Not your mother’s block party
Giles Rosbury is lugging a gallon of flammable liquid down the block. He’s preparing to engulf his body in flames, just a few doors down from his residence on Fourth Street. The self-immolation act is part of Rosbury’s fire-breathing troupe, Fire Fabulon, and the performance is one of many at this year’s annual Fourth Street…
Flash fiction
Stories in 100 words or less….
Cancer is Funny
By Michelle Woolery, Ann Arbor In my family, cancer is a punch line. Life is treated as a silly inconvenience, something that gets in the way of having a good time. Drug and alcohol addictions are viewed as endearing and comical personality traits. Everyone laughs when Uncle Bill gets drunk and gropes his wife on…
Kwame to News: Waaaaaahh
The Kwamster needs to foster a give-and-take relationship with city press…
North of the City
by Kim Webb, Hamtramck — a dissolving poem It is the morning after — the wildest dream imaginable is still sleeping warm and pre-industrial. The curtain cups a negligible breeze. Schedules shake out as blues and grays … below in the street a man is juggling three clubs. I look out catching then releasing his…
‘You knew her as the breath …’
by Candy Lee Laballe, Hamtramck You knew her as the breath in your mouth, the full in your stomach, the world in your head. Loved her as if she were everything. Loved her black hair, fuzzy soft from too many perms. Some nights she’d wrap strands of it round fat pink curlers. They were hard,…
Wyandotte commotion
U.S. Rep. wife, Debbie Dingell stirs crowd with anti-Republican mayhem…
The Plain of Sudden Circumstance
by Vievee Francis, Southfield (Texas Panhandle, 1998) 1. Moving west he watches the trees grow shorter until they are tripped over as tumbleweeds that surround a pink house peeling just one storm after painting, reminiscent of a torn dress; it seems to be crying from a distance. Six miles before the basket he can see…
The Farmer and The Donkey
by Patrick Dostine, Royal Oak It seemed just yesterday when my 3-year-old brother pushed my 2-year-old head through a window. We were playing a game he had made up on the spot called The Farmer and The Donkey. He wanted me to be the donkey and he would be the farmer and order me into…
Another bold move
Mayor Kilpatrick announces that he will not endorse any of the gubernatorial candidates, but his mother has made her choice…
Y2SLAVE
by Darsan Mitchell, Dearborn His spot, his dope, his motherfukin’ custo’s I’m broke as fuck reduced to slangin’ yae-yo I dropped out of the first grade Imma’ 2000 slave It’s a Digital Age My head’s filled with waves You know where I stay I gotta Johnny Blaze No other way The truth I can’t take…
‘Before Jake …’
By Erika Stone, Saline Before Jake, and before my pregnancy and the strange non-abortion that followed, I spent a year seeing a married man named Kyle Studnic. The first time I looked at him, I thought he was about 19, but he was actually 28, seven years older than me. Up close you could tell,…
Voter vitamins
The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan’s new voter’s guide ranks candidates on issues such as legalizing pot, abortion rights and censorship…
When We Both Looked Like Bukowski and The Legends I Built All Let Me Down
by Matthew Olzmann, Hamtramck I was led to believe by now I’d be famous, or simply Unemployed & incoherent with at least one healthy Narcotics habit hiding in my past Or up my sleeve. This was before I knew how it felt to hold a man back, Three stories up, he was determined to die…
Sizzling siblings
Q: I’m a 19-year-old guy with a big problem. My 18-year-old sister is very nice and very good-looking. We have been in love for two years. Our parents do not know. She might be pregnant. If she is, we want to get married. Do we hide this from our parents? —Please Help A: First, call…
CPOP goes the staff
CPOP Gallery seeks liquor license and band bookings for lucrative boost…
Statistics
by Matthew Olzmann, Hamtramck She thinks I’m too young to understand. After impact, flames look for survivors. Small toys deflate across a damp road. At rapid rates breath can collapse. What keeps dropping and won’t look up? This heavy lung, a melting wrist. The Chevy’s hood like folded crust. Nighttime, electric, all lit up side…
Come on in, the writing’s (super) fine
Heat does strange, contradictory things: It relaxes and excites us, soothes and provokes us, speeds us up and slows us down. In the heat of the moment, passions ignite. But turn up the heat and watch them critters squirm: "She got me hot, I couldn’t stop," the artist known as Prince once sang. So our…
Dupe-plex
Abandoned house of the week – 7/17/02
Random Interview in Jerusalem
by Ella Singer, Hamtramck My name is Salem They call me peace I come to this marketplace daily to help pull out the bodies of our common dead My name is Jeru They call me city my streets are filled with tanks crushing bones for bread to feed the national army This war is dark…
Breeders’ cup
After nine years, the Breeders drop another pup….
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
Nothing perplexes the Abandoned Shelter Squad (ASS) more than a decayed duplex. The burned-out two-banger at 1239-1243 Beech, located directly behind the Lager House on Michigan Avenue, exemplifies the slow response of the city to demolish — or at the very least board up — abandoned houses that present a hazard. A Lager House co-owner…
Art Fair: Passacaglia on Garden Ornaments
by Kit Nicholls, Troy The big thing now’s these Things on Sticks. Near every person who walks by’s got something on a stick. Metal butterflies, birds, large hoops and curly bits. Some of the women carry their youth on a stick. I saw a mangy squirrel shoot past me with a bushy tail on a…
Happy Mondays
Kevin Saunderson’s Global keeps summertime flying high….
Stylish & Southern
In nearly five years of restaurant reviewing, I have never had my napkin placed on my lap, but that’s how they do it at Sweet Georgia Brown. The entrées transcend the South, but are American favorites. They include provimi veal chops, fried lobster, crab cakes and filet mignon in a classic béarnaise sauce. We loved…
Traveling Economy Class
by Hugh Timlin, Mt. Pleasant In the late December rain the old green van with the red door passed. The paint job and the weather mocked the season as the season mocks us all. I’ve seen these people before. Helped the woman push the truck down the hill in front of the laundromat, delaying for…
The cows come home
Enough time has passed to allow comparisons between the Bush Two and Clinton administrations. As you might expect, there are some pluses and minuses on each side. In Bush’s favor is that, by all accounts, he hasn’t shot his sperm all over any fat intern’s blue dress, and thereby has considerately avoided having the government…
Free spirit
Hobo: A Young Man’s Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in America Eddy Joe Cotton Harmony, 224 pages, $22 The Last American Man Elizabeth Gilbert Viking, 271 pages, $24.95 Eddy Joe Cotton is a hobo with a knack for jumping on trains and landing book deals. According to his Web site, a writer for Maxim forwarded…
Batteries in July
by Lisa Wood, Grosse Pointe Farms I eat gapes one night in a Wal-Mart parking lot sitting next to him as he tries to break a battery on the black asphalt all around us. I wonder what it would look like, he says. He taps it harder, but it doesn’t even dent. He sighs, placing…
Executive decision
The race for the county’s top job might induce yawns, but the forecast calls for mud….
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Simon Leys’ novel, The Death of Napoleon, gets translated by director Alan Taylor into a filmic flight of fancy wrapped in the aura of a Hans Christian Anderson fable, and reinvents history as we know it by plugging in a "what if?" — with Ian Holm as Napoleon.
Day So Hot
Christopher Dungey, Lapeer Day so hot the air conditioners they run to keep robotics and computers comfortable can’t quite manage. I hear one line-chaser wearing black Harley muscle shirt, cell phone on his hip like a six shooter, headed down a Materials aisle to sneak out early for lunch on one of the picnic tables…
The backyard jam
One of the best things about Detroit is the summer. So many festivals, so little time — and nobody wants to stay inside for anything. There’s a good seven months out of the year when the weather stays locked inside a bad mood, so when the heat comes strolling into town and the weather cheers…
Lovely & Amazing
Like her debut feature, Walking and Talking, director Nicole Holofcener’s sophomore effort is a carefully observed slice of life, lightly comic, thinly plotted and surprisingly engaging. It centers on a family of women who, in varying ways, have serious issues of self-image.
All in the family
Q: I’ve been fond of a relative’s wife for quite a long time. (The relative is not an immediate family member, but I’d rather not get too specific.) They live a good distance away and we don’t see much of each other. After becoming more attracted to each other within the last few years, we…
Music without borders
In Detroit, we mark our time — especially our summertime — by clocking the free music on the river. In recent years, the summer has commenced at Hart Plaza with the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. For as long as anyone cares to remember, it’s wound down in style with the Detroit International Jazz Festival (Montreux/Ford).…
Reign of Fire
A postapocalyptic fantasy that, in some ways, recalls the Jurassic Park movies, Reign of Fire arises from the ever-smoldering ashes of dragon-slaying myths. Director Rob Bowman ("The X-Files") blows them into a glowing nightmare periodically hidden under a bushel of pseudo-science.
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): I dreamed I was with the Dalai Lama and three Aries friends. We were walking in the middle of the night through a neighborhood of boarded-up buildings and burned-out cars. A siren wailed nearby. We passed a group of skinheads in the midst of a drug deal. The Dalai Lama squatted…
Letters to the Editor
More to the story As the problems in Probate Court were uncovered, I kept abreast by reading the articles in other publications. Curt Guyette’s article ("Mother and child rebellion," Metro Times, July 10-16) did an excellent job putting these events into a human perspective. Thanks for the good work. However, you didn’t go far enough.…
The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course
If you’re a fan of the Discovery Channel’s ultrapopular nature show, the cinematic version is a must-see, with that same damn entertaining high-drama show-and-yell — but forget the story and dive into Steve Irwin’s refreshing "5-year-old-at-a-petting-zoo" attitude.
Trip to the Jubilee Barn
By David G. Hardin, Royal Oak I played a game in the car on the way to the Jubilee Barn. I cupped my hands against my face to make a tunnel. From inside my tunnel I could see blue sky and hills covered by green trees. I could not see my father sitting to my…
School of hard knocks
Balancing school’s grim-reaper sex rhetoric on abstinence with some common-sense guidelines….
Halloween: Resurrection
Does a live Webcast of college kids locked in a haunted house sound especially scary or clever? Not in this seventh sequel to John Carpenter’s seminal slasher, Halloween. Don’t look for the depth Jamie Lee Curtis brought to her last Halloween outings — it’s the last thing you should expect from this glorified B-movie.
The End of the World
By George Dila, Ludington On my 50th birthday I received a card from my ex-wife, Gayle. Inside, she wrote — Frank, just stop worrying. But I am worried, aren’t you? I’m worried about the Ebola virus. I saw pictures on TV. The bleeding eyes, the open sores. It started in Africa, but it could come…
July 17-24, 2002
17 WED. • MUSIC Robert Jones — Tired of fat 45-year-old balding white guys passing themselves off as bluesmen, those who think Stevie Ray invented the stuff? Tired of shaggy-haired garage rockers who bend a string every now and again claiming they play the blues? What you need is a dose of Robert Jones. His…
