People who like to categorize things often refer to Ron Padgett as a second-generation New York School poet. What that really means is that he's one of a group of friends who have worked and played in the city for the last...
Read MoreSomehow you don't expect much from a play with pizza in the title. The word itself is so redolent of soggy cardboard, third-rate ingredients, and stale pop culture. And while it's true that large slices of the second act...
Read MoreIn my family, it's a story about my grandfather. This would have been sometime around 1942, in a tiny town in southern West Virginia, where my grandfather, Sam Setrakian, owned and operated a saloon dubbed, with some...
Read MoreYuri Temirkanov has had what one would have to call a great career. Born in the Caucasus in 1938, he moved to Leningrad at thirteen to study violin. He soon switched to conducting and graduated in 1965. Two years later,...
Read MoreAnaïs Mitchell was raised on a sheep farm in Vermont, and her songs have the freshness of deep, unsullied nature. I don't think I've ever heard songs quite like this: twisty and melodic and somehow effortlessly...
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Legendary local folkie Dick Siegel stops before a head shot of a 1950s-era robot. Its bolts-for-ears, grille teeth, and raised arm provoke giggles. Siegel raises his own arm: "Hail!" It's Marvelous Mike, a yellow...
Read MoreOver forty years ago, four Chicago musicians founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) as a radical self-help group for nurturing, performing, recording, and teaching original music. Six years...
Read MoreIt isn't difficult to remember the slackers from the early 1990s, with their skateboards, their own language, their tattoos, their piercings, and their tough rock. They hung around towns like this, where they could easily...
Read MoreI can't imagine what it's like to be a longtime Josh Ritter fan and hear his new album, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, in which our hero, his four-man band, and the eight-piece Great North Sound Society...
Read More"This is sad," the bearded man (professor or specialist or rock/fossil guy) says. "A fragment of a paleosomethingsomething shell. Only a fragment." He turns the shell over and over in his hands before holding...
Read MoreThe seven members of My Dear Disco form a semicircle around me in the cramped dressing room of the Blind Pig and try to explain why the bar downstairs is jam packed. None of these hyperattentive and articulate twenty-somethings...
Read MoreThe Santa Cruz River Band comes from Tucson, one of the cities in the southern tier of states where deep connections with Mexico long predate the current immigration controversy. It's been said that the city's economy...
Read MoreThe Clean House, by up-and-coming New York playwright Sarah Ruhl, now at the Performance Network, is an absurdist romp stretched over the bones of a melodrama. It’s narrated by Brazilian maid Mathilde (Aphrodite...
Read MoreWhat will he play? When he makes his first Ann Arbor appearance in twenty-five years, Krystian Zimerman could play almost anything. Just because he's a Polish pianist and a student of Artur Rubinstein, don't assume...
Read MoreAll people who regularly attend classical music concerts in Ann Arbor know the excellence of the U-M music school faculty and student performers. They have gone to the piano-shaped music school building to hear the brass’s...
Read MoreThe short story, like any other art form, responds to fashion. The dominant fashion at the moment — a certain genuine wittiness that exposes a gently bizarre character often at swim in a sea of commodities — has...
Read MoreDarol Anger and Mike Marshall play music that starts at the meeting point of bluegrass and jazz — and can find its way into a classical concert hall without too much trouble. The genre doesn't really have a name apart...
Read MoreWhen I’m checking out local performers, I so enjoy seeing their parents or grandparents in the audience. The evening feels somehow more wholesome and meaningful with the older folks tuning in to the next generation’s...
Read MoreComedian George Carlin pointed out years ago that baseball's goofy, childlike soul (Caps! Parks!) contrasts starkly with football's martial combat (Helmets! Stadiums!). And perhaps the game's playful quality is what...
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