Analyzing Engler
Questions arise over Gov. John Engler’s $850 million veto…
Girls Get Busy
After yet another day of spinning the radio dial trying to find something that wasn’t maudlin-sensitive, neatly wrapped or mind-numbing utterly conservative shit, isn’t it about time to rediscover Bratmobile? After a two-year absence from the musical landscape, the band that was a pivotal force in — and inspiration for the bands that emerged from…
Everybody knows this is nowhere
When one thinks of pastoral Northern Michigan, one does not usually conjure images of radical queer-punk art icons, European free-jazz maestros and globetrotting skateboard prodigies. However, pick up the latest issue of Copper Press, an impeccably assembled magazine springing from no less a thriving burg than Acme, Mich. (a “suburb” of Gaylord), and that’s exactly…
Blame Motown
Is the Motor City really to blame for the increase in corporate scandal?
Fingerprints
Since about the mid-’90s, playing the “heartland rock” card has become a bit of a netless tightrope walk. Not only has the ascent of No Depression from budget-conscious magazine to virtual genre Bible exposed a lot of roots players as insincere hacks, the entrenchment of the hardcore blues community additionally meant that if a musician…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Give each of your two closest companions a gift. It should fire up their ambitions, not appeal to their urges to be comfortable. It shouldn’t be a practical necessity or ho-hum consumer fetish, but rather an adult toy or provocative tool. It should be an imaginative boon they’ve been hesitant to…
Jammed up
Monthly music mag Jam Rag is in serious financial jeopardy…
Silly harvest
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Mel Gibson, Signs builds towards an obvious, inevitable conclusion. While the frightening journey is worth taking, the final moments seem cheap and easy.
Like to watch?
• In answer to the reader who wanted sexy films that women enjoy — a favorite of mine is Wifemistress (cq) with Laura Antonelli and Marcello Mastroianni (cq). Another sexy movie with a wonderful script is Working Girl (with Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford). There’s not a lot of overt sex, but it’s a sexy,…
Travelin’ blues
The socially conscientious Blue Triangle Network takes action…
Read My Lips
The new film by French writer-director Jacques Audiard draws us into a complex, odd-couple office tryst. That’s the best part. Then it becomes a caper flick about outlaw lovers. But the suspense never really takes off. Maybe the Hollywood remake will get it right.
Neither heads nor tails
The Best American Travel Writing of 2000 features the brilliant, bizarre, funny story Winter Rules, by Steve Rushin of Sports Illustrated. It’s a side-splitting tale about ice golfing in Greenland. When talking about local cuisine, Rushin quotes some descriptive text about reindeer stomach: “It is neither delicious nor revolting, but somewhere in between.” That is…
Fur real fantasies
Q: When I first started dating my boyfriend, he told me he was a furry. I didn’t have any idea what he meant, so he explained to me that he really wanted a costume that was basically paws, a tail and maybe some other catlike features, and he wanted to have sex while wearing this…
Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams
Writer director Robert Rodriguez is back with his young spies Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara) Cortez, not to mention their spy parents played by Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino. Once again the essence is about family, imagination and a monstrous sense of humor.
Merry-Gore-Round
Merry-Gore-Round: The Murderdolls rock it, from the catacomb…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
Cuteness and light — There is a little slice of car-wash heaven on the corner of John R and E. Palmer: the “New Cultural Center Hand Car Wash.” The building’s white and blue façade is a vision of sweetness and light in the midst of a run-down, sparsely populated neighborhood. The rear wall of the…
Me Without You
Following two little English girls from childhood in the early ’70s into adulthood, Me Without You has a wonderful knack for capturing each decade’s zeitgeist with right-on rich costuming and animated colloquial dialogue. Starring Michelle Williams and Anna Friel.
Well hell
Delving deeply into the hazardous-waste injection spat….
High expectations
The Sky Club, on the second floor above the Spanish-tinged Sangria restaurant, epitomizes everything that is both fun and passe about this love-it-or-leave-it city.
Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat
Comedian Martin Lawrence is getting some comic mileage out of the chaos of his life in this concert flick. You know, busted for running around in traffic waving a gun and yelling incoherently. If only he managed to squeeze in a few more jokes.
Letters to the Editor
Shades of Green I’m a volunteer with the Green Party of Michigan, and I’m writing to take issue with Jack Lessenberry’s column ("The court and the council," Metro Times, July 24-30). The decision to deny Mike Madias the nomination was not made trivially. There were many people present who had worked extensively to support the…
You Never Know
Is there a more insane and sublime poet than Ron Padgett writing in America today? I doubt it. When I’m elected president, I promise to name him to my cabinet as Secretary of Imagination. Because this youthful elder statesman of the New York School of Poetry (the headquarters of which floats in the air above…
Code Unknown
Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000) is for the most part, of a series of relatively short, unedited sequences — no cross-cutting, just continuous, flowing takes separated by blackouts — a narrative of interlocking stories. Haneke make some cogent observations about modern multicultural Paris without seeming banal.
Hyde & seek
A quiet painter speaks — and not only through his work….
When I Was a Young Man
Midway through his memoir, When I Was a Young Man,former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey writes, "When I graduated from college in the spring of 1965, I was very much the sleepwalker." After stumbling into the living nightmare of Vietnam a few years later, Kerrey, like the rest of America, would be rudely awakened. And like…
The fruits are still green
Less than thrilled with the results of the primary? There is another choice for governor: Doug Campbell, who got a spot on the ballot two days before anyone else did. “I have a different American dream than the others do,” he told me before nailing down the nomination. “Mine is that regular people like you…
Read it and eat
Cosí has good food and an atmosphere the company calls “eclectic” and I call “chain.” It’s big and barn-y, not “cozy.”However, it’s good at the roasted red pepper-and-goat cheese genre. By the time you read this the “mocha martini” will be offered — Kahlua, white crème de cacao and vodka, rim dusted with mocha powder.
Puttin’ on the Schvitz
Perhaps only in fair, historically flabbergasted Detroit could the end of one cultural institution be marked with a one-act play celebrating the romantic notion of another. Case in point is playwright Kristine Dickson’s The Schvitz, now playing at Motor Lounge, Hamtramck’s one-time “king of clubs.” Dickson’s staged Schvitz has about as much to do with…
Halos & Horns
Dolly Parton hasn’t been played on FM since country radio mattered, to give you an idea of how long it’s been. But when God (or Capitol) closes a door, He (or Epitaph) opens a little window. Since her 1999 signing to Sugar Hill — and you can keep your smartass comments to yourself, buddy —…
Highly Evolved
No less an authority on the irrelevance of Importance than the Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne said in a recent MOJO interview, “Rock bands put too much emphasis on the idea that someone’s actually interested in them. People are too busy.” He wasn’t referring directly to the Vines, but he might as well have been.…
Mixed business
Ever get the feeling that you’re living in a time warp? Between disingenuous campaign ads and the incessant “back to school” mating calls of thrifty-minded soccer moms, it seems like summer’s going all too soon. If you don’t have time to run frantically into the woods and leave the city folk behind, going to the…
Shaker
From fronting the glitter-snot stomp of the New York Dolls, the back-to-rock ’n’ roll basics of his brilliant mid-’70s solo band, through his metamorphoses into the Louie Prima-humored lounge-swing of his alter-ego Buster Poindexter, Johansen has always proffered his own bigger-than-life personality atop myriad musical styles. As diverse as these styles first appear, they all…
Night & Day Center
7 WED-17 SAT • ART Rock Photos from Thomas Weschler — For the next 10 days former Creem photographer Thomas Weschler is presenting a show of never-before-seen photos of seminal Detroit rock moments — Cream at the Grandy, Bob Seger, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springstein and more. His intimate portraits recall an era…
Rebuild the Wall
When I was in college, a group of friends and I instituted Pink Floyd Day. The idea was, we’d block out a single 14- or 15-hour span during which we’d play every single Floyd album, in the order of their release. Throughout the day we’d enhance the experience with the assistance of whatever vegetative smokables…
State of Man
Meet an in-your-face punk minimalist….
X
As the record-buying kids of the late ’80s have turned the corner into young-adult consumerhood, the generation that was so quick to abandon Metal Edge pinups like Warrant, Winger and Skid Row after hearing the opening chords to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” has become sentimental for the toys of its youth. Revisionist historians have begun…
Washed up
Abandoned house of the week – 8/07/02
High Volume
Superbees guitarist Scott Carlson played in the influential Flint grindcore band Repulsion before attaining toast of the town status in Hollywood with his dirty-glammish garage punk outfit, the Superbees. The ’bees were among the highlights of Badsville, a documentary released late last year about the thriving California underground punknroll scene. And their much-anticipated debut full…
