We’ve topped yet another list!

Ann Arbor always seems to lead the pack when it comes to being a Top 10 city—best college town, place to raise a family, city for retirement, most educated city—you name it.

And whether it’s livability, real estate, visitor bureau, college sports, or academic rankings, we love being told that where we live is the best. 

We can add another gold star to the city’s list of accolades: a new report has named Ann Arbor as one of the 10 most arts-vibrant medium-sized cities in the nation.

Don't ever write a year-in-review intro before you've had lunch. See below for reasons:

2022 is Pulp’s sixth year of compiling a delectable list of Ann Arbor District Library staff picks, featuring a smorgasbord of media to review and devour. With an insatiable hunger for books, films, TV shows, podcasts, music, and more, our AADL staffer suggestions will whet your appetite for anything you may have missed in 2022—or from previous years.

Because who can keep current with everything on the media menu these days?

The current media landscape is a 24-hour grocery store with everything everywhere available all at once. It’s decision paralysis at the deli counter, so consider us your Instacart shoppers for things to read, watch, play, listen to, and experience. (Apologies if we missed anything on your shopping list, and we hope our substituting a banana for that frozen pizza is OK.)
 
With more than 36,000 words to ingest in the 2022 Staff Picks, we’ve divided everything into four separate courses so you can enjoy each portion at your leisure:

➥ AADL 2022 Staff Picks: Words
➥ AADL 2022 Staff Picks: Screens
➥ AADL 2022 Staff Picks: Audio
➥ AADL 2022 Staff Picks: Pulp Life

If you feel inspired as you eat up our words, let us know in the comments sections what you sank your teeth into this year. Your tasty tips can be from 2022 or any other era; it just needs to encompass whatever art, culture, or entertainment you enjoyed over the past year.

Now, open up these posts and chow down.

We’re off to make some spaghetti.

➥ AADL 2022 Staff Picks: Homepage
➥ AADL 2022 Staff Picks: Words
➥ AADL 2022 Staff Picks: Screens
➥ AADL 2022 Staff Picks: Audio
 

AADL 2022 STAFF PICS: PULP LIFE
Games, apps, sports, outdoors, and any other kind of hard-to-categorize cultural and life activities:

When the Ann Arbor District Library's 2022 Summer Game came to a close on August 28, one name was top of the leaderboard among the record-breaking 10,114 participants:

Jib Kidder.

That name might be unfamiliar to you if you're not into underground electronic music—or missed the 2013 episode of So You Think You Can Dance that featured a guy getting down to "Windowdipper," Kidder's booty-bass track built from samples culled from the Windows operating system.

But for the past 15 years, the man born Sean Schuster-Craig has explored the more esoteric and experimental side of electronic music with relentless vigor while never losing track of the beat. When listening to his music, I kept thinking of the out-there sounds of Aphex Twin and Autechre if they kept their love of hip-hop in the foreground, but Jib Kidder cuts a singular figure as a creative individual.

Whether as a musician, visual artist, video creator, or in the case of our email conversation below, a writer, Kidder approaches his creative endeavors with a slice-and-dice intellectualism that mixes collage, social theory, and humor. (A recent post on his sometimes inscrutable Instagram account features an image with the words "philosophy is just electronic music but words," which seems an indicator of his approach to the arts.)

Kidder cites Weird Al as an early influence, but I have to think avant-garde art and political movements like the anti-capitalist Dadaists and Situationists are right up there, too, alongside his professed love of 1990s Southern hip-hop and, as he told me in one email, "Lindsey Buckingham and Roy Orbison - huge influences." (Kidder is also a classically trained guitarist in addition to being a sampling savant.)

Astronomy at the Beach (AATB) is an annual two-day event each fall sponsored by the Great Lakes Association of Astronomy Clubs. This year AATB will take place in person after two years as a virtual-only event. It runs September 16 and 17, from 4 pm until midnight each day, at the Island Lake Picnic Grounds inside Island Lake State Recreation Area in Brighton, Michigan.

We asked AATB’s communications volunteer Brian Ottum to give us an overview of the event and what we can expect this year.

Pulp Bits is an occasional round-up of Washtenaw County-related arts and culture stories from various publications and podcasts.

Some highlights include profiles of Ann Arbor's Third Place [MusicFest] (May 25-28), Ypsilanti's ÆPEX Fest (June 1-4), Ypsi's IFFY film festival (June 2-4), a pandemic-inspired exhibit at U-M's Museum of Natural History, a new children's book courtesy of Chelsea's Barn Sanctuary founder, Ann Arbor chalk artist David Zinn discussing his work, and upcoming events at Ann Arbor's Top of the Park festival and next season's UMS schedule.

All that and much more below:

Leaping out of indecision, or into a new love, or over a chicken coop—these were some of the jumps storytellers shared at The Moth’s GrandSLAM championship on May 12 at The Ark in Ann Arbor.

In the first Ann Arbor GrandSLAM since 2019, nine storytellers who were previous winners of the regular StorySLAM events each received five minutes to tell a true personal story, without any notes to guide them. Three groups of judges—naming themselves Quantum, The 229s, and The Bullfrogs—secretly rated each story, not even revealing the scores after a winner was determined. Amir Badghdadchi, a past GrandSLAM winner, was the host and kept the energy high. 

With this year's theme being "leaps," the GrandSLAM invited the audience to listen to "stories of springing into action, clearing hurdles, impulsive decisions or concentrating everything they have on a single bound. In short: busting a move."

On January 1, AFC Ann Arbor announced the first signing for its 2022 women's team: Emily Eitzman, a University of Michigan college student who made her debut in 2019 with the semi-pro soccer club as a 17-year-old student at Saline High School.

But Eitzman never stopped working with AFC Ann Arbor despite her two-year playing gap for the team.

And AFC never stopped working for Ann Arbor and the greater Washtenaw community.

This is the fifth year we've compiled Ann Arbor District Library staff picks, featuring tons of recommendations for books, films, TV shows, video games, websites, apps, and more.

The picks are always an epic compilation of good taste, and last year's post was more than 35,000 words—incinerating phone data plans and overheating computers as the massive page loaded.

In a sincere effort to keep your electronics from catching fire, we've split up the hundreds of selections into four categories:

➥ AADL 2021 Staff Picks: Words
➥ AADL 2021 Staff Picks: Screens
➥ AADL 2021 Staff Picks: Audio
➥ AADL 2021 Staff Picks: Pulp Life

And since we've saved your phones and laptops from the flames, tell us what you enjoyed this past year in the comments section below—doesn't need to be something that came out in 2021, just some kind of art, culture, or entertainment that you experienced over the prior 12 months.

Lisa Barry, the longtime host of WEMU's Art and Soul as well as the local edition of NPR's All Things Considered, passed away unexpectedly on November 30 due to heart complications, according to a blog post by the Ypsilanti radio station's general manager, Molly Motherwell.

She wrote a bit more about Barry today in a post, remembering her as the "heartbeat of WEMU." Mothewell wrote:

Her positive attitude and vibrant personality were her trademark and were well known to all who had the good fortune to cross paths with her. She was a beacon of joy in our community, not only the community of WEMU listeners but the community at large. 

All About Ann Arbor compiled numerous social media posts from Barry's colleagues, friends, and associates paying tribute to her, including this one by her fellow WEMU broadcaster Jessica Webster: