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The Blake Babies’ second full LP, Earwig, is a lush and lovely, dense and extremely pointed essay on sex, the loss of innocence, stupid men, and pollution. The band is a highly textured and hugely melodic threesome from Bloomington by way of Boston–the three met at the Berklee School of Music. Freda Boner drums swimmingly and without cliche, and guitarist John Strohm is my kind of guitar god, keeping the riffs economical but blowing your head off with a distortion bomb when the situation warrants....

With the country’s economic and social fabric seeming to deteriorate more and more each day, it’s easy to see why so many musicians write songs about despair. It’s difficult to find concrete reasons for hope, and it’s harder still to make a positive statement without sounding insipid and naive. What made Bruce Cockburn’s recent appearance at the Riviera so welcome was that he avoided this trap, delivering a message of hope and affirmation in the face of the grave problems his songs describe without sounding self-satisfied or insincere....

Friday 15 It’s time to study the latest Vogue, pull out your credit cards, and put on comfortable (but fashionable) shoes: Oak Street’s Summer Sale runs today from 10 to 5 and tomorrow from noon to 5 at nearly 30 stores. Find out who’s officially participating at 943-1120, or just head for your favorite boutique. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The rebuilding of Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871 attracted architects from across the U....

From their beginnings as a funny, sometimes snotty band with a fondness for odd instrumentation and strange beats, Camper Van Beethoven has progressed into a strong live outfit, postpunk’s leading absurdists. But no one expected the explosive power of last year’s Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, and now comes an equally powerful Key Lime Pie, the band’s latest piece of dissociative, tangled brilliance. Three meditations on America dominate one side of the record, including a surprisingly vicious bazooka blast at Ronald Reagan; on the other side you get the soaring “June,” a rockin’ “Pictures of Matchstick Men” (a live staple), and, to close it all off, “Come on Darkness,” which is apparently the Campers’ idea of a seduction song....

In September the trucks started rumbling down the tree-lined side streets of Old Irving Park to dump their asphalt in the abandoned railroad yards near Kolmar and Berteau. The site at Berteau and Kolmar is part of an old industrial corridor just west of the Kennedy Expressway. In the last few years several of the companies around there moved to the suburbs, and the surrounding residential neighborhood has flourished. “This neighborhood is one of the most stable in the city, and we work hard to keep it that way,” says Linda Pudlo, a longtime resident of the area....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He would bring the ministry of Willow Creek into question as there are “few Asians and practically no blacks or Hispanics. And certainly no raggedy types–no homeless, no drifters, and no psychos, for God’s sake.” Would the same criticism be made of a prominent black or Hispanic church if he found no whites or “raggedy types”?...

GRECIAN FORMULA ’80 “Young man, put your pride on the shelf,” bellow the Village People in “YMCA,” the disco trash classic that opens Bailiwick Repertory’s world premiere production of Grecian Formula ’80. Rick Bromley, the hero of Fred Gormley’s comedy, is a young man who puts his pride on the shelf to work in a gay porn film. Attracted by the money and by the notion of starring in a sex epic, Rick accepts the role of a Greek king in a little something called Slave Boys of Athens....

The utter trashing of country music at the hands of pop schlock over the past few years has made it difficult to even think about the music without getting a headache. The only relief is a recent spate of honest and unassuming, if zero-selling, artists of vastly different styles for whom the rubric “new country” is more a default setting than anything descriptive. Latest submission: a yearning singer/songwriter named Iris DeMent....

Now that Lemonheads albums have essentially become Evan Dando solo albums, we can see that the lanky Bostonian’s personal concerns are more obscure, quieter, and more difficult than those proffered by former cohort Ben Deily. At his best, as on “Half the Time” (off of Lovey) or on the title song to the new album It’s a Shame About Ray, he conjures up a wistful, somewhat disturbing detachedness. Juliana Hatfield is the sometime Blake Baby who’s embarked on what should become a successful solo career; her new Hey Babe is the usual blistering commentary on the trouble with boys–and girls....

There’s a famous film clip of Billie Holiday toward the end of her career singing with tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Holiday’s not doing well: her voice is ravaged, she looks haggard and hollow-eyed, you wonder if she can even finish the show. But at one point, when Young takes off into one of his dreamlike ballad improvisations, Holiday shuts her eyes and smiles, her face suddenly transformed with beatific ecstasy. The care seems to melt away as she gently sways on the ascending beauty of his lines, carried for a precious moment from the hell of the present into music’s sanctuary....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “BIG MISTAKE. In Section 2 of the December 9 Reader a listing and publicity photo for Theater Oobleck’s current show was placed in the ‘Special Occasions Brought to You by Special Export Beer’ advertisement without Theater Oobleck’s knowledge or permission. VERY BAD. The Reader’s policy of mentioning artists in display advertisements paid for by G. Heileman Brewing Company without those artists’ consent is ludicrous and dumb and should be halted immediately....

“Five minutes!” Scott Stevens calls out. It’s the standard stage manager’s warning, familiar to actors the world over. And Stevens, a burly, bearded 26-year-old, is as much a stage manager as this gypsylike collective has. But it’s not five minutes to curtain time; it’s five minutes till the bus leaves for Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet. It’s 6:30 AM on a Wednesday morning in May. Allowing time to pull over at a truck stop for gas, coffee, doughnuts, and newspapers, Stevens is planning on a two-hour drive to Stateville, one of the Illinois prison system’s most hard-ass joints....

Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II, later ended a long and undistinguished film career with a cameo role in a B western that, lacking postproduction financing, was never released in the United States. Divorced, bankrupt, and prone to violent outbursts, Murphy barely escaped conviction in 1969 when he was brought up on assault charges by a dog trainer. For kicks, Murphy used to hang around with cops and participate in drug raids, and he wasn’t above using his honorary sheriff’s department badge to bully teenagers....

North Park College marks the start of its centennial–and the tenth birthday of its chamber music series–with a brass concert that pays tribute to its Scandinavian roots. The tribute is singularly apt since brass, more than any other family of musical instruments, has been a force in Scandinavian music since the days of the Vikings, when wailing horn calls–the Viking battle cry–instilled terror in the populace along the North Sea coasts; I’m told bronze trumpets dating back to 1200 BC have been found in archaeological digs in Sweden....

Last winter when parents and community activists attempted to oust Wells High School principal David Peterson, most observers wrote it off as a neighborhood insurrection. But that battle–which has spread from the near-west-side school into the courts–represents a much deeper conflict between activists and principals that threatens to upset the nascent public-school reform movement. It’s quite a contrast with the days before reform, when principals were the uncontested bosses of their schools....

To the editors: For it should go without saying that the Daley administration is thoroughly reflective of the class structure of American society. Who has great wealth can purchase great political power; and who doesn’t, counts for shit. Given this elementary fact of the local polity, it was predictable as far back as the spring of 1989 that the administration would defend Chicago’s business class (especially Com Ed) against the city’s popular classes....

Ken and Scott feed newspapers to the fire in the trash can, rubbing their hands above it. It’s ten degrees out, and a lot colder with the wind. A few feet away sits a bucket of salmon eggs, and three fishing rods rest over three holes in the ice. It’s past 2:30 and they have only one small perch to show for four hours of standing on the ice in numbing gusts....

THE UNCENSORED STORIES Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Donna Blue Lachman is trying to figure out the meaning of her own meanderings in The Uncensored Stories, a frank, funny monologue about the last 25 years of her very unusual life. Lachman is the founder of the Blue Rider Theatre, where in recent years she has staged several introspective, deeply personal plays. The Demon Show, for example, was Lachman’s attempt to deal with her own “personal demons....

Supposedly the idea came to Mayor Daley one day last summer, while he was thinking about the Museum of Contemporary Art’s long-delayed plans to move to a new location. Administration officials plead for calm. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “First of all, the proposal to move the MCA there is only a proposal; the MCA doesn’t even know if they want to do it....

This poetic masterpiece serves as the crowning testament of Joris Ivens, the great Dutch documentarist and leftist who made this film in collaboration with his companion Marceline Loridan shortly before his death at the age of 90. Neither a documentary nor a fantasy but a sublime fusion of the two, the film deals in multiple ways with the wind, with Ivens’s asthma, with China, with the 20th century (and, more implicitly, with the 19th and the 21st), with magic, and with the cinema....