Glen Young

Music Glen Young Tribal Sounds/Matt Koontz
Glen Young 5/18/09

Music from the heart,” says Matt Koontz is what lightly resonates from his Native American style flutes.
Koontz, originally from East Jordan, lives in Petoskey, where he teaches Spanish at Petoskey High School. And though not himself Native American, he nonetheless has been drawn to the richly mellifluous sound of the modest wood instruments.
“Like everyone else, I played in school,” he says of his adolescent experience in music. But he put down his instrument until about six years ago when he rediscovered an old recorder he wanted to play to his infant son.
Wanting to replace the worn out recorder with a new one, he was instead put off by the inflated price. So he decided to make his own. After reading up on making flutes, and meeting a Native American flute maker while attending a native language conference, he set about making his first flute. With a background in woodworking, he still found that first effort took him nearly 20 hours to complete. He has since cut that production time in half.
“You learn ways to be efficient,” he says of his refined approach. Koontz often cuts multiple pieces at once in order to make several flutes at once.
“I use white cedar which is local and I put it together with red cedar because I like the contrast,” Koontz says of his instruments’ soft bi-colored finish.

Books Glen Young Eye candy... Playboy takes a stroll down memory lane
Glen Young 3/30/09

Okay, so no one is going to buy Playboy’s pictorial for the reading. Nonetheless, astute readers, as well as critics of the culture, will find as many insights into evolving mores in the essays as in the stylized and recognizable photographs.
Oh yes, the photographs. In living color spread across more than 637 pages are “The Complete Centerfolds,” those iconic images from Playboy, starting with Marilyn Monroe in December 1953, concluding with Sasckya Porto, Miss December 2007, and including every lovely lady in between.

Features Glen Young St. Ignace welcomes the U.S. Pond Hockey Championship
Glen Young 2/16/09

Wearing team sweaters sporting names like The Puck Heads and Here For The Beer, more than 500 hockey fans are expected to descend on St Ignace the weekend of February 21 for the third annual U.P. Pond Hockey Championship.
This Michigan Amateur Hockey Association sanctioned event, sponsored by Labatt’s, takes place on Moran Bay, ordinarily home to ferry boats and fishing traffic.
Pond hockey has caught on quickly in St Ignace, where organizers are gearing up for more than 100 teams, nearly double last year’s turn-out. Divisions for women and men in all age groups provide opportunities for any player willing to brave the unpredictable elements.

Books Glen Young This time around, Grady Service might really be in the soup. Chasing suspicions that a long-time government contractor might be illegally mixing tainted salmon eggs in its caviar production, Service has alienated colleagues, irritated friends, and infuriated alleged foreign mobsters.
Service, the laconic Department of Natural Resources conservation officer protagonist of author Joe Heywood’s Woods Cop mystery series, is back in the sixth installment, “Death Roe.” Based on a case Heywood says he isn’t at liberty to further identify, “Death Roe” finds Service investigating allegations that a long-time, highly-paid, state contractor is illegally mixing salmon roe contaminated with the carcinogen Mirex with safe eggs, then selling the mixture to unsuspecting Caribbean cruise ship lines.
“When I write these books,” Heywood says, “I think it’s useful to use situations that will inform.” He says his books are regularly “based largely on real cases. Virtually nothing is invented in these books.”
Still recovering from the murders of his girlfriend and aspiring conservation officer Maridly Nantz, and his son Walter, Service again uses work both as focus and as distraction.
Navigating ever-changing territory, Service finds himself reluctantly coordinating with agents from IRS, FDA, FBI, as well as fisheries personnel from New York. He is working further outside the boundaries of his DNR confines than ever before.

Books Glen Young Native Michigander Jim Harrison is a man of large appetites and larger passions.
The writer -- whose new novel “The English Major,” a Kerouac-like road novel with Whitman-like sensibilities, is garnering widespread praise -- is also noted for his outsized ego. And though ego can insulate against public pressures, it is little help against personal anguish.
So when 70 year-old Harrison finished last year’s “Returning To Earth,” compelled in part by the death of his older brother John, he needed a reprieve. “After I finished ‘Returning to Earth,’ which is a tale of considerable melancholy, I was trying to figure out how to levitate my spirits,” he says over the phone from his home outside Livingston, Montana, inhaling audibly on an American Spirit cigarette.
“I began (writing the ‘English Major’) four days after finishing ‘Returning to Earth.’ I usually wait months.”

Books Glen Young Summertime is prime time to enjoy Michigan’s great outdoors. And whether on land or on water, the number of folks who take to Michigan’s wilds explodes in the summer months. John Knott of the University of Michigan has put together a successful group of writers and photographers to explore this call of Michigan’s wild in the new book “Michigan: Our Water, Our Land, Our Heritage.”
Published by the University of Michigan Press, in conjunction with the Nature Conservancy, the book is built around a solid collection of essays about Michigan’s many treasures. Several notable local authors are represented, including Stephanie Mills, Anne-Marie Oomen, Jerry Dennis, and Jack Driscoll.

Books Glen Young Much of what happened that summer day in 1968 is known. Six members of a prominent Detroit area family were gunned down in their summer cottage near Good Hart, north of Harbor Springs. No credible witnesses came forward to aid police. The community and the nation were stunned. These facts and a few others are prolifically documented.
What is not known is who committed the murders, or why. The uncertainty has haunted family members, vexed law enforcement, and intrigued the curious for 40 years.
Several authors are among those transfixed by the unsolved murders of the Richard Robison family at their Summerset cottage in the rustic Blisswood resort community. Traverse City area author Mardi Link has waded through what is known, what is suspected, and what is still a mystery for her new book “When Evil Came to Good Hart.”
Published by the University of Michigan Press, Link’s book is the first non-fiction examination of the family, the crime, and the suspects who were investigated by police both in the aftermath of the murders, and for years afterwards.

Art Glen Young Mackinac Island has long been a haven for artists. Photographers and painters have regularly found the Island’s rocky outlines inspiration for intense study. The surrounding waters and green spaces have lured artists since the 17th century.
So the development of the Mackinac Seven, a loose association of painters who depict the changing views of the historic island, is not hard to understand. Marta Olson, who has lived part of her year on Mackinac Island since the 1960s, describes the Mackinac Seven as a “group of friends who just started painting together and hanging out together.”

Books Glen Young Author Joe Heywood genuinely likes conservation officer Grady Service.
Heywood, a retired pharmaceutical executive, believes Service, the curmudgeonly Upper Peninsula “woods cop,” has a big heart, a sharp mind, and a knack for finding the bad guys.
Service is the fictional creation of Heywood, and the two have returned for a fifth installment of the “Woods Cop” mystery series published by The Lyons Press.
Heywood has pressed Service back into active duty in “Strike Dog,” the latest adventure in the series that began in 2001 with “Ice Hunter.”
A 1961 graduate of Rudyard High School, Heywood now lives in Portage, near Kalamazoo. But every year he returns to the U.P., riding alongside conservation officers and scouting new locations and new ideas. More than anything, however, Heywood finds a greater appreciation for the real-life woods cops.

Books Glen Young Way out East, in Cottekill, New York, author Steve Hamilton is likely sitting down, even tonight, to begin his new novel.
Hamilton, a Michigan native who has called New York’s Catskills Mountain region home since his 1983 graduation from U of M, is well known to Michigan mystery fans. Since the early success of 1998’s “A Cold Day in Paradise,” Hamilton has penned six other novels starring retired Detroit policeman Alex McKnight. But his most recent success finds Hamilton leaving McKnight and Paradise behind for his adopted home of New York.
“Night Work” marks a breakout for Hamilton; a first commercial departure from his tried and tested fictional series. This time, instead of the slushy confines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in winter, Hamilton’s story takes place in the Hudson River valley region of New York, near his own home. It’s a murder mystery in which the main character struggles both to exonerate himself and catch the killer.

Music Glen Young Rock and roll has long been implicated as a cause of the generation gap. Fathers, the argument goes, champion the Rolling Stones and the like, while sons bang their heads to hip-hop, Saliva or The Killers.
Scott and Dave Bachelor of Petoskey have instead used the thumping sounds of rock rhythms to forge a stronger father-son relationship. Scott plays drums and Dave sings lead vocals for the Petoskey-area band Nancy’s Fury, more popularly known as Footloose.
Appearing regularly at Petoskey’s Papa Lou’s, Northern Lights Recreation Center, and the Stampede in Gaylord, Nancy’s Fury has won a regular following, thanks in part to Scott’s cohesive drumming and Dave’s rangy singing.

Books Glen Young Writer Liesel Litzenburger is enjoying a success little witnessed in her business.
Litzenburger, a newly-40 blonde who grew up in Harbor Springs and now calls the Grand Rapids area home, can credit some of her good fortune to nine-year-old Annie Child.
Annie, the diminutive heroine of Litzenburger’s new collection of linked stories Now You Love Me, has been rediscovered. First published in 2001 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, Now You Love Me has become not only Litzenburger’s first book but also her second, thanks to its recent re-publication by new publisher Shaye Areheart.

Features Glen Young Tim Leeper has a secret, but he’s willing to share.
Leeper, who spends his summer hawking t-shirts, rubber tomahawks, and postcards at Mackinac Island’s Big Store, believes Mackinac Island’s summers are bested by its winters, and what Leeper likes best about Mackinac Island’s winters is the nordic skiing.