So what’s the deal with the big, dumb white box atop 55 E. Erie? Why did they cap this new, rather elegant building with a 50-foot-high bunker that further scars Chicago’s signature skyline? The architects have taken steps to distinguish 55 E. Erie from trailer park high-rises such as Grand Plaza and Superior Place. The skyscraper’s mass is broken up with setbacks and inset bays. The facade is light and open, with a generous use of glass....

The figure of “el Prometeo,” or Prometheus, is a motif in the murals of Jose Clemente Orozco, one of the “big three” of Mexican muralism. But few have seen Orozco’s relatively small canvas work Prometeo, a tumultuous, apocalyptic painting depicting a stooped man with his head in flames. The piece is in the collection of Dr. Alvaro Carrillo Gil, a close friend who supported Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros early in their artistic careers....

On his second solo release, Cee-Lo Green Is the Soul Machine (Arista), the former Goodie Mob star again proves he’s an original in a world of pretenders. While countless hip-hop tracks have harnessed the audience-pleasing power of the soul vocal hook, Cee-Lo is that rare performer who can both rap and sing with such facility and inventiveness that differentiating between the two approaches becomes pointless. (The rainbow-swirled records he made with Goodie Mob in the 90s anticipated much of the eclectic wildness that’s made superstars of his Atlanta homies OutKast....

On opening night of last month’s Chicago Cabaret Convention, Colleen McHugh nearly stole the show with her bravura rendition of Edith Piaf’s “Hymn to Love” and comically melodramatic take on Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” But in her club act at Davenport’s, Songs of Self-Delusion, McHugh opts for a subtler style, deftly balancing understated poignance and wry irony. An unusually expressive performer who’s accomplished in improv as well as cabaret, this Second City alum breezes through a set of tunes about sexual fantasy and emotional avoidance....

Neil Tobin says he got into magic the way most kids do: “I got a magic set for Christmas–well, Hanukkah. A lot of people I know went through the ‘magic phase.’ It seems to be a clearly defined developmental stage.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As he got older, Tobin says he began to gravitate toward what he calls “adult magic.” “When you’re a kid,” he says, “all you want to do is make your friends go ‘Wow!...

Jaguar Wright, one of the newest talents to emerge from the forward-looking Philadelphia soul and hip-hop scene, brings brassy sass to modern R & B. Like Jill Scott and India.Arie, she owes her breakthrough in part to the Roots’ “Black Lily” concerts, a series meant to spotlight new female soul acts. And her debut album, Denials Delusions and Decisions (MCA), benefits from production work by a coterie of new soul’s hottest hands–including James Poyser (Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun), Scott Storch (the Roots), and Philly house bigwig Vikter Duplaix....

Like a chameleon, guitarist Leni Stern keeps changing her stripes. On the dozen albums she’s recorded under her own name since the early 80s, the Munich-born Stern has led a fusiony two-guitar band starring Bill Frisell, written punchy instrumentals for more traditional jazz combos, and experimented successfully with various guitar effects. On her 1995 disc Words, she debuted as a vocalist, revealing a steely vulnerability in both her lyrics and her delivery....

Major Control Issues Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Tuesday the album was released by the popular New York indie label Self-Starter Foundation–also home to Les Savy Fav and Lifter Puller–and the Detachment Kit has become one of the most talked-about rock bands in the city. Last summer David Newgarden of Manage This!, a New York-based artist management company that handles Guided by Voices, Cibo Matto, and Mark Eitzel, heard the record, and since then he’s been informally advising the band, although he’s taken no money for his work yet....

On the Attack But by the time he went to nearby Webster University in 1990 to study drawing and sculpture he’d become “really reactionary, always trying to one-up everybody.” One day a classmate presented a door spattered with paint and said, “This is what life’s like under a microscope, under glass.” Ortmann decided to show them what life is really like under glass. So he pressed some roadkill–a whole dead fox, complete with maggots–between two pieces of Plexiglas and sealed it with resin....

A few years ago, in the course of a Web search on avant-garde violinist Tony Conrad, I came across a hilarious work of fiction describing two mountain geezers discussing a Conrad appearance at an old-time fiddlers’ convention (and approving of it, though amused). The piece had apparently run in the local newspaper in Wytheville, Virginia, which I remember mostly as the nearest Greyhound stop to my parents’ house in the sticks....

Japanese director Seijun Suzuki has called this 2001 feature a sequel to his 1967 stylistic exercise Branded to Kill. But that was a hit-man thriller in black and white; this is a sensual explosion in color, a surreal, deliriously balletic pop fantasy that defies most forms of narrative description. Shot for shot, it ranks as the most beautiful movie I’ve seen in years. The characters are four or five generations of women, most of them dressed to kill, with one, a determined hit woman named Stray Cat (Makiko Esumi), trying to shoot her way from third to first place in a hierarchy of assassins managed by an inscrutable and invisible “Guild....

ABCD: A Collection of Art Brut ABCD, the Paris foundation whose collection the show is drawn from, is dedicated to the propagation of art brut, a type of art French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet began to collect in 1945; the oxymoronic name translates as “raw art.” Art brut is a subcategory of outsider art (a term that came much later) and excludes naive and folk art. Dubuffet defined art brut in 1949 as work made by “persons unharmed by artistic culture” who draw everything “from their inner selves and not from the conventions of classic art or the art in vogue....

Dear Readers: I’m on vacation. I’m actually sitting on the beach as I write this, knocking back margaritas and watching my boyfriend’s tan lines come in. But you know what? I’m still thinking about you and your problems. I’m always thinking about you and your problems–and isn’t that just like me? While I may get two weeks off during the summer, I know your problems don’t take two weeks off. So despite being on vacation, despite my impaired state, and despite my boyfriend’s tan lines, I’m still here to help....

Reggie Williams once came into the Chicago Stadium and lit the Bulls up for 36 or 40 points–some obscene number. The Bulls won, but on this night nobody they had could stop him, not even Scottie Pippen. Yet Williams never had a reputation as an explosive offensive player. He’d come out of Georgetown as a defensive specialist good on the dribble and with a decent midrange jumper, but he’d never developed the shooting touch it takes to become a reliable scorer in the NBA, where the interior defense is tougher and tends to push midsize players outside....

Death on a Pink Carpet at Pilsen Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Married eight times. Romantically linked to Tyrone Power, Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, and Ava Gardner. Sexually voracious; according to a legendary quote, “If she saw a stagehand with tight pants and a muscular build, she’d invite him into her dressing room.” Battled alcoholism. Her father had been murdered over money won in a card game when she was nine; she had one daughter, Cheryl, fathered by two-time husband Steve Crane....

Mimi Chryssikos spent her childhood cooking with her French mother and Greek father. Among her duties was drying the lettuce with an apron on their back porch in Uptown. She has a catering business. She is strongly against ketchup. Chryssikos and her partner, Andrew Given, opened their deli on Montrose near Damen four years ago; before that they had sold marinades and salad dressings over the Internet. Mimi’s got smashing reviews, and customers started heading to Ravenswood from the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park....

The Roots’ excellent new album, Phrenology (MCA), expected in stores this summer, was delayed by problems with the first single, “Break You Off.” Neosoul singer Musiq Soulchild, who cowrote the tune and was set to record it with the band, was denied permission by his label, Def Jam. So D’Angelo, whose breakthrough album, Voodoo, benefited greatly from the input of Roots mastermind and drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, recorded a version–but then backed out because he “didn’t want to be the guy on the commercial Roots song....

Can a set of twins be born a month or two apart? I am working on my family tree and it appears that one of my ancestors delivered a child one month before having another, the earlier child dying and the latter child surviving. Was this once possible? –Ma Schu Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Delayed interval birthing is not, needless to say, the preferred way to have twins....

Friday 31 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » SAPS On three EPs and one self-released full-length, Finally…A Band You Can Trust, these local country-punkers suggest what the Old 97’s might sound like if they took that last stick out of their ass: the Saps bring the same breed of poppy hooks and bitter, clever-yet-stoopid lyrics to country chords, but they’re generally far drunker, and proud of it too....

The Unexpected Man, Apple Tree Theatre. This new play by Yasmina Reza, who also wrote Art, is so slight that if not anchored by substantial performances it will simply float away. Fortunately, William Brown and Peggy Roeder as its two characters–a midlist author and his biggest fan, who happen to share a train compartment–touchingly reveal all the ways we project our fantasies and hopes onto other people. While the unnamed man frets over minutiae–his daughter’s much older boyfriend, others’ reservations about his new book, his digestion–the woman engages in an imaginary conversation with him about the meaning of life as expressed in that book, which she doesn’t quite have the nerve to read in the author’s elevated presence....