Devils and Dolls Dolls are loaded objects. Thought to be the oldest toys, they’ve often had religious significance. And today they’re a kind of Rorschach test for point of view. Google “doll art” and you’ll find thousands of sites selling sweet, safe, socially acceptable miniature people to collectors. They can also be a vehicle for social subversion, however. In the 1930s German artist Hans Bellmer was celebrated in France for his use of dolls, often dismembered or deformed and posed sexually, as a response to the Nazis....

In his early films, director Tim Burton helped drag sick humor and glam nihilism into the mainstream. But his latest effort, adapted from Daniel Wallace’s novel, is an ode to white picket fences, hot apple pie, and old-fashioned storytelling. As in Sleepy Hollow, his drastic revision of Ichabod Crane’s adventures, the story unfolds against a historical backdrop; Big Fish is about the modern age sweeping away traditional storytelling. Yet Burton’s jaundiced sensibility slips through, coloring the film’s earnest facade and central character, a traveling salesman and rambunctious storyteller named Edward Bloom....

Perry Myers doesn’t know who murdered Lori Taylor one hot summer night in 1999. He can’t say for sure that Rosemarie Lombardi’s phone was tapped. And he has no idea whether DeAndre Wade’s claim that police let his cousin bleed to death holds any water. He has a gun but doesn’t usually carry it. The tools of his trade are a briefcase, a cell phone, and a Palm Pilot; his uniform is a polo shirt and jeans....

INDIA MATRI BHUMI ssss Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From this standpoint, India can be regarded as the pinnacle of Rossellini’s richest period, his crowning masterpiece. Jean-Luc Godard once referred to it as “the creation of the world,” and unlike many other films about India made by Westerners–Jean Renoir’s The River (1951) is prototypical–it can’t be accused of either presumption or pretension. It’s remained one of the hardest to see of Rossellini’s major works, in part because of the complex and chaotic conditions under which it was made and initially received....

You Snooze, You Lose Likewise, the “Audit Committee was deficient in reviewing and approving International’s asset sales, related non-compete payments and other transactions”–all of them being devices that Radler and Black allegedly used to sack the company. Black and Radler “had a right to rely in good faith” on the judgment of the committee members, for these were matters within their “professional or expert competence.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

For his video installation American Diorama Charles Woodman panned his camera across scenery in 17 places in Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and California. But the scenic content is secondary to the formal concerns, as is the incidental motion the camera records–a passing truck on a country road, Woodman’s fingers fiddling with the lens. He’s edited each of the 17 pans so that we see fragments of one entire pan after another moving across five adjacent screens in a 40-minute loop....

De Kooning: An American Master Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, there has to be a better way to describe this moment without resorting to the language of a high school boy who’s discovered his girlfriend made out with some other guy at a party. Or does there? Throughout De Kooning–a comprehensive, dazzling study of both an enigmatic, fascinating man and a period of seismic cultural shifts–the authors run up against the intractable problem of how to chronicle a solitary, intuitive process guided by priorities and struggles that don’t lend themselves easily to words....

Dale Watson’s latest album, Whiskey or God (Palo Duro), appeared to be his swan song when it came out in March: in late 2005 the hard-core honky-tonk singer had relocated to Baltimore from his native Texas to be closer to his children, setting music aside and picking up work as a UPS driver. The hiatus appears to have been short-lived–he moved back to Austin this summer and he’s playing shows again–but if Whiskey or God turns out to be the last recording he releases, he’ll have gone out in style....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Standing in the corner of the filing room, a microphone in hand and his longtime producer Tony Judge behind the camera, Avila cornered candidates for interviews, including powerhouse aldermen Ed Burke and William Banks. But his most pointed question was directed to long-shot mayoral candidate William “Dock” Walls in reference to Jon Burge, the former police commander fired for using torture to coerce confessions from crime suspects....

Isis | In the Absence of Truth (Ipecac) The band’s fondness for nonstandard rock meters shows up in lots of slippery threes and sixes that resist a straightforward backbeat, and the songs frequently hit trap-door shifts in tempo and density. Most audibly, the austere minimalism of Panopticon has been shattered by a storm of percussion–rushing, pattering, galloping, even churning with the steady thunder of a double kick (a first for Isis)....

The Reader’s Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Stove-top style for the smallest household: this two-cup pot from Mario Batali’s Italian Kitchen is part of the chef’s new line of personal-size cookware. It’s made of cast iron with an enamel finish in Batali’s signature persimmon hue. a$30 at the Chopping Block in Lincoln Square, 4747 N. Lincoln, 773-472-6700, thechoppingblock.net. For the new condo owner or the renter looking to make maximum impact with a minimum of space, The New Apartment: Smart Living in Small Spaces by Montse Borras (Universe) provides plenty of inspiration with an international, green perspective....

Chicagoan Adam Sonderberg started Longbox Recordings in 1993 to release his own work, but over time the label has emerged as an important outlet for electroacoustic improvisers from around the globe, including European artists like Boris Hauf and Francisco Lopez. Longbox keeps a strong focus on the midwest, though, and this performance serves as a release party for albums by a pair of area acts. Percussionist JON MUELLER (who used to play in the rock band Pele) and synthesizer player JIM SCHOENECKER deliver a glacial symphony of ringing tones on The Interview, a gorgeous 31-minute piece that glides and hovers within a narrow pitch range....

Rousseau checkmates David Hume in 17 moves? Get out! You can watch Jean-Jacques’s smash in their alleged chess game from 1765. Then check the kibitzers’ comments. They suspect that Rousseau wasn’t a strong enough player to have seen the sacrificial checkmate. For some reason that makes me feel better. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Troubled by sagging? Need concealment? NRAstore.com has a mesh undershirt if your small revolver is giving you problems....

A Prairie Home Companion With Keillor, Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Woody Harrelson, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Lindsay Lohan, Maya Rudolph, Virginia Madsen, Marylouise Burke, L.Q. Jones, Sue Scott, and Tommy Lee Jones Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s also guaranteed a warm reception because the octogenarian Altman, who’s on his 39th feature and his second heart, seems to be making some sort of valedictory statement....

Swedish singer-songwriter Nicolai Dunger has kept some interesting company on his recent albums. On This Cloud Is Learning, a 1999 record that finally came out stateside this year on the local label Overcoat, he was joined by members of the Soundtrack of Our Lives; Soul Rush (Lakeshore, 2001) featured support by Swedish jazz group the Esbjorn Svensson Trio. And he recorded Tranquil Isolation (Overcoat, 2002) in Louisville with Will Oldham, among others....

Ben Laposky’s photographs–described in a 1987 book on computer art as the “first graphic images generated by an electronic machine”–are both beautiful and fascinating for their mix of human and mechanical input. A draftsman for a sign-painting business in Cherokee, Iowa, Laposky began experimenting in 1950 with an oscilloscope, a device that records the activity of electrical circuits in wavelike patterns on the screen of a cathode-ray tube. By adding circuits he produced a variety of patterns, which he then photographed....

Their band is based in Brooklyn, but it sounds like the two siblings in the Rogers Sisters–guitarist-vocalist Jennifer and drummer Laura–are finally letting their Motor City roots bleed through. On their just-released long player, The Invisible Deck (Too Pure), the trio makes mantras out of three-note riffs, and a song that begins with a dark, menacing stir might explode into fits of overdriven fuzz. They no longer sound like a timid, overhyped party band too shambling and skronky to pull off anything solid; now they’re gliding on some primo scuzz, sticking to tried-and-true rock structures and doubling up on solos and urgency....

There isn’t a trace of rai–the amped-up street pop sung by the likes of Khaled and Cheb Mami–in the music of Souad Massi, a striking young folksinger from Algeria whose influences range well beyond her homeland’s borders. While most Algerians her age (she’s 32) soaked in rai, hip-hop, and funk, she gravitated toward 70s folk-rock singers like Joni Mitchell and Loudon Wainwright III; thanks to a guitar-playing uncle, she also developed an obsession with flamenco....

David Grubbs (formerly of Gastr del Sol) had long been an admirer of poet Susan Howe, a 1996 Guggenheim Fellow and poetry and humanities professor at SUNY-Buffalo, when the Fondation Cartier in Paris first suggested the two collaborate on a live performance. That initial 2003 meeting has now resulted in Thiefth (Blue Chopsticks), their first recording project, on which Grubbs transforms Howe’s recitations of two long-form poems, “Thorow” and “Melville’s Marginalia....

FLYING: CONFESSIONS OF A FREE WOMAN sss Known for such PBS documentaries as Beirut: The Last Home Movie (1987) and An American Love Story (1999), a miniseries about the everyday life of an interracial couple, Fox does a fair amount of globe-trotting, and during the time frame of Flying she’s juggling two lovers on separate continents who know about each other. The less serious relationship is with Patrick, a Swiss-German cinematographer she sees more often, mainly in New York (he’s credited as the film’s “technical supervisor”)....