Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "When the first settlers arrived in the New World, they were terrified by the vast open spaces," says Peter Anastas in the film *Polis Is This.* "They wanted to remake this unkempt paradise into a big English garden." This is a scenario you should NOT imitate in 2007, Aries. Wander out…
‘No’ always means ‘no’
Q: This isn’t the sort of question you usually answer, but I hope you will consider it anyway. I was in a good relationship with a guy, Enis for naming’s sake, for three years. About a year ago, Enis asked me if we could have anal sex. I might lose your sympathy here, but I…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Believe it or not, this is the Penultimate Anniversary Edition of Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout! Penultimate Platters of the Century: The Who — Who’s on First (Track) :: They all laughed when Pete Townshend announced that he was going to write a rock opera about Abbott and Costello. Well, they’re not laughing now. Aerostones —…
Going out in style
Pressure Drop Not known for her refined taste in food (she thought burgers at the Bronx were just too fancy), dinner details were left to more capable hands. But the group had selected her as arbiter of the rest of the evening, or as she thought of it, the evening: New Year’s Eve. Way too…
Motor City Cribs
The Avatars’ Ann Arbor sanctuary.
Sour grapes and sick cardinals
I am totally in favor of affirmative action, always have been, and I am a middle-aged, white, Anglo-Saxon male, of class origins lower than those of that intellectual pinup girl for today’s trailer park, Jennifer “Adenoidal Whine’ Gratz. I fought against Proposal 2, knowing all along that it would pass, that every laid-off metal bender…
Sinners and saints
It’s that time of year again, when the compulsion to placate our inner moralist rears its judgmental head. It’s New Year’s Eve, and those mental finger-wags are beginning to sully our collective drunken slumbers. But it’s not all bad — we know many of you are planning on making resolutions this year, and we hope…
Letters to the Editor
Exile on Woodward As a friend and colleague of Mariela Griffor (“An exile’s tale of Christmas,” Metro Times, Dec. 20), I am always amazed with her ability to talk and write about her life in Chile since 1973, and later, during her years in exile in Sweden. Most importantly, I’m impressed with the way she…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Disarming message
Detroit schools allow group to counter recruiters’ message.
New Year’s evil
The perfect scary DVDs for the morning after the night you weren’t yourself.
Ex-cop’s setback
John Bennett’s case against Detroit continues.
Oslo no more
Downtown sushi spot shuttered.
Bring on the heat
The weather report for New Year’s Eve weekend isn’t so much grim as it is irritating. The wind will likely be chilly, and sticky-cold needles of rain will fall sideways on Woodward Avenue — annoying byproducts of our inconvenient greenhouse of a winter. But here’s something that warms like brown liquor in a tumbler, or…
Art Bar
How many of us, when passing through some small town, have felt that it seemed familiar though we’ve never been there before. And of course it seems familiar because much of the course of life is pretty much the same wherever we go, right down to the up-and-down fortunes of the football team and the…
Head Cheese
“Disconet was a remix service in the 1970s and early ’80s that provided extended edits and mega-medleys,” Mike Trombley says from his new HQ in Philadelphia. The ex-Sights drummer and full-time disco freak DJ returns to the D this New Year’s Eve to spin records at the Eagle, tag-teaming with Stallone (Sam Consiglio of Tamion…
3.5MB pop shots
What will shake your floorboards when 2007 comes through? If you cue Goldfrapp’s “Ooh La La” at 11:59, its silky black Gaultier beat will drop in right at the witching hour, with the future sex siren hissing, “Switch me on, turn me up” just as everyone finds a foxy stranger to kiss. Or maybe it’s…
Sweet southwest
El Barzón offers a variety of excellent house-made moles (MO-lays), a sauce made with chocolate that is unusually rich and fruity. The menu includes a local rarity known as pipian, a pale green sauce with an unusual nutty taste. The sauces are served over boiled chicken. The taco offerings — $1.25 for a double-wrapped corn…
The Complete Motown Singles Volume 6: 1966
Any year of the 1960s holds its fair share of prestige and regard in Motown history. And the last four volumes of Hip-O-Select’s series (chronicling 1961 through 1965) have showcased that with a barrage of consistency that’s overwhelming. And yet, whether your interest is civic, musical, historical or whatever, 1966 pops out as prime time…
A Love Supremes
When you’re making a movie musical based loosely around a fictional Motown and the best singer in your cast is Eddie Murphy, you’ve got problems. That’s the stumbling block writer-director Bill Condon never quite cleared in putting together the movie version of the Broadway hit Dreamgirls. Murphy doesn’t have the best voice in the picture;…
Volver
Using a story ripped from the pages of midday television soap operas, Volver (Spanish for: to return) lacks the spontaneous combustion of outrageous wit and style the director is best known for but reveals a filmmaker who knows how to play to his audience. Particularly notable for its almost complete absence of men, here Almodovar…
Night at the Museum
Ben Stiller stars as, well, Ben Stiller, though he’s given the name Larry Daley, a standard-issue movie single dad who’s just a big goofy kid himself. Of course his ex-wife (Kim Raver) wants him to stop clowning and get a stable job as not to disappoint their son Nick (Jake Cherry). So he lands a…
We Are Marshall
For a football movie, there sure as hell isn’t a lot of pigskin here. A would-be inspirational drama about the redemptive power of lacing up and getting back out on the field, the film is based a real-life tragedy at West Virginia’s Marshall University in 1970. It opens with the plane crash that killed nearly…
The Good Shepherd
Having outdone Bond in the Jason Bourne movies, Matt Damon returns to the cloak-and-dagger game with an entirely different sort of espionage drama. Damon’s Edward Wilson is a secret agent, but he’s a cold calculating son of a bitch that makes 007 look like a mere reckless playboy, and his movie is as careful and…
Enter death’s creep
Varius Artists I Belong to This Band: Eighty-Five Years of Sacred Harp Recordings (Dust-to-Digital) Entrance Prayer of Death (Tee Pee) As Entrance, Guy Blakeslee’s ruminations on mortality assemble like stacks of mildewed treasures discovered in some abandoned home — a few pages torn from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, woodcuts with depictions of death…
