An elephant will be in the room Thursday when Jeff Daniels, the singer, songwriter and guitarist, performs at the Southgate House. That elephant is the simultaneous presence of Jeff Daniels, the acclaimed actor in such movies as Terms of Endearment, The Squid and the Whale, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Dumb & Dumber. Daniels, the musician, doesn’t try to pretend that his “other” career doesn’t exist. He performs Thursday at the Southgate House.  

An elephant will be in the room Thursday when Jeff Daniels, the singer, songwriter and guitarist, performs at the Southgate House. That elephant is the simultaneous presence of Jeff Daniels, the acclaimed actor in such movies as Terms of Endearment, The Squid and the Whale, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Dumb & Dumber. Daniels, the musician, doesn’t try to pretend that his “other” career doesn’t exist. He performs Thursday at the Southgate House.  

On my trip last week to New York City, I bypassed the blockbuster shows at the major art museums in favor of secondary shows and institutions. Secondary in visibility, maybe, in America's busiest arts city, but not in quality. In fact, every institution — in different ways — was pushing its own envelope in order to offer new, provocative ideas about the art it displays.  

A couple Saturdays ago, I went on an Architectural Foundation of Cincinnati-sponsored excursion to Columbus, Ind., a city just 90 minutes away that has developed an international reputation for its Modernist architecture. Besides the buildings, I was particularly moved by the Bartholomew County Memorial for Veterans in the city's downtown.  

Yo La Tengo's recent album, Popular Songs, is widely regarded as one of the band’s best, with many of the Yo La Tengo originals being concise, melodic Rock songs with trenchantly observed lyrics that emerge from the textured soundscape. Yo La Tengo play Saturday at the Southgate House with Wussy.  

Popular Songs is widely regarded as one of Yo La Tengo's best, with many of the band's originals being concise, melodic Rock songs with trenchantly observed lyrics that emerge from the textured soundscape. For example, on “Periodically Double or Triple,” Kaplan sings these words of wisdom: “Never read Proust, seems a little too long/Never used a hammer, without somehow using it wrong.” They play Saturday with Wussy at the Southgate House.  

It wasn't long ago that Joan Rivers was regarded as a joke. Her Fox network talk show had bombed, she and daughter Melissa performed high-kitsch red-carpet commentary before award-show broadcasts. But a new honest and spellbinding documentary offers a surprising insight into this interesting life. Grade: B-plus.  

Although Cincinnati Form Follows Function — an organization for enthusiasts of Modern design and architecture called CF3 for short — has only been in existence since 2004, it already has come up with a potentially famous photograph of the city. It's a panorama taken from Bellevue Hill Park in Clifton Heights. And the success of it gives CF3 something special to celebrate at that very park this Saturday.  

Visual Acoustics, a documentary beautifully and artfully made by Eric Bricker, shows the delighted, sweet way that architectural photographer Julius Shulman welcomed that fame in his last years, and even shows him working, with an assistant, on a few final valedictory projects.  

To call Peter Case's newest album, 'Wig!' (the singer/songwriter/guitarist's 11th of original material) "miraculous" isn't to merely say it's very good. It features new songs that in their expressive intensity and spontaneity conjure mid-1960s Dylan possessed by the spirit of those bluesy 1950s recordings by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Howlin' Wolf.