Earth Day
They've turned one of the fields next to Matthaei Botanical Gardens into a parking lot, and hundreds of cars are there. I've never seen this many at Matthaei before. Earth Day must be quite popular in Ann Arbor. I park...
Read MoreApr 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
They've turned one of the fields next to Matthaei Botanical Gardens into a parking lot, and hundreds of cars are there. I've never seen this many at Matthaei before. Earth Day must be quite popular in Ann Arbor. I park...
Read MoreApr 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Quite a few young bands have gone back to draw on the folk-rock of the 1960s, having realized, perhaps, that a good hook is harder to create than any number of more outwardly strenuous effects. There's no shortage of...
Read MoreApr 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
What's the ominous whirlpool in the three-by-two-foot paper Words of Warcraft map in the Graduate Library's eighth-floor Map Library? "Oh, that's just a maelstrom," says library information specialist...
Read MoreApr 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
For sheer bravura technique, there's not a piano player in the world who can touch Lang Lang. His fingers are fleeter, his attacks stronger, his releases crisper, his pianissimos quieter, his fortissimos louder, and his...
Read MoreApr 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
I'm no geneticist, but I was not surprised to hear that Natalia Zukerman, the daughter of Pinchas and Eugenia Zukerman, is a musician. Having parents who are both world-class musicians would certainly skew your odds. Can you...
Read MoreApr 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Like a bracelet around the Crisler Arena floor are ten sets of concentric circles: a circular drum, a circle of men playing it in unison with sticks and singing, and a group that gathers around them to listen. Sometimes, says a...
Read MoreApr 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The eleven songs on Tift Merritt's brand-new record Another Country were waiting for her in a series of rented flats in Paris. She just had to go there and get them. The liner notes tell the story: exhausted from relentless...
Read MoreMar 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Imagine a sculpture of a naked reclining woman, her lips painted full and red, her eyes flirting playfully with the viewer. Now add a sagging belly and breasts and drooping wrinkled skin. Finally, put a sheep’s head on her...
Read MoreMar 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
You know the old fable of the blind men who use their sense of touch to try to describe an elephant. One man feels the elephant’s leg and says, “An elephant is like a tree.” Another grasps the trunk and...
Read MoreMar 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Of the uncountable thousands of rock 'n' roll bands on the planet, very few have the gender composition of the Blue Rubys: three women and one man. The combination gives the band a kind of collective sexiness that's...
Read MoreMar 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
It is sometimes difficult, at a time when a jazz album receives a Grammy for best musical performance, to remember the long struggle that the music has had for legitimacy in the country of its birth or to imagine that there was...
Read MoreMar 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
For more than half a century now — certainly since the famous reading in San Francisco in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg first unveiled his Howl, Gary Snyder read from his Riprap poems, and the Beat movement entered the popular...
Read MoreMar 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
When Shakespeare wrote that "all the world's a stage," he was, of course, not referring to the Blackbird Theatre. Yet it's an apt description of Ann Arbor's newest theater. At the Blackbird the playhouse...
Read MoreMar 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The EMU Convocation Center is crawling with teenagers. They’re smart teenagers — high school students who design, build, and operate robots. They’ve traveled here, with their robots, from fifty-nine Midwest high...
Read MoreMar 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
"Fare thee well, I'm bound to roam. . . ." With these old-fashioned, courtly words in "Tennessee Blues" — the opening cut to his Grammy-winning new album Washington Square Serenade — Steve...
Read MoreMar 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The premise makes it sound more gimmicky than it is. Two staid suburban couples, on a dare, drink some sort of hallucinogenic truth-inducing "wine" made from Peruvian tree frogs. Vino Veritas, which continues its world...
Read MoreFeb 15, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Charles Baxter’s novels and short stories have often questioned the nature of their composition: Is this a story? And if so, where is the boundary between the story and the life it may or may not reflect? Where is the...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Jazz critics, like pollsters and pundits, are often wrong. When in 1958 a relatively unknown twenty-eight-year-old pianist named Ahmad Jamal had a hit tune named "Poinciana" that stayed on the top-ten charts for weeks...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Never one to go with the first metaphor that comes my way, I was dismayed, as I heard Anna Ash sing at a party on New Year's Eve, to find myself thinking, "Damn, this girl sings like a bird!" But she really does....
Read MoreFeb 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
When was the last time you heard a recital of four-hand piano music? At one time it was all the rage. Long before there was an iPod in every ear, there was a piano in every living room. And people played them, sometimes alone...
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