Animal rescues, pictures, information, and videos make up 90 percent of my sister-in-law Jennifer’s Facebook posts. Volunteering at the Huron Valley Humane Society, she wanted to bring every animal home, but her three cats...
Read MoreIn 1987, less than a year after the first-ever poetry slams were born in Chicago, Ann Arbor became just the second city in the world to host them. They’ve continued here, almost without interruption, ever since.Poetry...
Read More“As a scientist, I’m not supposed to advocate,” says Sara Adlerstein, whose love-letter paintings of water are on exhibit in the WSG Gallery at 306 S. Main.”As a journalist, I’m not supposed to...
Read MoreI’m thoroughly enjoying a set by the Chelsea-based bluegrass trio Thunderwüde when I discover that the trio is actually supposed to be a quartet. Mandolin player and vocalist Jason Dennie is out of town, leaving guitarist...
Read MoreMany people in this part of the world know the border that separates Detroit from the Grosse Pointes. The drive down East Jefferson past the empty lots and boarded buildings–past all the people who live there–until...
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During the second half of the last century, musical success most often required full dedication to life on the road. This was particularly true of jazz players who traversed the country moving from club to club and the...
Read MoreWearing a maize-and-blue helmet adorned with toilet bowl brushes, and with cans of beer chilling in his toilet tank, Dain Vettese is raring to race his Kohler toilet-on-wheels in the premiere Big Flush Toilet Race. His teammates...
Read MoreBluegrass music in its traditional form, with some combination of banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and bass, is about as grassroots as you can get in today’s centralized cultural environment, where even the categories of...
Read MoreOne evening some years ago I was at dinner in an Italian restaurant in Port Townsend, Washington. The food was lovely, the conversation lively, and recorded jazz was playing in the background. I thought I recognized the...
Read MorePerfectly named, the Rocks, Paper, Memory exhibit at the U-M Kelsey Museum of Archaeology takes you to the tactile carved stones of ancient Greece and Rome, immerses you in Wendy Artin’s watercolors of them, and bathes you...
Read MoreWe had postapocalyptic literature even before we realized that our species might actually destroy itself. Writers (and readers) evidently find it more interesting to imagine human beings facing extinction than bumbling along for...
Read MoreIt’s easy to make a comparison between Ypsilanti duo Junglefowl and the White Stripes, as even Junglefowl’s own publicity materials do. Both bands play raw, blues-influenced garage rock, and both are composed of a...
Read MoreEvery now and then a certain Nova Scotian fiddler descends upon our town, boards the Ark, rips the veil, and stands us on our ears. Ashley MacIsaac accomplishes this by whipping up strathspeys, reels, and jigs with astonishing...
Read MoreThe 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...
Read Morehe 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...
Read MoreThe 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...
Read MoreI 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...
Read MoreWith 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...
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