I'm Dreaming of a Stockingful of Holiday Stuff

Dash through the snow (dirt?) to these holiday events!

Dash through the snow (dirt?) to these holiday events!

December is upon us and, like the giant rolling boulder in that one Indiana Jones movie, the holidays are rumbling ever closer.

If you need some tips to help you celebrate the season, here's a handy list of festive holiday things going on in the area:

Dickens: An A Capella Carol
Friday, November 27th - Sunday, December 20th
Performance Network Theater - Ann Arbor, MI

National Theatre of Scotland: A Christmas Carol
Thursday, December 17th - Sunday, January 3rd
Power Center for Performing Arts - Ann Arbor, MI

Ypsilanti Community Choir's Annual Holiday Concert
Thursday, December 17th
Washtenaw Community College - Ann Arbor, MI

Gifts of Art presents Holiday Harmonies with Counterpoint
Thursday, December 17th
University Hospitals - Ann Arbor, MI

Home for the Holidays! with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Friday, December 18th - Sunday, December 20th
Detroit Symphony Orchestra - Detroit, MI

The Corner Christmas! (Not Your Family's Christmas Party) at the Corner Brewery
Saturday, December 19th
Arbor Brewing Company Microbrewery - Ypsilanti, MI

Krampus Costume Ball
Saturday, December 19th
The Dreamland Theater - Ypsilanti, MI

Scones and Shopping at the Eyrie
Saturday, December 19th
The Eyrie - Ypsilanti, MI

X'mas Explosion 4 feat. Archimime, Meridians, Scapegoat and The Path Of Exile
Saturday, December 19th
The Maidstone Theater - Ypsilanti, MI

Museum of Natural History Planetarium: Season of Light
December 19th-20th, 27-30th
University of Michigan Museum of Natural History - Ann Arbor, MI

Winter Solstice Celebration
Tuesday, December 22nd
Cultivate Coffee and Taphouse - Ypsilanti, MI

Gifts of Art presents Sweet Sounds of the Season with Wanda Degen
Thursday, December 24th
University Hospitals - Ann Arbor, MI

Black Christmas Feat. The Suicide Machines, The Black Dahlia Murder, BIGWIG, Mustard Plug, Koffin Kats
Saturday, December 26th
The Majestic - Detroit, MI

Mittenfest X
Tuesday, December 29th - Saturday, January 2nd
Bona Sera Cafe - Ypsilanti, MI


Nicole Williams is a Production Librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library and she's been listening to Christmas music since July.


Riot Grrls in Royal Oak: Sleater-Kinney Reunites

PREVIEW MUSIC

Sleater-Kinney comes to Royal Oak this Tuesday

Sleater-Kinney comes to Royal Oak this Tuesday

On Tuesday, December 8th, indie rock band Sleater-Kinney will be coming to the Royal Oak Music Theatre and sending riot grrrls everywhere into ecstatic dance-fits. The band was born in the heart of the Pacific Northwest’s 90’s indie rock scene, but this will be their first tour together since they announced their indefinite hiatus back in June of 2006.

The fact that I, a Sleater-Kinney novice, have heard the eager buzz about this event from all different directions really says something. And mainly that something is, “This is a really big deal.”

For those who, like myself, have little knowledge of the actual band (to the point of mumbling their name in conversation on the off-chance that I am pronouncing it wrong), the post-hiatus antics of the band members themselves might ring more bells:

After the dissolution of Sleater-Kinney, guitarist and vocalist Corin Tucker went on to form the Corin Tucker Band and released the albums 1,000 Years and Kill My Blues.

Drummer Janet Weiss joined the band Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks and produced two albums with them before leaving and joining the short-lived band Wild Flag, alongside Sleater-Kinney guitarist and vocalist Carrie Brownstein.

And, perhaps most recognizable, guitarist and vocalist Carrie Brownstein went on to wear hilarious wigs and vaguely creepy mustaches alongside Fred Armisen on the satirical TV show Portlandia.

That’s right! Feminist bookstore, anyone?

Portlandia: Feminist Bookstore

That fact alone has made me a Sleater-Kinney fan-in-training.

Carrie Brownstein also just published a memoir in October, titled Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl.

Sleater-Kinney reunited in 2014 and released their first studio album in ten years, No Cities to Love, in late January of 2015.


Nicole Williams is a Production Librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library and often asks if anyone wants to see her Master's degree at sporting events.


Sleater-Kinney plays the Royal Oak Music Theatre Tuesday, December 8, doors at 7:30 pm. Tickets are available online from the theater.

Night Vale Book Tour Slays Hundreds

REVIEW WRITTEN WORD

None of the attendees at the Welcome to Night Vale event recall host Dessa Darling or authors Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor devouring any audience members

None of the attendees at the Welcome to Night Vale event recall host Dessa Darling or authors Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor devouring any audience members (CC-by-NC)

It was a dark and stormy night.

Dreary gray clouds dragged themselves across a dreary gray sky. It was cold. It was raining.

Inside there was a shuffle of feet. The scrape of a door. A slight sense of…apprehension? And a sound. A peculiar sound. A murmur of hundreds of voices. A whisper of a thousand turning pages. A low hum. What was that peculiar, whispering, humming sound?

Oh. It was the sound of 500 podcast-obsessed book nerds vibrating in their seats waiting for the Welcome to Night Vale book tour to start.

On October 24th, the city of Ann Arbor opened wide its many sets of alien arms to welcome Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, creators of the popularly creepy and creepily popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast to town. The show is about a fictitious desert town where werewolves, ghosts, and mysterious lights in the night sky are familiar and routine, the weather is music, and the sleepy town’s supernatural goings-on are all calmly broadcast over the radio for everyone to hear.

Hosted by Literati Bookstore, Fink and Cranor came to Ann Arbor for an hour of questions, answers, and a brief reading as part of a nation-wide tour for their newly released novel Welcome to Night Vale.

Included in the price of the ticket were the following essential items:

-One seat (mostly for sitting, but possible for use as a shield against wild beasts, unknown hooded figures, or existential crises)
-One copy of the new book to take home and read to yourself, to your family, or loudly to strangers at the bus stop
-Human contact (optional)

In the auditorium of Emerson School, the authors took their seats on stage and faced the terrifying horde: hundreds of Night Vale fans wearing their most intricate costumes, their most supportive Night Vale T-shirts, screaming their sincerest screams of excitement.

For a fandom that prizes the mysterious, eerie, and monstrous so highly, it was probably the friendliest event I’ve ever been to.

Singer, rapper, and host Dessa Darling provided most of the questions and all of the enthusiasm allowed by law. She opened the event with a simple question for creator Joseph Fink: “If I were to corner your grandmother in an elevator, what would she have to say about Night Vale’s success?”

From there, it was pretty much a delightfully wacky journey from hilarious anecdotes about Welcome to Night Vale's narrator doing podcasts in his underwear to some Super Heavy Serious Metaphysical Stuff.

This was what impressed me most about the event. The questions, the authors' answers, and the brief reading of the book itself all proved the depth of feeling and philosophical thought that the Night Vale universe both creates for and evokes in its listeners.

I don’t know if you knew this, guys, but despite being pretty funny, Welcome to Night Vale is some deep shit.

Sure, the Q & A included questions as simple as “Do you think this book is going to be banned?” (to which Fink replied, “I hope so!”). But there were also questions as complex as asking the authors what it means to have a body, a physical form as a catalyst for all of your interactions with the world, and if our bodies ultimately determine our destinies.

Yeah. See? Deep.

As an occasional Night Vale podcast listener at an event that seemed to consist entirely of fans who had already heard all 80-or-so episodes and devoured half the book in the fifteen minutes between the hardback hitting their palms and the two creators appearing onstage, I realized one thing pretty quickly: the Night Vale fandom is one that makes you want to be pulled down into its gaping maw. The fans at this event cheered at everything. They clapped at everything. They laughed at everything. They told the guy who took to the microphone before the event had even started—the dude who was only up there to tell them the boring rules of safety and not to trample each other on the way out—that they loved him.

They screamed this. Repeatedly. And they meant it.

Between the positively-charged atmosphere of the event, the clearly devoted and downright pleasant fans, and the creators who have put way more thought into their writing than you might imagine, it was enough to make you wonder: Can I please take a bus to this Night Vale place, or do I need to be dropped from a mother ship into their town square?

Based on the brief 3-page reading done by Jeffrey Cranor and the 20 pages I got through while waiting for the show to start, readers of Welcome to Night Vale can expect the usual dark humor, a cast of strange and mysterious characters, an equally mysterious double-mystery, shape-shifters, sentient houses, and a lot of made-up quotes from famous people.

But, as Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “This is the end of the article.”


Nicole Williams is a Production Librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library. She prefers her meat rare and has never been seen at work on a full moon.

Romeo is Bleeding, and You Are Sobbing

REVIEW FILM & VIDEO


Romeo is Bleeding

There are very few films that can leave a person full-on ugly-crying in their seat and contemplating gun violence, poverty, creativity, and Shakespeare simultaneously, but Jason Zeldes’ 2015 documentary Romeo is Bleeding manages it.

The film follows Donté Clark, a young poet and emcee from Richmond, California as he struggles to rise above the violence of his hometown and the endless turf war between North and Central Richmond, two cities with bad blood to spare.

The film can claim a whole host of achievements, but above all, it succeeds in truly masterful storytelling. The story of Donté Clark’s journey from aimless youth to poet and activist and the story of the decades-old turf war inherited by the inhabitants of Central Richmond and North Richmond are seamlessly interwoven. The entire film is given perspective and focus by following the timeline of a third story: the efforts of a group of Richmond’s teen poets, including Donté, as they create and perform a production of Romeo and Juliet—with a twist, of course, because if there’s one thing this film doesn’t offer, it’s predictability. The well-known rivalry of the Montagues and Capulets is replaced with the completely different, but eerily parallel, rivalry of North and Central Richmond.

That’s right. Plot twist.

It’s amazing how well these two ideas come together, as the timeless verse of Shakespeare translates so perfectly to the gritty, almost slam-style poetry that the kids of Richmond perform when they take the stage.

And while the film may take place hundreds of miles from Ann Arbor, there’s a lot of local interest, not only through the film’s homegrown director Zeldes, but through one of the documentary’s main characters: Donté’s teacher and mentor, Molly Raynor, an Ann Arbor local who learned her love of writing and passion for poetry at Ann Arbor’s very own Neutral Zone.

The film is currently on the film festival circuit and recently won its 10th award.


Nicole Williams is a Production Librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library and her cry-face is hideous.

First Fridays Ypsilanti: Bee-decked in Art

REVIEW VISUAL ART


"Apis Mosaic" by Hava Gurevich / "The Honey Line" by Kay Murrell

First Fridays Ypsilanti, the monthly art-walk that invites locals on self-guided art tours through the city, generated buzz this September using bees as a theme for artist inspiration. In honor of Ypsi’s third annual Festival of the Honey Bee, local cafés, restaurants, and galleries became temporary homes to some bee-autiful art pieces, ranging from the truly enormous to the wonderfully weird.

It seems as if no work was too big or too small, and no medium too strange for this art crawl, and the result was a veritable explosion of artwork branching out in unexpected directions from the unified bee theme.

Some artwork hung traditionally in frames, like the pieces on the walls at Beezy’s and Café Ollie, which ranged from collages of paper bees exploring paper leaves to photographs of real bees swarming in their hive.

Some artwork hung from the ceiling by string, like the bizarre (bee-zarre?) mixed-media piece “Lady Bug Lady,” a doll covered in glitter and spots, connected to the theme by a set of sparkly antennae peeking through the doll’s purple hair at the 22 North Art Gallery.

At the Bona Sera Café, a massive, lifelike black-and-gold papier-mâché bee looked like it had just flown in and settled on the brick walls.

And, of course, the art crawl wouldn’t have been complete without some truly solid bee puns, like the whimsical piece titled “Let’s Bee Friends.”

The bee-related installment came down at the end of September. Plan your visit for the next First Friday on November 6th.


Nicole Williams is a Production Librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library and is terrified of bees.