Rick Aguilar Studios Caged Dames Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

From the Ages Red Bull Sound Select, a nationwide live music program that matches up big touring names with local artists, comes to Chicago for the third time on Saturday. Leaning towards punk and more experimental acts, Red Bull’s previous Chicago stops included sets from synthy indie-pop band Metric and electronic ambient artist Tim Hecker. This time around, the energy drink giants bring San Diego instrumental trio Earthless to the Empty Bottle—their first visit to Chicago since 2009....

ARTIST: Ryan Duggan SHOW: Slippery Slope’s three-year anniversary party on Sun 8/27 MORE INFO: ryanduggan.com

Q I am currently a senior in high school, but come Saturday, I will be a high-school grad! (Fuck yeah!) The only thing I’m worried about besides my hopes and dreams and making it in the real world? My sex life. I’m a virgin. When I go online, I see all my friends and peers having these crazy, awesome, smoking-hot sex lives. I am obsessed with this guy in my class....

Though they don’t do much to disguise their influences, this quartet from New Haven, Connecticut, kick up a deeply satisfying din by burrowing into their psychedelic comfort zone. On the recent eponymous album, their sixth full-length in total but first for Chicago’s ever-reliable Trouble in Mind imprint, Mountain Movers use five extended tracks to reflect different points of reference: “I Could Really See Things” suggests a more extroverted Spacemen 3, “Everyone Cares” embraces a loose, almost jazzy groove and a languid vocal sound recalling the Velvet Underground, and “Vision Television” conveys the shambling, distended thrust of Swell Maps....

Barney the Elf The Other Theatre Company’s tentative entry into Chicago’s already crowded field of campy, shlocky holiday shows suffers from fidgety staging, cluttered choreography, simplistic plotting, unnecessary musical numbers, and parody lyrics of pop and Broadway standards more workmanlike than clever. But Bryan Renaud’s alternately childlike and crude romp gets the most important element right: the unaccountable love affair between Barney, an incessantly cheery elf banished from the gay-unfriendly North Pole, and Zooey, a vain, cynical Chicago drag queen....

The film has become a severe threat to my freedom, and I’m forced to treat it accordingly,” wrote WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a message to Oscar-winning documentary maker Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) that she reads in voice-over near the end of Risk. The movie chronicles her increasingly tangled six-year professional relationship with Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since June 2012, fighting extradition to Sweden on rape charges, and now faces the renewed efforts of the U....

Courtesy of the artist No, it’s cool, it’s not like your ancestors killed them all or anything, Jen Mussari In my closet there’s a shirt with a giant outline of the Hindu deity Ganesha on the front. Whenever I see the shirt, I think of cultural appropriation and view the shirt skeptically—I wonder if, when I wore it, other people around me looked at it the same way. Hamid identifies herself as a British Pakistani and wears a keffiyeh to support Syria, Palestine, and suppressed Islamic countries....

On Girlpool‘s 2015 album, Before the World Was Big, Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad sing, “Is it pouring out my body? / My nervous aching? / I like that you can see it.” They’ve evolved on their subsequent releases, but they still honor the venerable indie tradition of diaristic lyrics whose openness borders on exhibitionistic—they’re not growing just as musicians but also as people, figuring out what their needs are, processing their motives and feelings, and learning to take responsibility for themselves....

Rainer Maria have as many lives as a cat. Formed in 1995 in Madison, Wisconsin, the three-piece emerged with a style and energy that situated them comfortably within the ranks of other midwestern emo bands of the day: their sound combined trembling, loosely woven guitars with half-screamed vocals volleyed between bassist Caithlin De Marrais and guitarist Kaia Fischer. But as Ian Cohen wrote in a recent Stereogum interview with the group, when Rainer Maria called it quits in 2006, they did so as a quintessential Brooklyn indie band, successful enough to sell out big clubs and tour full-time....

Courtesy Chicago Yacht Club Parade of Boats Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

Earlier this summer, Chicago soul artist Christian JaLon released “Getting to Know Vinyled Love,” a short behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of her 2017 EP Vinyled Love. On that EP, she’d tried to convey what love means to her—though it was inspired by a specific relationship, she connected those feelings to her understanding of divine love, which has its roots in her connection to the church. But now that relationship is over, and on her latest EP, If You Let Me (released August 20), JaLon is ready to cleanse her musical mind of love—at least romantic love....

Spike Lee believes Chi-Raq will save lives on the south side of Chicago and beyond—but so far he’s done a poor job of articulating how that will happen. “I don’t think that comes from a messianic point of view,” Cusack said. “But if Spike or other artists didn’t believe that art didn’t have the possibility for a voice for change, then we wouldn’t do it. There’s a part of us that believes art is supposed to effect change....

Today the results of the annual jazz critics’ poll organized by Francis Davis were published on NPR’s A Blog Supreme, the poll’s home for the past couple years. (The poll started at the Village Voice, then moved to Rhapsody before landing at NPR.) Rudresh Mahanthappa and Maria Schneider tied for top honors. Below is the ballot I submitted for the poll, which includes several selections that landed in the top ten....

It’s been a brutal year. A lot of darkness has crossed our thresholds, so that even when we make time to celebrate—to embrace life and joy—we can never entirely escape all the reasons to do the opposite. With winter poised to strike and our TV and computer screens continually stained with what look like signs of the apocalypse, it’s a fine time to consider five of 2015’s most wretchedly, painfully slow albums—they don’t even try to put the “fun” in “funeral doom,” and that feels awfully appropriate....

Jessica Miglio/FOX Without a Batman, the cops (Donal Logue, Ben McKenzie) are Gotham’s “good guys.” Are we so averse to the thought of seeing Ben Affleck’s lantern jaw under the iconic cowl that we’ve retconned Batman right out of the story? OK, that’s not exactly what’s happening on Fox’s Gotham, a new series by Bruno Heller (Rome, The Mentalist). But it is a Batman-less existence for the denizens of Gotham, a city where billionaires are gunned down in alleys, the police dance with the devil—er, mob—in the pale moonlight, and innocent children are orphaned....

Changeling Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood’s latest film, opened this Friday, and it’s based on the popular stage musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Eastwood strikes me as the ideal director to translate this story to screen because many of his films are alternately affectionate and critical explorations of forms and customs indigenous to American art and culture, including jazz (Bird), country music (Honkytonk Man), the film western (Unforgiven, Bronco Billy), and now, doo-wop....

The Beguiled Each Friday, we recommend seven Old Movies to Watch Now, all of which come recommended by one of our critics and can currently be screened online. Read the review, watch the movie, feel accomplished. • The Thief of Bagdad, Raoul Walsh’s silent Douglas Fairbanks vehicle.

When an oyster is perfectly shucked—that is, when its shucker is dexterous with his knife and neatly separates the creature’s shell without scrambling its stomach, feathery gills, or invisibly beating heart, or chipping off any nacreous shrapnel into its delicate anatomy—and then is gently laid on a bed of crushed ice without losing a drop of its precious liquor, it is still alive. I can’t think of very many animals you can eat live without getting arrested....