In one ear
I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT A couple weeks ago I had a dream that left me smiling. Not a Jennifer Lopez-whipped cream-bikini dream. Better … well, almost. I’m on stage at Woodstock playing guitar with Bob Marley, and we’re jammin’ in front of an endless mass of fans. I look left, there’s…
Beach blanket crapshoot
"It’s open, so you assume its safe," said Margaret Finch as she helped her daughter dry off from a recent swim in Kensington Metropark’s Kent Lake. "You don’t see any dead fish." She’s wrong. With no state or federal laws mandating water testing or the closing of contaminated beaches, Michigan swimmers often enter the water…
Mogue Doyle
Mogue Doyle play proud Irish songs that make you want to stand tall and raise your beer stein in approval. Quoting the Pogues as an influence, this ten member band has had the pleasure of opening for their idol Shane MacGowan at St. Andrews Hall. Like Shane, Mogue’s singer has strong, raspy vocals which—when combined…
D.W. Harris
When 80’s college alt-rockers Anne Be Davis broke up in the late eighties, their frontman D.W. Harris went solo, opening for The Violent Femmes and Matthew Sweet. Now Harris keeps it real with old-fashioned blues-rock in the traditions of Tom Waits and Nick Cave. His gritty vocals, groaning with angst and societal frustration, smoothly revolve…
Stabenow risks it all
Debbie Stabenow was once lucky enough to be backstabbed at exactly the right time. Five years ago, she was the Democrats’ likely nominee for governor when she made the mistake of showing leadership on an important issue. Knowing that public education funding badly needed reform, Stabenow, then a state senator, proposed to end property tax…
All the rage
I’m filled with a fuming, bubbling peevishness that has no real explanation except perhaps my own deep-seated psychological issues. Of course, nobody else besides me (and perhaps the Lizard of Fun) should give a damn about whether I’m annoyed by the preponderance of geek chic on television, or going squirrelly over the unnecessary billions of…
Food stuff
"Hot, hot, hot!" Soca artist Arrow had it right on the tune with that line. Of course, he was describing the sultry, sexy heat of his native Trinidad. But there are all kinds of heat, from the sun bearing down to that generated by the friction of bodies lustfully rubbing together. And then there’s the…
Sisterhood showdown
Here’s a quick checklist comparing the Lilith Fair with your average women’s festival. LILITH FAIR AVERAGE DYKE FEST Attire: Shirts Skins Locale: Professional amphitheatre with broken big-screen monitors Hot, dusty, mosquito infested forest lands Volume: About as loud as you would play the radio in the car with your grandma in the passenger seat…
Foolish games
Since Monty Hall made his first deal for two safety pins, an embroidered handkerchief and a can of sardines with a hysterical member of his studio audience, game shows have had a license to be quirky. In fact, few game shows have had the straight-laced dignity of Alex Trebek’s encyclopedic adventures on "Jeopardy" or even…
Gambling on unions
With no opposition from management, 2,100 workers at the MGM Grand Casino became union members on July 23, with their ranks divided among a four-union coalition called the Detroit Casino Council. Maintenance workers will be represented by the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE); parking lot attendants, phone operators, cashiers and Grandettes (drink servers) will…
DJ Assault
Detroit’s DJ Assault is at the forefront of our fair city’s low-end booty explosion. With accolades pouring in from national, regional and local press, Assault’s bread and butter is still the bump in the trunk and the grind on the dance floor. His mixtapes of revved-up, raunchy electro-funk have become as much a part of…
Brokedown Palace
Apparently, doing time in a Thai prison can do wonders for a friendship. That seems to be the only lesson lifelong pals Alice Marano (Claire Danes) and Darlene Davis (Kate Beckinsale) learn when their high school graduation trip to Thailand (cheaper and way more exciting than Hawaii!) turns nightmarish. Coming on the heels of the…
Costly wounds
Gunfire and poor health care coverage are a costly combination, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Acute care and follow-up treatment costs for gunshot wounds incurred throughout the country in 1994 was $2.3 billion. Taxpayers ended up paying nearly half that bill, with $1.1 billion (49 percent) coming from government programs…
Detroit Rock City
Slowly peeling away the grungy denim layers of the rock ’n’ roll experience circa 1978, Detroit Rock City is as much a typical, drug experimenting gross-out as it is a revelation about the blind politics of fandom/stardom. Four high school basement rockers, Hawk (Edward Furlong), Jam Bruce (Sam Huntington), Trip (James DeBello) and Lex (Giuseppe…
Students join U-M cases
Minority students and affirmative action groups have won the right to intervene in two lawsuits challenging the University of Michigan’s use of affirmative action in its admissions policies. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Aug. 10 to allow two groups composed mostly of minority high school and college students to help defend the university’s…
The Dinner Game
Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte) is in a serious bind. The weekly dinner party he attends with his fellow Franco-yuppies is coming up and he hasn’t found an idiot. This is crucial since the point of these gatherings is that each man brings an unsuspecting sap and encourages him to talk about his interests. Afterward, the…
Illicit cuisine
My fascination with cookbooks did not begin in our diet-free kitchen where, in times of trouble, my mother would whip up the most incredible cakes, or in the afterglow of a luxurious dinner at a five-star restaurant. No. My interest in food was prompted by Peter Greenaway’s cannibals of high art in The Cook, the…
Keep on busking in the free world
Those buskers are running wild in the streets, you know. Grown men with flaming bowling pins, roaring chainsaws, 16-foot unicycles, butterfly tattoos on their heads and kaleidoscopic Zuba pants are waiting to work their mojo on you and yours. No, the city isn’t under siege by forces of mutant Santa’s elves. A busker is that…
Illuminata
As he did in Mac, actor/writer/director John Turturro explores the conflicts, hardships, camaraderie and rewards inherent in the long, arduous process of creation. His first film was a love letter to his father, an exacting craftsman who built houses but envisioned homes. With Illuminata, Turturro puts his own craft under the microscope. Of the many…
Make the ad guys pay
Do you feel unloved and unnoticed, like a single, tiny, worthless atom in the ever-expanding gas that is mass society? Well, you are right to feel that way. No one – outside of perhaps six people, most of whom are faking – cares in the least about your search for a soul mate, your exercise…
Log on, click in, get the dirt
It’s getting a little easier to know who not to trust these days, thanks to the Web site The Smoking Gun. The site, which posts documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), offers a sort of pop-culture-inspired civics class demonstrating the type of information that can be dug up if you know where…
Trick
Falling in love is easy. Getting a room is the hard part. Gabriel (Christian Campbell) is a young musical theater writer, uninspired and down on his luck. The closest he gets to romance and passion is sitting outside his own apartment door listening to the mattress creaking under his womanizing roommate. Gabriel isn’t only shut…
To trust a snitch
Web sites like The Smoking Gun may provide lots of information for the public, but they sometimes lack context to help sort the important from the frivolous, the bona fide from the dubious. For instance, there is the Smoking Gun material posted before last year’s Teamsters presidential election. Two FBI documents, both decades old, label…
Twin Falls, Idaho
Twin Falls, Idaho is a somberly paced but very slight and sentimental reverie on fraternal bonds and the pain of letting go. Directed by Michael Polish, who co-wrote the screenplay with his twin brother Mark, the film features the two playing Siamese twins – Francis (Michael) and Blake (Mark) Falls, two natty looking guys co-joined,…
Femme fests
As the sun sets on Lilith Fair’s final tour and the commercial stock of estro-friendly music continues to rise, sexpert Susie Bright’s ruminations on Lilith’s origin and family tree seem all the more telling. OK, I admit it. I fell for the hype at the very last minute. After hearing about the Lilith festival for…
Old-hand
It’s hard not to like the sound of John Lee Hooker. As he enters the eighth decade of life, musicians half his age are still scrambling to record with the man. Listening to such recent albums as The Healer, where he recorded great-sounding compositions with such artists as Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt, it can…
Fashion bashing, rocking on
Thread Heads What could be the flashiest event in town took place last week in downtown Detroit at the Fox Theatre: The 30th Annual Fash Bash for the Detroit Institute of Arts. The preparty started the evening next door at the State Theatre with glitz, glamour and outrageous outfits. I saw everything from a man…
Keep the faith
1. Detroit, 1999 — Look, if you need an explanation: The Kid Rock/ICP/Eminem trinity, the Secret International Pop Society, the Demolition Dollrods, DJs Assault and Godfather, the techno pantheon, His Name Is Alive, the White Stripes, the Go, Ebeling Hughes, Windy & Carl, and on and on. And that’s on a slow day! 2. The…
Kiss incorporated
We were never about hits," says Gene Simmons referring to the transitory nature of the music industry and where KISS fits in that scheme. "We clearly are not in fashion now," he continues, "we clearly were not in fashion yesterday, and I promise you, we’re not going to be in fashion tomorrow. Because fashion is…
Rap went limp?
Because music is a cauldron, because it’s that boundless arena where vibrations meet, clash, combine and form new sounds, we should be thankful. Music refuses to conform to society’s rules, and instead offers a voice to anyone willing to speak aloud. Through music, conformists assimilate to whatever genre they choose. Rebels throw up middle fingers…
Smiley-face meets Happy-feet
Happy Hardcore, like acid jazz, is really neither, but instead a kind of impossibly upbeat blend of rave’s rush and arpeggiated, feel-good, New Age sounds: heartfelt female vocals singing Tori Amos-writing-greeting card lyrics over crisp drum fills, Vangelis/Enya-like keyboards, video game synths and beats so squeaky clean they pound you silly without ever quite banging.…
Retro futurism
It always begins in that glorious ‘mistake,’ the crazy unexpected note kicking out sideways to let us loose again no matter what you call it. It reappears periodically every few years, the next new absurd and outrageous squeak that no one could calculate till 10 years after it moulders buried under the wretched excess in…
Spontaneous machine music
It’s a slow midweek summer night at Manhattan’s Westbeth Theater, nestled in the cozy end of tony Greenwich Village. Amid the posters for comedian Margaret Cho’s one-woman show, which usually occupies the theater, Ann Arbor’s Brendan Gillen and Eastpointe’s Brian Jeffries – better known to the electronic music world as Ectomorph and DJ Godfather, respectively…
Welcome to Rocktacular!
Brothers and sisters (and even those of you who aren’t related), have you given the old rock ’n’ roll warhorse any thought lately? Could it be that what was once the music of rebellion has become a vehicle for aging Gen X nostalgia? Or worse, has rock as practiced by once culturally jarring artists such as…
Protect Ya Neck
You have got to have balls to sample Thelonious Monk, then drop some old-school big band and follow it up with lyrics about Ornette Coleman and Scott Joplin. But with a hip-hop record, that kind of hi-fi audacity is always two steps away from either the lowest kind of musical posing or true "beats-to-the-rhyme" type…
Film music
The ’90s will be remembered not just for its indie and grunge guitar groups, but also for the contemplative sounds of such bands as Vermont’s Labradford. With E Luxo So, Labradford’s fifth album in seven years, the experimenting trio continues to refine its drone aesthetic. It’s not simply about droning keyboards or repetitive sounds –…
Stretching the Imagination
It all began with a 16-year-old’s wish to escape the confines of reality, to free the Willys of this world, or in this case as Music Tapes frontman, Julian, states, "I thought we’d start the Music Tapes by freeing a goldfish." And thus it ends with their debut album The 1st Imaginary Symphony for a…
