Class ceiling
Here’s a scene from feminist ancient history: It’s 1972 and about 20 of us are gathered in somebody’s living room for our weekly "women’s support group" meeting. We’re all associated, in one way or another, with a small public college catering mostly to "nontraditional" students, meaning those who are older, poorer and more likely to…
Trance-endental
Just as hip hop has found its way to white suburbia, trance has toddled off from its cradles in Goa and Ibiza to equally dubious destinations. In Israel, trance is turning into bubblegum music. In the Far East, it scores the consumer fetishism of young Asians, putting their new wealth on display in glitzy clubs.…
Prison give and take
Last week was an eventful one for Michigan’s prisons. First the Michigan Department of Corrections announced that it would seek permission to stop using male guards in the housing units of its women’s prisons. The decision comes amid lawsuits alleging that women prisoners are often sexually abused, harassed and intimidated by male guards. At almost…
Start remembering
Nowadays everybody wanna talk / like they got somethin’ to say / But nothing comes out when they move their lips / just a bunch of gibberish / And muthafuckas act like they forgot about Dre. What do you do if you’re an extraordinary producer with a superior technical ear for hip hop who has…
Peers for peace
Maggie Wider rocks back in her chair, avoiding Amber’s gaze from across the table in the school library. "I don’t understand why she’s making such a big deal out of it," says Wider. "It was just a friggin’ seat at an assembly." Amber Karam, a Troy High School senior, fingers a beige folder nervously, while…
Rambling rock
No, Gomez is not the character from "The Addams Family," although this five-piece from London does epitomize the television series’ odd and quirky ethos. Liquid Skin is the more refined follow-up to the much-acclaimed debut, Bring It On. Liquid rocks, it rolls and gets downright dirty in a bluesy, Hendrix way. Sometimes. Usually, the members…
Sideshow infraction
Imagine walking through a huge shopping mall and suddenly coming upon a store that’s selling reproductions of your own art work. You’ve never heard of this store before, but there it is, plain as day, stocked with your paintings. Somebody you don’t know is making money from pictures that you’ve created. Aghast, you step inside…
Post-tribe vibe
If you hit up the icebox and there’s no jelly, you’ll settle for a peanut butter sandwich, right? Yeah, but it sho ’nuff don’t jam like PB&J, now does it? Having said that, Q-Tip’s new joint, Amplified, finds itself anywhere from dope to lacking, depending on the cut. But don’t sleep; just because a lot…
Women at work
What do Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and Hewlett-Packard’s Carly Fiorina have in common? According to Fortune magazine, they are among the 50 most powerful women in American business, potent examples of the way the corporate climate has changed in the past two decades. The Oct. 25 issue was the second time that magazine had published…
Blast-phemy
Here’s a strange one for Christmas: The recurring slogan on this release is "Two thousand years in the tomb, nine months in the womb." Produced and co-written by slick, intellectual, New York agit-pop artist Ron English, this concept album features fascinating contributions by such musicians as Mojo Nixon, Phoebe Legere, Railroad Jerk, Whammo and the…
Chill communication
Detroit’s Soul Clique is sending messages to your inner freak. Listen up, now!
Attention Span
LIVE THE HIGH LIFE Forget about the stupid parties and lame festivities; there’s nothing wrong with staying home alone on New Year’s Eve. But because the forecast indicates the possibility of chaos and apocalypse, you have to balance the partyin’ with preparation. Before locking yourself into some small, windowless room on December 31, shopping must…
Advancing with the past
As an odd signature of recognition, to know Stereolab is to know the High Llamas. Fact is, since Sean O’Hagan (the main man behind the High Llamas) has been working more and more with Stereolab, the two bands’ sounds have come ever closer. The key difference between the two groups, however, lies in the pace…
Offhanded thoughts
Timothy Leary ruminates to the beat and whacks poetic….
Hope this makes you mad
Back when philosopher Marshall McLuhan began spinning thought-provoking communication theories (the medium is the message, etc.) his publisher objected. "Your stuff is 90 percent new," the man said, or words to that effect. "People can’t handle more than about 10 percent new." Long ago, it became pretty clear that this is usually the case for…
Stewart Francke
Detroit-area singer-songwriter Stewart Francke is a songwriter in the classic heartland troubadour mode. His songs ring out strong, straight and clear from the core of his being, delivered courtesy of six strings and a remarkable ear for narrative pop-rock. Francke has managed the alchemy of song that translates life’s experiences clearly and artfully, expanding upon…
News Hits
The scoop that pooped The story in the Macomb Daily on Dec. 1 had Doug Martz going bonkers. The Great Lakes Commission was holding a conference about Lake St. Clair, with more than 230 experts attending. The paper sent a reporter, who came back with a story that appeared under the headline: "Lake Pollution Blamed…
The fun factor
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, there’s just a little bit too much excitement at this time of year for my delicate little constitution to handle. I need some way to make sense of it all. “You mean there are too many booze-filled candies, hot-buttered eggnogs and champagne toasts for your delicate constitution,”…
Shop-a-tronic
Ah, the hustle and bustle of shopping for the holidays. The adorable new toys, the amazing new gadgets … the Web-server crashes. Yes, I’m talking about online holiday shopping. Or, e-commerce if you’re hip to the industry lingo. Actually, despite the much-publicized day-after-Thanksgiving crash of the Toys "R" Us Web site, things have otherwise been…
Wine, wins and, uh, oops
WINE TIMES The Great Holiday Grape, an elaborate wine-tasting party presented by the Fine Wine Source of Livonia and the Metro Times, finally happened Thursday night at the Royal Oak Music Theatre. It was well worth my wait. Hometown hero Stewart Francke performed live while the hip set’s upper crust roamed about, nodding tipsy pleasantries…
Pitch’d
313 HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS For years now the 313 e-mail list has been the only online source for intelligent discussions on the deeper side of Detroit techno, as well as such topics as the finer points of Derrick May’s discography, the ever-popular "who is Drexciya-Maurizio," "Jeff Mills is-isn’t God posts" and current topics such…
Terrence Parker
It’s not enough simply to work as hard as Terrence Parker does to maintain his level of artistic and popular success — though he works as hard as the Funk Brothers once did to make this city’s music shine. Parker’s wildly-eclectic take on urban soundscapes, sweet millennial soul music and a dedication to making the…
Food Stuff
TASTEFUL PRESENTS If you want to give edibles as holiday gifts, the most appreciated, theoretically, are goodies you make yourself. Plan B is to deliver a basket of ready-to-eat items, usually foods people wouldn’t splurge on for themselves. But prepackaged gift baskets can seem a bit impersonal, sort of a one-food-fits-all approach. The only thing…
Alto Madness
In the late ‘50s, when young Julian "Cannonball" Adderley was a blazing star in the jazz firmament — as sax-sidekick to John Coltrane in the Miles Davis Sextet — he also authored an occasional article for the seminal Jazz Review. Cannon’s unparalleled work on alto — combining a sense of soul as vital natural resource…
Southern discomfort
When movies first appeared in the United States, the Civil War had only been over for 30 years. Add the fact that this was a war with its own visual history: The new medium of photography was used to document it, and the images shot by innovators such as Mathew Brady provided a common visual…
The Cider House Rules
Turning a novel into a film is a tricky process and, more often than not, what gets lost in the translation is precisely what made the novel so appealing in the first place. Stripped of its narrative complexity and texture, the story can come off as run-of-the-mill and trite, and this can happen even when…
Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo
It doesn’t take an hour of recycled comedic pranks, sex jokes and bad dialogue to figure out that just about any member or ex-member of the “Saturday Night Live” cast can snag a movie deal. Now Rob Schneider (as main manwhore Deuce Bigalow) and Adam Sandler (as cameo-making producer) are daring to show their names…
The Goddess speaks!
Meet a 30-ish writer named Amy, long brown hair, living alone with her little dog, possessing an uncanny knack for giving sound advice. No, not me. This is the other Amy; Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, whose nationally syndicated column appears in more than 70 publications, including our own Metro Times. Though some of our…
Ride With the Devil
It may seem like an odd combination, a Chinese director making a film about the American Civil War, but Ang Lee’s films (Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm) have always examined how traditionalists within specific cultures react when faced with the prospect of change. In addition, the Taiwan-born Lee has seen his own family…
Rethinking ink
When Jay Wheeler had two dragons and "a big crazy tree with a bunch of faces" inked on his arm, it was the cool thing to do. That was seven years ago, when he was 19. Now he looks at his arm and wants to cover it up. "That’s when I was a rough guy,…
Train of Life
Until recently, the Holocaust was usually dealt with in narrative films in two ways: as tragedy, expressed on a grand scale (Schindler’s List) or between individuals (The Harmonists); or through guilt, as in the whole genre of French films (The Last Metro, Au revoir les enfants) which detail the intricacies of collaborating with the Nazis.…
The secret life of toys
Few film fans will be surprised to hear that filmmaker John Lasseter — the mild-mannered creative genius behind the computer-animated hit film Toy Story — is, and has always been, an enthusiastic devotee of toys. Yes, he’s a toy fan: a defender, an advocate, a sympathizer, a fiercely passionate apologist for toys. He identifies with…
Looped culture
As ‘99 rolls into ‘00, there’s a lot of madness going on out there. This madness is perhaps best summed up by that 8-track copy of the Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (in quad, natch) that went for $227.50 on the innocuously lower-case eBay. Of course I’m talking about that monumental moment when the locally…
