The granddaddies of posthardcore metal, these New Yorkers make the genre’s popular vices–exaggerated bleakness, numbingly un-relenting volume, enervating levels of unfocused rage–sound like virtues. Front man and guitarist Chris Spencer took a much-needed break from Unsane between 2000 and 2003 (he’d been jumped in Vienna in ’98 and hospitalized for internal bleeding, then promptly toured for six months), but it’s like they never went away: the lineup’s been stable since ’94, the music’s still reliably brutal, and the album covers are as gory as ever....

In dance, the addition of other media can overwhelm and even distract where it ought to enhance. Valerie Williams and Co’Motion Dance Theater avoid this with an ingenious trick. Created live, video recordings of dancers are displayed in layers, and at a time delay, on a screen at the back of the stage. When the delay is significant, the video acts as a duet partner for a single dancer. Other times, treated with a fairy-dust filter, one layer comes across more as the suggestion of a figure—as white noise that resembles an evaporating dancer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today, though, he told reporters at City Hall that he would back “NBS—nobody but Stone.” Aftab said his supporters had told him they wanted to support Stone, and he’d decided that he needed to represent them. But it was clear that he was motivated primarily out of distaste for Naisy Dolar, who is squaring off against the incumbent in the April 17 runoff....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For my contribution the Reader‘s daily 12 O’Clock Track last week, I posted a biting version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” by the great Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence, noting that I don’t possess the same knee-jerk, absolutist aversion to holiday music as many of my colleagues. In fact, I sometimes really enjoy it, a clear vestige of warm childhood memories....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On her way out of her Bucktown apartment, a young woman with long straight hair and model-high cheekbones checks herself out in the mirror. The checking turns to looking, then staring, and now her face crumbles and she sobs. How awful! She must feel terrible. But wait. Suddenly she stops sobbing. All business, she widens her eyes, stretches her mouth into an “o,” and makes octave-crossing vocalizations....

The Daily Caller exposé of the JournoList listserv was a parody of a modern major newspaper investigation. It ran for days, bristled with indignation, amounted to almost nothing, and made its case out of various whiffs and hints of perfidy. And here’s the Washington Independent‘s Spencer Ackerman saying fight fire with tar. “If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us....

On her third album, Momento (Ziriguiboom/Six Degrees), Bebel Gilberto continues to inch away from the frothy electro-bossa that established her as a coffeehouse accessory when she debuted in 2000. The rhythms of her native Brazil still dominate the airy music and her warm, hushed delivery is pure Rio, but the pan-stylistic arrangements and increased use of English suggest she’s aiming at something broader; tracks include a languid take on Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” and the disco-tinged “Bring Back the Love,” cowritten with members of New York’s Brazilian Girls....

Alana Yolande Cakes da Killa Maybe we’re biased, but the Best of Chicago Bash tonight at Metro, presented by your favorite Chicago weekly, sounds like a dashing way to start off the weekend. Soundboard understands, though (not really), if you’re tired of hearing us rave about the Best Hyped Youngsters Who Can’t Play Your Neighborhood Bar. Here are the best shows over the next couple days, whether you accept the invitation to ours or not....

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE Directed by David Slade Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For those of you who’ve been living in a tween-proof bunker for the past five years, Twilight is a series of four novels by Stephenie Meyer that’s been turned into a mind-bogglingly successful movie franchise. The books and their screen adaptations chronicle the romance, heartbreak, angst, and abstinence of clumsy, obsessively conscientious Bella Swan (played onscreen by Kristen Stewart) and her true love, the devastatingly handsome, obsessively conscientious vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson)....

Today Gilbert Hernandez is an elder statesman of comics. In 1981 he and his brother Jaime created Love and Rockets, which, as all good comic geeks know, was one of the first series made expressly for grown-ups. There were no superheroes in Love and Rockets, only some truly badass punk lesbians and a fictional Latin American village where surreal things just seemed to happen. But even Los Bros Hernandez had to start somewhere....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show: James Blackshaw A 12-string guitar can be an unwieldy thing, but in the right hands it’s a peerless source of rich sonorities. Young Englishman James Blackshaw has such hands, and he puts them to good use on the splendid live album Waking Into Sleep (Kning), a solo performance recorded in Sweden in 2006: the stirring melodies of “Spiralling Skeleton Memorial” and “Sunshrine” billow into kaleidoscopic patterns of swirling tones....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dream School is an “adaptation” of a 2011 British television series, Jamie’s Dream School, created by Oliver, a well-known chef and restaurateur, who shifted his crusading energies from public school lunches to the curriculum. He enrolled teens who were struggling in conventional schools and enlisted a dozen celebrity “specialists” as instructors in his ersatz school, with mixed results: although one alum now stars on EastEnders, it’s unclear how many of the students remained in or returned to school....

Has any North American filmmaker led us further into the labyrinths of the human psyche than David Cronenberg? Since making his name in the early 80s with a trio of bizarre horror movies—Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986)—the Canadian writer-director has ventured into progressively more challenging psychological territory, exploring narcotics addiction (Naked Lunch), the sex-death instinct (Crash), the treacherous workings of memory (Spider), and our appetite for carnage (A History of Violence)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In a paper published a couple weeks ago, Dr. Sherilyn McGregor of Keele University in Staffordshire points out that when environmentally sound living requires extra work, that work is usually ‘women’s work.’ … What decisions are environmentalist citizens asked to make? Choosing the green laundry detergent and toilet paper and buying organic groceries. Carrying cloth bags to the supermarket....

Matei Vişniec‘s plays were banned under the communist regime in his native Romania. These days they’re among the most produced there, and this searing, hallucinatory 2005 work shows why. Refugees with slippery post-Balkan-war allegiances return to their decimated village to start new lives. The town stands beside a forest fed on a century’s accumulation of scrambled human bones, making one mother’s attempt to find her dead son’s body in a wheelbarrow full of dirt seem almost sensible....

QI’m a straight male from southern California and I really want to be a straight male escort. The problem is the industry is shrouded with deceptive “agencies” that take advantage of the situation. Also, it’s not like there’s a Male Escort 101 course that I can take to learn how to avoid these traps. I don’t know if you can help, but I really want to get into this industry, hopefully through a reputable agency....

Brazilian pianist Joao Donato never stuck with any single bag long enough to get famous like his old cohorts Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Although he was a key architect of bossa nova, he was also a huge fan of the west-coast jazz of Stan Kenton, propulsive Afro-Cuban music, and older Brazilian forms such as choro (he got his start playing accordion with flutist Altamiro Carrilho). His reputation for experimentation with rhythm and harmony lost him gigs at home, so in 1959 he moved to the U....

The Other Internees I was interned at the age of 17 after arrest at Woodward High in Cincinnati, at Crystal City, Texas, with an equal number of German and Japanese internees and one Italian family from Honduras, Central America. In April 1947 I was sent to Ellis Island and not released until September 1947. Does Anyone Even Want the Olympics? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your article was brilliant....

Adroitly directed by Kevin Heckman, this is a sprightly production of Victoria Stewart’s smart if occasionally self-conscious script. The pornography of performance art takes center stage–but we’re not talking Annie Sprinkle. Stewart is less concerned with the politics of porn than she is with the exploitation inherent in documenting social injustices. Demetria Thomas as the imperious academic/performer and Christine Gatto as the sly sex worker she’s interviewing seduce each other with barbs and personal revelations while the artist’s assistant files it all away....

It was only last December that Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Governor Pat Quinn visited the southeast side to promote the creation of the great Millennium Reserve—140,000 acres of wildlife and park space ideal for hiking, bird-watching, and Thoreau-like contemplation of nature. Now, just a few months later, Ninth Ward alderman Anthony Beale, one of the mayor’s City Council allies, is proposing an ordinance that would lift the city’s moratorium on landfills that had been operating near the proposed reserve—meaning the recreational frontier could be threatened by smog, noise, noxious odors, and potential runoff or leaks from the dumping sites....