Literary Quarterly: Fall 1999
Comic books, Barbie dolls, and candle wax… no, Bernardo Bertolucci and Quentin Tarantino are not making a film together. Even better — it’s the uniquely feminine fall edition of MT’s Literary Quarterly, featuring: Trina Robbin’s fresh take on women in comics; the sublimely perverse fascination of photographer Richard Kern; a femme farewell to Barbie and…
The Thomas Crown Affair
The pleasures of The Thomas Crown Affair are emblematic of what has been lost at the movies in our blockbuster era. This glossy fantasy of immense wealth and even greater sophistication (the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand) is a rarity: a movie about grown-ups who know themselves, what they want and how to…
Food for thought
From around the corner in the Detroit Institute of Arts’ European Art collection, I hear a horrified gasp, followed by a hysterical whine and quick footsteps. I look up from the painting I’ve been perusing, only to see the Lizard of Fun galloping toward me. "Thank bob, you’re here!" it says, the whine in its…
The Sixth Sense
Little Cole Sear (superbly played by Haley Joel Osment) lives inside a fraction of reality invisible to the naked eye. In his world, angry phantoms move about freely, unaware of their lack of substance. Restless, mutilated souls, pitiful and frightening, they appeal to him, asking for justice. The air grows cold when they lose their…
Pitch’d
GENERATION ECSTASY Detroit is at a crossroads: The generation gap in this still-young scene is getting wider and wider. The folks who first threw parties we called raves in the early ’90s – the parties that alienated the scene that came before them (Music Institute, UN, etc.) – are now even further from their progeny,…
Eternity and a Day
Like his last film Ulysses Gaze (1995), Greek writer-director Theo Angelopoulos’s Eternity and a Day wears its solemnity on its sleeve. With its long, brooding and often pictorially beautiful takes, its use of a rather elemental poetic language (ill-served, one suspects by translation), and its central theme of death and memory, the whole enterprise seems…
Food stuff
KNEADFUL THINGS I like bread. I like bread a lot, especially fresh and warm from the oven with a smear of butter and maybe some strawberry jam. Trouble is, I hate making bread. It’s just too darn much work. My arms get tired kneading the dough, and I get impatient waiting for it to rise.…
Book of Quandaries
Here’s the deal. Name-brand photographer produces semiautobiographical collection of images and text, handsomely printed and artfully packaged, replete with titillating snaps on the luxe slip-case. Question is, do you need to buy a copy? The photographer is Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953), whose works – especially those dealing with gender, sexuality, etc. – are well…
Back to basics
The first time I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, I was 15. It was a revelation of the highest order. Everything about it was stunning – the handheld camera work in the sexy streets of Gay Paree, the jazzy score, the insouciant mischief-making of Jean-Paul Belmondo, the blond naïveté of Jean Seberg and, of course, the…
Buh-bye, bimbo
It’s easy to find a scapegoat for the dysfunctional relationship American women have with their bodies. Whenever your favorite woman asks, "Do these jeans make me look fat?" all you have to do is shrug and point: The Media (capital M, which is an upside down W, which stands for Women’s magazines). Society (as a…
Picking up the pieces
The collapse of MCA Financial Corp. earlier this year could be a coup for the city of Detroit and residents, says City Council President Pro Tem Maryann Mahaffey. According to Mahaffey, the city and Wayne County are putting together a nonprofit corporation to manage about 1,500 homes that the defunct mortgage company owned before it…
Creepy kid stuff
"Soon all the kids in England will be pushing up daisies. That’s what Girl says every night before I go to sleep. Girl is my sister and I’m scared of her. She’s seventeen years old and got ice in her veins. Tonight she reads me my rights." His name is Billy and her name is…
Oakland’s looming trash problem
A recent report calls for dramatic improvement in recycling and other efforts to save landfill space in Oakland County, given that the space could run out as soon as 2004. Of more than 5,000 tons of waste generated daily in the county, about 18 percent is diverted from landfills through programs such as recycling and…
Secrets in camera
A young woman lifts her chin to the ceiling as she holds a lit red candle between her teeth. The flame’s reflection is a tiny white dot in the solitary eye of her profile. Although "Jen with a Candle in Her Mouth" is one of Richard Kern’s color photographs, its limited range of yellows, muted…
Art of demolition
Despite efforts to find an alternate location for the Institute of Music and Dance, its staff, parents and students remain irate about the hasty announcement that the longtime Detroit institution faces the wrecking ball. In a July 21 letter, Center of Creative Studies president Richard Rogers told students and their families that the institute’s building…
Va-va-voom!
If you think comic books have yellowed and cracked into antiquated photo albums of ink-splotched men in tights crammed between the baseball card holders and pogs ’n’ slammers at some hobby shop, scratch your temple and think again. While their mainstream commercial success has declined in the past four decades, comic books have managed to…
Camp No Nuke
Anti-nuclear activists from throughout the Great Lakes region will gather in western Michigan in mid-August to discuss issues and devise strategies. Sponsors of the event being held at Camp Soni Springs near Three Oaks expect 500 to 1,000 people to participate in the weeklong activities. "We hope to educate, motivate and teach various skills," says…
Weird Science
Who in hip hop has earned the right to be awkward more than Kool Keith? Who is freakier than Dr. Octagon? Who deserves more bragging rights than Poppa Large, Big Shot on the East Coast? Who can turn an obtuse track into something strangely creative better than Black Elvis? Ladies and gentlemen, hip hop’s most…
Building a ‘Mystery’
Everyone in the comic business wants to do movies and everyone in the movie business wants to do comics,” says Mike Richardson, who founded Dark Horse Comics in 1986, then segued into Dark Horse Entertainment four years later to produce film versions of their popular series like The Mask and Barb Wire. “I can tell…
Breathtaking
The other Man in Black of the music world, Japan’s Keiji Haino, provides one of this era’s most intense creative identities. His music, whether solo with his "rock" trio Fushitsusha or with other great improvisers of the world, extends notions of rock and improvisation, pushing the massive energy of Blue Cheer into Derek Bailey’s realm…
Her-story
In case of this./A story./Subjects and places./In place of this./A story./Subjects and traces./In face of this./A story./Subjects and places./In place of this and in place of this./A story./Subject places./In place of this./A story.– Gertrude Stein In case of this: Consider the journey of a book – any book – from its conception to its death.…
Better red than dead
How relentless is Mayo Thompson? After more than 30 years of crusading as the Red Krayola, the man is still pushing the limits of the anarchistic song structures that lie somewhere between rock and art. And while Thompson’s original bandmates, Frederick Barthelme and Steve Cunningham, are long gone, they are not completely forgotten. On Fingerpainting,…
Outsides in
Walt Whitman wrote "I hear America singing" in Leaves of Grass, which is as close to a true national anthem as we’re likely ever to have bestowed upon us as a people. We’re so different and crotchety and little tolerant of each other, yet hell-bent – each and every one – on expressing fully, independently,…
Glam-Rock Revisited
The Chamber Strings emulate the glam-rock era when Marc Bolan would strum his post-hippie mystical shit into his navel. The invention of singer-songwriter Kevin Junior, who began his career in 1987 with Mystery Girls and later the Rosehips, the Chamber Strings adhere to the lazy, stoned feeling of those early ’70s albums. Recorded in London…
How Nixon got his groove back
Believe it or not, Richard Milhous Nixon once wrote me a letter calling me an "opinion leader." (That ought to resolve any lingering doubts about this column.) The letter was attached to page proofs of one of the many books he cranked out after his fall from power in an effort to prove he was…
New pop order
When last we left our Teen-C heroes, Sci-Fi Steven, Disco John and Manda Rin, they had exploded onto the international pop music scene with hyperactive sloganeering, a boundless ability to nail gloriously naïve sci-fi/pop music/youthful-revolutionary sing-song chants and rants to impossibly hooky sketches of pop songs. Well, kids, it now seems as though our heroes…
On a clear day…
Poetic realist Ann Mikolowski painted both a record of her times and timelessness itself….
The Loss of Sexual Innocence
A small boy looks into the eye of an ancient camera. An old man listens to a young girl read. The man is fully dressed. The girl is in her undergarments. The camera caresses her ankles, her legs, her inexperienced thighs. The boy is watching. Time stands still. A boy, a girl, a funeral. Crowds,…
Jagged little thrill
God bless Roni Size. Not because he cut off those damn dreads of his, but because the Reprazent producer finally got wise and found himself a frontwoman – not a featured vocalist, not some sampled diva, but a real live fire-breathing frontwoman, – around which to build his newest drum ’n’ bass project. Vocalist Leonie…
Prose garden …
Gardener of Stars, a novel in progress, is an episodic conversation to a third party (the reader) of two women who are thrown together in a post-plague world by their own communal utopian fantasies while paradoxically separated temporally and spatially. In this episode, Gardener is trying to situate herself in a city of men and…
Mystery Men
Movies adapted from comics tend to come off as either broadly cartoonish or pretentiously self-important. Mystery Men avoids these pitfalls because of the very nature of its not-so-super heroes. This is The B-Team, a group of crime-fighters who no one would think to call when things get rough. While they’re fully aware of their lowly…
Tribute
In the late ’80s, before alternative became the standard cliché it became in the ’90s, a Boston quartet named the Pixies came out of nowhere and pretty much laid out the blueprint for much of the alt-rock to follow. Over the course of five albums, the Pixies blazed a trail and made things a lot…
Schools critic turns power player
Announced amid fanfare three years ago, the $60 million 21st Century Initiative was supposed to show the old Detroit school board how to reinvent its schools. A quieter initiative two years ago was supposed to show the board how to reinvent itself. Ultimately, both efforts helped foster the demise of the old city board. And…
The Iron Giant
The charm of The Iron Giant is that it draws on a collective bank of memory. The misunderstood monster theme is pleasantly familiar. Then, the animation around the Giant (Vin Diesel) looks like a Bugs Bunny cartoon – all clean lines, flat colors and one-dimensional faces. You’d almost expect Yosemite Sam to bust out of…
Scott Fab
Sometimes acoustic and other times electrically inclined, Scott Fab means moody and vibe-heavy songsmithery. Fab’s paints his lyrical mural in muted post-folk rock tones, with a cautious optimism that’s at once both kind and blue.
