LUNA, MERCURY REV 10/6, METRO Penthouse (Elektra), the third album by Luna, explores the same post-Velvet Underground strum grooves the combo has been working since it formed in 1992, after the dissolution of Galaxie 500, leader Dean Wareham’s previous band. With rolling rhythms and gentle melodies polished to a new luster, the band has continued to refine its sound, but its basic approach–enveloping Wareham’s shy warble in hypnotic guitar strumming and hydroplaning rhythms–remains the same....

On a Saturday afternoon the discount outlet mall in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is a modern souk, a throbbing marketplace teeming with uneasy juxtapositions. There are signs waiting to be read, a wealth of snap judgments that can be passed off as insights. The range of ethnic faces, the numerous languages being spoken, give the illusion of a futurist’s Community of Tomorrow. Unencumbered young power-walking power shoppers. Grandmothers with arms full of branded totes....

I first encountered the spirit of Black Hawk in February of 1979. It was an unseasonably warm, muggy night in New Orleans. A gauze of mist shrouded the city as I left the French Quarter, crossed Industrial Canal bridge, and entered a threadbare black neighborhood of the lower Ninth Ward. The bishop said opening prayers; after an a cappella hymn punctuated by tambourine bursts, he made a brief statement. “And so we welcome tonight our Black Hawk celebrator ....

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA The timing of this latest bad press couldn’t have been worse. Ambitious plans to expand the subscriber base as well as the building could be put on hold if corporate donors and the public no longer perceive the CSO as a civic success story. Certainly the peripatetic Barenboim, who was born in Argentina and reared in Israel, hasn’t helped his own cause. Even if his musical merits are debatable, Solti 25 years ago at least took the then-provincial orchestra on a long-awaited tour of Europe and brought it a coveted recording contract....

Bailiwick Repertory’s sixth annual Directors Festival showcases the aspirations of generally unknown, mostly young pro, semipro, and student directors whose projects range from established classical and contemporary selections to brand-new material. The fest runs through October 27, Mondays-Thursdays at 7:30 PM, with a different program of three or four one-acts each night (the shows on October 17 and 18 will be interpreted for the hearing impaired). Tickets are $8 per program....

Friday 13 Saturday 14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You can wander through Hyde Park’s Oriental Institute before it closes for renovations and see a private south-side collection of African and African-American art on a Museum of Contemporary Art-sponsored tour today. Marching Through Multicultural Millennia leaves at 9:30 from the MCA’s 237 E. Ontario home. The $45 fee includes lunch at the University of Chicago’s faculty club and bus transportation between locations....

Chicago Day: To Be Free, or Not to Be Free? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than ever before, Chicago’s major museums are watching their imperiled bottom lines. A hard-nosed attitude of fiscal responsibility is readily apparent in some Chicago museums’ decisions not to participate in the sixth annual Chicago Day June 19, when the city is expected to be filled with hundreds of thousands of visitors attending the World Cup....

About 15 years ago I met an economist with a bald head, a crooked smile, and some of the most outrageous ideas I’d ever heard. Our air and water are cleaner than they’ve been for decades, he said. There’s more food per capita in the world every year. Supposedly scarce energy and mineral resources have been getting cheaper over the decades, not more expensive. Population growth is good because it adds to the number of active, inquiring, innovative human minds–the ultimate resource of civilization....

Jay Bliznick was introduced to underground films by his local video store clerk, Christian Gore, who’d just started publishing the cult fanzine Film Threat out of a garage in Detroit. “I started to rent every weird film I could get my hands on,” Bliznick says. “Suddenly I realized that you could shoot something on Super-8 or video and have people see it, have it get a reaction. It was then that I decided–Yes!...

Hitting for the Cycle: Nine The time may be near when baseball as a theme in literature will be a completely absurd idea. Sure, the game will always be around in one form or another–as long as there are gym classes and shoe contracts and parents living vicariously as Little League coaches. But not baseball. Not the baseball that inspired Walt Whitman to write reams of poetry. Not the baseball that seduced Jack Kerouac into playing fantasy board games with his favorite players alone atop a mountain....

The Italian title of this lovely, rambling feature by Gianni Amelio (Open Doors) translates unidiomatically as “The Children Thief,” and is undoubtedly meant to remind us of the 1948 film The Bicycle Thief. The “thief” in question is actually a young carabiniere officer (Enrico Lo Verso) based in Milan who’s given the job of escorting an 11-year-old girl (Valentina Scalici) and her 10-year-old brother (Giuseppe Ieracitano) to a religious home after their mother is arrested for forcing the daughter into prostitution....

Museums Seek New Blood It looks like the city’s cultural institutions are getting serious about developing their young-adult clientele. Notes Newberry Library director of media relations Moyra Knight: “Many of the not-for-profits these days are having to extend themselves to get young adults interested in the programs they offer.” Within the past 12 months the Newberry, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Museum of Science and Industry have launched social organizations aimed at the 25-to-40 age group similar to those already in place at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute, and Lincoln Park Zoo....

OLEANNA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oleanna, Mamet’s 1992 tragicomedy–bleak, blunt, and blistering, chilling and amusing in unsettlingly equal doses–might in part have been written to dramatize his essay’s thesis. Of the play’s multiple levels, the most sensational–the one that will “get the asses in the seats,” as the sleazy movie producer says in Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow–is its provocative portrait of the sexually charged showdown between John, a college teacher in his mid 40s, and Carol, a 20-year-old student who comes to him for help in his course, which she’s failing....

Though not directed by an auteurist-approved figure (Mark Robson has never attracted any cult to my knowledge), this is arguably the greatest of producer Val Lewton’s justly celebrated low-budget chillers (rivaled only by his 1942 Cat People)–a beautifully wrought story about the discovery of devil worshipers in Greenwich Village that fully lives up to the morbid John Donne quote that frames the action. Intricately plotted over its 71 minutes by screenwriters Charles O’Neal and De Witt Bodeen, this 1943 tale of a young woman searching for her troubled sister exudes a distilled poetry of doom that extends to all the characters as well as to the noirish bohemian atmosphere....

An understated feminist parable set in Tunisia during the 50s, this film chronicles, through a series of flashbacks, the adolescence of a singer named Alia, who serves as filmmaker Moufida Tlatli’s surrogate in this semiautobiography. What distinguishes this directorial feature debut by the veteran editor of French and Tunisian films is her assured, Proustian evocation of the oppressively insular everyday life on the estate of a nobleman, Prince Sidi Ali. As seen by Alia, who may be the prince’s illegitimate daughter, the patriarchs of the household have their every whim, gastronomical and sexual, catered to by a harem....

I have never understood why Circus Peanuts (orange, gooey, diabetic coma-inducing, peanut-shaped candy) are still available. I have never known anyone who actually likes this candy and I have asked everyone I know. So, Cecil, can you give me a little information about who invented this candy treat, why they are colored orange, and any other interesting tidbits you could provide. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) Fear and loathing....

WATCH WHAT YOU EAT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After reading your column on hand washing after urination [January 12], I’m certain I’m going to die–that is, if coliform bacteria are as bad as you say. My girlfriend and I often share the pleasures of fellatio and cunnilingus. Heck, one night I even got up the nerve to perform (ahem) analingus. But what about the dread coliform bacteria?...

SHEILA’S GIANT WALL OF PLOT TWISTS Live Bait Theater Sheila and Vistamax are the latest entries in this crowded field. The better of the two is Sheila, the University of Chicago-spawned, Hyde Park-based troupe that took over at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap when Avant-Garfielde, distracted by its north-side success as Cardiff Giant, grew tired of the weekly improv grind. Using a format remarkably similar to Avant-Garfielde’s–an hour-long revue of unrelated improv games–Sheila’s five actors create a show that’s every bit as funny and quick as anything Avant-Garfielde turned out in its prime....

Like a number of progressive chamber music ensembles, the Vermeer Quartet often balances its programs with established 20th-century classics. This season, in its subscription series for Performing Arts Chicago, however, the estimable foursome has become even more adventurous: it’s presenting two local premieres of works by living composers. Part of the credit probably goes to violinist Mathias Tacke, who was a member of an avant-garde collective in Germany before joining the quartet last season, Tacke can produce a more somber tone than his predecessor and has a better grasp of contemporary string literature, and his zeal seems to have rubbed off on his colleagues; last season, for the first time in a long while, they shook off the tasteful reticence that marked many of their past performances of modern pieces....

A decade ago, only one word was needed to sell a dance concert: Baryshnikov. Today, mention that Baryshnikov will perform as a member of the White Oak Dance Project and you hear: “Baryshnikov? Isn’t he old?” Yes, but his dance is perhaps better now than ever. The amazing leaps of his classical ballet days are gone, of course, replaced by the more human vocabulary of modern dance, but in Twyla Tharp’s solo for him, Pergolesi, his movement seems richer, deeper in meaning–and every gesture is exquisite....