The Monday Mix is an occasional roundup of compilations, live recordings, videos, podcasts, and more by Washtenaw County-associated artists, DJs, radio stations, and record labels.

This edition features sights and sounds from Fans With Bands interviewing Mazinga, performances from the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, a MEMCO mix from DJ Art, and viral TikTok fella DJ DC.

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

This edition features jazz-steeped indie by Mei Semones, hip-hop soul by Nadim Azzam, Americana by Bill Edwards, '60s-style folk-rock by Chip Kramer, and jazz-dada jams by Tinn Parrow and His Clapfold Platune.

This story was first published on February 27, 2024. We're highlighting it because Zilka Joseph and Isaac Pickell will read from their work for "Jewish American Poets of Color" at AADL's Downtown branch on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, at 6:30 pm.

“From tumbled sands and shattered bark / blurred shadows dragged us,” writes Zilka Joseph in her new poetry collection, Sweet Malida: Memories of a Bene Israel Woman. 

These poems are immersed in the history, customs, and food of the Bene Israel people. The Ann Arbor poet shares about their shipwreck on the shores of India, worship of the prophet Elijah, and subsequent dispersing across the world. While Joseph imparts facts about the culture and community, she also makes the poems personal with her memories. 

This cultural and familial history informs Joseph’s poems, such as “Leaf Boat,” which is a longer poem that receives its own section of the book. Joseph describes “my body a leaf boat / lamp floated on water” in the context of the heritage of her ancestors, grandmother, parents, and herself who moved from place to place. Even her birth was during unsettled weather: “I was born Thursday in monsoon rain / night time East coast time / in Bombay a baby opens her eyes.” Water, especially oceans, flows through the lines, and “in my dream / the whales are singing.” 

Joseph focuses less on what is lost, though she does pay tribute to her parents, and focuses more on the richness that the traditions and foods of the Bene Israel pass along. One such food is “draksha-cha sharbath. Sherbet of raisins” for Shabbath, which Joseph writes about replicating on her own after moving to the United States. Earlier, she had prepared it with her grandmother and mother. As she writes in one of the short essays or prose poems that are interspersed throughout the book, making this recipe is like time traveling for Joseph:  

Barbara Neri has worked to get her movie, Unlocking Desire, made for several years while dealing with the pandemic, writers’ and actors’ strikes, and her own busy schedule.

And she's still working on it.

"I've more than one thing going on, so it’s not the only iron in the fire,” said Neri, an Ann Arbor creative who has worked in dance, theater, performance art, and education in addition to being a writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. “I try not to think of the amount of time too much, because I think things will happen when they’re going to happen. … But it’s a wild ride. … Some projects take 10 years, so you just have to stay in the moment as much as possible. That’s really what I try to do, and enjoy the journey, enjoy each step.”

Unlocking Desire, which won the Marfa Film Festival's best screenplay award in 2017, tells the story of an institutionalized woman who believes she’s Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams’ tragic heroine from A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche grows convinced that another inmate, Raoul, is Allan Grey, the young man she married as a teenager, and whom she later found in bed with another man.

In Williams’ play, Blanche’s reflexive disgust in the moment leads to Allan’s suicide, but in Unlocking Desire, Raoul is a gay man whose failed suicide attempt causes his wife to institutionalize him.

Robert Harling originally wrote Steel Magnolias as a short story to help cope with the death of his sister in 1985. She had given birth to a son but died from diabetes complications shortly after.

Rather than emphasizing a sad situation, Harling balanced the tale with humor. The short story became a play, a hit movie, and most importantly, a tribute to his sister and the comfort and support of a group of women in a small Louisiana town.

The Ann Arbor Civic Theatre is staging Steel Magnolias May 8-11 at the Arthur Miller Theatre on the North Campus of the University of Michigan.

Lindsey Brown is directing her first play for Civic.

“I was really drawn to the Magnolias because there is really something extraordinary about the communal aspect of the show,” she said. “Why this play now? I really think it’s very poignant in 2025 because there was something we missed from that timeline. At the risk of sounding regressive, not cool, not young, it’s a fact that we have our phones in our faces all the time. I think there is something I really miss about being in a room with people and being in touch with people who care about each other.”

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

This edition features R&B from Vonsíwel, a Whitney Houston cover from French Ship, piano ambiance by Optigan Conservatory, hip-hop from M.I.C. Book & HUES, and modern dance/hyperpop by GVMMY.

Oscar Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest, has a subtitle: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.

In a time of strife, trivial comedy is just what people need. Even better is a play that mocks the well-to-do who are never serious (at least in Wilde’s point of view).

The Encore Theatre, usually a musical theater, makes way for an energetic, well-choreographed, and expertly staged presentation of Wilde’s masterpiece.

After a couple of years helping to promote his friends' electronic dance music nights in Washtenaw County, Evan Oswald started thinking about ways to grow the local EDM scene. An avid dancer and sometimes DJ, Oswald saw an opening for a regular weeknight happening that didn't take away from what others were already doing well. After some trial and error, he settled on Gear Lords, a monthly Wednesday night series focused on live music production where genre is less important than the means of production; Gear Lords performers create electronic music using hardware—sequencers, synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, etc.

"I was talking about live sets. People that would plug a bunch of pieces of equipment into each other—a bunch of wires and knobs and stuff," Oswald says.

While he admittedly didn't know much about how the music was made at first, and many people told him why it wouldn't work, Oswald pushed ahead as promoter and recruited friend and musician Javan Cain (AKA "OMO") as Gear Lords' resident artist. A year and a half later, Gear Lords has hosted around 30 events at a handful of venues around Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, building a regular community of performers and patrons along the way. 

"I really just wanted more going on in my neighborhood, and I didn't want to copy other people or step on other people's toes," Oswald says.

For some reason, the Titanic seemed to have one of its biggest cultural moments in 1997, 85 years after the maritime disaster occurred.

Not only did the stage show Titanic: The Musical make its Broadway debut on April 23, 1997 (just days after the anniversary of the ship’s demise), and then go on to win five Tony Awards, including best musical; but also, in November 1997, James Cameron’s blockbuster film Titanic premiered, broke numerous box office records, and bagged 13 Oscars (including best picture and best director).

Of course, when I told people I’d be seeing a production of Titanic: The Musical at the Power Center, presented by the University of Michigan Department of Musical Theatre from April 17-20, I quickly felt compelled to add, “It’s not about Jack and Rose.”

Gamergate debuted in 2014 when a video-game designer's former boyfriend falsely accused her of having relations with a journalist to score a good review.

But Gamergate exploded when trolls at 4chan used the story as a jumping-off point to start attacking women and minorities over various things—from gaming to politics—with the results spilling out on Twitter, other social-media sites, and message boards, then eventually into mainstream news.

Internet harassment wasn't new when Gamergate hit, but the speed and size of the attacks were at a new scale, offering a playbook for the kind of bad actors who often dominate the web now. Disinformation campaigns are the norm, lies are truth, and weaponized anti-social media is the default mode for many who engage with these websites and platforms.

David Wolinsky has covered Gamergate for 11 years as a freelance journalist and author of The Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations on Gamergate, the Aftermath, and the Quest for a Safer Internet, whose paperback edition comes out in August. Wolinsky is also a dedicated archivist whose Don't Die project features more than 600 interviews with people from the gaming industry, the media, commentators, and more about the state of the internet in the wake of Gamergate.

For a deeper understanding of Gamergate, Wolinsky and Caitlin Dewey's Links I Would GChat You If We Were Friends Substack compiled "The Links x Hivemind Swarmed Reading Guide to Gamergate." This collection of articles will get you up to speed on the pervasive influence of Gamergate ahead of Wolinsky's visit to the Ann Arbor District Library's Downtown branch on Friday, April 25, from 6-7 pm for a panel discussion: "Swarmed: Gaming and the Social Internet’s Impact on Culture and Identity":