Taking up a collection
CD retrospectives for the millennium assemble songs for every taste and every decade.
Roll and rock into 2000
Local New Year’s blowouts promise great music – and good odds for smooching with strangers.
Down the line
Detroit pop-punk septet Telegraph keeps the good times rolling for the friends they’ve made along the way. Read the unabridged online interview, then listen to their latest song on Sonic Metropolis.
Healthcare-dot-dollars
With experts predicting that some 30 million Americans will go online for health information by the year’s end, it is not particularly surprising that nationally recognized doctors have teamed up with Internet entrepreneurs to get a piece of the $1 trillion health-market pie and make a fortune off publicly traded, health-related Web sites. Yet some…
Bound for pleasure
Dress me up, tie me down in a big new photo book of obsessions….
Attention Span
JUST IN CASE Never fear, weary travelers; baggage claim just got easier. The Luggage Locator is an electronic, remote-controlled gadget that attaches to your suitcase. A push of the button on the remote sets off an alarm and a bright flashing light on your suitcase, letting you know where your bag is on the airport…
In one ear
LUSH LIZLESS For more than a year and half, Liz Copeland hosted Friday nights at Lush. The night’s focus was the exposure of creative music via guest performances by the likes of Soul Clique and Spacelings & Bassheads (among the many) and Liz’s own musical mixing. One of the highlights of the last year at…
Mass transit off track
As Karen Kendrick-Hands navigates her gray minivan along the pothole-pocked streets downtown near the Detroit River, she points to the railway that, until the mid-1980s, was used to run commuter trains between Pontiac and the Renaissance Center. "That’s our precious rail line," she says. If things keep going the way they are now, says Kendrick-Hands,…
What a professor should be
Wayne State, where I manage to teach on my good days, has something the big prestige universities see little of anymore; students, many of them first-generation Americans, who are proud to be the first in their families to get a college education. Some of them are even excited about it: Dalondo Moultrie, who worked for…
Bag it
Since it’s the season of entertainment options that either involve getting nostalgic about Charlie Brown television specials or surfing waves of merry mall rats, I’m sitting with the Lizard of Fun, plotting Y2K survival strategies over a few bottles of vanilla porter. "OK, you get all the canned peaches, but I get the rest of…
Intrigue and insects
FERNS AND FLIES Yes indeed, it’s time for yet another update on how Ferndale (i.e. SORO, or south of Royal Oak) is even more hip and happening than it was last time you were reminded how hip and happening it has become. Get it? You will, and there’ll be even more drooling press as the…
News Hits
WWW.CENSOR The Internet is full of unauthorized sites that use the names of politicians in their URLs. There is www.sonofbush.com, for example, which takes pointed jabs at the presidential hopeful. Closer to home, there’s the domain www.johnengler.com, owned by this paper, which proudly offers a host of unflattering stories we’ve done on the guv over…
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…
Phantom Andy
One of the most demanding movie genres is the biographical film. Mixing fact with fiction, it ruthlessly condenses a messy life into a streamlined narrative that will make audiences feel that they know what made that person tick. In their biopics, Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and…
Food Stuff
KEEP YOUR COOL Several hundred years ago, ice sculpting started in France as an attractive way to keep food fresh. Ever since, the melting art form has appeared at many a reception and celebration. These sculptures can be traditional — a swan or a heart, for example — or unusual, such as a "toboggan run,"…
Auld Lang-xiety
Even with all the "Y2K readiness" that governments and businesses have assured us of, even now, at the 11th hour, no one can say for certain what will happen at midnight on Dec.31. At my own day job, my "Employee Y2K Manual" informs me that everything possible has been done to insure that there will…
Anywhere but there
Most of us will spend this New Year’s Eve in relative comfort, even if our computers do come crashing down around our feet. We’ll be celebrating with our families, our friends or at least some semblance of loved ones, either in small gatherings at nearby bars or restaurants or in the comfort of our own…
Movie into the future
Speculating about the future has been a movie obsession even before Gort sent Rennie to preach the anti-nuclear gospel in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) or H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1953) dreamed a black-and-white alien invasion on the big screen. Of course, back then all E.T.s were "Martians" and prop spacecraft…
Hope for homes
The Neighborhood Management Company has turned a potential disaster for Detroit into a triumph, according to city planners. Last September, a Wayne County-created nonprofit hired the organization to care for 1,600 dilapidated properties that MCA Financial Corporation had owned and RIMCO had managed after both went bankrupt. In the last three months, NMC has nearly…
Illegal firings
A National Labor Relations Board Judge reviewing Detroit Newspapers’ firing of 90 strikers ruled last Friday that nearly half the workers were discharged illegally, according to an NLRB spokesperson. A 156-page opinion issued by NLRB Administrative Law Judge Richard Scully ordered Detroit’s two daily newspapers and the company that manages business operations for both papers…
Y2K party guide
Millennium Fever is going around … it seems even the most laid-back among us are getting excited (and apprehensive) about all those nines turning over. How will you celebrate? There are a few big rock ‘n’ roll blowouts in town, or you could decide it’s best to stay home with the ol’ VCR. But don’t…
Anna and the King
This is how the story ends: With soothing music and unspoken truths, with restraint and melancholy, without even a kiss. Anna dancing with King Mongkut (Shall we dance?) – an Englishwoman dancing with the king. Better yet, a woman in the arms of a man. A strange sort of woman, stubborn and courageous (“Husband must…
Bicentennial Man
Director Chris Columbus has Robin Williams dressed up yet again. First as Mrs. Doubtfire, now as the precocious robot, Andrew Martin, in the future flick, Bicentennial Man, based on a story by Isaac Asimov. The new movie looks back – not to the rubber-padded dad who poses as a nanny to get access to his…
Nobody’s Stooges
For some bands, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as the MC5, the Stooges, the Damned and the Sex Pistols may seem like a good idea, but trying to live up to them is damn near impossible. Luckily, Amen understands this. Instead of aping its influences, Amen has drawn heavily from them and molded…
Mansfield Park
Was Jane Austen a proto-feminist? Director Patricia Rozema certainly thinks so, and in her spirited, revisionist version of Mansfield Park she transforms the novel’s heroine, Fanny Price, into Austen’s onscreen alter ego. Rozema’s screenplay derives not just from Austen’s 1814 novel, but incorporates her exuberant adolescent writings (stories, letters, journals). So young Fanny is introduced…
Man on the Moon
It’s only fitting that comedian Jim Carrey disappears so completely into comedian Andy Kaufman that all traces of his own personality are obliterated. The Kaufman portrayed in Man on the Moon would have demanded such total devotion to trickery. Director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus) follows a controversial film about a…
Liberty Heights
The most striking aspect about 1954 Baltimore in writer-director Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights is just how little different ethnic groups knew about each other only a few generations ago. Growing up in the Liberty Heights neighborhood, Ben Kurtzman (Ben Foster) assumed being Jewish was the norm, until he got a rude awakening with the kind…
Art on the Map
When you drive by the corner of Cass and Michigan in Detroit, do you ever stop to look at the big, orange funky thing in front of the Ameritech building? Did you know its creator is the world famous sculptor Alexander Calder? Ever enjoy sitting in the cool grass underneath the huge, brooding, insectlike steel…
Veteran Virtuosity
In many ways, NRBQ is something of an institution. While the "Q" has changed from Quintet to Quartet and the (R)hythm and (B)lues aren’t exactly (N)ew after 30 years of playing bars, clubs and festivals, nobody plays good-time rock ‘n’ roll like NRBQ, — nobody. Led by the zany-yet-inscrutable keyboard genius of Terry Adams, NRBQ…
Sublime Dolor
The setting of Mary’s suffering at the foot of the cross, "Stabat Mater," was written anonymously during the Middle Ages, and composers from Palestrina to Poulenc have been inspired to write moving choral works based on the ancient text. Inexplicably, Antonin Dvorák’s "Stabat Mater," a sprawling, reflective, often beautiful composition, has been gathering mountains of…
Straight-Up Down-Home
Like a fair number of smaller record labels dedicated to the preservation of the blues, Earwig was founded by a blues lover who heeded and followed a "calling" to support the music as a lifetime occupation and obsession. Michael Robert Frank, President and CEO of Earwig, has released this fine two-CD collection as a celebration…
Scottish Trip-Pop
Have you ever taken something apart and then tried to put it back together, but not with the intention of restoring it to its original form? The ’90s have been riddled with bands that focus on deconstructing the accepted standards of pop structure, sometimes to the detriment of melody and meaning — see Mogwai, Tortoise,…
Kings of rock – V 3.0
One word that often comes to mind when describing Metallica is "ambitious." Beginning with Kill ‘Em All, each Metallica album until And Justice For All (which I’ll call the end of Phase I) has been groundbreaking in its own way. Kill ‘Em All reinvented hard rock; the follow-up, Ride the Lightning, introduced classical textures and…
