Try a banana
Q: I know yours isn’t a how-to column, but I have to ask — any tips on giving a good blow job? A: Lots. But rather than my writing a column on oral sex techniques that would, um, barely cover the surface, may I suggest that you pick up an instructional video tape such as…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): It may be difficult to figure out how your problems are necessary, but that’s what I’m asking you to do. What part does your suffering play in holding your world together? How do your most intractable dilemmas help you avoid reaching goals you’re afraid to strive for? In what sense do…
Swan song of summer
Fanclub Foundation’s Latin jazz party is muy sensacional… Keith Famie goes on safari for the Food Network … The city’s waterfront casino debacle … Motor’s top-secret, new downtown location … & much, much more.
Talking points
Metro Times recently conducted lengthy interviews with six of the leading candidates vying to become Detroit’s next mayor. Read about their plans and positions on various issues, as well as the editors’ general impressions.
The Trembling
Pink, plush and itchy guitar, bass and drums insulate this wall of frantic but steady rhythm, while shouted grrl-ish lyrics crash into clever melodies that will flatten you with their “yeah, I know!” honesty. But the rhythms are so strong and fun you’ll want to make up dances for each song.
Porn again
A little more than 100 years ago, a New Haven, Conn., dry-goods-store clerk named Anthony Comstock decided, as he wrote in an 1882 article for the North American Review, that “there was a very large and systematic business, of the most nefarious character, carried on to corrupt and destroy the morals of the young.” He…
Bringin’ back the funk
This year’s Detroit Jazz Fest headliners stir up memories from the groove.
Evolution of a pop genius
England’s Matthew Herbert hasn’t forgotten techno’s original raison d’être.
From the guts
B-veteran John Carpenter on sex, violence and filming dangerously….
Here comes the deluge
Pontiac’s annual Arts, Beats and Eats festival overflows its boundaries with an art exhibition consisting of 200 juried artists.
Bring back Fieger!
Jack Kevorkian will finally get an appeal of his 1999 murder conviction. But this is really about your right to control your own destiny.
Back-to-school book review
Go back to school with these four electronic music and dance books that were written by insiders and true enthusiasts of the cultures they represent.
Poop ploy
Michigan pig and cow farmers find themselves in deep doody….
Nobody’s perfect
After an eight-year wait, Madonna’s megaspectacle leaves something to be desired….
Ambassador Satch
Celebrating the undying legacy of Louis Armstrong, a jazz genius whose brass blast was a clarion call to the world.
Yo!
Detroit citizens talk, and the candidates should sit up and listen….
Water walk
Walkers hope to generate support for clean Great Lakes….
Doobie duo
Director Kevin Smith parodies pop culture in a way the Wayans Brothers could only dream about. His humor may be frat-boyish at times, but underlying it is an acceptance of all races, genders and sexual orientations. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back ends up as one hilarious nation under a funky groove.
Let Bill Brooks shake up Detroit
After reviewing all the candidates’ qualifications, Metro Times editors make their endorsement for this fall’s mayoral primary.
Familiar friends
Every neighborhood should have a Jennifer’s Café: good food and reasonable prices on anything from a salad or a sandwich to an elaborate dinner. Twenty varieties of sandwiches are offered, most wrapped in a thin pita. Chicken, veal and fish predominate on the menu (although the beef tenderloin tips are outstanding), and dinner comes with…
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
In Woody Allen’s comic, Technicolor love letter to the silver screen of the ’40s, there’s ironic comedy in portraying Allen’s weasely investigator as a romantic leading man. But the sweetness of his blend of vintage Hollywood has an aftertaste like the reverberations of a Gershwin tune.
This is our music
At least in books, jazz fans have long been able to stroll the red-light district of New Orleans with Jelly Roll Morton, ride Mississippi riverboats where King Oliver and Louis Armstrong’s cornets pealed shoreward, and hang out from sundown to the next morning’s steak breakfast while listening to Kansas City swing. Los Angeles’ Central Avenue…
Down from the Mountain
Even those less than thrilled by the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? had a kind word for the sound track, a good sampling of musical Americana; emotionally direct, plain-spoken, deeply soulful. This is a film record of the concert given by many of the Brothers’ performers in Nashville on May 24, 2000.
Bubble Boy
A combination of Frankenstein and a lesser John Waters has dug up The Wizard of Oz to reanimate it as a satirically fractured American fairy tale about a so-called "Bubble Boy" (a child born without a functioning immune system), sending him on a mad race for the graillike Oz of connubial true love.
John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars
In 2176, long after Mars has been successfully colonized, a simple reconnaissance mission exposes a terror with global ramifications. Grueling and relentless, this brazen, in-your-face movie is done in Carpenter’s trademark no-frills style. What makes it so disturbing is the intimate nature of its barbarity — with Pam Grier and Ice Cube.
Substance and style
Perhaps the most typically “Western” of a modern, fecund batch of Japanese writers, Haruki Murakami has jury-rigged a style from the subterranean preoccupations of Don DeLillo, the geography of catastrophic relationships laid bare by Raymond Carver, and the hellish, quasi-sci-fi specters of Stephen King. And yet, despite all his influences (which includes a pop-culture fetish;…
Substance and style
Perhaps the most typically “Western” of a modern, fecund batch of Japanese writers, Haruki Murakami has jury-rigged a style from the subterranean preoccupations of Don DeLillo, the geography of catastrophic relationships laid bare by Raymond Carver, and the hellish, quasi-sci-fi specters of Stephen King. And yet, despite all his influences (which includes a pop-culture fetish;…
