Room to grow
A young family might consider purchasing this burned-out, red brick fixer-upper, sans windows and doors, on Detroit’s eastside at 3906 Marlborough. Assessed at $6,700 by the city, this week’s abandoned house offers abundant room for a playscape and swing set since several empty lots grace each side of this 78-year-old dwelling. In fact, just a…
Slackers
Not to be confused with the 1991 Richard Linklater film, Slacker, about Texan evaders of normalcy, Slackers is the 2002 Dewey Nicks-directed film about three quirky goofballs sliding through their bachelor’s degrees on stolen Blue Books and fabricated facts, until Ethan, a psychotic freak with an unhealthy crush, gums up the works. Ethan has discovered…
Surviving Feb. 14
Q: What are people who are not coupled supposed to do for the first two weeks of February? Hide our heads in the sand? Stick them in the oven? Every ad I see, read or hear is about spending money on your sweetheart for things from diamonds to chocolates. It’s getting so I hate the…
Open secret
The government finally talks about the reasons behind closed immigration hearings….
Eco-solutions
Here is what famed biologist Edward O. Wilson suggests the 900 million underfed people of the world do to improve their fortunes: learn to fish. Or, maybe they could become wildlife experts and guide eco-tourists through pristine natural habitats, stretches of nature that narrowly missed being razed for farmland and now are owned and protected…
Free will astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): It’s time to celebrate Return the Favor Week. Tell jokes to clowns and cook gourmet meals for chefs. Give crawling demonstrations to babies, sing to the birds, offer advice to the wise counselors you know, and shout out blessings towards the sun to thank it for its ceaseless work in your…
Bereave the beaver
Nature? Beavers? Oakland County don’t need no stinkin’ beavers.
Missed opportunities
Some guys should join a threesome while they can … Toilet paper: It’s not just for wiping! … & Sloppy fantasies about Ashton Kutcher (and other hunky hotties).
Brushed aside
Frustrated Brush Park residents protest amendments to development plan….
Song for my father(s)
Celebrating the 100th birthday of Langston Hughes (1902-1967), a poet of the people and for the people.
Thornetta Davis
Style and substance. Grit and grace. Wails and whispers. Control and abandon. I could use hundreds of words to describe the incredible voice of Thornetta Davis, but it’s almost impossible to translate just how great she sounds. Long a fixture on D-town’s blues scene, Thorny’s got the kind of pipes that make other singers just…
Letters to the Editor
Deep six the N-word I have struggled with the N-word all my life ("Niggers, old & new," by Keith A. Owens, Dec. 12-18, 2001). I used it during my youth. During my adult incarnation, I have elected not to use the word, and I request others not do so in my presence. I support dropping…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
A young family might consider purchasing this burned-out, red brick fixer-upper, sans windows and doors, on Detroit’s east side at 3906 Marlborough. Assessed at $6,700 by the city, this week’s abandoned house offers abundant room for a playscape and swing set, since several empty lots grace each side of this 78-year-old dwelling. In fact, just…
Sprayed away
Angela Essenmacher hired an exterminator to get rid of carpenter ants. She didn’t realize she was putting her health and home at risk.
A finer diner
Meaghan’s is one of those restaurants that looks like a diner, but serves food that doesn’t taste like it came from one. On the menu are eight salads, 18 sandwiches, and dinners ranging from ribs and meat loaf to pasta Alfredo. Everything’s done on the premises, from turkey roasting to ham baking. The soups are…
Albee damned
The Planet Ant Theatre heats up Hamtramck with a raging production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Black Buildings
Like the writing in his unpublished novel, Reality Slap, Neil Ollivierra’s creative gifts in music and painting have been used to explore themes of city space, blackness and the creative process. But unlike his paintings, which hold shapes that seem to fill the canvas like film stills from Tron, Ollivierra’s music touches a level of…
No more playin’
The bullshit bulldozing Mary J. Blige gets down with the song business at hand….
Nude On the Moon: The B-52’s Anthology
Appropriately, it started in the back of a Chinese restaurant in the South, with five people sharing a mammoth drink called a Flaming Volcano. From the restaurant, the party moved to a friend’s basement. It was there a frustrated poet-turned-journalism student (Fred Schneider), a protest singer-turned-goat farmer (Kate Pierson), a waitress kid sister (Cindy Wilson)…
Axis of evil, indeed
We’re in for a war without end, according to the most ominous State of the Union message in history. But who are we really fighting here?
Chicago’s Young Blues Generation
Billy Branch and Lurrie Bell are two of the most well-known members of the younger generation of Chicago blues players. The amount of homework, hard work and just plain dues-paying that both of these guys have gone through is evident in their playing. As this CD demonstrates quite well, the Chicago blues tradition is being…
Ken Lay & his posse
Comparing Enron execs to the “executives” who ran Young Boys Incorporated … although in this case, the bad guys will probably never make it to jail.
Eban and Charley sound track
That whole music-is-the-sound-track-to-your-life cliché is shit. Sure, music captures experiences as much as it creates them. And many of us will go to our graves remembering specific circumstances by the songs that were stuck in our skulls at the time, but real sound tracks have to be more thought-out than merely documenting whatever happens to…
Sugar highs and prurient lows
A voracious crowd gorges on booze, sweets and music at Decadence … Hopes for a Frog Island festival alternative in Ann Arbor this summer … Great lineups at the Elbow Room and Necto … & the Dirty Show is back.
Love after death
Monster’s Ball has all of the misfortunes of an old country song — and all of the love. First-time screenwriters Milo Addica and Will Rokos and director Marc Forster fashion an honest drama out of material that could have resulted in a Southern-fried soap opera in lesser hands — with Halle Berry, Billy Bob Thornton…
Over and out
Melissa Giannini’s last column: Techno, house, trash-tech, ghetto-tech, garage rock, hip hop, urban folk and so much more … Here’s a final offering to the great Detroit music spirit, from its biggest fan.
Storytelling
With this two-part invention on the theme of storytelling and its repercussions, writer-director Todd Solondz manages to push the envelope of scurrilous satire a little further than he already has. And that’s saying quite a bit, since the most sympathetic character in his last film, Happiness, was an active child molester. Solondz has mastered the…
Home, toxic home
Heidi DeBoer and her family won a court judgment for the pesticide poisoning they experienced in 1995; but they’re still suffering from medical problems to this day.
Trembling Before G-D
If religion is the opiate of the people, then fundamentalism is the purest heroin — which may explain why, in Sandi Simcha DuBowski’s new documentary about gay Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, nobody seems willing to kick. Instead they persevere, suffering in arranged marriages, alienated from their families and persisting in observing the tenants of a…
Poisoning primer
Environmental toxicologist Dr. Michael Harbut offers pointers to those who suspect toxic exposure.
Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.
Like A Visitor From The Living, his interview documentary about the Nazi showcase ghetto Theresienstadt, Sobibor is a footnote to French director Claude Lanzmann’s eight-hour-plus Holocaust documentary, Shoah (1985). It consists of a detailed and at times riveting interview with Yehuda Lerner who, as a young Jew during WW II, was shuttled to various places…
Nontoxic avenger
Former exterminator Steve Tvedten is now an evangelist for nontoxic pest control, and he’s willing to share his techniques.
Birthday Girl
Nicole Kidman has a career’s worth of movies to be proud of — from Dead Calm (1989) and To Die For (1995) to Eyes Wide Shut (1999), with such honorable efforts as The Portrait of a Lady (1996) in the intervals — but Birthday Girl isn’t one of them. Following closely upon that camp-till-you-cramp debacle…
