Funding the arts
Americans for the Arts, a private, nonprofit organization, tracks the annual amount of money U.S. cities spend on the arts. The total amount is not limited just to grants, but includes the salaries of city officials employed by city arts agencies, annual maintenance and upkeep of arts facilities, etc. Randy Cohen, vice president of research…
Welcome to Mooseport
Mooseport is a harmless, fictitious place where an ex-president (Gene Hackman) can end up running against his plumber (Ray Romano) for mayor. Meanwhile, the plumber’s girlfriend catches the ex-president’s divorcee eye, and a double-headed crisis rears its fuzzy antlers. It’s all so inoffensive as to be barely there.
Stealing from thieves
Little Charlie’s dad was known around Danbury, Conn., for two things: He led the parade band and he was the village eccentric. As Charlie would sit in Danbury’s town square, his dad would direct four marching bands toward the center of town from different directions, simultaneously playing marches in different keys and meters. That’s everyone’s…
Ranking Detroit
Author Richard Florida ranks cities according to four indexes he devised: creative class (the percentage of creative class members in the workforce); high tech (the state of the high-tech industry); innovation (the number of patents per capita) and diversity (a rating that relies heavily on the city’s tolerance for gays and lesbians). The four indexes…
Sharpton still matters
Should the Rev. Al Sharpton get a prime spot during the Democratic National Convention? And if he is allowed to speak, will it matter? As the race for the Democratic nominee heads toward the finish line, it is already obvious that Rev. Sharpton will not be the nominee, but then nobody — not even Sharpton…
The view from backstage
Like the main characters in the play, the new management of Meadow Brook Theatre has plans of its own. The story began last year when the board of trustees approached a member of the Nederlander family, hoping to save the theater from bankruptcy. This galvanized the theatrical community. Faced with the prospect of the biggest…
Hipster economics
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A prisoner is being sentenced to his fate. His captor solemnly commands: “Take him to Detroit!” “No, No!” the prisoner screams. “Not Detroit! Please, anything but that!” This oft-quoted barb is from the 1977 comedy Kentucky Fried Movie. But that was the ’70s, when Detroit’s economy and…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): You know that library book you checked out in 1999 and still have in your bookcase? It’s time to return it to the library, preferably along with a partial payment. Remember the unconscious way you broke up with one of your old flames? It’s time to send an apology. How about…
Do the Congo
Assassination and political upheaval often come to mind when students of African history think of the Congo. As a major focal point of 1960s decolonization, when indigenous people across the continent worked to overthrow European rulers, the Congolese attracted attention, largely due to the efforts of charismatic freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba. Murdered in 1961, the…
Rising sons
Editor’s note: This guy Ben Blackwell is one of two drummers in the Dirtbombs. We thought it’d be swell if he documented the band’s first-ever visit to Japan, so we gave him a pencil and paper with instructions to use his own camera. Besides pounding the skins, the puckish 21-year-old heads Cass Records. He’s also…
Gay marriage & sadder subjects
The trick to keeping your sanity, and not being angry all the time, is to occasionally pretend you are a foreign correspondent from Mars, say, and tell yourself you are dispassionately observing the lives and mating habits of the local creatures. Actually, I think I must have a touch of alien blood myself, since, for…
Altared states
Q: Can you explain gay marriage? I lost a friend who was a lesbian for expressing my view that marriage is meaningless. It seems to me that the point of gay marriage is to win official recognition that homos aren’t second-class citizens, that it would amount to a state-sanctioned “Gays are OK!” message. I’ve got…
California dreaming
John Steinbeck’s story about the dreams of working stiffs falling apart cloaks a sort of Cain and Abel tale in proletarian weeds. In this production of Of Mice and Men, even before the hobo protagonists shamble onto the stage with their bindles, the real star of the show — a massive revolving platform with three…
Does civic creativity pay?
It’s a beautiful idea: Creativity, according to Richard Florida, is the great engine driving the world economy. To succeed, a city must recognize that the age of factory and farm has forever passed, and that a new age has dawned with a new breed of workers: the creative class. According to Florida’s statistics, the creative…
Rage on
It looks like Andy Sprague has just been kicked in the head. He’s on the 11th Street sidewalk in San Francisco, pressing his fingers to his forehead. Between them, a trickle of black liquid runs down his face. It’s a drizzly rush hour and the glassy street is locked with sedans and SUVs trying to…
N&D Center
25 WED • MUSIC Celtic Fiddle Festival — For more than a decade the inimitable threesome of fiddlers Kevin Burke (Ireland), Christian Lemaître (Brittany) and Johnny Cunningham (Scotland) combined their personal styles and musical heritages to create a musical repertoire that electrified audiences the world over. Originally conceived as a special one-time tour, the audience…
Perfect skin
Four months ago, I was prepared, willing and able to go to Europe and spend a week on tour with the Von Bondies, to do a comprehensive, 6,000-word profile of the band. I was, that is, until the group and/or publicist nixed the idea. VB singer Jason Stollsteimer explained to me that the band really…
Coming clean
Flashback to 1997: The Ebony Showcase on 7 Mile in Detroit was the place to be on Tuesdays. It was open mic night for local rap hopefuls. You signed up, stepped up on stage, rhymed and hoped for crowd approval. Every now and then, emcees tested their mettle by battling one another. On one particularly…
YARD party
Detroit City Councilwoman JoAnn Watson hosted a party last Friday for Young Adults Re-claiming Detroit, a focus group of twenty-and-thirtysomethings that formed in November to explore the city’s attractiveness to this age group. News Hits was on hand for the meeting, which drew 110 people. The unofficial theme of the meeting? Detroit’s dearth of opportunities…
Final curtain
The Zeitgeist is lowering the curtain on live theater for good this summer, to the sadness of thespians and theatergoers alike. After seven years of edgy, avant-garde and sometimes award-winning plays — in a place where anything is possible once the lights go down and local actors, directors and playwrights rule — owner Troy Richard…
Courting a reversal
Attorney George Washington is feeling pretty confident these days. Two weeks ago, the Detroit civil rights lawyer argued before the Michigan Court of Appeals that a lower-court judge erred when tossing out a sexual harassment case against Ford Motor Co. As Washington sees it, the appellate court was sympathetic. In 2002, Wayne County Circuit Court…
Taste of the past
Vince’s is the kind of place you’d like to like, for nostalgia’s sake. A dose of ’50s-era Italian-American spaghetti served by waitresses who call you "honey" can be calming and restorative. But most of Vince’s dishes have little flavor.
Holy ghosts
The empty church at 5781 Grand River in Detroit is a beautiful structure. A shell of vandalized red brick and gorgeous windows, this building began life as the Scovel Memorial Presbyterian Church. It is said that Henry and Clara Bryant Ford attended this church during its heyday, but neighbors report that it has been years…
Afghan chiller
A 12-year-old Afghan girl passes as a boy to escape the Taliban’s crushing oppression of women. Not surprisingly, the ruse fails. A harrowing film that will haunt you for many days. In Dari with subtitles.
The Klan makes a choice
News Hits would like to give the members of the Mystic Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’s Michigan chapter a big bear hug. But since we only know of them through their Web site (the modern equivalent of a white-hooded sheet), we are resigned to publicly thanking them for their recent endorsement of the deceptively…
Touchez Pas au Grisbi
The usually pedestrian director Jacques Becker rises to the challenge of a compelling script and a cast that includes Jean Gabin, an actor who was as iconic to the French as Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne was to Americans. The result is a prime example of hard-boiled existentialism and tough guy gloom. The 1954 film…
All mucked up
For the past few months, Lisa Goldstein has been studying a proposal to turn human waste into fertilizer. As director of the nonprofit Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision, Goldstein is trying to weigh the pros and cons of a plan that could have a significant impact on her community. Is it better to let the city’s…
Eurotrip
From the producers of Road Trip and Old School comes a sexified comedy of delightful errors and running jokes that manage to stay funny all the way through. See American teens set free from high school and hungry for wild European sex! See full frontal (and rear-al) male nudity! And it’s OK. Remember, they’re in…
Letters to the Editor
Telling tales out of school Re: “Teacher’s pets” (Metro Times, Feb. 18). It angers me how the Roseville School District could keep this monster preying on young girls for almost 20 years, fully knowing the complaints from children and parents. The district pushed paper — and moved Lomnicki around from school to school knowing his…
The Big Animal
This modest ’70s fable from Poland balances absurdist humor and social commentary. A circus ditches a camel, which is in turn adopted by a man and his wife. This makes for considerably merriment for the village, until officials decide to intervene. Starring and directed by Jerzy Sturh, this is more bittersweet than tragic and obviously…
Against the Ropes
The story of groundbreaking Detroit boxing promoter Jackie Kallen falls short of being the next Norma Rae or Erin Brockovich. Starring Meg Ryan as Kallen, Omar Epps as boxer Luther Shaw and substituting Cleveland for Detroit, this is a mostly flat and problematic drama with a few moments of comedy, romance and interracial tension.
