Sun-Times Media Chicago police officials announce murder charges against Jason Austin in 2008. The charges were later dropped, and several witnesses allege that they were coerced or beaten into implicating Austin. Gustavo Granados said he told the police what little he knew when they came by his west-side auto shop on August 15, 2008. Granados agreed to review his records and talk with his three employees about the Buick Regal....

Q Straight female with a question. It’s about something that sometimes happens to me that I’ve never really told anyone about because it’s so weird and gross. It involves my bowel movements, so it’s not very sexy. (No offense to scat lovers, but I have zero interest in “poop play.”) After I have a normal bowel movement, I pull up my jeans. When I do that, the crotch seam presses on my clit as I begin to close the zipper, and I get what I can only describe as an intense miniorgasm....

Today Drag City announced that singer-harpist Joanna Newsom‘s latest album, Divers, is coming out on October 23. Recorded by Steve Albini and Noah Georgeson, it’s Newsom’s first album since 2010’s Have One on Me, which in case you’ve forgotten is a three-disc set and a total chore. But judging from the sound of “Sapokanikan,” Divers might be the first time I actually end up enjoying a Joanna Newsom album—the song’s winding recorder at the end is as graceful as the singer’s relatively restrained (at least compared to her past albums) delivery....

RE|Dance’s 75-minute epic starts out auspiciously. A single dancer appears in front of a luminous white 13-foot-tall origami crane serenely poised on a high platform, one long, slender wing sloping elegantly to the floor. The bird’s sheer size skews our perception just enough that we imagine the dancer as a puny, fragile little baby bird teaching itself to walk. Choreographer Michael Estanich’s focus on birds makes sense—a bird, after all, is the ideal mover, and it’s oddly stirring to picture a dancer envying the creature its ability to migrate mind-boggling distances winter after winter....

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, pool President Obama delivers his State of the Union address to Congress last year. Few of his proposals came to pass. Another State of the Union address is coming tomorrow to a flat screen near you, and I bet you can hardly wait. The federal minimum wage in the wealthiest nation on Earth ​then was $7.25, and so it remains. Tomorrow, Obama likely will again call for an increase—this time to $10....

Anyone not following closely would have missed the latest maneuver in the long political battle over expensive, dangerous, and illegal overcrowding at the county jail. The notion that the court and jail system needs reform may be the only point that criminal justice officials agree on. And since most of the problems are out of the public view, officials have felt little urgency to fix them. The issue has been a political and legal problem at least since the 1970s, when the Cook County Jail was first placed under federal court decrees for violating the rights of defendants because of chronic overcrowding....

Easier to admire than it is to describe, João Pedro Rodrigues’s The Ornithologist (which opens Friday at the Music Box) dances around motifs of faith, death, and transfiguration without quite asserting what it’s all about. The film recognizes its ambiguity, however, and has fun with it, shifting its shape whenever it seems like it’s about to settle on a particular message. Things soon get more complicated. Kayaking downstream, Fernando gets sucked into a rapid and his boat capsizes....

Q: I went to Dark Odyssey Winter Fire, the big kink hotel takeover event in Washington, D.C., in February. There was one thing I saw there that is messing with my head, and I hope you can set me straight. There was this lovely little six-person orgy going on with two cute-as-could-be hippie girls and four older dudes. Then these four people came along. They sat and watched—a guy and three women in hijabs and dresses that went wrist to ankle, fully covered....

No one in China escaped the impact of the Cultural Revolution. During the decade-long crusade launched by Chairman Mao in 1966 to purge counterrevolutionaries from the Communist Party and recapture the ideological purity of the People’s Republic, schools and universities closed as students rebelled against their teachers, and cadres of young Red Guards policed the ideas of their elders, violently persecuting professionals, intellectuals, and cultural figures. Local communities descended into witch hunts, and there were armed clashes in the streets....

Time hasn’t been especially kind to Camper Van Beethoven, the 80s band from Santa Cruz, California, that was a veritable showroom model of what used to be called “college rock” (before it was rechristened “alternative rock”). To the extent that they’re remembered, it’s usually as the group that eventually gave birth to Cracker, which lead songwriter David Lowery formed when CVB split up in 1990. While I enjoyed the easygoing strum of their 1985 college-radio hit “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” CVB’s first few records did little but irritate me, because the flip side of that song’s absurd charm was silliness and gee-aren’t-we-clever self-regard....

On Benny Latimore’s latest album, A Taste of Me: Great American Songs (Essential Media), the soul-blues veteran wraps his smoldering baritone around standards from the Great American Songbook (“Smile,” “The Very Thought of You”) as well as contemporary classics (“What a Difference a Day Makes,” “At Last,” “You Are So Beautiful”). He adds reworkings of his own “Dig a Little Deeper” and “Let’s Straighten It Out,” both of which prove themselves fully worthy of such august company....

On a sunny Saturday last April, a small crowd gathered in a Calumet City park to mourn the loss of a black child. “I want you to realize we have tragedies every day, black families,” 58-year-old Steven Watts told the crowd. His voice was worn and somber, barely eclipsing the hum of passing cars. “I saw it. I watched it. And for three years now, this is what I see every single day: I see my son dying....

Trouble is brewing in Oakland, California. Two weeks ago Annapurna Pictures released the surreal, satirical Sorry to Bother You, shot on the streets of Oakland last summer by rapper turned filmmaker Boots Riley. The movie begins as a simple workplace comedy along the lines of Mike Judge’s Office Space (1999) but ripens into a nightmare of capitalist exploitation. If that doesn’t shake you up enough, this week Summit Entertainment opens Carlos López Estrada’s bitterly funny drama Blindspotting, which was filming in Oakland at the same time as Sorry to Bother You....

In July chef Chris Pandel (the Bristol, Balena) told Chicago magazine of the Boka Restaurant Group steak house he’ll helm come October: “We don’t want to change the steak house. We want to elevate it.” So far, though, the place has been defined by change. Originally the restaurant was going to be called Armour & Swift, a name meant to honor Chicago’s meatpacking legacy, but Armour, which is still an active brand of meat, threatened to file suit....

Chuck Prophet has been pursuing his vision as a solo artist for so long that his earlier band, Green on Red, is almost an asterisk in his bio. Not that the famed psych-country group, which gained traction in the 80s, doesn’t deserve its shine, but Prophet’s discography has moved far beyond it. While his music falls under the umbrella of Americana, his definition of America isn’t trapped under glass—not the case with everybody in this genre....

Alex Ross Perry, one of the smartest and most ambitious young indie filmmakers around, comes to Chicago this week to chat with hometown director Joe Swanberg at the Saturday PM screenings of Perry’s new Queen of Earth, starring Elisabeth Moss as a young woman who’s losing her grip on sanity; it’s the subject of Ben Sachs’s long review this week. Also, I take a look at Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, a documentary profile of the personal-computer visionary by director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer)....

Astronautalis (Andy Bothwell) and P.O.S (Stefon Alexander) are both esteemed rapper-producers in the indie hip-hop underground. In 2013 they debuted the collaborative project Four Fists releasing a two-song seven-inch that infused posthardcore attitude into an electro-leaning, stylistically diverse batch of beats, rhymes, and hooks. Five years later, the two are back with their first full-length, 6666 (released via Alexander’s Doomtree collective/label), which is much more hard-hitting than its predecessor. Many of the duo’s early indie-rap elements—including electric bass, string samples, and clean singing as well as their chill vibe—have been replaced by trap beats and synths that oscillate between ominous and poppy....

Film historian Foster Hirsch once used the term “finger exercise” to describe Robert Siodmak’s Cry of the City (1948), meaning it was a relatively unambitious genre picture that nonetheless allowed a skilled director to take delight in his craft. I thought of that description while watching M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, which opens commercially today. The film belongs to a prolific genre—the found-footage horror movie—and while it doesn’t reinvent the form, it contains a number of effective scares and almost as many laughs....

Among the characteristics that have made Kurt Rosenwinkel one of the most influential jazz guitarists of his generation is the way he traces his limpid, harmonically sophisticated playing with a dreamy layer of wordless singing, a kind of sonic shadow that enriches the timbre of his bands. On his new solo album Caipi (Heartcore/Razdaz) the voice is no longer a complement but a key ingredient. A collection of original pieces steeped in the breezy lyric glow of Brazilian pop music, the recording features Rosenwinkel playing nearly every instrument—guitar, piano, drums, bass, and synthesizer—joined on some tracks by guests....

The Chef: Andrew Brochu (The Aviary)The Challenger:Jeremy Brutzkus (Longman & Eagle)The Ingredient: Milk jam To make the cajeta, Brochu simmered a half gallon of goat’s milk with vanilla bean, cloves, and cassia buds (the unopened flowers of the cinnamon tree) for ten hours, until it was reduced from 2,000 grams to about 100. “I did add a pinch of sugar,” he said. “I didn’t want to, but after the first six hours I was like, maybe I need to help it along....