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Babymetal have really just one joke, but it’s a solid one. Since the band’s self-titled debut album in 2014, their formula has become familiar: Suzuka Nakamoto (Su-metal) sings chipper Japanese J-pop while dressed in gothy black dresses, and metalhead producer Key Kobayashi (Kobametal) provides a background of chunky death riffage and lightning-fast technical guitar solos. On the recent singles released ahead of their forthcoming album, Metal Galaxy (BMD Fox/Toy’s Factory/Amuse, Inc....

Riot Fest riotfest.org Runner-Up: Pitchfork Music Festival

Maria Burnham Katie Ruppert Finalists: Ike Holter, Ross Compton

Jennifer Romano dreamtown.com/​agents/​jennifer-romano.html Runner-Up: Nolan Code

Independent Spirits Runner-Up: Lush

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, June 22, 2016. Cullerton blames Chicago Public Schools funding crisis on Rauner Illinois senate president John Cullerton told parents at Coonley Elementary that Governor Bruce Rauner is the chief obstacle to CPS solving its funding crisis. His explanation didn’t go over very well—Coonley parents quickly blamed Cullerton for being a part of the Springfield dysfunction. “It just feels like there is a lot of finger-pointing at Governor Rauner, who is a very easy target to point fingers at—his ideas are radical, as far as I’m concerned....

The car-sharing service Car2go will largely be steering clear of the south side during a pilot of the program—and transportation advocates are not happy. The service, approved by aldermen March 28, allows members to check out a vehicle, usually a two-seater Smart car, and end their trip at any legal curbside parking space, which makes it handy for errands and traveling the first or last mile to or from a transit station....

Earlier this year Numero Group released Ultra-High Frequencies: The Chicago Party, a compilation tribute to the local Saturday-night UHF program. Filmed at a south-side nightclub called the CopHerBox II, The Chicago Party only aired in 1982, and the folks at Numero Group pulled the best scenes from the show’s 23-episode run for a 100-minute DVD “mixtape,” most of which features ambitious Chicago soul and disco groups looking for a chance to shine....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Cooper S. Beckett, 38, swinger, pegging enthusiast, relationship coach, host of the Life on the Swingset podcast, and author of the memoir My Life on the Swingset: Adventures in Swinging & Polyamory and the novel A Life Less Monogamous. “Swinging sort of muted our problems for a while, but nonmonogamy is not a fixer, so ultimately they came back, and we recognized that we were better off not married....

The latest Key Ingredient, in which local chefs challenge fellow chefs with an ingredient of their choice. Rinkavage located the ingredient at Mayflower Market in Chinatown, where she says there’s a whole section for jellyfish, including flavored and instant versions. “In my mind, instant jellyfish is like those little dolls you have when you’re a kid that you put in water and they blow up,” she says. There were also jars of jellyfish that looked like “little alien hand things....

On the morning of Election Day, there seemed to be little doubt which image would appear on the cover of the issue that we’d send to press Wednesday before dawn. Piggybacking on Cubs fever, illustrator Johnny Sampson depicted a victorious Hillary Clinton being hoisted on the shoulders of a racially diverse baseball team as she unfurled a W flag. The Democratic nominee seemed like a sure thing—she started the day as the favorite with a 70 percent chance of winning, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who’s perhaps the most prominent of the many data analysts who’ve had to eat crow in the days since Trump’s upset....

The 1943 Harlem riots broke out on August 1, just a few days after the photographer Gordon Parks moved to the neighborhood. He considered shooting the chaos around him, but decided against it. “The police would only think I stole the camera and take it from me,” he wrote in a memoir years later. “Harlem Is Nowhere” was intended to focus on the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, the first racially integrated psychiatric clinic in New York City....

Guan tang jiao zi at Qing Xiang Yuan Dumpling An alternative to the difficult-to-make and notoriously unreliable buns known as xiao long bao, guan tang jiao zi, another version of soup-filled dumplings, are pot-sticker-size bundles of love inside of which the meat filling has been mixed with water, effectually creating stock when the dumpling are boiled. Not every single one is perfect, but at Qing Xiang Yuan Dumpling, in the Richland Mall basement food court, a great majority, each one made to order, literally burst with hot soup....

William Powell, author of The Anarchist Cookbook, died this past July at age 66. Published at the height of the counterculture movement in 1971, the book is a how-to guide for manufacturing bombs, weapons, and LSD, a subversive method of advocacy for a violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Powell and The Anarchist Cookbook are thoroughly examined in filmmaker Charlie Siskel’s latest documentary, American Anarchist, which screens as part of the Chicago International Film Festival this weekend....

DEAR READERS: I’m on vacation for the next three weeks—but you won’t be reading old columns while I’m away. You’ll be getting a new column every week, all of them written by Dan Savage, none of them written by me. A: Communication in any relationship is key. On the basketball court, one of the first things young players are taught is to communicate effectively with their teammates. They’re required to call out plays, offensive assignments, and defensive rotations in order to prevent breakdowns and keep the system working smoothly....

Ad Hoc [Home] Thirteen members of the About Face Youth Theatre Ensemble, aged 14-24, present an hour-long theatrical collage of autobiographical reflections about growing up queer. Developed by the ensemble members themselves through improvisation and writing workshops, the devised performance piece employs monologues, scenes, and choral speaking passages addressing the challenges and triumphs of being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and genderqueer. Some of the coming-out/coming-of-age stories have a familiar ring—parents who tell their kids that their discomfort with gender norms is “just a phase,” for example....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Decades ago, Bryan Ferry succumbed to an ailment that I’ve dubbed “Cheap Trick Syndrome”: that is, when young, hungry artists winkingly dive into a genre with tongue planted firmly in cheek but eventually become the very thing they were once all but parodying. Cheap Trick’s gleeful, over-the-top late-70s take on arena rock devolved by the 80s into soggy, irony-free, lighters-aloft anthems such as “The Flame” (they share the category “bands who’ve gone from fun to flaccid” with Van Halen)....