Tool Time
DIG THIS — If you haven’t tried using the Korean hand tool known as the ho-mi (Korean for “little spear”), you’ll be surprised by its versatility, durability and efficiency. The tool’s design has been refined over hundreds of years by generations of Asian farmers and gardeners. The ho-mi resembles an ancient plow stuck on the…
Down in the mouth
Hey Dan, about your response to HACB: I upset a few women before I realized I couldn’t get off from head alone, no matter how great it got or felt. When I figured it out and started to explain to women that head didn’t do it for me, most just tried harder. They wanted to…
Sister city
Elaine Brown stares directly into the camera lens, squinting hard — as if her furrowed brow has the power to underline her words: “To be poor, black and female in America is about the bottom of all (hardships),” says the former Black Panther, putting her own spin on a quote from W.E.B. DuBois. “Because we…
Inner grooves
I know I’ll never get tired of music. I’ll never get tired of seeing it, playing it, hearing it; of experiencing someone’s heart and soul, someone’s blood and tears, in my hands and in my CD player. And yet, sometimes it seems that the idea of music as one’s own personal connection to a bigger…
Production for use
Music and quantum physics, vigorous craftsmanship and heady ideas. The latest show at Ann Arbor’s Gallery Project, Instrumental, curated by Ann Arbor artist Sharon Que and Detroit artist Graem Whyte, conjures those things and more. With 37 pieces packed into the confines of the gallery, the exhibit meditates on “devices that facilitate creativity, work, expression…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Feast your eyes
People are weird about food. I know someone who seemingly has no problem pulling a cook’s long black hair out of his hash browns at a greasy spoon, but gets totally grossed out if you don’t wash “pre-washed” spinach well enough. It makes no sense. Here’s my thing: When I really, really like a meal,…
Fruit of the vine
Food is clearly secondary to the wine — at this storefront eatery in the Orion Village Crossing strip mall. They offer fewer than 50 choices on their constantly changing list, almost all from small producers. Twenty or so are priced at $26.95 a bottle or $6.95 for a generous 6-ounce pour in correctly oversized, 20-ounce…
Lost in the supermarket
Food ain’t what it used to be. At least not in the last 50 years. And we’d better face up to it. In the West, the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and genetic engineering (with generous government subsidies) has produced more food more cheaply than at any time in the history of the world, particularly…
Drive-in Saturday night
When the goal is to homage schlock, the filmmaking bar is set low, and saying Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse delivers the goods is a backhanded compliment. First up is Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a pulpy mash-up of Roger Corman sci-fi and George Romero zombiefest that’s consciously tasteless but, until its final half hour, rarely…
Roots of war
For most middle-class Americans, including myself, gardening is a relaxing hobby, not a necessity. There’s nothing like cultivating a head of cabbage or a bucket full of ripe tomatoes from delicate seedlings in my back yard. The pastime calms me and keeps me sane. But it’s certainly not the one and only activity keeping my…
Remembering newspapers
First, thoughts on Neal Shine: The death last week of the longtime Free Press managing editor and publisher produced an outpouring of grief, affection and respect that was remarkable in itself — and for the deeper meaning of what it represented. Shine was, indeed, everything the eulogies said about him. He was a fine journalist,…
Bamako
African filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako literally brings global politics to his own backyard, putting the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on trial for crimes against African society, and has this civil action unfold in the courtyard behind his family’s home in the Hamdallaye district of Mali’s capitol. This audacious concept works because Sissako grounds the…
Assimilated tastes
“Food is the thing, sometimes the only thing, that the immigrant will not give up,” says Bich Minh Nguyen. Arriving in Michigan in 1975 at the age of 8 months, Nguyen says she never thought of herself as Vietnamese — and yet there was plenty to remind her in tall, blond, Dutch Reformed Grand Rapids,…
Screwball shorts
About a decade ago in New York, filmmaker Marie Losier met Richard Foreman, father of the famed Ontological Hysterical Theater, while making props for his play Hotel Fuck. “It was my job,” Losier says by phone, “to make the giant penises on wheels.” Auspicious meetings that play out like screwball comedies inspire giddiness and spontaneity…
Avenue Montaigne
A plucky, naive backwater blonde comes to the big city in search of romance, luxury and success; her chipper bonhomie in turn transforms a group of comically callous socialites. It’s a classic scenario, here set in France. Using postcard-perfect images of Paris as a backdrop, the film follows the lives of three showbiz luminaries, all…
Bite your tongue
The massive, 4-pound severed beef tongue lay on the kitchen counter in all its gruesome glory. It was once attached to the head of a beef cow, organically fed and pasture-raised by Elmer Slabaugh on his Brown City Amish farm. Elmer sells his cattle in sections. The “home of Yale Bologna,” C Roy Inc., processes…
Death proof
Director Quentin Tarantino sports blue-green hospital scrubs as he explains why the extinction of back-lot studios and traditional B-movies represents a big loss to American cinema. Later, when he and Grindhouse co-director Robert Rodriguez shift from a 14th-floor room to poolside at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons, Tarantino adds a leprechaun-green sports coat to the…
The Hoax
Back in 1971, Clifford Irving (Gere), a journalist and struggling novelist desperate to jumpstart his career, convinced publishing giant McGraw-Hill he’d been recruited to pen the autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Everyone involved became convinced it’d be “the story of the century.” The only problem was Hughes had nothing to do with it. All…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "‘Don’t look before you leap!’ is a Zen saying that contrasts with what many in the West consider wise counsel," writes Christopher Moors in his article "Magical Buddha Nature." "If everything is premeditated, we never have the naked brilliance of a truly new experience. Though we might be able to temper…
Beats and meat
Michael Doyle and Bethany Shorb look a bit tired, understandable given that they’ve just returned from a New York weekend hopping from ballets in Brooklyn to museums in Manhattan followed by parties, afterparties and after-afterparties in each borough. They saw daylight only briefly, they say, as they walked at murky sunrise across the Williamsburg Bridge.…
Are We Done Yet?
Remember when Ice Cube was dangerous? The former hardcore voice of inner-city rage has become a tame mouthpiece for corporate Hollywood mediocrity, and the transition is still jarring. The sellout road from gangsta to prankster is a bumpy one, and where Cube used to rhyme about battling thugs and cops; this dismal little slab of…
Torturer’s toll
Tony Lagouranis is a 37-year-old bouncer at a bar in Chicago’s Humboldt Park. He is also a former torturer. That was how he was described in an e-mail promoting a panel discussion, “24: Torture Televised,” hosted by the New York University School of Law’s Center on Law and Security in New York last month. And…
Grindhouse tease
Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (Supercharger Edition) Anchor Bay When NASCAR heads Larry (Peter Fonda) and Deke (Adam Roarke) pull a complicated heist of a small-town grocery, things go well. Their getaway in a mean Dodge Charger, however, does not. For one, Larry’s previous night’s conquest — the lovely hussy Mary (Susan George) — decides that…
The Reaping
Even by the standards of Hilary Swank’s center-of-the-earth turkey The Core — is as moldy and desperate a bid for blockbuster status as they come. The 10 plagues — just in time for Passover! — are visited upon a small Louisiana town. Before you can say “boils and lice,” science professor Katherine (Swank) and her…
Reunited and it feels so stooge
There might be some cause for concern when the Stooges play in Detroit this week. Think about it — the last two times Iggy Pop and brothers Ron and Scott Asheton played in greater Motown, there was bedlam. First, in 1974, it was the battery-chucking near-riot at the Michigan Palace. In 2003, the band played…
Night and Day
Wednesday-Thursday • 11-12 Saidiya Hartman LITERATURE Three decades ago Alex Haley’s Roots stirred African-Americans with the prospect of following family trees from Anywhere, USA, through the plantation and the slave ship to a welcoming village in the Motherland. Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother is a sort of latter-day rejoinder, a knot of contemporary complexities to…
Inland Empire
Assessing David Lynch’s baffling, impenetrable, disturbing and exhausting mindfuck is a daunting task. An early threadbare narrative notwithstanding, Inland Empire’s three-hour spiral into confused identities and realities, like the best abstract paintings, asks that you surrender to its weirdness and draw your own conclusions. Opening with a sexually charged tryst in a Polish hotel room,…
Fillet of soul
The Delicious Taste of Crab Legs I must say I come from a horrid taste When I had olives I had to get rid of that horrid taste by Eating some of my mom’s delicious crab legs They were so delicious that I could probably Celebrate, jump up and down, give my brother A dozen…
Bite me
Our annual look at a consuming passion.
51 Birch Street
When Doug Block’s mother Mina unexpectedly dies and his father, Mike, weds his old secretary a few months later, the documentarian struggles to understand his parent’s 54-year marriage. Were they in love? Happy? Then he finds his mother’s journals — diaries she kept for nearly 35 years — and uncovers the frustrations, compromises and concessions…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
This is in defense of Pete Townshend, who’d probably be the first to argue that he doesn’t need anyone defending him in public — least of all a rock critic half a world away. But that’s just the point: Thanks to the Information Superhighway and the proliferation of 24 hour news, entertainment and music channels,…
Art Bar
Seeing red — As recently as 2002, Michigan was ranked fourth-highest in the nation in arts spending per capita. Five years later, we’re ranked 35th and falling fast. At $10.1 million dollars a year, the state currently invests $1.07, per citizen, in the arts. That amazing film you watched at the Detroit Film Theatre last…
Moving words and worlds
Sometimes the topics and themes of a book of poetry stagger all over the place. The opposite is true, however, with Zilka Joseph’s chapbook, Lands I Live In. It’s a highly focused work exploring themes of home, courage and displacement. Zilka Joseph grew up in Calcutta, India. In 1997, she and her husband moved to…
Displacing desire
Let’s face it: Food is sensual. Besides sex, there’s nothing else like it. We use our five senses to tear into something, to put it inside us, where it becomes part of us. Enjoying food is one of life’s great sensual pleasures, and its connection to sexuality is a basic fact of life. Why else…
Letters to the Editor
Sounding off on audio From the first glimpse of the lovely Jennifer Granstrom on the cover straddling across a tube amplifier biting down on those high-end cables, I knew that this cover story was going to be right up my alley (“Ear entry,” Metro Times, April 4). Ever since I was a young teen and…
Coffee and cigarettes
You’d be hard-pressed to find a society without coffeehouses. Not because of all those Starbucks everywhere, but because sitting around, drinking coffee and socializing in public stretches back centuries in our shared human history. Long before the advent of the drive-thru latte, coffeehouses, coffee shops and cafés were the public living room of cities like…
Motor City Cribs
Scott Morgan goes Westwood in Tree Town.
American Life in Poetry
American Life in Poetry By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 By describing the relocation of the moles which ravaged her yard, Washington poet Judith Kitchen presents an experience that resonates beyond the simple details, and suggests that children can learn important lessons through observation of the natural world. Catching the Moles First we…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
