Morning’s at Seven
Morning’s at Seven is a chance to catch the Purple Rose in a rare instance of mining–rather than cultivating–Michigan playwrights. This play by Paul Osborn is a find, although it’s a weird one. I watched...
Read MoreCulture
“Celebrating the Quilt”
Every two years, the Greater Ann Arbor Quilt Guild turns the lobby of the WCC Morris Lawrence Building into an intricate grid, with hundreds of quilts ranged on precisely aligned racks. Most of the quilt patterns are linear too....
Read MoreShannon Gibney
I’d never heard the phrase transracial adoptee until I read Shannon Gibney’s young adult novel, See No Color, yet it describes something I’ve known about for a long time. Alexandra Kirtridge, Gibney’s...
Read More
Seth Bernard
Seth Bernard has been a prominent presence on the Michigan music scene for close to two decades. He performs as a solo singer-songwriter, with his wife, May Erlewine, in the duo Seth and May, and in a variety of collaborations...
Read MoreTiempo Libre
It’s Friday night and you need to cut loose, so you head for Main St., climb the stairs to the Ark, and settle in for an evening with the Miami-based Afro-Cuban dance band Tiempo Libre. Twenty minutes into the set you...
Read MoreMichael Franti
Lanky, muscular, tattooed, barefoot, and dreadlocked, the poet crossing to center stage with an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder stands six-foot-six and appears even taller. Extending both arms as if to embrace his...
Read MoreBebel Gilberto
Daughter of bossa nova pioneer Joao Gilberto and Brazilian vocalist Miucha, stepdaughter of “The Girl from Ipanema” vocalist Astrud Gilberto, and niece of the socially progressive poet and songwriter Chico Buarque,...
Read MoreRebecca Makkai
I started seeing Rebecca Makkai’s short stories a few years ago. They’d pop up in some of the finer literary journals (including our own Michigan Quarterly Review) and then get reprinted with amazing regularity in...
Read MoreA Night with the Polyonymous Watusies
It was a snowy January night back in 1984 when I first encountered the Watusies. Singer Dan Mulholland, fresh from a long stint with the popular Urbations, had recruited keyboardist Fred Klein and guitarist Chris Casello (and...
Read MoreElizabeth Schwartz
I don’t “presearch” art exhibits. No site checking. No bios. I want fresh eyes, a mind uncluttered by prejudice, and an openness to the art even if it’s not on my list of favorite styles.That objective...
Read MoreRedbud’s Luna Gale
Luna Gale opens with several brisk scenes featuring a social worker, a grandmother, and a couple of parents whose youth and inexperience is signaled by the fact that they’ve named their wee one Luna Gale. “Weird...
Read MoreSkeeter Shelton
Detroit has long been a bebop jazz town. During the 1950s, the high schools, street academies, and jazz clubs nurtured musicians such as pianists Barry Harris and Tommy Flanagan, trombonist Curtis Fuller, bassists Doug Watkins...
Read MoreThe Corn Potato String Band
I heard a duo formation of the Corn Potato String Band, “the ears and eyes of America,” one Friday in February over happy hour at PJ’s Lager House in Detroit. I had been waiting for years, decades even, for...
Read MoreXu Weixin: Momumental Portraits
Stark and soft. Huge yet intimate. Victim, villain. Dry facts, bloody horror. These contrasts make seeing Xu Weixin: Monumental Portraits at the University of Michigan Museum of Art a skin-crawling, soul-deepening experience. It...
Read MoreJennifer Goltz
The human voice is arguably the most versatile of all musical instruments. It is perhaps the only one capable, whether coupled with words or not, of both expressing and eliciting all emotions–ones for which we have names...
Read MoreChris McCormick
A few decades ago I spent a couple of hours in the Antelope Valley, up in the northern part of Los Angeles County. Those California counties seem as big as medium-sized European countries, and once you’re in the Antelope...
Read More