Crossing over
Tadd Mullinix channels Dabrye, James Cotton and himself….
Nicely spiced fun
Korean food can be as familiar to Americans as barbecue — or as alien as wine-marinated pork belly and cow’s feet. Rest assured, even the most unadventurous diner can find something to like. Shilla’s menu combines Korean with Japanese. This was done to increase the appeal of the restaurant, and because the cuisines complement each…
Taking it to the bank
Detroit visionary Chris Turner renovates a relic for art….
Let it Bleed
Beggar’s Banquet Between the Buttons December’s Children Through the Past Darkly Metamorphosis ABKCO Sure, anyone who’s made a party-mix CD-R with ABKCO’s low eq’d Stones CDs from the late ’80s would want to hear the original London albums sonically overhauled. But who wants to fork over $18.99 22 times to Allen Klein, the still-undefeated bastard…
Tanks for the memories
Eyeballs bulge from Gramps’ wrinkled pink-and-gray head; whiskers droop below his frown. Tiny fans where ears should be propel him through the water. He looks like a brain with eyes. I find him irresistible. The Indonesian giant gourami lives alone in a tank at the Belle Isle Aquarium. When I approach, he opens and shuts…
Situationist Comedy
There was a time when punk was smart. Not some rote, four-on-the-floor exercise with its own herd of tattooed, steroidal malcontents, but a clever, informal bull session able to accommodate styles as diverse as Wire, Blondie and the Ramones. The boundless energy, machine-gun beat, blasting vocals and generous guitar roar — all conspire to classify…
Innocence found
Departure Lounge has left the building….
Jennie Bomb
How ironic that it takes bands from such a far-away land as Sweden to remind us Yanks what a national treasure we have in our very own stateside styled rock ’n’ roll. The Sahara Hotnights are four Swedish rock chix in Suzy Quatro zipper jackets and Runaways-era Joan Jett dos, who believe in the American…
Hit singles
This is a new column — part music news, part Hedda Hopper, part tripe and sometimes sincere — by Metro Times contributors. It will run whenever we see fit. You gotta love a town that has a rep for streetwise toughness and yet still has the heart to return an errant credit card to…
Aggro business
Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture Andrew Kimbrell, editor Island Press, 384 pages, $45 Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America Steven Stoll Hill and Wang, 287 pages, $30 The environmental movement has a few reliable, if predictable, villains to trot out to stoke the public’s ire: corporate lobbyists and chemical…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Arnold Mindell is a pioneer in exploring the relationship between mind and body. He believes you can achieve optimum physical health if you shed outworn self-images. Want to feel really good? “Continuously drop all sorts of rigid identities,” he says. Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw, agrees. Raised as a male,…
The ways of plain folk
I’ve got a new love: isolated populations. Specifically the Amish. Well, only the Amish right now as that’s the only isolated population I’ve ever encountered. I didn’t know crap about the Amish until a few weekends ago when I accompanied my sister Marcia to Lancaster, Pa. We were headed there simply to visit an old…
Aggro business
The environmental movement has a few reliable, if predictable, villains to trot out to stoke the public’s ire: corporate lobbyists and chemical manufacturers, Texas oilmen and oily Texas politicians–sometimes they’re one and the same.But stoking criticism of agriculture is a harder sell–a daunting public-relations barrier for the environmental movement. These days, farms are far away…
“I’m going to miss America"
By almost any measure, Caroline Vang is a typical young American woman. At 18, she dresses, talks and acts the part of a bright teenager ready to blossom into adulthood. Though she was born in France, “I guess I think of myself as an American,” she says. Like her entire family, Caroline’s future in this…
The problem with whites
When I first heard about this white guy who took pride in calling himself a “race traitor,” my instinct was to figure he was crazy, a publicity hound or some sort of shock jock. How many white guys do you know who say stuff like, “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity?” Right. That’s what…
Basic instincts
Here’s a Third Reich-flavored take on the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which a group of ostensibly average, well-adjusted men are divided into "guards" and "prisoners," and thrown in a mock prison for 14 days — a potent film with scenes of violence and degradation that can be hard to watch.
INS’ legacy of dysfunction
On March 11, exactly six months after two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, notification of student visa approval for Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi arrived at Huffman Aviation International, a flight school in Venice, Fla., where the two had taken lessons. For Atta and Shehhi, the point was moot. They had been at…
Oh, my darling clemency
The Michigan Battered Women’s Clemency Project fights injustice on the steps of the state Capitol.
Red Dragon
Though its dream team of A-list actors delivers effective performances, director Brett Ratner’s (the Rush Hour movies) film lacks the degree of artistic suspense and horror of both The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. The Red Dragon’s tale demands a level of terrible, awesome power that this movie is just shy of reaching.
Laos’ forgotten “killing fields"
Say the words “killing fields” and the image of the Khmer Rouge government under Pol Pot comes to mind. An estimated 2 million Cambodians were killed on Pol Pot’s watch after the Vietnam War. But the killing fields of Southeast Asia were not limited to Cambodia. In neighboring Laos, more than 300,000 people, many of…
They’ve got a secret
Metro Times and other newspapers suing to keep immigration hearings open to the public achieved another victory in court.
Spirited Away
Alice in Wonderland
meets the East in Hayao Miyazaki’s follow-up to his Princess Mononoke, which ups the animation ante and takes full advantage of the complex powers of anime and its freedom to go wherever the mind can imagine.
Letters to the Editor
Getting the picture Thank you Adam Stanfel for your article ("All the world’s a canvas," Metro Times, Oct. 2-8). Detroit needs to promote legal tag art, but also preserve the “illegal” tags found around the city. They are beautiful, stem from the underlying nature of the beast, and serve as a signature to the artistic…
Pacifists, Bushisms
President George Bush thinks optimistically about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
High and Low
Director Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 adaptation of an Ed McBain novel pumps it up to a 2 1/2-hour noir epic that switches from a realistic to an expressionist mode, with horror-movie imagery and a nearly sensual sense of despair — with Toshiro Mifune.
Talking hysterical
It all started with an elf — a 33-year-old, green velvet-clad Christmas elf named Crumpet, to be precise. In 1992, David Sedaris went on NPR to read — in his deadpan, nasal, but ultimately endearing voice — an excruciatingly hilarious account of his gig as a Macy’s Christmas elf. “Even worse than applying is the…
Bikers beware
Aaron Timlin gets a ticket for biking with insufficient lighting.
8 Women
François Ozon’s estrogen-rich romp — four parts Clue, one part Moulin Rouge — stars legends Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert and Fanny Ardant (and five other French actresses), in a dubious proposition for the Francophobic, but it acquits itself with a script so ridiculous it can’t help but be engaging.
The dildo dialogues
Q: Thank you so much for advising that whacked-out sexually ignorant mother to buy her daughter a dildo. As a former sex-worker (I was a pro-domme and a stripper), I understand intimately the ability of parents to turn normal sexual curiosity into something shameful and embarrassing. I had a similar incident when I was a…
All teed up
Who would expect to find a “members only” golf club in a rundown and distinctly grass-free eastside neighborhood on Chene between Garfield and Warren? The Abandoned Shelter Squad (ASS), that’s who. The 19th Hole Penthouse Golf Club is a relic from an era when people apparently enjoyed playing golf near low-slung windowless buildings painted bilious…
Happy Times
Chinese director Zhang Yimou continues his transformation from maker of large-scale historical dramas (Raise the Red Lantern) to purveyor of small contemporary ones (The Road Home), here offering the comedic story of a simple man whose essential goodness undermines his attempt to be devious.
The jewel in the lotus
“In my springtime heart I know that earth/will have its way.” These lines from “Renewal,” a 1994 poem by Detroit’s poet laureate, Naomi Long Madgett, remind us that its author has been the source of such hope and inspiration for so long in this city that we’ve almost taken her for granted. This minister’s daughter…
Country-fried comrades
“Ahhh, there’s nothing like a shot of tequila. Except for maybe a stab in the balls.” —Ronnie Nashville, bass player, Bill Parker and His Motherscratchers And so, with a quivered gulp and a chuckle, the evening began. Relegated to the bizarrely refaced Old Miami, Bill Parker and His Motherscratchers and I sat down for a…
Skins
Like Chris Eyre’s first feature, Smoke Signals, Skins has a naive feel, like a child with an important message to tell. As a project utilizing Native American actors, writing and direction, its faults are easy to forgive because the intentions are lofty — trying to lift a community from squalor to the stately height of…
Out of options
INS errors, technicalities may result in family’s ouster….
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
Who would expect to find a “members only” golf club in a rundown and distinctly grass-free eastside neighborhood on Chene between Garfield and Warren? The Abandoned Shelter Squad (ASS), that’s who. The 19th Hole Penthouse Golf Club is a relic from an era when people apparently enjoyed playing golf near low-slung windowless buildings painted bilious…
War and its aftermath
“We cannot ignore history. We must not ignore reality.” —George Bush, pumping up support for war against Iraq, Oct. 5, 2002 As I read the tea leaves, there really doesn’t seem to be any question any longer that we are going to attack Iraq. It’s a done deal. The only question seems to be when…
Trash magazine and Bootsy X’s lowbrow kicks
Bootsy X and The Lovemasters Pusherman of Love Sir Aquarius Records So there I am, minding my own business and house-sitting in Hamtramck for a friend in a traveling band when I get this manic phone call from a local legend claiming to be a fan of this column. Seven minutes later, this wild-eyed character…
Oct. 9-15, 2002
11 FRI • ART/COMMUNITY Yoko Ono presents: Come Together — Universally, John Lennon has been hailed a visionary, a musical guru and to many, the voice of a generation. This week however, it will not be what came from Lennon’s mouth, but rather, what came from his hands that will guide us. A master of…
Death’s mess
Nick Tosches doesn’t give a fuck. He’s a genuine tough guy, the kind who can’t help but be that way. He comes from the sort of background that makes you insanely hard. He first killed a guy when he was 6 years old, a slightly older bully who came at him with a knife and…
