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Dr. Strangelove

Could a film as pointedly satirical about our government and its appetite for war as Dr. Strangelove be made today? It's not as if we don't have the material, but which director could skewer the times as thoroughly as...

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Trevor Watts

In the wake of the liberating free jazz movements of the 1950s and 1960s, musicians all over the world reexamined their attitude toward jazz tradition. Perhaps the most radical new trends took place in England, where a small...

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Kerrytown’s WolfFEST

So if Hugo Wolf is the greatest song composer in the history of the German language, how come he wasn't famous? Because he had syphilis and died insane? Schubert had syphilis, and Schumann died insane, and no one held it...

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Ann Patchett 2003

Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel Bel Canto found a massive audience, but it did so in a very interesting way. Patchett had been publishing regularly for more than a decade and was critically respected for the quiet craft of her...

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Capercaillie

Some people know the Scottish band Capercaillie mostly by the voice of its lead vocalist, Karen Matheson, who sang a stark Gaelic lament in the film Rob Roy. Matheson's singing is impossibly beautiful — Sean Connery...

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Kempf House dig

The trash — I mean, artifacts — excavated from the Kempf House's backyard gives an evocative look at nineteenth-century life in Ann Arbor. For some time, excavators hoped they were digging where the Kempf...

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Khalid Hanifi

"Love doesn't always have to go wrong, but it's a lot easier to write about it when it does." This little bit of songwriter's truth was shared on-stage by Khalid Hanifi somewhere between "The Bloom Is...

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Millish

"We call this set of jigs 'The Jigs,' " quips Tyler Duncan of Millish, before launching into yet another cluster of impossibly rich and complex tunes. This blend of the matter-of-fact and the pyrotechnic...

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Randy Weston

The modern jazz piano tradition has a number of strands. Most common is the lineage of Bud Powell, who so spectacularly adopted the fleet language of bebop to the keyboard. Others, such as Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols,...

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Steppin’ in It

There's a picture of a wolf on the back panel of Steppin' in It's second CD, Last Winter in the Copper Country, a wolf walking silently through a winter landscape. And it's an apt image. Since stepping into...

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Stone Reader

Stone Reader is a compelling documentary of filmmaker Mark Moskowitz's passionate search for Dow Mossman, an author who effectively disappeared for thirty years after publishing his only novel, The Stones of Summer, in 1972....

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Annie Capps

Singer-songwriter Annie Capps is heir to the long history of folk music as a medium for social commentary. At the same time, she is clearly a folksinger for the twenty-first century, using her art to explore the psychology of...

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Blithe Spirit

Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit is about as frothy as theater gets. It's 1930s baronial Scotland. People dress for dinner and drape themselves languidly over the furniture drawling things like "Anyone can write books,...

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Michael Cooney

Michael Cooney is well into his fifth decade playing music professionally, and he has appeared at the Ark — where he returns on Friday, August 1 — in every one of those decades. Along the way, he's also played at...

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Rubber duckies

"He drove around all day looking for a rubber ducky," art grad student Todd Cashbaugh tells me in the airy Robbins Gallery in North Campus's Art and Architecture Building. "It was so frustrating," agrees...

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Otis Taylor

Before I picked up on his amazingly haunting new CD, Truth Is Not Fiction, my only contact with blues artist Otis Taylor was a brief chorus or two I managed to catch on various WEMU blues shows. His voice reminded me in a way of...

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Marcia Ball 2003

Marcia Ball has been known for blues songs based on her sharp, precise piano playing — party music for those who enjoy watching the piano player as much as dancing. But her latest release, So Many Rivers, is something else...

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Deep Space Six

I must admit that I changed out of my jammies and drove to Leopold Bros. at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday because I was broke. Not because I knew anything about the cult groove band Deep Space Six. Not because I wanted to have a beer...

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Horns and Halos

Codirected by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky, the 2002 documentary Horns and Halos focuses on the struggle of biographer Jim Hatfield and publisher Sander Hicks to republish and market the first unauthorized biography of...

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