In one ear
MAJOR MADNESS! While novelty swing band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy may have blasted its song "Go Daddy-O" during the abysmal Super Bowl half-time show – saved only by the sight of Stevie Wonder hoofing with Savion Glover – Detroit’s saviors of "the Swerve," the Atomic Fireballs have scored a coup much richer in pop culture…
Gloria
If There’s Something about Mary managed to put a crooked smile on every face, something about Gloria is going to replace that smile with a grimace. Not because director, cast and crew haven’t put any effort into it, but – on the contrary – because the effort is too visible, and the attempt to update…
What the hell is he running for?
Detroit’s monopoly newspaper consortium staged an exciting journalistic coup last Sunday, when it led the paper with the skull-popping news that Geoffrey Nels Fieger had "decided" to run for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate next year. Not only that, but the strength of their local talent is so deep one of their Washington…
The Inheritors
The setting for The Inheritors is rural Austria in the 1930s, though it could just as well be the mid-19th century or even earlier. In this benighted corner of the world, medieval conditions prevail. Landowners have absolute power over their dominions; farmers are petty tyrants and the peasants are a nominal notch above the livestock…
Netropolis
Despite the success of Apple Computer’s cuddly new iMac and its recent "Think different" ad campaign, today’s envelope-pushing computer radicals are quietly breaking the rules with hand-built, home-brewed Windows PCs. That’s right, Windows PCs. Long derided by Apple Macintosh loyalists as uncreative and corporate, the Windows PC is making an unexpectedly subversive showing as the…
Romancing the stone
The rise of multiculturalism in the American polity extends beyond the sacrosanct black-white split. Story of the Stone, a handsome albeit vacuous book, appears expressly designed to capitalize on an Asian-American audience caught between the realities of the New World and a faux nostalgia for the old country, a couple of generations removed. Stone is…
Pitch’d
ONE X’D ’TIL SPRING; GATHERING TO START AT MOTOR Motor co-owner and area soundman Carlos Oxholm has decided to close his recently-acquired One X nightclub on Michigan Avenue for renovations, possibly until May 1. The move comes as a sudden about-face from Oxholm’s original business-as-usual approach, but, as he explained, the club’s, uh, raw B-movie…
Varsity Blues
When the title for Varsity Blues first appears onscreen, the letters are in silhouette, and a red, white and blue flag ripples in the background. But the flag turns out not to be American, but the lone star emblem of the state of Texas. That’s just the first of many heavy-handed allusions to what screenwriter…
Food Stuff
COOKIE CRAZE It’s Girl Scout Cookie time again, and many parents may be echoing the words of stay-at-home Detroit dad Eric Halbeisen: "I got so I never wanted to hear another word about Tra-La-La’s or Do-Si-Do’s or Yippie-Ki-Yi-Yay’s." The girls themselves, or grown-up girls, are less jaded. Detroiter Laurie Townsend has fond memories of the…
Tunes from the leather couch
Bill "Smog" Callahan’s records have always been an analyst’s feast, full of deep-seated guilt for being human and the inevitable psychosexual frustration which follows. It’s no wonder he turns away from audiences when he performs; it isn’t easy to look people in the face when you’re telling your darkest secrets, even if they come in…
Coyote prowling
It seems the verdict on the ’60s is still out. At one extreme are those who look back in horror at an era of shameless excess to which every manner of social malady currently plaguing the country can be traced. Then there are those who wax nostalgic for a time when every convention was questioned;…
Electric Poems
An innocent and pleasantly amateurish release, Electric Poems is wistfully simple, as befits a Le Grand Magistery recording. Organ, flute, harpsichord, timpani and mellotron, plus the usual drums, bass and guitar, are woven into effortless, minimal folkpopsongs. Vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Kendall Jane Meade must have been in a melancholy, wishful mood when she crafted…
Carved in memory
In a 1993 interview, playwright August Wilson said he envisioned a participatory ending to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Piano Lesson. As Berniece, the play’s central female character, sits down at the family piano and belts out the name of her ancestors in gospel cadence, audience members would join in with names of their own forebears.…
She’s All That
During a suitably magical moment in their unconventional romance, Laney Boggs (Rachael Leigh Cook) tells Zack Siler (Freddie Prinze Jr.) that she feels like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, but without all the hooker stuff. The line is delivered without a whiff of irony or cynicism, and it proves that Cinderella is not just alive…
The swamped thing
Whenever I ask my friend how he is, he says he’s "swamped." It isn’t just him. A lot of people use the word "swamped." It is no longer sufficient to be fine. You must be swamped, and you must learn to say the word with weary and reluctant pride. In an era of conspicuous production…
Transparent smartassery?
It’s only natural that pianist-composer Carla Bley should arrive at the point of devising Fancy Chamber Music, since her avant-garde bite of yore has long since evolved into a droll elegance. What’s remained consistent throughout her career is her ability to take tongue-in-cheek pastiche – she was "postmodern" long before the term achieved wide currency…
Up against the oil
ON THE FORCADOS RIVER, NIGERIA At first, the other boat was nothing more than a gray hump on the wide, green horizon. But as it drew closer, we could see that the men aboard were carrying automatic rifles. Oboko Bello leaned toward the ear of the man piloting our boat and whispered something beneath the…
Summer of love
Beta Band could be a betta band. Although the Scottish psychedelic-folk quartet richly deserves its status as hotly tipped comer, listening to The Three EPs, Beta Band’s first stateside release, you can’t help but wish it’d stop noodling around with the equipment so much, muscle under and write some songs, darn it. Of course, much…
Life’s a parade
Tropical nectar mixes with carbon monoxide outside Miami International Airport. Salsa blares like a tribal antidote for concrete. Ferretti and I gawk with fellow tourists from Port-au-Prince and Brasília and Jerusalem. The shuttle to South Beach arrives. The driver either has to pee or confess. He winces. Ferretti sits in back and plays host to…
Sicking together
Signs of fomenting discontent among the City of Detroit’s unionized employees erupted last week when more than 100 Water and Sewerage Department employees participated in a sick-out. Nearly 16,000 unionized city workers have been without a contract since last summer. (The Detroit Police Command Officers Association is the only union to reach a contract agreement.)…
Oakland’s arsenic feud
Oakland County officials are again caught in controversy surrounding maps identifying wells contaminated with arsenic. First, County Executive L. Brooks Patterson battled to keep maps showing tainted sites from being produced at all. After activists and a few commissioners successfully fought to get the maps produced, Patterson’s administration refused to provide all the details activists…
Finding default
When the Southfield-based mortgage firm MCA Financial Corporation announced that it would close its 40 branch offices and lay off 900 workers last week, homeowners were not the only ones to worry about the fallout. Detroit’s Policemen and Firemen Retirement System Board raised the same concern at its weekly meeting last Thursday. "The total amount…
Between clever & stupid
In this roundtable discussion, Detroit’s songwriters talk around craft, community, life’s purpose and the muse….
This is their land
When the Southfield-based mortgage firm MCA Financial Corporation announced that it would close its 40 branch offices and lay off 900 workers last week, homeowners were not the only ones to worry about the fallout. Detroit’s Policemen and Firemen Retirement System Board raised the same concern at its weekly meeting last Thursday. "The total amount…
Rock and refusal
The furor over a recent benefit concert for famed death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal pushes the controversial figure further …
Fish and tricks
Waits of two or three hours on weeknights are de rigueur, and the menu is descibed as catering to the tastes of “middle america.” Lots of fried dishes on the menu. Children like the show: Elephants roar, butterflies flap their wings, and every 20 minutes or so, lightning and thunder interrupt the flow of conversation.
New word, old tales
After the fifth series of rings in 10 minutes, I begin to get annoyed. "Would you answer that damn phone?" I snap at the Lizard of Fun, who’s lounging on a pink inflatable chair and sipping a margarita. The Lizard gives me an exasperated look from over the rims of its mirrored shades. "I’m screening…
At First Sight
At First Sight is, ostensibly, about the distinction between looking and seeing. Tense Manhattan architect Amy Benic (Mira Sorvino) encounters massage therapist Virgil Adamson (Val Kilmer) in an upstate New York spa, where his hands unleash first appreciative moans and then cathartic tears. From that encounter, and the hesitant conversation that follows, it’s obvious that…
