One of the first musical subcultures I got excited about as a kid was LA’s early- to mid-80s Paisley Underground scene, one of the first neo-psychedelic movements in the U.S.—I was thrilled by the music but uninterested in the chemical mind alteration it often seemed to imply or encourage. So while I was happy to buy a paisley shirt at a vintage store, when I went to a concert by the Three O’Clock and somebody handed me a small paper cup with a sugar cube in it, I got nervous....

Sometimes a record label finds a sweet spot, locking in on an aesthetic that keeps you enthralled. That’s exactly what Bill and Lisa Roe of Trouble in Mind Records have been doing for me with one irresistibly hooky rock band after another. Not every act has staying power, and some are unapologetically mining aesthetics developed decades ago, but nearly every Trouble in Mind release over the past couple years has sounded great to me....

Alaska Thunderfuck knows the power of a catchphrase. She answers the phone with a nasal, drawn-out “hieeee,” her hashtag-ready greeting from the fifth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Since finishing as runner-up in 2013, Alaska (real name Justin Andrew Honard) has become glamazon royalty, touring with RuPaul’s Battle of the Seasons, showing up on other queens’ singles, and working as a spokesmodel for American Apparel. Courtesy the artist Alaska Thunderfuck...

Chicago Hot Dog Fest A celebration of the Chicago dog and Vienna Beef featuring bites from local vendors along with a performance by Robert Cornelius & Friends paying tribute to Prince. 8/11-8/13: Fri-Sat 11 AM-9 PM, Sun 11 AM-8 PM, Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark, 312-642-4600, chicagohotdogfest.com, $5 suggested donation. Wizard World Comic Con Nerd out to the max with four days of science fiction, fantasy, film, horror, anime, manga, cosplay, comic books, card games, and celebrity appearances....

Before Slow Roll Chicago cofounder Oboi Reed could get back to work advocating for transportation equity in black and Latino communities, he first had to overcome the medical condition that Sir Winston Churchill reportedly called his “black dog”—clinical depression. In early 2016, about a year and a half after he helped launch the bike group, which promotes cycling in the south and west sides as a strategy to improve health and economic outcomes and reduce violence, he experienced a crippling depressive episode that put him out of commission for the next year and a half....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Fashion writer Lauren Fern was flitting around during a release party for Giorgio Armani’s new self-titled autobiography in the designer’s Oak Street store. Fern stood out, largely due to her knit dress by Gudrun & Gudrun, a brand based in the Faroe Islands whose collections are handmade by women in Jordan and Peru as part of the company’s women’s empowerment projects....

Michael Gebert Paté en croute with heritage pork, wild boar, and foie gras Many of the restaurants that have popped up in the Randolph Street meatpacking district seek to create a little oasis of glamour in the midst of food-industry grittiness. Tete Charcuterie wants you to remember where you are and what they do for a living here. For now the patés and fresh sausages are made in-house, while the salumi is mostly coming from West Loop Salumi across the street....

Like The Hunger Games, Divergent is adapted from a young-adult novel (the first in a trilogy, naturally) and speaks to the postapocalyptic survivalist in every 15-year-old girl. A century after some vaguely referenced world war, all of human society has divided itself into five tribes based on people’s personality type—the smart, the brave, the honest, the selfless, the pacifist—and teenagers choose their affiliation in a public coming-of-age ritual. Young Beatrice (Shailene Woodley) throws in with the brave, or “Dauntless,” much to the consternation of her selfless parents (Ashley Judd, Tony Goldwin)....

We tend to think about culture in America these days as consumable products or ticketed events, and so the “cultural coverage” most media outlets offer is reduced to binary reviews: should one or should one not pay hard-earned money for the product or event in question? (“When I hear the word ‘culture’ I take out my checkbook,” visual artist Barbara Kruger posed in the 1980s.) Yet actual culture today—the musical, gustatory, aesthetic, movement-based, and intellectual pursuits of humans—is in greater flux than even the stock market....

Q: I’m a 31-year-old gay male. I’ve been with my fiance for three years, and we are getting married in the fall. I’ve got a question about initiating sex in my sleep—I read somewhere that “sexsomnia” is the medical term, but maybe the Internet invented that? According to my fiance, I have initiated or performed some kind of sex act in the middle of the night and then gone right back to sleep....

Tord Gustavsen Quartet As the weather starts to warm up, more bands are hitting the road. This is the busiest show weekend of the year thus far, so there’s a whole lot going on if you’re trying to catch some live music. Tonight’s Stephen Malkmus and tomorrow’s Skinny Puppy shows are already sold out, but there’s plenty more to choose from. Bluesman Eric Bibb, a 90s acoustic revivalist, comes to City Winery tonight with Ruthie Foster....

A black hexagonal table sits on a raised platform in the middle of the Logan Square Auditorium‘s cavernous ballroom, illuminated by a spotlight. A gangly referee in aviator sunglasses and tight spandex shorts checks to make sure the handrails at the table’s edge and the elbow pads at its center are fully secured. Next to him stands “Rockke L. Squelch,” mistress of ceremonies. In a white dress that leaves almost nothing to the imagination, her brown hair curled and piled high on her head, Squelch sashays across the stage and belts out a blunt command in a mild eastern European accent: “Let’s get this motherfucker started!...

Mike Sula Hazzard Free Farms’ purple barley Last month when I was going on about the panoply of locally produced foods at Ravenswood’s River Valley Farmer’s Table, I neglected to mention the small stock of obscure grains grown by Hazzard Free Farm in Pecatonica, near Rockford. Hazzard grows a bunch of cool-looking heirloom grains, many sporting unusual colors like Floriani Red Flint cornmeal and Hopi Blue polenta, but what caught my eye was a bag of dusty-looking whole-grain Tibetan purple barley....

Al Podgorski / Sun-Times Media To topple Mayor Rahm Emanuel, his challengers need to keep him under 50 percent in the first round of voting. Now that Alderman Bob Fioretti has announced he’s running for mayor, it’s a good time to remind you—once again—that we have a runoff system for electing mayors in Chicago. I understand why so many Chicagoans are confused. No, the lesson most people learned was to make sure that, from that point forward, no one race would ever risk splitting its racial base by going into an election with more candidates than the other race....

The opening image of Anguish Since invoking Spanish genre entertainment in my review of Non-Stop, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bigas Luna (Jamon, Jamon), the Spanish writer-director who passed away last year at the age of 67. Luna excelled at the flamboyant stylization that I associate with a particular strain of Spanish filmmaking, coupling deliberately outlandish plots with deliberately show-offy camerawork. “Luna’s point,” Fred Camper wrote of his 1998 film Chambermaid on the Titanic (released in the U....

When Peruvian superchef Gastón Acurio touched down in Chicago nearly two years ago he ushered in a new kind of environment for exploring his country’s food. Prior to that if you wanted to enjoy modern Peruvian cuisine’s unique alloy of Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, African, and indigenous influences, you went to one of a half dozen or so mom-and-pop places out in the neighborhoods, some of which excel at a number of things, but few of which consistently deliver on the great scope of what Peru, from mountain to sea, is capable of producing....

If Chicago’s film culture were more sensible, Oliver Laxe’s rapturously beautiful second feature, Mimosas, wouldn’t be playing at Facets Multimedia (where it screens for two more nights), but on every IMAX screen in the city. The chief pleasure of Laxe’s film is how it makes use of monumental locations in Morocco, setting the story against the grand splendors of mountains and wide-open deserts. The story of Mimosas is relatively simple, but the landscapes give it an epic sweep; they also make the story seem to exist outside of time, the eternal majesty of the setting overwhelming any momentary concerns....

Redgrave Into pioneering electronic music? Or maybe super-underground black metal? Well it’s a good weekend to be in Chicago. Tonight Kraftwerk plays a massive 3-D concert at the Riviera, and this weekend we get the fifth installment of the Cathedral of the Black Goat festival. Good weekend if you have tickets already, that is, because both are sold out. Sorry guys. Chinese Sonic Youth enthusiasts Carsick Cars make two appearances in town on Friday: a free in-store at Permanent followed by a later gig at the Burlington....

Courtesy of Def Jam Records Common headlines Aahh! Fest on Sunday. Riot Fest is all done, but World Music Festival is going strong; I suggest digging into our guide to the 11-day blowout to see which of the remaining shows might strike your fancy. There’s plenty of other concerts beyond World Music Festival that are also worth seeing. “As the mastermind behind LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy presented the anxieties of an aging New York hipster via straightforward lyrics and gold-standard musical touchstones (Bowie, Eno, the Fall, New Order, et cetera),” writes Tal Rosenberg....

It’s been 17 years since the husband-and-wife duo of Jon Spencer (of Pussy Galore and Blues Explosion fame) and the confrontational, underrated Cristina Martinez have released a full-length album as Boss Hog—though last year’s EP Brood Star was a tantalizing taste of things to come. Parenthood has had a lot to do with their unapologetic hiatuses—their son, now a college student, is an aspiring electronic musician—and they pick right up with their weird and wailing blues-noise as though they’d tucked the sound away in a time capsule and buried it in a Lower East Side basement in 1989....