A soap box for Christmas
Christmas stories are creepy. Think of Dickens’ ghosts or “that old silk hat” that sent Frosty wild in the streets. St. Nick is the most chilling figure of all — an old guy who keeps tabs on kids before some late-night B&E. In many ways, Robert Vaughan’s Christmas Past fits this tradition: It’s a creepy…
News lite
This column has heard that at least a few Detroit News reporters are unhappy with the paper’s “Real Life, Real News” initiative. There are two problems with the effort launched in October, gripe our sources. One is that the policy puts too much emphasis on soft features, taking valuable resources and space away from hard…
Happy horny holidays
Last year I devoted an entire column to horrifying true stories of desperate and/or depressing holiday sex. This year I’m devoting an entire column to my readers’ favorite, fondest, and most cherished (sex-related) holiday experiences. Enjoy. I entered college an 18-year-old virgin. Instead of screwing every frat boy on campus, I fell in love with…
Bush whack
Readers of this column won’t be surprised to learn that News Hits has little affection for most things Christmas. But someone just slipped us a stocking-stuffer that had us ho-ho-ho-ing well before we hit our eighth cup of brandy-laced nog at the annual MT holiday bash. It is the “Lick Bush in ’04” regime change…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): In his book, The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, John McWhorter says he prefers the energetic rants of poetry slams to the “doggedly flat rainy day poems” of more academic writers. On the other hand, the spoken word stuff rarely ventures beyond “alienation and scolding,”…
Holiday spirit
Finally, now that we’ve drained the nog bowl and are swigging brandy straight from the bottle, we can banish our inner Grinch just long enough to send out seasonal props to the Metro Times’ own Toni Smith. Our office administrative assistant and designated wonderful human, Smith spearheaded a gift drive for Shunt’a Nance and her…
From the east side to Hollywood
You wouldn’t imagine that a page of literature would be a hot commodity at the Big Boy on East Jefferson. Teens cruising Belle Isle are usually more interested in the eatery’s greasy fare; the older neighborhood crowd goes for the Sunday brunch. So it came as a surprise a few weeks ago when a handsomely…
Going, going…
You’ve heard of fixer-uppers. This is what might be called a tearer-downer. This former two-family flat on 2713 E. Vernor boasts half-boarded-up windows, a bag of garbage on the side porch, and a discarded shoe-and-rubble salad in the front yard. A big yellow D spray painted on one side of the building marks it for…
Slay bells
It would seem that Christmas is the season of farce, with no small variety of seasonal comedies appearing on local stages. Helping to lampoon the spirit of the holiday is the new improv-style comedy, 25, gracing the small stage at Hamtramck’s Planet Ant Theatre. This is the eleventh original comedy from the Planet Ant Improv…
N&D Center
24 WED • ART The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss — You know you like it on the wall, You have to dig it in the hall. To many, Dr. Seuss was a champ, Seems everybody loved his camp. From kiddies’ books, to political fodder, The man who invented the Grinch is modder And cooler…
Christmas in black & white
It was more than 100 years ago that The New York Sun made its famous response to an 8-year-old with a pressing question. Her name was Virginia. She’d written to the paper because her little friends told her there was no Santa Claus. And she wanted to know the truth. Well, here at Metro Times,…
Writing from silence
Russell Simmons is a deep dude. The rap impresario is also quite the settled man these days. Well, aside from his cell phone and two-way pager, which are always on and buzzing with calls, and the constant interruptions that can double the length of a seven-minute interview, and the sound of people oogling for his…
Starring, you, babe!
Looking back at renegade nightlife over the past 12 months, 2003 was the year that Detroit techno finally stole disco’s glam, punk’s irreverence and Hollywood’s processed glitz to make the dance floor a stage for cultural regurgitation, scathing self-commentary and rampant misbehavior. By refusing to accept the high-priced boredom that the clubs serve up, certain…
Washout
Until last week, nothing about the way that Democratic Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm does her job resembled the closed-door operating style of her predecessor, conservative Republican Gov. John Engler. Engler was ruthless, secretive and so intent on helping the state’s business community evade environmental laws that he encouraged senior aides to meet in private with…
Tried and trendy
The unpretentious exterior looks like a pancake house; it’s crowded and noisy inside. All the attention has gone into the superlative food, which includes roasted wild mushrooms with peppercorn boursin, salad of warm tomato slices with chevre and red and yellow peppers, whitefish with tomato-ginger-cashew chutney, mahi-mahi with black bean, corn and tomato sauce. On…
Counting our blessings
Striving to be a well-informed citizen who tries to make sense of the world, and of what our government does in it, has many drawbacks. Nobody much talks about this, but one of the more aggravating things is … not knowing what to call ourselves. For more than a century, going back at least to…
Modernist lines revisited
You can almost wrap your fingers around the effort put into these paintings — the artist striving toward the ideal, aching for a perfectly straight line, a flawless pool of pigment or maybe even a sense of calm with the realization that “the ideal” and “perfection” don’t necessarily exist. But the art is in the…
Friend indeed
George Friend loves to play his guitar. He has been doing it for 25 years in a career that put him onstage with such Detroit bands as the Twistin’ Tarantulas, Black Beauty and the Jive Bombers before he relocated to the West Coast a few years ago. It’s not the same scene there, says Friend,…
I’m no bumpkin
President Nixon didn’t think much of fellow Californian and Republican icon Ronald Reagan, calling him “strange” and not “pleasant to be around,” newly released White House tapes show. Associated Press, Dec. 10, 2003 Hello, friends. It’s the Ghost of Dick Nixon here. You know, at this busy, crazy time of year, I’m constantly accosted by…
Casting Shadows
This time of year, the activity room is a forest of synthetic pines. Each tree is covered in lights, garnished with crocheted snowflakes and topped with a beaming cherub. The air of the room holds a peculiar potpourri — something like a blend of sugar cookies, floral perfume and disinfectants. After lunchtime, the residents take…
Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation
For the past decade, Ferndale’s Magic Bag has hosted one of the most hungrily anticipated annual film festivals. The laid-back and liquor-stocked Bag is a perfect home for all the bloodletting, sexual depravity, and dead-on raunchiness of the more than 20 animation shorts, some brilliant, some clunkers, presented this year. Take part in this holiday…
Punk-ska for Christ
It’s 10:30 on Saturday night. All the kettles have been collected, and Joe Yerke is locking up the Salvation Army in Royal Oak for the night, marking the end of a 70-hour work week. As Sunday approaches, the 25-year-old program coordinator and youth pastor is looking forward to a day off. He’ll be back in…
Gloomy Sunday
When a brooding pianist creates a tune for his Budapest object-of-desire called "Gloomy Sunday," it becomes famous for its melancholic beauty and uncanny ability to induce suicide, and the stage is set for a ponderous yet powerful film. The film’s rich and fallible characters create a gripping tale amid the historic backdrop of impending Nazi…
Letters to the Editor
Pull our punches? I am disappointed at the slanted coverage you gave to the recent violent confrontation between Jack White and Jason Stollsteimer at the Magic Stick (“Red blood cells,” Metro Times, Dec. 17-23). The whole tone of the article brands Jack as guilty, which wouldn’t be so bad had there been an exhaustive investigation…
The Barbarian Invasions
French-Canadian writer/director Deny Arcand’s sequel to his The Decline of the American Empire (1986) centers on the slow death of one of the film’s coterie of cheerfully pedantic intellectuals. Although the film has its comic moments, the mood is generally autumnal. Maybe something’s being lost in the translation, but the mix of overbearing erudition and…
Lashed with a wet noodle
It took no less than 82 pages for a federal judge to explain why he will do virtually nothing to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft for violating a gag order in place during the first terrorism case to go to trial since 9-11. After presiding over the trial, which concluded in June, U.S. District Court…
