Mulleted and mustachioed, sharp-dressed and self-made, as sleazy as a strip-club regular and as shrewd as any businessman–DJ Hell is Germany’s International Deejay Gigolos label. Hell (aka Helmut Geier) has been DJing since his teens, but didn’t start the label until 1996, at the ripe old age of 34. He began with a small operation restricted to vinyl editions of DJ mixes, but now he’s both a financially successful, internationally renowned musical tastemaker and the center of a trashy, sexy jet-set lifestyle clique....

Truly original art tends to defy generic categories, and Pat O’Neill’s 35-millimeter, 73-minute The Decay of Fiction (2002), which Chicago Filmmakers is presenting this Saturday night at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema, is no exception. Inarguably an experimental work, it also reeks of classic Hollywood. The credits list O’Neill as producer, director, and editor and George Lockwood as cinematographer and sound designer, but no one is credited as the screenwriter—even though the film contains as much dialogue as any commercial feature, most of it apparently original....

Amir Ali can’t wait for the world to rediscover its Islamic roots. He calls Abraham a great man for preparing the world for the prophet Muhammad. But around the 13th century, Ali says, someone brought hypocrisy into the mix and the prophet’s message got corrupted. Islam has had an image problem ever since. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’re supposed to be honest, truthful, and excel in relationships between God and man, relationships between other people, and in our professions,” says Ali, who calls himself a moderate and Jerry Falwell an extremist....

In “The Conversion,” one of eight short stories collected in Katherine Shonk’s first book, The Red Passport, an American named Tom travels to Pushkin, outside Saint Petersburg, to visit a Russian couple he and his ex-girlfriend befriended while living abroad. Their house is full of relics of his failed relationship–his ex’s clothes, her books, her computer, her spice rack, all turned over to their friends after the breakup. As the visit turns awkward and sour, these shards of his past become an oppressive reminder of the fractured connection between Tom and his Russian friends, who’ve got problems of their own, thank you very much....

George Roadcap Harold Henderson: Where were you working? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » GR: We started out looking at groundwater chemistry and contamination. The Water Survey has been studying that for years. I started in the early 1990s. We want to know what controls that chemistry–why some contaminants move and others don’t, especially the metals in the slag. I don’t want to give all slag a bad name....

Omayra Amaya comes by her taste for experimentation honestly: her great-aunt was the legendary Gypsy flamenco dancer and movie star Carmen Amaya. A tiny woman with slim hips and wiry arms, Carmen broke the mold, dancing in pants and appropriating the percussive footwork that had been the province of men. She was born in poverty in 1913 in Barcelona; self-taught, she got famous in Madrid, where her debut was reportedly so exciting that spectators threw plates and broke mirrors....

In the last few years cornetist Rob Mazurek has stretched impossibly far beyond the music with which he first made his name–and appropriately enough, for his latest and longest stretch, he’s taken a new name. For most of the 90s, Mazurek was one of Chicago’s most promising hard-bop blowers, recalling high flyers like Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard. His transformation, through the various groups under the Chicago Underground umbrella as well as Isotope 217, has been well documented in this publication and others; since 1997, he’s gradually embraced a much wider sound world, borrowing liberally from numerous traditions and approaches while retaining jazz’s immediacy....

As a former member and past copresident of Artemisia Gallery, I would like to comment on your announcement of Artemisia’s closing in Culture Club (May 9). Rhona Hoffman’s negative quote was an ungenerous ending to the last bit of publicity for a gallery that has served a few thousand artists over 30 years. I would like to eulogize Artemisia by presenting some facts about the gallery’s contributions to the local, national, and international art community over the past 30 years....

The Gleaners and I By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Filming” is only an approximation of what Varda does, because her equipment consists of a DV Cam and a Mini DV, both of which use digital videotape that’s later transferred to 35-millimeter film. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about what digital video does for and to filmmaking, and The Gleaners and I demonstrates the positive consequences better than any other documentary I know....

Jean Smith says she started painting watercolor portraits of herself in 1973, at age 13, as a way of shoring up her self-image against her emotionally abusive parents, who were artists themselves. When she graduated from high school she got a cash grant to attend art school, but rather than enroll in classes, she used the money to buy a bitchin’ stereo, then moved into an apartment in a cooler part of Vancouver, her hometown....

SATLAH Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This limber New York jazz trio takes its cues from John Zorn and his Radical Jewish Culture movement, mixing Ornette Coleman-style free jazz with klezmer and eastern European folk music. On Satlah’s eponymously titled debut (on Zorn’s Tzadik label) Zorn himself appeared as a guest, but he needn’t have: saxophonist Danny Zamir, the group’s leader, played haunting melodies that could have been lifted from a Masada recording....

I am a female college sophomore whose boyfriend is currently studying abroad. I’ve been thinking about ending the relationship since I’m sick of the long-distance thing. Here’s the problem: I recently heard that at the beginning of last semester, which was before we started dating, he date-raped two girls. The story goes that on two separate occasions he was doing drugs with a girl and used the fact that he had provided drugs to pressure them into having sex....

Jimmy Fitzgerald sits outside the Flat Iron Building in Wicker Park, his hand-painted cane in one hand and a crucifix in the other, and surveys the passing scene. He’s a familiar presence at the southeast corner of North and Milwaukee, where he sets up his folding chair twice a day, six days a week, in the early morning hours and again from noon to one. Sundays are reserved for rest and mass, but Monday through Saturday, no matter the weather, Fitzgerald can be found in the same spot, manning his front-row seat at the neighborhood’s eclectic street parade....

A POLLINAIRE RAVE, ESKIMOS 2/28, SCHUBAS A Pollinaire Rave is another project from Kevin Barnes, ringleader of the giddy pop circus Of Montreal (who are actually of Athens, Georgia): over backing tapes, Barnes, his girlfriend Nina Grottland, and his brother David sing their way through an absurd theatrical piece about convicts released into a junior high as part of a government rehabilitation program. Fellow Athenians the Eskimos debuted in 2001 with Let It Come Down, which was considerably more fun than that year’s Spiritualized record of the same name....

Milk It! Collected Musings on the Alternative Rock Explosion of the 90’s by Jim DeRogatis (Da Capo) To Jim—Now It’s Your Turn. Best, Lester But while Bangs’s early demise meant that others would ultimately shape his literary legacy, DeRogatis has the luxury of shaping his own. Milk It! is loosely organized as a primer on the rise and fall of alt-rock, but it’s also DeRogatis’s first attempt to compile his work in a manner befitting a critic who’s made his mark....

The Lion in Winter, TimeLine Theatre Company, and The Lion in Winter, Rising Moon Theatre Company, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Perhaps the current glut of productions of James Goldman’s play about Henry II and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, represents nostalgia for the days when smart people were involved in government. Whatever the reason, two companies have confronted the text’s brittle wit and come up victorious. Neither show is perfect, but both are well worth seeing....

Why does Swiss cheese have holes in it? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No one wants to face up to this squarely, so I guess it’s up to me. Swiss cheese has holes in it because of bacteria passing gas. Contemplating a typical piece of Swiss cheese, the majority of whose holes, by USDA regulation, must measure between 11/16 and 13/16 of an inch in diameter, you may think: Here was a little microbe with a serious case of indigestion....

Oft have we all heard the aged whodunit cliche “The butler did it!” But when did the butler ever do it? I’ve never heard of the butler actually having done it. How did this cliche become the cliche it became if there were never any butlers who did it? The expression “the butler did it” is commonly attributed to novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958), who wrote dozens of popular books, starting with The Circular Staircase in 1908....

Robert Mazrim is haunted by a highway that no longer exists. Tantalizing bits of evidence that it served travelers for thousands of years keep disrupting his regular work as a historical archaeologist. Even the interstates he drives between Saint Louis and Peoria appear to follow the same ghostly corridor, a mile or two wide, through which the old road ran. Despite his reluctance to pursue the topic, Mazrim is now drafting a publication that will lay out the circumstantial evidence–none of it conclusive–that Native Americans were using this corridor on a regular basis as early as 1200 BC....

Rock, Pop, etc. MARY J. BLIGE, AVANT See Critic’s Choice. Fri 2/15 and Sat 2/16, 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress. 312-431-2355 or 312-559-1212. STEVEN CURTIS CHAPMAN Sat 2/23, 7:30 PM, Arie Crown Theater, McCormick Place, 2301 S. Lake Shore Dr. 312-791-6190 or 312-559-1212. GWAR, GOD FORBID, SOILENT GREEN All-ages show. Thu 2/21, 7 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield. 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212. ISLEYS with RONALD ISLEY Sat 2/16, 8 PM, Star Plaza Theatre, I-65 and U....