Each year, I look forward to the summer solstice. There’s something magical about the longest day of the year and the maximum amount of daylight that it brings.

But by June 20, 2020, at the age of 44, my outlook on the summer solstice changed unexpectedly. I awoke early that morning to sunlight streaming through my windows and felt excited about the day ahead.

My husband Brian and I were getting ready to visit my in-laws and celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary with the rest of the family. We were just about the leave the house when we heard an expected knock on our door at 8 am.

I opened the door and saw my father on the front porch looking ragged and exhausted. There was an unrecognizable sadness on his face when he said, “L, Your mother passed away last night.”

Those words punched me right in the gut, and it took me a moment to process what he had just said. My father explained that my mother had a heart attack the night before; she had collapsed instantly and then died.

He tried to revive her before the paramedics came, but it was too late. I was surprised that a heart attack had taken my mother’s life at 75 instead of Alzheimer’s. She had been battling that disease for nearly a decade, and I had prepared myself for that outcome gradually.

You don't need to go to Tromsø, Norway to see the aurora borealis—even though the town, more than 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is considered one of the best spots to view the natural phenomenon.

You don't even need to drive your car to the upper parts of Canada to see the northern lights, which occur when energized sun particles smash into the Earth's outer atmosphere and are redirected by the magnetic field toward the planet's poles. (Southern lights exist, too.)

Melissa Kaelin—founder of the Facebook group Michigan Aurora Chasers, co-founder of the International Aurora Summit, and author of Below the 45th Parallel: The Beginner's Guide to Chasing the Aurora in the Great Lakes Region—will tell you how to witness this beautiful sight here in Michigan when she appears at the Ann Arbor District Library's Westgate Branch on Thursday, May 11, 6:30-7:30 pm, for a chat.

Trivia nights in Ann Arbor are not uncommon, but Terry McClymonds' event might have the longest legacy. He started Trivia Night With Terry! in 2011 and has garnered a devoted following for his twice-a-month game, now at Argus Farm Stop’s Packard Cafe.

“It’s like a community,” McClymonds says. “There are students and graduate students, people from that neighborhood and my neighborhood, lots of ages. They’re all so enthusiastic.”

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."