Attention Span
THE COSMETIC COSMOS Beauty isn’t just skin-deep anymore, at least not according to Philosophy, an innovative cosmetics and skin care company that takes its creams and powders very seriously. Its high-end products are packaged simply and labeled with the philosophy behind each of them: A Philosophy moisturizer is called Hope in a Bottle; a cleanser…
Alternative Travel 2000
Give it a rest by Jerry Herron Once upon a time, Americans had to learn to take vacations. Hidden cities by Mary A. Dempsey High above the Carnival, Rio De Janeiro’s real life carries on with chaotic order. Home is where the dedicated line is by Suz Redfearn Diary of a born-again telecommuter. Istanbul 101…
Knee Deep Shag
Yes, of course they’re groovy. After all, they’re from Kalamazoo, epicenter of the jam-band/college rock universe. But, where many bands would be content to just provide a good backdrop event for a night of drinking, Knee Deep Shag exceeds expectations by bringing together lithe musicianship and an engaging, road-honed good time of a stage show.…
Can Detroit raise (Mc)Cain?
What, then, can we make of the latest Detroit school disaster? For inspiration, let’s turn to art, namely the worst country song I ever heard, back when I was booking flights for Patsy Cline. Though I mercifully can’t recall the title, it tells of a lady who finds a badly injured snake and nurses it…
More anachronisms
Since 1988, the Volebeats – who, as of this recording, were Jeff Oakes, Matthew Smith, Bob McCreedy, Russell Ledford and Scott Michalski – have been reaching into the recesses of cultural memory to breathe new life into old ideas, building new expectations in the midst of cliché-heavy musical forms. Solitude, the band’s fourth full-length record…
Crossover hits
Stomping snow off my boots and removing a mountain of coats, scarves and hats, I discover the Lizard of Fun huddled close to its favorite halogen reading lamp. "I’m stuck," it whines despondently. "It’s too cold out to have fun. Sometimes being cold-blooded really bites – I can’t even shiver to keep myself warm." I…
Perfectly puffy poori
Priced out of Royal Oak by skyrocketing rents, Noor, owner and chef, can now be found in a small and simple spot in Oak Park, with, he pledges, the same menu. Our reviewer found desserts to be a cut above the rest, but not all dishes better than average. Open seven days, with a bargain…
Packed parting party
BUMPER TO BUMPER When I stepped into my old biker boots and made my way to Lili’s 21 to attend the wake for Detroit’s queen mother of punk, it was a personal journey to honor Lili with like-minded souls. However, I grossly underestimated Lili’s impact, as there was a wall-to-wall barful of partiers that sucked…
Leave ’em lacking
Thousands of adjectives could be used to describe Walt Disney’s vintage library of animation: timeless, unforgettable or, irrefutably, the late Gene Siskel’s one-liner, "irresistible." Because of their emotion and brilliant quality, it’s hard to convict the heartfelt films of anything but boundless beauty. (Although there is a point where Disney’s long output of cartoons might…
News Hits
Still getting screwed In the February issue of Brill’s Content there is a riveting first-person piece by former corporate attorney George Ventura. The reason Ventura’s job description carries the adjective "former" is the result of his assisting a pair of Cincinnati Enquirer reporters in their exposé of Ventura’s one-time employer, Chiquita Brands International. A firestorm…
A Visitor from the Living
A Visitor from the Living is a 65-minute footnote to director Claude Lanzmann’s eight-hour-plus documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah (1985). It consists of a 1979 interview with one Maurice Rossel who, in 1944, led a delegation of the International Red Cross Committee in the inspection of a German “model ghetto” called Theresienstadt – a showcase…
Guilt ePleasures
OK, we know. The Internet is full of trash. Porn. Offshore gambling. Web sites about yarn. AOL. But like when a car crashes on I-75, sometimes we can’t help but slow down to take a peek – assuming the carnage is dramatic enough. A bad Web site can be as intriguing as a really terrible…
Down to You
Kris Isacsson’s Down to You gets down to the lowest common denominator with post-high school romance. Cute student Al Connelly (Freddie Prinze Jr.) meets the love of his life, Imogen (Julia Stiles), at college in New York. She’s a partying, whimsical painter, setting up romantic meetings in art galleries and talking in terms of brush…
Pitch’d
FOR THE HEADS "Head noddin’, body poppin’, bed rockin’, so you can feed your soul medicine" says the intro to "The Flow," Detroit’s (and Windsor’s, too) newest radio show. Detroit has long been the home of the eccentric DJ-programmed radio show – from Mike Halloran to the Electrifying Mojo – making the local airwaves exciting.…
The Third Man
The Third Man is one of Graham Greene’s most absurdist scenarios. He once said that the germ of the story was a scene in which a man attends his own funeral and, though that’s not in the final film, a similar through-the-looking-glass mood prevails. It’s a mood that’s established swiftly, with the arrival in Vienna…
Food Stuff
NUKES AND FOOD There’s something eerie about strawberries that stay plump, red and picture-perfect after sitting around in the fridge for almost a month. It’s even more eerie when you consider how such everlasting produce happened to exist. More than likely, these delectable-looking berries were irradiated before they hit the supermarket shelves, a process which…
Topsy-Turvy
It turns out that in his heart of hearts, Mike Leigh is a Victorian. This wouldn’t come as so much of a surprise if he hadn’t made his name with films like Meantime (1983) and High Hopes (1988), bittersweet comedies about the hardscrabble existence of the British underclass during Margaret Thatcher’s reign. But in Topsy-Turvy,…
Home is where the dedicated line is
I was born to telecommute, and now, at long last, I am living out my destiny. A few weeks ago, I accepted a job as a reporter with an online business-news site that has no local office. “We’re afraid you’ll have to work from home,” they said apologetically during the interview. I nearly squealed, so…
Play It to the Bone
As a screenwriter and director, Ron Shelton has explored the competitive dynamic in male friendships via football (The Best of Times), baseball (Bull Durham), basketball (White Men Can’t Jump) and even golf (Tin Cup). Now he explores male bonding through that most intimate of sports: boxing. In Play It to the Bone, former contenders Cesar…
Driving a new road
Viewed separately, neither of the two hats worn by journalist Jim Motavalli seem all that unusual. But when you join the often disparate realms of environmentalist and die-hard car enthusiast, you get a strange sort of resonance. For Motavalli, that mingling of specialties – he’s the editor of E/The Environmental Magazine as well as a…
Punk pulp
These two out-of-town rock magazines have two things in common: First, both of their current issues feature Joe Strummer on the covers and, second, they both remind me of Etch with money. The Big Takeover is a New York-based personality showcase for its founder, publisher, editor and all-around punk-rock guru Jack Rabid. It’s fun, filling…
Nukes on the highway
When nine nuclear fuel rods containing mixed oxides (MOX) of plutonium and uranium arrived secretly by helicopter before dawn at Ontario’s Chalk River Laboratory on Jan. 14, a long-running nuclear controversy did not come to an end. It was, in fact, only the beginning. If the so-called Parallex Project – described by the U.S. Department…
Punk pukp
These two out-of-town rock magazines have two things in common: First, both of their current issues feature Joe Strummer on the covers and, second, they both remind me of Etch with money. The Big Takeover is a New York-based personality showcase for its founder, publisher, editor and all-around punk-rock guru Jack Rabid. It’s fun, filling…
Give it a rest
Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States by Cindy S. Aron Oxford University Press, $35, 324 pp. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World by Jane C. Desmond University of Chicago Press, $30, 384 pp. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing by Orvar Löfgren University of California Press,…
With a little help
The reason why live albums exist is at times multidimensional. In the best-case scenario, a live recording is destined to capture an artist at the height of his or her powers. Say, James Brown Live at the Apollo, Kiss Alive I or even Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan. In other instances, a live record can…
Hidden cities
The plastic bag on the television antenna may signal that police are in the area. It could mean a drug shipment has arrived. Or it may simply be litter. In the slums – or favelas – of Rio de Janeiro, you take nothing for granted. Rio is famous for the world’s wildest Carnival celebrations, but…
Old school, new stomp
How about some old-fashioned New Orleans music by a guy from Milwaukee who was born in England? While Norrie Cox’s trad-jazz pedigree is geographically suspect, his innate grasp of New Orleans music is anything but. Inspired by now-legendary clarinetists from the Big Easy such as Johnny Dodds and George Lewis, veteran Cox is a steadfast…
Multiply by three
Detroit trio the Numbers is a rock band – simple but not plain. They do the math and rock the masses with energetic and romantic style … and you can dance to it!
Istanbul 101
From the hostel patios near the Blue Mosque, tourists watch fog creep up the Golden Horn. Far to the east, the suburbs of Asian Istanbul lie in rubble. Silence. Istanbul’s tourist district of Sultanahmet is closed for the night. Across the Galata Bridge, though, in the "New City" that is as old as Christianity, Istanbul…
No dead-ends
No one can accuse East River Pipe of romanticizing America’s myth of the self-made man – at least if The Gasoline Age is the evidence. As the one-man band East River Pipe, F.M. Cornog offers no tales of self-reinvention or speeding off into the horizon to start anew; instead, he demonizes the open road for…
Ring their bell
Detroit punk wrestlers the Bump-n-Uglies aren’t afraid to shed a little blood for the sake of rock’n’roll. (And they have the medical records to prove it.)
Traditional twist
Under the soothing late-January sun, 60,000 residents in the long, lean section of the west-central Mexican state of Jalisco will carry out a centuries-old tradition with a twist that dates back nearly a decade: They will celebrate the patron saints of their towns. And they will celebrate Detroit. After nearly 10 days of drinking jarritos (tequila,…
Grrl gang
So just what the heck is a "girl group" supposed to sound like in the year 2000? There’s still a specter hanging over the moniker, certainly. Intact images of rebel girls in love, perfectly ratted hair, miniskirts and spot-on backing vocals litter the popular landscape. Empowered proto-grrls such as Ronnie Spector and the Shangri-Las provided…
Hate me deadly
A Soldier’s Play rocks a whole world of preconceptions….
Vagabondage
The morning mist had taken all day to lift, but you could count the Pleiades the night the two strangers disappeared. Friends-of-a-friend, they came from the north to a barbecue in Arcata, Calif. They shook hands all around, made a little small talk, and set out on foot to the corner store for beer and…
Electronic education
From our vantage point in the year 2000, it’s hard to imagine a time when electronic music was new, yet it has its humble origins in a time when electricity itself wasn’t yet taken for granted. Appropriately enough for our present retrospective mood, the makers of the much-lauded electronic music documentary Modulations have extended their…
