Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Thai coffee salesman Prayoon Thongiorn owns a pet crocodile. So thoroughly has he tamed the creature that he lets it sleeps in his bed with him, even resting his head on it as if it were a pillow. I predict that you will make a comparable conquest in 2006, Aries. Some…
Metro Retro
24 years ago this week in Metro Times: Jeanie Wylie asks just who controls Detroit city planning and what the public’s role is in the process. Residents south of Poletown fear for the future of their neighborhood after seeing their neighbors evacuated to make room for a General Motors assembly plant. Both residents of the…
The horror of the holidays
This ghastly reindeer carcass, crafted by artist Tyler Ingolia for the window display at Royal Oak’s Noir Leather, was made out of papier-mâché, cardboard and fabrics. The animal, which looks more like a prehistoric predator than one of Santa’s hooved helpers, is Ingolia’s gift to the city upon his recent return — he originally lived…
Head Cheese
Dorkwave stays strapped like car seats in 2006, blasting into the New Year from the top of the Pontch. “Proper attire requested,” the flier for the DJ collective’s New Year’s Eve bash reads, adding “whatever this means to you.” Because if you’ve ever been to one of their monthly parties, the fun is in watching…
No S&M at home for the holidays
Q: My sister, whom I’m quite close with, has been getting into S&M. Recently she announced that she has acquired a slave. After much thought and discussion on the matter, I am still having a very hard time coming to terms with it. The problem I have is that she treats him like a slave…
Letters to the Editor
Pro-liberty, anti-Bush Re: Jack Lessenberry’s “God bless us, every one” (Metro Times, Dec. 21), thanks, Jack Lessenberry, for calling for the impeachment of Bush. I only hope many more commentators and newspapers will show similar courage and wisdom in the face of the great threat to our freedoms the Bush regime poses. Some people will…
Oh, baby
December is a miserable time for many. They’re everywhere, seemingly inescapable: swarming through the malls and coffee shops, popping up on every TV commercial, blocking your path at every turn, infecting your every move. Kids. It’s enough to make your blood run cold — if you’re childfree. Not childless, mind you, but childfree. Christmas, with…
Power walking down the year
John Conyers Jr., that cranky old left-wing dude, introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives calling on Congress to impeach the president. I can just see you shaking your head. There he goes again. Well, not so fast. I was actually referring to ancient history. Conyers introduced an impeachment resolution, all right —…
Night and Day
New Year’s Eve 2006 East siders can head on over to Ernie King’s Mill (16555 19 Mile Rd., Clinton Township; 586-286-8435). The ticket price of $125 includes a chef-prepared dinner buffet and a premium open bar. It’s open to 21+ and will run 8 p.m.-3 a.m. Top 40 dance tunes will be provided by a…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Drawing a tension
Artist Mark di Suvero, now in his 70s, is one of America’s most important living sculptors, and he’s been getting a lot of attention lately. Storm King Art Center, the nation’s premier outdoor sculpture park, located up the Hudson River 60 miles north of New York City, currently has a major exhibition celebrating the 50th…
Art Bar
Many of us keep journals, but while doing so few of us pay much attention to selecting the most precise words, to determining their most effective order, to working with effective pauses and breath-like pacing, to presenting an engaging impression of a single, unique day. This poem by Nebraskan Nancy McCleery is a good example…
Abate and switch
Last summer, a cleanup crew hired by the East Jefferson Business Association was pulling weeds in front of the old Vanity Ballroom on Jefferson Avenue and Newport Street in Detroit, even though the owner of the vacant building hadn’t paid association fees for more than five years. A chunk of mortar fell from the facade…
Burnin’ the blues
The infatuation started about 25 years ago when an insistent friend promised, “You’re really going to like this, trust me.” And even though Mike Boulan thought blues “was about some old guy sitting on a porch,” he let himself be dragged to the Royal Oak Music Theatre where Alvin Lee’s rendition of “Blues in C”…
Presto-chango
In Detroit, the refuse of a broken world often finds refuge in art. For many years, artist Nelson Smith has resisted this Motor City search-and-rescue mission, preferring instead to paint images of such conventional items as toasters, coffee pots and pencils. But recently, bits and pieces of “Detroitus” have made their way into his new…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Pick up sticks, it’s MB56! • Styx — The Complete Wooden Nickel Recordings (Hip-O) :: On second thought … • Logh — A Sunset Panorama (Hydra Head) :: This quartet starts off with a koda intro and concludes with a primo screamo coda. • Metric — Live it Out (Last Gang) :: Girls ’n’ guitars…
The other George’s war
Every Independence Day, Americans converge at backyard barbecues and neighborhood fireworks displays to pay homage to the good old red, white and blue. In celebration of the birth of our nation, we do things like wave flags, march in parades and drink beer. But the holiday often seems to come and go without much reflection.…
Over in Dover
Finally, some good news to report. The federal judge presiding over the intelligent-design court case, which Gordy Slack wrote about in our recent cover story on the issue (“The deity’s advocate,” Nov. 2), handed down a ruling last week that eviscerates the flimflammers on the religious right who claim that ID — which posits that…
Daddy and daddy
Voter approval of Proposal 2 last year may have banned same-sex couples from legally marrying in Michigan, but if a “second parent adoption” bill passes the state Legislature, gay couples would have the legal leeway to become adoptive parents. As it is now, only one member of a gay couple can adopt. State Rep. Paul…
Roots all over
As the last days of December disappear, tons of metro Detroiters are still searching for cool New Year’s parties where they can act a fool, stay warm and ring in 2006 at an affordable price. With ticket costs surging for the upper-echelon bashes, members of the reggae and dancehall community are throwing a few lesser-known…
Drinking it in
In Detroit, it seems like there’s a “special” bar night every night. Dives around town have tried everything from haircuts to feather bowling. But Wednesday, oh, Wednesday has gotten good. In a cozy brewery on Canfield Street, where the air smells more like a cider mill than common swill, you never know what you’re in…
Bush bash
Looking for some interesting reading over the holidays? News Hits recommends that you check out The Constitution in Crisis. Produced at the request of U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Detroit), the report was compiled by Democratic staff members on the House Judiciary Committee, on which Conyers serves. The 182-page document (not including voluminous footnotes), subtitled “The…
New year, rising sun
Pointing firearms to the night sky and blasting away, like Iraqi insurgents celebrating a gory victory over the Great Satan, has been a New Year’s Eve tradition in Detroit, my birthplace, for as long as I can remember. This moronic “tradition” is peculiar to our city (and the greater metro area), and is itself enough…
Day of the dumb
What David Lynch has gone and done now is written and animated a cartoon that his publicity people call “deliberately violent, deliciously crude and daringly absurd.” Nothing shocking? Well, the format is surprising — Dumbland is an eight-episode animated series available for viewing (for a price) on his personal Web site. It features a cast…
29
Ryan Adams’ third release of 2005 — yes, third — is stuffed with atmospheric meanderings and often minimalist tunes. Though slightly removed from his alt-country roots, 29 sometimes recalls Adams’ previous Love is Hell. The opener, “Twenty Nine,” however, is a rehashing of Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” and is the only shit-kickin’ country-rock song on the…
Beautifully Insane
You might recognize Beautifully Insane’s “Visine” and “Good Dreams,” as they both appeared on Words for Living, PJ Olsson’s 1999 album for Columbia. He’s on the Atlanta indie Brash now, but his approach is still the same: Layer sugary vocals over strummed acoustic guitars and a patchwork of drum programs, keyboards, electronic beeps and occasional…
Gilles Peterson Digs America: Brownswood U.S.A.
A few of us have at least one DJ friend with a colossal record collection that practically defines who they are and what they do. And raiding said DJ’s record collection would be a dream come true. And that’s basically what the folks at Luv N’ Haight records did to well-respected British BBC radio DJ…
Ghost Reveries
Ghost Reveries seizes the progressive rock gauntlet. Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt still periodically loses his black metal bleat — “Baying of the Hounds” begins with a fit of rage. But the album is actually pretty tame, with its animalistic, gloomy side, layers of acoustic guitar and cathedral organ, and stretches of stilted rock introspection that can…
Memoirs of a Geisha
In adapting Arthur Golden’s bestselling novel Memoirs of a Geisha to the big screen, American director Rob Marshall (Chicago) steadfastly refuses to delve beyond the white face paint and find out what really happens to a woman’s emotional state after a life of male servitude. Instead, he’s more content to focus on all the baubles,…
Assassins and killers
You can tell a director thinks his film is really important when he turns a two-hour story into a three-hour ordeal. Whether it’s artistic indecision or overindulgence, these movies exhaust the patience and bladders of their audiences. If elaborate, multifaceted films like Syriana and Crash can deliver the goods in two hours, there’s no reason…
The Producers
If you want a textbook example of how not to bring a Tony Award-winning musical to the big screen, you have only to look at the lifeless train wreck that is The Producers. Susan Stroman, the celebrated director-choreographer of the stage production, proves to be a painfully inept and unimaginative filmmaker, turning the rambunctious Broadway…
Blanket of snow and sorrow
Poet Jonathan Johnson (author of Mastodon, 80% Complete) has written a love song and elegy about the power of place. In Hannah and the Mountain: Notes Toward a Wilderness Fatherhood, that place is a mountain homestead in northern Idaho. Johnson and his wife Amy give themselves over to building a bare-knuckle cabin on a piece…
Formula = salaciousness and silk
Cocksure playa and sly trickster — Jamie Foxx’s dual personae derive from an unquenchable, but equally unassuming creative ambition. From Booty Call, to Steamin’ Willie Beamen, to Collateral, Ray, and choruses for Kanye? Of course; why not? And yet each project gets a particular wink and a smile, just to let you know it’s his;…
The Ringer
Say this for Johnny Knoxville’s latest attempt at comedic stardom: It has a great sound track. Unlike the sweet-and-sour comedy of, say, Stuck on You, there’s nothing even remotely daring in director Barry Blaustein’s approach to this material. The Ringer stumbles around for its first half-hour, unsure of what kind of comedy it’s trying to…
Queens reigns supreme
Queens reigns supreme In The Bridge is Over, rapper KRS ONE issued a fatwa against fellow MCs from the borough of Queens: “Manhattan keeps on making it, Brooklyn keeps on takin it, Bronx keeps creatin it and Queens keeps on fakin it.” The question of street cred — who has it and why — is…
Wolf Creek
Wolf Creek is sensationalistic and ugly, a horror franchise that tries to cash in on somebody else’s dead children. Liz and Kristy (Cassandra Magrath and Kestie Morassi), a pair of sexy young Brits, hook up with Ben (Nathan Phillips) on a cross-country drive across the dusty Outback. When their car mysteriously dies, an amiable yokel…
Rumor Has It
Rob Reiner’s best decision in this movie was omitting any graphic Jennifer Aniston-Kevin Costner sex scene, instead leaving it to the audience’s imagination. It’s not the May-December romance that makes one cringe as much as the circumstances surrounding their intimacy: Aniston’s character Sarah is frantically hunting down Costner’s Beau to question him about the affairs…
