Smoke Break, vol. 6
And we’re back. We all got the doldrums during the holidays. Our bouts of eating, shopping, and boozing were separated by Herculean couch trips, mammoth TV-watching sessions where the chafing of fabric-on-fabric wore holes in our jeans, and we watched random bits of Are We There Yet? interspersed with Hannah Montana, Hockey Night in Canada,…
A gig in South Detroit. WAY south…
Lily Allen doesn’t give a fuck about your MySpace page. Are you a local musician with designs on rock stardom, barbecue, and tasty Texas beer? Do you plan on driving your Toyota Tercel 1400 miles in less than 24 hours to play 8 gigs in 3 days, surrounded by a thousand other bands who are…
Top Tens, Top Tins.
” From The Lists!, our final word on local and national music in 2006: “I’ll sit right down on your face/And take a shit!” My girl Natalie Portman rocked 2006’s best lyric back in March on “No More Questions,” her sick-hilarious Saturday Night Live digital short. And that was in a year when the show’s…
Motor City shine
Mary Fortuna 1. The tribute for Joy Colby at Lola’s in Harmonie Park, where a couple of hundred people jammed a tiny restaurant and bar to honor the woman who had chronicled the visual arts in Detroit for 60 years (60 years!)as a reporter for The Detroit News. 2. Under the Radar: The Willis Remembered,…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The coming year will be a favorable time for you to prostrate yourself in prayer on mountaintops, to grunt ferocious promises into the night wind while standing on rooftops, to dance yourself into an ecstatic state and then meditate on your life’s bottomless questions, and to make love with funky spiritual…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Exposing a Craigslist creep
Q: To make a long and stupid story short, I met a guy on Craigslist who said all the right things. We had plans to meet a few times (once I bought a train ticket to visit him; another time I prepared an expensive meal), but he always canceled at the last minute. He had…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Bone-up, crits
According to a new Urban Institute report, Detroit is a cultural shithole, ranking at or near the bottom of 60 large American cities as measured by the number of local arts organizations and other supposedly objective criteria. Laura Berman of The Detroit News devoted an entire column to the report without recognizing that one explanation…
The big thaw
Three time’s the charm for Somerset Maugham’s tale of marital strife and suicidal reconciliation. After a lackluster adaptation of the novel did Greta Garbo no favors in 1934 and an equally plodding version re-titled The Seventh Sin (i.e. adultery) failed in 1957, Edward Norton and Naomi Watts pick up the baton and mount a prestige…
Family style
Family recipes and our common heritage.
Wintersoldier
In winter of 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War organized a conference in Detroit. For several days, more than 100 veterans testified about war atrocities they had either committed or observed during their tours of duty. Well received in Europe, the 1972 film has been virtually unknown in the United States. Though the film…
Art Bar
Home is where the heart … Well, surely we all know that old saying. But it’s the particulars of a home that make it ours. Here the poet Linda Parsons Marion, who lives in Knoxville, Tenn., celebrates familiarity, in its detail and its richness. Home Fire Whether on the boulevard or gravel backroad, I do…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
EDITOR’S NOTE: The editorial board of Metro Times would like to correct a number of items which originally appeared as statements of fact over the past three years in the weekly column Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout. A thorough investigation into this matter has determined that all of the statements in question made by Mr. Morgan…
The lists!
"I’ll sit right down on your face/And take a shit!" My girl Natalie Portman rocked 2006’s best lyric back in March on "No More Questions," her sick-hilarious Saturday Night Live digital short. And that was in a year when the show’s shorts ("Lazy Sundy," "Dick in a Box") helped continue the migration of the musical…
How Gerald Ford held the road
They made a lot of fuss over Gerald Ford when he died last week, and if you are younger than deep middle age, you may have wondered why people cared so much. After all, he was just one more boring long-ago politician, neither sexy nor a great speaker, who never uttered an original thought. He…
Cinematic thrill and torture
OK, we rounded up the MT cadre of eagle-eyed film crits and asked them to burp up their obligatory year-end lists. We just love these things, as you can see. But getting the year’s best from them wasn’t all that easy. Scribe Jim McFarlin summarizes it well: “This wasn’t a great year for movies, but…
HT, baby!
TracksParamount Ahead of its time in ways both good and bad, this 1976 film stars Dennis Hopper as a shell-shocked Vietnam vet tasked with transporting the body of his dead friend across America via a train journey. Predating the wave of PTSD movies that broke on screens in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Tracks…
Boob of the Year
When we at the Metro Times assumed the awesome responsibility of naming Detroit’s "Boob of the Year," we knew that the decision-making process could go one of two ways. There was the possibility of fierce and heated debate as we thrashed through the nomination process, carefully weighing the relative strengths and, more importantly, weaknesses of…
Artist of the Year: Aaron Ibn Pori Pitts
Empty beer bottles, a keg, pistachio shells, paintbrushes, a precarious old wooden ladder and photocopied fliers scattered throughout Johanson Charles gallery in Eastern Market isn’t damage done from late-night workers installing a show at the last minute. It is the show. The 65-year-old artist Aaron Ibn Pori Pitts is an elder in Detroit’s creative community…
Night and Day
Friday • 5 Painters’ Play — Act II ART The most problematic sequence in movies dealing with the arts is the moment of inspiration, followed closely by the act of creation. Such depictions usually ring hollow because, really, who was really there to witness the spark? At the Sherrus Gallery, guests will get to see…
Motor City Rides
James Carter rolls in his Town Car.
Letters to the Editor
Catholic distaste Jack: Love what you do, and I totally agree with you about Bishop Tom Gumbleton (“Sour grapes and sick cardinals,” Metro Times, Dec. 27). I happen to be a permanent deacon in the Roman church (in a technical sense only). I was ordained in 1983 and worked for a parish in Southfield for…
