Art gardening
Heidelberg’s lone ranger works with Cranbrook architects and school kids for a change….
June 12-18, 2002
13 THU • MUSIC Dead Low Tide — Were you there where the Murder City Devils almost burned down the Gold Dollar? It was August 1, 2000, when a crowd of 20 fans and five slumped-over drunks witnessed the Seattle quintet leveling the place. Spencer Moody’s brilliant, drunken aggression led the band through a set…
Homeland insecurity
“I do not believe that anyone could have prevented the horror of Sept. 11. Yet we now know that thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us.” —George W. Bush, June 6, 2002 Well, that’s certainly reason to hide The New York Times from the kiddies. But fear not: Our nonelected leader has a…
Our Far East paradise
On a hot Sunday, I drive past pastures of waist-high weeds and clusters of bushy trees along Dickerson Street toward the east side’s Fisher Mansion, once a palace of lush decadence and now home to the Bhaktivedanta Cultural Center, where Michigan Hare Krishnas meet to worship ancient Vedic scriptures and the god Krishna in her…
Gates to meaning
In one of his strange and wonderful stories, the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges referred to the dictionary as a monument to thousands of cultural victories. Defined, agreed upon and celebrated, the victories are the words themselves, those little black, encoded marks that carry an exacting signifying power. In an analogous way, Valerie Parks’…
Lowlifes and cheap beer
Firestarter Firestarter Mangrove Here are former members of Japanese punk bands Teengenerate and American Soul Spiders exploring their poppier influences. I hear flickers of Manic Street Preachers, the Records and Generation X, and bassist Sammy’s wearin’ a 20/20 T-shirt on the CD sleeve, if that tells ya anything. Highlights include “Trashy Dreams,” “Keith Richards Man,”…
Freedom Hill listings
June 15 SAT • V98.7 Smooth Jazz Fest — Boney James, Rick Braun, Jonathan Butler and Alexander Zonjic’s Smooth Jazz All-Stars featuring Dave McMurray and Tim Bowman perform the first evening of the Jazz Fest. 16 SUN • V98.7 Smooth Jazz Fest — Guitars and Saxes, Gerald Veasley, Alfonzo Blackwell, Four Play and Al Jarreau…
Old Smooth
The title itself better describes the texture of John Lawrence’s first CD than anything else that could be said here. Well, almost. This is not a jazz album for jazz purists. Anyone who frowns reflexively at all post-Breezin’ George Benson albums should move on. Read no further. This one is not for you. But if…
Speak of the devil
Have you ever been around people who don’t know when to quit? You like them, but they never know when to let a thing die. You say, “Have you watched ‘The Osbournes’?” and they do their Ozzy impression, and it’s funny. Then they do Ozzy stealing your fries. By the time they’re doing Ozzy as…
TA
What with everyone from Adult. to No Doubt successfully cracking the ’80s code these days, it certainly can’t be music’s biggest mathematical mystery that adding Gary Numan to (X)tasy and Joy Dividing by the B-52’s equals good times and great oldies. So why do so many musicians insist it’s still enough just to fine-tune another…
Propaganda and bubble gum
Want to make a deal? I’ll trade you my Mayor Giuliani Gives the “Thumbs Up” for your Condoleeza Rice. Or how about my Tom Ridge for your John Ashcroft. Or — the mother lode — my Osama bin Laden for your President Bush Addresses Congress. With Pokemon in the toilet, trading-card giant and Bazooka gum…
Undercover Brother
He’s righteous, he’s solid, he’s the Robin Hood of the hood, he’s Dolemite meets Maxwell Smart come to save what’s left of black culture from all those undermining Urkels and The Man — with Eddie Griffin, Billy Dee Williams, David Chappelle, Chris Kattan and Denise Richards.
Dearth of the cool
Never do we turn down an open bar. Never. Particularly one where the tab is picked up by a huge, greedy marketing concern like a major record company. (Yeah, yeah, I know — blaming a major label for greed is like blaming a hog for rolling in shit; it’s what they do. Money and exploitation…
VideoHound’s Cult Flicks and Trash Picks
Three-headed flying lizards that spit lightning. Amphibious goggle-wearing Nazi super-zombies slowly slaughtering shipwrecked vacationers. Blond, alien children with glowing eyes and deadly minds. Killer bimbos, corpse grinders and toxic avengers. Man-eating plants, brains, insects, lesbians, zombies, werewolves, queerwolves and musicals … If any or all of the above interests you — or if you find…
I believe he can fall
After R. Kelly wrote “I Believe I Can Fly,” I came very close to hating the man. But it’s wrong to hate a person just for writing a terrible song. After all, I figured, Kelly may have other redeeming qualities of which I’m not aware. So I decided instead to just hate the song, with…
Sharpen Your Teeth
Side projects are usually crap (Bowie’s Tin Machine, anyone?), and indie-rock side projects are usually worse (the Rentals, blah, blah, blah). But in the case of Ugly Casanova, a bluesy, loopy offering from Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock and roadie-cum-low rent-troubadour Brian Deck with all-but-forgotten ghosts of über-indie-rock circa ’95 like Red Red Meat’s Tim Rutili,…
Out in the real word
Dada Boy Paints on Canvas — part of the Tree Town Performance Festival running throughout the summer at Ann Arbor’s Performance Network — is written by and stars Jeffrey Steiger, with Dada bandleader Frank Pahl (also the leader of the avant-folk band Only a Mother). Back in the early 20th century, the Dada movement used…
MTV Unplugged No. 2.0
Unplugged, the re-education of Lauryn Hill, can be described by a hundred adjectives. It’s sincere and overbearing. It’s raw, inspired, emotional and, at times, agonizing. It’s brave and, possibly, foolhardy. It’s self-absorbed and self-effacing, wise and naive. And, at its core, though she only raps twice (albeit ferociously) on this double CD, it’s true hip…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Have you had productive fantasies about faraway places or exotic sanctuaries or mercurial X-factors lately? Have you sent messages to freedom fighters or remote beauties or high-flying networkers? Have you monitored the progress of unsung helpers or dark horses or unification specialists who are flying under the radar? If you’ll notice,…
Harassment factory
Claims of sexual harassment at Ford’s Wixom plant keep rolling off the assembly line….
The Red Record
It’s no surprise that in the wake of the success of garage-ist media darlings (the Strokes, etc.) that the major labels would be falling over one another to sign next week’s mop-headed garageland superheroes to hype, market and sell as their very own. Enter Loudermilk — my pick for the worst band name of 2002…
Body language
• Concerning the woman who climaxes in her sleep: The combination of anxiety attacks and dreams (not necessarily sexual ones) leading to orgasm is not unheard of in traditional Chinese medicine, where they occur as part of a syndrome called “heart and kidneys not communicating.” There are herbal formulas for this kind of thing. The…
Royal pain
Royal Oak’s ongoing battle to reduce visual pollution.
On
Imperial Teen’s always kinda just been there, lingering around the edges of the indie-pop scene; a little too something or not enough of another something to really be plunged into the bloodstream of a particular insular scene. Good thing on both counts since Imperial Teen is impressively broad in its musical perspective and is too…
More on tighty-whities
Q: I love you, Dan, but you are so wrong about tighty-whities! Last week you told Suffering Latent Underpants Trauma, aka SLUT, that men look good in tighty-whities. Wrong! If you like men in those horrible, Homer Simpson, retarded white things, Dan, you’re a freaking idiot. As a straight woman who is outspoken on this…
Homers, hummers
Detroit sports journalists grossly misrepresent North Carolina in an effort to root on the home team.
Our mothers, our selves
For her directorial debut, Callie Khouri (the writer behind Thelma and Louise) bit off a huge chunk of a project, one that would take a miniseries to cover adequately. But it’s hard not to be affected by the outrageous talents of Ellen Burstyn, Fionnula Flanagan, Shirley Knight and Maggie Smith. And Ashley Judd is absolutely…
Letters to the Editor
Beautiful sight As I expected, you got some complaints on the cover of your photo contest issue (May 29-June 4). If the ones you printed were the only ones you received, they were much fewer and milder than I expected. I’d like to express the opposite opinion. As a longtime reader of your paper, I…
Banned in South Lyon
ACLU of Michigan defends students’ First Amendment rights.
Bartleby
Director Oliver Parker’s debut feature is an adaptation of a puzzling short story by Herman Melville. But Crispin Glover as Bartleby is too much of a weird thing. Ah, Melville! Ah, adaptations that overreach!
Good news from space-rock base camp
Oh, god, I’m about to feel old now. There was a time, not too long ago, when Detroit was not officially known as Garage Rock City. Back in those halcyon days of the mid-late ’90s — in the Detroit Rock Export recession between Sponge and Kid Rock — Detroit was affectionately referred to as Space…
City gets science lesson
Fourth-grade class reports on Detroit’s poor recycling habits.
The Kress Lounge
The Kress Lounge
is more than a local documentary about a bar that may already be forgotten. Director Renie Oxley commits the spirits of a fabulous and fading Detroit to the cultural memory of film so that we may learn our history by heart — at the Main Art Theatre, Monday, June 17, 7:30 p.m.
The pathos of ethos
Ethos makes melodies that matter….
Bet on black
Are Detroit’s casinos blocking funds for African-American-owned businesses?
Festival at the Grand
Cinema culture pumps the imaginary up a notch as the first-ever "Festival at the Grand" presents its selection of winners to cine-fetishists of all persuasions on Saturday, June 15, at the Grand Café (33316 Grand River) in downtown Farmington.
Trans-ironic exhaust
Trans Am is an indie rock band. Don’t hold that against the group. Although it’s on über-cool indie label Thrill Jockey (home to post-rock icons Tortoise, among others), the Washington, D.C., trio has never been all that comfortable amid the post-everything irony, 7-inchier-than-thou world of smug record-store clerks and overnight college-radio geeks. As if the…
Stank and skank
This week’s abandoned house makes for the perfect party locale.
Bad Company
With the odd moment of suspense, Joel Schumacher’s visual storytelling and Jerry Bruckheimer’s reallocation of his fireball budget towards a more modest truckload of ammo and a novel car chase through the meadows of the Czech Republic, Bad Company delivers at least a share of its promised goods.
