Dan Peterman: Plastic Economies Recycling–or in some cases not recycling–is the subject of Dan Peterman’s seven large installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A midcareer retrospective, the show confirms that this internationally recognized Chicago conceptual artist is an original voice adept at fostering greater awareness of how we use our material resources. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two small sculptures, each titled Rathole, demonstrate that Peterman’s interests go beyond recycling....

It’s curtains for Marshall Field’s–and a pox on Macy’s for that–but the other Field in town is doing rip-roaring business in Hugg-A-Planet pillows and Balinese bat kites. Financial statements that went to the Field Museum’s board this month show that revenue from its business enterprises–largely retail–jumped 36 percent to more than $11 million in 2004. Laura Sadler, who oversees the museum’s businesses, including the stores and a new licensing program, studied the fashion merchandising branch of anthropology and got her training at the Limited, I....

Most jazz musicians are content to express themselves within the confines of their solos, but the great Dutch reedist Ab Baars is just as interested in personalizing tunes by reworking their underlying structures. In 1999 he did it to the oeuvre of clarinetist John Carter (a onetime mentor), and 2001’s Songs was a brilliantly conceived set built around Native American themes, mixing traditional chants and cheekily chosen standards like “Cherokee.” Baars navigates trickier turf on last year’s Kinda Dukish (Wig), radically revamping ten tunes from the Duke Ellington songbook–material that’s inextricably linked to Ellington’s original recordings and tailored to his group....

“We can’t hold scientific meetings here [in the United States] anymore because foreign scientists can’t get visas,” a top oceanographer at the University of San Diego recently told Richard Florida (Washington Monthly, January/February). And that isn’t the worst news. “The [foreign] graduate students I have taught at several major universities–Ohio State, Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon–have always been among the first to point out the benefits of studying and doing research in the United States....

Kids these days go to public schools sponsored by Coca-Cola, eat cafeteria lunches from McDonald’s, and (in Vernon Hills, anyway) play football on Rust-Oleum Field. Looks like the time is right for the reintroduction of the Wacky Packages, the classic trading cards Topps has released off and on since 1967. Boomers and Gen-Xers will remember Wacky Packs as the product-parodies that turned Crest toothpaste into Crust, the toothpaste for those who only brush twice a month, or Gravy Train dog food into Grave Train (“Your dog will never eat anything else ....

Ted Cox’s sanguine summary of the Sox’ wasted “encore” season [The Sports Section, September 29] fails to reflect the anger and frustration felt by this fan, who believes the precipitous collapse of the champions after the All-Star break was not inevitable. Two chronic problems were as clear as the (whatever) on your face but were not corrected. First, it became obvious soon after the break that most of the starting pitching staff were beginning to tire and/or ail....

The title suggests that this bluegrass musical version of Sophocles’ play is essentially a derogatory joke hinging on the assumption that putting rural mountain folk in a Greek tragedy is like bringing pigs to church. And ultimately the world here doesn’t so much resemble Thebes as a lurid Li’l Abner strip: cocreators Rick Sims and Heidi Stillman have comedy in mind and throw in every Appalachian stereotype they can think of–family feuds, religious fanaticism, incest....

It’s been nearly a quarter century since a nobody little Chicago ensemble called Steppenwolf took its production of Sam Shepard’s True West to New York and changed everything. One of the many consequences of that run at the Cherry Lane Theater was a rave by New York Times critic Mel Gussow, who singled out John Malkovich by comparing him to Jack Nicholson and calling his performance “an acting hole in one....

Camille Preaker, the heroine of Gillian Flynn’s debut novel, Sharp Objects, is a reporter for a second-rate newspaper called the Chicago Daily Post. In an effort to boost lagging sales with a sensational story, her crusty but compassionate editor sends her on assignment back home to the small town of Wind Gap, Missouri, to cover the grisly, unsolved murders of two preteen girls. Camille has to not only deal with the suspicions and gossip of Wind Gap’s leery residents but must also grapple with her obsessive, control-freak mother and her 13-year-old half sister, a borderline psycho who wields unnerving control over her schoolmates....

The musical “Springtime for Hitler” is supposed to be a stretch, but this romantic comedy is not: Swiss playwright Igor Bauersima based his glib, cloying play on the true story of two teenagers who met in a chat room and agreed to commit suicide together. Inexplicably, his 2000 work has achieved international success. Chatty, spunky Julie and August sit atop Norway’s 2,000-foot-high Pulpit Rock for almost 90 minutes talking about their generic adolescent alienation; noticeably absent from either character is a convincing suicidal impulse....

Land Escape PRICE $5 Joseph Tabet has produced the annual Navy Pier sculpture exhibit since 2001, when it fell in his lap. But earlier this year he had to rethink it. The Pier Walk, which once stretched the entire length of the pier, had shrunk in recent seasons and been banished to the little traffic-circle park in front of the entrance. Art Chicago, Pier Walk’s sister event, had decamped, its replacement had vanished, and it looked like the pier itself would soon be under construction....

On Mother’s Day I took my mom to Ed’s Potsticker House, a Mandarin restaurant in Bridgeport, outside the fray of Chinatown proper. I’d heard great things about Ed’s over the years, most important that it’s possible for a non-Chinese person like me to convince the waitstaff that you want the real stuff eaten in northern China and not the oversauced, Americanized glop that’s piped directly to food courts and strip malls everywhere from some central processing plant under the Nevada desert....

The 17th Polish Film Festival in America runs Saturday, November 5, through Sunday, November 20, at the Beverly Arts Center, the Copernicus Center, and the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $8-$10; a festival pass, good for five screenings, is available for $45. Following are selected features screening Saturday through Thursday, November 5 through 10; for a full festival schedule visit www.pffamerica.com. Unless otherwise noted, all films are in Polish with subtitles....

Attention, Late Nite Catechism fans: Sister’s back with a vengeance. Patricia Musker (alternating with Lynda Shadrake) brings her chop-busting A game to this spin-off of the long-running homage to old-school nunnery. Good material abounds in Sister’s Golden Rule seminar, in which she scrutinizes cell phone yakking and modern assholiness (woe betide anyone showing up five minutes late wearing pants with martini glasses embroidered on them, as I learned the hard way)....

Back in their prepodcasting days, Father Peter Funk and his Benedictine brothers at Monastery of the Holy Cross knew exactly to whom they were chanting. Between two and five devotees turn up each day for mass and the seven prayer services they offer at their Bridgeport cloister; the Sunday mass draws up to 30. At a recent Thursday night Compline service, I was the only nonmonk in attendance. But they’ve found a wider audience since taking their service online last December....

After Slint played one of their reunion shows last month at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in England, a reviewer noted that the crowd of several thousand outnumbered the combined attendance for every show they played before they broke up in 1991. Slint gigs were rare events–by most accounts, there were maybe about 30–which has only helped fuel the legendary status of the group in recent years. Guitarist Brian McMahan and drummer Britt Walford, both formerly of Squirrel Bait, formed Slint in the mid-80s with bassist Ethan Buckler and guitarist David Pajo; they recorded their first album, Tweez, in 1987 with Steve Albini, but didn’t release it until two years later on their own label, Jennifer Hartman Records....

Ever since Benito Mussolini invented the film festival, in Venice in 1932, art and industry have merged at festivals to create strange bedfellows. Now the workings of film culture are highlighted by incongruous blends of polemics and test marketing, promotion and education, displays of power and tributes to art and artistry. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Both movies were shown at the Toronto film festival afterward, but neither is coming to the Chicago International Film Festival, whose programming this year seems to suffer, as usual, from minimal clout, bad timing, disorganization, and the tendency of its better programmers to move on....

But, no, Daley stayed out of all the great civil rights struggles of his youth. His one great contribution to black empowerment came in 1983, when he challenged Mayor Jane Byrne, siphoning off just enough white votes to enable Harold Washington to win the Democratic primary. Of course, Washington would have had an easier time of things in the subsequent general election against Republican Bernard Epton had Daley come out strong for his Democratic colleague....

My biggest complaint about Second City is that ensemble members don’t stay around long enough. These days we’re lucky if an actor performs four shows in a row before being lured to LA or New York. This guarantees a steady parade of energetic, eager actors in their 20s and 30s. But it also contributes to a certain sameness in the scenes from one decade to another and robs Chicago audiences of the comic insights of actors who’ve had more life experiences than even a precocious thirtysomething....

Only Kurt Vonnegut, with his sardonic wit, could turn a resigned, even mildly depressive phrase like “so it goes” into a punch line, as he does in Slaughterhouse-Five. And who could help but laugh at the postmodern Christian sect he invents, the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, in 1959’s The Sirens of Titan? Lifeline Theatre’s bare-bones but carefully done staging of John Hildreth’s adaptation remains true to Vonnegut’s eccentric characters, odd sci-fi story, and playful way of batting around weighty ideas: free will versus determinism, God the loving father versus God the unmoved mover versus God the necessary fiction....