Night and Day
WEDNESDAY JUNE 23 Excel TWIST THE FOCUS KNOB This special exhibit, Excel: Teen Reflections on a Photographic Journey, features photos snapped by students from Focus: HOPE’s Excel Photography Program, a yearlong course that offered high school students the chance to learn technical and aesthetic photog skills through classes and photo shoots at locales throughout metro…
Metro Retro
19 years ago in Metro Times: Wayne County announces it is ready to demolish the 80-year-old Tiger Stadium and replace it with a $200 million state-of-the-art ballpark (which would eventually be called Comerica Park). After almost 20 years of dithering and flip-flopping, Tiger Stadium’s demolition would not begin until 2006, and was not completed until…
Funk Duminie-est
"I’ve helped more people paint their pictures in this city than Picasso," says Duminie DePorres. "Lately, I feel like Goya." After decades as an A-list sideman for George Clinton, Public Enemy, jessica Care moore, Bad Brains’ H.R., and Last Poet Umar Bin Hassan, DePorres has spent the latter half of the past decade as the…
Italian fantasy
Amici’s Pizza and Living Room 3249 W. 12 Mile Rd., Berkley; 248-544-4100; $$: This isn’t your typical Italian eatery: Pizza crust made with bran, biodegradable dishes, soy candles, no smoking, no TV — Amici’s manages both to be virtuous and to pull it off without a hint of self-righteousness. It is a bar, after all,…
Cheat Code
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands Ubisoft PS3 (Review Copy) Xbox 360, PC Man, this game’s lineage is really confusing. For one, it isn’t based on the Prince of Persia movie that’s out. Also, the PoP franchise rebooted itself in 2008, with a well-received game. So this game’s its sequel right? Well, it’s actually an…
Minstrelsy biopsy
"It’s a bastard child who won’t be invited to dinner anywhere," Bill Harris says of his latest work, Birth of a Notion (or The Half Ain’t Never Been Told). He does so with a warm laugh, knowing too well there’s no correct or clear shelf on which Notion belongs at the bookstore. But this book’s…
Radical listening
With Thousands of marchers headed down Woodward Avenue toward downtown as we went to press, the second United States Social Forum got under way Tuesday at noon. It’s the culmination of more than a year of organizing by a number of groups in Detroit — and the next step for the international network that has…
A future for the UAW?
Timothy Duperron, chief operating officer for Focus: Hope, is a more-than-decent guy who worked for the Ford Motor Co. for decades, starting at the bottom and rising into management. He was still on the lower rungs and hadn’t yet earned a college degree when he was given an electrician’s apprentice to supervise named Bob King.…
Inside the loop
Right smack dab in the middle of town I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble proof —"Up on the Roof" by Gerry Goffin and Carole King Standing on the roof at 71 Garfield St. on a recent late afternoon, the sun beat down mercilessly on our small group and reflected off the white rubber roofing enough…
Food Stuff
Soil makers — Residents of Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park: Are you interested in making your own compost but don’t know about home composting? You might want to learn more about Detroit’s Garden Resource Program. A compost workgroup is just one of many classes they’re holding all summer long. This one happens 6-8 p.m. June…
Pink tank
Code Pink — the anti-war, largely female, peace-pushing group that formed in the run-up the Iraq invasion — knows how to paint the town. Well, a Hummer actually. A scrapped one, salvaged from a local junkyard and converted into a colorful installation that’s part garden, part public art and part anti-war monument in the Heidelberg…
It’s the USSF, baby
It’s the USSF, baby Along with workshops, organizing and grass roots collaborating, the U.S. Social Forum offers near nonstop cultural haps from Wednesday to Friday. Music, art, film and performance feature on the Forum’s schedule, plus a slew of events happening about town, both officially and unofficially USSF-affiliated. Here are just some of the highlights;…
Transformers
Q: My friend is a gay-identified FTM. He’s hot, he’s cute and, above the waist, you would never guess what he’s got down below. We love to kiss and cuddle, and from my end, his blow jobs are great. The problem is that I have no idea how to reciprocate. He isn’t into anal (why…
Letters to the Editor
Sin-tax errors Re: "Tax the brewskis" (June 16), oh, my good golly, was I pissed when I saw Jack Lessenberry’s latest mind fart. I slammed the motherfucking paper down on the counter when I saw that headline. First of all, Jack may be cool with the forced interaction that is taxation, but not everybody else…
Motor City Rides
This year is shaping up to belong to Frontier Ruckus. The band is fresh off a buzz-worthy Bonnaroo performance and its sophomore album, is out soon on Ramseur Records, which took the Avett Brothers from cult faves to heroes. Frontier Ruckus’ success is the classic yarn of inherent skill, hard work and luck. In 2008,…
Swampadelic stripper din
Dutch Pink has been sculpting its baroque, barroom stomp sound since 2004, but it wasn’t clear until 2007’s Six Little Songs for Ourselves, a brief series of sonnets set to disconcerting melodies, what the band was capable of. More than anything, however, the EP was proof this Detroit trio could come out to play from…
Legal haze
More than 19 months after voters approved the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act, the battle over the medicinal herb continues to blaze. Ferndale is one of the state’s latest battlegrounds. The City Council there unsuccessfully attempted to close Clinical Relief LLC, a medical marijuana center, two weeks ago over zoning, according to Ryan Richmond, a company…
Notes for Haiti
Released June 1 — the day Hurricane Season was officially announced, as it were — the digital download album Notes for Haiti is, we’re pleased to report, not a natural disaster. It is, however, a soulful compilation of cuts from some of the best Detroit and Los Angeles hip hop. The project was produced by…
Actions and reactions
Four official targets for demonstrations — "actions" in the USSF vocabulary — have been slated through five days of the gathering. The first, a rally by hundreds of protestors with 17 cardboard coffins symbolizing deaths activists blame on DTE, began Tuesday afternoon at the utility’s downtown headquarters; the group then joined the opening march down…
Femme power
If you’re a fan of Michigan hip hop, you’ll know of OneBeLo. The Pontiac native has been a fixture in local music for more than a decade, has been featured in these pages, and is one of underground hip hop’s most beloved figures nationwide. Whether it’s from his material as a solo artist or his…
Toy Story 3
Launching into a slam-bang action sequence, Toy Story 3 begins, appropriately enough, inside a child’s imagination — young Andy’s to be exact. And what a goofy, exciting and wonderful place it is. In five short minutes, director Lee Unkrich makes clear why Woody, Buzz and the others live to be played with. But Achildren grow…
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
This “year in the life” proves worthy of its subject as an amusing, fascinating and unflinching doc that never pulls punches or steps on a punch line. Rivers is so embedded in the culture, a ubiquitous TV presence since the days of Jack Paar, that it’s easy not to notice the extraordinary effort it takes…
Punk Goes Classic Rock
There are two genre definitions in question here. First, do the 15 bands contained qualify as "punk"? There’s even a local band, Marysville’s Every Avenue. Also, what qualifies as "classic rock" nowadays, when Hendrix sits comfortably alongside Eddie Money, Beck and Blondie? Bullshit aside, there’s some fun here: VersaEmerge’s version of the Stones’ "Paint It…
Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
Since 1971, humanitarian aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) — called Doctors Without Borders stateside — have sent volunteers into hostile, chaotic world hot spots, not to extinguish flames but smother embers one patient at a time. This exceptional story doesn’t offer much history of the organization’s triumphs and controversies, but instead focuses on a…
Retro area
With knee-to-ceiling windows on the north and west walls, a wealth of natural light washes across the white counter and the vibrant aqua vinyl stools and chairs. Mae’s is quite clean and decent and suggestive of a fairy-tale era where young love is measured in baseball euphemisms and cigarettes aren’t yet bad for your health.…
Knight and Day
Tom Cruise is a super spy. Cameron Diaz is super hot. At 38, she still looks great in a bikini. Blam blam blam! There’s a battery that keeps going and going and going. Foreign bad guys with lots of bullets want it. Peter Saarsgard does his sleazebag Peter Saarsgard thing. Lame comic banter. Exotic locales.…
Bastards of Ozarks
In the Ozarks, as depicted by filmmaker Debra Granik, a woman who asks for help is courting the mercy or brutality of men. To ask questions is to invite trouble. And though it is the fathers, brothers and husbands who hold all the power in the Missouri-Arkansas borderlands where Winter’s Bone is set, it is…
For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism
Gerald Peary (himself a critic) parades talking heads across the screen, from contemporary faves to seasoned vets, all furiously contextualizing and attempting to legitimize the craft. But it would’ve been better if the fussy presentation, stock music and grainy clips weren’t strictly local public television quality. Despite much state-of-the-industry hand-wringing, Peary gamely eyes the uncertain…
