Critical survey
Covering the metro Detroit art beat for six decades has been a great ride. It has kept me young at heart, close to the people I admire most and well supplied with flashbacks. I’ll never forget how Sam Wagstaff, the curator of modern art at the Detroit Institute of Arts during the 1960s, invited earthwork-meister…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Turner’s cheek
Frank Turner has a face made for radio. So why shouldn’t he make that his full-time occupation? Turner, the rubber-cheeked Channel 7 (WXYZ) news anchor with a patronizing on-screen chatter and self-righteous tone, is hell-bent on becoming, in his words, “America’s First Evangelical Anchor.” (How he knows there isn’t one already, I’m not sure.) He…
Puritans are made, not born
Q: My problem may not be as kinky as most you get, but it’s currently terrorizing my thoughts. While in high school and early college, I was fairly sexually repressed (right-wing, Bible-belt upbringing and all that), so I used online chat rooms to explore my sexual curiosity. I would find random pictures of people on…
Universal language
Juana Molina has a thing about American record stores. The Argentine singer and songwriter dislikes seeing her subtle and intricate music, which she assembles carefully in solitude over many months and sometimes years, reduced to a single word when it comes time to shelve her CDs. That word? Latin. “I like how it works in…
Mind games
Local playwright Ron Allen writes in his latest press release, “The Aboriginal Treatment Center is an examination of the archetypal black man’s mind,” and, judging by the manner in which his acting troupe, the Thick Knot Rhythm Ensemble, takes on this complex concept, examination is one part pensive contemplation and one part unabashed exhibitionism. The…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
True colors
It’s not news to report that Detroit musicians are often bigger abroad than they are at home. But for Franki Juncaj and Maurice Herd — also known as DJ 3000 and Pirahnahead — status is all relative. They’re two guys born a few months apart in 1972, one white and one black, who grew up…
Head Cheese
Paper Street Saints seem happy in the loud space between WRIF and 89x. They preen, but that’s all right — the guitar hooks blaze, the rhythms are bootheel-heavy, and they look good in the reflection from a chrome tailpipe. With their second record, Pride & Punishment, on the way, here are their monomanias from the…
Ramblin’ Rose
Watching Iggy Pop fishing in some Mississippi backwater as he regales a child with an old Negro folk tale is one of the many experiences in Dan Rose’s cinematic blues riff Wayne County Ramblin’ that perfectly expresses the surreal, awkward, yet potently meaningful mythologies that connect Detroit with our musical cousins of the South. Voodoo…
Sketches of Frank Gehry
If the world of architecture has a rock star, it’s Frank Gehry. He evokes strong reactions — you either love Frank Gehry or you loathe him. This tension between artistic vision and commercial necessity makes Sydney Pollack an inspired choice as a documentarian of Gehry’s work. Deliberately avoiding Gehry’s personal life, Pollack offers a captivating…
To fight terrorism, invade Paraguay
We have now spent $400 billion on our glorious war in Iraq and have gotten 2,500 American soldiers killed, plus 40,000 or so brownish locals, whose names neither our government nor media deem worth recording. The dead natives, at least most of ’em, could only jabber in Arabic anyway. Incidentally, another 18,000 or so Americans…
Wah-Wah
Actor Richard E. Grant’s screenwriting and directorial debut, is a semi-autobiographical account of coming of age in antiquated outpost of British colonial Swaziland. The story is set amid a community of British officials on the brink of being tossed out on their cans during the empire’s last days in the African country in the late…
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…
Stranded at the Corner
Anybody who saw a ballgame at Tiger Stadium can recall the rowdy spirit of the huge bleachers section, the dizzying slopes of the stands, the feeling of living in history that the ballpark engendered. The new documentary, Stranded at the Corner, produced and directed by Gary Glaser and written by Richard Bak, is sure to…
All abroad!
On Saturday morning, when most kids his age are waking up to Apple Jacks and music videos, University Preparatory High School junior Matthew Singleton has a mission to attend to: washing cars so he can go to Africa. Singleton is one of eight kids from the charter schools University Preparatory High School and University Preparatory…
The Lake House
The mix-CDs they sell at Starbucks are full of familiar old tunes: mostly predictable picks packaged together in a classy, tasteful and utterly unchallenging way. The new romantic fantasy The Lake House is a lot like one of those CDs — it takes two attractive stars who have been paired together before, plops them down…
American Life in Poetry
Contrary to the glamorized accounts we often read about the lives of single women, Amy Fleury, a native of Kansas, presents us with a realistic, affirmative picture. Her poem playfully presents her life as serendipitous, yet she doesn’t shy away from acknowledging loneliness. At Twenty-Eight It seems I get by on more luck than sense,…
Nacho Libre
Napoleon Dynamite was an amusing but overrated comedy that felt like Jim Jarmusch crossed with John Hughes. Filled with more blank-faced dorks than a Babylon 5 convention, writer-director Jared Hess’s indie hit had enough quotable laugh lines to spark a rabid cult of fans but lacked two fundamental traits of good filmmaking: character and story.…
Shot down on the farm
Tom Crosslin was a lot of things. A brawler with a mean streak, a charmer, a bully, a civic do-gooder, a pothead, a don’t-tread-on-me rebel, a dreamer and a doer. He was Mr. Party and Mr. Charity and a hustler who envisioned Rainbow Farm, the campground and concert venue he established in western Michigan, as…
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
The cliché-ridden script is as predictable as the rising sun, and often aggressively stupid, but nobody comes to a flick like this for the character development. You can almost smell the diesel and burnt rubber.
Uncivil fight
State says MCRI supporters deceived signers.
Precious mettle
At times the mineral-blue, eye-searing flames from an arc welder illuminate the room or apocalyptic showers of sparks spray from a whining grinder. The artist, clad in the protective armor of industrial-grade denim, stands combatively over his sketch. When you walk into a metalsmith’s studio, you can envision, almost comically, Hephaestus, the Greek god of…
Venezuelan eye-opener
Latin government to give Midwesterners free cataract surgery.
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): During America’s Civil War, John Bell Hood was a top general for the Confederacy. Though initially impressive, he grew increasingly ineffectual as his ferocious courage devolved into maniacal force devoid of strategy. His superior officer, Gen. Robert E. Lee, said that Hood was "all lion and no fox." I mention this,…
Night and Day
Friday • 23 Kathy Griffin COMEDY While her claim to infamy is that she’s a self-proclaimed Hollywood D-Lister, comedian Kathy Griffin ain’t fooling anyone anymore. The wonderfully acerbic celebrity-basher-cum-reality show star has clawed her way out of obscurity (not to mention a predominately gay male fan base) to become one of the most well-liked and…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Stay tuned! Coming up next, James Garner stars in The MB74 Files! Cheap Trick — Rockford (Big 3) :: This is Jim Rockford. I can’t take your call because I’m busy investigating why a once-great musical combo is using my name on their latest lousy album. At the tone leave your name and message, I’ll…
Letters to the Editor
Over there Jack Lessenberry: Truly enjoyed this week’s article on America losing its way (“What are we for?” Metro Times, June 7). Well, we Canucks aren’t doing so hot these days either. As you’re likely aware our Bush-lovin’, America-cuddlin’ Prime Minister Harper has sent almost 2,400 troops to Afghanistan to — guess what? — protect…
