Marketing the Steppenwolf Brand Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hawkanson, a consultant to Steppenwolf before joining the company and managing director of Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater prior to that, says they took a look at their strengths and weaknesses and realized they needed someone with serious marketing chops. They settled on Bradford Matson, who knows all about databases, focus groups, and conjoint analysis but had been using them to sell silk shirts and sofas to the working woman....

Dekkagar, the debut album by the National Trust, is impressive sheerly on a technical level–its assured, sybaritic sprawl encompasses lush orchestration, sumptuous slinky soul grooves, and loads of inventive vocal harmonies. Released this past Tuesday on Thrill Jockey, it’s a stunning leap forward for its creator, Neil Rosario, whose rock “career” in the 90s could generously be described as meandering. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dolomite played its last show in the summer of 1995, and Rosario spent some time bartending at the Empty Bottle, where “seeing the histrionics and prima donna syndrome and stuff” of touring bands soured his enthusiasm for the scene....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On April 29, 17-year-old Carla Renee White was named Miss Hell Hole, winning a beauty contest now in its 30th year. According to the Boston Globe, the competition is named after the Hell Hole Swamp, the “defining body of water” in Berkeley County, South Carolina. The Narcissistic Society The London Daily Telegraph reported in March that southern Tibet has become a popular destination for newly rich Chinese because of the Mosuos, a matrilineal people whose women choose which males will be their sexual partners....

Pinback appeals to emo kiddies and indie-rock oldsters alike: you can hear authentic heartbreak in the band’s melancholy, sculptural melodies, if you have an ear for that kind of thing, or you can take them as proof that these guys have fabulous record collections and know just what to borrow from them. Guitarist Rob Crow (Thingy, Heavy Vegetable) and six-string bassist and pianist Armistead Burwell Smith IV (Three Mile Pilot) are the chief songwriters and core members of this loosely defined San Diego ensemble....

Pinetop Seven Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the two years between Pinetop Seven’s second album, Rigging the Top Lights, and last year’s Bringing Home the Last Great Strike (both on Truckstop) cofounder Charles Kim left the band to focus on his own Sinister Luck Ensemble. The haunting moods he evoked on guitar and pedal steel were key components of Pinetop’s sound, complementing and tugging on the melancholy, twangy singing of bandleader Darren Richard....

Why is Rosie O’Donnell so popular? One theory often put forward, sometimes by Rosie herself, is that she reminds us of people from our own lives–a neighbor, or maybe an aunt. But if that’s the case, why were the fans of her recently expired daytime talk show indoors watching TV when they could have been spending time with their neighbors or family members? I can only speak for myself, but none of my aunts acts like Rosie O’Donnell, and if my neighbors did, I’d move....

THE LION IN WINTER, Pyewacket, at Wheadon United Methodist Church. James Goldman’s play–which spawned the 1968 film that Sylvester Stallone recently called his all-time favorite–is essentially “Shakespeare for Dummies.” It has all the plotting for political power, the fierce family squabbles, and the lusty, romantic intrigue but lacks the poetry, wit, and personality. Set in the 12th century, this dated drama grafts an Albee-esque sensibility onto the fight for succession among the three sons of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine....

Daniel Bodner Daniel Bodner’s paintings capture “the unbridgeable gap between people,” critic Wim van der Beek wrote in 1994. But Jürgen Kisters saw a “story of love, of tenderness” in a 1999 show while the Tribune’s Alan Artner found in the same exhibit a “somber existential atmosphere.” Bodner himself has written that his work questions whether the artist must create “a new space” in order to include the figure. A similar range of responses is likely to Bodner’s 20 paintings now at Roy Boyd....

By Ben Joravsky The language of peace and love makes a drastic contrast to the hammering that’s been the rule in Uptown for the last 30 years. When Shiller moved there in the 1960s, Uptown became a generational and ideological battleground. She and her New Left cohorts organized the ward’s poor blacks, whites, and Latinos against the older, regular Democratic politicos based in the lakefront high-rises. Those early campaigns are the stuff of legend....

Kon Ichikawa’s 1963 masterpiece, one of the most dazzling and stylistically audacious Japanese films ever made, has to be seen to be believed–though in Japan, interestingly enough, it’s never been regarded as anything but a potboiler. The film was putatively made to celebrate the 300th film appearance of box-office idol Kazuo Hasegawa, and is in fact a remake of a 1938 film by Teinosuke Kinugasa that featured Hasegawa in the same parts....

In 1995 Evanston art collector Marcia Specks, her husband, Granvil, and a friend, filmmaker Bert Van Bork, traveled to Buchenwald and Auschwitz in search of what they thought would be several pictorial journals. Instead, what they found at Auschwitz was a former cell block containing hundreds of pieces of art, much of which had been surreptitiously produced and hidden at the camp by its inmates. Most of the artists had died, but the couple and Van Bork tracked down four survivors....

Blowing Back Into Town Morris drove to Chicago, bunked with a friend in Evanston, and took up his CSO gig while deciding if he should kiss it off. In the end, the distance from San Francisco to Herseth’s position looked shorter than the distance from fourth trumpet in Symphony Center. “Bud, through his career, had established [CSO] as a brass players’ mecca. When I won the position there I thought, ‘This is incredible,’” Morris says....

Coachwhips’ Get Yer Body Next ta Mine (Narnack) is a pretty predictable slab of front-porch boogie, just a bunch of churning, repetitive songs about booze, brawls, and broads. In fact, the San Francisco trio might be indistinguishable from the rest of the faded-black-jeans-and-sunglasses crowd if not for the weirdness that is John Dwyer. He was the hyper, violent Pink in noisy pranksters Pink and Brown and is currently pissing off the rainbow flag community as German pervert Hans Bunschlapen in Ziegenbock Kopf, an exaggeratedly homoerotic leather-daddy techno group....

As this remount of their two-woman sketch-comedy show about romantic relationships makes plain, ImprovOlympic veterans Dori Goldman and Margaret Hicks are mistresses of the bizarre situation. Again we meet the Siamese twins looking for love at the gym, the succession of loser guys (played by Hicks) who woo Goldman during a speed-dating session, and Boston couple Arthur and Barbara, whose “pahk the cah in Hahrvahrd Yahrd” accents add hilarity to a spat....

In the past few years several books have been written about the “Rape of Nanking” and other atrocities committed by the Japanese military across Asia during World War II, as well as on the Japanese government’s refusal to apologize for or even acknowledge its crimes against civilians. According to historian Hua-ling Hu, who edited the Journal of Studies of Japanese Aggression Against China and is now a professor at the University of Colorado, during the three months after the Japanese took over the Chinese capital of Nanking in late 1937 at least 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed....

Greg Holden is the kind of guy who spends vacation time hunting down the homes of his favorite authors–Hemingway’s house in Key West, Faulkner’s estate in Mississippi. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Along with the usual suspects–Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hemingway, Bellow, Sandburg–Holden covers the haunts of writers such as Edna Ferber, Poetry magazine’s Harriet Monroe, Charles MacArthur, Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, and playwright Lorraine Hansberry....

New York drummer Matt Wilson has spent a good deal of time in Chicago since the 80s, either with the postmodernist Either/Orchestra, behind former Ornette Coleman sideman Dewey Redman (a hero of his), or at the helm of the Matt Wilson Quartet, a quasi-outre pianoless band that emphasizes wailing sax work and whose songs seem designed to provoke a dadaist’s admiration. Next to those projects, his current band looks utterly retro....

At eight o’clock on a Thursday night Joe Perl’s standing at the bar with a bucket of meat. In his left hand he has a four-pound ham. In his right a small knife. A half dozen men at the bar are unwinding with shots and beers. Perl’s workday is just beginning. The men gather around and snatch up the pieces. “It’s a lean rich meat,” Perl says, “almost like a chicken breast....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River movie really sucks, and I commend Jonathan Rosenbaum for having the balls to criticize it [“Vengeance Is Theirs,” October 24]. The major movie critics just love the movie, so it isn’t PC to say anything negative about it. Sean Penn’s performance made me roll in my seat. It’s hard to take that guy seriously in a role like that....

Jonathan Rosenbaum has written intelligently often enough that his gaffes and errors just amaze me. In this last month two different films have played in Chicago which have scenes in which Rosenbaum thinks characters are hallucinating. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Irma Vep Hong Kong movie star Maggie Cheung plays a Hong Kong actress named Maggie Cheung, who travels to Paris to perform a movie role as a cat burglar and jewel thief....