Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): I predict that after Castro dies in 2003, Cuba will become both a haven for American corporations seeking cheap labor and a more exotic version of Nevada, featuring legalized gambling and prostitution. A booming tourist trade from its northern neighbor will ultimately turn the island nation into a wealthy “paradise of…
Presto change-o!
Man of a thousand faces Arturo Brachetti is a human transformer….
Dial twisting
2002 in fits and starts….
A tale of two hospitals
The first of a two-part series….
In black and white
On a hot day in September 1999 in Athens, Ga., Laura Wexler telephoned a couple in nearby Walton County. While researching her book on the gruesome and mysterious 1946 lynching of four African-Americans at the local Moore’s Ford Bridge, she had been soliciting interviews all summer long. This call, however, was different. Wexler hoped to…
When dad becomes a mom
Q: I am a single parent with a wonderful 15-year-old son. My son’s father, my ex, is a gay man. We’ve accepted this and we love him dearly, but there are issues affecting my son which my ex is ignoring. My ex has also been diagnosed with HIV. This was heartbreaking news for all of…
Jan. 8-16, 2002
8-11 WED-SAT • THEATER Candida — As part of the ongoing Shaw Festival, Oakland University’s Department of English and the Meadow Brook Theatre present another classic. The transcendently modern tale of the young wife Candida Morell and her complicated interactions with the opposite sex is one of modern literature’s most brilliantly plot-driven pieces of character…
The directors
In the summer of 1994, Dr. Soon K. Kim recruited five people to sit on the board of the nonprofit corporation he created to oversee the Greater Detroit Hospital. They served until the fall of 1997, when Kim fired the hospital’s chief operating officer, Linda Carroll. The board supported Carroll, and claimed Kim had no…
By design
Detroit Artists Market steps out … into a world of functional beauty….
Reckoning with race
My last column, “Detroit’s year of reckoning,” was intended to stir passions and even to make people mad, and I succeeded. I expected that two sentences in particular would provoke a lot of reaction. For once, I wasn’t wrong. “Detroit is not really a flesh-and-blood city so much as it is a rotting black ghetto…
A parking paradise
Untold gallons of ink have already been spilled regarding former Gov. Engler’s recent New Year’s Eve “surprise,” a stunning veto of the long-in-the-making regional transportation bill intended to get metro Detroit on the rocky road toward a transit system that may one day exceed Third World standards. An unapologetic Engler spurned the Detroit area by…
Big daddy romance
There’s a black Jeep riding my ass all the way to my parking spot. A toady little runt with a Red Wings coat that weighs more than he does gets out and shakes his head as he heads for “Oscar’s — A Neighborhood Tavern” in Shelby Township. “You’re shaking your head at me?” I protest…
Let the good times roll
Shiny in a gold dress, Aretha Franklin sits at a corner table in a third-floor cocktail lounge in downtown Detroit’s Ford Field. A handful of fans fawn over the Queen of Soul as she graciously poses for pictures. But tonight, Franklin is not the main event. The growing crowd waits anxiously for Michigan’s new empress,…
Margin for (t) error
The Peaceful Industrial Progress of the Great Nation of Iraq Copyright © 2002 by Saddam Hussein. All rights reserved. Printed in Baghdad. No part of this report may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author. “Permission”? Who the hell is he to make us beg for “permission”? Does…
Rough draft
Would Daddy Bush be hell-bent on attacking Iraq if his daughters, Jenna and Barbara, had to fight on the front line? It may sound like a silly question, but it’s one worth asking. Which is exactly what U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, is doing with a bill he supports that may be introduced this week…
Grueling banjos
The Salt Miners thrive on a stage where distortion has no home and a bola tie is standard garb. And even though they all come from goodly rock ’n’ roll beginnings, they have developed their very own version of the modest sound of bluegrass. Long before Joey Ramone hummed adenoidal “oh-oh’s” and Johnny Thunders threw…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
“It’s been empty for so long that I hardly even notice it anymore,” says Derrick Williams, who lives not far from the former Mr. Ted’s Restaurant, 11020 Conner Road in Detroit. Some older neighbors remember it as a Big Boy restaurant. The 2,764-square-foot building was erected in 1968, but in the early ’90s joined the…
Evening the score
Here’s one glimpse of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in motion: Upon a plainly lit stage, the multiethnic troupe members are methodically arranged, allowing themselves just enough space to enter and exit the hive they’re shaping. Lithe bodies move in and out of the center, going on- and off-stage, as free-flowing appendages whirl…
Pieces of the puzzle
Greater Detroit Hospital In May 1994, an attorney working for Drs. Soon K. Kim and Orekonde Ganesh establishes this nonprofit corporation. Greater Detroit Hospital-Medical Centers (GDHMC) Drs. Soon K. Kim and Orekonde Ganesh buy out of bankruptcy for $2.2 million the former North Detroit General Hospital, which was closed for two years, and Carpenter Plaza,…
Letters to the Editor
A multicolored issue I am writing because I can’t shake my uneasy feelings about Jack Lessenberry’s column ("Detroit’s year of reckoning," Metro Times, Jan, 1-7). He makes a statement about two-thirds of the way through the article that, yes, does sound a lot like racism. I fully expected, though, that the following paragraphs would give…
Dow dioxin deferment dead
Year 2003 is glorious already for Midland residents, thanks to the demise of a last-minute deal between the state Department of Environmental Quality and the community’s hometown industrial polluter, Dow Chemical Co. Midland activist Diane Hebert says the victory shows that community activism works. “There wasn’t a day that went by that we didn’t work…
Penny wise, impound foolish
It isn’t the first time the City of Detroit has been sued for deploying undercover cops as prostitutes. News Hits predicts that it won’t be the last. In December, Gary Culver sued the city and a Detroit police officer in Wayne County Circuit Court after he was arrested for allegedly soliciting an undercover cop posing…
Jefferson’s beach
Eat under a thatched roof or schmooze at the bar — you can almost hear the waves slapping on the beach. Join other revelers slurping their tsunamis, a tropical version of Long Island iced tea, as blue as a swimming pool and served in a goldfish bowl with Gummy Worms on the bottom. Slurp clams…
Holocaust sonata
Roman Polanski’s film, steeped in his personal history, opens with what looks like documentary newsreel footage of Warsaw in 1939, before the ghetto walls went up. It follows Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman through six years of avoiding death at the hands of the Nazis in Poland — with Adrien Brody.
The Phantom of Liberty
The most ostentatiously surreal of director Luis Buñuel’s last three films, The Phantom of Liberty (1974) is structured as a series of apparently random anecdotes. It’s a wonderful example of an old master revisiting some lifelong concerns, slightly mellowed but still incorrigibly subversive.
Intacto
The sumptuous but controlled visual style of this eerie film about luck manages to overwhelm a ridiculousness at the heart of its premise. Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s debut is a twisty, supernatural thriller engrossing enough to allow us to overlook its occasional lapses in logic.
Baraka
Director Ron Fricke’s 1992-released film is a vacation from dialogue and narrative, traveling strictly on imagery in the same style as Koyaanisqatsi (1983). But like a vacation without a distinct purpose and an all but nonexistent structure, it gets old before its 93 minutes are up.
Nicholas Nickleby
There may be urgency and darkness to Nicholas’ character in the Charles Dickens novel, but onscreen he’s an indomitable fellow who can barely summon enough furor to defend his sister’s honor. This broad, entertaining nothing of a movie features Charlie Hunnam, Christopher Plummer and Jamie Bell.
