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Has Chicago reached Street Fest glut? “Heck yeah!” is my response, as well as the chronic complaint from owners of our beloved music venues whose business drops dramatically every summer as they compete with events ranging from Lollapalooza and Pitchfork to Ribfest and Rock Around the Block. Now a well-reported piece by Paul Wilson on the Roscoe View Journal reaches the same conclusion.

Despite the new challenges the city is placing in the way of street fairs, which were protested loud and clear at the festival-organizers’ “ground-truthing” meeting for the cultural plan, they continue to proliferate.

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Many and widely varyied in quality are coming-of-age films charting the journey of a troubled teen from the world of the lonely outsider to a member of a small but vibrant alternative society offering acceptance, excitement and pride in weirdo geekdom. But I’ve rarely seen one that captures punk rock as the ideal vehicle for this trip as well as Matthew Lillard’s Fat Kid Rules the World.

Based on the 2003 young adult novel by KL Going, the movie made its premier at the South by Southwest Film Festival earlier this year. I missed it there, and its limited release came and went quicker than a hardcore punk tune. But I finally caught up with it last weekend after watching Lillard talk about his decade-in-the-making labor of love in a brief preview for Comcast On Demand.

Lillard, 42, probably is best known for Scream or playing Shaggy in the 2002 Scooby-Doo film (though he also appeared in the much cooler SLC Punk).

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Psychedelia always has been one of many strains running through the long and fruitful career of the great Neil Young. Remember those otherworldly acoustic idylls like “Expecting to Fly,” or better yet, the long, languid guitar jams in songs such as “Mr. Soul,” “Cortez the Killer” and “Down by the River.” So when the 67-year-old musical giant entitles his 35^th studio album Psychedelic Pill and announces that the music will cover two CDs or three vinyl album sides—recorded with the mighty Crazy Horse, no less!—well, there’s reason aplenty for high expectations, if you’ll pardon the pun.

In fact, after nearly a decade apart, this is Young’s second release backed by rhythm guitarist Frank “Pancho” Sampedro, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina this year, following their jaunt through the antique folk songbook on Americana.

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The consultant who spoke about great strides forward in security at the troubled Congress Theater during Wednesday’s fourth Deleterious Impact/Public Nuisance Hearing is a former Chicago police officer fired in June 2011 for what the Police Board called “dangerous and offensive conduct.”

Bill Whelehan is one of three managers of BluCorp Consultants listed in state corporate filings. He formed the new company in February with his father, a retired police lieutenant also named Bill, and his brother-in-law, John Curry, who still serves on the police force. The firm began providing security to the Congress, its first major client, about 10 weeks ago.

The younger Whelehan, the point person for the firm at the theater, was fired by a unanimous vote of the nine-member Police Board after an altercation with a neighbor over an errant pet in November 2009 on the city’s far Northwest Side.

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In keeping with Halloween tradition, last weekend’s episode of Sound Opinions once again was devoted to great, scary rock songs. But after several years of doing this, we decided to narrow our focus a bit for 2012: This time, we highlighted our favorite songs specifically about monsters.

As I noted in passing during the show, no one in the history of rock n’ roll has written more classic songs about monsters than Austin, Tex., troubadour Roky Erickson. But I couldn’t devote all of my picks to this underappreciated genius. That sort of self-indulgence I reserve for this space!

Roky’s monster music dominated the second phase of his career. He first made his mark on the scene in the mid-’60s with the pioneering psychedelic rock band the 13th Floor Elevators.

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Building from the sparse beginning of an oddly percolating heartbeat rhythm and a barely discernable whispered mantra (“Gotta be above it, gotta be above it…”), presumably voiced by bandleader Kevin Parker, to waves of undulating synthesizer, layers of heavily affected guitars and the barely more expansive but more assertively delivered lines, “Know that I gotta be above it now/And I can’t let them all just let bring me down,” Australia’s Tame Impala sets the agenda for its second album on the opening track, “Be Above It.”

The music goal, as with all great psychedelic rock, is to take the listener on a journey to alien worlds—sometimes beguiling, sometimes inscrutable but always wildly imaginative. The lyrics, meanwhile, seek to transcend the everyday in that fabled journey toward what ol’ Aldous Huxley called “the white light.”

What, exactly, is Tame Impala trying to rise above?

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