Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, January 26, 2016. Rahm declares that Chicago will remain a sanctuary city despite Trump executive order to pull funding Mayor Rahm Emanuel says that Chicago will continue to protect undocumented immigrants from federal deportation despite an executive order from President Donald Trump to pull federal funds from sanctuary cities. “Jurisdictions that willfully refuse to comply [with federal immigration laws] are not eligible to receive federal grants except as deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes,” reads the executive order signed by Trump Wednesday....

Diary comic, 2012, by Rachel Foss After a week of staring at a computer screen, it’s about time you expose your eyes to something exciting. Here’s what’s going down in visual arts this weekend. “Pigeon Hill: Then and Now” at Catherine Edelman Gallery Your last chance to see Jeffrey Wolin’s presentation of photographic portraits featuring low-income residents of Bloomington, Indiana. “Renoir’s True Colors: Science Solves a Mystery” at Art Institute of Chicago The conservation team tasked with maintaining Renoir’s Madame Léon Clapisson in all its glory discovered there’s more to the impressionist painting than meets the eye....

DEAR READERS: Two weeks ago, I announced I would be taking a nice long break from questions about miserable sexless marriages. (I don’t get questions about happily sexless marriages.) I tossed out my standard line of advice to those who’ve exhausted medical, psychological, and situational fixes (“Do what you need to do to stay married and stay sane”), and I moved on to other relationship problems. Readers impacted by sexless marriages—men and women on “both sides of the bed”—wrote in to share their experiences and insights....

Mike Sula Skewers, aka chuanr, Lao Pi BBQ I’d like to thank whoever subscribed me to News China, a glossy magazine whose title pretty much says it all. There’s lots to read in the August issue, including a report on extremist violence in the far-western province of Xinjiang, a lovely travelogue on the tea harvest in Zhejiang province, and a spirited defense of Chinese Muslim barbecue, or chuanr, in Beijing, where authorities have scapegoated vendors of live-coal-charred lamb skewers, blaming them for the city’s awful pollution....

I suspect that the longevity of the Waltzing Mechanics’ El Stories series can be attributed to a couple of different factors. For one, its casual, documentary-style monologues—which are based on real rider experiences on the CTA—are varied and open-ended enough in concept that, even after yielding close to a decade’s worth of anecdotes, the premise hasn’t gotten stale. And secondly, the malleable nature of the show’s casting has made El Stories‘s different iterations over the years a sort of rite of passage in Chicago’s non-equity scene, like a post-grad showcase of fresh faces in the city’s industry....

In 2012, brothers David and Rene Pacheco emerged from East Los Angeles with Thee Commons, a band that blended elements of cumbia, chicha, surf, punk, psych, and more. Despite having all the ingredients for an excellent dance party, the group initially struggled to find a foothold in LA’s music scene, which like those of many major cities is often fragmented along genre, ethnic, and generational lines. But when Thee Commons finally built their own community, they hit their stride—and they hit it hard, electrifying fans from all walks of life with their high-energy music and over-the-top performances, which sometimes featured burlesque dancers, clowns, and/or guys in gorilla suits....

West-side rapper and M.I.C member Lil Chris is among a handful of locals who could spend a career testing the limits of Auto-Tune and its ability to melt, twist, and reshape syllables. Lil Chris uses the vocal processor to infuse hard-edged bars with hints of melancholy and add muscle to his rap-singing to further color his supple, full melodies. He’s got a lot of range when he sings, but Lil Chris is a rapper first and foremost; he’s not trying to be, say, Marvin Gaye, and Lil Chris is up-front about it on his latest single, “Let’s Get it On....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Media Under repeated questioning, Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle was happy to avoid saying whether she’s challenging Rahm for mayor. Toni Preckwinkle is going to keep answering the question by not answering the question. She said it a few more times after a much-ballyhooed speech to the City Club on Thursday. So when she faced reporters and TV cameras after her speech, the questions moved quickly from budget and jail matters to election politics....

Courtesy iO iO veteran Dave Koechner Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

It turns out the doctor dragged off a United plane at O’Hare has not only a past, but an inconvenient past. It’s a sleeping-dog past that journalists ought to let lie—at least that’s the contention made by David Uberti of the Columbia Journalism Review. And he’s far from the only person critical of the media that woke this particular dog. “Stories About United Passenger’s ‘Troubled’ Past Prompt Massive Backlash,” reads one headline on the Wrap....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

The winter holidays invariably unleash a blizzard of Christmas-themed productions that range from the sentimental to the satiric. Hell in a Handbag Productions’ new show SnowGirls fits in the latter camp—and I do mean camp. With a book by Derek Van Barham and songs by David Cerda with Scott Lamberty and Jeff Thomson, this rude, raunchy, and funny burlesque of the 1995 Paul Verhoeven movie Showgirls is definitely more naughty than nice....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Media Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County Board president, says thanks but no thanks to a mayoral bid. As recently as this weekend, when the Sun-Times released a poll showing Toni Preckwinkle ahead by a whopping 24 points, her campaign spokesman indicated that she was seriously considering a challenge against Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Not surprisingly, one of the first people to vocalize his renewed support for Preckwinkle was Emanuel....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. See more street style in the Chicago Looks blog.

Michael Gebert Next After reading Nick Kokonas’s fascinating 6,000-word manifesto-slash-case study for the ticketing system he devised for Next and Alinea, the reason you’d want to do something, anything, to do shake up the existing order becomes clear. As he says, “Three full-time employees answering phones, mostly to say ‘no’ to potential customers since 70 percent of people request the same times: Friday and Saturday prime times. This was costly payroll, costly phone lines, and, most importantly, frustrating to the callers....

Patriots Day, Peter Berg’s new drama about the Boston Marathon bombing, arrives in theaters less than four years after the attack, which left three people dead and hundreds more wounded. Sensitive to this, star­-coproducer Mark Wahlberg and director-cowriter Peter Berg take great pains to celebrate the humanity of those who were on Boylston Street near the finish line of the race in April 2013, when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded in quick succession, spraying shrapnel across the sidewalk....

Next to Her, screening at the Chicago International Film Festival Week one of the Chicago International Film Festival isn’t even over yet, and already we’ve got ten more new reviews of movies screening during the second week, along with repeat screenings of movies that premiered last week and two notable revivals (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Roger and Me, the second introduced by filmmaker Michael Moore).

In this modern ballet, performed as part of the Pivot Arts fest program “Gravity,” Kristina Isabelle retools the proportions of her dancers by literally sending them out on a limb, putting them onto stilts. A kind of next-generation pointe shoe, stilts perform a similar function, boosting dancers to different levels in space and elongating the lines of their legs. Ingeniously, Isabelle sometimes deploys the stilts asymmetrically. When dancers wearing one stilt ply it like a lever to swing their bare foot to sublime heights, the alien angles they produce abstract their legs into pure lines that show crisply against the Joan Mitchell-inspired scrim....