Culture

The Polish Muslims, whose name is a purely fanciful oxymoron, have been characterized as a Hamtramck counterpart to Weird Al Yankovic. They do traffic in parodies, and for a drive-by blurb that’s adequate, but several...

he tradition of so-called sacred steel, the pedal steel guitar as used in African American churches, developed within a single Pentecostal denomination with a very long name: The House of God, Which Is the Church of the Living...

The Glen Levens are a classic example of a band that exists not out of necessity but out of desire: its members all have solid day jobs but just can’t stop getting together to play the music they love.The band started out...

I claim no expertise on the parameters or expectations of young adult fiction. I read the Harry Potter books, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Laura Ingalls Wilder when my own child was the right age, and I read Sherman...

With near-perfect symmetry, summer solstice will occur midway through the twenty-second annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, a two-week series of more than twenty concerts taking place in theaters, chapels, galleries, and...

Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata is perhaps the most-performed opera ever. The tragic story of Violetta, the courtesan with the heart of gold, who sacrifices her last chance at true love to protect the honor of the man she...

Many years ago, a friend passed along a copy of Whiskey River by Michigan writer Loren D. Estleman. The book is a crime novel about booze smuggling set in Detroit during Prohibition, and I burned through it in record time. I...

The greatest moments of the celebrated Detroit jazz tradition took place at times when jazz was a popular art and when music was widely taught in the schools. In recent years other kinds of music have achieved a broader appeal,...

In the photo exhibit Cheap Shots III: Blurred, Not Shaken–a clever take on James Bond’s shaken, not stirred martini–the Ann Arbor Area Crappy Camera Club pays homage to an older, slower, more artistic...