Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): You will have valid reasons for unleashing vigorous critiques in the coming week. For best results, however, I suggest that you dress them up in fine language. Your complaints will be more likely to have a cathartic effect if you make them witty and even a bit florid. To get in…
Victory is certain on all fronts now!
Don’t know whether you are a true patriot or not, but I’m still celebrating our glorious killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose name can now be pronounced, almost flawlessly, by nearly every anchor babe. True, we did have to kill a little girl, and at least two other women in the process, but you can’t…
Why the ‘N’ word refuses to die
First, a warning. This column contains racially offensive language for which the author makes no apology. Not that offensive language — or at least language that is offensive to some — is anything new to Metro Times, but when it comes to certain subjects, even we freewheeling types here at Detroit’s own alternative weekly sometimes…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
MB73: It’s a birthday column ’bout a henpecked man and his nagging wife doesn’t understand! Paul McCartney — McCartney (Apple) :: Includes the hit single “Maybe I’m Amazed.” Todd — Comes to Your House (Southern) :: The craziest experimental horror album of the year. John Oswald’s Plunderphonic meets Ed Gein’s kitchen. Care for some ……
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 Remember those Degas paintings of the ballet dancers? Here is a similar figure study, in muted color, but in this instance made of words, not pigment. As this poem by David Tucker closes, I can feel myself holding my breath as if to help…
Head Cheese
The 1980 debut from Detroit’s own Nikki Corvette amplified the girl groups’ boy-crazy side with the rambunctious spirit of punk and garage. A cult favorite obscurity (except in Japan) throughout most of the ’80s and ’90s, Corvette’s recently returned with a new record and tour. Here are her monomanias, likely written in sparkly pink ink…
Summer Guide spotlights
GENESEE Flint Cultural Center’s Summer of Discovery Flint has pulled itself up from a post-recession spiral and has made enormous strides. Its summer outreach initiative features a broad-minded approach to community. Highlights include the Summer Auto Fair (Friday June 23- Sunday, June 25 at Cultural Center Campus, 1525 Dakota Ave., Flint; 810-238-7185); Turntablism DJ Jam…
Water woes
Paying her water bill was tough enough for Nicole Covington when she still worked as a mall security guard. But when the Detroit resident and mother of four lost that job in January, making ends meet became impossible. And her debt to the city’s Water & Sewerage Department kept mounting. “I was having trouble keeping…
The kids are online
Flee the Seen guitarist-vocalist R.L. Brooks pities the teenage listeners of Aerosmith and Metallica, kids from years past who had to go without e-mailed interaction with their favorite frontman or thriving message boards with set lists and fawning testimonials. Pre-Internet, the fan experience was just so impersonal. For up-and-coming bands like Flee the Seen, a…
Cyber games get personal
There is a world where soldiers never die in battle, a realm where the hero always succeeds, a planet where rotting zombies swagger through streets and, most inconceivably, the Detroit Lions actually win. This is the world of gaming, which has become a multibillion-dollar commercial juggernaut, generating more than $7 billion in 2005 — a…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Living the lie
When they debuted in 2001 with They Threw Us in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, the Liars were placed in that same strident, New York City-centric incubator that spat out Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio and the Rapture. But while Trench was frazzled and kicky art-punk served straight up, the…
Backslash
Geek afterlife — Everyone and their grandmother has their own little annoyingly blinky, epileptic-fit-inducing, graphics-heavy page at myspace.com — it’s simply an unfortunate fact of life these days. And with the ridiculous amount of MySpace accounts, it’s an inevitability that some of those users are going to die sooner or later. Hence, someone saw the…
Same surf, new turf
This tri-level establishment in an old TGIF, handsomely refitted in dark brown woods, can seat 190 diners. In warm weather, the patio, which seats 45, may be quieter, although it overlooks the parking lot and the traffic on Crooks. Although entrées come with a large house salad and a warm soft baguette, the appetizers are…
Reunion vibe
If retiring from the Berklee College of Music after 33 years has meant one thing to Gary Burton, it’s meant a chance to really get to work. The 63-year-old vibraphonist explained the other day that since leaving the premier jazz school in 2004, he’s spent most of his time either in the studio, on tour…
Play right
With two sod-covered human figures lying prostrate head-to-head, Denise Fanning’s earth-sculpture-cum-miniature-golf-hole “Swallow Me Hole” seems straightforward enough. Just putt up the ass. Shoot for the figure’s rectum so it comes out its mouth, rolls into the other figure, out that one’s butt and into the cup. If you’d like, let the game be cathartic. Envision…
Spike-topped lit
There are books that make their way into our lives that we simply want to like; for instance, books written by friends, or books given to us by friends, who boldly claim, “This book saved my life.” Sadly, not all of them turn out to be as good as we might like them to be.…
Strip teases
It ain’t easy being a comics snob these days. Ten years ago, simply pointing out the existential angst underlying Charles Schulz’ Peanuts or knowing that Krazy Kat creator George Herriman was half African-American was enough to set you apart from the unwashed, Garfield-hugging masses. Casually mentioning the Pulitzer that Art Spiegelman won for his Holocaust…
Grandmaster flash
While most people spend their lives playing by the rules, Fred Goodman has spent his making them. When you’ve made a career of creating games, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between work and play. Since officially retiring last year after nearly five decades in the education department at the University of Michigan, Fred…
Rather Ripped
You heard it here first: Rather Ripped fits into Sonic Youth’s master summer plan. Eight of the veteran group’s last nine albums have been released in even-numbered years, and seven of those in the months of May or June. This isn’t a fluke … it’s perfect. Of course every SY record reveals a variety of…
Harmony park
This may not be the storied American melting pot, but it’s a vibrant mosaic shimmering under the summer sun. In a region where disharmony seems to course like a dark, unsettling undercurrent that occasionally surfaces open and raw, Metro Beach park along Lake St. Clair in Macomb County offers an example of this area at…
Taint right
Prosecutor’s statement a “whitewash” of perjury allegations.
The heat is on
From the impressive bulge in his hot pants, the Ark’s Ola Salo hasn’t suffered a botched sex-change operation. Still, listening to The State of the Ark, it’s easy to imagine him starring in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. After all, the Swedish quintet’s first stateside release cuts a rug on the same glam-pop cloth as…
Our prime guide
There’s a theory that we’re descended from aquatic apes. It supposedly explains why we’re buoyant and hairless, and mysteries of evolution from upright posture to peculiarities of our mating. It’s outsider science, far from mainstream, but it can feel right, intuitively, this time of year when there’s a pull to the shore and the water.…
Letters to the Editor
Wayne’s world Re: “Returning to the scene of the crime” (Metro Times, June 7), I am interested in Wayne Kramer’s history and current practices relative to the MC5 because I worked as a graphic artist with the band from 1966 to 1971, and subsequently with all of the members in their post-MC5 musical incarnations. Wayne’s…
Global warning
If there’s anyone who still believes Ralph Nader’s cynical charge that there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush, the new documentary An Inconvenient Truth will blow that notion out of the water. Gore has spent decades compiling and refining a sophisticated multimedia presentation (modestly referred to as his “slide show”) about…
Hirstute woman gets astute advice
Q: I’m writing regarding Frigid Frustrated Fool. My problem is hairiness too: I’m crazy about hairy women! I will stare in rapt lust at a woman’s hairy armpit in public. While FFF sounded too self-pitying to be hot, thoughts of her hairiness moved me to engage in hand-to-gland combat. My question: Where can I find…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
A Prairie Home Companion
After five decades of filmmaking, five Oscar nominations and the adoration of countless Hollywood stars, 81-year-old director Robert Altman can make whatever kind of film he feels like. Oddly enough, he’s chosen Garrison Keillor’s long-running (31 years) radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, as a cinematic meditation on his own mortality. A variety show steeped…
Bust this
Call it the summer of premature box-office ejaculation. No matter how huge a wad they blow in opening weekends, this year’s early entries in the summer blockbuster fray have been disappearing as quickly as they come, leaving thousands of dissatisfied lovers — er, audiences — in their wake. When moviegoers realized that Philip Seymour Hoffman…
This summer: Get lit
ENTRY FORM Metro Times invites you to show off your talent. Every year we hold a summer contest for fiction and poetry, and publish the winners in a special issue of the paper. Rules: Each submission requires you to fill out a separate entry form, including a $5 check or money order made out to…
The Proposition
Brooding musician Nick Cave’s second stab at screenwriting is a bloody, sun-stroked Western with all the yippee-ki-yay sucked right out of it. The setting is the 19th century Australian Outback, a small slice of hell on Earth, where British colonists, lawmen and indigenous people are never more than a shotgun blast or two away from…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 14 Planet Ant Film & Video Festival Opening Night FILM Hamtramck’s Planet Ant Theatre is probably best known for its allegiance to original playwriting and progressive theater, but what many people might not know is that the hometown upstart has a vested interest in the celluloid and digital worlds. To kick off Planet…
89x’s b-day soiree
Anyone who attended last year’s show will tell you. Moving its annual birthday party/summer kickoff concert downtown, to digs that take up the State, the Fox and a makeshift outdoor stage in between, was probably one of the coolest things 89x radio has ever done. It was hot, hands were wrapped around sudsy, 20-ounce diuretics,…
Goal! The Dream Begins
Though stateside enthusiasm for the world’s biggest sports spectacle is lukewarm at best, the hype machine is cranking full-blast in a continuing effort to turn us stubborn Yanks on to soccer — and what better tool than a rah-rah sports flick? Young Santiago Munez and his family leave Mexico to sneak across the U.S border…
What goes around …
December was a very bad month for Eugene Strobe. Within the span of a few weeks, the local rocker had to contend with an appendix removal surgery and a car crash that totaled his van. Like countless area artists, Strobe has neither health insurance nor the immediate resources to deal with his swiftly mounting medical…
Cars
Narcissistic stock car rookie Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is the hottest competitor on the racing circuit. Hoping to land the juiciest contract, he travels to the Piston Cup Championship. But en route, Lightning gets unexpectedly waylaid in the forgotten Route 66 town of Radiator Springs. Over time, sexy sports car Sally (Bonnie Hunt), rusty tow…
It’s graphic: how novel
Mark Siegel says he wants to do the impossible: publish attention-grabbing graphic novels that are literate and entertaining, as good for the soul as they are for reading at the beach. "We intend to raise the bar on what people think comics are," says Siegel, the editorial director for First Second Books, a specialty imprint…
Ghost stories
For good or for ill, metro Detroiters have long looked upon “Up North” as their personal summer playground. But a new book from local historian Gene Scott, Michigan Shadow Towns, shows that outstate Michigan wasn’t always pretty and pastoral. Scott’s backwater Baedeker chronicles the boisterous salad days of small-town Michigan, tracking the rise and fall…
Taking it slow
Ann Arbor eatery stresses slow food.
