Team UMS
Twenty-five years ago, the University Musical Society was drowning in debt.Since its founding in 1879, the group had presented classical music in Ann Arbor under only four leaders: Henry Simmons Frieze through 1889, Francis...
Read More2011 September
Happy Talk
If the economy is bad, publish only positive business news, and funders will line up to bask in the glow. That’s the profitable formula of Ann Arbor’s Paul Schutt, who has built a small empire, including the local...
Read MoreBorders’ Last Days
On July 28, ten days after the announcement that Borders was toast, CEO Mike Edwards called together the staff at the company’s headquarters. A decade ago, 1,300 people worked in the fortress-like white building in an...
Read MoreGhost Writers
v Keith Taylor usually reviews books here, but he also writes them, mostly poetry and short fiction. He and fellow poet and fiction writer Laura Kasischke gathered together some Michigan writers and asked each to contribute a...
Read MoreThe Wayward Sisters
There are precious few things worth spending a spectacularly beautiful Sunday afternoon indoors for, and if you’d told me that one of them would be a recital by the Wayward Sisters of a program called “Ashes, Ashes:...
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Concealed Carry
Concealed Carry: Appearing on bulletin boards in places including the Washtenaw Dairy and Stadium Hardware, Dan O’Bryan’s bold-lettered signs stand out among the usual postings for painters and handy people....
Read MoreLane markings on Catherine
Q. How are drivers (and cyclists) to make sense of the new lane markings on Catherine St. between Fourth Ave. and Main? There’s a bike lane down the middle of the street with traffic on either side. Would any sensible...
Read MoreRose Martin’s Struggles
A year ago, Rose Martin, the charismatic former director of Peace Neighborhood Center, incorporated Rose’s Good Company. She says her five-year-old, one-woman charity helps adults who “fall between the...
Read MoreMedia Moment
Even in Ann Arbor, not everyone has air-conditioning–a truth apparently lost on some young local hoodlums. On a hot night in early August, a couple living on Ann Arbor’s south side were cooling off in their darkened...
Read MoreWhite House Black Market
White House Black Market is Briarwood’s newest women’s clothing store. Its name derives from the store’s gradually expanding color palette. Originally two Baltimore chains of boutiques that had even more...
Read MoreClosings around town
Squares, also open for less than a year, announced a temporary closing at the beginning of summer. By July, Bluestone Realty was posting a For Lease sign in the window on E. Liberty. “I feel bad for them. They lost half a...
Read MoreFranz Wright
When I knew I would write about Franz Wright’s new collection of prose poems, Kindertotenwald, I wrote to my German friend Thilo von Debschitz, whose English is decidedly better than my German, to ask him how he understood...
Read MoreIorio’s opens
Iorio’s Gelateria, on the first floor of the Maynard House apartment building, is owned by brother and sister Nick and Mary Lemmer, twenty and twenty-three, respectively. If you think that sounds young, they’ve...
Read MoreHello Zamaan Cafe
In early August the last traces of Naser Derneika’s Gyro Palace at the Colonnade were being cleared away to make room for Ali Hijazi’s latest Zamaan Cafe. (Hijazi has closed a location on Packard, but still has his...
Read MoreMikrokolektyw
Over the last half-century, jazz has flourished in Central Europe, especially in Poland. Banned by the Stalinist postwar government, it emerged from the underground in the late Fifties to become an important component of...
Read MoreRestaurant Reset
“I thought the menu was just wrong,” says Jim Leonardo.”In Europe, there is a rich tradition of wine pairing,” says Leonardo, the new chef at Vinology. On Main Street in Ann Arbor, however, it’s...
Read MoreBiercamp’s Yooper Inspiration
Back in the 1980s, Da Yoopers had a backwoods hit with “Second Week of Deer Camp,” a song about the beer-drinking proclivities of Upper Peninsula hunters. It turns out the song didn’t inspire the name of Hannah...
Read MoreThe Missing Ticket
Jack Briegel lives off a quiet dirt road, in a home he shares with Jeannette, his wife of fifty-three years. If you go straight in from the front door, you’ll enter a living room decorated in Zen-like soft greens and earth...
Read MoreAvtomobile on East Liberty
Avtomobile, a tiny new shop on East Liberty underneath the Bead Gallery, is hard to characterize, but it’s not hard to say. It’s pronounced–pronovnced?–“automobile.” Maris Turner, one-half of...
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