There's a full week of exciting activities that don't require you to pull out your wallet. 

Wednesday 23

"Dutes Miller: In the Garden"
11am–6pm, Western Exhibitions
Miller's ecstatic installation of new works on paper and sculptures portrays a natural world in which homosexuality is the norm.

The Maltese Falcon
1pm and 7:30pm, Northbrook Public Library
Dir. John Huston. 1941. 100mins. Bogie would perfect his whip-smart gumshoe routine in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, but this earlier detective yarn is the better film: a morally complicated caper, with private eye Sam Spade (Bogart) outwitting a trio of lowlifes searching for a priceless antique. The ending is devastating—and, with apologies to Sleep, it actually makes sense.

Lois Leveen
4pm, Loyola University
Leveen discusses her historical novel, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, about a Union spy who posed as a slave in the Confederate White House.

Neil Steinberg
6pm, Chicago Public Library (Blackstone Branch)
Steinberg discusses his latest book, You Were Never in Chicago, as part of the 2012–13 Despres Family Memorial Lecture Series.

Potential Disclosure
5:15pm, Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art
Northwestern's Jason LaFountain, Terra Foundation postdoctoral fellow in American art; performance studies chair D. Soyini Madison; and American studies director Ivy Wilson join Dan Silverstein, manager of exhibitions and collections at the Block Museum, for a conversation about "Terry Adkins: Recital."

Artists' Talk: Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater
6:30pm, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
The Canadian artists speak about their film project Modest Livelihood, which is on view at Logan Center.

Writer Dan Harmon is perhaps best known for creating the NBC sitcom Community, but since he was fired from producing the show last year, the self-professed narcissist has found a new passion: podcasting. Recorded live at the NerdMelt Showroom in Los Angeles, Harmontown is a loosely structured show that features Harmon and Jeff Davis (Who's Line Is It Anyway?) chatting about whatever topic floats into the host's mind, frequently bringing audience members up on the stage to take part in the conversation. Additionally, Harmon and Davis conclude each episode with an installment of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, run by Spencer, a 23-year-old Dungeon Master that was plucked from the audience. Now, Harmon is touring the country with the podcast team and a documentary crew, bringing Harmontown to 19 different cities, including Chicago. After a successful show in Brooklyn the night before, Harmon called us from the tour bus to discuss the his podcast.

How did the Harmontown show in Los Angeles originally get started?
It started as just a hobby, a kind of therapy for myself. I really like performing for people. I like talking to strangers. I've got a lot of personality flaws that don't make me the most dynamic person to have a one-on-one encounter with. But there's something very comforting about lights shining in my eyes and hearing my most shameful thoughts rewarded by people laughing or just listening. I just started doing it in the back of this comic book store to keep from going insane. I would always tell people in that room, "Please, whatever I say in this room, let's keep it here and not YouTube this stuff.” For almost a year, they were able to keep that agreement. But then, one fateful night, I played Chevy Chase's drunken voicemails into a microphone and someone in the audience couldn't resist the temptation to record it and put it on the Internet. After that happened, Jeff and I started thinking to ourselves, “Why don't we just record this thing and podcast it for everyone? If these things are going to get leaked, then why pass up the opportunity to have a podcast, which seems to be every American's God-given right these days?”

With the film festival circuit basically running year-round, one of the benefits of attending a major fest is the opportunity to see titles that screened earlier elsewhere. Case in point: Some eight months after its premiere at Cannes 2012, Jeff Nichols's Mud screened yesterday for critics at Sundance. I was less enamored than many of the filmmaker's last effort, Take Shelter, which—to these eyes, anyway—made some very critical missteps in its home stretch. Mud furthers my impression that Nichols's work behind the camera far exceeds his efforts at the keyboard.

If Shotgun Stories (2007) found the writer-director taking up the Southern-poetic-realism mantle of friend David Gordon Green—the latter of whom also has a film, Prince Avalanche, screening in Park City—then this is his Undertow: a boyhood adventure yarn, set on and around a raging river. Two Arkansas middle-schoolers (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland, both excellent) travel to a nearby island, find an abandoned boat stuck in a tree, and meet Matthew McConaughey's eponymous outlaw hermit. Soon the boys are playing gopher for this wanted man, getting mixed up in his romantic and legal troubles while dodging both their guardians and some nasty customers on the hunt for Mud.

Here's a sneak peek at what's coming up in this week's Time Out Chicago, on newsstands tomorrow:

There are some of us (my mother) who, when given a choice between two similar items, will always choose the cheapest one. No matter if the cheaper one is made of the chintziest material this side of Bangladesh and will fall apart after a few wears, the cheap one is a deal. Sometimes, my mom is right: Who needs high-quality purple jeans when that color will be out of style next season? But when it comes to things like bikini waxes and fresh produce, it pays to shell out more.

In this week's Deals Issue, we help you through that difficult choice—cheap out or pay up?—by weighing all the important factors such as how much of a hassle the cheaper item is, whether the more expensive choice will pay off in the long run and more. Turns out, more often than not, my mom is right. As if there were any other option.