American Life in Poetry
Every reader of this column has at one time felt the frightening and paralyzing powerlessness of being a small child, unable to find a way to repair the world. Here the California poet, Dan Gerber, steps into memory to capture such a moment. The Rain Poured Down My mother weeping in the dark hallway, in…
Tired tale
Tire clean-up effort screeches to a halt.
Must Love Dogs
Diane Lane has a knack for making bland romances sparkle. While her sweetness is deceptively comforting, the portrayal of love after divorce here is ultimately shallow and high-glossed. Lane and John Cusack play a couple of divorcees egged on by friends and loved ones to rejoin the dating scene, via the Internet. Lane and Cusak…
Vamp camp
The Exotic World Burlesque Museum is a sparkling journey through past and present, for women of all ages, shapes and sizes. A dusty former goat ranch located in the middle of the desert in Helendale, Calif., just off Route 66, it was the former home of stripper Jennie Lee. The museum’s curator is the seventysomething…
Revolving whores
Ex-legislators strike it rich as lobbyists.
Cruel Summer
“I can’t stop punching my own face.” The line was buried in the pathos and hushed recollections of Xiu Xiu’s 2004 LP Fabulous Muscles, a total cliché that was nevertheless gripping when sung by Jamie Stewart, the group’s main brain. It must have been weird for him, the critical acclaim for a record about scarred…
Paradise Regained
They called her The Body. She was built like a double order of pancakes — sweet and stacked. The only light in the room bathed her as she emerged from a thick velvet curtain, incandescent, platinum hair piled high on her head. As the band struck up a slow, seductive wail, her intricately beaded gown…
Vacation hideaway
This little dwelling at 4209 Joseph Campau on the East Side of Detroit has much to offer prospective vacationers looking for a convenient summer getaway. With two walls burned down, you’ll never lack for ventilation. And since most of the surrounding land is vacant, it’s nearly as secluded as anything you’ll find north of I-69.…
Grocer’s garden
There are reasons to move to Detroit. Cheap rent. Houses on lots big enough for small farms, minutes from downtown. But not grocery shopping. Throughout Detroit, grocery shopping for the most part is deplorable. Corner stores are stocked with packaged, hydrogenated and processed foods, sugar drinks, salt, booze and canned wieners — expired wieners at…
Proactive
Bombs away — The Soviet Union is gone, but the threat from nuclear weapons lives on. There are some 30,000 nuclear weapons in existence, 17,500 of them operational. If you want to hear a truly informed opinion about the issue, check out the upcoming talk by Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Robert G. Gard. A 1950 West…
In The Flesh
Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals Royal Oak Music Theatre July 22 Ben Harper’s been crafting his Weissenborn gospel since 1992, steadily blending the essences of Hendrix, Wonder and the bluesman canon with earthborn groove. Nowadays he’s beloved by the jam-band scene, appreciated by fans of Jack Johnson-style jangle, and respected as an American music…
Art Bar
Home is where the art is — Over the years in Detroit, there have only been a few exciting galleries run out of artists’ homes or studios. One such space was Maureen Maki’s 2 South, an apartment-cum-gallery owned by painter Maki and her boyfriend Billy Hunter. On last Fridays of recent months, photographer Joshua Smith…
Media Blackout
Men will still say: “This was their finest MB42!” • Darkest Hour — Undoing Ruin (Victory) :: It’s always darkest before the yawn. • Catlow — Kiss The World (Boompa) :: Chandler’s restless lunatic daughter from The Big Sleep records a chirpy album of perky power pop rubber-room refrains. • Kid Icarus — The Metal…
Knit one, punk two
Under the hot lights of a stage, Exene Cervenka is the picture-perfect rock star. Her patented style — cherry lips, an odd, unkempt beauty and one of the most recognizable voices in modern music — makes her the kind of woman who was always destined for something. Her fans understand that somewhere within her imperfectly…
A collection of unlikely stories
I’m still on vacation. Here’s another column from the Savage Love archives, which are housed at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. One day scholars of human sexuality will pore over old Savage Loves, pondering archaic sexual practices like solo piss play and ancient slang terms like “whack.” Q: My girlfriend and I only see each…
Letters to the Editor
Disappointed in MT Dear editors: I can only say that I am very disappointed that you chose to endorse Freman Hendrix in the mayoral campaign (“What Detroit needs and what Detroit can get,” Metro Times, July 20). I always felt that you listened to and expressed opinions more in line with grassroots and the more…
Saving our schools
Well, now we’re down to two candidates for mayor of Detroit. We’ve already heard a lot about them; we are bound to hear a lot more. But today, let’s move on to what may be the really important election in the city this fall. Nobody denies that the mayoral choice is crucial, especially this year.…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
Hot-button law
For 36 years, Paul Dylenski installed pipe and boiler insulation at construction sites throughout the Detroit area. When he died of esophageal cancer last year, doctors blamed decades of exposure to asbestos — a fiber long used in insulation and other materials because of its remarkable ability to resist heat. The history of asbestos dates…
Motion pictures
Andrew Simsak’s body suit and Matt Monroe’s rowing machine are two highlights of Detroit Now, a show by recent Cranbrook graduates and current students at the Museum of New Art, 7 N. Saginaw, Pontiac, 248-210-7560. Show runs through Aug. 13.
Wall works
In the 1950s, abstract expressionist Morris Louis became well-known for staining canvases in acrylic resin. His thin washes of color, showcasing the relatively new medium, are soothing representations, but now don’t seem so revolutionary. For the past few years, artist Christian Tedeschi has been pushing the medium further, getting gorier, drenching bulky objects in the…
Fair game
Ninety sticky degrees, little shade and a crazy blazing sun aren’t enough to get Shadows Fall shouter Brian Fair down. In fact he stands in it for most of our conversation. “Good times,” Fair says, laughing. But is his laughter mocking? If anything, it’s self-mocking. See, Shadows Fall (Fair, guitarists’ Jonathan Donias and Matt Bachand,…
Pedal power
People power energized Back Alley Bikes’ third annual art auction recently, at the community center on Cass Avenue just north of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. In addition to bidding on bicycle-themed art and buying cheap yet inventive crafts made from recycled bike parts, such as chain link bracelets, attendees enjoyed ragtime music by Two…
The sense of Paine
There’s a whole lot of parsing going on lately, of looking at some thing or situation so closely, in such minute detail, that the larger sense is lost. It’s not seeing the forest for the trees. It’s not seeing that the larger sense is common sense. One of our roughneck revolutionary forebears, Thomas Paine, was…
Ripe down to the rind
Try this. When you find that perfect, sweet, fragrant cantaloupe — the summer that passes without one is a failure — seed it, cut or scoop out the uniformly orange flesh and drop it in a blender or food processor. Add a pinch of salt and whirr until it’s a thick puree. Now either run…
Time has come today
This Detroit-area guitarist deftly weaves the blues with a grown-up contemporary sound, which ain’t an easy thing to do. Al-Saadi’s deep, gritty voice resonates through this collection of smooth songs as if he has lived far beyond his 27 years, and his restrained guitar playing is powerful without trampling the tunes. The songwriting is varied…
Ryan’s song
Ryan Elliott is lying on his couch playing kissy-kissy with Sylvia, his 11-month-old Burmese cat. Neatly arranged on an otherwise empty coffee table to his left are a couple of glossies, Dwell and I-D. His girlfriend Eryn, with whom he shares this house on a leafy block in West Dearborn, is in the kitchen, talking…
Strange days
The sheltered 15-year-old boy who tells his story in Hungarian author Imre Kertész’s new novel Fatelessness does not try to suggest anything so inadequate as “the triumph of the human spirit over adversity” as he takes us along on his extraordinary journey from Budapest to the concentration camps during World War II. On the contrary,…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The Drama Queen or Drama King within you is secretly plotting to raise the emotional stakes to record levels. For that inner extremist, mere adventure might not be enough; thunderous histrionics and romantic excess may be considered essential. But I don’t think it’s necessary to cross the line into delirious hysteria…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 3 Taste of the Nation Benefit Dinner FUN FOR ALL There’s something deliciously ironic about stuffing one’s face to raise money for the hungry. But it’s nothing short of scrumptious when more than 100 of metro Detroit’s finest chefs, restaurateurs and wine distributors take over the beautiful Wintergarden atrium in downtown’s Renaissance Center…
No asylum here
This somber tale is about a young man named Binh (Damien Nguyen) and his search of his American GI father, a painful odyssey which takes him from his small Vietnamese village to a ranch near Austin, Texas. The climax plays out in a way that is wholly original, remarkably restrained and a sharp contrast to…
Flicks got game?
Having progressed from Missile Command and Space Invaders to movie cross-platform marketing ventures such as Fantastic 4 or Batman Begins, video games have certainly gone Hollywood, with the production values to prove it. Unfortunately, they’ve fallen prey to the same problems of Hollywood blockbusters; that is, look-alike titles become mind-numbingly repetitious. That’s not to say…
Head cheese
The Prime Ministers are pure power pop. There’s the “Ticket to Ride” drumbeat here, the 20/20 descending riff there, the perfectly placed “ahh” harmony and lots of eighth-note muted downstrokes propping up astute tales of suburban wonder and woe. In fact, many of theirs are ones that old Dwight Twilley, the Plimsouls or the Beat…
Sky High
It’s no Incredibles, but this superheroes-in-puberty comedy has a decent amount of clever ideas to balance out its uninspired look and a few dud performances. When Sky High finally settles into its teen-angst groove, it actually becomes kind of engaging. Sort of like Pretty in Pink with superpowers.
Scrap mettle
You don’t have to wait till the leaves fall in autumn, as is the tradition, to see the best art Susanne Hilberry Gallery has to offer. Summer Pack 1, the first exhibition in a two-part series curated collectively by gallery staff and local artists, has just ended. It was the best exhibition at Hilberry since…
Time for reform?
Detroiters fighting for council election reform gather steam.
Stealth
Jamie Foxx may have an Oscar under his belt, but he still plays second banana to the dopey Josh Lucas in this high-tech action thriller. Director Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) pulls off a few impressive action scenes, but Stealth’s grim mood and Lucas’ dull lead performance eventually sink the film.
