Masterworks of industry
An exhibition at U-M’s Museum of Art utilizes photographs, paintings, film and essays to examine Albert Kahn and the drama of Detroit’s functional architecture.
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Imagine yourself having a religious experience in a big pile of money. Feel the crisp, high-denomination bills cushioning your body as you writhe ecstatically, the white light of enlightenment surging through you. This should help you activate the magic circuit in your brain where the lust for more money overlaps your…
Babe in toyland
One of the wildest performers in Michigan, Viki has rediscovered the primal joy of making music with what she’s got.
Letters to the Editor
No imitation Liz Langley’s comments about a recent Newsweek story regarding Christian entertainment ("Swept by religion," Metro Times, Aug. 1-7) call a Christian rock festival “an imitation of Lollapalooza.” While Christian entertainment does its share of copying from current popular trends, the music festival is not one of them. In 1988 I went to a…
Wait and see
The latest in the Beard Elementary contaminated soil scandal….
All roads lead to Motor
The prime techno venue turns five and can rave about it….
London loves us
The British music industry goes bloody mad for Detroit music of all stripes.
Desperately seeking something
Twentysomething angst can paralyze you….
Swept aside
With 21 declared candidates, why does Detroit’s mayoral primary feel like such a sleeper?
But what would they do?
Choosing the person that’s supposed to win doesn’t matter – we should be concentrating on what each mayoral candidate plans to do for this city.
Beat with a joystick
With its violent, slo-mo action and plot-rich, cinematic style, Max Payne may be pointing the way to the future of all computer video games.
Strained relations
One-on-one discussions may be the best way to improve the often strained relationship between Detroit’s Arab-American and African-American communities.
Building a movement
The Committee for the Political Resurrection of Detroit is putting forth progressive City Council candidates as it prepares for the long run.
Fame, blame and shame
Marilyn Manson and other local celebs at the raunchy, scary Peaches gig … the confusing mekka tour cancellation …. Retro burlesque prances on stage at the upcoming Drag Stip … & much more.
Running from the margins
To call their candidacies long shots is to drastically understate their situations … but quixotic mayoral candidates remain hopeful despite obstacles.
Wising up, sort of
Police say no more annoying-person tickets in Rouge Park….
Bush’s glow job
1,200 people to die from radiation if the President’s energy plan goes as planned….
More bright ideas
More power plants mean more corporate love for Bush….
Sparks fly
A recent mayoral forum is full of jabs and jeers….
Life’s lyrics
Virtually plotless, while relying on subtle writing and acute performances, director Jim McKay’s film ambles on like life itself. Focused on a group of teenage girls in the black and Latino milieu of Crown Heights in Brooklyn, it’s a series of small crises on the way to an ambiguous future.
Road trip
Take a little trip and discover out-of-state music happenings like Ladyfest Midwest in Chicago … Bloomingtonfest …. and magic from Le Grand Magistery (in more ways than one) … plus, Esham and D12 get physical … & lots more.
Wilder than you think
If any director deserves a major DVD box set, it’s Billy Wilder. New DVD releases of The Apartment and The Fortune Cookie showcase the talents of Wilder and the late Jack Lemmon.
The art of dining
The food at Joseph’s is simply wonderful. Joseph Petrinac, the chef-proprietor, calls his cuisine “modern fusion.” He trained in France for five years but likes to blend Asian ingredients and fresh pastas into the French foundation. It works. And you’ll spend only about $50 US for salad, soup, appetizer, entrée, coffee and dessert. Highlights include…
Lost and Delirious
Canadian director Léa Pool (Mouvements du désir) captures the intensity of a friendship between teenage girls and then turns up the heat, because the adolescent pair at the heart of her first English-language film also happen to be lovers.
Original Sin
How much can a person be fooled by what they want to see? That’s the central question of director Michael Cristofer’s adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s Waltz into Darkness, an exotic curiosity about love inexplicably conquering all — though it does capture the heat generated by the charismatic duo of Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie.
The King Is Alive
A tourist bus loses its way in the Namibian desert and runs out of gas at an abandoned mining station in the middle of nowhere. In this classic melodramatic setup, with ostensibly civilized characters thrown into an extreme situation, it’s only a matter of time before the grasping secret selves emerge and take over —…
The Others
With a nod to a host of psychological ghost stories (particularly Henry James’ Turn of the Screw), Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar fashions a suitably sinister environment for his first English-language film, but his twist ending is painfully apparent early on — with Nicole Kidman.
Good read
What niche has Detroit’s Outrageous Cherry carved out of this helter-skelter, groovy-gone-wrong, ever-expanding pop and rock universe? Not garage rock, not psych garage; not ’60s girl group-meets-’70s sonic reducers; no, not quite. Torch bearers of the frittered away pop genius once possessed by Brian Wilson, P.J. Proby and Scott Walker? Closer, maybe, but not the…
Dubplate peer pressure
Takin’ it back to the old school while pushing things forward, a crew of Michigan bassheads are rewinding drum ’n’ bass history and dropping it in a sci-fi context. In the early ’90s, primarily in England, jungle sliced and diced its way through the dance world. Its spastic beats — often with vocals sounding like…
Piano mas
Think of this as the year of the keyboard, in which a bumper crop of luscious jazz pianists fills the bins at your local record mart. After recent CD triumphs by Marilyn Crispell (Amaryllis), Brad Mehldau (on two from Charles Lloyd, The Water is Wide and the forthcoming Hyperion with Higgins) and Jason Moran (last…
Between the buttons
Proxima Estacion: Esperanza, the second full-length solo album from Manu Chao, fulfills in an odd sort of way the heat-stroked imagery conjured by Wall of Voodoo many years ago when Stan Ridgeway imagined the "Mexican Radio." However, Esperanza is largely a continuation of the work Chao started on his solo debut from a couple years…
Yearbook snapshots
Back in 1996, the Rondelles were precocious punk upstarts singing about homework and hormones and playing nostalgic, bobby socks pop that blended garage rock with the shimmy ’n’ shake of ’60s girl groups. They weren’t overly retro so much as obsessively romantic, though, with guitarist-vocalist Juliet fawning over math-geek crushes and dishing out melodramatic one-liners…
Well-contained
Built to Spill is three Idaho boys with a hankering for arena-sized grandeur and a penchant for melding tales of small-town life into a sound that smells like indie and tastes like Neil Young. On last year’s Live, the band paid homage to its spiritual pops with a cover of Young’s "Cortez the Killer" that…
Three-ring activism
Wookie Foot is a spiritually electrified big band — a barefoot, red-eyed, dreadlocked orchestra. Led by fuzzy guitars and dubby percussion, it is a Dalai Lama philosophy with a Rage Against the Machine mentality and a Sublime-inspired sound. The album is saturated by psychedelic spirituality that fortunately, in the Zen spirit it encourages, never takes…
A soldier’s story
Assata Shakur’s autobiography, Assata, is understandably biased. If you were an escaped political prisoner, living in self-imposed Cuban exile for the past 30 years for a crime you did not commit, your life story also might incorporate a few choice words in reference to the New York criminal justice system. Racist pigs. Cracka dogs. Read…
