Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Scientists at the Crazy Wisdom Institute of Applied Surpriseology have discovered the existence of the clown chakra. Located near the sex chakra, it houses the sense of humor and determines one’s capacity for spiritually cleansing laughter. It’s largely shut down in most people, resulting in a global epidemic of taking things…
And baby makes four
Q; I am a 43-year-old woman who’s been married to the same man for 23 years. Our children are in college. I work in bank management and am fairly conservative. My husband, however, is fairly liberal, but it was me who ended up in an extramarital affair. He was someone I used to work with…
The gift of Detroit garage
Holiday gift picks: Make your own boxed gift collection of Detroit garage rock ‘n’ soul circa 2001.
Letters to the Editor
From across the pond I’d like to thank you for your article on the reactions to the Patriot Act ("In the name of patriotism," Metro Times, Dec. 5-11). It is heartening to know that not everyone in the United States has been “shredded by the shrapnel of rampant jingoism.” Apart from the Morning Star, the…
What’s driving Peter De Lorenzo?
A fervent auto industry critic wreaks havoc with his flamboyant online publication, autoextremist.com.
Trademark infringement?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation watches over several trademark infringement cases.
Of elves and Vez
El Vez returns for his annual holiday extravaganza … Royal Oak’s mayor confuses us … Downtown’s train station ruins featured in a new, giftable book … & more.
Organic tendencies
DJs Mike Huckaby and Michael Geiger stretch out the house with a blend of international and East Coast dance rhythms and textures … it’s no stereotypical Detroit club night.
Cyber tussle
Complaint sites skewering large corporations test the latest laws governing freedom of speech on the Web.
Idiot culture triumphs
Journalists today seem scared someone will question their patriotism. They should worry instead about asking hard questions about real issues — and we the public should be demanding answers.
Oh, MONA
Downtown Detroit’s Museum of New Art continues to amaze everyone with its vast 10,000-square-foot space set in the archeological ruins of Washington Boulevard.
Disco punk and neo-new wave
A rare and unforgettable night of retro futurism … Ann Arbor nightlife continues to evolve … A holiday “Family Reunion” at Motor … & “Revival” Sundays bring fresh energy to Porter Street Station.
Scraping bottom
Michigan politicians rank at the very bottom of ethical conduct lists….
Pee-u press awards
Prizes awarded for this year’s “stinkiest media performances”….
Church aid
Central United Methodist church raises funds (and support) for people with HIV/AIDS….
Union Friendly redux
Union Friendly Computers furloughs workers for three weeks, just in time for the holidays….
Undercover uncovered
Royal Oak cites local clubs for simulating sex acts (and other various liquor law violations)….
Watch out women
Michigan women’s health clinics may be in big trouble….
Modern classics
Holiday gift picks: Music from the ages meets contemporary thinking head-on in a series of classical releases from the past year.
New jazz standards
Holiday gift picks: The year’s best jazz recordings from Malachi Thompson and Fred Anderson — dissimilar styles, yet similarly fresh and adventurous.
His Name Is Alive
Considering that announcements for almost every His Name Is Alive performance are either earmarked with the phrase “first show in a long time” or “last time we’ll see this band for a while,” it’s safe to say that the live HNIA experience is a rare and festive occasion. The group’s elusive nature is heightened by…
Even in Darkness
Since Outkast’s debut in the early ’90s, fans of Atlanta hip hop have taken pride in the emergence and establishment of the Dungeon Family. Each year since 1994, them boys from the ATL have introduced a new branch of the family tree to their loving public. In order by debut: Outkast and Organized Noize, Big…
Born Into Trouble as the Sparks Fly Upward
Born Into Trouble as the Sparks Fly Upward is a haunting, beautiful album. The Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra is a side project of Efrim, Thierry and Sophie of the revolutionary Canadian group Godspeed You Black Emperor! The group’s first album, He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of…
‘Better when we’re loved’
Alistair MacLeod’s compact body of work presents a powerful case against literary overproduction: there’s his sparkling novel, No Great Mischief, published in 1999, and now a near-perfect collection of 16 stories written between 1966 and 1999. In both books, MacLeod renders knowing and affectionate portraits of the hard-working, tight-knit, Scottish immigrant clans based in northeastern…
The Glow Part II
While solo artists are nothing new, there seems to be a growing amount of music coming out by individuals single-handedly creating entire recordings and presenting the results as the work of a group. Rather than going the traditional route of using one’s own name, solo projects appear under invented titles that imply group effort, leading…
The Photo Album
For its third album, Death Cab for Cutie has finally found a suitably inventive drummer (Michael Schorr) whose added power has enabled the band to release its most sonically creative work yet. Not only are the melodies more pointed and pronounced in an early R.E.M. vein than ever before (best exemplified by the simmering “Information…
Outside Looking In
Chances are somebody has already labeled this guy the Australian Blue Thunder from Down Under. For some reason that title keeps kicking around in my head as I listen to this cat. But I honestly can’t think of a much better handle to attach to somebody who attacks music like Dave Hole. I don’t know…
5:30 Saturday Morning
What’s worse than a singer who follows a mundane formula? It’s knowing that the singer could’ve done so much better. Such as it is with Lennon. Her debut album, 5:30 Saturday Morning, growls, snarls and stumbles its way through an already well-navigated musical region: grinding guitars mismatched with a polished female voice. In short, this…
Lifestyles of the Laptop Café
Agent OPP: We have been recording your activities. Your elusiveness is unprecedented, shrouding yourself in mystery at nearly every juncture. It is your signature, however, that leads to your true identity. It can be safely concluded that you have some association with Dopplereffekt, Drexciya, Japanese Telecom, Underground Resistance and even Ultradyne. You’re too old school…
Tamed flames
Feeding its Livonia neighborhood for more than 10 years, this is a busy little place, but the staff is friendly and attentive. Authenticity has been subjugated to American tastes; fiery Szechuan specialties are toned down and interspersed with milder Cantonese entrées. Best bets include the Mandarin crispy duck and that old standby, moo goo gai…
Spike and Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation (2001)
Well, kids, the Spike & Mike S&T fest is a little tepid this year. True, there’s a lot of impolite language for those who can still automatically snicker at such, but not a single fellating crack whore or grossly fleshy person wallowing in feces to be seen. Sort of makes you wonder what the world’s…
Poet’s palate
How easily we forget that the life over examined is not worth living. Rather than descend into the sump of neuroticisms that makes many of us what we are, I’d like to think that my eating and drinking comprise a strenuous search for the genuine, that I am a voyager, an explorer, an adventurer in…
Ultramarin
The most prolific electronic music factory in the world, bar none, is the Mille Plateaux/Force Inc./Force Tracks/Ritornell axis of labels based in Frankfurt, Germany. Beneath this vast marketing umbrella, some of the most essential recording artists on the planet are given room to work as quickly or slowly as they like. Performers such as Vladislav…
Hip Check!
With two back pockets full of get-down-yeah, some slow-burn ESG-style funk bass, trembling organ, wailing harmonica and hand claps to spare, The Come Ons get right into it with Hip Check!, the latest rhythm-heavy hip-shaker from Deanne, Jim, Patrick and friends. It has all the shimmy of the group’s past work, but with a cleaner,…
Cracking the code
With the unveiling of a rough draft of the human genome last January, genetic determinism is being floated more than ever to explain human behavior and disease. Medical reporters gush about unraveling the human DNA code to find new cures and create designer babies. Of course, smart journalists point out why there are no single…
Lack of Communication
If you can hear past the initial blurry-eyed guitar-bass-drum bombast, you’ll realize that The Von Bondies aren’t lacking in communication as much as they’d like you to believe. The messages Jason Stollsteiner announces, while spit-wailed and warbled, are actually quite coherent logically. And whether they’re muffled under distortion or belted out between drum-guitar blasts, the…
Say It Loud! A Celebration of Black Music in America
George G.M. James writes in Stolen Legacy, a history of ancient Egypt, that Kemetic (Egyptian) people believed music to be a “combining of the spheres.” The spheres to which he refers are temporal and spiritual. And music brings them together in harmony. Say It Loud! A Celebration of Black Music in America is a lesson…
Fire in the sky
Famed zoologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould has been railing of late over historical biographers shoehorning their subjects’ lives into prefabricated narratives. As he wrote not long ago in The New York Review of Books, such authors too often “misdirect history into channels of our evolved mental preferences.” Readers of science biographies know these…
Can You Dig It? The ’70s Soul Experience
From Wattstax to 8-tracks, cuz, the Five Stairsteps and Curtis Mayfield, this collection pulls together a six-disc trip through the funkiest era in American music. You may need to dust off your blue light and head to the basement. Pull your platforms and dashiki out the box. Hang your love beads back in the doorway.…
Ghostly apparitions
Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro (Cronos, Mimic) has fashioned a great, old-fashioned chiller, a ghost story that is about the terrors of the living as well as those of the restless dead, set in an isolated manor house during the waning days of the Spanish Civil War.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
"Epic" and "mythic" are the words that come to mind to describe this film, a labor of love for writer-director Peter Jackson and his wife, screenwriter Frances Walsh, who’ve packed the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic trilogy into an adventure that awes and gallops through just under three hours. It’s true cinematic wizardry made…
Vanilla Sky
What is it about Alejandro Amenábar’s 1997 psychological thriller, Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), that would prompt writer-director Cameron Crowe and producer-star Tom Cruise to remake it? What they’ve created here is the ultimate vanity project — with Penélope Cruz and Cameron Diaz.
The Jam: The Larry Graham & Graham Central Station Anthology
When Larry Graham put Graham Central Station together, he may have saved a lot of souls caught in limbo after he left Sly & the Family Stone. GCS probably sang the sentiments of Graham fans when they said, “We’ve been waiting for so long.” GCS’ music is chicken soup for the soul. Its sound picked…
Not Another Teen Movie
Take a group of hits, toss them in a shredder and stick no-holds-barred satirical sketches to a plot line all built from the random scenes that roll out. Those of you who lined up with wallets in hand for Scary Movie 2 proved that if it’s worked once, then it might work again — just…
Talking Horns
Sitting in the car and something fresh comes on the radio. Hmmm. So I take it as my personal Down Beat blindfold test. Sounds a little like mid- and late-’70s Art Ensemble of Chicago, that period when they used records like Fanfare for the Warriors and Nice Guys to flaunt how well they could channel…
On the Run
Sitting in the car and something fresh comes on the radio. Hmmm. So I take it as my personal Down Beat blindfold test. Sounds a little like mid- and late-’70s Art Ensemble of Chicago, that period when they used records like Fanfare for the Warriors and Nice Guys to flaunt how well they could channel…
Dark Day
Sitting in the car and something fresh comes on the radio. Hmmm. So I take it as my personal Down Beat blindfold test. Sounds a little like mid- and late-’70s Art Ensemble of Chicago, that period when they used records like Fanfare for the Warriors and Nice Guys to flaunt how well they could channel…
Morimur
Music of the ages meets contemporary thinking head-on in a series of classical releases from the past year. Recent scholarship having uncovered deep thematic interconnections between Bach’s works for solo violin (in particular, the “Six Sonatas and Partitas”) and his choral writing, leave it to ever-courageous ECM producer Manfred Eicher to illustrate these findings with…
Requiem for Adam
Music of the ages meets contemporary thinking head-on in a series of classical releases from the past year. Recent scholarship having uncovered deep thematic interconnections between Bach’s works for solo violin (in particular, the “Six Sonatas and Partitas”) and his choral writing, leave it to ever-courageous ECM producer Manfred Eicher to illustrate these findings with…
Kingdom Come
Music of the ages meets contemporary thinking head-on in a series of classical releases from the past year. Recent scholarship having uncovered deep thematic interconnections between Bach’s works for solo violin (in particular, the “Six Sonatas and Partitas”) and his choral writing, leave it to ever-courageous ECM producer Manfred Eicher to illustrate these findings with…
Cold Water Dry Stone: New Music with Traditional Roots
Music of the ages meets contemporary thinking head-on in a series of classical releases from the past year. Recent scholarship having uncovered deep thematic interconnections between Bach’s works for solo violin (in particular, the “Six Sonatas and Partitas”) and his choral writing, leave it to ever-courageous ECM producer Manfred Eicher to illustrate these findings with…
frequencyLib
The most prolific electronic music factory in the world, bar none, is the Mille Plateaux/Force Inc./Force Tracks/Ritornell axis of labels based in Frankfurt, Germany. Beneath this vast marketing umbrella, some of the most essential recording artists on the planet are given room to work as quickly or slowly as they like. Performers such as Vladislav…
Detect
The most prolific electronic music factory in the world, bar none, is the Mille Plateaux/Force Inc./Force Tracks/Ritornell axis of labels based in Frankfurt, Germany. Beneath this vast marketing umbrella, some of the most essential recording artists on the planet are given room to work as quickly or slowly as they like. Performers such as Vladislav…
Questions and Comments
The most prolific electronic music factory in the world, bar none, is the Mille Plateaux/Force Inc./Force Tracks/Ritornell axis of labels based in Frankfurt, Germany. Beneath this vast marketing umbrella, some of the most essential recording artists on the planet are given room to work as quickly or slowly as they like. Performers such as Vladislav…
