Rosey Robards

Macy Whitaker meant to suggest their band, which practices in 14-year-old guitarist Zach Meltzer’s basement, be called Post Mortem but a misinterpretation led to Pole Smortum and it stuck.

It seems you do karaoke or you don't. After a week of scouring the town for the best and worst karaoke spots, I've come to the conclusion that Anchorage does karaoke.

It started with a favor, one that was only supposed to be a single show. Eight years, three new band members and what might be as many as 1,000 shows later, the band now known as Great American Taxi just can't seem to give it a rest.

As John Lee Hooker Jr. wrapped up our phone conversation, he took a few minutes to email a photo to accompany this story. "Let's show me smiling, the nice side of me," he said.

There’s this intriguing uncertainty at events like an open-mike night. Who will play tonight? It could be good. It could be really bad. It could get inappropriate or completely strange. A performer could say something that brings people to tears. Maybe I’ll buy a CD or download some of the music tomorrow. Maybe I’ll never want to hear that again. Or rather, it’s so bad we have to hear it again!

Sometimes there are those moments at a concert when audience members feel more connected to the music than they did before they arrived or even after they've left the venue. When Ryan Sollee and Harvey Tumbleson of The Builders and the Butchers went to a Crooked Fingers concert years ago, they had one of those moments. Led by longtime indie-rock frontman Eric Bachmann, Crooked Fingers came out into the audience to play some songs in the middle of the set.

SAY the word "conscious" when talking about Brooklyn, N.Y., hip-hop artist and poet Talib Kweli's work and he will probably accept the compliment but roll his eyes. "I stay away from the titles of 'conscious' just like a gangster rapper should stay away from the title 'gangster,' " Kweli said in an interview with National Public Radio's Farai Chideya.

At MTS Gallery, there will be live jazz inside, spoken word and local music outside. An old wooden warehouse will be brimming with an art exhibit called "Salon des Adieu Mobile Trailer Supply," showcasing work from a wide range of Anchorage artists. Community members will eat, drink and catapult balloons of paint at the Trailer Art Center building, creating their own masterpiece. Sounds like a party. "I like to call it the three-ring-circus effect," artist Sheila Wyne said as she described her vision of the MTS Gallery goodbye party in Mountain View on Saturday.

James Keck and Tara Loyd read an article in the newspaper in February about a young Anchorage man, Nathan Miller, whose afternoon stroll near Kincaid Park Chalet suddenly became a near-death experience. The tide came in and left him stranded on a shelf of ice. If circumstances were different, the couple would have read the article, put down the paper and gone to work; they both have jobs in the public health field. But Keck and Loyd tracked Miller down.

Coffee will be the first order of business when Rogue Wave's Pat Spurgeon, Zach Rogue (Schwartz), Dominic East and Cameron Jasper arrive in Anchorage on Monday afternoon. The indie rock band that had its song "California" featured on TV series including "The O.C." and "Nip/Tuck" is arriving in town a bit early. Drummer Spurgeon said it's not every day a band gets invited to Anchorage and they want to take advantage of it.