BLUE OYSTER CULT 8/7, NAVY PIER I went out and bought Secret Treaties, Agents of Fortune, and Tyranny and Mutation–on CD this time–to see just how glorious these smart-ass Long Islanders’ glory days had actually been. Turns out I was a lot smarter in junior high than I remember. BOC’s catchy, intricate hard rock still sounds pretty good, and their complex yarns–conspiracy theories involving demented bikers, Lovecraftian sea creatures, the side effects of radiation, and Nazis from outer space–place them down the hall from Funkadelic in the pantheon of pioneers of Roswell rock....

TERRANOVA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I admit my recommendation for the Berlin DJ triumvirate Terranova ain’t based on much, but what little I’ve heard sure sounded good. The only group member who might have any stateside name recognition is Fetisch, who moved to New York in the late 80s to immerse himself in the city’s thriving hip-hop scene. DJing around town, he caught the attention of Gee Street Records honcho Jon Baker, which eventually led to production work for Stereo MC’s and X Clan....

The Joffrey Shuffle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alpaugh has spent the last 20 years in the nonprofit performing arts, but he lasted only 18 months as executive director of the Joffrey–about as long as his predecessor, Arnold Breman–and apparently he had trouble keeping people. “There has been a lot of turnover directly under him,” says one staffer. Sources inside and close to the company also report considerable tension between Alpaugh and Gerald Arpino, the troupe’s founder and artistic leader....

The Pawnbroker Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, in 1958, he plies his pawnbroking trade in Harlem, performing by rote in a bleak cagelike structure. Here he encounters lost souls whose lives resemble those of prisoners in a work camp–particularly the prostitutes. Their plights trigger tormented memories of his wife, Ruth, who was used as a sex slave by Nazi soldiers. Fifteen years later, though ostensibly free, Sol remains a slave–to the police, whose protection he requires, and to his boss, the gun-toting Murillio....

Fresh from a showcase in Wales, Goat Island returns to Chicago with the American premiere of The Sea & Poison, a complicated, sardonic, grueling journey through the landscapes of propaganda and war. With ritualistic intensity, director Lin Hixson and her courageous performers move smoothly from task to task: two men talk about their rubber-frog offspring (who keep reappearing like silly, creepy specters); a man plants a seed on his head; a limp dancer is dragged around until everyone drops from exhaustion....

WIRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rock ‘n’ roll is not like a mountainside in which layers of history accumulate and fossilize, waiting for sunburned grad students to dig them up and make notes on each old bone chip. It’s more like a big vat of stew simmering on the stove, constantly being turned and churned, the stuff that’s settled to the bottom regularly brought up to swirl around with the new flavors....

X & Y (two working stiffs), Black Forest Productions and Synerdreams, at Angel Island. Seamus (James) Connors, writer and director of this uneven, seemingly unfinished new play, would have greatly benefited from an outside eye in staging it. Set in the “near future” after a nuclear “occurrence,” the story is strangely divided between the antics of two graveyard workers and the marital infidelities of the two rulers of this postmodern wasteland....

Closer –Jose Saramago, All the Names Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Ever seen a human heart?” asks Larry, a dermatologist whose profession–like those of the other three characters–seems a bit too purposefully chosen, demonstrating the skin-deep values of a society more surface than substance. “It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.” This striking image of human brutality and suffering may not completely represent Marber’s point of view–there’s ample evidence to suggest that beneath his characters’ ferocious sexual competition, unmitigated loneliness, and selfish savagery lies a slightly more hopeful view of human interconnection....

Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shot before and shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Wu Wenguang’s 1990 video ushered in a new documentary style in China, focusing on urban issues and operating outside the cultural bureaucracy. The five young artists he profiles–a writer, a photographer, two painters, and a director of avant-garde theater–reject a life tethered to the government yet still hope to modernize the urban cultural scene; their frank ruminations about life, art, and the future are punctuated by groundbreaking verite shots of people doing their chores in squalid back alleys and studio apartments....

By John Flink Shortly after the Rosemont deal was announced and construction of a casino parking garage was begun near a tangle of on- and off-ramps, the process was cut short by a lawsuit filed by a group of investors, Lake County Riverboat LLC. The group claims the legislation that allowed an existing casino license to be transferred from a defunct boat in Jo Daviess County was written in a way that made Rosemont a sure winner....

Just try driving on a expired license for five years. Forty-five, or 17 percent, of Illinois’ 268 major Clean Water Act permits have expired, and 6 of them have been expired for more than five years, according to a report by Friends of the Earth and the Environmental Working Group. (Five permits belonging to the Chicago Water Reclamation District have expired.) The permits state the amount and type of pollution that factories and sewage treatment plants are allowed to discharge, and when they’re renewed, the amount of discharge allowed is decreased....

Campaign finance censorship. From an October 1 letter written by the ACLU’s Laura Murphy: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t think you can tell people this area is safe and this area is unsafe,” says Robert Mason, executive director of the South East Chicago Commission in “Common Sense” (Autumn), a publication on security for University of Chicago newcomers. But he adds that “in Hyde Park-South Kenwood–bounded by 47th Street to the north, 61st Street to the south, Cottage Grove to the west and Lake Shore Drive to the east–residents receive double police protection” from University police as well as the Chicago Police Department....

Friday 4/16 – Thursday 4/22 The unrelated Chicago Black Lesbians and Gays’ Unity V conference also takes place this weekend, with workshops, seminars, a dinner dance, and keynote speakers Reverend Carol Johnson, Dr. Elias Farajaje-Jones, and writer and activist Barbara Smith. It begins tonight with a reception from 6:30 to 8, followed by a “people of color poetry slam” at 9. Admission to the slam is $5; the weekend conference is $40 to $140....

The ospreys are back in the forest preserves around Palos Park. A pair has been resident there the past two summers, but they didn’t seem to lay any eggs in the nest they built; ospreys typically spend a few years building a nest before they use it. One of the birds I saw last Sunday was perched in a tree next to the snag that supports the nest. Back in 1854 Robert Kennicott reported that this species was known to nest in Cook County....

You don’t wake up one day a charted country, it happens slowly, in parts. But suddenly you notice that the once all-compelling mystery of your deepest holes has already been explored. The maddening desire and titillation you felt at being bared, licked, prodded where no one had ever been (or where many had been but where none had understood the significance of being) fades, leaving you only the ethnographer’s notes: wrinkled, already mapped....

Dear editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It struck me that Mike Sula’s “Cat Fight” article (August 27) framed a problem of poor communication and misunderstanding between neighbors (like there aren’t thousands of such problems every day) and opened the possibility that it was about ethnic politics. Why else would the Reader make a cover story out of it? As someone who has lived in Ravenswood Manor since 1986, I offer a few additional reactions....

Lead Stories In January the Toronto Sun published photos from the office of surgeon William G. Middleton showing his nurse straddling an unconscious female patient. The patient subsequently filed a complaint against the doctor. On the same day in Tulsa, Oklahoma, dentist Donald C. Johnson pleaded guilty to sexually molesting several young patients after lewd Polaroid photos of apparently anesthetized girls were discovered in his office. And in December a woman in Waynesboro, Virginia, sought damages of $350,000 from physician Dale A....

SPOT, GRANDPA’S GHOST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These two acts are part of a traveling showcase for Upland–a rootsy, more cerebral subsidiary of Owned & Operated, the Denver-area indie started by the band All and run by Joe Carducci. Grandpa’s Ghost, from Pocahontas, Illinois, are the least known of the gang, even in these parts, but they shouldn’t be. On their first CD for the label (which is their fourth overall), Il Baccio, they prove themselves a startlingly good psychedelic roots-rock band....

BROWN WHORNET 10/29, FIRESIDE BOWL It’s dawned on some of us lately that the most enervating and threatening music one can possibly play is not punk or gangsta rap or death metal but rather prog–and by that I mean the kind of obscenely elaborate, indulgent pileup favored by folks who think Sheik Yerbouti was too subtle. In addition to displaying promiscuous technical proficiency and toilet humor, Austin’s Brown Whornet curse the pope, tweak racial humor, and make hamburgers unappealing forever....

KIMBALL ROESER EFFECT 8/11, EMPTY BOTTLE Jim Kimball and Ed Roeser weren’t the stars of their most successful bands–Kimball has drummed for the Laughing Hyenas, Mule, and the Jesus Lizard, and Roeser played guitar in Urge Overkill–so their new outfit is blessed with a modicum of freedom from the burden of audience expectations. (For contrast, see the sad spectacle of Nash Kato hoping to evoke nostalgia for something that was sort of a camp act to begin with…it’s like Sha Na Na playing Woodstock ’94....