Cut to the bone
Michigan GOP cuts taxes, brings on serious budget crisis….
Corporate endgame
Julie Styron (Stockard Channing) has the power. Or so she thinks. Director Patrick Stettner makes a confident feature debut and walks a fine line in his portrayal of this striver who has climbed the corporate ladder rung by rung — with Julia Stiles.
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The Arizona Diamondbacks are the macho kingpins of baseball. Last November, they dethroned the invincible New York Yankees with a come-from-behind World Series victory. As the players joyfully mobbed each other, an anthem blasted from the loudspeakers: “We Are The Champions,” a song written and sung by a famous gay musician,…
Gil’s new gig
Career advice for outgoing councilman Gil Hill….
Ocean’s Eleven
Screenwriter Ted Griffin (Best Laid Plans) and Oscar award-winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) have used irony to build a new Ocean’s Eleven from the ground up, with excellently performed, quirky (if shallow) characters, clever laughs and even suspense — with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Andy Garcia.
Flunking geometry
• You recently printed a letter from a young man who was concerned about the size of his erection. You assured him that his size was perfectly average. He claimed to be 4 inches in diameter. If that were the average size of most men’s erections, the human race would die out within a generation…
Who’s da boss?
Mike Duggan forgets he’s his own boss (or is he?)….
Joe Brainard: A Retrospective
Whenever I hear the words “New York School,” I reach for my funny bone, my thinking cap and my johnson all at the same time. Since I’ve only got two hands, this becomes a Three Stooges imitation of a Hindu deity, a blur of imaginary arms grasping at the rays of poetic enlightenment emanating from…
Music, madness & Marquette Prison
The sad opus of Detroit master percussionist, brilliant bandleader and creative composer Roy Brooks: From hard bop to hard time.
Flag waggers
Ashcroft chastizes critics; declares News Hits enemy of the state….
The Straight Line: Writings on Poetry and Poets
Whenever I hear the words “New York School,” I reach for my funny bone, my thinking cap and my johnson all at the same time. Since I’ve only got two hands, this becomes a Three Stooges imitation of a Hindu deity, a blur of imaginary arms grasping at the rays of poetic enlightenment emanating from…
Lock ’em up
Why Detroit jails house so many mentally ill patients.
Whither City Airport?
If the Xanadu development company gets its way — and that’s a very long shot — homes, schools and businesses will replace the drone of planes on the east side of Detroit.
The Great American Paperback
In a kitschy clash of chisel-cut gangsters, half-naked women and radioactive beasts from beyond, Peter Haining’s The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines offers a polemical history of the scandalous dime magazines that populated drugstore magazine racks between the world wars. Haining’s insightful commentary walks us through the rich American tradition of the pulp classics,…
On record & online
How to find percussionist Roy Brooks’ best recordings (and an online video, too).
Songs for the loveless
Still shoegazing after all these years….
The comeback trail
Details on getting involved in producing a comeback concert for Roy, spearheaded by Ron Alpern and Marion Hayden, are pending. Please stand by.
Let ’em talk
A dialogue with writer-director Richard Linklater, auteur of the verbose.
Stuff it and groove
Metro Times’ holiday guide to hip giving and commodity fetishism, in which our usual suspects come up with a few shelves’ worth of extreme pleasures — of the cerebral, visual and aural kind — to warm the season with plums of passion and fountainheads of inspiration.
Tape
Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman give some of the best performances of their careers in director Richard Linklater’s rogue’s gallery of slackers. A film that poses the question: Do overage frat-boy behavior and grassroots criminality make a guy a "dick"?
Union unfriendly
A computer company created to serve organized labor seems to have suddenly turned against it.
La Bûche
Director Danièle Thompson’s film opens like a Christmas present to Paris, then becomes just a clever, well-produced soap opera begging comparison to Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters — with Françoise Fabian and Emmanuel Béart.
Put a spell on you
Plowshares’ It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues is a musical that’ll stir up the mojo and shake the soul.
Come Undone
While it often seems like the French believe they discovered genitalia and are anxious to share this with the world, the sexual explicitness that films such as this story of gay love use so casually reveals more than flesh. Director Sébastian Lifshitz bathes this brand of raw realism in a rich, cinematic glow.
McNamara’s band
To an extent even Chicago’s first Mayor Daley might have envied, local government is honeycombed with products of Ed McNamara’s machine.
Mangia, mangia
Thousands of people love this place, a fast-growing chain that attempts to re-create the Southern Italian immigrant experience of the 1950s. The surprising thing is that the food is really good — not to mention cheap. The corporate mission is to take diners back to the ’50s, when families were large and the meatballs were…
Niggers, old & new
Since September 11, is the pressure off African-Americans and on the Arabs living in this country?
One/Three
Trip hop has just been shot dead. It’s about time. The little subgenre that could seemed to run out of gas about three years ago and has been losing momentum ever since. With the first Dabrye album (an alias for Ann Arbor’s Tadd Mullinix), it’s clear that trip hop didn’t really change hip hop at…
Dancin’, chowin’ & morality cops
Electronica and liquid latex at the first-ever “Ghostly Disco Nouveau” at Labyrinth … WEMU-FM throws a party for its listeners … & Royal Oak cops threaten Noir Leather show hosts, after determining dancers’ pasties aren’t up to code.
The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines
In a kitschy clash of chisel-cut gangsters, half-naked women and radioactive beasts from beyond, Peter Haining’s The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines offers a polemical history of the scandalous dime magazines that populated drugstore magazine racks between the world wars. Haining’s insightful commentary walks us through the rich American tradition of the pulp classics,…
Letters to the Editor
Get the story out Thank you, Curt Guyette, for the wonderful work in your recent cover story for Metro Times ("In the name of patriotism," Metro Times, Dec. 5-11). I am frightened at what is happening in this country and truly disgusted at the state of mainstream media. Please keep covering this horrible turn of…
Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins: Ping-Pong and the Art of Staying Alive
It’s 1947. A young woman is sunning herself in a bathing suit with the top rolled down. The future author of Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins is but an adolescent struggling in vain not to stare at her breasts. A young GI comes, makes love to the girl in the grass and then teaches the…
Wave your mittens in the air
A sturdy and diverse show at the detroit contemporary, featuring Switch Stance, Red or Dead, 25 Suave and xbxrx. Plus, alternative holiday music from the Brothers Groove, Lisboa and Blair.
The Angel Hair Anthology
Whenever I hear the words “New York School,” I reach for my funny bone, my thinking cap and my johnson all at the same time. Since I’ve only got two hands, this becomes a Three Stooges imitation of a Hindu deity, a blur of imaginary arms grasping at the rays of poetic enlightenment emanating from…
Daily news blues
Looks like there’ll be no holiday party for the Detroit dailies….
Once
As a filmmaker, Wim Wenders has mastered the beauty of the banal, training his camera on places our eyes would automatically glide over — the commonplace, the overly familiar — and transforming them into vistas rich with portent and purpose. This collection of his photographs feels the same way, and combined with Wenders’ poetic text…
