Metropolis
Ranking among the top twenty-five films ever made, Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis is full of inventive visual styles and thematic structures that offered the then newly formed art of film analysis a lot to...
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Allison Moorer
I've never quite understood why it's so compelling to compare the texture of a voice to something completely unrelated to hearing, but for whatever reason, Allison Moorer's voice always reminds me of the hot whiskey...
Read MorePaesano’s wine tastings
I laughed all day when I got this assignment. They're going to pay me to drink wine? It was too good to be true. But then I told my sister, the wine snob. "Charmie," she chastised me, "you have to spit out the...
Read MoreClaudia Sherman
Claudia Sherman is exactly the kind of girl who intimidated me in middle school: cute, pert, smart, irreverent, and exquisitely, fearlessly, foul mouthed. Now that we're both all grown up, however, I just think she's a...
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Cellist Matt Haimovitz
The Ark, Ann Arbor's premier club for acoustic music, has booked all manner of acts in its nearly forty years — but never a cellist performing hard-core classical repertoire. This month, however, the young Israeli...
Read MoreMexican Night
The Latin American presence in Ann Arbor shows itself only in intermittent signs — a Spanish-language church service here, a section of Mexican groceries there. For Ann Arborites who travel around the country a bit and have...
Read MoreChemical Traces
Naia Venturi’s puppet show Chemical Traces offers a perfect Everyman for an era of rabid-lemming consumerism and ecological destruction. In an age that thinks, for example, that the Yucca Mountain plan to transport nuclear...
Read MoreThe Jaycees Summer Carnival
Hey! Kid! Yeah, you! You wanna have some fun? Some real fun? The kind of fun that's so much fun that you won't want to leave until you heave? Kid, I've got just the thing for you: the annual Jaycees Summer Carnival!...
Read MoreKim Richey
Kim Richey grew up in southwestern Ohio, right on the line dividing rock-speaking from country-speaking lands, and her musical career has turned on intriguing tensions between the two styles. In concert she's dispassionate,...
Read MoreLove Lies Dreaming
I've seen the local pop band Love Lies Dreaming only twice: once in a quiet, living-room-like setting in the basement of the Michigan League on a wintry Saturday night in front of a couple dozen friends, and once at Leopold...
Read MoreO Brother, Where Art Thou?
In the depths of Depression-era Mississippi, three convicts escape from their work farm and begin a race against time to reach buried treasure. Hair-obsessed, quick-tongued Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), ill-tempered,...
Read MoreLife on a String
Once upon a time, an artist mom sewed three hand puppets representing her son and two daughters. When one daughter turned fourteen, she took a local rec department class in puppetry. She gleefully holds up her puppet in a grainy...
Read MoreWet-N-Wild Wednesdays
There was a time, say about ten or eleven years ago, when any utterance of the word "pool" was met with riotous, schnauzerlike hysteria on the part of my male child. And it was with this in mind that I suggested to my...
Read MoreJerry Douglas
The Dobro is the instrument that put the twang in country music, but it is much more besides. It was the 1928 creation (and contracted namesake) of the Czech American Dopyera brothers, who placed a steel disc over the sound hole...
Read MoreA Midsummer Night’s Dream
The U-M Residential College production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last June in the Arb was an enormous pleasure, and Ann Arborites will be delighted to know that the college will produce the play again June 13-16 and...
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