Lighting up
Thanks to seductive star Aaron Eckhart and a light yet wry screenplay by director Jason Reitman, the film version of Christopher Buckley’s novel captures all the sly jabs that made the Washington-skewering book such a juicy read. The movie may amount to little more than a weightless political romp, but when it does punch it…
Art Bar
Writing poetry, reading poetry, we are invited to join with others in celebrating life, even the ordinary, daily pleasures. Here the Seattle poet and physician Peter Pereira offers us a simple meal. A Pot of Red Lentils simmers on the kitchen stove. All afternoon dense kernels surrender to the fertile juices, their tender bellies swelling…
Letters to the Editor
Dick’s Tricks Re: Jack Lessenberry’s “Should We Bring Back The Draft” (Metro Times, March 22), no question bringing back the draft could increase opposition to the war in Iraq (if that’s possible) which could lead to a change of course as it did in Vietnam. But I don’t think it would with this administration. However,…
Joyeux Noël
It’s Christmas Eve, 1914. For weeks the French and Scots have fought in mud-filled trenches against the Germans, watching in horror as friends and family are gunned down. But in a moment of calm, the sound of bagpipes floats across the battlefield, and an opera tenor-turned German soldier steps out of his trench and joins…
Waxing Wayne
Wayne Shorter’s sense of musical self-rule rises and falls in the weight of his notes, in the shifting purr of his tonality, in the sound he hears in his head as a composer. That’s why he was a Jazz Messenger. That’s why guys like Miles Davis recruited him. That’s why the jazz world is so…
Keeping it on the KT
There’s a gaggle of them out there right now, the flavor of the week, chicks strumming $8,000 Taylor guitars, draped in gauzy boho-chic attire, and trying to grab hold of the brass ring the way Sheryl Crow did back in the ’90s. The industry buzz might help them get a short-lived radio hit and a…
The Syrian Bride
Try comparing the inconveniences of an everyday wedding to one in Golan Heights, the bitterly disputed area of land between Syria and Israel. Writer-director Eran Riklis deftly uses one woman’s arranged marriage to explore a multitude of conflicts, characters and customs. Though his film may look and feel like a Middle Eastern soap opera at…
Soapbox cinema
Special interest book clubs have been around for as long as Bible-study groups. But in our media-saturated age, television and film have usurped literature as our passion for discourse, and Internet message boards have replaced smoke-filled salons. With that in mind, Netflix has stepped in to merge our infatuation with cinema with our compulsive need…
FBI gets mugged
Peace activists make their point with pictures.
Shakespeare Behind Bars
For some of the inmates at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex, a medium-security prison in Kentucky, Shakespeare is salvation. For seven years, inmates at Luckett have been analyzing, rehearsing and performing plays by the Bard. Hank Rogerson’s riveting and unbiased documentary follows the yearlong journey of 18 inmate-actors as they prepare for a production of The…
More than love
“The Jiri Kylián ballets are not banal stories of ‘I love you, why don’t you love me?’ They’re beautiful paintings in lighting, costumes and music,” says Gradimir Pankov, artistic director of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal. And this weekend, the Detroit Opera House hosts the biggest dose of Kylián choreography to be seen in…
Deep stink
Would proposed law let factory farms dump on the environment?
Before the Fall
If you’re looking for a probing, harrowing analysis of how ordinary young men became sadistic puppets of the Third Reich, you won’t get it from Before the Fall. This German import bills itself as a sobering look at “Napolas” the Aryan training centers where impressionable boys were once indoctrinated into the evil ranks of Hitler…
Night & Day
Thursday • 6 Markus James MUSIC Guitar man Markus James grew up in Virginia, but he had to cross an ocean to find his personal sound. It was in Mali — yes, Mali — that he found the signature style that has won a following on the world-music circuit. He recorded his blues-infused records with…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Slither
Stepping into the director’s chair for the first time, James Gunn returns to his roots to deliver an entertaining mash-up of various popcorn horror flicks. If you’re a fan of John Carpenter’s The Thing, the original version of The Blob or Tremors, you’ll love this homage to schlock cinema. Mixed in with all the cheesy…
Shoot ’em up
ENTRY FORM The medium of photography has many histories. It’s as personal as a shoebox of Polaroids stuffed beneath the bed, as practical as a Xerox, as historical as war footage and as scientific as an X-ray. But it’s time for Metro Times’ 25th annual photo contest, and all we’re interested in is artistry. The…
ATL
Say this for the new coming-of-age flick ATL: It makes for great trailer material. In his movie debut, hip-hop video director Chris Robinson lavishes so much fancy camerawork on the ordinary Atlanta teens at the heart of his story, you almost feel like you’re being introduced to a new world. He works so hard to…
She-male trouble
Q: I’m a straight guy with conventional tastes in women. But a few years ago I accidentally ended up at a bar with drag queens. I found myself surprisingly turned on by this drag queen in a G-string who came over and shook her tits in my face. Ever since then I’ve had fantasies about…
Basic Instinct 2
The sequel to 1992’s Basic Instinct opens with a high-speed hand job in an Alfa Romeo Spider racing through London, proving that Sharon Stone can still go from zero to orgasm in a matter of seconds. The biggest blunder with reprising the ice-pick-wielding Catherine Tramell role isn’t Stone’s age but the fact that someone decided…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Why does the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame have an ongoing vendetta against Alice Cooper? Why hasn’t Alice Cooper ever been nominated, let alone inducted, into the Rock Hall? If the prerequisite for consideration is being a pioneering and influential rock ‘n’ roll artist with a series of multimillion-selling hit albums and hit singles…
Ice Age: The Meltdown
The first Ice Age, though hardly an animated classic, was likable enough. The sequel is smart enough to recognize the appeal of pummeling the crap out of cute little critters and gives the single-minded Scrat a lot more screen time, brightening up the film’s otherwise tepid story. Unfortunately, very little of the humor comes from…
Bad medicine
In the summer of 2004, Native American activist Kay McGowan spotted David Santacroce at a cocktail party. Santacroce directs the University of Michigan Clinical Law Program that gives students hands-on training with clients who otherwise could not afford legal representation. McGowan, a cultural anthropologist, author and university instructor who is a member of the National…
Born to loose
Jeff Tweedy, Glenn Kotche and Jim O’Rourke’s initial 2003 collaboration as Loose Fur was mostly an idea jam. But the self-titled EP’s scuffed and blurred musical snapshots still summarized the conceptual American pop that eventually defined Wilco’s last two albums. This time around, everyone’s more comfortable. Kotche’s ensconced as Wilco’s drummer, and Tweedy’s no longer…
Bush push
According to its director, Lucy Harrison, the American Indian Health and Family Services of Southeast Michigan has nearly 15,000 encounters a year with sick and needy American Indians. But under President Bush’s fiscal year 2007 budget, funding would be eliminated for the southwest Detroit clinic and 33 others like it in urban settings throughout the…
Almost Home
The name Ellington Jordan should be familiar to anyone who’s ever scanned the writing credits of Etta James’ huge hit “I’d Rather Go Blind.” As “Fugi,” Jordan also played a role in the career trajectory of legendary Motor City group Black Merda “(see The Merda files,” Metro Times, Dec. 1, 2004). Not long ago, Fugi,…
Day by day
Joseph Steward never had much of a chance. Born into the poor southwest Detroit neighborhood where he still resides, he has taken medication for a variety of physical ailments since he was a child. Steward has always been unusually small. When he was a teenager, an infected batch of human growth hormone gave him a…
12” Pop shots
This eight-song Little Claw debut is the kind of thing every town needs; noise and scree for ADD-addled kids and people too oblivious to pay attention to three-minute pop. It’s the kind of shit that’s resurfaced in indie music of late, where you spray-paint your own record sleeves and play shows whenever and wherever for…
Tonya’s ticking bomb
The house that Tonya Passage and her husband rent in a working-class section of Wyandotte is fractured and broken. One of the outside doors doesn’t open. The stairs are creaky. But inside, it’s remarkably clean and neat. It is decorated with coverlets and paintings that reflect her heritage as a member of the Sault Ste.…
Constant Companion
Constant Companion was Ruthann Friedman’s lone album. Originally released in 1969, its stripped-bare style floats alongside Clouds, Joni Mitchell’s record of that year. Friedman’s vocals and plucked acoustic guitar are dressed only in filmy fabric and misty morning echo, like she’s singing her songs to gathered lovers and friends after a night of wine and…
Head Cheese
As his 2005 album proves, Detroit’s Jason Croff offers more than the usual singer-songwriter wooden stool. There are no weary platitudes or generic paeans to heartbreakers here. With piano, smart turns of lyric, and a smart, versatile band, Croff makes stylish pop that rings with songwriting know-how but also stays on edge. Here Croff lays…
Bob’s back pages
Trying to figure Bob Dylan out is a tough task — just ask the man himself. In a 1984 European press conference, Dylan told reporters: “I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now. What I’ve done, what I’m doing, nobody else does or has done. When I’m dead and…
Eye To The Telescope
Was that really a boisterous KT Tunstall bellying up to the Stubbs’ bar alongside MT at South By Southwest in Austin last year? The raven-haired Scottish songstress wasn’t listed among the night’s performers; turns out she’d bum-rushed her way onto the bill, her cheekiness paying dividends in the way of several hundred new fans. Yours…
Men of the people
Edward Glaeser is a man who lives on a six-and-a-half-acre estate in rural Massachusetts, and likes wearing tailored suits, a pocket watch on a gold chain and large silver cuff links. A man of the people, in other words. He is also a brilliant economist who is regarded as a “genius” and the “most exciting”…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Attitude galore
As they strut, sulk, preen, pose, glower, pout, stare or hide behind sunglasses, Kristin Beaver’s “sitters” do anything but sit or stand decorously in the manner of classic portraiture. Her show of more than two dozen oils at Meadow Brook Art Gallery, though certainly dashing, eschews the grand manner and to-the-manner-born subjects of Sargent, Boldini,…
Raising Kane
The New York Dolls’ story of decline and resurrection is one of the most stirring in rock ‘n’ roll history. No small part of that tale is how one of their key dudes, Arthur “Killer” Kane, converted to Mormonism — about as far from glam rock debauchery as you can get — then finally reconnected…
Yams, hams & jams
It’s not common to find a bar where everyone seems to know each other and yet newcomers don’t feel excluded. Dozens of regulars turn up Wednesdays and Thursdays for the open mic jazz jam sessions. Bert’s serves the music fans bargain-price soul food from rows of steam tables: meat and two sides for nine bucks,…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): If you live to be 90 years old, you will have spent a total of eight months sitting in your car stopped at red lights. In addition, you will have wasted 10 months standing in lines at stores, banks, and government agencies, and you will have lost almost two years killing…
Backslash
Getting out — Everybody needs to get away sometimes — but the notion of traveling to countries where our cultural customs may not be common or even tolerated can be intimidating. It’s even more troubling when your lifestyle is subject to discrimination in your home country. That’s where gay and lesbian tourism groups come in.…
