2008 March

Imagine a sculpture of a naked reclining woman, her lips painted full and red, her eyes flirting playfully with the viewer. Now add a sagging belly and breasts and drooping wrinkled skin. Finally, put a sheep’s head on her...

You know the old fable of the blind men who use their sense of touch to try to describe an elephant. One man feels the elephant’s leg and says, “An elephant is like a tree.” Another grasps the trunk and...

Of the uncountable thousands of rock 'n' roll bands on the planet, very few have the gender composition of the Blue Rubys: three women and one man. The combination gives the band a kind of collective sexiness that's...

It is sometimes difficult, at a time when a jazz album receives a Grammy for best musical performance, to remember the long struggle that the music has had for legitimacy in the country of its birth or to imagine that there was...

For more than half a century now — certainly since the famous reading in San Francisco in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg first unveiled his Howl, Gary Snyder read from his Riprap poems, and the Beat movement entered the popular...

When Shakespeare wrote that "all the world's a stage," he was, of course, not referring to the Blackbird Theatre. Yet it's an apt description of Ann Arbor's newest theater. At the Blackbird the playhouse...

The EMU Convocation Center is crawling with teenagers. They’re smart teenagers — high school students who design, build, and operate robots. They’ve traveled here, with their robots, from fifty-nine Midwest high...

"Fare thee well, I'm bound to roam. . . ." With these old-fashioned, courtly words in "Tennessee Blues" — the opening cut to his Grammy-winning new album Washington Square Serenade — Steve...

The premise makes it sound more gimmicky than it is. Two staid suburban couples, on a dare, drink some sort of hallucinogenic truth-inducing "wine" made from Peruvian tree frogs. Vino Veritas, which continues its world...