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Lollapalooza’s officially sanctioned afterparties (and a few preparties on Wednesday and Thursday) give fans unwilling to brave the festival’s heat and crowds or unable to score a ticket opportunities to see some of its standout acts; for festival attendees with a high tolerance for exhaustion, the shows provide the chance to watch live music almost around the clock. The events take place at a wide range of venues, not only in terms of size and atmosphere but also in terms of location—Thievery Corporation vocalist LouLou is doing an afterfest DJ set at a club inside the Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, Indiana....

MILK sss The opening credits of Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic of the slain gay-rights leader Harvey Milk, play out against black-and-white archival footage of police raiding a Miami gay bar. As Danny Elfman’s elegiac strings swell on the soundtrack, patrons are hustled out by the cops, covering their faces, oppressed by their own shame. One of them, frustrated by the camera’s glare as he sits at the bar, hurls his drink at the lens; outside, men are jammed into the paddy wagon like cattle....

When Gloria Barrios made the risky journey across the U.S.-Mexico border in the early 1980s, she had to leave her only child behind. Five-year-old Blanca Luna arrived a few years later with relatives. Thanks to the “amnesty” law of 1986, she and her mother were both able to become U.S. citizens. She was scheduled to graduate March 10, after which she planned to head home to Pilsen for some family time before being reassigned for more training....

Between 1904 and 1906, James Joyce tried to write an autobiographical novel called “Stephen Hero,” but he grew frustrated with the manuscript and abandoned it (it was published posthumously in 1944). A decade later, armed with the publication of his short-story collection Dubliners, he revisited this failed pass at a first novel, emphasizing the psychology of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, and experimenting with language and form to create A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man....

Black Ensemble Theater A performance of “the best of the best” of Black Ensemble Theater follows a champagne and hors d’oeuvres reception. After the show there’s an open mike and dancing. a8 PM, Black Ensemble Theater, 4520 N. Beacon, 773-769-5541, $100. ComedySportz Theatre Two shows: a family-friendly one with an early countdown (6 PM, $21) and a later one with party favors, drink specials, a champagne toast, and a retro dance party afterward (10 PM, $30)....

New Too Cipollina1543 N. Damen | 773-227-6300 “Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided,” declared Marcel Duchamp. So he’d have to scoff at Michael Taus, whose chummy Bucktown spot Duchamp is aesthetically delectable in a couple ways. Unlike the chef’s pricier Zealous, most main courses here run between $15 and $20, and for that kind of money they’re a lot more satisfying than might be expected. We approached a crispy fried skate wing “fish-and-chips” with tartar sauce with some unease, but the dense pieces of fish held up well to the oil under the bread-crumb batter (though the garlic spuds on the side didn’t)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The folks at Insight Studios, a tattoo and piercing joint at 1026 N. Milwaukee, may like to stick pointy things into people (in the name of creative expression, of course!), but they’re committed to being nice to animals–they’ve organized a benefit blowout this weekend for Anti-Cruelty Society of Chicago. This Friday through Sunday, 100 percent of the shop’s profits will be donated to the organization, and there are two benefit concerts as well....

QThere was a letter in your column recently that must have been painful for you to receive. I refer to the letter signed God Hates You. I’m sure you’re no stranger to hate mail, being an openly gay sex-advice columnist, but I hope you get fan mail too. Just in case not, I wanted you to know that your column means a lot to me. I love your bluntness, openness, and honesty....

Kevin Tanaka/For Sun-Times Media Sheriff Tom Dart says the Cook County jail population could be reduced by as much as a third without any threat to public safety. Cook County sheriff Tom Dart is the local jailer, the guy responsible for overseeing nearly 10,000 inmates deemed unfit to go free by prosecutors and judges. He said that’s especially true at the county jail, where most inmates haven’t yet been tried for the crimes they’re accused of....

Last month Chicago sound artist J.R. Robinson, aka Wrekmeister Harmonies, gathered a team of musicians to perform the lone track from his recently released You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me (Thrill Jockey), a 38-minute ambient composition inspired by black metal. Robinson found a perfect venue to play his haunting and beautiful music—the Bohemian National Cemetery in North Park—and to top things off the show fell on the very same night that the supermoon appeared in the sky....

CULTURE GLBTQ 23 Shopping & Services 35 Emil Bach House Built in 1915 for the co-owner of a brick works, the Bach house is one of the few examples of Frank Lloyd Wright’s late Prairie School work within Chicago city limits—a compact, urban configuration of the cantilevers and boxy massing found, for instance, in Oak Park’s Laura Gale house. The interior embodies Wright’s pioneering open plan, and still contains fixtures and furnishings specially designed for it by the architect....

The Tempest Steppenwolf Theatre CompanyOLD TIMES City Lit Theater4PINTER AstonRep Theatre Company at Peter Jones Gallery Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Bard even wrote a role for the winter: Prospero, from The Tempest. Running now at Steppenwolf Theatre in a slow-building but ultimately fascinating and delightful production directed by Tina Landau, the play is thought to have been Shakespeare’s last—and Prospero, an old nobleman who’s spent his years learning and working magic, a poeticized version of the playwright....

Thursday2 Chicago Symphony Orchestra and ChorusSuperchunkMichael Thieke Canceled Friday3 Sonny BurgessChicago Symphony Orchestra & ChorusDoomtree Saturday4 Chicago Symphony Orchestra & ChorusGalactic InmateEd Herrmann, Jason Adasiewicz, Adam Vida, and Sam HertzLoVidRootsMichael Thieke Sunday5 Chris Speed’s Endangered Blood Monday6 Jeffree StarTalk Normal Tuesday7 Dans les Arbres SUPERCHUNK Majesty Shredding (Merge) is the first new Superchunk album in nine years—a gap almost half as long as the Chapel Hill band’s career—so it’s not surprising that they’d spend part of the record looking back, half wondering where the time went: on “Fractures in Plaster” front man Mac McCaughan pleads, “When the past proves hard to resist / You’ll keep a loose grip on my wrist, won’t you?...

Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies Second City Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Spoiler Alert isn’t one of those holy-shit epoch-making Second City shows everybody hopes for. It’s modest, amiable, and resolutely conventional at heart. Even, perhaps in unconscious homage to the company’s 50th anniversary, a little retro. The sketches—22 of them, which in itself is about average—hit all the familiar tropes, topics, formats, and tonalities....

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times Media Mike Frerichs. Problem Solved. Someone needs to be appointed Illinois comptroller to succeed the late Judy Baar Topinka, who died suddenly this week. The situation is perplexing. Cross wasn’t elected. He lost a squeaker to Mike Frerichs. I’m not sure what the state constitution has to say on the subject, but in a sensible world one governor or the other would appoint Frerichs comptroller too. It would be an elegant way to save millions of dollars, and during the four years of Frerich’s double term, Illinois could amend its constitution to make the arrangement permanent....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “This phenomenon is not mysterious,” says Allen Taflove, a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University who has studied the hazards of electricity carried by high-voltage transmission lines. “The electrical infrastructure gets old, and insulation around wires degrades. Some of the wires might have been buried decades ago.” He says moisture and salt contribute to the deterioration and help conduct underground currents to the surface....

Every year around this time I get lost in the forest’s worth of food books released before the holidays, most of which would best serve as kindling. But often there are a handful of extraordinary ones I’d proudly give as presents. A resurrection of the lost art of punch making, a tombstone-size monument to Nordic haute cuisine, and a collection of kitchen atrocities from metalheads are among my ten favorites this year....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The city’s immediate budget problems may be lessened, if not wiped out, by the deal to privatize Midway Airport that the Daley administration announced Tuesday. It will almost certainly win approval from the City Council—the quick dividends will be too much to pass up in this tumultuous economic climate, and aldermen won’t have much expertise except the administration’s to use for evaluating the deal....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But thanks to the Internet, even Americans can read what she thinks in a long interview in Eurozine, where, among other things, she contrasts liberalism and libertarianism. “If you go out into the rural areas of Bihar in India, then you see what ‘negative liberty’ [a libertarian ideal] comes to. Total chaos, where nothing is being done, where there are no roads, no clean water supply, no electricity, and therefore where no one can do anything, no one has anything....

Cakes da Killa’s already been lumped in with Le1f, Mykki Blanco, and all of the other gay New York rappers that other gay New York rappers always get compared to. But on “Goodies,” the first single from The Eulogy—his Mishka-sponsored follow-up to 2011’s Easy Bake Oven—he most closely resembles the Bay Area’s E-40, with whom he shares a taste for bouncy beats and cramming as many syllables as possible into every bar....