Andrew A. Nelles/Sun-Times Governor Pat Quinn wants voters to know that, unlike Republican foe Bruce Rauner, he ain’t no fortunate son. The November election season started even before the primary votes were counted Tuesday. Best individual effort to boost the state economy by dropping a few million bucks on campaign ads: Bruce Rauner. The multimillionaire venture capitalist raised more than $6 million, gave his campaign $6 million more of his own money, and then spent at least $7 million of it to win the Republican nomination....

The story behind Sandro Miller’s new photo exhibit, “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich,” which opens this weekend at the Catherine Edelman Gallery, begins 17 years ago when Miller first met John Malkovich at the Steppenwolf Theatre, where Malkovich, a founding member of the company, was appearing in The Libertine and Miller was taking promotional photos. The two hit it off. In time, Malkovich would consider Miller his favorite photographer, and Miller would consider the actor his favorite subject....

Michael Gebert Soul food cafeteria line at Morrison’s, 8127 S. Ashland The richest food cultures come from the people with the hardest histories, in which food was always a matter of immediate concern. That’s why you can’t go wrong reading a book about Jewish food (or writing one), and you won’t regret a minute spent with Adrian Miller’s lively, eye-opening Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, which just won a James Beard Foundation award in the reference and scholarship category....

In spring 2015, keyboardist Jaime Fennelly drove to Milwaukee to meet with David Ravel, the curator behind the long-running Alverno College performance series Alverno Presents. Fennelly has been making drone-based music under the name Mind Over Mirrors since a few months before settling in Chicago in 2010, and Ravel had met him earlier in 2015, when Fennelly played the Alverno series as a member of the Death Blues project led by Milwaukee percussionist Jon Mueller....

Q: I’m a 27-year-old woman living on the east coast. I’ve been sexually active and on birth control since I was 16—almost always on the pill. I recently switched to the NuvaRing, which I had a bad reaction to: I had no libido at all and extreme mood swings/bouts of depression I could not live with. My boyfriend and I decided it would be a good idea to go off hormonal birth control for a while, just to see what would happen....

I had always assumed that Eric Clapton was a mostly useless windbag. But recently I discovered that, in fact, there was a period between 1965 and 1970 or ’71 during which Clapton was not a useless windbag. “Clapton is God” hyperbole aside, the guitarist went on a pretty remarkable run between the Yardbirds, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Cream, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” Blind Faith, Delaney and Bonnie, session work, and Derek and the Dominos....

Fadi Freij Wanees Zarour Palestinian musician and composer Wanees Zarour has been a fixture on Chicago’s international music scene for more than a decade, adapting his fluency on the violin and the buzuq (a long-necked Arabic lute related to the Greek bouzouki and the Turkish saz) for a wide variety of musical traditions from the Middle East and the Mediterranean. For the last four years he’s led the well-regarded Middle Eastern Music Ensemble at the University of Chicago (taking over for oudist Issa Boulos in 2010), leading the group through a broad traditional repertoire, but as the musician’s debut album proves, his personal aesthetic is even broader....

Metro Manila Despite its long, diverse history, the cinema of the Philippines has never made much impact on Western movie culture. But in a surprising turn of events, Chicago has been consistently abuzz with Filipino movies since the beginning of September. The Siskel Center recently concluded a monthlong Filipino series, and a few weeks back artist Blake Heo spread the word about noted political filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik when he almost screened Tahimik’s I Am Furious Yellow at the Drake Hotel....

The President If you’re free tomorrow at 2 PM, I recommend going to River East for the encore screening of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The President at the Chicago International Film Festival. The film is this year’s winner of the Gold Hugo for best narrative feature—and, for what it’s worth, I too consider it the most impressive thing I saw at the fest this year. President finds the Iranian director working in the righteous, formally adventurous mode of his groundbreaking 80s features The Peddler and Marriage of the Blessed, though it differs from those earlier films in a few crucial ways....

On Wednesday night, the very first episode of Hannibal Buress’s very own show aired on Comedy Central. You’d think it would be safe to say he can officially pen a politely generic missive to all his friends and family back home in Chicago and say, in about as many words, “Lookit me. I’ve made it.” Landing an eponymous program on the cable network is a rite of passage to be sure—but passage to what remains the question....

Did you miss Jammin Gerald’s free noontime set at the Chicago Cultural Center today? Same here. Fortunately the people behind Boiler Room—the online music series that put on last summer’s Pitchfork Music Festival afterparty with with Nicolas Jaar—just posted footage from their Dance Mania night at hip new Logan Square speakeasy East Room. The Boiler Room showcased a handful of producers who dropped music through the beloved local ghetto-house label during its initial run through 2001....

Kathleen Hanna wrote the Riot Grrrl Manifesto in 1991, in the process helping to spark a DIY subculture of angry, inspirational girl music and a feminist movement that fought to undo the silencing of women’s thoughts and opinions on sexual assault, politics, creativity, and anything else they wanted to talk (or write or sing or scream) about. Hanna’s manifesto overflowed with messages of love and support toward other women, but its language was hardly warm and fuzzy: “We must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings,” she wrote....

Jim Mickle’s violent black comedy Cold in July begins with a suburban family man (Michael C. Hall) confronting and then fatally shooting a burglar who’s broken into his home. The movie takes place in 1989 in east Texas, and the local sheriff who investigates the shooting writes it off as self-defense. Unfortunately for the man who pulled the trigger, Richard Dane, the burglar’s father is a hotheaded killer just released from prison; after getting word of the incident, ex-con Ben Russel comes to town and starts terrorizing Dane’s family....

Did you ever wonder about earwax, and exactly why you shouldn’t dig it out of your ear canal with a cotton swab? Or about the Nazis’ failed attempts to infiltrate American society during World War II, and the pretty boneheaded ways in which they were found out? Josh Clark and Charles W. “Chuck” Bryant, hosts of the Stuff You Should Know podcast, are here for you. Since 2008 it’s been their job to research and report on topics that range from the seemingly—and dreadfully—mundane (“How Moss Works”) to the bygone and faddish (“A Podcast on Zoot Suits?...

A10 Chef Matthias Merges offers a four-course prix fixe; reservations recommended. $85, $135 with wine pairings. 1462 E. 53rd, 773-288-1010, a10hydepark.com. Read about four of Chicago’s most outstanding couples, as chosen by our readers. Cicchetti Five-course menu from chef Michael Sheerin with the theme “Lucchetti dell’Amore” (“locks of love”); a craft cocktail and house-made blood orange “‘cello” are included. A vegetarian option is available. $150 per couple. 671 N. Saint Clair, 312-642-1800, cicchettirestaurant....

Lana Turner (left) in A Life of Her Own, a likely influence on Roommates “It’s hard to believe there was a time when such progressive politics could be expressed in a drive-in movie,” Dave Kehr wrote of Stephanie Rothman’s Terminal Island (1973), “but yes, Virginia, there was an early 70s.” I’d argue that the era of subversive exploitation cinema continued after the Nixon presidency, as evidenced by such works as George Romero’s Martin (1978), Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979), and Chuck Vincent’s Roommates (1981), which screens on 35-millimeter tomorrow at 7 PM at Doc Films....

The Master For a certain generation of moviegoers, Philip Seymour Hoffman was considered one of Hollywood’s great actors, known for bringing his towering presence to the smallest of roles. His sudden passing creates a gaping hole in the American film landscape, but the performances he left behind will stand forever. I won’t waste time rehearsing the tragic details of his death, as so many other eulogies and “dedications” have—what matters most is his legacy....

Every fall, to give music lovers a few gift ideas during this jolliest time of the year, I review a pile of recent box sets. Releases like this are rarely geared to the casual listener, and it’s hard to gauge their success using commercial metrics—as sales of physical media continue to decline, expensive multidisc collections become increasingly niche ­oriented. I’ve tried to cast a broad net here, including not only folkloric compilations whose musicians are by and large known only to their friends and relatives but also a giant set by long-­running hit makers the Isley Brothers....

Anyone who lives in Chicago who has any artistic ambition whatsoever has seriously considered, at least once, moving away. All the real action, it seems, is elsewhere, and if anyone outside the midwest is going to pay you any attention, you’re going to have to head to one of the coasts, where you can spend the rest of your life wallowing in nostalgia for how young and free you were in Chicago....

Despite the current deep freeze, we’ve had a remarkably mild—some would say anemic—winter so far. (Thanks, climate change.) Still, there have already been a couple of nasty sleet- and snowstorms, and for days afterward, you didn’t have to look hard to find unshoveled sidewalks and impassable bike lanes. Last winter, a challenging season that included our city’s fifth-heaviest recorded snowfall, CDOT wrote only 226 citations for failure to shovel. Meanwhile, Evanston, with about 1/36th the population of Chicago, issued 53 tickets for noncompliance, according to Evanston city staffer Carl Caneva....