the emails we get #138: coney dog poster
Working at Metro Times, you never know what kind of fun stuff you’ll discover in your email inbox. This morning, I found this. Yeah, a website dedicated to artistic renderings of hot dogs with geographic connotations. Papaya dog, really? What have I been missing out on? Anyway, they have a Detroit Coney poster. But we…
9/11, 911 — who doesn’t get confused?
Everybody makes mistakes, and we’ve made enough of our own — oh, confusing the Vatican astronomer with a Vatican astrologer comes to mind painfully, and the time a reporter mistakenly attributed those comments to Knight Ridder chief Tony Ridder in the middle of the Detroit newspaper strike, and … but enough about us. We just…
DETROITERS & THE GRAMMYS….
Let’s face it: The Grammy Awards are kinda like the weather — everybody bitches about them but nobody ever does anything about it. Nevertheless, some people seem to take them very seriously (possibly the same people who thought Jethro Tull had recorded the “best heavy metal album” the year they won that award) and it’s…
Guilty pleas from Swift’s captors
Two Detroit men charged with kidnapping Walter Swift and stealing his furniture and other items pleaded guilty today in Wayne County Circuit Court. Detroit residents Leonard Duplessis, 23, and Cortez McAdoo, 22, had been scheduled for trial in the May incident, but in a deal with Wayne County prosecutors pleaded guilty to extortion and armed…
UPDATE: Danger, Barack Obama, danger in Afghanistan
(See update below.) With Obama nearing a fateful announcement on plans to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, our recent, cautionary interview with historian Juan Cole remains atop the most-viewed list of MT stories. With good reason. Since Curt Guyette and I conducted that interview, a number of articles have struck me as important complementary reading…
Night and Day
THURSDAY-SATURDAY DECEMBER 3-5 Arab Film Festival CINEMA PROVOCATEUR The fifth annual Arab Film Festival features a broad range of compelling and provocative films, from Fatenah, an animated short about women in Palestine, to the feature-length documentary Garbage Dreams, which chronicles the "garbage people" of Cairo and is a semifinalist for Best Documentary Feature for the…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
The cooking life
Metro Times: When did you start cooking? Elvira Saragosa: I cook all my life. My mother taught me to make pasta when I was 5 or 6 years old. I went to school only three classes. That’s it. No more. I was born in Detroit in 1923. They took me back to Italy when I…
Faulty motives
Q: I’m a longtime reader who thought I’d never have a reason to write since I’m universally known as the "good girl," but I’m not sure who else I can turn to. I have a close male friend. Even though I knew he was dating someone else, we became friends-with-benefits several years ago. Because of…
Croakin’ around the Christmas tree …
When it comes to 2009’s crop of holiday music, Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart (Columbia) is obviously the biggest — and some would say weirdest — news. The album has already generated more mixed reviews and controversy than probably any such album in history. How much you enjoy it or hate it, however, will…
Hello, we must be going
His band may be preparing a breakup and its final show — but Adam Kempa doesn’t sound all that hung-up about it. In fact, he sounds quite upbeat, managing to stuff in more than a few sprightly chuckles during a recent conversation. His cheerful demeanor probably reflects that, while the Recital, a band Kempa has…
Cheat Code
New Super Mario Bros. Wii Nintendo Wii Mario can do almost anything. From reffing boxing matches to racing go-karts, he’s truly a Renaissance man. But there’s one thing that he and his lesser-heralded bro Luigi don’t do anymore, and that’s run from the screen’s left side to its right in a 2-D adventure on a…
Download Detroit
Alan Scheurman Old Patterns myspace.com/alanpatrick Dismantling the fabric of psych-folk and reassembling it like some mystical quilt, singer-songwriter Alan Scheurman — assisted by His Name is Alive soundscaper Warren Defever — turned in one of 2009’s more complex and (dare we say) emotional albums. Offering introspective tunes ("Starless") alongside unnerving and tribal ones ("Marco Polo"),…
Detroit’s sad Gypsies
When you ask Joseph L. Harris what he thinks about Detroit these days, he likes to talk about the Sea Gypsies of Southeast Asia. No, Harris is neither on acid nor a surrealist poet. In fact, he may know more about Detroit city finances than anyone alive. A CPA by training, he was auditor general…
Terminal death!
Up until this point, the Wonder Twins have avoided the Twilight craze. Sure, they see the plethora of Twilight propaganda in every store and hear friends and co-workers talk about the books as if they’ve just joined the cult of the "Born Again Bloodsuckers." But it wasn’t until the soundtrack for New Moon, the franchise’s…
Raking the bottom
Everybody has some sort of screen for calculating just how bad things have gotten around here. When I started hearing about people breaking into houses and stealing food, I knew the desperation level had ramped up. I got more peeks at the carnage the past couple of weeks. First, I heard about a group of…
Go ahead, shoot yourself
Good painters, it’s said, look inward, often relying on a private emotional response, some right-brain trigger, to inform their art. Skilled photographers, it could be argued, are their outward-looking, left-brained counterparts, artists who consider rationality, chemistry, mathematics and motor-driven mechanisms — so much analytical information — and filter it all through a single (artful) eye.…
Boob tube androgen
I cannot tell you the last time I was more geeked to preview a new television series than Men of a Certain Age, TNT’s latest original effort premiering at 10 p.m. Monday. This heavily hyped hour unites three of the more sublime performers from our TV happy days: Ray Romano, who’s spent most of his…
Food Stuff
Box set — Door to Door Organics of Michigan, a company that delivers fresh, organic fruits, vegetables and groceries to customers’ doorsteps, is offering special holiday gift boxes until Dec. 24. The four gift packages are $29.99 each, with free shipping anywhere in the Door to Door Organics’ delivery area. Customers can place their order…
Soft-core stocking sillies
Screwballs Severin Films B-cinema’s king, Roger Corman, commissioned the Screwballs script and put up half the money for the flick’s production. So dig it: The, uh, plot, is about a group of horny ’50s high school boys determined to see the perky boobs of the cock-teasing Taft & Adams homecoming queen Purity Bush. (Think of…
Time out
The evening anchors on Detroit’s ABC affiliate Channel 7 (WXYX-TV) recently interviewed Time Magazine writer Steven Gray, one of at least a handful of staff reporters imbedded in the city for the next several months for Time’s "Assignment Detroit" project. Gray and his colleagues are posting blogs and short video exposés on the Assignment Detroit…
Target shift
As an attorney advising southeast Michigan businesses, Aimee Guthat has worked with hundreds of companies that hire foreign workers in industries ranging from agriculture to information technology. This year, with a new U.S. president has also come a new way of ensuring a legal work force at those businesses. "With the Bush administration, the focus…
Letters to the Editor
NOI annoyed Re: “Motown gunslingers” (Nov. 18), I’m writing to express my disgust in relation to your remarks about the Nation of Islam’s Fruit of Islam. For you to talk about Andrew Spivey as though his looking like a member of the Nation of Islam is equal to looking like some thug on the street…
Bridge bog
Add "exit RAMPS" to the list of issues being litigated by the Detroit International Bridge Co. and its leader, Manuel "Matty" Moroun. The Warren-based company filed suit last week in the Michigan Court of Claims against the Michigan Department of Transportation, claiming the state is delaying opening ramps from Interstates 75 and 96 to the…
Heart and soul
Lady Louisa’s tagline is “Slow Cooked Ribs and Comfort Food.” It’s interesting that just about nothing Americans call comfort food requires much chewing, though we’ve all had teeth from a very young age. We want our nostalgia soft, apparently, and that’s what their four cooks offer up. All meats, even turkey, are smoked before cooking.…
Until the Light Takes Us
An aggressive Norwegian offshoot of speed metal with a deeply sinister bent, “black metal” is so laden with gothic gloom, satanic brooding and Viking iconography it would be comical if not for the seriously screwed-up antics of some of its biggest stars. This curious, and occasionally ponderous lo-fi documentary peeks behind the veil of one…
All tied up
Meg Ryan plays Louise, a type-A Manhattan lawyer who arrives a day early at her country home and discovers that husband Ian (Timothy Hutton) is about to run off with 23-year-old Sara (Kristen Bell). Instead of breaking down or exploding, however, she knocks Ian out, binds him with duct tape to the toilet and declares…
