When you read the poetry of Susan Stewart, you are going to learn things. Interesting things. Things you never knew you wanted to know. Yes, she is indeed an award-winning critic and Princeton professor, but those occupations...
Read MoreWhy did Giuseppe Verdi hate the Catholic Church? There were two reasons, one political, the other personal. First, the church opposed Italian unity, the political cause Verdi fought for all his life. Second, its consolations...
Read MoreVampires don’t dance to the music of NOMO — the warm blood of the living courses not through their veins — but pretty much everyone else within, say, 100 feet of this A2-born-and-bred post-Afrobeat horn-heavy band will be...
Read MoreWhen it was shown at the still fledgling Sundance Film Festival in 1985, Blood Simple astounded audiences around the world with its playfully professional yet grisly homage to the noir and horror film genres. Brothers Joel and...
Read MoreThey call this music flamenco rock, and Del Castillo is not the only band in Austin that plays it. Perhaps it got started with El Mariachi, Austin filmmaker Robert Rodriguez's delightful low-budget romp in which a...
Read More
Hey, kids — if Superman's stunts had your heart in your throat, try watching an actor swinging a real baseball bat at a real pitch on the small Purple Rose stage. He's supposed to miss, but what if he hits the ball...
Read More"I knew something like this would happen when their parents started listening to Devo." This was my companion's comment at a recent performance by Ann Arbor's Mason Proper. Only some of the music of these young...
Read MoreA lion with a heart of steel wool, a rainstick torpedo, and a lawn mower dog-man appear in the Ann Arbor Art Center's show of exuberant works by Detroit multimedia artist and muralist Vito Jesus Valdez. The nine large,...
Read MoreThe place: Way out west. The time: Not that long ago. The cast: Blond-haired, blue-eyed Young Man; gray-haired, grizzled Old Man. Young Man: Tell me, Father, what’s “The Cowboy Way”? Old Man: Son, we...
Read More"Freedom fries" are only the latest manifestation of this country's 150-year-old tradition of linking patriotism with food, as documented in the Clements Library's exhibit Patriotic Fare: Abe Lincoln Tomatoes,...
Read MoreThe young new Canadian band Greenwich Meantime calls its music "Celtic rock/ pop," but even more than these three genres are involved. These musicians seek to use the Celtic past in a modern, eclectic context without...
Read MoreI’m in thrall to a rerun. I can’t help it. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, where I’m going, how late I am, what’s burning, or who’s ringing the doorbell with a hot pizza, I will stop...
Read MoreIn 1995 two sisters, Kristy and Kelly Montee, originally from Detroit but then living in two different southern states, combined to become one mystery writer, P. J. Parrish. As Parrish, they (or she?) created the essential...
Read MoreOutside the historic Stockbridge Township Hall, an older gentleman wearing a John Deere hat calls to me from his truck, "Miss, is this where the drumming thing is?" "Yes, sir," I shout. My boys and I are...
Read MoreLast fall, New York Times dance writer Gia Kourlas wrote a still-controversial "think piece" lamenting that New York City has lost its edge and no longer serves as the vortex of international contemporary dance....
Read MoreLet's see. Urbations, Watusis, Stomprockets, Navarones, the Shanks, and a half dozen other Marshall-amp-charged garage bands I've forgotten the names of, none with a snowball's chance in hell of ever becoming...
Read MoreI was sitting in a downtown coffee shop, coasting merrily along as Drew Nelson sang "Lovely Day" — his paean to the simple joys of spring, love, friendship, and impending fishing — when it struck me: this...
Read MoreWhile listening to Paul Klinger's Easy Street Swingtet at the Firefly recently, I overheard someone say, "You'd pay big money to hear music like this in New York . . . but the band would be better dressed."...
Read MoreDoes anyone remember the New Orleans flood — remember not just the death and destruction, the pain and loss, but the directives given at the time by federal, state, and local government leaders? Does anyone remember that...
Read More