The hip-hop collective The Dirty Ol’ Men unexpectedly lost three members in 2021.

“Fourteen of us met in Memphis in 2021 and eight got COVID,” said Rod Wallace, an Eastern Michigan University alum and member of The Dirty Ol’ Men. “One of the variants was going around and we found out about it while we were preparing. The majority of us were vaccinated … but one of us—Blacmav [aka Mario Blocker]—passed away. Later that same year we lost two other members, Tasherre Risay and Chenika Bowens, who was also known as ThatBlessedGirl. One of our members, RTO Beats, had a heart transplant.”

The grieving remaining members channeled their emotions and experiences into writing and recording a cathartic album, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, during The Dirty Ol’ Men’s annual retreat two years later.

“It took a lot out of everybody,” Wallace said, “but we got back together in Charlotte, [North Carolina] in 2023. We created a bunch of music and I executive-produced and put the album together along with the producers.

“The music that we were making spoke specifically to the trauma that we had experienced in losing our friends. It wasn’t with complete intent to make an album that was about Black men and trauma, but it’s what came out of what we were creating.”

The Fall spooky season is always a great time to revisit the macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and this October the Penny Seats Theatre Company brings to life a stage adaptation of one of the author's most haunting tales.

Based loosely on The Fall of the House of Usher, Michigan playwright John Sousanis's Usher finds the last two heirs of a once-great family reunited with an old friend within their crumbling mansion. Penny Seats' production is directed by company Artistic Director Julia Garlotte, and stars Brittany Batell as Madeline Usher, David Collins as Roderick Usher, and Jonathan Davidson as the unnamed Visitor.

This year marks Garlotte's first season as artistic director of Penny Seats, though she has previously worked with the company as an actor and sound designer. Staging Usher, as with the other Penny Seats performances for 2024, was selected by previous artistic director Joseph Zettelmaier, though Garlotte was in conversation with him throughout the decision-making process. "We both decided that it would be a cool addition to the season," Garlotte says. Zettelmaier had seen Usher during its original run in 2007, and Michigan playwright John Sousanis rewrote the script for Penny Seats. 

"We had some stuff we wanted fleshed out and questions answered," Garlotte says, "and he was willing to take another stab at it. So we have a really great script."

As to what appeals to her about Usher, Garlotte says she is "always a sucker for drama and tragedy, which is a strange thing to say when sometimes the state of the world calls for something a little more light-hearted."

In U-M alum Perry Janes’ new poetry collection, Find Me When You’re Ready, the poems weigh desire by examining what you can express, what you hold back, and how you tell the story. These poems chase and dodge competing and sinister desires—and see what prevails. 

Janes, originally from Michigan, now lives in California. The poems in Find Me When You’re Ready involve both places, as the book’s description says, “Janes traces a sweeping journey from Detroit to Los Angeles.” 

Janes returns to Ann Arbor for an event at Literati Bookstore where he will be joined in conversation by Peter Ho Davies, with a reading by Tommye Blount, on Friday, October 4, 2024, at 6:30 p.m.

On the topic of relocating from Detroit to the West Coast, Janes writes in the poem, “Ode to Xeriscaping; or, Regarding Austerity, I Find Devotion":

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features jazz by the Nick Collins Sextet, synth-pop by Same Eyes, experimental jazz by microplastique, grunge by Good Man's Brother, and twinkling math rock by Pluot.

It seems a too-painful irony that U-M art professor Rebekah Modrak while working on the new book Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who Are Fighting Back had to work around censorship laws.

Modrak’s co-editor, Nadine M. Kalin, is on faculty at the University of North Texas, “and in the middle of working on the project, Texas created a new law saying that you can’t essentially do work around diversity,” Modrak explained. “So we, at the University of Michigan, had to create an email address for [Kalin] and sponsor her as an academic so she could use our email address as she worked on the project, to create some distance for herself and some protections. And I thought, wow, maybe this is the future of the country, where we have blue states, where work like this is being done, and we protect academic refugees from red states who are being censored.”

Even with this awkward workaround in place, the pair managed to gather oral histories from 14 public school educators who’d been harassed (or outright dismissed) in recent years because of, among other reasons, their gender presentation, or the topics they taught in class, or the books they offered on their shelves.

“The impetus for the book was that they wanted to be able to tell their own story because their stories were so—the way it was being told by parents or outsiders in the community, or by the administration, was such a distortion from the truth as they understood it,” said Modrak. “So they wanted to be able to tell that. A few of the teachers did go to the media in order to try to get that story out and were punished further for it.”

Remember when voting was fun?

Frankly, I didn’t, either—until I settled into my Power Center seat on Wednesday night to see Belgian theater company Ontroerend Goed’s Fight Night, presented by the University Musical Society.

Before the show, in the lobby, ushers distributed tiny digital voting machines (attached to neckstraps) to each audience member, and the first two people we saw on stage were two tech guys who man laptops that report, on two raised screens, vote tallies throughout the evening.

And there were many.

But to warm us up, wry emcee (and Fight Night co-writer) Angelo Tijssens, dressed in a neutral plaid suit, cajoled us into participating in some basic surveys, both to get us comfortable working the devices and to provide crucial intel to the evening’s five “candidates.”

For what office, exactly? It’s never clear, and it doesn’t matter. Pretty immediately, we’re asked to choose a candidate with no information. By default, then, we must select our initial champion by way of our own racial, gender, and body/age biases, or by our mindful resistance to those biases.

See? Right from the get-go, things get tricky.

Ayokunle Falomo’s new poetry collection, Autobiomythography of, examines the concepts of decolonization, identity, and truth while also studying the poet’s relationship to self, family, writing, and growth.

Several poems in Autobiomythography of bear the title “Lugard & I” followed by a parenthetical, such as “Lugard & I (Meditation).” In the notes section, Falomo, a University of Michigan alum, describes that these poems “take/borrow/steal/repurpose words, phrases, sentences, images, ideas, etc. from The Diaries of Lord Lugard, Volume 4 as well as the personal journal I kept in 2018, during my residency at MacDowell.” Falomo, who is Nigerian and American, also notes that Frederick Lugard participated in Britain’s colonization of African countries, including Nigeria. These poems, related by title, “are poems through, by which I mean because of, or more accurately, by way of, Lugard.” The first one in the book, “Lugard & I (Ars Poetica),” offers a series of commands and command-like questions:

Count the cost. Ask questions. Are they loud,
the nouns. Do they speak back.
Consider each word as a rider must his horse.
How fit. How strong. Your adjectives,
how trustworthy are they. How much
does each word weigh. Can you account for every one
of them, for every single thing. Consider scale.

Some knew Jay Stielstra as an activist who ran for Ann Arbor City Council in 1964 and served as a board member of the Washtenaw County chapter of the ACLU.

Others knew Stielstra as an athlete who attended the University of Michigan on an athletic scholarship. He played football, basketball, and track and became a Big Ten champion in the long jump.

He also was a public school teacher who introduced Black history into the curriculum at Ann Arbor’s Pioneer High School and coached the football team.

Stielstra also connected with others through his creative pursuits, including novels like Meet Me at the River, musicals like North Country Opera, poetry collections like In Drought Time: Scenes From Rural and Small Town Life, and a revered catalog of music.

As a singer-songwriter, he brought all his passions together. He wrote songs about the devastation of war, social justice, the passage of time, drinking in taverns, the beauty of Northern Michigan’s woods and waters, finding and losing love, and getting old.

For over 50 years, Stielstra—who died March 1 at age 90—performed these songs on stages large and small.

“He walked through so many different communities in the course of his life,” said Barbara Schmid, Stielstra’s widow.

To celebrate Stielstra’s legacy, Schmid and Ann Arbor singer-songwriter Judy Banker are hosting a tribute and benefit show September 28 at The Ark—a place that nourished Stielstra and was one that he loved. 

Celebrating the Music of Jay Stielstra will feature a lineup of Michigan musicians performing his songs in acoustic styles from blues to bluegrass. It also doubles as a fundraiser for the Ann Arbor folk and roots music club.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features hip-hop by Gostbustaz, atmospheric folk by Rabbitology, fuzzy power-pop by Pet TV, outsider folk by Do We Have a Problem?, and live jazz-world fusion by The Missing Cats.

This story originally ran March 27, 2024. We're republishing it because Mark Jewett & The Strategic Advisors perform on Saturday, September 22, 6:30 pm at the Ann Arbor District Library, 343 South Fifth Avenue.

These days, Mark Jewett moves at warp speed.

The Plymouth singer-songwriter maintains a frantic daily pace on his latest single, “Too Fast.”

“It was more of a general feeling of being closed in and trapped and things just coming at me faster than I could deal with them,” said Jewett about the folk-pop track, which features a collaboration with Sav Madigan and Katie Larson of The Accidentals.

“One day, I just took a break at my desk, and I picked up my guitar. I started doing this chunking rhythm like you hear at the beginning of the song. I was drinking coffee, and I thought, ‘I need some energy,’ and the line just popped into my head.”

That initial opening lyric was “I’ve got a thousand watts of black coffee / Pumpin’ through my veins,” but Jewett upped the ante to “Two thousand watts of black coffee” instead.

“Kyle Rasche caught me between shows up at Nor-East’r last year when I was in the merch barn. He said, ‘Man, that’s a great line,’ and he thought I had said something about ‘8,000 watts,’ but it was originally, ‘I’ve got a thousand watts,’” said Jewett, a University of Michigan alumnus, who started writing the track last spring. “I thought maybe there was too much there, so starting it with 2,000 [watts] just punctuates it right at the beginning.”