Scott Lasser’s new novel, Say Nice Things About Detroit, starts with a double homicide and dementia. That makes it sound like an Elmore Leonard novel, and Lasser’s fast-paced narrative and ear for the speech of the...
Read MoreOrpheum Bell has been kicking around Ann Arbor since 2005, playing its distinctly Eastern European folk, yet genre-challenging, sound. Founded by Aaron Klein and Serge van der Voo, the only remaining members of the original...
Read MoreThe first classical music concert I ever reviewed was a piano recital by James Tocco in Rackham Auditorium. That was 1983, and Tocco and I were the two youngest people in the hall by a good three decades.Twenty-eight years...
Read MoreOf the more than fifty stereographs on display in the exhibit “Michigan in 3-D,” one appears to be a fake.The exhibit, presented by the U-M Bentley Historical Library, brings together new and old 3-D technologies....
Read MoreAnn Arborite Natalie Bakopoulos has done some wonderfully unexpected things in her debut novel, The Green Shore. In addition to the textured family drama we might expect in a first novel, she has taken on much larger themes of...
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If you’re a film buff, you’re surely geeked about Cinetopia, the Michigan Theater’s new film festival. Spanning everything from the silent era to contemporary films and from box-office gold to indie cred,...
Read MoreThe country genre has its own classical music: bluegrass, with its acoustic rural string band raised to startling virtuoso heights. But as the classic barroom country ensemble, with its electric guitar, steel guitar, and small,...
Read MoreHana Malhas (say HEN-a) was raised in Amman, Jordan, and came to Ann Arbor to attend business school at the U-M. She graduated a few years back, and now she says she’d like to spend the rest of her life making music. Based...
Read MoreExploiting hypnotism for its comic potential is at least as old as vaudeville, and when vaudeville died, it had a good second run as a sitcom subplot in the 50s and 60s. In vaudeville and sitcoms, the audience laughed at victims...
Read MoreWhile it was well attended—seventy-some folks gathered in St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Liberty on a sunny February afternoon—the Ann Arbor Cantata Singers’ concert called Serenades and Nocturnes still seemed very...
Read MoreIf you’re eager to hear or share a compelling story, the monthly Ann Arbor Moth StorySLAM at the Circus bar invites you to participate in an evening of “True Stories Told Live,” the motto of the NYC-based...
Read MoreJoanne Leonard’s twenty-one photographs at the U-M Institute for the Humanities gallery are what the 71-year-old feminist calls “visual analogies.” In each are two images (one a news photo and the other a book...
Read MoreYou park in the big parking lot, past the sign that lists the parking lot rules: No cursing or loud talking. No sitting in cars. No hanging out. Go down the back stairs and enter the small door, bypassing the sign that says you...
Read MoreJazz is a creole music, created out of a blend of different sources—African, African-American, Afro-Caribbean, French, Spanish, and who knows what else. As it has evolved, it has absorbed other traditions but has also...
Read MoreEver since Plato kicked the poets out of his Republic, it’s been said that the gulf between poetry and philosophy cannot be bridged. Luckily enough the people who actually practice these arts often don’t listen....
Read MoreJamie and Jordan, which returns on April 28 as part of the monthly Performance Network children’s theater series, is a charming musical about two boys born in the same hospital on the same day who become best friends until...
Read MoreViolinist Joshua Bell with the Academy of St. Martin in the FieldsIs this some kind of mistake?That the UMS is presenting American violinist Joshua Bell as the soloist in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in their season’s...
Read MoreSome folks say Jack Driscoll doesn’t get out much. The same people are inclined to say that this is the reason Driscoll remains “our best-kept literary secret.” If they mean that this fabulous writer...
Read MoreCharles Lloyd is a jazz musician who revels in spirituality and in sound. When he first came to public attention in 1960 as a member of the popular Chico Hamilton Quintet, like many saxophonists of the time he was heavily...
Read MoreLindsay Lou & the Flatbellys have been playing all over the state during the last year or so, and they’re coming in April for three Ann Arbor shows in one week: at the Circus on April 11 and April 18, and at Wolverine...
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