It’s officially film festival season in Chicago. As the Gene Siskel Film Center’s long-running European Union Film Festival wraps up, two similarly enduring fests, the Chicago Underground Film Festival and the Chicago Latino Film Festival, are shifting into gear this week. Though they offer wildly different programming—CLFF favors narrative features, CUFF prides itself on experimental fare—both festivals make it a priority to promote small, independent voices. Closing this year’s CUFF is American Arab, a documentary directed by former Chicagoan and Columbia College alum Usama Alshaibi and produced by Chicago’s venerable Kartemquin Films....

Recently Slow Roll Chicago, a group that promotes biking on the south and west sides, called for more black and brown input on Chicago’s Vision Zero traffic fatality prevention plans. In the wake of this pushback, city officials detailed efforts to collect perspectives on the program from residents of the current Vision Zero focus communities of North Lawndale, Garfield Park, and Austin. The city has hired four community organizers to do outreach and collect data on the west side this year, including tabling at farmers’ markets, health fairs, and block parties....

You might want to write this down. Carol Marin is leaving the Sun-Times, staying at WTTW and at WMAQ-TV, and joining DePaul University, which is where her offices have been for the past 12 years. Marin’s last column as a contract writer for the Sun-Times will run on December 13, though editor in chief Jim Kirk has told her she’s welcome to contribute to the paper whenever she wants to after that, and Marin isn’t saying no to the possibility....

Chicago rapper-producer Valee Taylor, who records and performs under his first name, talks a big game. If you believe the claims in his breakthrough single, “Shell,” he’s the kind of guy who walks through luxury-brand stores like a master gamer let loose in an arcade with a backpack weighed down by quarters—he’s effortless and in full acknowledgment of his own abundance. But as much as Valee raps about excess, his strength is his brevity....

Atlanta R&B singer 6lack is emerging as a voice capable of making everyone and everything around him look and sound better. What’s interesting about his breakout single, “Prblms,” is basically everything but his singing—the song’s glistening instrumental, its midnight-hour atmosphere, the 700-pound grizzly bear relaxing in the video. But in our age of curation, 6lack (pronounced “black”) has proved that carefully creating a vibe is as crucial as having a voice that draws people in....

Chicago label Lake Paradise has had an impressive run since launching a couple years ago. Hell, in its inaugural year it released one of my favorite local LPs of 2013: Mines’ Just Another Thing That Got Ruined. That being said, I like to keep my eye out for Lake Paradise releases, and just a couple weeks ago the label pressed the cassette version of Leaving, a spare acoustic album from a gentleman named Pat Keen....

Most mentions of the stunning new album Semper Femina (More Alarming) note that singer-songwriter Laura Marling addresses only women over its nine songs. It’s unclear whether her lyrics are directed toward friends or lovers, but her sharp observations and plainspoken language render this ambiguity irrelevant. The album title comes from a line in Virgil’s Aeneid, “Varium et mutabile semper femina” (“Fickle and changeable always is woman”), and just about every song finds a doubtful narrator in the midst of a relationship at a crossroads....

Michele K. Short Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson: two of the best southern drawls in Hollywood How many more television shows about a couple of detectives working tirelessly to track down a killer—destroying or altogether eschewing healthy interpersonal relationships in the process—is the entertainment world going to produce for us? If the networks know their beeswax, this is specifically not a question we’re asking ourselves, because we’re just ever so happy to continue to ride shotgun with various hardscrabble cop types as murders are committed and solved....

No matter where you land on the Joss Whedon fan spectrum—whether you socialized among the Bronze, the online community of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, in a past Internet life, or just loved The Avengers—there’s something for you in Amy Pascale’s new bio of the cult-magnet screenwriter and director. Even big Jossheads might be surprised by the candid, exhaustively researched interviews with Whedon, who reveals some previously unearthed gems, such as his vision for his never-realized Wonder Woman movie, in which he reimagined the superhero’s introduction to our world as an adolescent rite of passage....

The worlds of stand-up, improv, and sketch rarely intersect onstage. It’s not surprising; there aren’t a ton of similarities between the rhythms of improv scenes, stand-up riffs, and polished sketches. When the different forms take place in progression, audience expectations usually need to shift, sometimes drastically—but successfully combining the worlds can strengthen local comedy. The late-night variety show Goofballs United aims to do just that. A collaboration between the Upstairs Gallery and local comedy blog Steamroller, the show provides a place for alternative comics of all mediums to perform side by side....

Since nu-metal fizzled out in the early aughts it’s generally been treated with the kind of derision found in VH1 specials eviscerating bygone pop-culture ephemera. But “What were we thinking?” one-liners are more fitting for the oversize JNCO jeans of those years than the music that defined them, and while it’s getting harder and harder to understand how we wound up with Tommy Lee’s Methods of Mayhem, a lot can be explained by the 1994 self-titled debut from Bakersfield, California, metal band Korn....

penguin.com The book that changed my life I come from a line of people who do not clean. According to family legend, my grandmother attempted it as a young bride and hated it so much, she took a job as a schoolteacher in order to pay a cleaning woman to come in three days a week. I deeply admire her for this. This is a long way of saying I am profoundly grateful for Jolie Kerr’s new book My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag ....

Ten days after the opening of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Governor Bruce Rauner positioned himself in the spectacular atrium lobby of the Thompson Center to announce that he intends to “close and sell” the building to a private developer in an “open auction” for “cash.” Rauner said he’s conferred with state senate president John Cullerton, house speaker Michael Madigan, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and they are all “forward leaning and positive on this....

Signe Baumane’s Rocks in My Pockets screens at the Gene Siskel Film Center through Thursday. “People want to see representations of themselves,” said New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis in an interview a few years ago, reflecting on what inspires casual viewers to go to the movies. This is hardly a controversial opinion. I’ve encountered more than enough anecdotal evidence to support that claim, and I’m sure you have too....

In 2010 Adam Schatz, a New York musician who’s been one of the driving forces behind his city’s sprawling Winter Jazzfest, launched Round Robin, a program focused on free improvisation where musicians with disparate approaches and backgrounds improvise in a steady stream of five-minute duos. The evening begins with a solo performance by one of the participants, followed by a duet with the next musician, after which a new player turns up to relieve the musician who’s already been through a pair of duos....

It’s been six years since this stalwart Swedish thrash band’s last full-length, and the new Sinful Birth (released by Sweden’s I Hate Records), the long-awaited follow-up to 2011’s Forbidden World, delivers an even more solid wall of riffage that never stops rising. There’s such a purity to their studied 1980s post-Slayer thrash that a listener could be forgiven for thinking this is a band of crusty old guys who’ve been playing for 30 years—when in fact this is only Antichrist’s second full-length....

My faith in Chicago’s improvised and experimental music scene is regularly renewed by a number of factors, but the most important is its reliable infusion of new blood. Bassist Eli Namay and drummer Phillip Sudderberg have been playing out for a couple of years, but I’m only now beginning to catch up with them. This evening they celebrate the release of a new self-titled album by their Vibrating Skull Trio, which also includes clarinetist John McCowen (Wei Zhongle)....

Death by Hanging In her essay for the winter series “Early Katharine Hepburn,” Doc Films programmer Ursula Wagner writes that “Hepburn’s unconventional looks, intense personality, and ambiguous gender presentation all posed problems for the 30s film industry.” Despite having won an Oscar in 1933, the actress was deemed “box office poison” for most of the decade. Several of her films which are considered classics today—including Holiday and Bringing Up Baby (both of which screen later in the series)—were flops upon first release....

Nam June Paik’s Global Groove (1973) Before attending the David Bowie exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I was unaware that Bowie had collaborated on a music video in the 1980s with Nam June Paik. I wasn’t surprised to learn of this collaboration, however. Paik, who died in 2006 at the age of 74, is widely considered to be the godfather of video art. His groundbreaking work from the 1960s and ’70s introduced a range of devices to the new medium of video, such as stroboscopic effects, closed-feedback loops, and the use of magnets to deform how the images appeared on TV sets....

When Charlie Trotter alum Matthias Merges opened the playful, yakitori-inspired restaurant Yusho in Avondale a little more than two years ago, it was pioneerish; the most notable cuisines in the hood at the time were hot dogs and hamburgers (damn fine ones, but still). More predictable, though no less thoughtful or delicious, was his early 2013 follow-up: the craft-cocktail outpost Billy Sunday, just up the street in Logan Square. Merges’s next venture—nearly 80 blocks south, in Hyde Park—was another pioneering effort, his most ambitious so far....