The Fifth of May
The Fifth of May Lori K, Redford Third Prize, Fiction I knew I’d find a pen in her purse. I knew Danielle had one — a blue ballpoint Bic pen with bite marks on the tip. I’ve dove my hand into many a strange purse to know exactly where to feel for my salvation —…
Hot and bothered
Even as he enjoys a brief reprieve from the July heat wave, things are nonetheless heating up for Johnny Jenkins as he reaches the final stages of planning and producing Hotter than July, one of the oldest and biggest black gay pride events in the country. Jenkins’ Mies van der Rohe townhouse in Lafayette Park…
The Day the Ice Cream Talked Back
The Day the Ice Cream Talked Back Jules Deward, Royal Oak Honorable Mention, Fiction It started out as a great idea, after all. Technology had finally given her the ultimate answer for quick weight-loss woes: The Calorie Counters. She had watched the infomercial with insatiable attention, and for $24.99 a month for the first 12…
Backslash
Travel trail — OK, so the name is a wee bit dorky — but the concept behind funspotpals.com is a good one. Few people like traveling alone — and often your friends’ schedules, income and level of thrill-seeking don’t always dovetail with your own. Always wanted to go skydiving but your best man is too…
My Father’s Song
Raymond Carver once wrote in a poem of his own, “Make use of the things around you.” The poet behind “My Father’s Song” and “For Buzzy” makes use out of such universal themes as melancholy and loss and guilt and brings forth the “thinginess” of those singular experiences in such a way that I believe…
When getting serious, be casual
Q: I met a guy through a BDSM chatroom. It seemed like the perfect no-risk adventure sex — he’s dom, I’m sub; he’s sexy as all get-out, I’m fat in all the places he likes girls to be fat. So we hook up. But instead of the one-time adventure I was expecting, we hook up…
For Buzzy
For Buzzy Karin Hoffecker, Birmingham Second Prize, Poetry This autumn afternoon, one of red and gold fire in the canvas of the sky, I thumb the photo, Easter Sunday 1960, you, brother, dressed in gray flannel trousers, jacket, boxy bow tie. We smile hand-in-hand, my white crocheted gloves, a ruffle at the wrist. I remember…
Head Cheese
Ghost City is populated by some people you might recognize, including Stephen Palmer (ex-Back in Spades) and Tait from Electric Six. But there are also new apparitions floating around in the sound, from influences like Costello and Catherine Wheel to commentary on the sad souls that Detroit has lost. Too creepy? Whatever. You can still…
Bubble Wrap and Packing Foam
Bubble Wrap and Packing Foam Matt Sadler, Detroit Third Prize, Poetry And what did you do with yourself today? The sun closes its empty eyelids, the unemployment line breaks for a meal, the janitor jangles his giant ring of keys. Doesn’t it seem he could unlock anything? Why doesn’t he go into the vault and…
Telling tales
To be witty and lively in a description of just a few words. To make a topic that’s interesting, but not obviously so, gripping. To stir the soul, not with beauty — that would be prosaic — but with an honest hand. Whether working with subject matter as typical as a woman who craves Chunky…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Centri Sociali Romani (Roman Squats)
Centri Sociali Romani (Roman Squats) Laurie Smolenski, Detroit Honorable mention, Poetry we occupied an abandoned meet packing plant, where ghosts of slaughtered cows haunted hallways that we would later paint in kaleidoscope murals of one thousand rainbow shades. we built stages and sound systems to make music where machinery had churned bones. we called it…
What really threatens us
The biggest story in America today is one most people don’t know much about, one which seriously threatens to destroy this nation. And no, it is not the war in Iraq. That is only damaging our economy, killing tens of thousands and making enemies of much of the world. What’s much more dangerous to us…
A walk in the park
The most difficult problem in reviewing or even identifying the vast array of Comerica comestibles is that the Tigers provide no food and price guide or concession map. This means that only serendipity will lead you to discover the tiny obscure stand on the first level that offers sushi ($8), hummus with pita ($8), and…
Maps
Maps Doug Tanoury, Detroit Honorable mention, Poetry Sister Antonina’s map Of the world worked Like a large window shade That pulled down And went up noisily In true window shade fashion, Its roller turning made the sound Of a morning dove cooing, and The map’s fabric winding up Were wings flapping. I remember France was…
Letters to the Editor
Alternative means I read Ben Lefebvre’s excellent article on ethanol (“Stalking the answers,” July 19). Anyone who reads the whole thing will be well informed, so thank you for providing that service to the public. I have just returned from the third international biofuels and bioprocessing symposium in Toronto that gathered many of the people…
Service industry blues
Kevin Smith made the original Clerks in 1994 with $27,000 and a bunch of Jersey kids with bad hair and tight-rolled jeans. It looked like it was spliced together with duct tape and shot by a cameraman with cataracts; the actors deliver their lines with the finesse of a 6-year-old who hasn’t finished Hooked on…
Stolen Lines
It seemed to have been taken right out of some stupid conversation my friends and I would have. — Stolen Lines judge Eric C. Novack is author of local cult novel Killing Molly and publisher of Elitist Publications. Nitpicking A. Zayne Tawil, Livonia Stolen Lines, Grand Prize “Spiders don’t glisten.” “Well, they would if they’d…
Poisoned Ivy
Middle East blogger Juan Cole won’t be going to Yale.
Wassup Rockers
For a certain breed of indie movie fan, hearing the name Larry Clark is liable to induce seizures. Ever since “Kids” convinced polite, middle-aged art-house audiences that their precious children might be getting stoned, having unprotected sex and beating up gays in the park, each of the director’s new films has been greeted by equal…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
And now MB79 asks you to please rise and observe a minute’s silence for the passing of a great rock band, found dead at the age of 33 due to a massive self-inflicted dumbshot wound. Autopsy Result of the Week: New York Dolls – One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This (Roadrunner)…
Tween beat
Growing pains are a bitch. When it began 12 years ago, Warped was the bratty little brother of summer package tours. Skate culture-friendly and fueled by punk revivalism, it was happy to skew away from the format and demographic of festivals like Lollapalooza. But while it’s been remarkably durable over the years, Warped is now…
Monster House
First-time director Gil Kenan follows in the footsteps of “Gremlins” to deliver a scary and quick-witted movie for the pre-teen set. Its clever, morbid sense of humor is reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s children’s books, but with a more contemporary flavor. Though it’s too scary for the wee-est ones, the nine-year-old in your house will probably…
Joan Jett’s set
For artists with a history more extensive than a six-minute egg, the 1990s were a staggeringly confused time. Joan Jett crested to the top of the Hot 100 in 1981 with “I Love Rock N Roll,” but a little more than a decade later she was attempting a career jump start in a climate where…
Fite night
The 17 songs on Tim Fite’s Gone Ain’t Gone LP were recorded in a modest Brooklyn apartment and meant to be heard by only a few friends and family members. The graphic artist-cum-musician got his inspiration for the record from a place most people don’t like to admit they even go — the dollar bin…
My Super Ex-Girlfriend
“My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” is a great idea, but director Ivan Reitman can’t deliver the laughs. The light-on-guffaws, high-on-concept scene is typical for this mash-up of superhero stories and romantic comedies. The mild-mannered and sappy Matt is just a regular joe who thinks he’s landed the girlfriend of a lifetime with the heroine G-Girl (Uma Thurman).…
Deth’s door
In all its rusted splendor Detroit can still stoke the imagination — we’re a city built of stone and chrome and sweat, a testament to the ultimate fusion of human and mechanical muscle that made the modern world. We are, after all, the city that created techno, so it’s no real surprise that so many…
Recycled
Continuing the ethanol debate.
Lady in the Water
Among the things you’ll encounter in the new film “Lady in the Water”: a fanged creature called a Scrunt; an otherworldly redhead named Story, who is a narf; a stuttering handyman named Cleveland Heep. That’s right, kids, it’s time to be force-fed another convoluted tale “from the imagination of M. Night Shyamalan.” The writer-director who…
Sign off
For an artist who uses his own name, writ large, as the leitmotif for his expressionistic paintings, Josh Smith is surprisingly self-effacing. Currently showing at Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Smith sloughs off a recent New York Times review calling his work “stunningly sophomoric.” He regards the review positively, as validation of his existence in the art…
Sayonara
Lefebvre moves on.
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "The honest man must be a perpetual renegade," said French essayist Charles Péguy. The honest woman must be one, too, I would add. While that’s always a good rule to keep in mind, it will be especially apt for you in the coming weeks, Aries. If you hope to remain true…
Art Bar
This marvelous poem by California poet Marsha Truman Cooper perfectly captures the world of ironing, complete with its intimacy. At the end, doing a job to perfection, pressing the perfect edge, establishes a reassuring order to an otherwise mundane and slightly tawdry world. Ironing After Midnight Your mother called it “doing the pressing,” and you…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Guiding passions
Training the chefs of tomorrow.
Chicken Littles and voting rights
Sometimes people forget. When President Lyndon Johnson won passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it was because it had become painfully obvious by then that black Americans, particularly black Americans in the South, didn’t stand a chance of being afforded the most basic and elemental American right — the right to vote —…
Comics
This looks more like notes for a comic strip than the finished product, but I love it, cause everything you need to get the gag is right there.— Comics judge Sean Bieri is Metro Times design director. Pieter Wiest, Detroit Grand Prize, Comics Jeremy Kreis, Fort Gratiot Second Prize, Comics David Holtek, Ann Arbor Third…
Some Tomatoes Please
This story gave me something to think about: the fragility of life and changes that could turn our lives around in a couple of minutes; the honest description of the struggle of an average citizen who gave himself the opportunity to step into someone else’s shoes for a moment.— Short Fiction judge Mariela Griffor is…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 26 Scott Gwinnell orchestra Music Detroit’s most innovative big band is back with a regular gig at a new club that’s putting serious jazz downtown. In addition to Gwinnell’s ensemble Wednesdays, the posh-but-homey Cliff Bell’s has a Greg “Vibrations” Williams jam Tuesdays, French themes on Thursdays and a changing weekend lineup (Kevin Grenier…
In The Flesh
Journey is still measured by Infinity, Evolution, Departure, and Escape, the albums that made the band stars between 1978 and 1981. The hit singles, the lengthy tour schedules, even the albums’ iconic galactic scarab artwork combined to make the San Francisco group legitimate arena rock superstars in an era of emerging FM radio and increasing…
Her Bones Stick Out Like Weapons
The business of fiction is to create a world so similar to the reality we live in that you cannot see the thin line between what is real and what is not. This story, with its different point of view, recounted the life of an anorexic character, and I feel a tremendous empathy with her.…
Marvelous one?
Tough luck or charmed life? Butch Walker’s first band, a Southern-fried hard rock combo called Southgang, disappeared in a puff of aerosol during the early 1990s transition from hair metal to grunge. Then Walker resurfaced, after grunge had birthed modern rock and MTV’s “Alternative Nation,” and with the Marvelous 3 he made the most of…
