The Ann Arbor District Library begins its Downtown Sounds series on Thursday, October 24, with an energetic headliner: local pianist Tom Loncaric and his big band. Decades younger than the generation of music they represent,...
Read MoreI am no fan of the piano playing of Garrick Ohlsson. I admit that he has astounding technique, amazing stamina, and great taste in what he plays. And I acknowledge that he is admired and even adored by Ann Arbor audiences. But I...
Read MorePoet Philip Levine left Detroit almost fifty years ago, when he was twenty-six. He had been born and educated in the city, part of the immigrant Jewish working class; his father died when he was five, leaving his mother to raise...
Read MoreThe shadows are long. The leaves are falling. My four-year-old is smacking the daylights out of every ball I throw to him. He straightens from his stance and asks, "What's that?" I, too, stop and listen. At first,...
Read MoreWhen looking for a new music director, the Cleveland Orchestra has a tradition of favoring people who might politely be called “strict disciplinarians”: Artur Rodzinski (1933-1943) supposedly carried a revolver to...
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"I am content with my country: good, bad, and worse than bad — I am enchanted by my country," Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo has said. His twenty elegiac dreamscapes on display at the U-M Museum of Art...
Read MoreCloud Nine Music can certainly get into a groove. Trouble is, they can't get out of it. They've got the steady beat, the dependable keyboard line, and the bass riff you can latch onto — all creating a dance-party...
Read MoreJohn Fulton is on a roll. Last year, just out of the U-M creative writing program, he published an award-winning book of short stories. He follows that this year with his first novel, More than Enough, a moving tale of a...
Read MoreUnlike contemporary ballet companies, which must present work by a range of choreographers to appear relevant and stay fresh, most modern dance troupes today are showcases for the choreographers who started them. Think Trisha...
Read MoreRanking among the top twenty-five films ever made, Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis is full of inventive visual styles and thematic structures that offered the then newly formed art of film analysis a lot to...
Read MoreI've never quite understood why it's so compelling to compare the texture of a voice to something completely unrelated to hearing, but for whatever reason, Allison Moorer's voice always reminds me of the hot whiskey...
Read MoreI laughed all day when I got this assignment. They're going to pay me to drink wine? It was too good to be true. But then I told my sister, the wine snob. "Charmie," she chastised me, "you have to spit out the...
Read MoreClaudia Sherman is exactly the kind of girl who intimidated me in middle school: cute, pert, smart, irreverent, and exquisitely, fearlessly, foul mouthed. Now that we're both all grown up, however, I just think she's a...
Read MoreThe Ark, Ann Arbor's premier club for acoustic music, has booked all manner of acts in its nearly forty years — but never a cellist performing hard-core classical repertoire. This month, however, the young Israeli...
Read MoreThe Latin American presence in Ann Arbor shows itself only in intermittent signs — a Spanish-language church service here, a section of Mexican groceries there. For Ann Arborites who travel around the country a bit and have...
Read MoreNaia Venturi’s puppet show Chemical Traces offers a perfect Everyman for an era of rabid-lemming consumerism and ecological destruction. In an age that thinks, for example, that the Yucca Mountain plan to transport nuclear...
Read MoreHey! Kid! Yeah, you! You wanna have some fun? Some real fun? The kind of fun that's so much fun that you won't want to leave until you heave? Kid, I've got just the thing for you: the annual Jaycees Summer Carnival!...
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