In the years since Lollapalooza became a destination festival in 2005, organizers C3 Presents have perfected a formula for success. The fest’s tenure in Grant Park has outlasted its original seven-year run as an alt-rock package tour, and three-day passes to the 2014 version were all snapped up in March, before the lineup was even made public. Single-day passes became available a few days later, after the lineup announcement, and they were gone within two hours....

Since emerging at the start of the decade, Seattle singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas (who performs as Perfume Genius) has displayed steady growth and a dramatic expansion of sound, morphing from a soulful albeit tortured piano balladeer into a full-blown art-pop experimenter. His new album No Shape (Matador) was produced by Blake Mills, and it situates Hadreas’s rich, androgynous singing in the widest array of contexts yet, all of them far more explicitly pop than his previous efforts....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, March 29, 2017. Rauner predicts that Rahm won’t be mayor in 2023 Governor Bruce Rauner doesn’t think Mayor Rahm Emanuel will have a fourth term as mayor based on how he’s planning to pay for pension contributions—with proposed tax increases on water and sewer services. “Who’s not going to be mayor in 2023?” Rauner said at an event. “The current mayor is not going to be mayor in 2023....

Both Boystown and Dadville will be hopping this weekend. Pride Fest kicks off on Saturday, and Sunday is Father’s Day. So welcome, allies of LGBTQ rights and, um, dad’s right to strut naked in the racquet ball locker room, to a gorgeous Chicago weekend of celebratory things to do. (We’ve compiled a complete list of this month’s Pride events as well.) Sat 6/17-Sun 6/18: Gold Coast Art Fair (100 S. Lake Shore) celebrates its 60th year by displaying works of art from over 300 artists from around the world....

Over the last few months Mayor Emanuel has repeatedly vowed to use every tool at his disposal to help end the murders on the city’s south and west sides. The mayor established the approximately $20 million fund last year to provide property tax rebates to home owners who couldn’t afford his tax hike, intended to finally pay off our pension obligations. Indulge me for a moment as I return to a happier time in Chicago finances, when former alderman Richard Mell offered this breathless ode to Daley during the council’s debate on the Skyway deal: It’s good to know that pensioners somewhere are benefiting from our largesse—too bad they’re in another country....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, May 16, 2017. Northwestern study links high blood pressure to segregated neighborhoods Segregated neighborhoods have a “powerful effect” on blood pressure levels, according to a new study led by a Northwestern University researcher and published in the JAMA journal Internal Medicine. The study tracked 2,820 African-Americans over decades and discovered that the subjects who left highly segregated neighborhoods experienced a drop in blood pressure, the Tribune reports....

Twin Peaks | 1:00 Artists’ names are in the color of the stage they’re appearing on. See our previews of the bands playing on Friday and Sunday. Pitchfork main » Circulatory System | 1:55 Brooklyn songwriter Lorely Rodriguez attracted Pitchfork’s attention with “Hat Trick,” a bubbling, gauzy single where she sustains a late-summer-evening mood with just a couple of synths and pedals and the upper register of her ghostly voice. The recent “Realize You,” on the other hand, collides her ethereal singing with cacophonous percussion in a way that makes the track sound like a slightly outre take on freestyle, the soap-operatic dance music that dominated New York and Miami airwaves some 20 years ago....

Born in 2002, the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival celebrates its 13th birthday this winter with a marathon bar—or possibly bat—mitzvah party featuring 150 sketch troupes. Ten thousand guests are expected at Sketchfest, which unfolds over two long weekends, January 9 through 19. Among the relatives flying in from out of town are Brooklyn’s Boat (Fri-Sat 1/10-1/11, 9 PM), whose dry, smart wit references sources from Chekhov to The Usual Suspects, and Fuct (Fri-Sat, 1/17-1/18, 10 PM), also from New York but gravitating more toward routines about shooting babies and drinking spit....

There are scenes in American politics so familiar you could watch them with the sound off and not miss a thing. Near the top of that list has to be the public apology for infidelity. In fact, the disgraced politician’s words of remorse and promises to reform only distract from the spectacle’s most fascinating figure: the mute, shell-shocked wife standing next to the podium where her husband is trying with all his might to look and sound sincerely disgusted with himself....

It was only a few weeks ago that Mayor Rahm delivered a budget address in which he praised himself for doing the responsible—although boring and unpopular—thing of raising taxes to free future Chicagoans of onerous obligations. Oh, if Rahm were only so accommodating to, say, the mental health needs of low-income people in high-crime areas. When the City Council approves a TIF district, it basically freezes for 23 years the amount of property taxes the schools, parks, library, city, county, etc....

It was finally sultry when I bellied up to the bar. I wanted a front row seat! Summer was here and only house made bubbles could slake my thirst. My immediate neighbors were two gleaming faucets beaded with perspiration; one sparkling and one still. I ordered three sodas total. And an iced tea: A supremely friendly, chill vibe pervaded the light filled space. The Louvin Brothers’ “Satan is Real” played on the turntable at one point....

Usually our coverage of the Chicago Underground Film Festival ends with a roundup of notable short works playing on various bills—but this year, the last shall be first. Some of the most inventive and exciting stuff at CUFF comes in small packages, so why not give them the attention they deserve? In a way, shorts are even more underground than features because they cost so much less to produce. The only way to be more underground would be not to make a film at all....

After 35 years of profound confounding, it’s a wonder the Melvins have any “firsts” and “never done befores” left. But they claim that the brand-new A Walk With Love & Death (Ipecac) is their only double album to date. That’s a little bit misleading, though. Album one, Death, now, that’s a real Melvins record—from the eerily percolating, almost Pere Ubu-like “Black Heath” to the huge, shrieking barn burner “Euthanasia” to the heavy psych chug of “Edgar the Elephant....

Jerry Williams (formerly known as Little Jerry Williams) has been knocking out bizarre R&B records for 48 years under the name Swamp Dogg. Since his 1970 debut on Canyon, Total Destruction to Your Mind, he’s taken his music down some weird back roads: a black-liberation song with an admitted Ku Klux Klan member on banjo (“Call Me Nigger”), a tender ballad about a man whose son is engaged to a hooker (“Or Forever Hold Your Peace”), and entire albums devoted to country and calypso—Dogg claims his version of John Prine’s “Sam Stone” would have been a hit if only Al Kooper hadn’t released his recording of the track around the same time....

Time Bandits 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 Naked City, Jules Dassin’s classic thriller.

Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses plays in the adults-only portion of this year’s cat-related experimental film program. There are way too many good screenings scheduled for tomorrow night, presenting Chicago cinephiles with their greatest dilemma since, well, last Friday, when there were concurrent revivals of The Ladykillers, Knife in the Water, and Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (the latter screens again tonight, thankfully). The weeklong runs of James Gray’s masterful The Immigrant and Sam Fleischner’s flawed (yet courageous) Stand Clear of the Closing Doors conclude at the Siskel Center and Facets Multimedia, respectively....

When Trina Robbins was around 11 or 12 years old, her mother, a schoolteacher, would bring home reams of paper and lots of number-two pencils. After carefully folding the sheets in half (and diligently gnawing away at the pencils’ erasers) Robbins would draw herself four-page comics. She remembers one that was inspired by her fascination with the “goddess” behind green goddess dressing. “Why,” she remembers her heroine exclaiming upon discovering the goddess’s temple, “she’s green!...

Q: As a queer man of color—I’m Asian—I feel wounded whenever I am exposed to gay men in New York City, Toronto, or any city where white gay men dominate. Gay men, mostly whites and Asians, reject me because of my race, and no one admits to their sexual racism. I understand that sexual attraction is subconscious for many people. But it is unfair for a gay Asian like myself to be constantly marginalized and rejected....

Narrative opacity collides with emotional brutality in Philip Ridley’s 2011 play, now making its local premiere with the new-to-Chicago Quick + Dirty Productions after a run in Portland, Oregon. A man (David Lind) and a woman (Rebecca Ridenour) trade tales of violence and domination—from rape-by-grenade to castration. Sometimes their stories involve fantastical sea creatures and monkeys. References to a birthday party, a young child (shades of George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?...

Getty Images/iStockphoto 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.