Blood, fists and spit
Paging Jason Voorhees. As fortune would have it, this Friday the 13th, Joe Louis Arena will host an eight-fight card of professional boxing. ESPN2’s “Friday Night Fights” crew will roll in the trucks for a bout dubbed “Friday the Thirteenth Judgment Day” by local professional boxing promoter Four Corner Productions. And, as part of this…
Altar alternative
In an event guaranteed to convince the Christian right that Sodom has risen from the ashes, the Ann Arbor-based Washtenaw Rainbow Action Project (WRAP) will again host a mass Commitment Ceremony for same sex couples on the steps of the Capitol building Saturday afternoon. The event culminates the Michigan Pride LGBT March, Rally & Festival…
Let’s compare mythologies
Seattle-based writer Rebecca Brown has already established herself as one of the more promising and original voices in literature today. The End of Youth, her latest collection of seamlessly blended short fiction and essays, follows The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley’s Girl and The Dogs, also from City Lights. Straightforward, edgy and witty, then suddenly experimental…
Inner circle
David Baker on composing, life & learning from a jazz titan….
Vangs revisited
Smiles were the special of the day one sunny afternoon late last month as Genevieve Vang strolled from table to table at her Bangkok 96 Restaurant on Telegraph in Livonia. Vang, her husband Guy and daughter Caroline, 19, had received a reprieve from a deportation hearing that was scheduled this month. The Laotian family, which…
South Indian spice
Mysore Woodlands 28233 Ford Road, Garden City 734-525-6422 Most entrees: $5-$6 Handicap accessible Eats: 3 stars / Experience: 3 stars As we were discussing Mysore Woodlands on the way home the other night, my partner pointed out to me that I give a rating of "eats, three stars/experience, three stars" to a pretty broad swath…
The 10th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival schedule
The 10th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival encompasses two weeks of music at several locations. Call 248-559-2097 for more information. Saturday, June 14, 8 p.m., Seligman Performing Arts Center, Beverly Hills Emerson String Quartet, James Tocco Elaine Lebenbom, Shostakovich, Beethoven Sunday, June 15, 3 and 4:30 p.m., Detroit Zoo, Wildlife Interpretive Gallery…
Orwell in the low post
This week’s Doublespeak Award goes to the Detroit Pistons, whose Web site contains a click-on headline: “Carlisle Steps Down.” Open that item to find the grotesquely passive headline: “Rick Carlisle Not to Return as Pistons’ Coach.” News Hits gets it, though. We reckon you wouldn’t expect the franchise’s official digital organ to post the real…
Fire
The Electric Six have, after seven years of generally exciting and specifically confusing audiences, released their legitimate debut album. Fire begins by demanding that “you must obey the Dance Commander” and ends with an invitation to “trip on my synthesizer” and rocks like a hurricane in between with detours into dumb (good), dumb (not so…
June 11-18
11 WED • ART “Live Free or Die” — Celebrating not only the artisanship, but the culture behind the much-misunderstood tradition of tattooing, CPOP’s latest multimedia exhibit is one of the more unusual installations in town this summer. The exhibit, which is scheduled to spotlight works from both tattoo and non-tattoo artists, will focus on…
Inconspicu-ASS
Unlike many of the places visited by our Abandoned Structure Squad, this little house at 18162 Heyden St. is not an eyesore. Sitting in the middle of a quiet neighborhood, it is so inconspicuous ASS drove right past it at first. Aside from a broken front window and overgrown backyard, the home, built in 1940,…
Also Rising
Psychedelia? While the last hippie was killed off in a hail of Altamont-Manson Corp. cue sticks over thirty years ago, lingering visual images of flower-powerish garb and dippy little twirly dances continue to dog the genre. But don’t expect incense ’n’ peppermints pop at a SubArachnoid Space gig. As evidenced on its eighth platter, this…
Train keeps a’rollin’
Chris Dreja, founding member of the band that spawned three guitar gods….
WWJ Newsradio 950 – Internal Memo
To: WWJ Staff From: Georgeann Herbert Date: 05/28/2003 Re: AOL for Broadband ———————————————————————————————————— A Unique Partnership Recently, AOL and Infinity Broadcasting reached an agreement on what may be the single largest radio marketing campaign in history. The deal includes some traditional advertising, but most of the deal depends on individual stations creating interest and opportunities…
Sculpting wilderness
Here’s a very different film about art, one that shows Scottish environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy at work in the great outdoors. Exquisitely filmed on various American and European locations, it lets us hang with an artist at peace with the world and in awe of it. A must see for anyone interested in contemporary art.
Nettleurgy and other urges
Q: I find applying stinging nettles to my body highly pleasurable. I’ve tried the Web for more information but either get herbalist pages or, when searching the words “nettles” and “fetish” together, I get directed to SM-type pages. I don’t really go for that. Can you direct me somewhere where I can get advice? Are…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
Unlike many of the places visited by our Abandoned Structure Squad, this little house at 18162 Heyden St. is not an eyesore. Sitting in the middle of a quiet neighborhood, it is so inconspicuous ASS drove right past it at first. Aside from a broken front window and overgrown backyard, the home, built in 1940,…
Man on the Train
Directed by Patrice Leconte, this is the story of two men of seemingly opposite personalities who meet at a point in their lives when they’re both ready for a change and who see in each other an attractive approach to living that has so far eluded them – with Johnny Hallyday and Jean Rochefort.
MC5, Stooges homecoming; TV eye on dollar signs
Seems the Electric Six are finally a mere one degree of separation away from Crispin Glover. See, the ever-more-improbable success of the Detroit sextet’s hit, “Danger! High Voltage,” continues apace with the song’s inclusion on the sound track to the upcoming Glover-featuring summer blockbuster Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle — sandwiched between Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” and…
Club, nay …Pub, yah
From the outside, Bailey’s Pub ’N’ Grille may look like your run-of-the-mill bar — and, once you get inside, you’ll be glad to discover that it still has some strong remnants of the workaday watering hole. For anyone who’s sick of the growing trend of having to dress up just to have a cocktail only…
Together
China has long been known as a breeding ground for musical prodigies, a fact that Chen Kaige takes as the basis for his movie that explores the bond between a motherless violin phenom and his instrument (and more importantly his father), with an eye on adolescence and a sonata’s worth of schmaltz.
Give Poe another Reed
Appreciating Lou Reed’s latest album, The Raven, requires a couple of sacrifices. First, forget your high school introduction to Edgar Allan Poe. Screw the literary canon and all its prescribed bullshit. Second, be prepared to want it. Like an urge for a cruel ex-lover, you must embrace your insecurity for (at least) the duration of…
City of Ghosts
Actor Matt Dillon’s directorial debut is decent B-movie pulp wrapped up in a pretentious package. There’s not much going on beneath the old-fashioned thieves-falling-out plot and it all could have benefited from an old b-movie virtue, namely tightness – with James Caan and Gerard Depardieu.
Dragons no myth
Between ballooning ticket costs and the price of foamy medicine, between the pimping of revolting apparel and bearing witness to past-shelf-life rock stars and calculated pubescents preening in whatever tired context, a worthy few slither through the proverbial cracks of rock ’n’ roll. Enter the Dragons. All blanket statements and lathery verbiage aside, what you…
2 Fast 2 Furious
The Fast and the Furious, while not exactly a work of art, was at least artful in its entertainment – good times with great action and unbelievable rides. 2 Fast 2 Furious straddles the line between good bad movie and bad bad movie for a short while, but that isn’t enough.
Wild at heart
Metro Detroit is spreading like the blob that ate southeast Michigan. Our beloved megalopolis keeps gobbling up more towns — Pontiac, Rochester, Ann Arbor and beyond. And as the sprawl grows, the “Detroit” art scene gets bigger, more diverse and more exciting. This month, an exhibition (actually four exhibitions) called “Detroit Now” gives us a…
Graphic Iran
That Pantheon has made Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis its flagship graphic-novel release for the year is no surprise. The story Satrapi tells — about her childhood in Iran, as the country transformed from a Westernized dictatorship into an Islamic theocracy and then went to war with Iraq — couldn’t be more topical. However, the resulting book…
Sorting out the Times
Detroit this week is wallowing in self-congratulation and nostalgia over Ford Motor Co.’s 100th birthday. Some of this is justified; if Hank the First hadn’t figured out how to build a lot of cars cheap and fast, Motown might still be Slotown. We might, in fact, look something like Indianapolis without the speedway. Fortunately, the…
Generations
Of all the divergent subsets of contemporary religious music, none is more explosive, intense or subversive than underground Christian hip-hop. Since the dawn of the movement in the early ’90s, Uprok Records has been on the creative vanguard, constantly pushing the envelope with artists like the Tunnel Rats, LPG and Peace 586. For reasons unknown…
Mechanical pleasures
In the ’40s, when things were swell, when Velveeta and Spam were futuristic miracle foods, things were more black and white, and films were filled with quick-cracking witty dialogue that kept your mind off the boys overseas. And women, who knew their place, gladly gave up their happy homemaking to replace GIs in wartime factories.…
Praise and Worship Songs of Yolanda Adams
Though Yolanda Adams has definitely flirted with the idea of secular success throughout her long career, her feet have been firmly been planted in traditionalist-minded praise and worship music. There is no better evidence of that fact than the aptly titled Praise and Worship Songs of Yolanda Adams, a compilation record of her more devotedly…
Letters to the Editor
Detroit pride I find it both interesting and infuriating that the only letters you printed in response to Jack Lessenberry’s column about the perils of life in Detroit were written by people who don’t live here. Though I realize that the main issue here is the mayor’s ability (or lack thereof) to keep our city…
Come Together
After five years and four successively popular releases, Come Together finds Atlanta-based Third Day poised at the forefront of the contemporary Christian rock movement. Similar to their past efforts, Come Together blends gritty Southern rock with edgy power pop, making them sonically akin to the massively popular mid-’90s secular act, Collective Soul. But in terms…
Not exactly over
In the aftermath of terror trial: changed lives, big questions, appeals that could linger for years….
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "People demand freedom of speech," said Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, "as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use." I hope this smart-ass witticism gets you agitated, Aries, and prods you to wonder whether you sometimes let your mouth race ahead of your brain; whether you’re not as…
Ad nauseam on the air
The New York Times, the most powerful newspaper on earth, reels under the weight of scandal, its top editors cashiered. Journalists across the nation grope to undo the collateral damage and retain the public’s confidence. Over the objections of 90 percent of those who commented, the Federal Communications Commission votes to drastically loosen rules on…
Power Me, Ballad Me: The Power Ballad Timeline
Hoist your butanes for Journey, Styx and REO Speedwagon — three bands that fed the fire!…
The balance of power
In a budget process that was noticeably more congenial than the barb-slinging conflict endured in his rookie outing, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick — who has been claiming recently that he “loves” the city’s council members — didn’t get everything he wanted. But the bottom line is that a projected $196 million shortfall was dealt with.…
