Cosmiccomic
Japan’s Boredoms take their art apart with what’s around them….
Crash test kids
For Alison Sanders, the calculus of automobile safety and the vagaries of chance collided as dusk approached on a Sunday in October of 1995. Just a half-mile from her father’s home in suburban Baltimore, the 7-year-old sat on the front passenger side of a brand-new Dodge Caravan. Her two brothers, strapped in the seat behind,…
metrotimes review
From her 50s gospel roots to her 60s pop hits to her more recent hip-hop studio collaborations, Aretha Franklin is perhaps the world’s greatest female soul singer. A living Detroit legend.
? And the Mysterians
Featuring the cosmic vocal stylings of the, well, mysterious Mr. Question Mark, ? and the Mysterians are one of the true originators of what we now lovingly call the ’60s garage sound. Best of all, they’re still kickin’ around today, as they follow their trail of “96 Tears” to a more modern (and hip) cult…
Brendan Benson
Detroit singer/songwriter (and rocker) Benson concentrates on simply writing the good song and fighting the musical good fight. Eclectic in his tastes and expression, Benson will swing from rollicking power-pop to introspective musical soul searches to sublime, bashing rock and all of it straight from the heart. Check out his Virgin Records debut, One Mississippi,…
Auditor general blocked
The Michigan Department of Corrections has succeeded, at least for the time being, in keeping the state auditor general from fully probing allegations that employees are mistreated. Audit Operations Director Mike Mayhew says a performance audit, prompted by employee complaints, will indicate that the auditor general was denied access to cases the department considers to…
From here to Australia
When local peace and social justice activists assemble this Friday at Hart Plaza to protest the G8 summit meeting of leaders from the world’s wealthiest nations, they will be part of an effort stretching across 40 countries. Groups ranging from Indian farmers to Australian trade unionists charge that the gathering in Cologne, Germany, will focus…
Fighting words
As I drag the canoe out of its storage space, in preparation for a summer cool-down paddle on the Detroit River, I hear something rustle behind me. I turn and read, in bright green letters on shiny paper, "Warning: Parental Advisory. May contain offensive language, inflammatory ideas and bad puns. Also drinks too much coffee."…
Why can’t we win at home?
Well, we seem to have won the war, and by air power alone. That, and a few dozen billion dollars. Now we (that is, NATO, now essentially the military arm of the American empire) will settle in for years of occupation and rebuilding of Kosovo. Nobody, certainly not I, thought this would work. It did,…
Cheapskate chic
If the best things in life are free, today’s Web may be a mixed blessing at best. Witness the glut of giant tech company mergers and previously unthinkable media partnerships (MS-NBC, anyone?). Everywhere you look, business is seeping into everything online. It doesn’t matter if they call it e-commerce, i-business or even "safe, secure online…
Pitch’d
SUMMERTIME AND THE RAVIN’ IS EASY You know it’s summer when the counters of baggier-than-thou retail stores start brimming over with those Japanimation-and-future-fonted full-color fliers for upcoming parties promising the world’s (and Detroit’s) best DJs at an undisclosed (and, most of the time, as yet unsecured) location on some Saturday night in the not-too-distant future.…
Alice Cooper
Born Vincent Furnier, young Vince was reborn in the early ’70s as Alice Cooper, king of the shock rockers. But with nearly thirty years now to reflect, Alice Cooper’s brand of rock theatricalism-meets-live monster movie make him come off as nothing less than a true originator. Ms. Manson, where would you be without your Uncle…
Food stuff
TASTING AFRICA As comfortable as I am with greasy cheeseburgers and colorful pizzas, I was a little hesitant to accept my friend’s offer to cook me an authentic Nigerian dinner. But Ronke Akintunde, a native of Lagos and a member of the Yoruban ethnic group, was ready to challenge my taste buds. She took me…
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me is the kind of movie that relies heavily on its audience’s awareness of other movies and pop culture for its humor to succeed. For those in on the joke, particularly fans of cult hit Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, this sequel provides another dose of silly pleasure.…
Revenge of the nose
Like the rest of Alexander Dumas’ enduring tales, The Count of Monte Cristo translates easily from text to screen. But while more action, adventure and faraway places sometimes make a better movie, they don’t always mean there’s no room for feeling and contemplation. Director Josée Dayan was selected by Gérard Depardieu to work on the…
Lyrical lakes
"A song is not a poem; it’s a song. It’s a third thing. It has music and it has words, and it also has meaning which nonvocal music does not have," says Ned Rorem by phone from Massachusetts. Rorem’s ideas on the subject come from more than half a century of setting words to music,…
Buena Vista Social Club
Riding in one of the immaculately preserved, vintage American cars that dot the streets of Havana, 92-year-old singer-guitarist Compay Segundo is trying to pinpoint the location of the long-defunct Buena Vista Social Club. Once the place to see pre-revolutionary Cuba’s best musicians, it is now only a vague memory even to longtime residents of the…
Wim and vigor
"When you see them, you realize that you cannot even make any separation between their lives and music," German director Wim Wenders says of the Cuban musicians in his documentary, Buena Vista Social Club. "It’s just all one and the same. For them it’s not art; it’s just their way of living. "I would almost…
This is My Father
Recently, C-SPAN broadcast a program called “The Great American Think-Off” during which contestants debated the topic “Which is More Dangerous, Science or Religion?” Those who chose religion as the greater culprit could have saved themselves a lot of verbiage and simply screened writer-director Paul Quinn’s This is My Father, a dour fable of sexual repression…
Looking alienated? Beware.
At the end of a horrifying school year, questions linger about how Michigan schools can prevent bloodbaths similar to those in Conyers, Ga., and Littleton, Colo. A state Senate task force is compiling information from law enforcement, schools and other sources for a report schools can use to initiate or improve safety programs. However, amid…
Pleasurably Guilty
If you’ve ever sat down and really pondered what, exactly what, would it sound like if a member of such Satan-spawn prefab four-or-five outfits such as Backstreet Boys, N’Sync (yadda, yadda, yadda ad nauseam) would record if he stumbled his way through the pop-star looking glass, precious, teen-swoon-inducing voice intact, but wiser, cheekier and self-aware…
Mix-mix it up
Royal Kubo gets four stars simply for being something really different – a Filipino karaoke bar/restaurant. Basically, Filipino food is a mix of native methods and ingredients, influenced by Chinese customs and then again by the Spanish colonizers: rice, of course, and lots of garlic and vinegar, which make for tasty broths. A good place…
The Rite Stuff
Writer-documentarian Greg Palmer’s quote on the back cover perfectly describes this collection of disparate songs about one of humanity’s two immutable life events: "These grief rituals had only two things in common. Food was always served, and everybody I met thought what they do is normal and what everybody else does is weird." Palmer worked…
We Had Joy, We Had Fun, Or Did We?
If you do something well, maybe you can’t do too much of it. But if anyone is going to push that envelope, it’s Pizzicato Five. We’re snide, goofy, funny and hip. And we know it. Sounding like something you stumble across while playing with your grandfather’s short-wave radio (still), the Japanese ’50s-’70s kitschophiles go at…
