Chandler West/for Sun-Times Media Mayor Emanuel addresses business leaders downtown on Monday Chicago is a shining example for the nation, Rahm Emanuel wants all to know. He told a receptive audience downtown Monday that the goals President Obama has for the country—more jobs, a vibrant economy benefiting all—are Chicago’s goals, too, but “the difference is, we are obviously getting them done.” The president apparently agrees that his hometown is a model for America....

Q: I am a 38-year-old married woman. My husband of 18 years is 22 years my senior. I credit my husband for giving me a good life and helping me pursue goals. But my husband is a type A professional, and that has played out in the bedroom. He has always been disinterested in my pleasure. When our kids were little, I did not want sex as often as he did (“only” twice a week)....

Peter Margasak, Reader staff writer Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories New York pianist Karl Larson performed this late Morton Feldman masterpiece at Constellation in November as part of the new-music series I program there. It was transcendent to finally hear this gorgeously meditative work in the flesh: I lost all sense of myself in its gradual cascade as bass tones collided with upper-register plinks in delicious slow motion. I have a few recordings of it, but I’ve been returning to my favorite, a 1983 version by Japanese pianist Aki Takahashi....

AP Photo/Stacy Thacker Mayor Emanuel last Wednesday with Hillary Clinton, who was in town promoting her new book. “Rahm re-election on ropes” a Sun-Times headline proclaimed May 10. “Right now, Rahm is not connecting” with voters, Michael McKeon, the president of the firm that conducted the poll, McKeon & Associates, told the Sun-Times. “If he doesn’t do that, he’s gonna lose.” The Sun-Times article about the poll provides a link from which “the complete poll results can be downloaded....

Michael Gebert Troublesome, a sour beer from Off Color Brewing. Yesterday I published the first half of an interview with John Laffler, former R&D brewer for Goose Island, who started Off Color Brewing with his partner Dave Bleitner on the west side. Besides talking about some of the obscure historical styles that he brews—or at least brews versions of—he also offers his assessment of our beer scene, where it’s going, who’s going to get hurt if there’s a shakeout, and why it matters that the world of beer remain small and collegial....

Censorship, unicorns, sexism—no topic is too sensitive or outrageous for Karen Finley. The Chicago native will visit Steppenwolf for a pair of shows: Written in Sand, on February 10 and 11, and Unicorn Gratitude Mystery, on February 17 and 18. This Friday and Saturday, Finley presents Written in Sand, a spoken-word performance of her writings from the 1980s and ’90s, which criticize the homophobia and governmental indifference surrounding the AIDS crisis....

Over the last couple of years LA underground rock fixture Tim Presley (aka White Fence) has been working regularly with beguiling Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon. In 2015 they released a fascinating mess of a record under the name Drinks, and last fall Presley dropped his first album under his given name, one on which Le Bon serves as producer. The music on The Wink (Drag City) is smeared with her fingerprints as she redirects Presley’s deep affection for the Who and early Pink Floyd toward something rooted in British postpunk, with clipped phrasing, stiff and twitchy rhythms, and a loose, probing quality....

Perhaps Thomas Frank should have added an exclamation mark to the title of his latest book. As it was, Listen Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? largely fell on deaf ears when it was initially released in April 2016. Echoing arguments frequently made by Bernie Sanders during the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, Frank’s pointed polemic attacked the Clintons, Rahm Emanuel, and the mainstream Democratic Party for abandoning America’s working people in favor of Wall Street and the professional classes....

Closed Sessions cofounders Alex Fruchter and Michael Kolar went into 2016 viewing it as a make-or-break year. Well, not only did the young hip-hop imprint put out two full-lengths that helped define the local scene during a period when Chicago’s hip-hop community made itself well-known nationally—that’d be Kweku Collins’s Nat Love and Jamila Woods’s Heavn—but Closed Sessions also ended 2016 being named Chicago artists of the year by the Tribune’s Greg Kot, as strange as that designation for a record label may seem....

With the city’s public schools facing massive budget deficits and cuts, house speaker Michael Madigan has apparently decided that it’s in Chicago’s best interest if Mayor Emanuel is more like me. On the table was Mayor Emanuel’s proposal to have the state pick up about $200 million of the annual payment CPS has to make to the teachers’ pension system. The General Assembly gave CPS that holiday. But now things are worse....

Michael Gebert Smoked salmon from H. Forman & Son The first thing I ask Ethan Forman as he slices smoked Scottish salmon in my kitchen is where’s his English accent? “Everyone asks that. I came to this country when I was three,” he answers in flat midwestern tones. “Many of our competitors inject brine into the salmon, as part of their cure,” he says. “Brine actually adds water to the salmon flesh....

Drummer Vinnie Sperrazza has been part of the New York jazz scene for more than decade, most often working under someone else’s leadership. He’s nonetheless been exerting his own musical personality, which straddles postbop fundamentals and relatively outward-bound tendencies, in collective efforts with the likes of pianist Jacob Sacks and saxophonist Matt Blostein. Three years ago he dropped his first record as a leader, Apocryphal (Loyal Label), on which he employed bassist Eivind Opsvik to anchor the extroverted machinations of guitarist Brandon Seabrook....

Tomorrow night posthardcore group Planes Mistaken for Stars return to town less than five months after their first 2015 reunion tour brought them to 1st Ward in Wicker Park. Formed in Peoria in 1997 but based in Denver since ’99, they’ll head to Logan Square to play Quenchers, which feels too small for a band with such a devoted following—though the dive-bar setting is fitting. Many of the group’s best songs sound like the work of disgruntled bar regulars who’ve been dragged into the sunlight after a long night of excess—though of course the execution is tighter than I’d expect to hear from anyone with a hangover....

It’s difficult to imagine a dish more universally Latin American than arroz con pollo. Everyone eats it, but it’s different everywhere you go. It’s cooked with achiote in Puerto Rico. They add ketchup in Nicaragua. In Peru it’s dark beer. But even with all the variations from country to country, one thing unites them all: the pollo is always cooked in the arroz. The reason for that is elementary. You give that rice to the chicken, and the chicken gives back to the rice....

The AMC River East isn’t exactly Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the Chicago International Film Festival isn’t Cannes, but over a week and a half each October some of the better new films and many of the people who made them show up at this airport terminal-like multiplex a half mile short of Navy Pier on Illinois Street. When I pitched writing something about the festival this year, I envisioned wandering about and eavesdropping on the excited conversations of film lovers and putting together an impressionistic travelogue-type essay....

One hundred and twenty-seven years after August Strindberg penned his seminal naturalist tragedy Miss Julie, it’s not difficult to feel the still-resonating percussion of its assault on bourgeois theatrical sensibilities. Beyond Strindberg’s overhaul of performance conventions (no footlights, minimal makeup, placing actors where they might actually stand in a room rather than stranding them before the prompter’s box) is the title character’s ferocious sexuality. Miss Julie, an aristocrat’s daughter, addles, provokes, humiliates, and emasculates her father’s valet until he ravishes her in the servants’ quarters—while his fiancee sleeps in the next room....

On Friday, November 23, Chicago-based rapper KC Ortiz performs at Subterranean as part of a showcase organized by Chicago label Futurehood, which supports gay and transgender musicians of color. She’s no longer actively working with the label, founded in 2015 by rapper Mister Wallace and producer Aceb00mbap, but their parting was amicable—there’s a reason the concert is called “Futurehood & Friends.” What church is on the cover of Church Tapes? That was my church when I was a little kid, True Vine Missionary Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama....

With the certainty of a Trump presidential library in our not-too-distant future, it’s a little hard to get worked up over the Obama Presidential Center and Golf Course that’s about to emerge in Jackson Park. The closings would, however, facilitate the creation of an elite 18-hole championship golf course from the Chicago Park District’s existing Jackson Park and South Shore courses, now separated by Marquette Drive. That’ll have to be a mega-reduction: the top rate for residents last summer was $33....

Q: My wife has been seriously ill for three years, and I have been her sole caregiver. The doctors here weren’t getting the job done, so we made the difficult decision for her to move 2,000 miles away to start over and be near her family while I stayed behind. Our sex life has been nonexistent since she became ill. She offered me a “hall pass” with two rules: (1) It couldn’t be anyone I worked with, and (2) she didn’t want to know about it....

Although jazz musicians like Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff, and Jimmy McGriff are some of the best-known practitioners of the Hammond B-3 organ, my entree into the funky world of organ jazz was through Big John Patton. In fact, the first organ-combo record I ever owned was not only by Patton but a 1963 session that didn’t see the light of day until it was released by Blue Note in 1986, so it was hardly considered an essential of the sound....