In the act
“It’s always a little bit of a shock,” says photographer Chris Scalise. “But it seems like they can’t take their eyes away from it.” He’s describing viewers’ typical reactions to his latest collection of photographs, a documentary series on Noir Leather’s fetish shows. “They’ll pass by [an image that strikes them] — and then pass…
Justice slowly served
The Supreme Court sides with former newspaper striker Gary Rusnell.
Global decay
On Atwater Street, across from the quaint St. Aubin Park and Arena on Detroit’s east side, sits the sprawling ruins of the Globe Trading Company. One can barely make out the remaining white-painted text giving ghostly hints as to the whereabouts of the shipping and receiving areas at the ancient warehouse. What seems to be…
N&D add
17 THU • MUSIC DSO with James Carter — Sax sensation James Carter is no stranger to this stage, but sharing it with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is a first. Composer Roberto Sierra, whose works have been performed by numerous orchestras and chamber groups including the Kronos Quartet, has written up a saxophone concerto for…
Letters to the Editor
Righting a wrong I am a Hmong who came here from Laos 26 years ago as a refugee. I would like to give my support to Mr. Vang’s family ("Out of options," Metro Times, Oct. 9-15). I would like the United States government to stop the INS from deporting the Vang family back to France.…
Braying up the wrong tree
Detroit newspaper columnist Thomas Bray surrounds Jennifer Granholm with reparations hubbub.
Night and Day add
17 THU • MUSIC DSO with James Carter — Sax sensation James Carter is no stranger to this stage, but sharing it with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is a first. Composer Roberto Sierra, whose works have been performed by numerous orchestras and chamber groups including the Kronos Quartet, has written up a saxophone concerto for…
Saying no to the war on drugs
Conference highlights hypocrisy and injustice….
Motor City music meltdown
’Tis the season to be rhythmic. Music lovers relish the onset of autumn, one of the year’s biggest seasons for new releases. A number of Detroit artists are testing their sonic fate this fall through independent and major record companies. Here is a preview of some new Motor City grooves hitting record shelves (maybe, see…
Rock it from the crypt
Night of the Living Dead musical an ‘underground’ hit….
Wrong-stradamus
Sometimes I like to sit alone in a completely darkened room and smoke a big, stinking cigar. If somehow you were able to hide in a corner of this room and observe me, all you’d be able to see would be the glowing red part of the cigar getting really red and then getting dimmer.…
David vs. Goliath redux
U.S. Rep. David Bonior, D-Mt. Clemens, is the Hanoi Jane of the new millennium. Bonior, a lame duck, and fellow Democratic representatives Jim McDermott of Washington and Mike Thompson of California recently spent five days in Iraq on a fact-finding mission. Critics of their State Department-sanctioned tour are uniform in stressing that it was managed…
Discs in the mail
Oftentimes listening to local music can be like having a rotten tooth wrenched from your jaw. It can require enough beer to beach a whale. Still, here’s a quick rundown of discs that have hit this desk in recent months, the best and worst. Check our man Khary Kimani Turner for his rundown of some…
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Karen O and co. are running with the boss sound….
Hush
As serious as he needs to be, Hush’s funky bass loops and hip-hop dance rhythms are remiscent of the funked -out 70’s, but his approach to their delivery is new. Dominatingly sexy, Hush challenges the current goings-on in popular rap with a stripped-down, “Just the facts, m’am.”approach to his rhymes. A new-fangled Detroit modus operandi,…
Cops off campus
Detroit neighborhood may lose help from Wayne State University’s campus police.
Nothing to gag about
Mr. Belvedere fails to overturn First Amendment rights of former employee.
Catch a bus, cause a fuss
Protest against bombs over Baghdad on a trip to our nation’s capitol.
The sound and the fury
Ever hear the one about the Jewish lawyer who was trying to defend a guy for talking smack about the Catholic Church? Earle Warren Zaidins was in court on Feb. 27, 1963, defending one Leonard Alfred Schneider, aka Lenny Bruce, on obscenity charges stemming from his performance at a Chicago nightspot called the Gate of…
Beware of toe jam
Q: I have recently developed a strong foot fetish. When I’m not in a relationship (or if I’m with someone unresponsive to my desires), I have turned to visiting the local titty bar. I will buy a lap dance from one of the lovelier strippers and sit her in a chair facing me. Then I…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
On Atwater Street, across from the quaint St. Aubin Park and Arena on Detroit’s east side, sits the sprawling ruins of the Globe Trading Company. One can barely make out the remaining white-painted text giving ghostly hints as to the whereabouts of the shipping and receiving areas at the ancient warehouse. What seems to be…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Picture yourself carrying fresh orchids through windy city streets. You want to offer them as a gift to someone you adore. Imagine holding the delicate stems in your hand. Your grip must be firm enough to keep them from falling, yet gentle enough so that you don’t crush them. Now and…
Don’t call it a comeback
Electroclash is one of those polarizing musical genres/socio-cultural phenomena/hype tornado memes that seems to take over popular culture every few years. At its most surface level, electroclash is the umbrella term for a relatively wide subspectrum of music that blends New Wave, classic electro, DIY punk ethos and a handful of other retrograde/forward-looking, blender-worthy genre…
The Teaches of Peaches
When Peaches last brought her burlesque electro-strip show to Detroit, Marilyn Manson showed up to take notes. Black-clad and statue-still, Mr. Man Boobies didn’t exactly fit in with the throng of dancing, half-dressed bodies at the Magic Stick that night, but otherwise he wasn’t that outta place. In fact, it made a sick sorta sense…
A stable force
Mike Lesperance stands in the barn with his loyal “partner,” Randy, a 1,150-pound Morgan gelding. The sleek purebred has been part of the Detroit Police force for 14 years. Lesperance has been riding him just as long. “He has been my partner longer than anyone,” says the 32-year police veteran, as he pats the chestnut…
The religious wrong
Q: I was surprised you didn’t mention the hilarious article in USA Today about the latest crusade launched by the religious jackasses in the United States. Apparently some conservative Christian groups in your country are pressing big hotel chains to drop pay-per-view porn from their in-room amenities. The way things are going, you Americans will…
Animating the corps
It’s alive! Tearing off the mask of convention to show the fresh face of artistic innovation comes Complexions, a company (and a show) dedicated to reaching up and out of the precincts of canonical dance. The New York troupe, founded in 1994 by artistic directors Desmond Richardson and Dwight Rhoden, is a work in progress…
Brown Sugar
With romantic comedy high in the mix, director Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood) visually fades in issues of color and class, and assumptions of power. The love plots more or less successfully echo hip hop’s loss of innocence and its sold-out marriage to big business — with Sanaa Lathan and Taye Diggs.
Don’t forget the other races
Don’t know if you saw the one and only televised so-called debate between the major-party candidates for governor last week. Naturally, having no friends and a broken eight-track tape player, I watched it all. Afterward, a cantankerous old liberal told me, “He seems like a kinda nice guy, not too bright, who represents a party…
Harvest swoon
If Dan Lutz were not harvesting organic radishes and winter squash on this perfect fall day, he would probably be managing a bar in Detroit. That’s what he did before he and his wife, Michelle, moved 70 miles northeast of the Motor City to the 80-acre farm they purchased in Yale. For years Dan, 45,…
Oct. 16-22, 2002
16 WED • COMMUNITY WDET-FM 101,9 Fundraiser at Jacoby’s — Sprechen sie "fun" this week as part of WDET FM 101.9’s annual fall fundraiser. Detroit’s favorite biergarten, Jacoby’s, will be hosting a cornucopia of eclectic local musical acts including: Pas/Cal, Audra Kubat, My White Momma, the Hentchmen and the Bloody Holly’s. Find your way to…
(pronounced eat-shit)
It was real generous of Ted Nugent, upon hearing that Lance Bass had gotten his space-flight buzz unceremoniously shaved, to offer the ’NSyncer a primer in bow-hunting, critter-skinning and flesh-gnawing. At a mere $1 million, it’s a bargain compared to the $20 million Bass needed to ante up for the Russkies. Hell, the Nuge even…
Yojimbo
Yojimbo
(1961), which translates as The Bodyguard, was director Akira Kurosawa’s most popular film in his native country. A late-mediaeval samurai tale that draws on the American western tradition, it adds a nearly nihilistic streak of black humor to the mix — with Toshiro Mifune.
Lust for life
Porno, for what it’s worth, is a brilliant (if unintended) piece of conceptual fiction. That is, the title, storyline and even the marketing conceit (“the Trainspotting lads 10 years later and worse than ever …”) often do little more than generate empty titillation, offering a loose framework of subcultural signifiers, expected plot twists and stereotypes…
Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi)
It’s Election Day on an out-of-the-way, Farsi-speaking island. Iranian director Babak Payami calls upon the fundamental problems inherent in choosing one or two candidates to represent the needs of the many, and exhibits the flaws of democracy, but can’t help hitting us over the head, over and over.
Blonde on blonde
“Love humiliates you — hatred cradles you”: Mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) brews her philosophy and feeds it to daughter (Alison Lohman), daily. Director Peter Kosminsky’s perfectly seductive and unnerving film embodies the potentially torturous struggle of a child breaking free of a parent’s psychological grasp.
Heaven
In this collaboration between two distinct artistic personalities, German director Tom Tykwer’s snazzy postmodern viewpoint bumps up against late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s script (and more monastic, reflective temperament) with mixed results — with Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi.
The Transporter
Director Corey Yuen dishes out an action buffet seasoned for American tastes, with an urban car chase à la The French Connection, his own gymnastic kung fu Occidental style and a quantity of firepower that would seem absurdly extravagant, even for an epic pyromaniac like producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
Swept Away
This remake of director Lina Wertmuller’s darkly comic, over-the-top, 1975 polemic falls into the “what were they thinking?” category — this time it’s directed by Guy Ritchie and stars his wife, Madonna, who can read lines, but can’t inhabit a part, even a lightly comic one like this. And she looks terrible.
Folklore
Sixteen Horsepower’s palette of sparse, windswept murder ballads and desolate, dread-”full” dirges follows an aesthetic as frightening and convicted as Robert Mitchum’s character from The Night of the Hunter. Like Mitchum’s phony priest, his fingers tattooed with “love” and “hate,” Sixteen Horsepower singer David Eugene Edwards pursues a wild-eyed course, tracking the narrow line between…
