Solidarity forsaken
The venue spoke volumes when a fundraising dinner was held Saturday in Detroit for members of the mechanics union on strike against Northwest Airlines. The event was to be held at International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 58 union hall. But members of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) — which represents 4,400 mechanics, cleaners…
Undiscovered
Ashlee Simpson stars in Undiscovered, which follows young star-crossed lovers (Steven Strait and Pell James) seeking fame and fortune in Los Angeles. It’s all shot with slick, hip, overcast feel of a mopey urban rock video or an episode of Angel, but the movie has about as much emotional depth and romantic sensibility as a…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Here’s how rock critic Aidin Vaziri described the stage set when hip-hop artist 50 Cent played in San Jose: "an urban wasteland that looked like it was designed by Disney (complete with an overturned police car, graffiti-covered trashcans and the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty)." I hope you don’t…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 31 Animal Liberation Orchestra MUSIC While we normally can’t bring ourselves to extol the virtues of a jam band, we here at Night & Day have heard good things about the Animal Liberation Orchestra. Their sun-soaked funk jams and bass solos (yes, bass solos) are rumored to spread dancing fever to crowds of…
Chaos
This no-budget shocker tries to pass off its ineptitude as some sort of raw style, but even the most tolerant horror fans will find Chaos dull, lazy and sick — but not in a good way.
The great creative writing swindle
Charles Baxter ruined my life. OK, not really. But he did ruin my college GPA. OK, not really. But my intense disregard for his pretentious, hackneyed work did. See, I suffer from what can only be described as a Baxter allergy. Whenever I’m faced with the prospect of reading good ol’ Charlie’s work, I become…
Get your game on
For the best flavor, master the art of butchering.
To live and work in L.A.
You have to leave Detroit to get discovered. It is a saying you hear a lot from artists who’ve left Detroit to get discovered. But perhaps that’s unfair. You have to leave just about any city for New York or Los Angeles to get discovered. They just aren’t discovering people as much in, say, St.…
Coffin up votes
City Clerk Jackie Curry has her story and she’s sticking to it.
Cracking codes: Dating a friend’s ex
Q: I went to a friend’s wedding, a friend whom five years ago I would have called a “best friend.” I don’t know how to describe our friendship now because we don’t talk or see each other much. I was reacquainted with her ex-boyfriend (she dated him for three months three years ago) at her…
Steal of a deal
This week, in honor of Fox 2 News investigative reporter Scott Lewis, the smart-asses here at the Abandoned Structure Squad, in a fit of whimsy, have decided to temporarily re-christen ourselves the Corrupted Structure Squad. You’ll notice the pictured home isn’t the kind of dilapidated wreck typically featured in this space. Instead, according to Lewis’s…
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate In this short poem by Vermont writer Jean L. Connor, an older speaker challenges the perception that people her age have lost their vitality and purpose. Connor compares the life of such a person to an egret fishing. Though the bird stands completely still, it…
Letters to the Editor
Slap shot “My 56-year-old dad plays hockey once a week,” begins a short essay by Rob Keast (“Poetry’s beer leagues,” Metro Times, Aug. 10), my friend and former student. A few paragraphs later, he says, “Yet, if my dad were an amateur poet … I suspect the other spectators and I would all have been…
The other people mover
Game day for Detroiters means one thing — lots of walking. Most of the major parking lots downtown are a considerable distance from the stadia. Closer lots are usually exorbitantly priced and snarled in a nightmare of traffic. Detroiter Steve Christensen has a simple and fun solution. While downtown on one of his many biking…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
Backslash
Walken the walk — What with the Shrub’s perpetual vacationing, can you blame those who are looking toward the 2008 election in hope of salvation? Our country needs a brave, no-bullshit leader who can clean up the tremendous mess we’ve made, who can command authority and perhaps a hint of intimidation with just a single…
Scorpions & snakes
Just back from a peaceful and rejuvenating sojourn in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a place I’d never been, I’ve begun to fret about this mojo that has suggested itself in my life countless times in the past. Usually it takes the form of “coincidences” of little or no consequence — someone speaking a…
Teenarama
A skittish butler with forced mannerisms and short, unkempt hair opens the home’s double doors. A butler. He looks barely old enough to shave and is clearly discomfited by his ill-fitting suit. His “master,” Snowhite frontman Christian (just Christian), appears to have it made. At age 19. His house is one of those suburban monsters,…
Hip-hop homeboy
As Detroit debuts go, Bulletproof is closer to Kid Rock’s Devil Without a Cause than Eminem’s Slim Shady LP. Eminem has always been a character, but Hush — longtime Em’ homey and fellow white rapper — has been unfairly, if understandably, compared to him (see the scathing Bulletproof review in Rolling Stone). Hush, like Em’,…
Summer’s end
Based on Night & Day’s highly scientific empirical testing methods, it seems 2005 was a banner year for summer outdoor festival fun. TasteFest was a resounding success, the Fourth Street Fair provided the hippies, hipsters and politicos all the fun they could shake a stick at, and the first annual Woodbridge Festival looks as though…
Penitentiary Blues
As the liners to this reissue of his 1970 debut note, David Allan Coe’s reputation as a roustabout continues to overshadow recognition for his music. Of course, at the same time that rep has always fed the man’s muse. On Penitentiary Blues he lays out the brigandry, the hard time and the hard drugs, and…
The war hasn’t even started
“You can support the troops but not the president.”—House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Tex. Whoops! Did old nasty really say that? He certainly did. Could it be that all those chemicals he inhaled back when he ran a pest control firm in Texas finally reached his brain? That’s entirely possible. However, he wasn’t talking…
Of kings and paupers
Craftily plotted and filmed in a jittery style, writer-director Arnaud Desplechin’s latest work strives to overwhelm you with its audacity — and pretty much succeeds. The film is a comic melodrama, a clever soap opera crammed with character detail and plot twists; a thick slice of life spread over an event-filled two and a half…
Head cheese
The term “melodic hardcore” has become a misnomer of late, with so many bands failing at either or both parts of that equation, often sounding like a pop-punk band in the midst of a weeklong meth binge, or Carcass doing Poison on mood elevators. Boston’s A Wilhelm Scream carries on the hardcore heritage of Beantown…
Pickpocket
Pickpocket is Robert Bresson’s 1959 drama about Michel, a young writer who’s living in poverty who picks pockets for a living, feeling he’s above the law because of his intellect. The parallels to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment are plainly evident, as Michel dangerously flirts with the law. Even those resistant to Bresson’s unconventional approach will…
Roots rock revels
Detroiters have left an indelible mark on the face of American music. Nuances of Detroit can be heard in blues, jazz, rockabilly, soul and hip hop. So much so, that the city has secured itself a coveted spot in the annals of modern music history: We gave birth to Motown, made garage rock a household…
The Constant Gardener
A true rarity: a film that strives to combine political suspense with emotional resonance and social relevance and delivers on all three counts. City Of God director Fernando Meirelles delivers a provocative and thoughtful adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel. Using nonlinear storytelling and a guerilla-style filmmaking he creates an urgent thriller that is as…
Pax day
You may have seen the Paxahau logo, been mystified by obscure artists called Autechre, Crackhaus, Deadbeat or Superpitcher, whose names are squeezed next to that iconic yin-yang symbol on glossy promo fliers. It’s a weird package that may appear off-putting at first, sometimes misinterpreted as elitist by competitors in Detroit’s often-political electronic dance music scene.…
Brothers Grimm
Director Terry Gilliam’s first film in seven years is the most obviously commercial film of his career. Reimagining the famous storytellers as con men who travel the Napoleonic countryside posing as supernatural exterminators, the script suffers from a complete lack of subtext. Still, the filmmaker’s enormous talents are on full display. Boasting dazzling otherworldly images,…
Behind the swing
It was Gretchen Carhartt-Valade’s big day at the jazz festival on Hart Plaza last year. She had worked the vendor booth for the label she owns, Mack Avenue Records, hawking discs by her artists. She had attended a backstage reception for her label’s Grammy-nominated jazz veteran, Gerald Wilson, marking his 76th birthday, just before his…
Pretty Persuasion
In this lame Heathers rip-off, Evan Rachel Wood plays Kimberly Joyce, a cunning smart teen who coaxes her friends into bringing harassment claims against their hated teacher. The ensuing trial incites a media frenzy at their hoity-toity Beverly Hills private school. The witless script is riddled with stabs at humor that are off-color for the…
Tradition with a twist
Since their beginning in 1980, the variously named jazz festivals in Detroit have tinkered to find a winning formula. In the rough early years, the issue was how to balance ticketed acts with free ones, and national acts with Detroiters. (The solution was to put everyone on free stages to create the largest free jazz…
The Cave
This warmed-over Alien rehash features a lot of buff explorers, some cool, slimy beasts and exactly one decent action scene. The Cave is exactly the sort of late-August stink bomb the studios hope to pass off on audiences who’ve already seen all the bigger, better summer thrill rides.
