Joe Reilly has been a big hit with the Ann Arbor-area kids for nearly two decades. They know him from his many performances at local schools, libraries, and music workshops, and they love him for his songs celebrating awesome animals, the wonders of nature, and the importance of our connection to the earth and each other.

On Saturday, May 17, he’s throwing a free family concert at The Ark that will pair his big-hearted, interactive show with a celebration of Indigenous culture. Joe Reilly and his band, the Community Gardeners, will perform alongside the All Nations Dancers, a group of Anishinaabe pow-wow dancers from Mt. Pleasant.

The University of Michigan grad's music is gentle and generous in spirit, drawn from traditional folk and blues to encourage sing-alongs, and spiked with the lyrical flow of hip-hop to keep it real. His easy rapport with his tiny audience members leads them to learn while they play, like a Buddhist Mister Rogers whose essence is his greatest lesson.

Sponsored by Ann Arbor Public Schools, The Ark event launches at 11:30 am with a catered lunch provided by local Indigenous vendor Anishinaabe Meejim, followed an hour later by music and dance. Per The Ark, pre-registration is “strongly encouraged.”

I asked Reilly a few questions about "There’s a Place for You in the Circle" featuring Joe Reilly and The Community Gardeners with the All Nations Dancers.

"Well, it's 1969, OK
All across the USA"
—The Stooges, "1969"

John Norman Collins was arrested in Ypsilanti on July 31, 1969, for the murder of Karen Sue Beineman, an 18-year-old student at Eastern Michigan University. It made national news because a serial killer had haunted Washtenaw County since 1967, and eventually Collins was under suspicion for five other Michigan murders (as well as one in California).

But the story was knocked out of the country's consciousness just over a week later when Charles Manson and members of his cult killed seven people on August 8-9, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, the wife of acclaimed director Roman Polanski.

The Manson murders were a cultural touchstone that some think helped usher out the hippy era, making way for a grittier 1970s where the idea of peace and love were swept into the dustbin of history.

This overall portrait of America in transition is the backdrop for director Andrew Templeton's new documentary, 1969: Killers, Freaks, and Radicals, which makes its Michigan debut on Friday, May 16, at Cinetopia Ann Arbor (Michigan Theater and State Theatre, May 15-18). It features new interviews, vintage footage, and re-creations.

The film focuses on Collins' crimes, but unlike John Keyes' 1974 book The Michigan Murders, Templeton analyzes the story through the lens of social upheaval and how the local police force stumbled through its investigation by targeting the "freaks and radicals" when looking for suspects.

What does it truly mean to "become the best version of yourself?" To find meaning, to overcome obstacles?

In Ann Arbor author Omar Hussain's debut novel, A Thousand Natural Shocks, a charismatic figure offers a unique solution: Don't try to overcome trauma, but excise every trace from the conscious mind. To "detonate the past" you must "liberate the future," but only the most devout followers will access this obliterating salvation.

Dash, a reporter intent on forgetting no matter the cost, is determined to rise through the ranks of the faithful. But who will he be when he comes out the other side of his altered history, and how will Dash cope with the revelation of the cult's true purpose?

Under Hussain's pen, Dash's narration is frenetic, rich with ripe anxiety, and fractured by our hero's sleep deprivation, self-medication, and general mind-destroying tactics in his pursuit of erasure. From the very first pages, it's clear how the cult's mantra would resonate with a man in his state: "God is love. God is life. God is a bomb."

I spoke with Hussain about A Thousand Natural Shocks, which he is reading and signing at Literati on May 13, and his work with Defy, the communications company he co-founded.

Every so often, I find myself daydreaming: As the members of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) watch their stock portfolios plummet because of Trump’s tariffs, or as they observe the president ignore decisions by other justices, including those he appointed, they have second thoughts about giving Trump unprecedented power—and they find a way to save us.   

I was disabused of this fantasy when I read Leah Litman’s marvelous new book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes. The University of Michigan law professor, who clerked at the high court, will discuss her book with Barbara McQuade on May 14 at Literati Bookstore.

I loved the book—well, as much as I can love something that convinces me that radical right justices are ruling from their feelings instead of the law. Litman’s style is accessible, and her book is full of pop culture references: American Psycho, Arrested Development, Game of Thrones, Taylor Swift. The story she tells is bleak, but there’s comic relief, mostly in the form of snarky comments of the sort some of us are driven to these days.

Barbara Neri has worked to get her movie, Unlocking Desire, made for several years while dealing with the pandemic, writers’ and actors’ strikes, and her own busy schedule.

And she's still working on it.

"I've more than one thing going on, so it’s not the only iron in the fire,” said Neri, an Ann Arbor creative who has worked in dance, theater, performance art, and education in addition to being a writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. “I try not to think of the amount of time too much, because I think things will happen when they’re going to happen. … But it’s a wild ride. … Some projects take 10 years, so you just have to stay in the moment as much as possible. That’s really what I try to do, and enjoy the journey, enjoy each step.”

Unlocking Desire, which won the Marfa Film Festival's best screenplay award in 2017, tells the story of an institutionalized woman who believes she’s Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams’ tragic heroine from A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche grows convinced that another inmate, Raoul, is Allan Grey, the young man she married as a teenager, and whom she later found in bed with another man.

In Williams’ play, Blanche’s reflexive disgust in the moment leads to Allan’s suicide, but in Unlocking Desire, Raoul is a gay man whose failed suicide attempt causes his wife to institutionalize him.

Robert Harling originally wrote Steel Magnolias as a short story to help cope with the death of his sister in 1985. She had given birth to a son but died from diabetes complications shortly after.

Rather than emphasizing a sad situation, Harling balanced the tale with humor. The short story became a play, a hit movie, and most importantly, a tribute to his sister and the comfort and support of a group of women in a small Louisiana town.

The Ann Arbor Civic Theatre is staging Steel Magnolias May 8-11 at the Arthur Miller Theatre on the North Campus of the University of Michigan.

Lindsey Brown is directing her first play for Civic.

“I was really drawn to the Magnolias because there is really something extraordinary about the communal aspect of the show,” she said. “Why this play now? I really think it’s very poignant in 2025 because there was something we missed from that timeline. At the risk of sounding regressive, not cool, not young, it’s a fact that we have our phones in our faces all the time. I think there is something I really miss about being in a room with people and being in touch with people who care about each other.”

After a couple of years helping to promote his friends' electronic dance music nights in Washtenaw County, Evan Oswald started thinking about ways to grow the local EDM scene. An avid dancer and sometimes DJ, Oswald saw an opening for a regular weeknight happening that didn't take away from what others were already doing well. After some trial and error, he settled on Gear Lords, a monthly Wednesday night series focused on live music production where genre is less important than the means of production; Gear Lords performers create electronic music using hardware—sequencers, synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, etc.

"I was talking about live sets. People that would plug a bunch of pieces of equipment into each other—a bunch of wires and knobs and stuff," Oswald says.

While he admittedly didn't know much about how the music was made at first, and many people told him why it wouldn't work, Oswald pushed ahead as promoter and recruited friend and musician Javan Cain (AKA "OMO") as Gear Lords' resident artist. A year and a half later, Gear Lords has hosted around 30 events at a handful of venues around Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, building a regular community of performers and patrons along the way. 

"I really just wanted more going on in my neighborhood, and I didn't want to copy other people or step on other people's toes," Oswald says.

Gamergate debuted in 2014 when a video-game designer's former boyfriend falsely accused her of having relations with a journalist to score a good review.

But Gamergate exploded when trolls at 4chan used the story as a jumping-off point to start attacking women and minorities over various things—from gaming to politics—with the results spilling out on Twitter, other social-media sites, and message boards, then eventually into mainstream news.

Internet harassment wasn't new when Gamergate hit, but the speed and size of the attacks were at a new scale, offering a playbook for the kind of bad actors who often dominate the web now. Disinformation campaigns are the norm, lies are truth, and weaponized anti-social media is the default mode for many who engage with these websites and platforms.

David Wolinsky has covered Gamergate for 11 years as a freelance journalist and author of The Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations on Gamergate, the Aftermath, and the Quest for a Safer Internet, whose paperback edition comes out in August. Wolinsky is also a dedicated archivist whose Don't Die project features more than 600 interviews with people from the gaming industry, the media, commentators, and more about the state of the internet in the wake of Gamergate.

For a deeper understanding of Gamergate, Wolinsky and Caitlin Dewey's Links I Would GChat You If We Were Friends Substack compiled "The Links x Hivemind Swarmed Reading Guide to Gamergate." This collection of articles will get you up to speed on the pervasive influence of Gamergate ahead of Wolinsky's visit to the Ann Arbor District Library's Downtown branch on Friday, April 25, from 6-7 pm for a panel discussion: "Swarmed: Gaming and the Social Internet’s Impact on Culture and Identity":

When film auteurs Joel and Ethan Coen were writing the script for the 1998 caper comedy The Big Lebowski, they listened to the sort of groovy artists they imagined would be adored by the main character, The Dude: Kenny Rogers and The First Edition, The Eagles, and Creedence Clearwater Revival in particular.

Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski, as played by Jeff Bridges, is a slacker with the same name as a millionaire, and this case of mistaken identity plays out across Los Angeles and a bowling alley. With his long locks and penchant for robes, The Dude looks like the sort of chilled-out guy who knows all the great tunes.

When producer T Bone Burnett was asked to suggest more artists for The Big Lebowski soundtrack, he kept one thing in mind: “Since the Dude was high all the time, he would have to have incredible taste in music," the music archivist told Rolling Stone in 1998.

Rootsy music by Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and Nina Simone sits next to avant-garde songcraft by Meredith Monk, Captain Beefheart, and Moondog, which dances alongside exotica from Yma Sumac and Henry Mancini. Those initial inspirations of Kenny Rogers and The First Edition, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Gipsy Kings' cover of "Hotel California" also appear. Carter Burwell, who did the original soundtrack music, added his noir-inspired compositions to flesh out the ambiance, and there are many more songs in the movie that didn't make the official album by the likes of ZZ Top, Santana, Booker T. & the MGs, Eagles, The Monks, and more.

The Dude Revue is a now-annual sonic tribute to The Big Lebowski, with core members James Bourland, Jordan Otto, and Connor Otto bringing together friends to perform music featured throughout the movie as well as act out scenes. This second edition takes place on Saturday, April 26, at The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor.

I asked guitarist-singer Bourland about how The Dude Revue came together to honor this cult classic.

Best friends don't always have exactly the same interests, but it can be especially fun when what excites one pal complements the thing the other enjoys most.

For Batcat and Al the Ghost, one literally feeds the other: Al loves to cook and Batcat loves to eat. What happens, though, when their favorite hobbies take on a competitive edge?

Batcat: Cooking Contest!, the third volume of Meggie Ramm's early middle-grade graphic novel series, finds the colorful residents of Spooky Island testing their respective skills as part of a local festival.

The book is fun and cute, and it explores Big Emotions.

Ramm will launch Batcat: Cooking Contest! with a signing session at Vault of Midnight in Ann Arbor on Saturday, April 26, 4-6 pm. (They will also be at Sidetrack Books in Royal Oak on April 19 and at Constellation Cat Cafe in Lansing on May 2.)

I spoke with Ramm about the latest book, the origins of Batcat, and what they hope kids and parents will take away from volume three.