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

This edition features psychedelic pop by George Mashour and psych-rap with side-project VaporDaze, jazz by Rick Roe, indie pop by Toadally, trippy improvisations by Cats Jams, and noise rock by Horse Bomb.

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

This edition features emo-punk by The Great Homesickness, experimental jazz by Marc Hannaford, electronica by Catspangold, cloud rap by Nem?, and hip-hop by Gostbustaz.

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

This edition features hyperpop by GVMMY, hip-hop by Dastardly Kids, country by Kandy Fredrick, electronica by Kaito Ian, and jazz by Eric Nachtrab.

It’s been a nerve-wracking year.

The country is divided. Americans say they’re pessimistic about the future, even those who voted for a change in the White House.

Could a little girl be just what we need to make us more optimistic about our future and see that we always have tomorrow?

The Encore Theatre seems to think so and is offering the perfect Christmas musical that just might provide a little lift in our spirits, Annie.  Director Daniel Cooney draws together an excellent cast, combining seasoned stage veterans to young performers giving seasoned performances.

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

This all-singles edition features indie rock from The Nuts, a remixed Michael Skib sci-fi excursion, electronic folk-pop by Rabbitology, techno by Zagc, and fuzz rock from Mazinga.

In April 2023, Michelle Hinojosa presented her thesis exhibition at the University of Michigan's Stamps Gallery. The exhibition, Lime Green Is the Taco Stand, was inaugurated with a poetry event, "Poetry by the Light of the Quilts," where Hinojosa read a series of poems on immigration and the collective feeling of loss that comes with this experience.

Hinojosa returns to Stamps a year later with a new creation, Logcabins. This time, we encounter her work outside the gallery as her log cabin quilts wrap the two columns of the gallery building.

The two colorful quilted columns help the gallery signal its existence amidst the dreary concrete landscape. Hinojosa’s striking quilts use color combinations that play with shades of yellow, green, pink, blue, and orange to create patterns of tesselations. Developed around the unit of a pink square, the blues and yellows of the respective quilts can be seen as stepped borders surrounding the squares to make a larger square motif. However, on closer inspection, a corner of the motif breaks away from this neat enclosure to connect it to the other blocks on the quilt, forming a sense of continuity unique to tessellated patterns.

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

This edition features the many guises of rock from Mother Night, Younger Dryas, and Cracked & Hooked, drum 'n' bass by Aikanã, and emo-indie chiptunes from the Battle of the Bits forum.

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

This edition features lo-fi chill by Whimsical Beats, hyperpop from The Cicada, rampant eclecticism via Isolation Sundaze, modular synths by Luminous Fridge, and political grunge by History History.

Ann Arbor has celebrated its 200th anniversary throughout 2024 with numerous citywide events and initiatives. But a recent exhibit drills down to the first 50 years of the town's formation.

The Museum on Main is a two-story yellow-beige house just north of downtown, at the five-point intersection where Main and Kingsley Streets meet with the end of one-way Beakes Street.

The museum is hosting Ann Arbor's Story: The First 50 Years, a revealing look at the beginnings of European settlement in the area, through its first half-century of officially existing as a village, long before it became a city. Photographs, maps, and original documents provide a revealing and humanizing view of a past, which can seem so foreign to 21st-century America, making the exhibit worth the 15 minutes or so most people will take to go through it.

The Museum on Main's website explains the people, places, and things that comprise the exhibition:

Sequels aren’t exactly rare or novel. As a creative enterprise, they’re safer than a wholly original property because they thread a narrative needle, providing readers/viewers with something both familiar and unknown—a new story featuring characters and a world we already “get,” no exposition necessary.

More recently, of course, we’ve witnessed the rise of the prequel (Wicked, anyone? The Joker? Cruella?), which offers the same artistic advantages but projects backward in time rather than forward.

With all this in mind, allow me pause to sing the praises of prolific, Michigan-native playwright Joseph Zettelmaier (now based in Florida) for breathing new air into an old form with his latest play, The Men of Sherwood, now having its world premiere via Penny Seats Theatre Company through December 8.

While most sequels lean in hard on a story’s central character, depending on their allure to draw fans back, Zettelmaier instead kills off a beloved, charismatic hero and asks: What happens to a story’s minor characters, the followers, when the nucleus that long held them together perishes? Can a body, without its beating heart, function? (And even if it can, should it?)