Vocalist Sir Charles Jones is one of the leading lights in contemporary southern soul-blues. He comports himself well in the dance-floor workouts and celebrations of down-home cultural identity that are typical of the genre (2008’s “I Came to Party” and 2012’s “Good Old Country Boy” are good examples), but his true metier is the pleading, lovelorn ballad. His latest album, The Masterpiece, which he self-released on his Southern King Entertainment label, contains a few run-of-the-mill hoochie-man boasts, such as “Wherever I Lay My Bone,” but he redeems them with some of the finest ballads he’s ever recorded, including “Destiny,” which features a neo-Barry White, sex-machine-with-a-heart-of-gold spoken narration, and “Squeeze Me,” a broken-hearted plea from an unsatisfied lover....

The Hunting Accident by David L. Carlson and Landis Blair The Hunting Accident is the story of how Charlie Rizzo uncovered the story of his father Matt’s friendship with his Stateville Prison cellmate Nathan Leopold, of Leopold and Loeb infamy. Carlson wrote that story down, and Blair illustrated it, and now it’s a handsome doorstop of a graphic novel that Mary Schmich will help introduce to the world. Tue 9/19, 7 PM, Unabridged Bookstore, 3251 N....

Now in its fourth year, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events’ OnEdge series returns with a month of experimental theater and dance shows that examine the intersections of identity, history, psychology, and more, all through an unconventional lens. OnEdge kicks off on February 23 with Swiss choreographer Marie-Caroline Hominal’s dance performance The Triumph of Fame, running through February 25 at Dfbrl8r Gallery. Rather than showing the piece before a traditional audience, Hominal pulls one spectator to the stage for 20 minutes at a time, from 5 to 10 PM, for an intimate one-on-one performance....

Stephanie Bassos A crowd shot from Deafheaven’s set Philip Montoro: I learned something interesting at Pitchfork on Sunday. The poor sod dressed as Twinkie the Kid could barely see in that costume. I saw a woman leading him (it?) by the elbow across the lawn, and she had to warn him when they crossed the paved path: “Look out, there’s a little step down here!” This presented a truly difficult temptation: I mean, it’s not like I wanted to get kicked out of Pitchfork, but if it had to happen, I’d have wanted it to be because I blindsided Twinkie the Kid with a flying tackle....

The rollout of the Ventra payment system was a clusterfuck: the byzantine sign-up process, the hours-long customer service calls, the tale of one commuter who had to cope with hundreds of new Ventra cards clogging up his mailbox. Even Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CTA president Forrest Claypool were pissed; they refused to pay Ventra’s parent company, Cubic Transportation Systems, till it ironed out some issues. But where most of us saw red, a couple members of iO troupe the Ruckus, Alan Linic and Ollie Hobson, saw comedic gold, and they mined enough of it to craft a jokey hip-hop track called “V....

Estrella Morente Did you make it through all of the Empty Bottle’s outdoor festival Saturday without losing a single toe to the cold? Still in the mood to check out some live music? Well, you’re in luck, because there are plenty of shows worth seeing this week. Peter Margasak writes that Estrella Morente has been carrying on the legacy of her late father, iconoclastic flamenco singer Enrique Morente. “On the cover of her most recent album, 2012’s Autorretrato (Parlophone Spain), he’s pictured standing behind her, and he duets with her on the closing track, ‘Adagio,’” Margasak writes....

Receo Gibson grew up in Chicago’s south suburbs on a steady diet of geek culture. His original rapper name was Shintendo64, an element of which he’s kept alive—after local producer Sage Nebulous gave Gibson the moniker Sage, Gibson augmented it by tacking on “the 64th Wonder.” Fortunately, knowledge of the anime that Gibson finds inspiring isn’t necessary to enjoy his music. His June mixtape, God’s Hand, is filled with the kind of dusted-off instrumentals prefered by hip-hop artists endeared of the genre’s “golden age,” and like the best of them, Gibson doesn’t linger on the past so much as he uses it to push himself forward....

Over the last few weeks I’ve been regularly talking with a public teacher named Erika Wozniak about the 36 kids in her fifth-grade classroom at Oriole Park elementary—go Panthers!—on the city’s far-northwest side. But it’s dreadfully overcrowded. For instance, there are 72 fifth-graders but only two fifth-grade teachers. That means each class has 36 students, even though the teachers’ union contract says no fifth-grade class should have more than 31....

Orson Welles has made films with his right hand and films with his left hand,” Francois Truffaut once wrote. “In the right-handed films, there is always snow, and in the left-handed ones there are always gunshots.” Later that evening, the family decides to take in a five-year-old girl named Juri, who lives in their neighborhood with parents who are alternately abusive and neglectful. The group’s first dinner with Juri exudes warmth and a sense of interpersonal connection, with the various members taking protective interest in the little girl....

This Friday two new films shot in the south of France by prominent auteurs will open in Chicago: Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical (which plays for a week at the Film Center) and Christophe Honoré’s Metamorphoses (which plays for a week at Facets). In addition to featuring similar geography, both films exhibit a sense of narrative liberty, shifting shape in a manner that befits the characters’ shifting lives. Staying Vertical is a dream narrative wherein characters change suddenly and frequently, while Metamorphoses, a modern-dress adaptation of about a dozen tales by Ovid, is very much about the joy of storytelling, containing playful digressions and tales within tales....

Chicago’s laws can be confusing, even to the folks who make them. And in a city scraping for pennies to stay afloat, a pair of grand palaces of culture can attract attention. Like glittering Fabergé eggs, just sitting there looking rich. The caucus submitted a motion that struck the whole paragraph out. Which suggests that he hasn’t been hanging out with the music lovers in the $30 seats in the upper balconies....

Vincent Macaigne and Maud Wyler in 2 Autumns, 3 Winters Romantic comedies about white, college-educated thirtysomethings are a dime a dozen, which is why I had fairly low expectations for 2 Autumns, 3 Winters, despite having read Michael Castelle’s laudatory write-up on CINE-FILE over the weekend. Yet this buoyant French indie, which plays again tonight at 6 PM and tomorrow at 8:30 PM at the Gene Siskel Film Center, has little of the smugness or complacency I’ve come to associate with the genre....

When Ed Devereux opened Unabridged Bookstore on November 1, 1980, with two business partners and $18,000, he had no idea if the store would last. Though, to be honest, he wasn’t thinking very far ahead at all. “When you’re 27,” he says, “you don’t ever think you’re going to be 62. When you’re young, you’re fearless.” Eventually the store not only survived but thrived, expanding to fill two more neighboring storefronts and a basement....

courtesy of Chris Jones Chris Jones Last year bluegrass singer and guitarist Chris Jones released Lonely Comes Easy (Rebel), the first album of new recordings he’d made with his band the Night Drivers in four years. Jones, who along with the band’s banjo player, Ned Luberecki, hosts the Sirius XM program Bluegrass Junction, got his start in the business as the vocalist for Chicago institution Special Consensus in the early 80s, but in recent years he’s emerged as a major figure....

Ward Robinson Dub Thompson At the heart of Dub Thompson—the Agoura Hills-based jam/slacker indie-rock band—are Matt Pulos and Evan Laffer, a pair of friends who met in high school and have been playing together ever since (they’re 19 now, by the by). Throughout that time, they’ve seemingly been digging deeper into the backs of their brains, discovering new genre hybrids. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Dograces,” is a jerky, almost tribal track that maintains a heavy, druggy groove throughout—or at least until the track disintegrates into a noisy wildout, eventually transforming into a dark and bizarre amusement park ditty....

Ava Luna’s Electric Balloon On its second album, Electric Balloon (Western Vinyl), the split-personality New York band Ava Luna continues to ricochet between dissonant, hard-hitting funk inspired by the glory days of No Wave and elaborate adaptations of modern R&B, with many stops in between. “Sears Roebuck M&Ms” sounds like Thin White Duke-era Bowie shorn of any polish and luxury, “Daydream” suggest a less antisocial James Chance, and “Crown” contains traces of Dirty Projects—a band Ava Luna is often compared to—with falsetto singing closer to Jeff Buckley and David Longstreth....

The clouds in Close Encounters of the Third Kind mark Squires’s first contribution to Hollywood movies. A few weeks ago I was flattered to find that a blog post of mine about computer-generated imagery had elicited a comment from Scott Squires, a longtime visual effects supervisor whose credits include Willow, The Mask, and Starship Troopers. Squires politely took me to task for suggesting that the failure of so many recent Hollywood productions can be blamed on overabundant computer graphics....

You could be forgiven for expecting Arca’s set at the Pitchfork Music Festival to be a somber one. The Venezuelan producer’s recent self-titled album plays like a dirge for a faintly remembered lover. It’s the first Arca project to feature prominent vocals, which often take the shape of wails and jagged gasps or carry the rich inflections of the Venezuelan folk songs called tonadas. The album Arca conjures profound desire and profound suffering, but the producer’s show on the festival’s Blue Stage on Friday pushed aside that weight in favor of play, camp, and welcome confusion....

Q: I’m a woman in a straight relationship. I woke up this morning, and my BF wasn’t in bed with me. He felt ill in the middle of the night and went to sleep in the spare room—where he found a condom in its wrapper behind the nightstand. Now my BF thinks I’m cheating on him. I haven’t cheated on him and have no desire to. I have an IUD and we are monogamous, so we don’t use condoms....

Tool have long been notorious for operating at a glacial pace, but those once-familiar five-year gaps between full-lengths today seem like insignificant stretches when you consider that their last full-length, 10,000 Days, came out more than 11 years ago. Now members of the band are saying that 2017 could be the year we actually get some new material—though they’ve also been saying that LP number five is coming out “pretty soon” since 2013....