Mac McCaughan seems to have reached that magical point in his career where a guy can just say the hell with it–his main bands, Superchunk and Portastatic, have pretty much topped out in popularity, and it sounds like he’s decided to quit knocking his head on that ceiling and do whatever he feels like. For Portastatic’s new album, Bright Ideas (Merge), he apparently felt like making rock music so incandescent that it’d all but obliterate my memories of the band’s previous records....

Say It With Ceramics Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ceramist Karen Swyler took naturally to her work: her mother made and sold pottery, and the family ate from her mother’s dinnerware. Swyler started making usable vessels in high school, then in 1994 enrolled in Alfred University’s noted undergraduate ceramics program. But a few years ago, near the end of grad school at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she started making nonfunctional pieces for the first time....

Tom Huck got the inspiration for his work in a flood of blood. He fell in love with printmaking as an undergrad at Southern Illinois University, but by his second year of grad school at Washington University in Saint Louis he’d hit a wall. “I would go to my studio and just sit there, because I didn’t know what I wanted to say.” Huck had been making woodcuts similar to the drawings he’d done earlier, photo-realist renditions of collaged family photos, but at this point was arguing with his instructors and had been put on probation because he wasn’t producing any work....

The Side Project’s midwest premiere of M.R. Fife’s play is certainly dramatic–in a soap opera kind of way. A family has gathered for the matriarch’s funeral, which provokes the usual explosion of secrets and rivalries. The play’s hook, though, is breast cancer, used mercilessly throughout the plot. Fife is not fond of nuance–he even gives the three daughters stock labels they pin on themselves: the martyr, the bitch, and the baby....

Seven years ago city officials stood before the people of Pilsen and vowed to save their relatively high-paying local industrial jobs. Their weapon was a TIF, or tax increment financing district, which would provide funding to help build new industries and keep existing ones from closing. Roughly bounded by 16th Street on the north, Stewart on the east, Western on the west, and the Stevenson on the south, the Pilsen TIF zigzags around the southwest side’s major industrial corridor....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So far they haven’t, but the exit of Jesse Jackson Jr. and Luis Gutierrez from the mayoral race has only appeared to embolden Daley further. At a council meeting last month, when three aldermen dared to interrupt the chorus of acclaim for Daley’s 2007 budget by criticizing city corruption, the mayor ridiculed them. “The inspector general will be in your office tomorrow morning,” he sneered at 28th Ward alderman Ed Smith....

An Unimpeachable Source Three swift boats took part in the operation that day, and Kerry and Rood commanded two of them. According to Rood, the three skippers set out having decided that instead of fleeing the inevitable ambush, their boats–under Kerry’s command–would turn toward shore and counterattack. Rood won a Bronze Star, and the Tribune published the citation from Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt that praised his “courage under fire and exemplary professionalism” as well as the message from task force commander Roy Hoffmann, now one of Kerry’s critics, calling the “extremely successful raid and land sweep…a shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy....

Developer Ross Gambril specializes in shopping malls and industrial parks–recent projects by his firm, Eon Properties, include a sprawling “lifestyle center” on 53 acres of Indiana farmland. But four years ago he and his son, Joe, began a very different project: restoring a 70-year-old home built as a display “house of the future” for the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago. The Wieboldt-Rostone House was a showcase for a new brand of synthetic stone exterior....

The Drive-By Truckers bio heralding their new A Blessing and a Curse (New West) suggests that one such blessing-slash-curse they’ve had to shoulder is the mantle of Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World, thrust upon them from time to time not just by their rabid fans but by people in my dubious profession. Well, yes–with great power comes great responsibility, y’all. The songwriting on the new album doesn’t always hit the bull’s-eye, but that’s a quibble when a band’s got a catalog as deep as the Truckers’....

“When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.” So begins the commentary of this remarkable French documentary (1953, 30 min.) about African sculpture, directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais and shot by Ghislain Cloquet. It’s the first major work for all of these artists (though it comes five years after Resnais’ Van Gogh, which won him his only Oscar to date); the beauty and anger of Marker’s text are perfectly matched by Resnais’ exquisite editing and Cloquet’s piercing images....

A correction and suggestion for the indefatigable Ben Joravsky. The correction: Joravsky identified one of Dan Proft’s clients as the Republican mayor of Cicero in his recent dispatch on Peraica’s election night parade [The Works, November 17]. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Larry Dominick is the president of Cicero and is an independent, both because he was elected on a nonpartisan ballot and because his political organization actively and successfully supports both Democratic and Republican candidates in primary and general elections....

It’s been a whirlwind couple years for Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. Since releasing their second record, the joyfully soulful Naturally, in 2005, they’ve toured Europe, Australia, and the States, played about a dozen festivals, and appeared on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. But the road there has been a long one for Jones. Born in 1956 in James Brown’s childhood home of Augusta, Georgia, and raised in Brooklyn, she dreamed of a career as a singer but couldn’t get further than session work; eventually she took a job as a corrections officer at Rikers Island and sang only in her church....

The Bulls’ media guide this season is bound with a trompe l’oeil cover that gives it the frayed appearance of an aged tome, in keeping with the team’s new slogan, “History in the making.” After all, this was to be the year when phenoms Eddy Curry and Tyson Chandler matured and carried the franchise back to the playoffs for the first time since the Michael Jordan era. It was a concept emphasized in a TV ad campaign set to the hip-hop refrain, “Everything can change in the blink of an eye....

The literary pub crawl Drinking & Writing shows no sign of slowing down. Devised by Neo-Futurists Sean Benjamin, Steve Mosqueda, and Diana Slickman in 2002, this free-form love letter to the union of liquor and language has hopped from bar to bar in Chicago and beyond, spawned a radio show on WLUW, and had a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Now going on year four, Benjamin and Mosqueda have ordered up a celebratory round: the daylong Drinking & Writing Festival, to be hosted by the Hopleaf....

Li’l Roy is a nine-year-old doofus who goes to the circus and never quite makes it home in the Seldoms’ new Li’l Roy and the Weird Sisters, a comic nightmare whose characters also include three sideshow workers with towering beehive hairdos (Cotton Candy, Doily, and Bingo) and three heroines, all danced by choreographer Carrie Hanson: bombshell Brunella, mermaid Aquamarina, and “bawdy gladiator” Ruby, who travels via skateboard. Li’l Roy himself is played by performance artist Doug Stapleton, whose pageboy wig, high-water pants, and Converse sneakers make him look like a young, uncool Elvis....

Friday 11 CENTRO-MATIC The last full-length from Austin roots rockers Centro-Matic came out in 2003, but front man Will Johnson has kept busy. He released his second solo album, Vultures Await, last fall, and his other band, South San Gabriel (Centro-Matic with four additional members), will release its new album, The Carlton Chronicles: Not Until the Operation’s Through (Misra), in April. It’s a concept album told from the point of view of a cat, and if that sounds a little precious to you already, the music and songwriting won’t change your mind....

Hatred is the subject of this feisty sketch show, Triplette’s fourth. Roommates offstage, the three women turn head games into heady humor by exploiting the power dynamics of everyday and only-on-stage situations: a hungry grocery shopper clashes with a free-sample attendant, a woman grows jealous of her shadowy “understudy for life.” In one sequence they play a scene of shopping for lingerie three times: at first their casual banter is polite, then it’s slightly acidic, and finally they vociferously voice the vituperative unsaid....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The history of genetically modified foods doesn’t feature a history of testing appropriate to their innovative character.” That’s Vivian Weil, longtime head of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She and University of Chicago geneticist Jocelyn Malamy did a thorough job of setting the table at the Illinois Humanities Council’s genetics program last Saturday, identifying and distinguishing the issues around genetically modified foods, but that didn’t leave the audience much time to eat....

Angela Desveaux grew up in Nova Scotia and lives in Montreal, but her heart is in old American country. On her debut, Wandering Eyes (Thrill Jockey), her sweet, breathy voice makes her sound younger than 28, but her songs perfectly illuminate pre-thirtysomething concerns, balancing woe and wonder, doubt and rose-colored romanticism. The record isn’t stunning, but it has a warmth that makes it easy to return to, and Desveaux a dexterous songwriter....

Box Tortoise One of the unreleased cuts is a Mike Watt remix intended for Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters. His version of “Cornpone Brunch,” from Tortoise’s self-titled 1994 debut album–which Watt referred to at the time as “the brown thing” because of its unbleached cardboard sleeve–arrived late on a damaged DAT and ended up shelved for a decade, until preparations for A Lazarus Taxon got under way and former Tortoise member Bundy Brown went digging for it....