A crooner and a crusader
As the shortest month of the year (ironically reserved for black history) draws to a close, and theater fans worldwide mourn the loss of black theatrical icon Ossie Davis, it seems fitting that another black theatrical pioneer is honored onstage. Local Detroiters Lou Beatty Jr. and vocalist Carl Clendenning star in the dynamic rendition of…
Busted!
Embattled Roseville artist Ed “Gonzo” Stross sees his problem this way: He’s painted a formidable mural on the wall of his studio — and he’s facing jail over about 2 square inches, specifically the nekkid-as-God-created-them breasts of Eve in his reproduction of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” News Hits notes that the Detroit Free Press…
Moolaade
The twelfth feature by Senegalese writer/director Ousmane Sembene, Moolaade is a fictional tale of four pre-adolescent girls who are supposed to undergo a genital mutilation ritual, but flee and take refuge with a woman who challenges tradition. The woman offers the girls moolaade, a form of protection which tradition must honor. But her rebellious actions…
Temp rising
Ah, yes, the underground is, as Julie Andrews would chirp, alive with the sound of music. It is also alive with Internet and cellular phone blather regarding Movement. The latest news is breaking as we write, and what we can say is that last year’s lead organizing body, the crews at Derrick May’s Transmat label,…
Closed book
The words “books are doors to wide new ways” loom large on the facade of the McGregor Public Library at 12244 Woodward Ave. in Highland Park. Unfortunately, its doors have been boarded up since April 2002. What’s going on? Highland Park officials didn’t return our calls, but it’s a pretty safe guess that it has…
Young, loud and snotty
The ever-fanciful fuck, drugs and rock ’n’ roll fantasy/myth that has plagued countless prepubescent dudes from Anywhere (or maybe that’s Nowhere), USA for the past 50-plus years will continue to thrive as long as there are albums to spin and a guitar to be riffed. At least that’s what Even the Odd frontman and guitarist…
Letters to the Editor
Canadian contentment I am a capoeirista from Canada. I read your article “Still Kicking” (Metro Times, Feb. 9), and have to agree with pretty much everything that was said. I discovered this art two years ago, and have been practicing for four months shy of a year. Everyone I talk to who plays always feels…
College hoop madness
A perennial among console games, EA Sports’ NCAA March Madness is blessed with the irrepressible, over-excited ramblings of former Detroit Mercy and Pistons coach and color commentator Dick Vitale. Though his schtick soon becomes wearying, it does help the game’s aura; Dicky V. is, after all, synonymous with college basketball broadcasts. The gameplay here is…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
Masked and magnanimous
True generosity is modest, humble, done without playing to a crowd. But anonymity isn’t the only reason to hide behind a mask at the Detroit Institute of Arts’ annual Cirque event. The fundraiser is in the grand tradition of an old-time masquerade ball, and is not only a benevolent way to spend your dough, it’s…
In the city of Kwame
While routinely monitoring Detroit-oriented online discussion groups last week to get a taste of what people are talking about, I found a link to something that stopped me cold. It was part of a discussion string labeled “God’s City” on Lowell Boileau’s excellent Web site, DetroitYES.com. The link took me to the City of Detroit’s…
Everything must go!
What do you do when you are swimming in red ink? Well, if you’re Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick — who is guiding a city that’s neck-deep in vermilion — you’re considering ways to keep Detroit afloat. And as the mayor pointed out in a recent news conference, the sale of some city assets is up for…
An afternoon with Louise
“We are all together,” said the old woman in a thick French accent, as she stared at the eager group seated on stools in her living room. She had just maneuvered in slowly with her walker, a fragile-looking thing wearing sweatpants and big black tennis shoes. Kylie Lockwood, a young Detroit artist, scribbled the sentence…
Payin’ it back, blowin’ it out
It’s been a noisy whisper on blogs and barstools recently that, after two albums and myriad tours, John Szymanski and Mike Latulippe parted ways with the Paybacks. On one hand their departure is odd, considering the downright, if not deserved, blowjobian spikes the band has received in national press of late (Spin, Rolling Stone, Creem,…
Sunrise
Released in 1927 at the tail-end of the silent era, Sunrise was the first American film made by famed German director F. W. Murnau. Considered by some to be a perfect film, or at least a perfect silent film, its odd structure makes the film dramatically uneven. A country farmer, besotted by a vamp from…
Why I write this column
Well, let’s see: Our nation is tied down in a quagmire of a war it was lied into and has no idea how to get out of. Meanwhile, we’re running budget and trade deficits that are invisibly undermining our economy. The state of Michigan is stuck in a perpetual budget crisis that’s threatening our great…
Notre Musique
The eternally avant-garde French film maker Jean-Luc Godard’s latest cryptogram is structured like Dante’s Divine Comedy, layered in the three sections of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Obviously this is territory for buffs and not just film buffs. Godard peppers the soundtrack with re-contextualized quotes, offering snippets of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius and aphoristic insights from Dostoevsky.…
The Mayer touch
When Michael Mayer talks about anything, words like “family” and “love” come rolling out, without a hint of irony, cynicism or even pretension. This German club DJ and producer, who may be 21st-century techno’s most rhapsodic superstar, uses other words that might normally raise a brow. He refers to the music business as “sexy” when…
More than just green beer
In these days when almost every restaurateur will tell you he’s trying to run a “neighborhood place,” Baile Corcaigh achieves that feel — even if many of the patrons travel far to get there. The restaurant serves spuds in leek pie, Connemara broth, Irish stew, and fish and chips. What this place does with humble…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): During a morning hike in the hills, I scavenged for omens to use in your horoscope. While rambling down a trail from the top of the ridge, I spied the back of a man moving towards me. It took me a while to realize he was walking up the hill backwards.…
N&D Center
Wednesday • 23 The Other Auto Forum ART/ISSUES & LEARNING With the auto show out of the way, Detroiters can get back to discussing other vehicular issues — say, the lack of a true mass transit system in the city. The Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID) has put together a forum to discuss the…
WorkName:Ghost Town Radio
Could you drive me home/Can you save my soul? … I don’t know what I want/But I want more and more. On his debut, Patrick Thomas sketches the immediacy and potential of a twentysomething life, where the struggle to get out of bed is reason to wonder about love and the universe. Similar thoughts surely…
Aiming for success
With a blow of the coach’s whistle, 16-year-old Detroiter Cherelle Vance saunters up to a line marked by red masking tape. Standing with one foot on each side of the line, she takes an arrow from her quiver and draws her bow. With a quick snap, the arrow flies 20 yards, striking her multicolored target.…
Patently frightening
If you thought The X-Files was strange, try real life. My mother always said that truth is stranger than fiction, but I still had to do a double-take at this Washington Post headline: “U.S. Denies Patent for a Too-Human Hybrid.” Seems a New York professor tried to get a patent on a yet-to-be-created thing that…
Lost in America
Yesterday came today, and boy, did it smell like thrice-reheated post-post-punk lasagna. Seriously, do Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, the Faint, etc., provide much of anything other than a healthy appreciation for your old Lene Lovich and Nash the Slash LPs? And then we have the exception proving the, er, well … technically, in postpunk there were…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Well this is MB22! I say oh, my and a-boo-hoo! • Black Maria — Lead Us to Reason (Victory) :: Never place an ad that says: Lead Singer Wanted, Personality Not Required. • Armor For Sleep — What to do When You Are Dead (Equal Vision) :: Never answer an ad that says: Lead Singer…
Head cheese
What can we say about Timmy Vulgar? The disheveled man-boy has that presence. He fronts the woefully underestimated art-damaged punk combo Human Eye, had the Clone Defects (who, by the way, are sorta back; they just gigged Chi-town and a late April Detroit reunion is scheduled). His Monday DJ nights (with pal Hyman Silvergland) at…
New York Rocks
New York Rocks is a collection of 14 slabs of early punk straight outta Gotham. It’s not the prole-punk that originated in Detroit, nor is it the sk8r boi variety that came from California. This is the smack-shooting, cars-and-girls-loving, gender-bending stuff that slinked up from the Bowery and created the formula that bands have been…
Backslash
Hey all you crusty ol’ Net fogies — remember Netscape Navigator? Most of us old farts who can recall the dawn of the Internet popped our Web-surfing cherries on Navigator. But in the late ’90s, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser busted onto the scene, packaged as the default browser for Windows, and swept up the majority…
Art Bar
Talking bull: In conjunction with Elliott Earls: The Bull and Wounded Horse exhibiting at Cranbrook Art Museum through March, Earls gives a lecture about his artwork — painting, sculpture, design, video and performance that bends the boundaries between those media and playfully flexes stereotypes about artists and designers who work in each. As head of…
Rehab
Damn if some music doesn’t require a multiple listens before the head-nodding kicks in. On this, the Detroit rapper’s debut, the dark packaging and skinny white-boy cover pose might turn away the judgmental, and that’s too bad ’cause Chief and his post-emo-hop, true-to-life rhymes can pluck heartstrings on almost every verse. Chief’s delivery is fluid…
Play now, pay later?
Q: One of my best friends was recently diagnosed with HIV. Since college, he’s been on an unending sex conquest, hooking up with countless guys he meets online to engage in risky activities. My concern is that he doesn’t seem fazed by his HIV diagnosis and he says he has no intention of giving up…
Road rash
Scott H. Biram went head-to-head with an 18-wheeler on March 25, 2003 — and survived. Of course, 13 surgeries later, he now has pins in his knees, screws in his foot, a titanium rod in his leg, a metal plate in his right arm, 12 inches less of his lower intestine and just for good…
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is Ana Da Silva’s return to recording, nearly ten years after the brief Raincoats reunion. With only a simple digital keyboard to assist her vocal, the album lacks the stirring, skeletal guitar dynamic of Da Silva’s old band. But just as there was a powerful amateurism to the Raincoats’ music — as if they…
Fifth at 40
It is 2005, 40 years after the Watts riots, the death of Malcolm X and the prime time of Motown Records. On his WRIF radio show, Night Call, Peter Werbe’s husky voice is intoning some of the 217 reasons why he didn’t feel joyous about the recent “coronation” of George W. Bush. Some of Werbe’s…
Proactive
Cop in — Interested in letting the powers that be hear your ideas, concerns, compliments, bitches, etc. about the Detroit Police Department? If so, here’s your chance. The Detroit Board of Police Commissioners will host a community meeting on Thursday, March 10, at Brush Park Manor, 2900 Brush St. Public comment on any police or…
Weekly Fecal
What horseshit. Any disc that opens with the line “Close the door and drift away/Into a sea of uncertainty” should immediately be ejected from the car stereo and Frisbee-whizzed out the window into a sea of freeway traffic. In fact, this slice of solipsistic bombast (their third LP), goofy tempo changes (read: “epic” arrangements) and…
Getting some tail
First off, oxtail isn’t the tail of an ox. Let’s get this out of the way right now, lest you look ahead to the recipe, see that ingredient and retire to the burrow of the irrationally queasy. Knowing that those odd-looking, roughly circular slices of bone and meat that you routinely pass by in the…
What the ho?
Ever since the dismissal of misdemeanor charges against Melvin “Butch” Hollowell, the former co-chair of the Michigan Democratic Party arrested last year near his Detroit home for allegedly picking up a prostitute, News Hits has wondered exactly who was responsible for the snafu that allowed him to walk without a trial. After some digging we’ve…
Heaven doesn’t want you …… and hell is full
Based on the critically acclaimed Hellblazer comic book, this film is a triumph of style over substance. Keanu Reeves stars as a chain-smoking, misanthropic devil-slayer who must thwart the arrival of the Antichrist. Reeves, however, is the wrong choice for this unique antihero. Visually stunning andoverflowing with arresting imagery, the film has no shortage of…
