Down with sex!
Quick history quiz, comrades: Which of these three men would you say was the most morally admirable: A) King George III of Great Britain, the one the founding fathers rebelled against; B) Benjamin Franklin, genius and inventor; or C) Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and later the president who doubled the size…
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
Jacques Audiard delivers a stylishly chilly re-imagination of James Toback’s 1978 film, Fingers. Darker, more ambiguous and, well, French, it bristles with intimate energy. Romain Duris stars as Tom, a crooked real estate broker and thug. Discontent with his violent life, he struggles to leave the low life behind and become a concert pianist. A…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): It’s time to play a game called Do-It-Yourself Horoscope! Here’s how it works: I provide a skeleton outline of your fortune, and you fill in the blanks. Ready? Weave the following threads together to create your oracle. 1) The magic toy is within reach. 2) Sexy heresies are risky and wise.…
Ladies sing the blues
It’s a hot, wet July afternoon at Nancy Whiskey’s, and a rich and soulful voice is bouncing off the tin ceiling inside the century-old Corktown bar. Heady blues-belter Lady T is offering up a gut-driven version of “Happy Birthday.” When she adds the “how old are you?” line, the one meant for kids, or to…
Last Days
A portrait of a drug-addled rock star — based loosely on Kurt Cobain — that’s so deliberately garbled, mundane and unromantic, it makes the “this is your brain on drugs” commercials look like trailers for a Michael Bay film.
Backslash
Liberal libations — Given the current presidential administration, things look pretty bleak for those who lean toward the left. Since Sandra Day O’Conner has split, Roe v. Wade teeters in a precarious position; the Shrub is pushing “intelligent design” in schools and the Christian right wants to censor everything from video games to TV commercials.…
Smash bash
This year marks the seventh anniversary of the Summer Smash music festival, practically making it a staple of Detroit’s ever-shifting music scene. And yet, unless you are a local indie rock enthusiast, you’ve probably never heard of it. So, with the 2005 version happening this weekend in Corktown at the Lager House, that cozy den…
The Skeleton Key
The plucky Kate Hudson uncovers a horrific secret in the attic of a New Orleans mansion in this clichéd but effective supernatural thriller. The Skeleton Key is the same pseudo-mystical fright show Hollywood has been dishing up for years, but it’s tense, creatively convoluted and skillfully acted.
Adieu, Carleton S. Gholz
More than 500 nights. That’s how many times I figure I’ve gone out in the last six years in Detroit as a dancing, bullshitting, chin-scratching participant-observer in one of the most intense, competitive music scenes in the world. It’s nothing compared to Cliff Thomas’s 25 years at Buy Rite Records or Zana “Spectacles” Smith’s three…
Senior shove
Advocates for senior housing are criticizing the city of Detroit’s decision to pursue a high-priced condo development at the site of the former Rochdale Court Apartments. Located at the corner of Lafayette and Orleans, the building — which offered senior citizens affordable housing — was torn down in 2002 with the understanding that its replacement…
The Great Raid
Based on true events during the end of World War II, this film recounts one of the most daring and successful rescue operations in American history. However, director John Dahl only offers a sturdy but static depiction of patriotic courage. But despite a clumsy setup and flawed character narratives, Dahl redeems the film with the…
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate In this fascinating poem by the California poet Jane Hirshfield, the speaker discovers that through paying attention to an event she has become part of it, has indeed become inseparable from the event and its implications. This is more than an act of empathy.…
Head Cheese
The man who killed hippie rock, who reinvented the teen anthem, who took glitter rock Top 40, who made fans of Dylan and Nilsson, and who’s wrestled with more demons than Shane MacGowan, still does, um, killer tour business. And he continues to release a laudable new album every couple years. Sure, he’s been copped…
Four Brothers
Yet another set-in-Detroit, shot-in-Canada action flick, Four Brothers tells the tale of a group of interracial, adopted siblings who set out to avenge their saintly mother’s death. A couple of strong performances can’t make up for director John Singleton’s confused approach to the material.
Media Blackout
MB44 … it’s about having fun, but it’s no joke! • Lenny Bruce — Thank You Mask Man (Fantasy) :: No, thank you. • Andrew Dice Clay — The Diceman Cometh (American) :: Now, more than ever. • Vaughn Meader — The First Family (Cadence) :: He looked like JFK, he sounded like JFK, and…
Night and Day
Friday • 19 Art & Wine Crawl FUN FOR ALL The city of Wyandotte presents an Art & Wine Crawl to benefit the Josephine Ford Cancer Center-Downriver this week. Works by more than 20 artists will be on display at various downtown businesses, which will also offer a selection of sparkling, red, white and dessert…
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
Rob Schneider returns for a sequel that’s even louder and lewder than the first film dedicated to lovable loser and male prostitute Deuce. Enjoyment of all this nonsense depends entirely on your tolerance for gross-outs and dick jokes, and whether you find the term “man-whore” funny the 50th time around. The flick employs a strategy…
Wild about jazz
In the 1940s, Idlewild in western Michigan was a popular visiting place for such legendary jazz artists as Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan. In those days, the small township was one of the few places where African-Americans, so often hemmed in by discrimination elsewhere, could vacation freely and buy summer homes. Jazz clubs such as…
Wrecking-ball blues
Whither the United Artists and Fine Arts?
Some sensational scoops
Don’t be confused by the fruit names — these are not sherbets. They combine fruit purees with butterfat to produce that rich taste and velvety texture that only cream can bestow. Nonfruit ice creams are equally inspired. The array of Mediterranean and European pastries is vast and changes daily. Shatila has a few nonsweet offerings,…
How to break off a no-strings affair
Q: You so rarely answer questions of etiquette in your column, unlike so many of your advice-giving peers. Here’s one for you: I’ve been in a casual sexual relationship with this girl for about four months. (Two months ago we spoke, reaffirming that all either of us wanted was the casual sex.) I have grown…
Democracy on parade
Dearborn parade flap ends in free speech win.
Very well mixed
It’s a sound track, it’s a mixtape. In Jim Jarmusch’s new film Broken Flowers, a neighbor gives Bill Murray’s shiftless main character some music for a road trip, dusky and curious Ethiopian jazz from bandleader Mulatu Astatke. Beautiful as jazz but taken for left and right turns, it sounds vaguely familiar but also foreign and,…
The goods on garlic
If you ever want to build a pyramid in debilitating desert heat, eat a lot of garlic. Do the same thing, and you’ll never have to worry about a vampire sucking on your neck — or much of anybody else, for that matter. It can make an exceptional meal out of the honeycomb-patterned lining of…
Who gives a shirt?
Birmingham teen doffs T under duress.
Different Class: Complete Singles and Unreleased Recordings
Squished beneath the glitter boots of the Sweet, Slade and T. Rex, U.K. quartet Jook sadly went unnoticed as one of that era’s Bright Young Things. Too bad too, ’cause the sides collected here (their RCA and Chiswick-Bomp singles, plus unreleased songs from an ill-fated album) find a band befitting its (major label) contract and…
Dwelling on the positive
Andwele Gardner, 27, better known to the music world as Dwele, makes the kind of soul music that suggests he’s more a lover than a fighter. And that may be true. But when you grow up in the neighborhoods that line legendarily tough Joy Road on Detroit’s West Side, you learn quickly when to love,…
Point blank
Sign tells recreation-seekers to hold their fire.
Momentum
As befitting a practitioner of state-of-the-art jazz, tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman has released two discs reflecting both sides of the contempo coin; the Elastic Band plays listener-friendly, if occasionally tedious, funk-jazz while the SF Collective plays in a more traditional and also occasionally tedious if slightly left-of-center mainstream style. The Elastic Band has a lot…
In The Flesh
Le Tigre and Electrelane St. Andrew’s Hall Aug. 7 Sure, Le Tigre preach to the choir — so what? In today’s depressingly conservative climate, the choir could definitely use some preaching. So it’s not surprising that the political, electro-punk party thrown by the New York City trio — Johanna Fateman, former Bikini Kill shouter Kathleen…
Proactive
The ride side — This week, Proactive offers a forum to Lawrence Hands, head of the group Transportation Riders United. Hands wants y’all to turn out Thursday, Aug. 18, and raise your voices in opposition to the plan to expand I-75 from Eight Mile Road to M-59. Here’s why: “For the last 50 years, metro…
Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah
Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah’s self-titled debut begins with a revival organ and the froggy wail of Alec Ounsworth. It’s not really an opening song. It sounds like Ounsworth sitting in a tiny apartment imagining the opening song of his band’s album, if they were to make it. Well, Clap Your Hands made it,…
Weekly Fecal
Little Steven’s Underground Garage Radio Show There’s nothing wrong with liking yourself, but unhinged self-adoration should frighten the living piss out of the public. Meet the new corporate ego, same as the old corporate ego.
Letters to the Editor
That’s cold, Jack There’s obviously something personal when it comes to a Lessenberry column about the Free Press. I never really had a problem with that. What offends me to no end about his Aug. 10 column “Read All About It” is the line about the “smug little people who now work at the Freep…
J.A.C.
Much has changed since Austria’s Richard Dorfmeister and his partner Peter Kruder all but invented the stylish downtempo instrumental funk that paved the way for careers of such like-minded beat-craftsmen as Thievery Corporation. First off, Dorf has a new partner — pianist Rupert Huber — and is also a new dad, both of which are…
Dog day aftermath
Q: You want a little personal responsibility, Dan? I couldn’t agree more, so let me lead the way: I fuck dogs. (Actually, I don’t own a dog at the moment, but if I did you can bet we’d be doing it like, well, animals.) Since your advice to Help Me, the girl who supposedly awakened…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
Weekly Fecal
There’s nothing wrong with liking yourself, but unhinged self-adoration should frighten the living piss out of the public. Meet the new corporate ego, same as the old corporate ego. Art Rambo writes about music for Metro Times. Send comments to letters@metrotimes.com.
Healing work
Anyone who has suffered the anxiety and sadness of having a loved one injured or ailing knows that merely moving around in the world can seem impossible. Artist Charles McGee remembers it well. So when he was commissioned a few years ago to create an artwork for Detroit Receiving Hospital’s emergency waiting room, he thought…
Back in blue
Alberta Adams I’m On The Move — Eastlawn — 2003 Live AA — Eastlawn — 2002 Say Baby Say — Cannonball — 2000 Uncut Detroit II (compilation) — Venture — 2000 Born With the Blues — Cannonball — 1999 T.J. Fowler and his Rockin’ Jump Band (featuring Calvin Frazier) — Savoy Jazz — 1999 Women…
Closing the book
“It’s kind of like a funeral,” independent bookseller Fred Hughes says of the customers who shuffle in and out of Paperbacks Unlimited to pay their last respects. “Except I’m not dying — the store is.” After 36 years on Woodward Avenue in Ferndale, the store is closing Sept. 15. Hughes is calling it quits and,…
Cart and soul
The sight of a street-corner hot dog vendor a block from our downtown offices reminded me of an old newsroom colleague hard at work while a rubber ducky face peeked out from under his tochis. I was sitting one miserable summer’s day in a remote, dark corner of the newsroom, hiding — the heat being…
Leaping over land
After choreographing more than 100 dances and running his own company for more than a decade, Peter Sparling knows dance. A third-generation Michigander, he left Detroit for New York in the late ’60s, studied at The Juilliard School and became a disciple of American modern dance greats Jose Limón and Martha Graham. After spending about…
Funny face
Jim Jarmusch’s melancholy road movie, Broken Flowers, is a deadpan love letter to Bill Murray, creating a wistful and mildly comic portrait of a man whose reluctance to grow has left him lonely and without meaning. He plays Don Johnston, an ex-lothario who visits four old flames after learning he may have a teenage son.…
