Book closes on strike
Striking union employees at Borders’ flagship book store in Ann Arbor began returning to work Friday after negotiators reached a tentative agreement earlier in the week. The walkout, and calls for a nationwide boycott that followed, began Nov. 8 after nine months of unsuccessful negotiations (Metro Times, “Borders skirmish,” Nov. 19-25, 2003). The details of…
Jammin’ man
I was working a double shift at a trendy downtown Detroit music club when I first discovered what the term “blue-eyed soul” meant. For years, I thought the expression was just another cumbersome reference to sad, emotive music. The act for the evening was Johnny Winters. I know, the irony is stupid, as albinism has…
Fought the Power – Walter Sisulu
After Walter Sisulu collapsed in the arms of his wife after a long illness on May 5, two weeks before his 91st birthday, African National Congress President Thabo Mbeki declared that “the African colossus that lies in front of us might have fallen, but he has not died.” Mbeki, who delivered the oratory speech at…
N&D Center
9-10 FRI-SAT • FILM All About Eve — Though she wasn’t originally cast in the role of aging theater actress Margo Channing in the 1950 hit, All About Eve, it is hard to imagine anyone besides Bette Davis playing the part. This classic film about a backstabbing ingenue, Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter), and…
History’s neighbor
If the Ettinger Apartment Building at 1920 Collingwood could speak, it would probably talk about its former neighbor, the demolished Collingwood Manor. Built in 1925, Ettinger Apartments is situated at the corner of 12th and Collingwood Streets, just north of the historic Boston-Edison neighborhood. On Sept. 16, 1931, three men known as the Terrors of…
Pop Life – Mickie Most
In May 1964, marginal pop star/budding record producer Mickie Most, on the cusp of 26 years old, leased time at a London studio to cut a song with the Animals, a white R&B quintet he’d recently discovered in their hometown of Newcastle. “‘House of the Rising Sun’ took eight minutes to make,” Most recalled for…
Pig Lit – Paul Zindel
You probably read it in sixth or seventh grade — a book so cool you couldn’t believe it was homework. It was a story about teenagers who smoked, drank, played pranks, and made out; parents were insane, and kids had to strike out on their own to find love and acceptance. For many kids, Paul…
The Breath of Life – Dr. Peter Safar
One Saturday in December 1956, Dr. Peter Safar made history at Baltimore City Hospital (now Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center). Human volunteers were given curare, a potent poison that causes asphyxiation, to paralyze their breathing muscles. They were sedated, hooked up to monitors, and filmed as Safar directed an experiment in which each patient was…
Swallowing whoppers
Sometimes News Hits just has to sit here staring slack-jawed at the wondrous synergy that is our corpocratic form of government. One nation under the almighty dollar sign, conceived in capitalism, of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation. What has us marveling at the moment are the trailing innards of last month’s…
Black Beauty – Frank Lowe
Everything about the album says “free jazz,” and from a time when that tag not only carried political, spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual baggage, but when it was patently synonymous with all four. On the cover, a solidly built, bearded African-American man in a dashiki strangles a tenor saxophone inside a close-cropped photo centered on the…
Falling Star – Leslie Cheung
On the afternoon of April 1, 46-year-old Leslie Cheung took the elevator to the health club on the 24th floor of Hong Kong’s grand Mandarin Oriental Hotel. According to press accounts, he ordered a soda and some cigarettes and asked that his table be moved out onto the balcony. He borrowed a pen and some…
Sitting Pretty – William F. Draper
Ever since a bunch of bohos started to democratize painting with a little thing called modernism, portraiture has been looked upon as a kind of stonemasonry in the art world: workmanlike, lucrative, and useful to the wealthy few who commissioned it, but not very creative stuff. It was in this environment that William F. Draper,…
Michael’s world, sans suits
This is the best version ever of J.M. Barrie’s classic 1904 play, in which Peter Pan and Wendy Darling are living on the threshold of adolescence, sampling the fantastic fruits of both worlds simultaneously. Technical beauty and impeccable casting stand out in this wondrous ode to the adventures of childhood, where thimbles, acorns and kisses…
Nobody home
Ancleto Alfaro migrated from Mexico to the United States 10 years ago, leaving his wife and children behind. He found work and set out to earn enough to bring his family here and provide a home for them. In 1999, Alfaro took a fancy to a vacant, tax-delinquent home on Springwells Street in southwest Detroit.…
Calendar Girls
Girls is the story of a group of middle-aged (and beyond) rural women who pose nude for a calendar to raise money for their local hospital. The move makes them international stars. But like some of the characters, this movie is so slight it’s already a vague memory. Question: Didn’t British comedies used to be…
Letters to the Editor
A Brit upset I just felt it right that somebody make you aware that your staff writer, Jane Slaughter (appropriately enough named in this instance), has written an article that not only smothers itself in a blanket of poignant sarcasm, but belittles a nation’s food in the same undignified manner! In her recent article (“Ladies…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The astrological omens say it’s a favorable time for you to seek greater exposure and get yourself noticed. But there are relatively bad ways and good ways to proceed. Do not, for example, distribute nude photos of yourself over the Internet or proclaim your mad love for an unavailable genius in…
Auto exotic
Aw, my kid can do that! Yes, but did your kid do it? And did they do it within a contextual language that redefined accepted avenues of fine art? It’s easy to pooh-pooh a painting, sculpture or creative whatnot — say, a white canvas enclosed in metal mesh or a circular board covered in corks…
Leveraging the Thin White Duke
And in the death, as the last unsold copies of David Bowie’s latest Reality go sliding down the charts and into shrink wrap warehouses in Hunger City, Bowie Ltd. called a meeting just before New Year’s Day with the rankled shareholders of Bowie Bonds. The group gathered in Manhattan on the 13th floor of the…
Complaints and compromises
Q: I have been with my husband for four and a half years. I am currently very frustrated. My husband cannot maintain an erection while performing oral sex on me. He manually stimulates himself while giving me oral sex. I feel rejected, because shouldn’t the act of giving pleasure to someone you love and find…
Founding a Movement – Cholly Atkins
In a fitting bit of blind fate, the teen-pop explosion of recent years fizzled in 2003 just as Cholly Atkins ended his days on Earth. No doubt Atkins’ name would mean nothing to Backstreet Boys or Britney Spears, but they and several other generations of pop and R&B artists would probably never have succeeded at…
Here’s something to vote for
Now hear this: I have for years behaved in a manner designed to cause today’s FBI to conclude that I may be a terrorist. What’s more, I have encouraged others to do the same, and have given some of my students the tools to do so. And I intend to keep it up. For the…
We’re No.1 twice
Two news items in recent days caught our attention. One had to do with Detroit’s murder rate, the other with blubber. We always have to chuckle when city boosters talk about Detroit’s image problem. They decry how media consistently portray our fine city in a negative light. The “demon media,” as Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick might…
Ear benders
Well, the album as we know it survived 2003, but barely. What with rampant song downloading, mix tapes, pricey CDs and so on, it’s been a rough year for the full-length. Yet we here at Metro Times still believe in the idea of the album, the very idea of a body of songs that moves…
Model Citizen – Suzy Parker
Hips cocked, right knee bent, standing just off-center in the foreground of the meticulously composed beside-the-Seine mise-en-scène of Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s early-1950s black-and-white fashion photograph for Harper’s Bazaar, model Suzy Parker–wearing a light-colored Balenciaga fisherman’s overblouse, matching skirt, and small, flat straw hat–twists her gazelle-like neck slightly to gaze heavenward, an ethereal look suffusing her startlingly…
Turbo art
The turn of the New Year means it’s time once again for that venerable Motor City tradition, the annual North American International Auto Show. For the true devotees, the motor vehicle is a study of science and aesthetics — and big, splashy events like the auto show tend to focus more on the latter. It’s…
