Indigo

Morrissey "You Are the Quarry" (Sanctuary) *** Stephen Patrick Morrissey is a piece of work, as they say here in the U.S.A., the Englishman's current land of residence. After a five-year hiatus, Brit-rock's eternal misfit returns in full flower on "You Are the Quarry" (in stores Tuesday), atremble with emotional conflict, affronted by a world that treats him with indifference or cruelty, cursed to isolation but longing for connection. Welcome back, Mozz.

Indigo Girls first came to prominence during the late-'80s sensitive-chick movement (Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, etc.), and they haven't changed their formula much. But, hey, if Jewel can still be relevant in the pop world, then why not Indigo Girls? Basking in the fan love that partly explains its staying power, the folk-pop duo gave the faithful a taste of its forthcoming album and played a lot of old favorites during a sold-out show on Monday at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood.

Hewlett-Packard Co., which earlier this week made a bid for Compaq Computer Corp., said it would pay as much as $882 million in stock and cash to buy industrial printing systems firm Indigo. HP already had a minority stake in Indigo, which makes high-speed color print technology, an area HP expects will take off in the commercial printing market. The deal would add to HP's earnings per share in the first full year of operation, HP said. HP said it owned about 13.

The singer-songwriter tradition is immune to age. Even protest songs, so often connected to a specific movement or historical event, continue to resonate decades later, such as Bob Dylan's withering "Masters of War" or Neil Young's outraged "Ohio." "It's like old, old folk music that just lasts through time, like Woody Guthrie," says Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, who will perform Saturday at the Sun Theatre in Anaheim.

UCLA gave you Francis Ford Coppola. USC, George Lucas. Cal State Northridge offers up A.C. Manzano, a former intern at Paramount Studios and DreamWorks SKG, who is learning the corporate side of the movie-making business. While richer, slicker film schools turn out A-list talent, Northridge's Arts, Media and Communication Department produces the administrative staffers who make movies happen.

You might associate the Indigo Girls with heavy-handed lyrics, but it was the heavy power chords played by Emily Saliers and Amy Ray to open their first of two nights at the Wiltern Theatre on Thursday that sent the strongest message. "Go," which also opens the Georgia duo's new "Come on Now Social" album, could well have been Neil Young with Crazy Horse, the way the pair and their four-piece band churned. And they hardly let up for two hours.

After marching through Georgia and beyond, the Indigo Girls, inspirational heroines to a generation of young women, bring their brand of introspective folk rock to the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara for a gig tonight on their "Shaming of the Sun" tour. Opening will be Danielle Howle & the Tantrums, another Atlanta-based act. Emily Saliers and Amy Ray met in elementary school in Atlanta, and began performing in high school in 1980 as Saliers & Ray.

"Chandler with onions" is the way novelist Ross Macdonald described one of his earliest short stories, adding, "but then Chandler himself is Hammett with Freud potatoes. As Dostoevsky said about Gogol (I think), we all came out from under Hammett's black mask." Forty-five years after Macdonald issued that summation, it remains valid. Today's hard-edged crime novels range far and wide in style and content, from George P. Pelecanos' "King Suckerman," which revels in the excesses of mid-1970s masculine lifestyles, to Wendy Hornsby's "A Hard Light," a generally unvarnished portrait of a modern woman at the crossroads.

While Jewel was still up in Alaska, the Indigo Girls delivered a lilting, country-steeped tune called "Closer to Fine." Ever since, the Atlanta folk-rock duo's career has struggled to top the down-home heart and living-room spirituality of that minor 1989 hit, even though the team has stretched in both its music and its ideology.