Inside dope
Detroit’s poised to oppose medical marijuana legislation, and proponents are prepared to fight.
I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings
Before you gripe about how Radiohead’s stellar new live release is only eight songs long, you should know that it still runs 40 minutes. That’s longer than recent albums by Weezer and the Strokes, so just hush up and give yourself over to these maniacal, vibrant renditions of already great songs, most of which were…
Park chat
Let’s sit down with Mayor Kilpatrick for a personal one-on-one (this and other great ideas).
Superpower
The extreme, multidimensional gabba (fucking fast) techno composed and performed by Ultraviolence (Johnny Violent and a roster of collaborators) has changed little since 1991 when “Shout,” Violent’s debut single, landed him a record deal in the U.K. And that’s just fine. Superpower shows that equal parts manic-depressive electronic opera and throbbing video-game obsession still makes…
Buckingham palace
The abandoned house of the week…
Madonna
Considering the prepublication hubbub surrounding Andrew Morton’s Madonna and Barbara Victor’s Goddess: Inside Madonna (HarperCollins, $26, 432 pp.), would-be readers can’t be blamed for expecting the two unauthorized bios to be full of revealing interviews and insightful anecdotes about the Material Girl. Maddy may have outright denounced the books, but both authors still promised to…
Closed court
Is Rabih Haddad a terrorist sympathizer? What about the Global Relief Foundation, the Muslim charity he founded? If federal investigators have any evidence of wrongdoing, they are refusing to disclose it.
Red-faced
Florida apologizes for its role in so many nutty episodes….
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): During his concerts in 1999, electronic artist Moby often repeated this midway through his set. “If it was humanly possible,” he teased, “I’d have sex with each and every one of you.” He’d then launch into “Bodyrock,” a sizzling, churning song that whipped his audiences into a Dionysian froth. Many of…
Movie buffs take it in the can
Wincing over the worst of times for film fans (and looking forward to upcoming stinkers).
Where’d that come from?
Q: How does female ejaculation work? I know there’s a path that sperm takes, and that there are several body parts involved in producing and ejaculating the sperm, but how does it work for women? What is the fluid that is expelled? Where is it produced? Why does it happen sometimes and not other times?…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
Located at the corner of East Outer Drive and Buckingham, this palatial two-story apartment-style estate screams for … well, it just sort of screams. The once sturdy (before two fires) red brick structure features two handy entrances, at 5709 and 5711 Buckingham (good for hasty escapes), a porch and trim that apparently was once some…
The jerker & the jerk
Telling a jerk to go jerk off … Politely dealing with unsightly mattress stains … & more.
Gosford Park
Robert Altman’s latest offers the odd experience of watching the most loose-limbed of modern directors mingle his multidirectional observational style with the hidebound form of a traditional English murder mystery. The results are like an avant-garde Merchant-Ivory film or one of Agatha Christie’s clever constructions gone all cubist.
Relaxation on speed-dial
Telefon Tel Aviv connects with new area codes….
The Royal Tenenbaums
Writer-director Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore) has created a hypertextual book-on-film rooted in the literature of the New Yorker magazine about a family of geniuses and prodigies and those who desperately want to belong with them. With truly human performances from Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bill Murray, et al.
Sit home and listen
A couple of great compilation records from Carl Craig and Tom Simonian … New Year’s Eve party cut short by Detroit police (but everyone gets a rain check) … Plus, a list of other key events to enter into your Palm Pilot.
Goddess: Inside Madonna
Considering the prepublication hubbub surrounding Andrew Morton’s Madonna (St. Martin’s Press, $24.00, 256 pp.) and Barbara Victor’s Goddess: Inside Madonna, would-be readers can’t be blamed for expecting the two unauthorized bios to be full of revealing interviews and insightful anecdotes about the Material Girl. Maddy may have outright denounced the books, but both authors still…
Letters to the Editor
The pain’s the same I read with astonishment Keith A. Owens’ column trumpeting the promise of the Kilpatrick administration ("Kilpatrick’s promises: smoke & character," Metro Times, Jan. 9-15). Weeks before, the same columnist vehemently opposed discrimination and bigotry in all forms, going to the extreme of using the word “nigger” to drive his point home.…
Ring Ring, Waterloo, Abba, Arrival, The Album, Voulez-Vous, The Visitors
The first time you open one of the brand-spanking-new reissues of seven original Abba studio albums, a card comes out trumpeting Mamma Mia! That’s the Broadway production built around Abba hits and riffing on the film Muriel’s Wedding (which, along with Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, gave Abba its most recent cultural revival). I opened…
Lessons from the Enron mess
The scandalous Enron collapse and the massive Ford layoffs seem only to affect the working class — reminding us that today’s giant corporations have power never even imagined before.
Facets of darkness
There are many intentional parallels between master photographer Roy DeCarava’s approach and technique, and those of the disciplines of the jazz form and the blues aesthetic. These are the themes of The Sound I Saw. The particular challenge for a photographer of DeCarava’s ilk is to be present and strategically placed at the possible convergence…
Info highway robbery
Comcast is in the crosshairs of Detroit’s Cable Communications Commission, but nobody seems willing to pull the trigger.
Sy Thai
This is one restaurant where you ought to take the hot pepper rating seriously; even the mild spice level will prickle your taste buds. The little storefront eatery is a busy, noisy, friendly place, also doing a brisk take-out business. Each of 14 traditional entrées is offered with a choice of chicken, beef, pork, tofu,…
Babes in arms (and gowns)
Chowing, smoking and guzzling his way through Auto Show preview week and the black-tie “Auto Prom,” our reporter rubs elbows (and other parts) with some of the city’s top dogs.
A bad case of movie logic
Slight and sort of corny but watchable, thanks in part to its secondary cast, this coming-of-age (or, rather, getting-into-college) morality tale lacks the courage to follow through on its more restrained intentions. Although written by Mike White, the writer-star of the somewhat creepy indie favorite Chuck & Buck, in the end it’s a rather conventional…
Visa-vis Rabih
While Muslin charity founder Rabih Haddad languishes in a jail cell, his wife, Salma Al-Rushaid, breaks her silence.
Brotherhood of the Wolf
The pain may be all yours if you gamble your ticket price with the hope of winning more than a few moments of cinematic satisfaction out of nearly two-and-a-half subtitled hours of gothic horror redux. It’s a buffet of misogyny, court-conspiracy theory, flat period-costume romance, racist colonial adventure and Hong Kong-styled kung fu fighting.
Gas bags
Spence Abraham hypes up the hydrogen, but what about fuel economy in the here and now?
Alone At The Microphone
Royal City’s second album, Alone at the Microphone, is haunted. The lyrics are crowded with devils, fiends and goats. The production on some songs sounds like it was accomplished with the aid of a pack of studio ghosts. They seem to swoop in after singer Aaron Riches with eerie harmonies on the album’s opener, “Bad…
