2003 April

Tom Russell was born in Los Angeles in 1950 and now lives in El Paso. To use the words of one of his songs, he "took the long way around" to get there, passing through "the wide-open countries and the heart-attack...

Before the curtain even rises on a U-M Gilbert and Sullivan Society (UMGASS) show at Lydia Mendelssohn Theater, you know this isn’t your ordinary student musical. The small but very capable orchestra brings you to your...

The mention of a jazz clarinetist often leads to an obligatory lament over the decline of the fortunes of this instrument in modern jazz. It is true that clarinetists were prominent during the first few decades of the music and...

The great press notices from the New York Times ("one of the fresher and more imaginative voices on the New York new-music scene") and Opera News ("striking emotional music") are imposing. The great...

Known mostly as the “lead stoner” in the 1998 film Half-Baked, funnyman Dave Chappelle, in his efforts to establish a new brand of comedy, has in fact established a new brand of comedy, one where uncertain discomfort...

I was at Dar Williams’s first performance at the Ark, in April 1994. She opened for Ani DiFranco, and I’ve never seen an opening act stun and charm a crowd the way hers did. After five songs and one encore, it seemed...

Diane Glancy's new novel, Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, comes just in time for the 200th-anniversary celebrations of the journey of Lewis and Clark. Partly of Cherokee heritage, Glancy has written extensively, in poems...

Jonathan Safran Foer's wildly successful first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, is told in two voices. The first is that of a young American named Jonathan Safran Foer, "our hero," a secular and assimilated Jew,...

“They try desperately to sound pretty despite the difficulty of beauty in a bar.” This is my husband’s take on the Original Brothers and Sisters of Love. They do seem like good-natured people who like their...

A show of Russian photography that would have been banned in pre-glasnost days is on display at Dave's Photo Emporium. Irakly Shanidze's intense nudes, Eugeny Safian's dreamlike streetscapes, and Katarina...

Reporting for the Observer has brought out the best in me. In fact, I consider myself a sort of sleep-deprived, female Indiana Jones, always a few steps ahead of catastrophe. I've been nearly run over by the entire Michigan...