romantic entreaties. Chicago’s African American cartoonists have created such tales for decades, and their often neglected work is now receiving wider attention. “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” is on view through October 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago at 220 E....

Last Friday, Chicago’s City Council overwhelmingly voted to rename Lake Shore Drive after Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Black trading post operator who, along with his Potawatomi wife Kitihawa, established the first recorded permanent settlement in the area in the late 1700s, which eventually grew into our current metropolis. I had previously advocated for the change. Media commentary showed a similar, if somewhat less pronounced, racial divide. Black journalists Laura Washington and Mary Mitchell from the Sun-Times, and Michael Romain from the Wednesday Journal wrote in favor of the name change....

I haven’t always been gentle when I’ve written about Bill Kim’s food. I’ve long been of the (immensely unpopular) opinion that the former fine-dining chef behind the immensely popular BellyQ (and erstwhile Urban Belly and Belly Shack) tends to oversaturate his food with too many disparate influences. That being said, this was a busy week, so I wanted something simple, settling on grilled skirt steak and asparagus with a gochuchang-based sauce....

Since the advent of cinema, people have been drawn to the screen by the promise of intimacy: the facial close-up, an overwhelming experience for early movie audiences, allowed them far inside the personal space of a stranger. Mainstream movies tend to celebrate intimacy—that quiet moment with a child or lover that redeems the stress and strain of being an astronaut or a hostage negotiator. But intimacy can also be a terrible burden....

Japanese producer Ryu Yoshizawa has a rich career that includes making music for business conglomerates Square Enix and Lotte, spending 17 years and counting in sound artists’ group Office Intenzio, and providing live support for synth-pop pioneers Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi. His output as Koeosaeme has been varied too. His 2017 debut under that alias, Sonorant, features confetti-blasted footwork abstractions; 2018’s Float is all brooding drones and minimal electronics; and 2019’s Obanikeshi embraces full-blown sound-collage frenzy, with kaleidoscopic productions that often move at breakneck speeds....

For the past few days, I’ve been barraged with calls and e-mails from friends of the progressive persuasion, extolling the virtues of Lori Lightfoot or Toni Preckwinkle. Look, I understand we’ve entered the frenzied final moments of a campaign, where folks are losing their collective minds with the urge to glorify the home team and demonize the opposition. And I know that if you can’t convince the voters of your candidate’s virtues, the next best thing is to scare them with a distorted caricature of your opponent....

Beach Bunny singer, guitarist, and songwriter Lili Trifilio established herself as a surrogate older sister to a generation of listeners when the band’s single “Prom Queen” went viral on TikTok in 2019. The Chicago four-piece are more than a “TikTok band,” though. Sure, the teens who dominate the popular video-sharing platform connected with Trifilio’s concise melodies and with the feminist themes of “Prom Queen” (it indicts the unrealistic beauty standards applied to young women), but by then Beach Bunny had already come up through the city’s DIY rock scene—they’d earned their bona fides by playing years of house shows and self-releasing a string of EPs....

Sound artists Oren Ambarchi and Crys Cole have both had thrilling careers. Ambarchi has run experimental label Black Truffle for more than a decade, and he’s collaborated with a wide array of avant-garde luminaries, including Sunn O))), Keiji Haino, and Keith Rowe and John Tilbury (both veterans of long-running UK improvising group AMM). Last year, the Australian musician released the resplendent solo LP Simian Angel (on Austrian label Editions Mego) right in the middle of summer, which felt like perfect timing: its two long-form pieces invoke hot, humid weather....

Last month New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art celebrated brilliant and singular pianist Cecil Taylor with a series of performances, film and video screenings, listening sessions, and poetry readings, plus an exhibition of “archival videos, audio, notational scores, photographs, poetry, and other ephemera,” all under the name Open Plan: Cecil Taylor. The whole thing was bookended by rare performances from Taylor himself. The pianist has worked with loads of fantastic musician throughout his long career—many of whom participated in the exhibition, including bassist William Parker, drummers Tony Oxley and Andrew Cyrille, and cellist Tristan Honsinger—but few players have inhabited Taylor’s aesthetic and work with the devotion, clarity, and commitment of Jimmy Lyons, a powerful alto saxophonist who performed with Taylor between 1961 and his own death in 1986....

For about a year, Democrats have been calling for a “Fair Tax” that would raise more money for our dead-broke state and schools by soaking the rich. Instead, we’ll make do with hearings on a nonbinding, largely symbolic resolution that castigates our current system as unfair without actually doing anything about it. That’s what progressive Democrats have been proposing for the better part of a year. In fact, the Republicans introduced HR 975, their own nonbinding referendum, resolving to stand “united in opposition to any measure that would allow the creation of a graduated income tax” in Illinois....

The weekend of July 25, 2020, was supposed to be a coronation for Taylor Swift. That’s when her intercontinental touring music festival, Lover Fest, scheduled to begin in April, would’ve arrived at the brand-new Sofi Stadium in Los Angeles, where she would’ve become the first woman to perform the inaugural event at an NFL venue. Instead, the COVID-19 pandemic wiped those plans clean, and Swift largely retreated from the public eye, making only an occasional political tweet supporting BLM protesters after George Floyd’s murder or taking Donald Trump to task for stoking white supremacism among his supporters....

Courtesy the artist Nature Ganganbaigal of Tengger Cavalry So many great Maryland Deathfest spillover tours pass through Chicago this week that the Reader couldn’t preview them all. (It’s the music section, not the metal section.) I wrote about Ufomammut and Anaal Nathrakh, but I didn’t manage to cover what I’m pretty sure is the first Chicago show by Czech grinders Lycanthropy or the bonkers avant-black-metal bill of Thantifaxath and Imperial Triumphant....

Sue Kwong This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....

Within an hour of first seeing the music video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs single “Maps” on MTV (on MTV, I said!), I stood up, walked to my car, and drove to a record store to buy their 2003 full-length debut, Fever to Tell. I can’t remember ever having done that before or since. On the album the trio captured the zeitgeist of supra-hyped New York City everything—when excess cool seemed particularly en vogue in rock ’n’ roll—but harnessed the energy of that white-hot scene to become something so much greater than just another local club act happily pinballing around a then-flourishing incubator....