Novelist Harry Dolan
A month before the stylish new mystery novel Bad Things Happen was published, there was Internet chatter about the first sentence: “The shovel has to meet certain requirements.” I feel the appropriate tingle there....
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The Brewers Guild Festival
The Michigan Brewers Guild annual Summer Beer Festival is held just down the street from my house, in Depot Town’s Riverside Park. The place is packed with students, Ypsi Hippies, and well-groomed Ann Arbor poser types who...
Read MoreArt on a Stick
This is off the record. You can’t tell anyone. I mean it: nobody. If this gets out, I’ll lose all credibility—as an art critic, a journalist, and a woman of intelligence, sophistication, and taste. Especially...
Read MoreFifty Years of the Art Fairs
Scott Berry began going to the art fairs in the 1970s, when he was in elementary school. He and his sister collected bottles while their father, John, sold jewelry from his booth on East University Avenue.”Back then you...
Read MoreMr. B’s Joybox Express
Ann Arborites are used to seeing Mark Braun, aka Mr. B, play piano on the street. He’s been a fixture at the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, the Original, since 1980, playing blues, jazz, and boogie-woogie piano—first at the...
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Hollywood Calling
Naomi Spivak runs Matan Embroidery out of her house, designing and embroidering monograms and logos on fabric with her fifteen-needle industrial machine. So when she got a call from a woman asking if she could embroider some...
Read MoreMisty Lyn & the Big Beautiful
“We’re gonna get a little country on now,” warns Misty Lyn from the Blind Pig stage to a modest but engaged crowd. “It happens.”Country happens a lot with Misty Lyn & the Big Beautiful. With...
Read MoreRockin’ the Stacks
When a piercing guitar riff echoes through quiet library stacks, it brings a smile to Bill Harmer’s face. It’s part of his mission of “rebranding.”Libraries desperately want to change their image from...
Read MoreDiscovering Endover
“Well, this month’s ‘I Spy’ appears to be a very nice angle on the ‘Cube’ near the [Michigan] Union,” emailed Julie Sorenson of Ypsilanti. “I’ve spun it many a time over the...
Read MoreWhose Live Anyway?
Stand-up comedy is to improv what classical music is to jazz. Outstanding stand-up combines sidesplitting jokes with perfect timing, in the same way that a fabulous classical music performance is the blend of a great...
Read MoreCrossword King
When Huron High math teacher Pete Collins hands out New York Times crossword puzzles to his students, they’re impressed: they know he created them. Collins started constructing puzzles three-and-a-half years ago, and made...
Read MoreDancer Savion Glover
Savion Glover is to tap dancing what Bobby McFerrin is to singing. Both have taken a craft and turned it into a high art. Bobby McFerrin can make his voice sound like any instrument in the orchestra or like an angel or laughter....
Read MoreJazz Revisited
During his thirty years as host of the WUOM radio show Jazz Revisited, Hazen Schumacher amassed 50,000 78s, 10,000 LPs, and 400 CDs—enough to fill five rooms at various university locations. Then, in 1997, WUOM changed its...
Read MoreGive $3, keep Top free
“We’ve always had donation requests,” says Robb Woulfe, director of the Ann Arbor Summer Festival. “We’re just a little louder in our ask.” He’s talking about Top of the Park, the hugely...
Read MoreThe New Regionalism
Once the word “regional” was used to dismiss writing that was firmly based in a particular place. There might have been good reason for condescension: some of the writing wasn’t of in-terest to anyone beyond a...
Read MorePoetry Stars
“You never forget about the cameras,” says Carolyn Blessing, one of our teen-age Ann Arbor poets featured in a recent HBO series on the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam in Washington D.C. While all...
Read MorePianist Joel Hastings
A Scandal at the Symphony? How could a performance by the venerable Ann Arbor Symphony possibly be considered scandalous? While I was out of town for the March 21 concert, my plant in the audience filled me in.Towards the end of...
Read MoreHayes Carll 2009
Texan Hayes Carll made a splash last year with “She Left Me for Jesus,” an outrageous little portrait of an apparently religiously unaffiliated redneck who laments, “She says that He’s perfect. How could...
Read MoreClassics at the City Club
When Ann Arbor City Club dropped “Women’s” from its name in January 2008, management hosted a focus group to learn “what the guys want,” says member Jeff DeBoer. Now they’re getting their top...
Read MoreMillion-dollar Ears
In August 1962 jazz composer-pianist George Russell recorded a forward-looking album, The Outer View, that included a twelve-minute version of “You Are My Sunshine,” a song first recorded in 1939 by the Pine Ridge...
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