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SPOT 8/27, BOULEVARD CAFE Spot’s got the cred 30,000 younger genre hoppers would kill for: good thing indie musicians don’t get their reps the same way gangbangers do. He spent the 80s producing a lot of the bands that made that decade tolerable–the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, Husker Du, Black Flag, the Butthole Surfers, the Misfits–and since ’86 has lived in Austin, where he’s been a sideman for fellow punk refugee Alejandro Escovedo, all the while immersing himself in traditional Irish music....

CHEVELLE 10/15, METRO Rumors of grunge’s death have been greatly exaggerated. But this youthful local trio of brothers (the youngest, bassist Joe Loeffler, is 18) knows that angst alone, even when expressed with the sheer testosterone of a Helmet or a Tool, is not enough. Not even Steve Albini–who, as pointed out in the press release, the CD booklet, and even the fine print on the disc itself, recorded Chevelle’s recent Point #1 (Squint)–is enough....

Fresh out of Columbia University with a BA in French literature, David Divita landed a job that most aspiring journalists would kill for. On the basis of a friendly reference and a good interview, the personable young man was hired by the New York Times to work in one of the paper’s most important departments. Not the metro or arts section, not the Washington bureau or the op-ed pages–the promising 23-year-old had snared a spot in society news, writing the wedding announcements that run in the paper’s hefty Sunday edition....

Music listings are compiled by LAURA KOPEN and RENALDO MIGALDI (classical, fairs and festivals) from information available Tuesday. We advise calling ahead for confirmation. Please send listings information, in-cluding a phone number for use by the public, to Reader Music Listings, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611, or send a fax to 312-828-9926, or send E-mail to musiclistings@chicagoreader.com. CHRISTINA AGUILERA Next Saturday, August 19, 7:30 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison. 312-455-4500 or 312-559-1212....

Fake Stamps and Other Mischievous Behaviors: Michael Hernandez de Luna and Michael Thompson at Morlen Sinoway, through April 2 For several years now Chicago artists Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna have been making fake stamps with a computer and laser printer or color copier. Like my rendering of Ho Chi Minh, their subjects often offer mischievous alternatives to typical commemorative stamps: a sheet of bare-breasts stamps, for instance, and another showing a postal worker with a rifle captioned “Disgruntled Postal Employee/Handle With Care....

Shirin Neshat: Rapture By Fred Camper Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Neshat was born in Iran in 1957 but has been a U.S. resident since 1974; in 1990, 11 years after Iran became an Islamic republic, she returned for a visit and was shocked by its transformation. “I had never been in a country that was so ideologically based,” she says in the booklet for this exhibit, yet claims impartiality in her art: “I made a decision that this work was not going to be about me or my opinions....

Darlene Gonzalez and Lydia Arce huddled over a mixing board in an editing suite in Loyola University’s communications department. The girls, students at Antonia Pantoja High School in Bucktown, were listening to an interview they had recorded the day before, trying to decide what to include in their radio documentary about the political future of Puerto Rico. “What if we put a little piece of this part at the beginning and a little piece of it at the end?...

LINCOLNWOOD CHAMBER ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When composer and pianist Ilya Levinson emigrated to Chicago from his native Moscow, he was a nearly penniless “political refugee” with a minimal command of English. He’d been a star student at the Moscow Conservatory, but was convinced that if he had joined the composers’ union–the only way a Soviet composer’s work could be published or performed–he’d have been at the mercy of an anti-Semitic bureaucracy that had been suppressing Russian Jewish culture since before World War II....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mr. Molinaro, music teachers do not create audiences. If anything, they “create” musicians. You create audiences. Instead of lamenting the museumlike state of classical music, why don’t you get out there and play something that others are not playing? Your Bennett-Gordon Hall program is obviously very challenging, and it is important to keep playing Bach, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff....

Lead Stories The I Am Hurt Corporation lawyer-referral company filed a lawsuit in Edmonton, Alberta, in March against a competing lawyer who advertises his phone number as 428-HURT. In November a New York grand jury indicted three principals in a Maryland distribution company for substituting common fish eggs for high-quality caviar. And in March the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against four Georgetown University law students, accusing them of recommending an obscure stock on an Internet bulletin board and then exploiting people who bought it....

Dear Mr. Kleine: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First of all, please verify the battered-women’s shelter somebody was going to bulldoze. I have lived in Ms. Shiller’s area for nearly five years. I volunteer in a shelter, the likes of which you have described, but never to my knowledge has a bulldozer ever been near it and, I might say, neither has Helen Shiller....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest; now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the Rhino Fest, now in its 11th year, features shows by such local notables as Theater for the Age of Gold, the Billy Goat Experiment, Blair Thomas, Antonio Sacre (now based in LA, but returning for the festival), John Musial, Michael K....

Dear Kristin Ostberg: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a regular participant in the Critical Mass bike rides (who by the way can barely contain his frustration and outrage at your dismissive point of view), I have yet to see as regular an expression of economy, safety, etc as Critical Mass. I am also a regular bicycle commuter and a former bicycle courier, and I realize all too acutely the point of Critical Mass....

Hey, Faggot: Hey, ASS: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let me walk you through this: If there were such things as angels, which there are not, and if there were such a thing as God, which there is not, God and his heavenly host would have more important things to do than stand at the foot of your bed and watch you get fucked in the ass....

Hey, Faggot: This is going to sound odd, but I’ve been reading Sex for Christians: The Limits and Liberties of Sexual Living by Lewis B. Smeades (Eerdmans, 1976), which is not as skinny a book as one would think, but that’s probably because it was written in the early 70s, just before the ascendancy of the sex-phobic religious right. As Susan Faludi points out in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, Christian sex manuals were once surprisingly progressive, even coming out in support of sex-fer-pleasure and a woman’s right to expect the odd orgasm now and again....

GROOVIE GHOULIES 5/26, FIRESIDE BOWL It’s a law of nature: there must always be good new Ramones records in the world. If the Ramones won’t make them, somebody else will. This two-man, two-woman California quartet’s sixth and latest, Travels With My Amp, isn’t as good as Road to Ruin but it’s a lot better than End of the Century. There’s a family anthem a la the Addamses and the Munsters (“Ghoulie Family”), a deliciously concise answer song to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” a poignant tale of interracial love (“Hair of Gold and Skin of Blue”), a Jonathan Richman cover (“Dancing Late at Night”)....

DIANE IZZO 1/22, METRO; 1/30, Museum of contemporary art When I was called to help judge a local Lilith Fair talent competition at Metro last year, I gratefully threw points at those few performers out of the 21 female-dominated acoustic acts who didn’t make me feel like I’d been sentenced to community service. First-runner-up Izzo stood out for her solid songcraft and that urgent something in her husky voice that hinted she’d rock out in an instant if only the format allowed....

This 1953 Egyptian musical is sprawling, heterogeneous, and somewhat uneven, but it’s worth seeing for the lively performance of child star Fayruz and for director Anwar Wagdi’s close attention to class differences. Fayruz has been compared to Shirley Temple, but as the title character, an unwanted child adopted by a struggling street musician, she reminds me more of the charming teenage hustler played by Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett. Dahab and her adoptive father are often reduced to begging, and Wagdi uses composition and camera movement to contrast their ragged figures with the elegant rich, but when the pair suddenly hit the jackpot, Dahab’s biological father tries to reclaim her in an update of the King Solomon tale....

Long considered a landmark of feminist filmmaking, Michelle Citron’s 48-minute 1978 film deals with mother-daughter relations, but its self-questioning form and avoidance of prescriptive judgments make the film lively and relevant today. An opening autobiographical voice-over tells us that the film stemmed from a personal crisis the filmmaker underwent at age 28. This voice-over returns repeatedly, always heard over home-movie footage that Citron has rephotographed, slowing it down so that individual frames last just long enough to be perceived separately; this invites us to examine the tiniest gesture, to consider each choice of composition and camera angle....

DEL THE FUNKY HOMOSAPIEN/CASUAL/UGLY DUCKLING Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the early 90s the Bay Area hip-hop crew called Hieroglyphics–Del the Funky Homosapien, Souls of Mischief, and Casual–was a potent ingredient in the antidote to California gangsta rap. Along with LA groups like Freestyle Fellowship and the Pharcyde, they gravitated toward classic battle rhyming, riffing amusingly on everyday episodes over jazz-flavored samples and heavy, shuffling breaks....