Rock, Pop, etc. CHENILLE SISTERS Free in-store performance. Mon 12/4, 5 PM, Borders Books & Music, 830 N. Michigan. 312-573-0564. DOOBIE BROTHERS Sold out. Sun 12/10, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. FLAMMABLE DRESS performs at the museum’s “First Fridays” reception. Fri 12/1, 6-10 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. 312-280-2660. HOLIDAY CABARET 2000 Benefit for Teen Living Programs, Inc., with Alexandra Billings, Kathy Taylor, Audrey Morris, Ester Hana, 3 Girls 3, Elizabeth Doyle, Kari Howard, and others....

Greetings: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than two million immigrants are currently waiting for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to handle their citizenship applications. This includes 90,000 immigrants in the Chicago area and throughout the state of Illinois. Thousands have been waiting since 1996 or even before. All too often INS will send notice of an interview or a swearing-in ceremony to the wrong address, or so late that the applicant does not receive it until after the date has passed....

By Michael Miner “It seems he always takes on the small guy’s side, but he has to realize some of the unions he’s really hurting. The unions are getting tired of him dragging them into court and depleting their treasuries.” Thomas Geoghegan But the next morning (this was last Sunday) Krone called from Italy’s Amalfi Coast to say he had nothing to do with the caper. He said Geoghegan is “a personal friend,” though “many members of 134 despise him,” and besides, the pamphleting is “counterproductive....

Who Sent That Spam? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Hot Type, Michael Miner has twice written about that “familiar piece of collegiate Internet humor,” the “Dear Doctor Laura” letter. It is being circulated widely and was even cribbed for the TV show The West Wing. Although I’m sure Michael Moore would have no problem with the letter’s wide circulation, I believe in giving credit where credit is due....

Everyone talks at one time or another about bolting for parts unknown. George Savino actually did it, leaving a secure job at the Reader for a three-year sojourn in sunny Italy. What did he bring back for us? His monologue After Italy, created under the watchful eye of Second City main-stage performer Stephnie Weir. The show recently moved to prime time at Live Bait after a couple of months at the Playground, where it thwarted any expectations of a post-Spalding Gray travelogue: Savino has no great revelations about his journey and falls in with no excessively eccentric people–he doesn’t even stumble into any exotic sexual encounters (unless you count that blissful week of lunch breaks with the dishy construction worker)....

BILL FRISELL QUARTET Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bill Frisell has long been one of the most distinctive guitarists in jazz, but only in the last five years has he managed to focus his talent–oddly enough, by funneling it through country music. Frisell’s associations in the 80s with Bill Laswell and John Zorn infected his subsequent work, replacing the pastoralism of his first recordings with often functionless eclecticism: he can switch from ethereal fluff to heavy metal to country twang to surf in the blink of an eye, and too often, especially with Zorn, he did....

FREAKWATER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With album number six, the ominously titled End Time (Thrill Jockey), Freakwater has undergone the most significant reinvention of its career, and the swapping of multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston for steel guitarist Eric Heywood feels like the least of the changes. End Time is the first Freakwater album to include as many songs by Janet Bean as by Cathy Irwin, the first not to include any covers, the first to feature a full drum kit throughout, and the first to use a string section....

Even before she started her research, Libby Hill knew exactly how she was going to begin her book on the Chicago River: with the great plague that followed the flood of August 2, 1885. It was a familiar piece of river history, and it played out in spectacular panorama in her mind’s eye. That Sunday, five and a half inches of rain fell on the city in 18 hours. The Illinois and Michigan Canal, which was supposed to carry sewage and surface water away from Lake Michigan, proved sorely inadequate for this kind of load–in spite of the costly “deep cut” that had enlarged it a few years earlier....

Bev said she was taking a day for herself and I was delighted to oblige. She was no picnic when she wanted to be alone. She was out the door almost before I gave her my answer. I heard her car start and heard it stall because she never followed my advice to let it warm up for half a freaking minute. Then she was gone. “Sounds like luck to me,” she said....

Red Psalm Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » East Side Story, a recent documentary about communist musicals, assumes that communist-bloc directors were just itching to make Hollywood extravaganzas and invariably wound up looking strained, square, and ill equipped. But Red Psalm (1971), Miklos Jancso’s dazzling, open-air revolutionary pageant, is a highly sensual communist musical that employs occasional nudity as lyrically as the singing, dancing, and nature; within its own idioms it swings as well as wails....

SPINANES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When they debuted at the International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, Washington, in 1991, the Spinanes embodied the fresh promise of indie pop. Portland natives Rebecca Gates (guitar and vocals) and Scott Plouf (drums) played ingratiatingly tuneful, bedroom-bred guitar pop; their early sets included a song about having a crush on Jad Fair and a catchy instrumental called “I ª That Party With the Monkey Kitty....

Ska Against Racism 5/1, Riviera Theatre One of my biggest frustrations with the so-called third wave of ska (besides the fact that whoever’s counting missed a couple waves) is that the music’s deeply political roots got left behind somewhere, if not in Kingston then in Brixton. But at least these guys are trying. This nine-band skankfest, headlined by Less Than Jake and the Toasters, is a stop on the Ska Against Racism tour, organized by Michael Park of San Francisco’s Asian Man Records–and as if to show that it ain’t just 2-Tone anymore, the bill features the Christian ska band Five Iron Frenzy and Japan’s Kemuri, who give the sound a weird heavy-metal crunch....

By Sridhar Pappu But right now the Dirksen Federal Building seems as distant as Guam. Bulldog and I are in a family restaurant in Evanston. As he slides into the corner booth, he lets out an “oooooh,” explaining that his back’s been killing him lately, though it’s nothing compared to last year, when he tore his left rotator cuff and had to have surgery. For six weeks he couldn’t come to a restaurant like this because he couldn’t bend his arm....

wiens.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’d like to correct a mistake that appeared in your Calendar section this week (July 31). Your writer chose to illustrate the pluck demonstrated by Pilsen’s Dogmatic Gallery by noting that it is moving to new digs this month, “undeterred by harsh words from the New Art Examiner’s Ann Wiens, who called it ‘simply a waste of time....

BEN GOLDBERG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Oakland’s Ben Goldberg is a prime mover in the ongoing jazz-clarinet renaissance, progressive division, but on a raft of recent recordings he avoids the split tones and shrieks favored by many new-breed licorice-stick players. Although Goldberg’s been on the scene since the dawn of the 90s–leading the revisionist New Klezmer Trio, whose two superb albums used traditional klezmer as a compositional jumping-off point–only in the last few years has he started to earn the acclaim he deserves....

Bigger Than History But try proposing that the Holocaust offers no lessons at all, or suggesting that most Americans know more about it than they do about the bombing of Hiroshima–that will raise hackles, for reasons that have as much to do with the cold war as World War II. Then try declaring that many American Jews today use the Holocaust to win the gold medal in the “Victimization Olympics.”...

Black Harvest International Film and Video Festival See Critic’s Choice. (6:00) This 1996 Zimbabwean film, directed by Tsitsi Dangarembga and sponsored by several development agencies, is weighed down by its good intentions. Three rural children are orphaned when their parents die of AIDS; after an uncle and the neighbors abandon them (signaling the breakdown of traditional social structures) the daughter is forced into prostitution, and the older son seeks his fortune on the streets of Harare....

Friday 8/4 – Thursday 8/10 You might know British actor Michael York from his recent role as British Intelligence agent Basil Exposition in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. But he’s also an acclaimed Shakespearean actor of both stage and screen and a writer to boot. His new book, A Shakespearean Actor Prepares, cowritten with Adrian Brine, “points out the sources of energy in [Shakespeare’s] plays, which, if tapped, will galvanize an actor’s fantasy and liberate his talent....

Friday 5/28 – thursday 6/3 Critical Mass’s bike-home-from-work ride on the north side last week went through the 18th District, where some of the group’s members had been arrested during a ride last fall. The most recent foray resulted in a handful of tickets, and one cheeky cyclist was arrested for chanting “Biking is not a crime.” At tonight’s ride the group will vote on whether to pass through the area again....

GOLD SPARKLE BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Gold Sparkle Band’s name says flash, but its high-spirited music delivers substance. The quartet’s compositions are steeped in a half century of jazz history: the sprawling “Fellowship,” on their latest CD, Nu-Soul Zodiac (Squealer), is dedicated to Other Dimensions in Music; on the 1997 Downsizing (Nu), the melodies of “Lamentations (for America)” sound like Mingus, and “Posledni Autobus Z Bratislavy” is tinged with klezmer....