On last year’s terrific Girls Can Tell, Austin’s Spoon finally outran the long shadow of the Pixies with a taut strain of pop informed as much by 60s soul as postpunk austerity. Front man Britt Daniel surfed the lean grooves like the perfect wave, slipping in and out of the tube. On the surface the subject was his disgust with the music industry–Elektra had dropped the band just four months after releasing Series of Sneaks in 1998–but the songs ultimately conveyed a more universal disillusionment....

The Rebel Souls, led by drummer Ted Sirota, play all around Chicago all the time–just not together. The quintet is made up of several of the city’s most provocative young jazzmen, including its newest addition, trombonist Jeb Bishop, and guitarist Jeff Parker, who’s lent his porous tone and discrete phrasing to groups as varied as Tortoise, the New Horizons Ensemble, and the Chicago Underground Orchestra; saxist Kevin Kizer (a founding Soul) and bassist Josh Abrams complete the lineup....

This trilingual comedy, set in the wilds of Lapland in September 1944, is largely predicated on misunderstandings among three people: a Finnish sniper (Ville Haapasalo), who’s dressed in a German uniform and chained to a rock for being a reluctant fighter but who eventually frees himself; a Russian captain (Viktor Bychkov), who’s en route to a court-martial for alleged anti-Soviet remarks but is accidentally freed by a Russian bomb; and a local widow and reindeer farmer (Anni-Kristiina Juuso), who takes them both in but can’t understand either because she speaks only Sami, the native Lapp tongue....

Kenneth Lonergan’s inexplicably popular 1996 portrait of three disaffected college students meets its match here with a cast comprised of . . . disaffected Columbia College students. After suffering through the reign of George Bush II, the young Hipshot Theatre Company probably has a pretty good sense of what the Reagan administration was about and so can cut to the core of a play set in 1982. And their inexperience turns out to be a boon as they give the script a hip, fuck-all 90s mentality....

Hilda Vasquez wears heavy black eyeliner every time she goes to protest against the company that used to employ her. She walks in comfy black worn-out sneakers that make her seven-month pregnancy easier to carry. Holding up a blazing red sign, the 33-year-old chants halfheartedly, slightly off the beat: “El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido!” Then a rough translation: “The people united will never be defeated!” Improvised drums set the tempo as the lead voice wails through a megaphone, “El pueblo callado jamas sera escuchado!...

Adult. could’ve ridden their wave of underground popularity straight into a rut; instead the Detroit electro act made Anxiety Always (on their own Ersatz Audio), an album that’s sure to alienate a bunch of their fans. Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus have ditched melancholy sweetness and the Kraftwerk vibe in favor of increased paranoia. They’ve also overcultivated a fondness for chilly beats and ironic lyrics, heaped on ruffly Sisters of Mercy darkwave, and thrown in some inept punk-guitar riffs–plus somewhere along the way Kuperus acquired an embarrassing British accent....

The Ass Ponys’ flirtation with mainstream success was embarrassingly brief, but it’s not quite fair to lump them in with Nada Surf, Better Than Ezra, Possum Dixon, or the countless other harmless chumps who got swept up in the mid-90s alt-rock gold rush. Nobody in the quartet is particularly cute, and their music has never been what you’d call punchy. Their biggest “hit” bore the decidedly radio-unfriendly title “Little Bastard.” And although Some Stupid With a Flare Gun (Checkered Past) is their first album since they were let go by A&M in 1996, it doesn’t sound like a last-ditch attempt to remain relevant....

In a gloomy March weekend in a windowless banquet room at the Kenosha Holiday Inn, a group of determined people are trying to raise the dead. It doesn’t look like a seance–most of the attendees are eating cake, sipping coffee and beer, and munching on sandwiches. The rest are onstage, playing a form of music known as “hot jazz.” Three weeks before this year’s event, Pospychala is frantically searching for an E-flat tuba for the West Jesmond Rhythm Kings, a hot-jazz band from England....

For years Bobby Rush, whose blues career started in Chicago in the early 50s, has expressed a desire to cross over from the southern soul/blues circuit into the lucrative white market. But he’s also adamantly refused to compromise what he sees as his black aesthetic: he’s sworn never to play “Sweet Home Chicago,” and he’s never tempered the funk–musical or otherwise–of his racy stage show. This year, with his major part in The Road to Memphis, Richard Pearce’s entry in the seven-part Martin Scorsese PBS series “The Blues,” and a live DVD filmed at actor Morgan Freeman’s upscale blues bistro in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Rush is closer than he’s ever been to his goal....

Thrown out of work when the coca fields he tends are destroyed by a U.S. drug interdiction program, a Bolivian farm laborer with a wife and children illegally emigrates to a suburb of Buenos Aires and finds a job as a fry cook, but his new life is plagued by corrupt cops and the bigots who patronize the diner where he works. Severe budgetary constraints obliged director Israel Adrian Caetano (Pizza, Beer, Smoke) to shoot this plain but powerful drama discontinuously over the course of three years, but he elicited fine performances from a cast that includes seasoned professionals (40-year movie veteran Enrique Liporace as the Bolivian’s tough, manipulative boss), local thespians (Freddie Flores as the dogged protagonist), and novices (Rosa Sanchez as the unhappy young woman running the kitchen)....

Books have a mystical place in our culture: they’re signifiers of wisdom, vessels of secret knowledge, repositories of private longings. Recommending a book is a coded communication: by suggesting this title at this time I tell you something about myself and about what I think of you. Loaning a book is an act of intimacy. Yet the myriad meanings of books remain largely unexamined, especially in the performance-art world, which has long been ambivalent about books and the printed word....

Truant officers for parents. Collins High School outreach worker Deborah Michael is quoted in Catalyst (December) saying, “The initial response from many parents [of students who miss school] is: ‘I can’t do anything with my child.’ I look at them and say, ‘What do you mean you can’t do anything with them?’ I let them know that if they don’t get their child in school, their public assistance can be cut off....

With no chording piano or guitar to clutter things up, horn-bass-drum trios are ready-made for unfettered blowing: think Albert Ayler’s trio circa ’64. But they also tend to create sturdy structural foundations to compensate for the stripped-down resources–witness Sonny Rollins’s suddenly much-revived 1958 “Freedom Suite,” where simple themes give the players a strong rhythmic trajectory. These days Dutch saxophonist Ab Baars’s trio is a model of such conceptual clarity; so is the newish Dragons 1976, which consists of several of the brighter bulbs among Chicago’s younger north-side improvisers: alto saxophonist Aram Shelton, drummer Tim Daisy, and bassist Jason Ajemian....

Hershey Felder’s splendid one-man portrait of George Gershwin distills the essence of the short-lived composer and his enduring music. Skilled as an actor, singer, and pianist, writer-performer Felder reveals the links between Gershwin’s work and his personality: ambitious, charming, passionate, and playful, yet imbued with a melancholy loneliness that adds emotional depth to compositions ranging from “The Man I Love” and “But Not for Me” to An American in Paris and Porgy and Bess....

Go West, Loud Man Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Soon Walter will have a chance to burn new ones–in February he’s relocating to San Francisco. It’s a good time to make the move. Nationally, his profile is high: he’s become a key player in the movement he jokingly dubs “brutal prog.” Bands like Lightning Bolt, Orthrelm, Black Dice, and the Locust have begun to combine metal, prog, noise, and improvisation much as the Luttenbachers have done for years....

Fire investigator Bill Cosgrove sees it all the time: a candle, a flame, and a finger going through it. “People are curious about fire,” he says. “Children are the most curious. You don’t really get burned when you run your finger through a flame, if you go real fast. I don’t do it because I’ve been burned.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cosgrove, 56, joined the Chicago Fire Department in 1969 and spent 18 years as a firefighter before becoming an investigator....

So you think there’s a good person inside of you just dying to come out, but your ugly facade won’t let it? If you’re smart you might see a shrink about that. But thanks in part to shows like Extreme Makeover and The Swan–the most evil TV show the scientists at Fox have ever concocted–you’re probably just as likely to call a plastic surgeon. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

On her first two records, Meshell Ndegeocello backed up her soulful, buttered-rum voice and daughter-of-Larry Graham slap-and-pop bass playing with a sardonic strut–the big single from her 1993 debut, Plantation Lullabies, was a sidelong sneer called “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night),” and the highlight of 1996’s Peace Beyond Passion was a delicious cover of Bill Withers’s classic arched-eyebrow jealousy song “Who Is He and What Is He to You....

Samuel de Champlain was searching for a route to China in 1615 when he paddled into Lake Huron. Certain he’d found the ocean, the French explorer scooped up a palm full of water and raised it to his lips. It was fresh. Disappointed–and puzzled, because he’d never seen a lake so large–Champlain named his discovery la mer douce, the sweet sea. For a long time the focus has been on outsiders who want water from the Great Lakes basin....

This ambitious 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 13th annual Rhino Fest runs through October 13. Performances take place at the Lunar Cabaret, 2827 N. Lincoln, and at Prop Thtr, 4225 N. Lincoln....