Mona Lisa smiles (After Grosse Pointe Park Ordinance Battle)
Grosse Pointe Park officials wanted Erica Chappuis to take down her art. The Grosse Pointe Park ordinance used to prosecute an artist’s husband because paintings were displayed in the couple’s yard is unconstitutional, a Wayne County judge has ruled. Score one for the First Amendment. Erica Chappuis and her husband, Laurent Chappuis, have had her…
Artiste confidential
Disclaimer I am an art-school veteran. I survived creative boot camp and graduated from the College for Creative Studies with a BFA. I paid for this endeavor on my own dime — I’m still paying for it. I dated two women while there: a photographer and a ceramicist. Many of my friends are artists, and…
College drinking
When it comes to college drinking, America has a puritan streak a mile wide. Our children get told from Day One that alcohol is forbidden. They get stuffed full of Hot Pockets and pumped full of Sunny D their whole lives. Then, when they’re sent off to a place where they’re relatively unsupervised and suddenly…
The Bright Mississippi
At 71, Allen Toussaint need merely call up the R&B of his youth to be hailed for his contributions to "roots" music. After all, he’s the man behind such classics as "Working in a Coal Mine" and "Ride Your Pony," and an inheritor of the boogie-ish New Orleans piano tradition of the late Professor Longhair…
Heat beat (Heat? What heat?)
Summer ’09 may best be remembered as the one that arrived anti-fashionably late. After the Movement Festival’s impressive Memorial Day weekend intro to the season of sweat, a nuclear wintry chill descended upon the creative electronic dance scene in this post-Motor City. The hangover of global recessionary times, as well as the continuing exodus of…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Lazrus
It’s not at all hard to dig Lazrus. This, the debut solo full-length from songwriter Daniel Johnson — namesake and leader of late and lauded indie-rock cabal Judah Johnson (as well as a sometimes MT contributor) — offers much to justify referencing a biblical figure whose name has become shorthand for suddenly coming back to…
College resources
BREAKING BREAD Beezy’s Café But a stroll from the Eastern campus, and sporting a sundry hipster staff and a kind of lower-Manhattan-eatery-in-spring milieu, Beezy’s ought to feel like home to many student types, from trendy millennials to floppy-fringed Cro-Magnons to those who look like what would result if you crossed a Paris hipster with Lee…
An anti-hipster cache
Down to impress? Here’s a toilet-reader ramble to aid you in choosing a handful of books and records that you need, even if your sole purpose is to appear cool. For the college digit bookshelf, we eschewed the usual hipster dust-collectors (Henry Miller, Palahniuk, Moody, Hornby or anything that Dave Eggers yaps on about, and…
The Champion Mixtape
Considering Detroit’s plethora of hip-hop talent, it’s easy to overlook top-tier music while keeping up with the more familiar names. Some may know Terron "iLLite" Calmese for his work with One Be Lo’s Subterraneous Records crew and The Chosen…, his album with partner-in-rhyme Octane. But his top tier debut Crème De La Crème last year…
We love you, Dan!
Q: There was a letter in your column recently that must have been painful for you to receive. I refer to the letter signed God Hates You. I’m sure you’re no stranger to hate mail, being an openly gay sex-advice columnist, but I hope you get fan mail too. But just in case: I wanted…
Straight outta college
It’s quite possible that more great music businesses were started out of college dorm rooms than from any other field of endeavor. Think about it: Allen Klein and Don Kirshner met as dorm roommates; the stories of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Sam Cooke, the Brill Building pop explosion, the Monkees and rock on TV in…
Houses of the Unholy
Japan’s Church of Misery have two features that not only set them apart from their stoner-metal peers but make them, quite bluntly, more enjoyable than most. One is their knack for groove. The band’s sound comes from nothing else but tracking the footsteps of Black Sabbath, paraphrasing the Brits’ churning doom rock and sculpting it…
Heaven up here
If there’s one main reason why Detroit has consistently produced excellent, challenging and often off-the-wall music throughout the decades — especially when it’s noted that other cities shine brightly for a short time before burning out (think: New York in the ’70s, L.A. in the ’80s, Seattle in the ’90s) — it’s that we’ve never…
Higher and higher
Although specifics differed, as budgets for the coming school year were set, Michigan’s public universities began issuing press releases with a similar tone: They were working hard to put a positive spin on unwelcome news. All the schools, dealing with anticipated cuts in funding from a state government in the throes of a massive budget…
The lucky 13
Interestingly, there are probably more quality films about high school — running a gamut from the comedic John Hughes flicks to Scent of a Woman — than there are ones about college. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that college is so much fun for most of us that there’s really not a…
Trouble bus-ting out
Just so everyone knows from the get-go, News Hits fully realizes that, in terms of municipal finances, the city of Detroit truly is in the deepest kind of shit. We’ve been there for a while, but it wasn’t all that obvious to most because of Kwame Kilpatrick’s budgetary flimflam. But when you talk about accumulated…
Eye to eye
Before she was an urban exploring, photo journalizing, portrait-capturing woman, Vanessa Miller was gettin’ down and nerdy in Wayne State University’s darkest rooms. She’s but a couple years removed from her college days, so who better to query about separating true sensitivity and beauty from the cliché? Metro Times: On art school chestnuts and truisms:…
Barack’s backbone problem
News Hits is edited by Curt Guyette. Contact the column at 313-202-8004 or
Short Order
Abe’s Coney Island 402 W. Michigan Ave., Ypsilanti; 734-448-5200: This popular after-bar stop has a kind of self-deprecating humor, billing itself as "Ypsilanti’s finest four-star coney dog, steak-and-egg joint." Whether you’re stopping in for eggs over easy with hash browns "burned" in the morning, or sopping up booze and making ironic jukebox selections at 3…
Ol’ schoolin’
So, you’re going to college. Or you’re still going to college. Maybe you’re still going to college after 30 years (literally, financially or psychologically). Or maybe you figure that you’ll just watch the movies instead of reading thousands of dollars worth of textbooks. Whatever category you fall into, we’ve got something for you in Metro…
Ye olde twins of wonder
Summer’s coming to an end — and you know what that means: It’s time to don some chain mail and a leather corset and party like it’s 1599 at the Michigan Renaissance Festival in Holly (weekends and Labor Day through Oct. 3-4, michrenfest.com). The Wonder Twins walked into the woods as jaded women, immune to…
Italian remodel
Maria’s anchored Ferndale’s restaurant scene for more than a decade. Then, after memorable owner Joan Orlando died in 2004, the restaurant remained open until April of 2008. Its longevity had a lot to do with the fact that little had changed over the years. David Brown reopened the cozy trattoria in October 2008, and even…
Hacking college
Hi, I’m average. I graduated high school this June with a GPA smack in the middle of the "average" range. I did well on my ACT and state tests, and, like most kids in my grade, I didn’t take the SAT. Like the other average kids in Michigan who test well, I was promised money…
Bastardized bliss
Quentin Tarantino sure is an unpredictable bastard, isn’t he? The Promethean video geek brain buzzing away in his massive forehead is continually charged, seeking new ways to delight and confound fans and critics. His latest is both a bare-knuckled spin on war flick tropes, while not really a war movie at all, instead a giddily transgressive…
Gift of a poet: Clarity
Sometime in the mid-1980s I was with a group of poets at a café. We were young and excited because Dudley Randall was among us. Randall, poet laureate of Detroit, founder of Broadside Press and editor of the exciting anthology The Black Poets, was a gigantic figure in my mind, although his calm, nearly nerdish…
Dinner and Coffey
If you’re looking for something musical or cultural that’s unique to the Motor City, Dennis Coffey’s Wednesday night "Dinner with Coffey" residency at Northern Lights Lounge is it. These shows provide a rare opportunity to hear one of Detroit’s great musical innovators in an intimate setting. More than that, it’s a chance to hear one…
Austentatious
Though they have similarly rabid fan bases, you would never expect to find the worlds of Jane Austen and George A. Romero forcibly colliding, but collide they do, brilliantly in the ultimate postmodern mashup. Purists will be aghast that some artistic travesty has been committed here, but curious rubberneckers can rest assured; it’s the same old…
Couch Trip
The Last Days of Disco Criterion When a character mounts an impassioned defense of disco culture in the last minutes of The Last Days of Disco, it may as well be taken directly from the mouth of this affectionate film’s writer-director. And Whit Stillman crafted such a perfect portrayal of early ’80s work-all-day, party-all-night yuppiedom…
Up against Goliath
Manuel J. "Matty" Moroun is an 82-year-old billionaire, one of the richest people in the world, according to Forbes Magazine’s annual ranking. He lives in Grosse Pointe, and owns, among other things, the Ambassador Bridge, the hulking ruin of Michigan Central Station, and vast trucking operations, organized under his holding company, CenTra, Inc. Rashida Tlaib,…
Gloriously bastardized
The opening title card “Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France…” tells you nearly everything you need to know about Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist, alternate-dimension approach to the Holocaust. Shifting genres (horror, western, thriller, comedy), musical styles and languages (French, English, German Italian), QT curates all his totems into a camp-operatic stew that revels in its…
Mad Menning
My friends, aware of my avocation, have been coming from all corners this month urging me to "Mad Men Myself" and create my swingin’ ’60s avatar alongside the cast of AMC’s celebrated ad agency drama, as can be accomplished on the show’s website. Reluctantly, I built my computerized doppelganger feature by feature, and while I…
Letters to the Editor
It’s a crime! I felt depressed in reading Tammie Graves’ letter last week about her seeking a career counselor at a community college (Letters, Aug. 19). I worked with Graves for many years at the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers, where she was a very creative and talented graphic artist before joining the Ann Arbor News. …
Shorts
Robert Rodriguez brings his hypermanic pacing and homegrown special effects to the tale of a nerdy tween named Toe (Jimmy Bennet), who stumbles across a rainbow-colored wishing stone that, well, grants wishes. The magical rock is then passed from one kid to the next, unleashing all sorts of wacky unintended consequences. From castles and aliens…
Home schooling
Detroit is a city with myriad problems — and an image that’s even worse. But colleges and universities in the metro area and beyond are offering an array of classes, service programs and other efforts to bring some perspective to "the dirty D." And by "paying" students with credit hours, some academic institutions can boost…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 26 The Two Man Gentlemen Band KAZOOS UP THE WAZOO Dressed in impeccable suits and top hats, and armed with little more than a banjo, upright bass and kazoo, the Two Man Gentleman Band creates an updated vaudevillian spectacle, performing foot-stomping sing-alongs with the showmanship of traveling salesmen hawking cure-all tonics. The duo…
Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
This affectionate, by-the-numbers doc about the most famous celebrity you’ve never heard of is an unabashed valentine to a woman called the Oprah of her generation. Director Aviva Kempner, eschewing traditional narrative voiceovers, lays out the remarkable life story of writer-actor Gertrude Berg (aka Molly Goldberg), who built a 25-year media empire (1929-1955) that bridged…
Food Stuff
Yous and yinz — Cheesesteak lovers, rejoice! Carolyn Wyman, author of The Great Philly Cheese-steak Book (Running Press, $15.95), will be at Joey’s Famous Philly Cheesesteaks this week. She’ll be at the Southgate location (14625 Northline Rd.; 734-281-4444) from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., and at the Woodhaven location (16125 West Rd.; 734-692-1111) from 2…
Dorm dine
THEM’S THE RULES — Strictly enforced rules against hot plates in residence halls often leave dorm-dwellers at the mercy of their cafeterias and microwaves. If you’re off to campus housing, be sure to check their lists of prohibited items. They can get a little intense, forbidding everything from the obvious (firearms, space heaters) to the…
Native son
When lists are compiled of great musical artists from Michigan, Joe Henry is almost never mentioned. But make no mistake about it: the North Carolina-born but Michigan-raised Henry is one of the finest musical mavericks to ever come out of the Mitten. These days, Henry may best be known for his production work — which…
METRO TIMES LOVES YOU! FREE MUSIC…
Metro Times, in conjunction with LimeWire, recently helped put together a compilation of some of the best indie music this city currently has to offer…and the best part is that all the downloads are free. Ear To The Ground: Detroit just went live today. Click here to download free tracks from an assortment of D-town…
