Culture

Alexander Weinstein’s first book Children of the New World, imagines an imperfect future that is partly a logical projection of our current fascinations with new technologies and the social media they have spawned. The...

I walked into the main auditorium at the Michigan Theater and was dumbstruck by the sea of Santa hats. We had arrived more than a half-hour before the annual sing-along screening of White Christmas, but we were having a hard...

Yes, I admit it. I went all wide-eyed and weak-kneed when the U-M Museum of Art used lures like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt in the previews for its current exhibit, Europe on Paper. I wasn’t this excited or rubbery in...

There exist magnificent concertos for classical guitar and full orchestra, and players who are up to the task of projecting–without amplification–to the back of Hill Auditorium. (I still vividly recall the stunning...

Do people really wake up from drunken one-night stands wrapped in sheets?Or was this trope conjured up in some long-ago decade to slip a bedroom scene past the censor, or to get a classier brand of actress to sign on? When a...

Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly rejected all distinctions based on class and social status. “Music is for everyone,” he said. “It is spiritual food, a prime necessity of life.”Kodaly’s progressive,...

In 1947 the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie recorded his big band playing “Cubana Bop,” which featured the Cuban conga player Chano Pozo. On this tune, widely considered one of the landmarks in the complex musical...

Jo Serrapere has a real talent for attracting good musicians to her bands–or maybe good musicians are attracted to her bands by her talent. She was one of the co-founders of the old-time country group Uncle Earl, then went...