Manuel Alvarez Bravo
On two huge walls upstairs in the U-M Museum of Art are twenty-three small photographs. From a distance, they’re simple, unassuming, black and white. Don’t be fooled. This collection and its photographer, Manuel...
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Liberty’s Secret
Ann Arbor City Council member Sabra Briere sits in a room filled with desks. Along with other volunteers, she’s making phone calls to get out the vote for presidential candidate Senator Weston.Senator Who? Weston is a...
Read MoreJon Kimura Parker
The Ann Arbor Symphony will open its 2016-17 season on September 10 with the Festive Overture, written in 1954 by Dmitri Shostakovich. A friend who watched him dash off this cheerful piece at lightning speed later compared its...
Read MoreThe Gibson Brothers
Some performers are beloved by hard-core fans of a genre but hardly visible at all to the wider public. It’s worth chasing down such favorites, for eclecticism is overrated as an artistic philosophy–in the main,...
Read MoreJive Colossus
Watching Jive Colossus take the stage before a set, it’s difficult to know exactly what sort of music to expect. Looking at the predominantly Caucasian ten-person lineup, with a wide variety of fashion senses and ages,...
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Petra Van Nuis & Andy Brown
Singer Petra van Nuis (pronounced Pay-tra van Nouse) and guitarist Andy Brown could legitimately be called Chicago’s First Couple of Jazz. The married pair is a fixture on Chicago’s vibrant jazz scene, frequently...
Read MorePeter Ho Davies
Peter Ho Davies’ new novel, The Fortunes, tells four stories of Chinese Americans over their long collective history in the United States.The first and longest is about Ling, the fictional servant of the very real Charles...
Read MoreThe 25th Annual Putnam Co. Spelling Bee
Unlike this one-act musical comedy’s title, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is short and sweet–and blunt. Conceived by Rebecca Feldman, with a book by Rachel Sheinkin and music and lyrics by William Finn,...
Read MoreAaron Burch
Ann Arbor fiction writer, editor, and teacher Aaron Burch has written a rare book. Neither exclusively criticism nor memoir, Stephen King’s The Body recounts Burch’s deeply personal, even intimate, engagement with a...
Read MoreGeorge Bedard
George Bedard is soft-spoken, dead serious about the music he loves. There is a lot more to him than the crowd-pleasing Duane Eddy-style guitar rock for which he is justly famous. While uncommonly adept at that kind of...
Read MoreBroadway in Dexter
Broadway in Dexter: Tony and Academy Award-winning designer Tony Walton says Jessica Grove is his “muse in my directing adventures, and she has called my wife and I her ‘New York parents.'” So last year, when...
Read MoreOccidental Gypsy
If it’s true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Django Reinhardt, were he still living, would feel very flattered indeed. Since his death in 1953, a whole jazz subgenre devoted to Reinhardt’s...
Read MoreWill McEvoy’s Third Coast Quartet
About a month or so ago, jazz night at the Old Town bar was packed. As a trio played an Ornette Coleman tune, my attention was drawn to the bassist who was driving the music, feeling the groove but constantly shifting his lines...
Read MoreMorning’s at Seven
Morning’s at Seven is a chance to catch the Purple Rose in a rare instance of mining–rather than cultivating–Michigan playwrights. This play by Paul Osborn is a find, although it’s a weird one. I watched...
Read More“Celebrating the Quilt”
Every two years, the Greater Ann Arbor Quilt Guild turns the lobby of the WCC Morris Lawrence Building into an intricate grid, with hundreds of quilts ranged on precisely aligned racks. Most of the quilt patterns are linear too....
Read MoreGood Trouble
Ann Arbor-born Rachel Dengiz recently wrapped Trouble, a film starring Anjelica Huston, Bill Pullman, and David Morse. Dengiz was lead producer on the film, which she anticipates will open at festivals next winter and spring,...
Read MoreShannon Gibney
I’d never heard the phrase transracial adoptee until I read Shannon Gibney’s young adult novel, See No Color, yet it describes something I’ve known about for a long time. Alexandra Kirtridge, Gibney’s...
Read MoreSeth Bernard
Seth Bernard has been a prominent presence on the Michigan music scene for close to two decades. He performs as a solo singer-songwriter, with his wife, May Erlewine, in the duo Seth and May, and in a variety of collaborations...
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