Evolutionary ant-stitution
Hamtramck coffeehouse-turned-theater-turned-renaissance venue keeps the art and ideas marching on….
Expressive locations
A sampling of spots boasting hip-hop regularity….
The candidate’s right to snow
Let’s say you’re a resident of Pontiac and you want to know how your councilman, Everett Seay, has funded his elections for the last decade. If you go to the Oakland County clerk’s office, here’s what you’ll find: not enough of what you were looking for. Seay still owes the county 11 campaign finance reports…
Teenagers Live Forever
Teenagers, indeed, live forever, and Detroiter Adam Paul is out to prove that if you’re young at heart, you need not ever lose that particular brand of anguish, angst, heartbreak and love that you feel dissipating as you grow “older.” His minimalist, straight-from-brain-and-heart-to-tape lo-fi bedroom recordings sport simple, repetitive indie pop and yowling vocalising that…
Sonic rumbling
Detroit producer-sound provider Jay Dee and Slum Village are fixing to serve the world a heavy dose of Detroit hip hop….
The real deals
Ypsilanti indie label ReAl stirs the pot of Michigan music….
1999 Metro Times Photo Awards
…These words came up frequently when the judges for the 17th annual Metro Times Photo Awards got together to choose the winning images you see here in our interactive gallery. The judges — professional photographers Judy Eliyas and Bill Sanders, and MT’s arts editor, George Tysh — agreed that the overall quality of the 403…
THE LANGUAGE OF LOW-LIFE
The most derided and least respected act in mainstream music defies all the rules of good marketing and still outsells scads of corporate-backed bands. It goes to show that even for poor white Midwestern kids, there are creative ways to decadence and the in-your-face amplification of their small, tragic histories. If that means finding a…
Cultivating membership
The sun has almost baked my brain into a casserole, and I’m feeling dizzy from the heat of a summer barely even started. "Perfect!" says the Lizard of Fun, handing me a tall glass of red Kool-Aid. "Drink this, you’ll feel much better." I gulp it down, noting that it tastes a little bit less…
Growing into the void
Well, I certainly hope you had a better Memorial Day than I. Being a stateless commie during a popular sanitized "bloodless" war is no picnic. What’s worse, the weather was so lovely it was hard for me to get out to the boneyard to desecrate the graves of our honored war dead. Now that I…
Pitch’d
LOW-END RUMBLINGS The fur is flying after a story on Detroit’s "ghetto-tech" phenomenon – "booty" to the rest of us – appeared in this month’s issue of swanky New York hipster lifestyle mag, Details. Members of Detroit’s electro-bass community are pitching a bitch at the piece’s one-sided approach to the ghetto-tech phenomenon, which, for those…
Endurance
In the beginning, time stands still. Days melt into a single, repetitive unit. Get up, splash water on your face, grab your books and start running. Six miles to school, six miles back: over the hilltops, into the valley, through golden fields of nothing. You’re late. The teacher remarks on it, casually, but you’re not…
Food stuff
YIN, YANG AND YUMMY The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen By Grace Young Simon & Schuster Editions, $27.50, 282 pp. At first glance, you might think The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen is another version of Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club. On the cover, there is a photo of three generations of Chinese…
Environ-Mental
Next-wave techno renaissance man Dale Lawrence is an über-hip Web designer-illustrator by day and the one-man ambient techno band Theorem (the only other artist on techno giant Richie Hawtin’s M_nus label) by night. On this first full-length compilation of Theorem’s 12″ single releases over the last year, Lawrence proves himself a reverent and, better still,…
Light from the tube
"If one could believe in God, would he fill the desert?" – Graham Greene, The End of the Affair The spirit of television moves in mysterious ways. Perhaps it’s just me, but it didn’t seem the least bit fishy that Billy Graham would make his farewell tour on "Larry King Live" the very week of…
MTV takes on violence
"How many of you have ever been angry?" asked the psychologist. Every hand in the room went up without hesitation. "How many have ever felt excited and happy?" The reaction was markedly less enthusiastic, as only half of the hands were raised. It quickly became apparent during a recent anger management seminar at Clawson High…
Get Real
Even with all the current teen movie releases, few coming-of-age films – character-based stories where the actual, painful realities of growing up are examined instead of focusing on who’s taking who to the prom – get made anymore. When a coming-of-age movie does appear, it’s often also a coming-out story like Get Real, a frank…
Tweaking prison justice
Officials on both sides of a federal lawsuit alleging sexual abuse of Michigan’s female prisoners declared victory after the suit was settled last week, pending its approval by a U.S. District Court judge. Meanwhile, prisoners panicked. The U.S. Department of Justice settled with Michigan officials May 25 in federal court, where the department’s lawsuit had…
Notting Hill
Watching Notting Hill, it’s impossible to forget that the woman playing Anna Scott, an American movie star trying to elude the suffocating grip of international celebrity, is actually Julia Roberts, a beloved if not critically well-regarded actress whose status as gossip industry fodder overshadows her work onscreen. Or that Anna’s love interest, down-at-his-heels bookstore owner…
Record store discord
A walk through the front door at the Rock of Ages record shop on Ford Road in suburban Garden City produces no shocks or surprises. CDs by such edgy acts as Insane Clown Posse and Marilyn Manson line shelves alongside classic rockers like Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones. However, local anti-racist activists accuse the…
The Thirteenth Floor
In olden times, say in the early ’60s when “The Twilight Zone” was having its first run, if someone wanted to tell a story about a character, or characters, who slowly come to realize that the world as they know it is actually a simulation, somebody else’s dream or perhaps a projection from their own…
The Winslow Boy
For anyone even remotely familiar with David Mamet, the idea that he’d make a genteel English period piece like The Winslow Boy seems absurd. This was, after all, a playwright (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna) whose use of the American vernacular cut through the politesse of conventional theater like a knife. Even his strongest…
Short of Transcendence
It’s hard not to like big-beat band the Freestylers’ all-beats-to-all-people mix of rave, ragga, b-boy and bounce, but it’s hard to love. Like Jesus Jones the better part of a decade ago, the Freestylers cleverly mix dance and modern rock elements, but, also like Jesus Jones, they have little staying power. Sure, say, a song…
Passive Attack
Every once in a while an album comes along with one track so brilliant and compulsive it threatens to streamroll every other song. The first few times you listen to it, you might think that Red Snapper’s Making Bones is just such a competent and enjoyable record, flattened and slack in the wake of the…
Dance Floor Derivations
Not since Chaka Demus and Pliers has a dancehall DJing-singing duo had such a good chance of gaining American pop acclaim as the team of Tanto Metro and Devonte. The title track was featured on last year’s Strictly the Best 21 and is still getting play on mainstream radio such as New York City’s Hot…
De Blues
Yes, this is good stuff, and as authentic as it gets. It is especially gratifying to see a collection of historic blues material from women, who are so often overlooked yet so integral to the story of this original American musical art form. But before going any further in praise of these two CDs, I…
Digital Hardcore
A week or so before the release of its second album, all three members of Berlin’s Atari Teenage Riot were arrested while playing an anti-war protest in their native Germany for, of all things, inciting a riot. Footage from the scene, available on the band’s Web site, unintentionally plays like a promotional film and serves…
