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.”

The characters in ’Pemi Aguda’s new collection of short stories, Ghostroots, set out to protect what they have or find what they want—sometimes at a major cost and often via circumstances beyond the ordinary. 

Aguda, who earned her MFA at the University of Michigan and now lives in Philadelphia, will be in conversation about her new book with author and U-M professor Peter Ho Davies on Friday, September 20, at 6:30 pm at Literati Bookstore.

All of the stories in Ghostroots, which is longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction, are set in Lagos, Nigeria. One story, “The Dusk Market,” covers a woman’s interactions with an evening fair, where “When the sun slinks away, when the light of the day things out—oranges replaced by dark grays and purples, the women come out of nowhere.” Yet, “You don’t see the dusk market if you are not invited to the dusk market, but there are slippery moments, slits, frissons.” This unreliability, this capriciousness, catches the attention of this woman, Salewa, whose “eyes are willing to see more than is otherwise available to her.” 

Salewa catches on to the dusk market, but it seems to elude her attempts to go there. The market becomes her main goal because “forget these men, their syrupy tongues, their slimy hands that can break a heart, a body. It is the market that Salewa wants, the soft light, the pleasant hum of commerce, that warmth of camaraderie she had stumbled unto, into, for a short moment or two.” This market becomes a place to feel at home. 

As Salewa searches, she struggles to locate this event and to be recognized as a human. While continuing her quest, Salewa tries to speak to a person whom she recognizes, but the individual responds:  

Like many versions of the American Dream, the “pack your bags and move to New York City to become a star” variety is profoundly hard to achieve—and Encore Theatre’s world premiere production of the musical New World Comin’ takes those challenges seriously.

Written by Dayle Ann Hunt, and set in the turbulent late '60s and early '70s, New World Comin’ focuses on a trio of young women who decide to leave Moosetown, Minnesota, to compete in a music contest in New York. Mickey (Charly Dannis), the leader of the Carlettes, helps out at her widowed dad’s (David Moan) gas station but feels extra motivated to try because her mom once left her own singing career behind to raise Mickey. Sharon (Kira Whitehead), tired of dealing with her small town’s racism, is the most anxious to leave and start a new chapter; and Bonnie Lou (Gabriella Palminteri) is torn, both because she genuinely likes Moosetown, and because Eddie (Shaun White), her mechanic boyfriend, is getting more serious about their relationship.

Drawing from the era’s catalog of pop songs (sung by Petula Clark, Cass Elliot, Lesley Gore, etc.), New World Comin’ chronicles the women’s complicated, hard journey not just from Moosetown to New York City, but from youth into self-directed adulthood.

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

This edition features indie-gaze by The Nuts, post-everything by Post-Ford, modern classical by Carlos Taboada, remixes of Annie Bacon songs, and electro-pop by Lovepark.

Diane Seuss questions and challenges the utility of poetry in her new book, Modern Poetry. The poems in this collection examine poetry directly and indirectly. One poem, blunt in its title “Against Poetry,” speculates, “Maybe what distinguishes / art from illustration / is its uselessness.” 

Death and love crop up frequently throughout this book, as is fitting for a collection titled Modern Poetry. In the poem “Love Letter,” death is reality—“It’s clear we die a hundred times / before we die”—and love is imperfect: 

When I first read the word denouement
out loud, my ex-husband
laughed at my mispronunciation.
I include it here as an illustration
of the fact that love does not conquer
all. Now when I think
of love, it’s like focusing too hard
on the mechanisms of blinking or breathing.
You can be blinded or suffocated
By that degree of self-consciousness.

Through these poems, Seuss articulates the inadequacy and necessity of our human constructs, both in poetry and in life. The poet asks, answers, and prods the reader to contemplate this as well. 

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

This edition features emo-tinged punk by Geranium Red, yoga music by Golden Feelings, electronica by Evan W, improv and electronics by Panto Collapsar & Cyrus Pireh, and indie-tronica by Ness Lake with DJ FLP.