Gwen Lux was 20 years old when she brought the gods to Michigan Avenue. It was 1929, and Lux and her husband Eugene had been commissioned to create sculpture for a 16-story skyscraper going up at 520 N. Michigan. The building’s architects, Frederick J. Thielbar and John Reed Fugard, wanted embellishment that would complement the art deco building’s sweeping vertical lines and setbacks. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Luxes responded with a celebration of strength and grace....

This is a homecoming celebration for a major bluesman who left Chicago for Paris in the early 80s and has performed here precious few times since then. Allison cut his teeth in the 50s and 60s playing with such greats as Freddie King and Magic Sam, but he emerged into the “mainstream” (i.e., white) consciousness after he recorded for Delmark in 1967 He toured the hippie ballroom circuit and built a reputation as a guitarist whose Buddy-Guy-by-way-of-Hendrix fretboard fire sometimes spilled over into chaos but always infused his performances with an emotional charge....

Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson’s pair of local concerts last year gave plenty of reason for pause. A free improviser with bulldozer power who also pays attention to detail is a rare thing, and his astonishing mastery of both ends of the spectrum never faltered. With complex logic, heart-stopping surprise, and assured fluidity, his dense stream of ideas flowed from one polarity to the other, occasionally fluttering breathlessly in between. The recently released Parrot Fish Eye (Okka Disk), a striking collection of duets with percussionist Michael Zerang and trios with bass clarinetist Gene Coleman and guitarist/accordionist Jim O’Rourke recorded here last year, proves Gustafsson is as flexible as they come....

“I woke up one morning and the creative urge was gone,” director Jim Schneider says, explaining why he dropped out of theater a year and a half ago. “I just reached a burn-out point.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Suddenly theater, which had been the center of his life since he was a kid, held no attraction. “I didn’t go to theater. I didn’t read a play....

Like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic–its fellow members in the Big Five of American orchestras–the Philadelphia Orchestra has new artistic leadership. Gone is the glamorous and youthful Riccardo Muti (for Milan’s La Scala), and succeeding him is the 70-year-old Wolfgang Sawallisch. Thoroughly German-trained, Sawallisch spent much of his career in his native Munich, where his last post was at the head of the Bavarian State Opera. He also holds the distinction of being the youngest person ever to conduct at the Bayreuth Festival, in 1957 at age 34....

Criticism in the mass media in recent years has become little more than an adjunct to the capitalist culture of consumption: the critic (of films, books, music, theater, or whatever) serves primarily as a consumer advocate, a guide to the bewildering variety of consumer choices. And Beavis and Butt-head are not the only ones to have reduced criticism to simple binary oppositions–cool stuff and stuff that sucks. Our two most influential critics, Siskel and Ebert, years ago reduced their own criticism to the positioning of their thumbs....

If food is the sex of the 90s, dining trends indicate it will be limited to foreplay and afterglow. People are skipping entrees (a London restaurant offers “no intercourses,” just appetizers and desserts) and tapas are the new cheap thrill. At Santa Fe Tapas, just down the block from tapas pioneer Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba!, that thrill is intensified by the laying on of chili peppers, the fruit that’s into domination. It produces pleasure by sending pain messages to the nervous system, which then manufactures endorphins to counteract them....

Spearheading the recent interest in Madagascan roots music, Tarika–literally, “the group”–and their former incarnation, Tarika Sammy, relate to their traditions in the same way that Taj Mahal plays the blues: their approach is both folkloric and revisionist. The difference is that music from Madagascar, an island located in the Indian Ocean off the coast of east Africa, still sounds exotic, while the blues is so thoroughly familiar that we don’t even notice its sway most of the time....

Robert Perkins and Rocco Landesman have thrown down the gauntlet. Against the backdrop of an increasingly anemic off-Loop theater industry, Chicago producer Perkins and Landesman, president of New York’s Jujamcyn Theaters, announced plans last week to transform the Royal George Theatre into a busy venue for new work, commercial revivals, and the more challenging Broadway transfers. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Topping the list is the Chicago premiere of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a two-part, seven-hour dramatic epic that tells the story of three groups of characters whose lives intertwine and deals bluntly and at times graphically with the topics of Mormons, homosexuality, and AIDS....

Drs. Ram Yogev and Patricia Garcia have much in common with Bernard Rieux, the physician and secular saint of Camus’ The Plague. Yogev, director of the Section of Pediatric and Maternal HIV Infection at Children’s Memorial Hospital, and Garcia, director of the Women’s Program of the HIV Center at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, must daily roll up their sleeves and battle despair as the infection rate in the populations they serve continues to climb, and the ignorance and misunderstanding of self-appointed experts flows unabated....

By Neal Pollack Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first seven pages of his book cover his family’s growing fears about Stalinist purges, but they escaped from Ukraine in 1928 by simply applying for a visa to Mexico. Once there he spent two years as a leather worker and as a member of the Confederacion Regional Obrera Mexicana, a major Mexican labor union. Then his family moved to Juarez, where he became a shoe-leather salesman, sang Russian folk songs for a weekly radio program in El Paso, Texas, and learned how to repair radios through a correspondence course....

The duo of saxophonist Anthony Braxton and trombonist George Lewis contains at its heart an exciting purity. This concerns more than the minimalist instrumentation. It has to do with the unique voices of the two instrumentalists–even though, at this point in their careers, both have established their primary reputations as composer-theorists (to the point of sometimes obscuring their achievements as horn men). Many noteworthy jazz soloists have presented a distinctive syntax in their playing....

THE PRETENDERS METRO, JUNE 2 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unfortunately it was. After a dissipated and disappointing sophomore effort, Farndon departed from the band and then from life itself, and Honeyman-Scott succumbed to a similar fate less than a year later. Hynde and Chambers hired new hands and roared back with 1984’s Learning to Crawl, another instant classic and perhaps the best album ever made about trying to strike a balance between motherhood and artistry, toughness and vulnerability, love and hate....

ZOE LEONARD, PHOTOGRAPHS Leonard’s photographic investigations concern the role of certain objects, among them animals and women, in the formation of scientific knowledge and aesthetics, two areas of intellectual endeavor that have long been the exclusive domain of men. The most compelling aspect of her photography is the tension she sustains between photography’s objectivity and subjectivity: the views Leonard captures are always both documentary records and studies of form. The interaction between the work as evidence of wrongdoing and as art-for-its-own-sake is the constant beneath what appears to be a wide surface divergence....

Sometime back in the 1960s, Fluxus artist George Brecht created a performance that consisted of simply turning a light on and then turning it off. Then turning it on again, then turning it off again. Techniquewise, Brecht’s performance is no chef d’oeuvre; my three-year-old cousin gave the exact same performance last Thanksgiving. But Fluxus artists don’t want you to be impressed by their technique–they want you to share their fascination with life itself: when was the last time you turned on a light and marveled at how it comes to be that the room is suddenly illuminated?...

Loopy Rhythms, Slow Disintegration Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The group formed when the pair met as students at the School of the Art Institute in the mid-80s. Schneller was getting a master’s in sculpture; Prekop was an undergrad in painting. A painting master’s candidate, David Kroll, became the group’s bass player, and the incipient Shrimp Boat was filled out with drumming by Schneller’s brother Eric, who later changed his last name to Claridge....

On a wall at Beacon Street Gallery, handwritten in big letters in English, Hindi, and Urdu, are these words: “You belong to me. You’ll serve me and my whole family.” “I didn’t choose you. My mother did.” “Shut up or I’ll tear your tongue out.” Part of a work called Shame, they’re just some examples of the abuse suffered by the south Asian residents of Apna Ghar, a local shelter for victims of domestic violence....

The ballyhooed gang peace summit wasn’t the only thing happening at the Congress Hotel last weekend. The notion of drug-running killers holding court while in another room medical professionals discussed emergency-room issues seemed so ironic that the item topped the “Inc.” column in Sunday’s Tribune. But there was another event taking place at the old Michigan Avenue hotel that Saturday that helps explain–in ways that bullet-riddled bodies never will–why Chicago is in such a sorry state....

When does movement become dance? Or is all movement that’s not work dance? (We’d have to include football and step aerobics then.) Such questions arise when dance threatens to cross some indeterminate line and encroach on theater, as it does in the hands (feet?) of the companies on this Dance Chicago ’96 program. The venerable three-member Fluid Measure Performance Company will offer an excerpt from For Love or Money, which enhances a funny, chilling, moving text about growing up Italian-American in Chicago with movements both realistic (a seemingly innocent hand game with an aunt) and formal (walking in big loops like birds of prey circling for food)....

To the editors: Like Pauline Kael’s negative publicity campaign against Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (undoubtedly inspired by her failures in trying to make it as a Hollywood screenwriter), Rosenbaum criticizes Scorsese for being out of his element, saying he’s more at home with gangsters and filthy streets and inferring that he couldn’t possibly know of life among the upper classes by virtue of his background, as if one’s upbringing (or class) solely determined, or limited, the extent of his imagination....