Backslash
Serving up laughs — Anyone who’s ever worked in the service industry knows both the perks and perils: With the flexible hours come with achin’ feet, and those great tips are offset by the rudest, foulest, strangest morons imaginable — meaning both your customers and your co-workers. All that abuse day in and day out…
Letters to the Editor
A mother’s prayer Just read your story, “Florence Nightingale meets Sherlock Holmes” (Metro Times, March 23), on the Web. You wrote about my son Andrew Warshaw. Thank God for the testing that was able to prove Andy committed the rape in Macomb County, and led to a conviction in the murder of Steven Kaplan. I’m…
Head cheese
Notorious for middle-finger drive-bys and gloriously drunken live shows, some say the Supersuckers are the most dangerous band in Texas. Well, they are an errant tumbleweed of scabrous riffs and melodies; a braying aesthetic that swings between country and rock like a meth-sniffing bipolar teen. They’re on the road promoting an odds & sods collection,…
Mommies dearest
“Diapers, candy and you name it in the mosh pit,” it’s all par for the course at a Candy Band gig, says guitarist Paula Messner, aka, Almond Joy. Not so at metro Detroit’s first Mamapalooza on Sunday, May 1. The four suburban Detroit moms will serve up their sugar-frenzied punk versions of kiddie classics like…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
The bass and I
Rodney Whitaker was in middle school when he told his parents that he’d one day move to New York and become a famous bass player like his idol, the late Paul Chambers. The Whitakers, hardworking blue-collar folk, were more than a little taken aback. No one in their family had ever played an instrument, much…
Off the prigs
When one of the new nickels showed up in my change, someone pointed out that the buffalo on the back stands intact, vividly displaying his admirable, ground-scraping buffalo-ness. “I’m surprised they let that go,” he said. Yes, they. You’d think there were a lot of them, their works are so widespread. They’re the ones who…
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate None of us can fix the past. Mistakes we’ve made can burden us for many years, delivering their pain to the present as if they had happened just yesterday. In the following poem we join with Ruth Stone in revisiting a hurried decision, and we…
Brush and pen
Seattle-based writer Rebecca Brown casts a sensitively tuned eye toward the human condition. Her books combine ferocity (of attachments, longing) with the gracefully humane. They often verge on the violently comic. The interrelated stories that comprise 1992’s The Terrible Girls include the piece, “Forgiveness,” which opens with the line: “When I said I’d give my…
Media Blackout
She was common, flirty, she looked about MB30! • Super Heavy Goat Ass — 60,000 Years (Arc Light) :: Damn fine no-nonsense fuzztone blues rock from the Lone Star State that’ll never get the extensive cross-country breakout FM airplay it rightfully deserves because of their self-defeating career-limiting band name. • Serena Ryder — Unlikely Emergency…
Master of the macabre
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a purveyor of strange unmentionable horrors, the keeper of the dreaded Necronomicon, the literary successor to Edgar Allan Poe. Without him, there may not have been a Stephen King or an Evil Dead. His influence spans film and literature. Just as the word Proustian evokes long meandering sentences running between…
Our changing newspaper world
What continues to be most surprising about the papacy of Carole Leigh Hutton over at the Detroit Free Press is the utter ham-handed clumsiness of it. Two years ago, she suppressed an honest book review criticizing a mawkish book by Mitch Albom with all the grace of a squat 1930s commissar expropriating a peasant’s cow.…
Through the looking glass
In this French drama with touches of dry humor, various types of neediness are depicted, from the emotional hunger of a neglected child to the self-absorption of a successful adult. Against a backdrop of music that achieves an exquisite sort of perfection, foolish mortals stumble about, full of suspicious thoughts and misunderstandings. The filmmakers may…
Against all odds
If only Detroit Public Schools’ board of education simply required proof that art students are worth the money. They could easily look to Cass Tech high school senior Mario Moore. On Thursday, June 2, the teenager will be on stage at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, accepting his rightful place as second among 250,000 student…
The Interpreter
The stakes are set high — maybe a little too high — in Sydney Pollack’s new political thriller, in which Nicole Kidman stars as a mysterious UN interpreter who becomes a pawn in a convoluted assassination plan. Kidman and co-star Sean Penn smooth over the script’s rougher patches, and the gorgeously shot, on-location scenery is…
The food bug
The one bug that I intentionally ate wasn’t too bad. It may have been a grasshopper, hard to tell. It was crispy, seemed to have been roasted and had a sticky, candy-like coating the color of stained cherrywood. It was part of breakfast served in a beautifully enameled bento box in a ryokan, a traditional…
Eating Out
Welcome to the naughty Breakfast Club for the gay set. It’s a dirty little number with moments of gross-out so gross you just gotta laugh. With a nod to John Waters, Eating Out plays with worthy subject matter, though often botching it with superficiality that’s not funny enough. The film flirts with the phenomenon of…
The Harris Manifesto
Editor’s Note: There was a moment of high tension last week as Detroit Auditor General Joe Harris concluded the blistering financial critique he’d delivered to City Council. With his 10-year term ending this year, Harris let loose before heading out the door. He hammered the mayor for producing a proposed budget that Harris claims bears…
Dust to Glory
This documentary of the 2003 Baja 1000 race would have been better served if director Dana Brown had let the pictures and the drivers speak more for themselves. Instead, he drowns his movie in an extensive catalogue of interviews with racers, crew members, their families and fans, as well as his own clichéd commentary and…
More advice to 15-year-old girls
I’m a 50-year-old bisexual woman who has had more than my share of interesting male lovers, and I’m currently happily monogamous with the guy of my dreams. This is my advice to 15-year-old girls: 1. Befriend members of the opposite sex. Guys are people too. They have feelings, ideas and interests. Know them as individuals.…
Night of Henna
First-time writer/director Hassan Zee’s moviemaking skills are still green, and he pulled off Night of Henna on a shoestring. It all shows, but this little picture has some merits. It tells a classic American story of immigrant parents and second-generation kids trying to reconcile old traditions with Western desires — all delivered through a Pakistani-American…
Get the funk up
There was a time in Detroit when funk was king. With groups like Black Merda, the Propositions and the Lyman Woodard Organization, Detroit had a reputation as a place where people could come and lose their minds on a nightly basis. Those old enough to remember, or wise enough to buy a few key compilations,…
A Lot Like Love
Picture, if you will, When Harry Met Sally but without the witty repartee. Now throw in a pair of eye candy in the form of Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet. If you’re thinking A Lot Like Love looks a lot like crap, you’re thinking right. The story chronicles a couple’s evolution of hookups and hiccups,…
Still kicking
Anyone even remotely interested in punk rock knows the story of its emergence in the mid- to late-1970s. The Ramones and the New York Dolls did it first, the Sex Pistols followed suit and the rest is history. But for five pimply faced teenagers growing up in Derry, Ireland, who would later become the Undertones,…
Dope flow!
Around the late ’90s, word on the street was that you had to see Joel “Da Fluent” Greene in action to believe how magnetic his personality was. At the time, he was the host of Café Mahogany’s legendary open-mic poetry night. He was the “finger snaps, toe taps and dap” man who made every poet…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): A huge supply of frozen natural gas lies beneath the oceans. Researchers have just begun to develop the technology to mine it. When they succeed, civilization will gain access to more energy than is available from all the world’s oil reserves. This tantalizing prospect reminds me of your situation, Aries. You’re…
Night and Day
Thursday • 28 Patty Griffin MUSIC It’s possible that singer-songwriter Patty Griffin has inspired more young ladies to pick up the guitar than Dolly, Emmylou and Joni combined. The ethereal performer, whose musical offerings range from the femme folkiness of 1996’s Living with Ghosts to the sullen maturity of her latest album, 1000 Kisses, is…
Little Barrie
This four-song EP from bluesy British power trio Little Barrie came highly recommended by no less an authority than legendary Howlin’ Wolf guitarist Hubert Sumlin, who’s a big fan (and label mate). And it’s easy to see why. These three gents mash up funk and blues and soul in an inventive way, taking a simple…
Medium cool
The 1970s was a tumultuous decade, leaving many artists searching for a direct way to deal with an era of changing views on sexuality, race and politics. At that time, New York-based artist Lynda Benglis was at the forefront, using materials and media unfamiliar to the art world, such as poured latex and even video,…
White noise
This year’s Detroit Music Awards were billed as the kickoff event for the Motor City Music Conference. And they were, sort of. On Wednesday evening the State Theatre’s lobby was clogged with loitering hopefuls, musicians, merchandise hucksters and bright-eyed hangers-on. Most necks were adorned with newly minted MC2 badges, and chatter turned often to the…
Weekly Fecal
Pop fluff so weak it makes Savage Garden sound like Savage Grace by comparison. It takes all of 10 seconds to realize why Verraros didn’t win his American Idol stint — because his vocals are wafer-cookie brittle and thin. Usually, production gurus can protect artists with fat, booming rhythm tracks and calculated hooks; that doesn’t…
Pole positions
Polish-Americana is a vast work in progress that stretches back to this country’s revolutionary period, when military commanders Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski helped the fledgling United States gain independence from British rule. In Poland, over the course of 200 years that followed, political upheavals and partitions, uprisings and insurrections, invasions, massacres and broken treaties,…
Motives, money & MCMC
It’s dark and two Amazonian blondes from L.A. band Lithium wearing short porno skirts and hooker boots with cold goose-pimpled flesh are walking the deserted streets in downtown Detroit between 1515 Broadway and the 2500 Club. With them are Motor City Music Conference co-promoter and band manager Erica Koltonow, a few of her relatives, some…
