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

This edition features the many guises of rock from Mother Night, Younger Dryas, and Cracked & Hooked, drum 'n' bass by Aikanã, and emo-indie chiptunes from the Battle of the Bits forum.

Chien-an Yuan is an evangelist.

Not the type who's selling you hope in exchange for a monthly tithe but the kind who just wants you to believe—in art and its healing powers; in music and its succor; in poetry and life-giving energy.

The Ann Arbor musician-photographer-curator works not just in words but in deeds—and sometimes, the deeds are words, carefully arranged and expertly recited as is the case with The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry.

The project is a collaboration between Yuan's 1473 record label, Michigan poets, and Fifth Avenue Studios, the recordings division of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL). 

Named after two high school teachers who inspired Yuan, The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry is a collection of recited poems, documented at Fifth Avenue Studios, with covers created by local artists for each chapter in the series. (Shannon Rae Daniels' watercolors will adorn the first 10 sessions.) All the recordings can be listened to and downloaded free of charge whether or not you have a library card.

The anthology's construction is ongoing—you can listen to Ann Arbor poets Kyunghee Kim and Zilka Joseph so far—but there's an official launch for the project on Monday, December 9, at 6 pm at AADL's Downtown location. Kim will be joined by upcoming Coolidge-Wagner writers Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe, Chace Morris, and Emily Nick Howard, along with Yuan introducing the poets and talking about the project. (Joseph will be at a future Coolidge-Wagner event.)

I sent Yuan some queries about The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry, and his answers were so passionate, revealing, and thorough that they stand alone without my framing questions.

Below is Yuan's testament to the power of art and a brief history of The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry:

Amanda Krugliak remembers the first time she saw the work of artist Ericka Lopez.

“I was walking a gallery in Chinatown, in L.A., and I saw this work. It just had something undeniable about it,” said Krugliak, curator for the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities Gallery, which is hosting Lopez's touch exhibit. “There’s something incredibly powerful immediately about it. It felt like the kind of work that doesn’t have a motive. There’s no other reason for the work, but the immediate human connection, or something material we respond to. There are a lot of contemporary artists who try to achieve this, and here was this artist that just felt so natural.”

Lopez's tactile textiles and colorful ceramics bristle with textures. She also happens to be blind. After finding out about Lopez’s story, Krugliak made inquiries about bringing the show to Ann Arbor.

Jim Ottaviani has spent much of his career putting words into the mouths of physics geniuses. Sure, he also used the scientists' own words when penning scripts for graphic novels about Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Richard Feynman since Ottaviani's books are always deeply researched.

But for Last Summer, a new play by Ottaviani, he had to imagine the words exchanged during a summer 1939 private gathering at U-M physics professor Samuel Goudsmit's home following a physics symposium in Ann Arbor.

The Summer Symposia had been happening in Ann Arbor since the late 1920s, bringing together the greatest physicists to share ideas. Nobel laureates and nuclear pioneers Enrico Fermi and Werner Heisenberg were at Goudsmit's place that summer 1939 evening, with the former trying to convince the latter not to go back to his native Germany and help the Nazis with their nuclear program. It didn't work: Fermi went on to work for the Allies and Heisenberg returned to his homeland.

Their discussion is the basis for the 20-minute Last Summer, which will be staged by the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre (A2CT) on December 7 and 11 at the Downtown location of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL).

What happens when the goal you've spent an eternity working toward is finally within your reach, but then you encounter something you want even more?

And what if forsaking your long-sought goal also came with an impossible price?

In At the End of the River Styx, Zan needs only one more soul to fulfill his obligation to the terrifying Ferryman of delivering 500 souls in 500 years, but the latest soul to walk through his door is unusual. First, this boy, Bastian, does not seem to be entirely dead; and what's more, he sees something in Zan beyond a grim harbinger of doom. 

"At the End of the River Styx is a book about grief and about love, about two boys finding themselves at the edge of Death," says Ann Arbor author Michelle Kulwicki about her debut young adult novel. "I think it's really about conquering grief and learning to love again, learning to love yourself, learning to love other people around you."

I spoke with Kulwicki about At the End of the River Styx and other creative pursuits.

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

This edition features lo-fi chill by Whimsical Beats, hyperpop from The Cicada, rampant eclecticism via Isolation Sundaze, modular synths by Luminous Fridge, and political grunge by History History.

Despite life’s obstacles, Jo Serrapere sees the beauty in herself and the world around her.

The Dearborn singer-songwriter shares that hopeful mindset on her latest double album, The Beautiful Ones, Volume I and Volume II.

“The whole record is about beauty and about seeing beauty through light and dark and the good times and the bad times. It’s most fulfilling to write from a personal [perspective] and try to help people,” said Serrapere, who’s a clinical psychologist and U-M alumna.

“It’s [also] coming to that realization of where I want my music to go. I could just sing in my bedroom and that would be fine … but the whole point is to try to touch other people in the process.”

Serrapere includes 22 tracks that explore her emotional struggles and the growth she’s experienced along the way. Those personal reflections also prompted her to take a more autobiographical approach to songwriting for the album.

“I joke that I’m at an age where I’m going to write my autobiography,” Serrapere said. “I wanted a personal record and all these songs fit in that genre.”

Ann Arbor has celebrated its 200th anniversary throughout 2024 with numerous citywide events and initiatives. But a recent exhibit drills down to the first 50 years of the town's formation.

The Museum on Main is a two-story yellow-beige house just north of downtown, at the five-point intersection where Main and Kingsley Streets meet with the end of one-way Beakes Street.

The museum is hosting Ann Arbor's Story: The First 50 Years, a revealing look at the beginnings of European settlement in the area, through its first half-century of officially existing as a village, long before it became a city. Photographs, maps, and original documents provide a revealing and humanizing view of a past, which can seem so foreign to 21st-century America, making the exhibit worth the 15 minutes or so most people will take to go through it.

The Museum on Main's website explains the people, places, and things that comprise the exhibition:

Sequels aren’t exactly rare or novel. As a creative enterprise, they’re safer than a wholly original property because they thread a narrative needle, providing readers/viewers with something both familiar and unknown—a new story featuring characters and a world we already “get,” no exposition necessary.

More recently, of course, we’ve witnessed the rise of the prequel (Wicked, anyone? The Joker? Cruella?), which offers the same artistic advantages but projects backward in time rather than forward.

With all this in mind, allow me pause to sing the praises of prolific, Michigan-native playwright Joseph Zettelmaier (now based in Florida) for breathing new air into an old form with his latest play, The Men of Sherwood, now having its world premiere via Penny Seats Theatre Company through December 8.

While most sequels lean in hard on a story’s central character, depending on their allure to draw fans back, Zettelmaier instead kills off a beloved, charismatic hero and asks: What happens to a story’s minor characters, the followers, when the nucleus that long held them together perishes? Can a body, without its beating heart, function? (And even if it can, should it?)

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

This edition features hard rock from Black Note Graffiti, worldly electronica via KUZbeats, psych-funk by Davis Caruso, modern classical by Alexis C. Lamb & Andy P. Smith, and folk-pop by Bekka Madeleine.