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A Squared

I went to the Art Center's A Squared theme exhibit hoping to see works touching on things I like about this city: the last few threads of its once lush lunatic fringe, pockets of ungentrified seediness, and beer-soaked...

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Claudia Sherman

Claudia Sherman is exactly the kind of girl who intimidated me in middle school: cute, pert, smart, irreverent, and exquisitely, fearlessly, foul mouthed. Now that we're both all grown up, however, I just think she's a...

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Cellist Matt Haimovitz

The Ark, Ann Arbor's premier club for acoustic music, has booked all manner of acts in its nearly forty years — but never a cellist performing hard-core classical repertoire. This month, however, the young Israeli...

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Mexican Night

The Latin American presence in Ann Arbor shows itself only in intermittent signs — a Spanish-language church service here, a section of Mexican groceries there. For Ann Arborites who travel around the country a bit and have...

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Let It Be

August is a good time to drive out to a small, green town, sit in an air-conditioned theater, and let someone else's view of the human condition wash over you for a few hours. I was in a heat-induced trance the Sunday...

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Chemical Traces

Naia Venturi’s puppet show Chemical Traces offers a perfect Everyman for an era of rabid-lemming consumerism and ecological destruction. In an age that thinks, for example, that the Yucca Mountain plan to transport nuclear...

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Elvisfest

With the twenty-fifth anniversary of Elvis Presley's death fast approaching, opportunities to commemorate in style seem limitless. You could don a Priscilla-style black wig and light a gigantic bust-of-Elvis candle; get...

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Kim Richey

Kim Richey grew up in southwestern Ohio, right on the line dividing rock-speaking from country-speaking lands, and her musical career has turned on intriguing tensions between the two styles. In concert she's dispassionate,...

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Love Lies Dreaming

I've seen the local pop band Love Lies Dreaming only twice: once in a quiet, living-room-like setting in the basement of the Michigan League on a wintry Saturday night in front of a couple dozen friends, and once at Leopold...

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O Brother, Where Art Thou?

In the depths of Depression-era Mississippi, three convicts escape from their work farm and begin a race against time to reach buried treasure. Hair-obsessed, quick-tongued Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), ill-tempered,...

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Life on a String

Once upon a time, an artist mom sewed three hand puppets representing her son and two daughters. When one daughter turned fourteen, she took a local rec department class in puppetry. She gleefully holds up her puppet in a grainy...

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Y’All

God, I love this country. The burgeoning popularity of the gay, old-timey duo Y'All gives hope to a weary world. Y'All is James Dean Jay Byrd (his real name) and Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer — partners in life, love, and...

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FUBAR

On a visit to Ireland's remote Dingle Peninsula years ago, my wife and I got wind of a music session at a local pub. In a back room, local musicians — mostly farmers — gathered with townsfolk, friends, and...

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Wet-N-Wild Wednesdays

There was a time, say about ten or eleven years ago, when any utterance of the word "pool" was met with riotous, schnauzerlike hysteria on the part of my male child. And it was with this in mind that I suggested to my...

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Jerry Douglas

The Dobro is the instrument that put the twang in country music, but it is much more besides. It was the 1928 creation (and contracted namesake) of the Czech American Dopyera brothers, who placed a steel disc over the sound hole...

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Summer chamber music

Isn’t it grand that somebody still performs hard-core classical music in Ann Arbor in the summer? Sure, there’s Marilyn Mason’s organ recital series during the Summer Festival, and this year there are a couple...

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Weddings of Yore

Since Victorian-era ladies could not in all decency approach men, they used their fans to broadcast coded messages. According to the Museum on Main Street's Weddings of Yore exhibit, frenzied fanning meant that one was...

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