Generation Y? More like Generation Y Don't You Get a Job, right? With their texting and MyFace-ing and their classical music. ... Wait. So string quartet Brooklyn Rider is a foursome of young lads who play everything from Haydn to jazz to Philip Glass? I see. Well, I hope you've all learned a valuable lesson about stereotypes. See the pigeonhole-busting group perform Friday, Feb. 12, at 6 p.m. at Downtown's Hotel Andaluz Ballroom (125 Second Street NW), presented by Chamber Music Albuquerque. Get your $30 tickets and more info at cma-abq.org.

Meg Mullins never thought she’d make her living as a novelist. For one thing, the native Albuquerquean wrote short stories, not books, and she never expected to make a living off those, either. But after leaving the state to go to college at Barnard and get her MFA at Columbia University—and after a large pile of rejection letters—Mullins got a break. One of her stories was printed in The Iowa Review and then picked up by The Best American Short Stories series in 2002. It was then that people began asking her if she was working on a novel. So she decided she’d better get started on one.

While exploring the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History’s Albuquerque Now or Inpost Artspace’s I Also Make Art this fall, you likely noticed the works of Angela Berkson. Whether in acrylic or encaustic (hot wax painting), Berkson’s compositions evolve from diligently layered surfaces. Her final forms rest on the balance between geometric precision and organic freeform—her work plays with the contrast of black to white here, the complement of mustard to celadon there. On a visit to Berkson’s Second Street studio, the Alibi learned how her creativity first took root and what now makes it bloom.