The Ann Arbor Works

Though living in California, I carry my unique midwestern place and time with me.

Ann Arbor Michigan in the 1960s and 1970s was a time of much excitement, controversy, innovative music, style and cinema. All of which contributed greatly to my development as an artist and intellectual.

This endless mine of material, filtered through time and a heightened faculty-brat sensibility, crops up in different ways in numerous artworks and projects in diverse media to this day.

The most recent example of this was the "bA2cchus '70" proposal of February 2000.



In August 1993, with a little help from my musical friends and some programmed computer visuals, I performed an autobiographical musical revue back in my Michigan hometown (on the night after my 20th highschool reunion) called @narchy A2rbor.


 

 

 




I have always celebrated Washtenavian musical culture. In Pioneer High School I proposed an Ann Arbor Rock Hall of Fame to decorate the soon-closed Student Smoking Lounge, kicking it off in late 1972 with 4' x 4' painted panels of Iggy Pop and of Deon "Love Makes the World Go Round" Jackson.

Fast-Forward to May 1995, I had the opportunity to collaborate on a four-hour KFJC-FM radio special called "Ann ArBomb! the Musicultural Revolution" showcasing the city's music, and that month gave five radio readings there from my unpublished Ann Arbor-inspired novel FUN .

 

In November 1996, I read a "worried memoir" of the politics of flying saucers in 1960s Ann Arbor on KPFA-FM (Berkeley, CA).

I returned to KFJC with collaborators Ann Arbor and Dan Gunning in May 1998 to produce "Arborview 2000: Southeastern Michigan Music in the 1990s"


From a 1994 CD-ROM prototype built in Macromedia Director "The Ann Arbor Psychedelic Scene of the 1970s", detailing its personages and cultural artifacts.





LA rock guitarist Mark McNally (Stool Pigeons, Liquor Giants) and I assembled an anthology of cover versions of songs by our ol' highschool bud Jimm Juback, in honor of his fortieth birthday in November 1994, recorded by some of the friends with whom he played music in the olden days. Among the many jolly contributors were fiddler Kathy Frey Kerr and her Arlington-area neighbors and friends.


A downloadable audio example of my gang the Windbreakers' 1978 garage-rock shenanigans (in its content foreshadowing my interest in human-machine interface!) was published in early 1995 in Emory University's online publication a lt.journal.


 



This Ann Arbor Works page is dedicated to
my wild and glittery ladylaugh rocknrollstar friend
Carolyn Moon Barber (1957-1996).

 

"We had that Midwesterners' special kind of ability
to IMAGINE and to CONCENTRATE..."
-Iggy Pop on his band the Stooges, PBS History of Rock, 1995.

Some other fine Michigan-cultivated cultural crops:


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