A subversive shade of purple
Even before I open the door, I know something is amiss. There are paper cutout flowers growing from the doorknob, and a strange, banjo-heavy music emanating from the living room. I cringe, expecting to find the Lizard of Fun in one of its "I’m having a rave in my own mind" moods. Not quite. "Eh-oh!"…
Affliction
“You know, I get to feeling like a whipped dog some days,” Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte) tells his brother during a late night telephone call. “Some night I’m going to bite back, I swear it.” “Haven’t you already done a bit of that?” Rolfe (Willem Dafoe) answers him, maintaining his usual reserve and careful distance.…
In one ear
STUDENT GHETTO SUPERSTARS Ann Arbor’s Ghettobillies – to put it somewhat cryptically – play two-legged songs for three-legged gentlemen and ladies with a sense of humor. The bastard lovechildren of Tom Lehrer, the Kinks, Dave Matthews Band and the Rugburns – or some other recombination thereof – Ghettobillies snuggle right up against that thin line…
Blast from the Past
Blast from the Past is actually two movies. The first is a spoof of Cold War paranoia as epitomized by American families building private, underground bomb shelters stocked with enough supplies so that they could – theoretically – survive the first effects of a nuclear blast. In 1962, the Webbers are hosting a dinner party…
What happens next?
Well, it’s all over now. I know you don’t want to read another damn word about it. I haven’t the faintest desire to write another syllable on it. But the strictest canons of journalistic ethics demand this column deal with the decomposing remains. So allow me to put a new spin on the meaning of…
My Favorite Martian
It’s cool if you’re 7 and love gadgets: a shrinking spaceship, a magic belt and a living Polymorphic Zootinix 3000 spacesuit named Zoot, described by director Donald Petrie (Mystic Pizza, Grumpy Old Men) as “a cross between Roger Rabbit and the magic carpet in Aladdin.” It’s cool if you’re an Estée Lauder aficionado and lust…
Give the web a cookie?
I hate television advertising. There are too many messages and none seem to be for me. Whenever I’m stuck watching a commercial, I at least hope to see something I’m vaguely interested in. Most of the time, I’m bored to distraction. Even when I escape to the Web, I find advertising is growing like mold…
My Name Is Joe
British director Ken Loach is an anomaly: a political filmmaker who, during the course of 30-plus years of tumultuous history, has kept the faith. Loach wears his political agenda on his sleeve – right next to an unapologetically bleeding heart – and although he sometimes seems to be preaching hardest to the already converted, his…
Pitch’d
IT TAKES TWO TO MAKE EVERYTHING ALRIGHT The pressure was on last Wednesday night at Solar’s One-year Anniversary Party at Ann Arbor’s Blind Pig. Not that you could tell from the sold-out sweat-box of a crowd that had come to hear Detroit’s best known techno entities, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson take it to the…
The Last Days
The woman cries. Her voice falters. She covers her face with her hands to suffocate the images that find unbearable refuge in her mind. Wounded, agonizing words – the raw flesh of memory – come slowly out of her mouth as she remembers hearing the screams, watching two children fall out of the truck, seeing…
Food Stuff
MMM, MMM, MISERABLE Now that Valentine’s Day is over, and you’ve met the love of your life, fallen head over heels, and planned an incredible future together (which is, of course, what happens every Valentine’s Day, right?), it’s time to get a few things straight. Such as who does the cooking, and who does the…
Paris is Sleeping Respect is Burning
For a country where style and substance are wonderfully, hopelessly intertwined, it’s no surprise France never lost its taste for the flare-wearing fierceness of disco. While the rest of the world — okay, England — tweaks out on techno and rolls in drum ’n’ bass, Parisians, as the wealth of French neo-disco hitting our shores…
Sportin’ life
A few weeks ago, I met a woman on the shuttle bus to the Oakland airport. We were chatting and she mentioned that she was from Salt Lake City, a rare non-Mormon. In a hushed voice, she discussed the current Olympic bribery fiasco. "About time those bastards took a hit," she hissed with glee. Indeed,…
Psychedelic babble
The members of Elephant 6 band Olivia Tremor Control provide a long-winded, largely abstract explanation for the chaotic interludes dotting their second album. Well-meaning musical experimentation though these "animations" and "combinations" may be, they diminish what is otherwise the most assured and engaging album of psychedelic pop-rock to surface since – big words – Pet…
Lofty words
Significantly increasing the residential population in Downtown will be fundamental to success. – The Greater Downtown Partnership’s Reinvestment Strategy for Lower Woodward In 1996, the Greater Downtown Partnership – a private, nonprofit planning agency created by Mayor Dennis Archer – launched its reinvestment strategy for the blighted lower Woodward corridor at the heart of Detroit’s…
Exorcise the Demons
On its full-length follow-up to last year’s Controlled Developments EP, Photek-protégé-outfit Source Direct proves itself to be the UK drum ’n’ bass scene’s darkest star. Tracks such as "Mind Weaver" exaggerate hardstep and techstep jungle’s mix of menace and kineticism with slasher film eeriness, grinding black chrome basslines and an arcing – if overwrought –…
Psycho teen killers
JET’s production of Never the Sinner has lofty ambitions. The story behind the infamous killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks by college students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in 1923, John Logan’s drama attempts to use a historic event to comment on a slew of what remain contemporary ills – murder, media sensationalism, courtroom heroics, capital…
Power and desolation
"Trauerfarbenes Land" translates as "Country the color of mourning." As evidenced by this record, the mournfully dramatic influence of Gustav Mahler goes east, straight through Shostakovich to Georgian composer-in-exile Kancheli. During Shostakovich’s excruciating tenure as one of Stalin’s star whipping boys, his symphonies, string quartets, etc., expressed a vast, poetic melancholy that was shared both…
A piece of the earth
The wind is strong and unseasonably warm as farmer Danny Lutz strides across his field to shake a visitor’s hand. "Nice day?" he asks cordially, and waits for a yes before launching into his reply: "Weather now is lovely, right? It’s great, right? But it’s not right. It’s wrong. Humans have set their hands on…
Taking the bull by the strings
OK all you open-minded guitar freaks with a penchant for acoustic eclecticism and obscure innovations, here’s a chance to make up for lost time. Culled from three albums recorded during the early ’60s – with one cut from the early ’70s – Re-Inventions is a marvelous exhibition of the artistry of Sandy Bull. Playing acoustic…
Spirit quest
Clarice Carter has traveled to the ends of the earth seeking spiritual energy. Literally. She has felt the magnetic fields of the North Pole from the uppermost waters of Canada, and of the South Pole from Desperation Island off Antarctica. Carter seeks spiritual energy wherever she wanders, and has found it at some of the…
A man and his balloon
Sam Prekop’s vacation from The Sea and Cake is a departure of the neighborly kind. He’s still the late-blooming guitar player-singer – of TSAC’s precursor band, Shrimpboat – who works best in the realm of enigmatic soundscapes and roaming pop songs. Pinning his territory on the musical map is a game of proximity and not…
Post office X factor
The United States Postal Service describes response to a new Malcolm X stamp as overwhelmingly positive. And in one sign of approval, the slain leader’s eldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, is appearing in Detroit next week for a ceremony at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. But a number of researchers, former Malcolm…
So What’s This All About Then
With nary a Yellow Brick Road to follow, what’s a "local" band with a lot of heart and guitar-powered drive to do these days? While Pleasure has its moments, ultimately the Windsor band is that fine-tuned yet songless identity crisis in the making – just waiting for that e-mail from the coast that reads, "Good,…
Grainmark questions
They came for answers. But after two-and-a-half hours, they left with the same questions. This is what angered about 40 residents who attended last week’s Detroit City Council hearing on the $56.7 million Graimark development project. "No one seems to want to tell us what’s going on," said Joseph Horn, a 21-year resident of the…
Songs of Exstasy and Devotion: Lucrezia Vizzana
The extraordinary success of recordings devoted to medieval nun Hildegard von Bingen naturally makes one wonder what other gifted women might have been composing behind the convents’ doors. Lucrezia Vizzana, an Italian nun, published a set of 20 motets called "Componimenti Musicali" in 1623, which have languished in obscurity. This CD reveals that Vizzana was…
Grand pianists
There’s no time like the present to harvest a turn-of-the-century bumper crop of fresh piano virtuosi….
1 down, 5 to go
Despite the contract agreement reached between the International Typographical Union (ITU) Local 18 and Detroit Newspapers (DN) last Sunday, nearly 1,000 newspaper workers are still locked out of their jobs, says Shawn Ellis, spokesperson for the Metropolitan Council of Unions. "This is far from being over," said Ellis. "The newspapers are trying, through use of…
WWW.ALTCOUNTRY.LOSTRELICS
Lone Justice – altcountry before the genre was hot enough to merit its own airplay chart and bimonthly magazine – split seven years before the 1994 implosion that was Uncle Tupelo sparked a twang-rock Big Bang. Terrible timing. Maria McKee, all of 18 when she assembled the Los Angeles rabble-rousers, nevertheless created a body of…
Where hip hop lives
Sure he’s a cute white kid, but Detroit rapper Eminem is not the offical candy of the new millennium….
Hot and puffy pitas
Elie’s menu is supplemented with a sheet of daily specials, but even the standard menu is full of unusual Middle Eastern delicacies and a dozen vegetarian entrees. A favorite for lunch, even though the supply of hot pita loaves can run short.
Dear Lauryn
An open letter to Lauryn Hill, who — juggling celebrity, tykes and artistry — couldn’t squeeze another journalist into her …
DETROIT HIP HOP
Detroit hip hop is finally outgrowing its local-talent-deserving-wider-recognition, charity status. Leading the D through its growing pains is Da Ruckus. As forerunners of the Detroit skills-first aesthetic, producer-MC Hush and rapper Ill have never been ones for the obvious sampling and MC superheroics of more prominent, coastal hip hop. But while, in the past, the…
