2005 October

Indigo Girl Amy Ray’s new solo album, Prom, starts with an affectionate glimpse of a bunch of high school misfits, “the punks and the queers and the freaks and the smokers.” They’re waiting for rides,...

I made a point of discussing this nighttime walk in the woods with my little boy before attending. Where do you meet animals? I ask him. Do we meet them at the grocery store or in the city where we live? Nope. So we’ll go...

Based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now is a psychically charged tragic thriller. You could call it a horror film, but there are no zombies, aliens, conspiratorial witches, or little girls with spinning heads...

Avant-garde sometimes equates with in-your-face, but the avant-garde music of Frank Pahl manifests an innocent enthusiasm for pure sound. When I heard Pahl perform with a backup band of three at Kerrytown Concert House a couple...

For almost thirty years now, U-M English professor Laurence Goldstein has edited the Michigan Quarterly Review, and he’s done the scholarship — in his case studies of the use of aviation and movies in literature —...

It was an August night, and Ann Arbor dragged against shirt-soaking humidity and temperatures that climbed to meltdown. But the scene was a whole lot cooler upstairs at the Crazy Wisdom Tea Room on Main Street, where a packed...

One of the dependable joys of being a parent is reading to your child. Children love being read to; we can feel virtuous, knowing we’re doing a good thing for our kids; and great children’s books make terrific...

Lucinda Williams sings about addiction — to love, sex, religion, drugs, danger, and memory — in songs riddled with an undeniable, compelling poetry. If her music is any reflection of her life, hers has been a hard one. That she...

When people think of the flute, they rarely associate it with jazz music. But there is nothing intrinsically “nonjazz” about any instrument; the main problem with some is their low volume, an issue that was overcome...

Here is the myth of Daphne as adapted by composer Richard Strauss and his librettist, Joseph Gregor: Apollo, god of light and truth, falls in love with Daphne, nymph of trees and rivers. When his amorous advances are rebuffed,...

A singer, songwriter, and player of almost anything with strings, Tim O’Brien started out in the late 1970s as cofounder of a bluegrass band called Hot Rize that contained its own western alter ego, Red Knuckles & the...