Culture

In the words of poet Jacques Prevert: “It is spring, the needle goes wild in the compass.” Conditions are ideal, then, for a visit from a chamber ensemble named after an uncontainable forest goddess. On April 19 the...

After we walk down the long hallway back to the cafeteria for Skyline High School’s Brick Bash, ten-year-old Little Brother stops dead in his tracks when he sees the twelve-foot-tall skyscraper, all clear glass and blue...

Someone once wrote of the German poet Heinrich Heine that he delighted in blowing big sentimental soap bubbles and then deliberately pricking them. That’s a good description of the songs of Steve Poltz, the Friday-night MC...

Almost forty years ago two renowned jazz pianists, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, put their other projects on hold and went on tour together. By then they were in mid-career, approaching their forties. They had started out...

“Shakey” Jake Woods’ legend is well known among Ann Arborites, but the late street performer’s legacy has taken on a surprising new dimension: a tribute band. You probably wouldn’t guess at first...

In early April 2014, on a night barbed with sleet and gusts of wind, I count no fewer than seven moons hanging in the sky. There is a full moon with a hooked nose, a butter-colored quarter moon, a greenish-blue crescent with a...

Guard your hearts, tender people. And you tough ones may want to crack open those aortas. The current exhibit at U-M’s Rackham Hall, Responding to Chaos: Art as action, engagement, and revelation, may flood them with...

On the first Tuesday of every month, there’s opera at the Sidetrack in Ypsilanti. Yup–opera–in a bar. Highbrow meets Loewenbraeu. Granted, the Sidetrack’s event space, where Opera on Tap reigns, is not a...

Hilarious, brilliant, engaging, slapsticky, cerebral, challenging. And in 1999, when it was first produced, Stones in His Pockets, a play by Marie Jones, was joltingly original, too.In the intervening years, either by cultural...

Kirstin Valdez Quade has recently joined the faculty of U-M’s creative writing program as a Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor. This new position brings emerging writers to the U for a few years as they work to solidify...