A tad rigid, a tad crazy-eyed, with a million-dollar smile and a talent for generating nasal, cartoonlike vocal inflections, Kurt Braunohler was born to be a bizarro-world game show host. And that’s just what he was on IFC’s quirky, improv-based Bunk—at least until the cable network yanked the show last fall. Braunohler infuses his stand-up with the same warm, amiable, this-close-to-putting-a-hatchet-in-your-head persona he brought to Bunk. One of his best bits, built around the people-to-kill list he supposedly hung on his apartment wall as a joke, ends with a stroke of genius no serial killer would be clever enough to pull off....

Marco Ugarte / AP Photo Federal authorities say Alfredo Vasquez-Hernandez was a coordinator for the Sinaloa cartel and its former leader, El Chapo Guzman, who was captured in February. Vasquez-Hernandez denies it. Alfredo Vasquez-Hernandez says he was desperate when he agreed to help coordinate the shipment of 200 kilograms of cocaine from Los Angeles to Chicago. Instead of convincing them to buy into the apartment project, Vasquez-Hernandez says the brothers talked him into helping them move the coke....

It’s been six years since the London-based instrumental groove juggernaut Heliocentrics released their terrific debut album, Out There (Stones Throw), a vibrant collage of funk, hip-hop, Sun Ra-inspired free jazz, and cinematic soundscapes. But the band has hardly been idle, putting out ambitious full-length collaborations with the great Ethio-jazz pianist Mulatu Astatke (Inspiration Information 3) and the peculiar American ethnomusicologist Lloyd Miller (Lloyd Miller and the Heliocentrics). The group’s drummer, Malcolm Catto, continues to work in DJ Shadow’s live band, while percussionist Jack Yglesias recently released a debut album by his superb cross-Atlantic collective, Family Atlantica (Soundway), which weaves together sounds from West Africa, the Carribbean, and South America (and includes guests spots by Astatke and the Senegalese singer Nuru Kane; Catto coproduced)....

Imamura (center) in A Man Vanishes (1967) It’s already a great year for nonfiction cinema in Chicago. On Sunday—only days after concluding its Jean Rouch retrospective—the Gene Siskel Film Center begins a two-week series devoted to Japanese director Shohei Imamura’s documentaries. These films display as much creativity as Rouch’s in their approach to the nonfiction form—and an even greater disregard for journalistic neutrality. Rouch used the term provocation to describe his method of creating real-life events in order to film them, but Imamura’s documentaries are acts of provocation in a literal sense....

For years proletarian filmmaker Ken Loach has been one of the most reliable downers in British cinema, reminding us time and again that the rich get richer and the poor get exploited (unless they can figure out how to exploit someone else). But in his mid-70s Loach has begun to try his hand at comedy, with Looking for Eric (2009) and now this 2012 feature. Eric was an admirable attempt but a failure nonetheless, mainly because its wackier moments seemed so incongruous given the drab Manchester milieu and down-and-out characters....

BRIAN KERSEY/AP Adrian Holovaty The hyperlocal website EveryBlock was shut down Thursday by NBC News. NBC News senior vice president Vivian Schiller told Poynter blogger Jeff Sonderman that EveryBlock was a “wonderful scrappy business but it wasn’t a strategic fit with our growth strategy and — like most hyperlocal businesses — was struggling with the business model.” The good news, I suppose, is that people notice and people are shocked....

For now, my favorite part of Persepolisgate—the latest educational train wreck engineered by the Emanuel administration—is the parent-penis theory. In fact, I’d like to take the time to give a shout-out to the teacher who was one of the first to champion Persepolis in CPS. That would be Nora Flanagan, an award-winning English teacher at Northside College Prep. That’s when librarians started getting calls from the central office that schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett had ordered all copies of Persepolis removed from classrooms and libraries throughout the system....

Kiss Land Last week the world finally got a preview of the highly anticipated official full-length from the Weeknd, aka Toronto’s Abel Tesfaye. Tesfaye made a pretty gigantic impression on the hip-hop and R&B communities in 2011, when he dropped three stellar and highly acclaimed mixtapes on his website. Originally released behind the internet’s hood of anonymity, these three records featured spaced-up, drugged-down production and bleak, desperate lyrics about the dark side of an excessive, glamorous lifestyle sung by a smooth, sweet Michael Jackson soundalike....

When chef Cleetus Friedman landed at the Fountainhead in March, he brought along several items he’d been making at City Provisions, the Ravenswood deli he closed earlier this year. My favorite among them: the smoked hummus. When Friedman was at City Provisions, Barry Sorkin gave him a smoker after Smoque outgrew it, and as Friedman told me a couple years ago, “Every single thing in this kitchen has made it into this smoker in one way or another....

In the vein of Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir about her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, with her ninth novel Cathleen Schine (The Love Letter, The New Yorkers) has sketched a couple mangy young adults living in Manhattan in the mid-1960s—only these ones have trust funds and even more free time on their hands. Fin & Lady opens in 1964 on two orphaned half-siblings, 24-year-old Lady and 11-year-old Fin, whose mother has just died....

I haven’t seen Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby yet, but from what I’ve read about it, it seems like a pretty fitting movie for our times: a meditation on the spiritual dangers of decadent living, filmed in lovingly extravagant 3-D and screened for an audience whose insatiable desire to live beyond its means has helped push the earth to the very brink of economic and ecological catastrophe. But I have heard the movie’s soundtrack, and can more confidently assert that it pretty well reflects what’s happening in pop music right now....

The puppet-friendly peeps at local cable-access dance party Chic-a-Go-Go and D.C. kiddie music show Pancake Mountain are in cahoots to shoot a full-length movie around town this summer—in fact, Gossip Wolf saw ’em filming at Pitchfork. Chic-a-Go-Go honcho (and Reader contributor) Jake Austen tells us that the film, tentatively titled The Gorilla of Grant Park, is a “Scooby Doo-type mystery” about a “gorilla that’s threatening to destroy the world’s biggest music festival....

When local artist John Campbell was featured in Culture Vultures last month he was credited as the creator of the webcomic Pictures for Sad Children, of which I am a longtime on-the-record fan. However, on Monday a message turned up in PfSC’s slot in my RSS reader saying that Campbell was turning the Pictures site into an archive, and has already spent the past few months working on the project that will replace it....

Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) screens this Tuesday. Doc Films kicks off its spring calendar this Monday with Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, the first in a series titled “Women in Film Noir.” There are a number of obvious highlights over the next few months: a rare revival of Agnes Varda’s first feature La Pointe Courte (edited by Alain Resnais!), 35-millimeter prints of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, and an only-at-Doc double feature of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Repo Man....

“Pigeons and starlings and sparrows don’t often hit buildings. I’ve seen a sparrow fly right toward a window, pick off a bug, and fly off in the other direction. The ones that collide with buildings are mostly small migratory birds. In Chicago, we’re on a major flyway. We get indigo buntings, American woodcocks, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, white-throated sparrows, brown creepers. “Picking up a bird that’s injured mostly entails having an appropriately sized paper bag....

Bernie Taupin and Elton John in 1971 Every year on Thanksgiving and Christmas, the city of Chicago celebrates what I like to call antiholidays—with most businesses closed and few cars on the streets, the town seems to be shunning its own people, demanding that we let it have some peace and quiet for once. The antifestivities usually start around midevening the night before the holiday and continue for about 36 hours....

Like many Hollywood sports movies, this Jackie Robinson biopic seems to be pitched at high schoolers, but writer-director Brian Helgeland still manages a pretty absorbing account of Robinson’s rookie year as the first black player in major-league baseball. Chadwick Boseman is appropriately anguished as Robinson, who struggles to control his rage as he absorbs a torrent of abuse from white fans, players, and officials. But ironically, the most valuable player here is Harrison Ford, giving one of the best performances of his career as Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey....

With every smack of the snooze, every discontented groan that another day is underway, there’s also, somewhere, the harmony of beer bottles being popped open and served to patrons of an idiosyncratic world of 7 AM drinking. Mainly catering to blue-collar, third-shift crowds, the city’s early-to-rise saloons are, for the most part, hard-nosed, old-school Chicago—and, like their clientele, set in their ways and firm in their hours. Then there are those bar-liquor-store mutants ready to egg on the party from the night before, probably with some attitude....

It was only the third week of school, and already 12 boys had been killed in gang-related shootings on the south side. Another 42 had been wounded. Shots rang out not just on street corners but in school hallways. In one month, close to four dozen Chicagoans would die in acts of gang violence. Williams and Moore drill down to the block level of gang activity while simultaneously exploring the methods and motivations of the Stones’ upper echelon....

STEVE GULLICK Phosphorescent The weather may not be complying with the calendar, but this week is packed with enough concerts to remind you it’s actually spring. Tonight in particular: there’s Joey Bada$$ at Reggie’s Rock Club, Ron Sexsmith at City Winery, Rhye at Schubas, Devin Hoff Bastet and James Falzone’s Renga Ensemble at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater, and Keiji Haino headlines the first night of the Million Tongues festival at the Empty Bottle....