Kid Rock
From his early days as the “Early Mornin’ Stoned Pimp,” spinning and rapping anywhere and everywhere at underground parties in and around Detroit, to his current, multi-platinum-selling status as “Pimp of the Nation,” Kid Rock has always laid his own blueprints for hip-hop and rock ‘n’ roll success. Mixing a low-key DIY ethic with impeccable…
New body buzzing
Pontiac has seen its nightclubs come and go, but who’d have imagined a swing mainstay like Velvet transforming itself into an electronic dance club called Tonic? On any given night, you’ll hear house, pulse, trance and jungle remixes. Whatever the reason behind the change, it’s OK to bid farewell to the past when it’s replaced…
Droning and honing
Humans play the strangest things. Aeons after femur flutes and tibia drumsticks, we have samplers, electronics and rock ‘n’ roll tools put to the task of unlocking the primordial. What has always been here becomes audible – again. Though from John Cage onward – through Morton Subotnick, David Behrman and Brian Eno – the sounds…
American Psycho
By all appearances, Patrick Bateman (a pitch-perfect Christian Bale) is what women call a good catch: an attractive professional whose success and confidence indicate a keen intelligence, a gentleman with cultured manners who refuses to embrace the conventions of machismo or intolerance. They would be dead wrong. Bateman is a monster, a preening narcissist (imagine…
Mifune
Mifune, directed and co-written by Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, is the third Danish film made according to the tenets of Dogma 95, a set of rules devised to foist a kind of technical neoprimitivism on the filmmaker. The two main imperatives of this credo, at least as far as the average viewer is concerned, call for natural…
Teen Beat
Chynna Clugston-Major has been contributing stories (including ones involving the Blue Monday characters found here) to a variety of anthologies, most notably the all-girl Action Girl series. Now finally the Blue Monday kids have been unleashed in their own miniseries. Bleu Finnegan and her friends are your average teen outcasts in the average suburban high…
Highway to havoc
SWM, mid-40s, divorced, no kids, ISO guns. Big guns, little guns. Handguns, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, and, yeah, OK, grenade launchers and anti-tank weapons here and there along the way. Meet Burdon Lane, executive vice president of UniArms Incorporated, Alexandria, Va. A real dreamboat if you’re a Soldier of Fortune kind of gal. Or you’re…
Where the Money Is
Caper films, where characters come together to pull off a heist or a scam, are either tension-filled psychological dramas or breezy comedy-laced tales. Where the Money Is fits into the latter category and might have been a disposable romp were it not for the casting of the still-formidable Paul Newman as a career bank robber.…
Return with Honor
This may be a problematic film for those, like myself, who view the Vietnam war as having been an avoidable calamity, though the makers of Return With Honor have largely depoliticized their story in a manner that asks us to set aside the old contentions. And so, though one may not share a belief in…
Rules of Engagement
The only thing Rules of Engagement needs to make it completely predictable and clichéd is Jack Nicholson shouting, “you can’t handle the truth.” That is in no way to diminish A Few Good Men, but rather the makers of Rules who wanted to create a hybrid of a past Best Picture nominee and an equally…
Hometown heroes
Detroit’s rap champs Eminem, Kid Rock and Insane Clown Posse didn’t rush off to Hollywood at the first sign of success – they’ve stayed local, keeping the spotlight on the 313.
Higher learning
Hip-hop contender Paradime takes his lessons from those who came before, but is the first to point out that his take on the Detroit rap sound is a proudly unconventional one.
Guerilla culture-jam
From the lowliest cable-access commercial to the latest Pepsi ad, found-sound collective Negativland treats the pre-existing cultural spectrum as a readymade source for its sonic collage art.
