In his State of the City address Jan. 30, Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero said the city was working with an Indiana manufacturer to put micro-turbines on city buildings as the first in “a series of small-scale green energy technologies” to be piloted here.

People with no filial relation felt the same way. Nina Simone recast the Dylan song as a fragile ballad, dusted with harp and strings, suspended over a gritty gospel groove. She sealed the steal by changing Dylan’s third-person “she” to “I” in the last verse.

A coalition of Michigan State University students, frustrated with the university’s newly minted energy transition plan, announced Friday it will submit an alternative plan to MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon by Feb. 28.

Many of the pictures, on display at Lansing Art Gallery through February, record Miller’s solo backcountry trips to the shores of Lake Superior in the off-season. With no human in sight, sheets of ice build into massive crags, push colorful beach rocks into black walls and scour the casual footprints of summer to a blank slate of bedrock.

Usually, it’s a bad sign when a house makes noise, but the modest two-story home at 530 Pacific Ave. in south Lansing can be forgiven for squealing. It’s just had a spiffy three-week makeover, courtesy of the Ingham County Land Bank, that would do Oprah proud.

As assistant curator for painting and sculpture at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, Gass curated a New Work series that juggled politically charged images (Luc Tuyman’s stark Sept. 11 paintings) with grand aesthetic epiphanies (Allyson Schotz’s room-filling webs of prismatic beads) and wild installations (Nikka Rothenburg’s bizarre contorting-body videos).

Sunday evening at 6, Gerardo Ascheri hustled a lingering piano student out of the living room of his Lansing home to answer a reporter’s knock at the front door. Ascheri’s partner of 18 years, Doak Bloss, threw some vegetables in a Ziploc bag and put dinner prep on hold.

If we had known we’d be banging our heads into the wall with Beethoven by night’s end, we may not have embarked on the journey with such good cheer, but maestro Timothy Muffitt has a knack for avoiding cliché overtures and respectfully opening your ears. It was a pleasure to wake up and smell “Rounds for String Orchestra,” an intricate, caffeinated romp by American composer David Diamond.

So you welcomed Baby New Year with a toast and a cheer, did you? Think again, deluded one. Throw that devil spawn back on the street and call Old Man 2011 for one more bow. It’s time for the City Pulse/WLNS annual Top of the Town Awards, celebrating the best of the past year.

There comes a time when the voice deepens, strange new emotions stir and hair grows in interesting places. Adolescence? No — there’s something even hairier, deeper and more emotional than that. Nothing surges through a culture more powerfully than a major change in music.