Stars of wonder
If the fruitcake, roasted almonds and sugar-coated goodies of the season have already begun to turn your stomach, there just might be a very different kind of holiday recipe that is bound to bring out the blithe spirit in you. Take one part Barry Williams, aka Greg Brady of The Brady Bunch; add Jackee Harry,…
Off the deep end
Derrick Kelly lay unconscious on the deck of Eastern Michigan University’s Jones Pool, bloody foam oozing from his mouth and nose. At that moment on the night of Jan. 31, 2003, decades’ worth of effort on the part of Dr. Henry J. Heimlich came into play when the maneuver bearing his name was performed in…
Art Bar
DIRTY, DIRTY, DIRTY! The sultans of smut, the pimps of perversion, the kings of kink, i.e., those filthy masterminds of The Dirty Show have launched a call for entries for the sixth annual exhibition. The Dirty Show, once a humble gathering of lowbrow “art” and crudely fashioned clay penii, has exploded into Motown’s most controversial…
Proactive
There are plenty of ways to warm the hearts of people in need during the holidays, but Higher Ground, a Royal Oak-based nonprofit support group for men living with HIV/AIDS, figured out how to warm the needy within and without. Donating a blanket to Higher Ground by Dec. 15 will bring men who are not…
Fake: the new real
Life sucks, ya know? And I ain’t talking those moments when it forces you to get your knees dirty. It’s the ever-widening chasm between what you wanted for yourself and the reality that stares back at you from the bathroom mirror. How do you bridge that? Sex and drugs are too pricey. Fortunately, the fine…
Letters to the Editor
Kicking it, not kissing it Re: “We pause for a note about the author” (Metro Times, Nov. 24), yee-haw! Buckets of bile, profligate spleen-venting, unrestrained media-skewering and formidable Dee-troit street cred to boot! Now that’s what I like to see. This will put to rest those nasty rumors about you being nothing more than an…
Kirkland’s blues & dues
Eddie Kirkland is a roadrunner, baby. The 81-year-old blues man lives much of his life behind the wheel, crisscrossing the nation in a 1978 Ford Country Squire station wagon he affectionately addresses as Bodingle. With his guitars, amp and portable P.A. riding in a roof compartment, he’s one of the few blues performers of his…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
Our Animals, Ourselves
Detroit, thanks to human folly over many years and on many levels, is in grave danger of having its two most important governments essentially collapse. The city is running a huge deficit, and it’s hard to see how the gap can be closed without dangerously crippling essential services. The schools are worse. Yet what haunts…
Stupid old white men
There are way too many filters in Detroit for anybody to get a clear signal. Take reader Eric Raymond’s e-mail that poured in Monday. First congratulating Metro Times columnist Jack Lessenberry for having the cojones to express himself in blunt terms on Detroit, its leaders — even fallen ones — “and other woes,” Raymond made…
Are you nuts?
You know those annoying, high-maintenance girls who insist on wearing cutesy, sexy, Halloween costumes, showing up at a party in some filmy piece of tartiness and subsequently bitching about how cold they are for the rest of the night? That would be me. Particularly last year when I decided fishnets and a tiny little red…
Getting pie-eyed in Birmingham
Brooklyn is considered the home of the North American pizza, and the owners of Brooklyn Pizza describe their pies as New York-style pizza cooked in a brick oven, fueled by coal or wood. This method creates a thin, crisp crust that snaps and shatters when you take a bite. This is one place where you…
N&D Center
Wednesday • 8 THTX MUSIC This likable, totally trippy prog-rock outfit likes to give audiences an earful. The group — 23-Hour Technicolor Xcorcism (or, for those who find themselves tongue-tied, THTX) — is another brainchild of much-admired local music wonk Matthew Smith. The ubiquitous frontman founded such celebrated local bands as the Volebeats and Outrageous…
Fa-ra-ra-ra-ra, ra-ra-ra-ra!
Forget It’s A Wonderful Life — Bob Clark’s sentimental and subversive A Christmas Story is the true classic. There’s a good reason TBS runs a 24-hour Christmas day marathon of the 1983 film: it’s quite possibly the best holiday film ever made. It’s also very telling that over the last 20-plus years Hollywood has been…
Drumming up support
In Room 219, at Madonna Nursing Center in Detroit, drummer Roy Brooks sits in a wheelchair. He wears a black satin skullcap and a brown winter coat over his hospital gown. Brooks looks frail. His hands are in his lap and look as though they’re locked; his arthritis is so bad he can barely move.…
I Am David
A young boy makes a treacherous journey on foot from Bulgaria to Denmark in I Am David, a big-screen adventure from Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig. Along with Finding Neverland, the film gives smart, sensitive preteens and their parents a reason to wander into the multiplexes again.
Hip-hop colonizing
It’s a chilly Thursday afternoon on the fringes of the Cass Corridor. New condo construction suggests that this tumbledown neighborhood is headed for a new era. But on the corner of Selden and Second, inside the apartment of local hip-hop renaissance man Nick Speed, the clock has been turned back, the present seems more like…
The Machinist
Forget Dr. Atkins — actor Christian Bale shows off his plan for maximum weight-loss as the emaciated basket case Trevor Reznik in the psychological horror flick The Machinist. Despite some freaky images, most of them provided by Bale’s caved-in torso, the film’s plot winds up being a few bites short of a full meal.
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): According to my reading of the astrological omens, you need to feel high levels of both reverence and exuberance in the coming week. You’ll thrive whenever you can experience awe and rowdy happiness in the same setting. Here’s one possible way to achieve that: Dance in a church, synagogue, mosque, oak…
Head cheese
This dude called Lyfe ain’t afraid to take chances. After spending a decade in the slammer, the twentysomething, Toledo-born singer-songwriter took a leap of faith. He made a jailhouse vid of himself crooning and sent it to the judges at the Apollo Theater. In return, Lyfe received a handwritten invite to perform. Just days after…
Sex is Comedy
Neither sexy nor particularly comedic, writer/director Catherine Breillat’s Sex Is Comedy is a sometimes-intriguing look at the difficulties in making a sexually explicit movie, especially when it involves an antagonistic female director and an uncooperative leading man.
Strange bedfellows
Gentle Readers: If there’s ever been any doubt about how seriously I take my responsibilities, this column should lay ’em to rest. Not only am I sharing my advice-giving duties with a co-adviser this week — note the dual byline, above — my co-adviser, Jill Corral, is paying to play. Last year I agreed to…
Gifts that keep on giving
There are two big mistakes that should be studiously avoided when giving gifts of kitchenware: falling for the hypnotic looks and claims of gadgets and gear that simply don’t work; and giving what could be regarded as nothing more than chore-oriented, domestic items to someone who’s not too hot on cooking. I can’t help you…
Closer
The truth can bite you on the ass, and honesty takes a brutal toll in Closer, Mike Nichols’ film adaptation of Patrick Marber’s acclaimed play about a bizarre love rectangle. The tale of seduction and jealousy stars Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen as four lovers caught in a tangle of hookups…
Intimate spaces
Local artist Sandra Cardew’s solo exhibition at Cary Gallery in Rochester is a perfect fit. This small space is ideal for her intimate and emotional sculptures and paintings; some are almost painfully visceral. Though she works in a less conceptual manner than some, Cardew is aware of the history and context of her archetypes, materials…
Puppet plays
Naia Venturi has been making puppets since she was a little girl. The creative director of The Snow Queen in Seven Stories at the Dreamland Theater in Ypsilanti is not only the brains behind the quaint theater’s marionette shows, but she accounts for a good portion of the brawn as well. It all started with…
Blade: Trinity
It sucks. Blade gets a cadre of nubile young ass-kickers to help him defeat yet another Euro-trash Dracula. Lacking the expert pacing or lush atmosphere of the first two installments, we’re left to contemplate stilted dialogue, paper-thin characters and a chaotic script where story ideas are picked up and dropped with alarming frequency. Even the…
Revolutionary rabbits
In 1981, Michael Luchs’ star was burning bright in Detroit’s art firmament and beyond. He’d recently been featured in the Detroit Institute of Arts blockbuster, Kick Out the Jams: Detroit’s Cass Corridor, 1963-1977 (which also traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art), and written up in Art in America as part of a major spread…
Trouble in the air
Hell froze over last Thursday. It must have. That’s the only explanation News Hits can find for the rare unity Hamtramck residents displayed on the issue of the city’s medical waste incinerator. In a town that’s been in constant turmoil recently over municipal government, school government and religious observances, members of the little inner-city municipality…
New theater venue a fruitful venture
Any theater fan who’s explored Detroit’s smaller, often half-hidden venues knows a secret: Alchemy is possible. In revamped spaces across the city — including Hastings Street Ballroom (a former printing factory), Planet Ant Theater (a Hamtramck storefront-turned-theater) and Abreact (a Greektown loft) — artists are using limited resources to create work that’s valuable to the…
Who’s pimping who?
News Hits was a bit surprised at what we found after an intrepid reporter from a metro area daily newspaper tipped us off to a highly unusual, possibly groundbreaking ad placement in the Friday business section of the Detroit Free Press. There, on the business front page, is a story from The New York Times…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Back again to give ’em hell! Say hello to MB12, pilgrim! • John Wayne — America, Why I Love Her (MPI) :: Now, more than ever. • Pink Floyd — The Wall (Columbia) :: Producer Bob Ezrin records schoolkids on 1979 album, schoolkids now sue for royalties. • Hero (Miramax DVD) — Back in the…
Ethics watch
Ethics in Michigan? Not our strong suit. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity recently gave Michigan’s state Legislature an “F” for scoring 0 out of 100 points when it comes to requiring state lawmakers to report their outside sources of income: Who they work for, who their wives work for, businesses they own, employers,…
Library daze
Although we hate being called out for the snobs we are, the Subterraneans will admit their guilt when the critics are right. And, yes, they were right when they say they trainspotted us weeping in a dark corner of Oslo on Thanksgiving Eve, our heads pressed into the speakers, blown away by the high, low…
Carved out
A search of Detroit city records suggests that the old Hotel Melrose is located at 87 E. Canfield. But we can’t bet our A.S.S. on it, because the Midtown area husk has no visible address. It sits, like a lonely debutante, invisible to the nonstop activity on Woodward and John R., the avenues that sandwich…
