Sky-high caramel-apple pie
Lunch options include “philly bello” sandwiches and shrimp burgers, while the dinner menu offers dishes such as chicken scallopini and pasta aioli. Desserts are the highlight, especially the caramel-apple pie.
Keepin’ it ersatz
Transforming this city’s legacy of techno into a self-created world of techno-pop, innovative Detroit label Ersatz Audio puts on a showcombining sound, art and design, inventing its own sound and its own way to experience music.
The Emperor and the Assassin
Director Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin is reminiscent of the type of biblical and historical epics which flourished in the West in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, where the characterizations are nearly pre-Freudian, the action takes place in a luxuriant vastness, and the plot moves easily between the intriguing and the ridiculous. Ostensibly…
Absurd surfaces
In a Pinter drama, things are just what they seem….
Boiler Room
Boiler Room is a white-collar gangster film whose young, anything-for-a-buck stockbrokers see themselves as the bastard sons of Gordon Gekko and John Gotti. What they want is everything. Writer-director Ben Younger brings the audience into this world via Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi), a 19-year-old college dropout who doesn’t lack brains or ambition. What he’s looking…
We’ll take you there
Surreal palaces, apocalyptic towers, sculpture gardens of the moon….
Diamonds
Without the presence of Kirk Douglas, Diamonds would have ended up as a television movie of the week: an innocuous tale of cross-generational reconciliation that preaches the merits of family ties. But Douglas turns Diamonds into something more by infusing the film with his still-formidable strength. It doesn’t hurt that the role of former boxer…
Michigan Earned Income Tax Credit
"The poor are my constituents. As their representative, I will not turn my back on them. I urge you – I urge you with every argument I can muster – not to turn your back on the poor." – Gov. John Engler, 2000 State of the State Address If Gov. Engler is so concerned about…
Indelible Tales
Extremities are fingers and toes, the human parts that float out in space like exposed roots of underwater plants waving with the current. They are also points of lost perspective, departures from the safety of perceived reality – of signs of reality. In Kathe Koja’s new collection of short horror tales, Extremities: Stories, these dual…
Attention Span
SMILE ART Art can be found anywhere, and virtually everything is for sale. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that art, particularly "High Art," often makes appearances at the mall and grocery store. Take, for instance, Rembrandt Whitening Toothpaste. Nowhere on the packaging is the actual Dutch oil painter or his work mentioned; but…
The Beach
"Everyone wants to do something different, but you end up doing the same damn thing," intones Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) when he realizes that Bangkok, which he came halfway around the world to see, has been drained of its distinctive character by an influx of young, party-hearty Westerners. The Beach immediately distinguishes between a tourist and…
In One Ear
WATER SIGNS, PISCES SINGS Some people need just the flimsiest of pretexts to put on a veritable avant-sound music festival. And Detroit’s quite a better place for it, too. Good Sounds mainman Dave Hartman has put together "The Febrarian Birthday Party," ostensibly to celebrate those of you who have birthdays in February (including Hartman himself).…
Connect the dots
Despite the unfortunate cliché of the protest-happy folkie, the hallmark of a truly great singer-songwriter is not the ability to make us stop and think. It’s the ability to make us feel. For example, Bob Dylan’s aversion to cannon fire doesn’t move us. That sentiment alone is too obvious. Rather, it is the chilling ambiguity…
What a week this is
This may be the week that decides the presidency. Seven days from now, we will know – thanks to Michigan and South Carolina – whether the plucky candidacy of John McCain has a shot at overcoming the trillion or so dollars and many phalanxes of hack GOP politicians propping up the SOB (Son O’ Bush).…
Hip-hop ’em dead
New Jersey’s Outsidaz brings a much-needed bit of perspective to East Coast hip hop with its pared-down, percussive beats and spitting, battle-style delivery. The MC collective (which at one time included Detroit’s own Bizarre, now of D12 fame) never gets into the "yeaah yeaah" / "knowhatI’msayin’" sameness of their East Coast brethren, but instead reignite…
Slight modifications
I have a tattoo. I have a few pierced body parts. But, hey, so does almost everybody these days – compared with some people’s more creative body adornments, I blend into the background like a chameleon lounging on a beige, ‘80s-era sectional sofa. "Or like a lizard perched on an IKEA barstool?" asks the Lizard…
No parking on the dance floor
Tjinder Singh is a genius in short bursts. That is, you should approach any full-length works from the mastermind behind Cornershop and, now, Clinton, with an appropriately pro-rated attention span or face the consequences of going deep into the mind of an unparalleled musical collage artist. Clinton’s a two-person operation on paper (a studio collective…
Loose Lips
SWEET DREAMS Ahhhh, Valentine’s Day, that saccharine-sweet, Hallmark-quality interlude which appears like a blood-red comet in the cold gray depths of winter. Florists, chocolatiers, restaurateurs and jewelry brokers alike quiver in greedy anticipation of this welcome cash cow in the desolate midwinter months. What better way to kick off the celebration of all things romantic…
News Hits
Behind closed doors Members of a group called the Students of Color Coalition have thrown open the University of Michigan’s once-secret Michigamua headquarters, a wigwam-like room on the top floor of the student union where self-selected "elites" have been holding covert meetings since 1902. Eight protestors who have been occupying the 18-by-28-foot room since Feb.…
Food Stuff
SUPPLEMENTARY KNOWLEDGE There are dozens of nutritional supplements out there, all claiming to improve your health in one way or another (often ignoring the basics of a healthy diet and exercise). Sites promoting them abound in cyberspace, but one to especially watch out for is at www.electriclife.net. ElectricLife is proud to promote "the new science…
Hard-boiled scam
When Wall Street opened in 1987, it was seen as a scathing condemnation of Reagan-era avarice and greed. This bombastic morality tale (it was an Oliver Stone movie, after all) appeared in theaters not long after the insider trading scandal broke and America became intimately acquainted with Wall Street millionaires who made acquiring a fortune…
What’s goin’ on?!
Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit by Suzanne E. Smith Harvard University Press $24.95, 320 pp. Unlike nostalgic histories of Motown such as Berry Gordy’s autobiography, To Be Loved, and Nelson George’s chronological study, Where Did Our Love Go: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound, Suzanne E. Smith’s…
Son of a Witch
It’s Sunday, 11 in the morning, and Roger Ebert looks pissed. While I’ve noticed the superstar critic out and about during this 2000 Sundance Film Festival — at screenings or on the sidewalk, snapping pictures of Tammy Faye Baker — this is the first time I’ve actually seen the guy speak. He’s stuck on a…
Hype and Hurricane
When Hollywood takes a true story and, in retelling the tale, rewrites history, whose history is it? Is it the history of people whose lives have had a social impact? Or is it history packaged for a public which deserves a closer look at the truth but is delivered interpretations that can hike up box…
