David Roberts
It’s been said that people travel to reinforce what they already know, not to discover anything new. This theory may also explain the appeal of pictures that strengthen visual perceptions of a specific place. Such is the...
Read MoreNov 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
It’s been said that people travel to reinforce what they already know, not to discover anything new. This theory may also explain the appeal of pictures that strengthen visual perceptions of a specific place. Such is the...
Read MoreNov 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
At thirty-two years of age, and weighing in at 320 pounds, comedian Kevin McPeek proudly claims that "I've been gaining ten pounds a year since the day I was born." The math may be fuzzy, but McPeek's...
Read MoreNov 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
It is seven days before the year 2000. A Kafkaesque plague is sweeping across Taiwan, an end-of-millennium virus that causes its victims to behave like cockroaches — crawling around on the floor, avoiding light, seeking...
Read MoreOct 15, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The experts disagree about Riders in the Sky. Do they offer "the loving re-creation and perpetuation of a myth," as country-music historian extraordinaire Bill C. Malone opines in his liner notes for the album...
Read MoreOct 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
When you head out for a night of live music, sometimes you want to be challenged by new bands and cutting-edge sounds; other times you simply want the relaxing comfort of familiar tunes and dependable talent. Laith Al-Saadi...
Read MoreOct 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Based on Petru Dumitriu's short story "La Salade," Lucian Pintilie's 1994 film An Unforgettable Summer evokes the insanity and moral outrage of war, Balkan style, from the perspective of an officer's wife....
Read MoreOct 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
There's a new film group on campus — thank god — that calls itself Projectorhead. On Halloween, at the Modern Languages Building, it will screen the 1942 Jacques Tourneur classic Cat People. Simone Simon stars as...
Read MoreOct 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
During the swing era the clarinet was king in the public eye, but during the postwar years, as small combos took over in jazz, it was eclipsed by the louder saxophones and trumpets in the front line. The instrument may have lost...
Read MoreOct 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Building a private mental greenhouse of growth and respite amid a daily blizzard of dirty dishes, half-done homework, unpaid bills, and questions that begin, “Honey, where’s my . . .” takes determination. The...
Read MoreOct 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The Ann Arbor District Library begins its Downtown Sounds series on Thursday, October 24, with an energetic headliner: local pianist Tom Loncaric and his big band. Decades younger than the generation of music they represent,...
Read MoreOct 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
I am no fan of the piano playing of Garrick Ohlsson. I admit that he has astounding technique, amazing stamina, and great taste in what he plays. And I acknowledge that he is admired and even adored by Ann Arbor audiences. But I...
Read MoreOct 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Poet Philip Levine left Detroit almost fifty years ago, when he was twenty-six. He had been born and educated in the city, part of the immigrant Jewish working class; his father died when he was five, leaving his mother to raise...
Read MoreOct 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The shadows are long. The leaves are falling. My four-year-old is smacking the daylights out of every ball I throw to him. He straightens from his stance and asks, "What's that?" I, too, stop and listen. At first,...
Read MoreOct 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
When looking for a new music director, the Cleveland Orchestra has a tradition of favoring people who might politely be called “strict disciplinarians”: Artur Rodzinski (1933-1943) supposedly carried a revolver to...
Read MoreSep 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
"I am content with my country: good, bad, and worse than bad — I am enchanted by my country," Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo has said. His twenty elegiac dreamscapes on display at the U-M Museum of Art...
Read MoreSep 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Cloud Nine Music can certainly get into a groove. Trouble is, they can't get out of it. They've got the steady beat, the dependable keyboard line, and the bass riff you can latch onto — all creating a dance-party...
Read MoreSep 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
John Fulton is on a roll. Last year, just out of the U-M creative writing program, he published an award-winning book of short stories. He follows that this year with his first novel, More than Enough, a moving tale of a...
Read MoreSep 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Unlike contemporary ballet companies, which must present work by a range of choreographers to appear relevant and stay fresh, most modern dance troupes today are showcases for the choreographers who started them. Think Trisha...
Read MoreSep 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Ranking among the top twenty-five films ever made, Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis is full of inventive visual styles and thematic structures that offered the then newly formed art of film analysis a lot to...
Read MoreSep 1, 2002 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
I've never quite understood why it's so compelling to compare the texture of a voice to something completely unrelated to hearing, but for whatever reason, Allison Moorer's voice always reminds me of the hot whiskey...
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