Friday Five is where we celebrate new and recent music by Washtenaw County artists.

This week we start in the club, head down some dark country lanes, then head back to the dancefloor with new music by Tadd Mullinix's JTC, The Kelseys, Diesel Marine, Lily Milo, and DJ FLP. 
 

Someone recently uploaded Nirvana's April 10, 1990, show at The Blind Pig to YouTube for the umpteenth time with the bad audio and wonky video.

Why bother when there's the version above, which has been online since 2012 and it sounds pretty good? It also boasts the following: "New Custom 2-Camera Mix/Deshaked with synced Audio (Aud1 JWB remaster)."

"Deshaked" is a shaky but accurate technical term, and for that alone, I'm entering this version of the video onto the record as the definitive edition of this bootleg.

Tracklist:

For 12 years, going through UMMA's front entrance was the second thing you did when you arrived at the museum. The first thing was to swing on Shang, the giant metal sculpture by Mark di Suvero.  But a private collector bought the piece and it was deinstalled in early October. UMMA is encouraging folks to share photos of themselves on the swing with the hashtag #GoodbyeShang. Click here to read a great letter from an anonymous visitor who left a laminated letter attached to Shang with magnets; let's hope your experience on the swing has half as revelatory as it was for this fan.

Since the pandemic forced WCBN's DJs out of the studio, the station has run a mix of previously aired shows and, as time has progressed, gradually added programs that the hosts record at home. Shelley Salant, who helms The Local Music Show, is one of those folks who has provided home-recorded shows the past few months, but she's also had some friends DJ from their pads. A few weeks ago, Ypsilanti's Isaac Levine—he of numerous bands and the Fish People Birds label—programmed a setlist dubbed "Summer Is Over and I Feel It" for The Local Music Show, and it's an excellent cross section of indie rock, hip-hop, electronica, and general weirdness from Washtenaw County artists.

Not every Local Music Show is posted to the archival Soundcloud page immediately, so the only other pandemic-era program on there right now is from July 22. But it's a prime example on how wide open The Local Music Show is to styles: the show features Dr. Pete Larson—a U-M epidemiologist by day; a nyatiti player and Dagoretti Records chief at night—along with Dr. Tiffany Ng's carillon concert in solidarity with Black Lives Matters.

I've embedded these two Local Music Shows below, but there's a weath of great shows going back years over on the Soundcloud.

The easy part of compiling a book that celebrates a comic strip’s silver anniversary is, well, you’ve got lots of options.

“I’ll get reviews and comments that say, ‘Not a clunker in the bunch!’—but, you know, I had 10,000 to choose from,” said Ann Arbor-based cartoon artist Dave Coverly, whose book Speed Bump: A 25th Anniversary Collection debuted in September. “If anyone wants to visit my house, you could see a big plastic tub of cartoons that are terrible.” 

Perhaps that’s inevitable when your job’s required you to hatch and execute seven new ideas every week throughout two and a half decades. “You can’t wait for the muse to strike when you’re on deadline,” Coverly noted.

But having the National Cartoonists Society award your work with Best in Newspaper Panels (’95, ’03, ’14) in addition to its highest honor, the Reuben Award (’09), might suggest that you’re getting it right far more often than not.

And for Coverly, one of the most appealing things about a single-panel cartoon is its unfettered flexibility.

“I do a lot of cartoons that use aliens and animals, but they’re always really about people and the things we all have in common,” said Coverly. “My daughter, who’s a painter, had a professor who told her, ‘Don’t ask yourself what you’re going to paint. Ask yourself why you’re going to paint it.’ And I love that quote because I’m someone who—I don’t like jokes for the sake of jokes. … I’d rather try for something that’s driven by an idea. Something that’s more subtle.”

Friday Five is where we celebrate new and recent music by Washtenaw County artists. This week we feature Fred Thomas, Isaac Levine, Briaa Dupree, Jib Kidder, and Aye Hawk. 

WSG Gallery's transformation from a Main Street attraction to an online art house continues apace—with some timely dips into physical spaces, too.

The collective created a small pop-up gallery at 401 N. Ann Arbor St. in Saline (Sept. 25- Oct. 2), which was a warm-up to taking over the second floor of the Ann Arbor Art Center from Oct. 6- Dec. 31. This a multi-artist show and the featured works will rotate at Thanksgiving.

But WSG's two most recent virtual exhibitions focus on single artists.

Painter Sara Adlerstein's Not for Sale: My Private Collection exhibition officially ran Aug. 18 to Sept. 28, but WSG is doing the smart thing and keeping all its virtual exhibitions online permanently. The current exhibition is sculptor Francesc Burgos' Recent Work (Sept. 29 to Nov. 7).

Back in April or so, I got overwhelmed with the number of music livestreams popping up on my radar. Anybody with an instrument and a cell phone was broadcasting from their bedroom stages, and I pretty much shut down on trying to follow livestreams. But as the pandemic wore on and venues figured out how to safely present music, I started to peek at livestreams every now and again because curation helped narrow down the list of things I might want to watch rather than me remaining forever frozen by decision paralysis.

Ann Arbor has a small but vibrant jazz scene thanks to the University of Michigan's robust music school, so I thought it was time to give a nod to that genre's artists and the host venues whose livestreams have caught my eye. (In many of these cases, you can tip the artists for the shows you've just watched, too.)

If you really want to keep up on the neverending supply of improvised music livestreams, check out the Facebook group LiftingUpA2Jazz, which is a comprehensive source for events in Washtenaw County.

A collection of recent-ish music videos from Washtenaw County artists Dre Dav, The Kelseys, Towner, Hi Potent C & Dyelow, and DruziBaby734.

The natural world and the built environment sometimes seem so enmeshed that the borders between them blur. We walk into the fluorescent lighting of a store and then back out into the day’s weather. We go to the beach and some sand trails, then back inside vehicles and homes. 

Poet Alison Swan explores this complexity in the lives that we live both with nature and in our manmade world in her new collection, A Fine Canopy (Wayne State University Press). One poem called “Lake Effect” considers how the environment coexists and contends with human life: 

[…] We don’t ask,

where’s the sea? We can walk to it,

 

and to acres of scrub, pasture, crop,

asphalt draining to it, and the reactor

it cools. 

Signs of human change to the environment appear to be inescapable. 

Yet, the splendor of the natural world heartily persists in Swan’s poems, and many lines admire this place where we reside, as the poem “Aubade” declares near the end of the collection:

It is good to […] 

[…] 

look out into 

the lemon light of morning and

call it beautiful […]

Swan will read and be in conversation with poet and teaching artist Holly Wren Spaulding in a virtual event Tuesday, October 6, at 7 pm through Literati Bookstore. I interviewed Swan, a teacher at Western Michigan University, about ecopoetry, the Bentley Historical Library, and what she's reading.