Free Will Astrology
Are you an Aries who pushes on doors that have “pull” signs? Do you think it’s a thrill to open cartons from the end that reads “open other end”? Do you love to drive in the carpool lane when you’re alone in your car? Please use your rebellious energy more constructively. You’re now in possession…
Shazaam!
Green Brain Comics’ giant giveaway beams up life as we know it….
Voices go on
Speaking of collateral damage, one of many innocent bystanders affected by the continuing leak in the stock market balloon is Detroit’s own InsideOut. The literary arts project, which has brought thousands of blossoming Detroit Public Schools poets and prose writers into contact with writer-mentors-in-residence for the past nine years, took a serious hit to the…
Shop around
Don’t assume you can’t get a low-cost mortgage. Before signing a loan, shop around. Both the Detroit office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now and the Detroit Alliance for Fair Banking offer consultation, seminars and classes on home finance and lending. Call Richard Winslow at ACORN, 313-963-1840, or Veronica Williams at the…
Black-eyed pleas
As feds rest case in terror trial, they are accused of intimidation of a witness….
Good kinky vs. bad kinky
Two weeks ago, I responded to a letter from Fifteen and Gay, a closeted gay high school sophomore who longed to be “some dude’s sex slave.” FAG met a 38-year-old “really nice guy” on the Internet who offered to pick him up from school, take him back to his house, and make FAG his sex…
Open for foreclosure
Spike in mortgage defaults fuels debate over "predatory lending."…
Concrete calling
Johnette Napolitano on Bush, mortgages and aging in song….
Four on the floor
Here’s a classic tale told a thousand times: A teenager with hormones to spare makes some friends who also happen to play musical instruments. They find some common musical ground and begin playing around for fun — even if they’re not so proficient right away and no one’s paying attention yet. Soon they’re recording some…
Bush spotlights Dearborn
George W. Bush, installed president of the United States, military victor over Saddam Hussein and somewhat worried candidate for re-election, came to Dearborn on Monday, as the press release said, “to discuss the future of a newly liberated Iraq.” That rings more than a little false, since Our Leader is fond of sneering that he…
Tough breaks
DJ ’Munk on stretching ears and sharing music….
Drawings in old places
As you walk up to this red, one-story structure surrounded by trees, vacant lots and houses built at the beginning of the 20th century, it starts to become clear that Alley Culture is truly one of a kind. A renovated garage-turned-gallery in the alley south of Willis, between Trumbull and Lincoln, it has been showing…
Juggling altruism, rank exploitation
The 10th annual Hip-Hop Summit, held Saturday at Cobo Hall, was a compelling juxtaposition. It was late-night TV self-help infomercial-meets-anti-war activism-meets-youth voter registration rally — all as a means to participate in a greater good under the umbrella of hip-hop culture. The event, part of a national effort facilitated by Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, was…
April 30-May 6, 2003
30 WED • MUSIC No Ego Open-Mic Night — Still working on that folky opus? Need a forum for expression? From bluegrass to jazz to gypsy music to folk, this welcoming open-mic setting is perfect for any musician with a hankering to share. Keep the amp at home, though, this is an intimate, all-acoustic event.…
Pie in the eye
Despite his/ her/ their phantom status, Detroit’s irascible terrapin tagger(s) won’t stop stirring trouble, even if it’s only indirectly. Jef Bourgeau, founding director of the now-homeless Museum of New Art, has announced a bounty on the head of Aaron Timlin, director of the Detroit Artists Market. Bourgeau and New York graffiti artist Crash are each…
Letters to the Editor
On the team Thank you so much for publishing the edited transcript of Tim Robbins’ National Press Club speech (“‘A chill wind is blowing in this nation…’” Metro Times, April 23-29). I watched Tim on CNN and was overwhelmed with a newfound sense of patriotism. Boy, I haven’t felt that in a really long time.…
Appropriate this story
The hot topic in journalism circles in Memphis, Tenn., is a scandal swirling around the Tri-State Defender, an African-American weekly newspaper there. The controversy began when a reporter at the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly in Oakland, Calif., discovered that the Defender had printed a pared-down version of a lengthy Express investigative piece. As…
Love bites
The vagaries and travesties of affection at Trinity House Theatre….
Perpetual peeves
From the more things change, the more they stay the same file, News Hits offers up the latest list of gripes Detroit residents have about their city. Damned if it doesn’t look a whole lot like last year’s list, which looked a lot like the list produced the year before that. Doing the tallying is…
Monster-osity
It’s usually out of the ashes of failure and disappointment that the future arises, which is exactly the story behind the making of Dead/Undead, a genre flick that trades on the rich history of the horror film. Co-directed by four guys from the Royal Oak area, the locally made indie was conceived by Daniel Casey…
Acting its age
This morning, I woke up, feelin’ brand new. I jumped up feelin’ my highs, and my lows, in my soul, and my goals. —Talib Kweli, “Get By” On Saturday, hip hop acted its age. I had a feeling something powerful was going to happen at Saturday’s Detroit Hip- Hop Summit, which was part of…
Desolation row no more
This structure at 11000 E. Jefferson was once one in a long row of dilapidated storefronts that helped make this eastside neighborhood look a lot like Berlin just after World War II. But over the past several months the neighboring buildings have been razed to make room for a new commercial development, while this one…
Spun dizzy by Dubya
Isn’t it amazing, my friend asks, how the White House successfully spun the war in Iraq to win the support of the majority of Americans? No, I am not surprised at all, I respond. Americans are malleable, like Silly Putty. Any society that can be convinced that $150 sneakers are the key to status is…
Disabled, distraught
Detroiter Harry Baker faces a September deadline to leave his Margareta Street home. The disabled Vietnam vet refinanced his house twice to get money for home repairs and to pay expenses, but couldn’t keep up with increasing house payments. His home is valued at $30,000; he owes $81,000 on it. Baker says he could manage…
“They’ll do anything”
Senator O’Brien of Bloomfield Hills says when he was a kid, his dad, a Michigan senator, won all his political battles. All of them, that is, until the politician tried to regulate mortgage banking, at which point “he got his butt kicked,” says O’Brien. Now, O’Brien, a singer-songwriter, and his actress wife, Nicole, know how…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
This structure at 11000 E. Jefferson was once one in a long row of dilapidated storefronts that helped make this eastside neighborhood look a lot like Berlin just after World War II. But over the past several months the neighboring buildings have been razed to make room for a new commercial development, while this one…
Better Luck Tomorrow
Justin Lin’s film, about four months in the lives of a group of would-be bad boy, top-of-their-class, Californian-Asian high schoolers who supplement their 4.0s with 9mms, captures that special teenaged feeling of invincibility, wrapping it in a stylish blanket of techno-rough cinematography and editing.
Multiple and choice
An Oxford professor has discovered why it’s more fun to eat tapas-style than to concentrate on just a few foods per meal. Apparently, many of the brain’s taste neurons respond only to specific smells, tastes and textures. This is one reason that Windsor’s new tapas-inspired Three is such a terrific place. The idea is to…
Requiem thrill ride
Jonas Åkerlund (the Swedish director whose music video for Prodigy’s "Smack My Bitch Up" was banned by MTV) runs his first feature film on a dark sense of humor. This cinematic carousel ride on methamphetamine recalls the drug-taking montages of Requiem for a Dream revved up to the visual redline.
The Man Without a Past
Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s latest is being hailed as both a return to and an extension of the style and thrust of his earlier films. The title character, simply called M, rises from the dead and, with no memory of his former life, waits for something to fill him in.
Identity
Geezer: HHHH / Weezer: HHHH
Director James Mangold’s dread-on cocktail of claustrophobia and psychosis will do a lot for the filmmaker’s rep, but even more for late-night video rentals for decades to come. Weezer says, "What a shocker! I was hoping for an above-average mystery-horror-thriller, but this was awesome."
Seven and a Match/ Side Streets
Seven and a Match
HH 1/2
Side Streets
HHH
Ann Arbor’s Madstone Theaters kick off "Film Forward" (a series dedicated to giving the Indie underdogs a chance to be seen by the people who inspire them) with two films, showing now through May 14, that cock a couple different angles across the web of human…
Confidence
This isn’t the first and surely won’t be the last movie to be made in which the direction is so ostentatious that it veers into the heavy-handed. Edward Burns, Dustin Hoffman and Rachel Weisz get screwed by the people who are supposedly paid to make them look good.
