Culture

Aimee Mann named her new album The Forgotten Arm after a boxing move a friend taught her. Punch your opponent with one fist over and over, get him on the ropes, sagging, and a blow from your other, forgotten arm can finish him...

The Dutch post-postmodernist heir to the Dadaist tradition of Old Europe, Louis Andriessen composes music that melds anything to everything to nothing while fusing high culture with low culture and no culture in a high-concept...

Bits of flamenco have seeped out into the stream of free-floating artifacts that runs through our landscape of cultural consumption, showing up in a television commercial here, a dance mix there. But the individual atoms...

In her new collection of poems, White Sea, Cleopatra Mathis writes, "I have lost my killer instinct / for beauty, for embellishing and relishing / the art of it." She has come to this place — the one where she...

One of the last dances I ever choreographed was a trio for women about Queen Elizabeth I and her lifelong love for Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. I wanted it to be both sad and timeless. So, rather than using some English...

Aggressive kimonoed Japanese waitresses grab passing travelers to yank them into their teahouses, scholars lounge in rural Chinese retreats, Angkor Wat broods in mist, and minimalistic seascapes glisten. Four exhibits of...

Jazz pianists are often judged by the company they keep. Some eventually become soloists and front their own groups, but most have to make their living as accompanists and collaborators, venturing out sporadically for solo or...

It's said that when Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, "Because that's where the money is." Clearly, that was not Lee Knight's motivation when he chose to make his life's work the...