Goodbye, Detroit
Metro Times: What have the past few weeks been like for you on a personal level? House Shoes: A roller coaster ride, baby. I’m good, man. I went on the whole journey from the highest to the lowest and back up again. I was out in New York for Dilla’s release party having a good…
Letters to the Editor
We all fall down Re: “Juan’s World” (Metro Times, Feb. 22), it stunned me to learn that Cole’s “worst-case” scenario of the Middle East crisis doesn’t mention anything about the role of other nations in its outcome. The United States and Israel make no secret of intentions to take action against Iran, which could easily…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Come on down!
When I think of TV game show hosts, I think of brittle, Brylcreemed Bob Barker, the king of the game show hill. I think of Pat Sajak — as much as anyone can think about an unctuous, transparent grinning suit. I even think of Alex Trebek, who always seemed a bit too pompous and bigheaded…
Whites on ice & Gumbel’s gaffe
Just because blacks are scarce doesn’t mean it’s not a sport
From Russia with blood
Night Watch is the movie that Underworld fans hoped for but never really got. A huge hit in its native Russia, writer-director Timur Bekmambetov’s jarring, cluttered and convoluted horror-fantasy film is a blended cocktail of The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Wars.
Shades of true
“I always knew I wanted to get into the magazine industry — but I didn’t think it would happen,” Margarita Barry says. “At least not in the traditional way.” Fair enough. The traditional mold hardly suits Barry, whose current career owes more to the punk rock ethos than corporate ladder-climbing. Barry’s steadfast self-reliance is the…
Women folk
The Syreens can find the soft touch in even the toughest critic. For starters, they’re one of the few all-female roots music outfits you’ll see around town. And they also go great with biscuits and gravy. It’s Sunday morning at the Steak Hut in southwest Detroit, and the greasy spoon is standing room only. Hung-over…
After Innocence
You don’t need to rent The Shawshank Redemption to see a gripping tale of wrongfully imprisoned men fighting a corrupt justice system. The documentary After Innocence provides a glimpse into a relatively recent phenomenon: The scores of men exonerated from long-term prison sentences, often through new, advanced DNA testing of old evidence. Director Jessica Sanders…
American Life in Poetry
Every parent can tell a score of tales about the difficulties of raising children, and then of the difficulties in letting go of them. Here, Texas poet Walt McDonald shares just such a story. Some Boys are Born to Wander From Michigan our son writes, How many elk? How many big horn sheep? It’s spring,…
Blowout 2006
Breaking down the bash we put together
Duma
Xan (Alexander Michaeletos) and his dad (Campbell Scott) find an orphaned cheetah cub poised to become roadkill on a rural highway. They bring him home to their family farm and christen him Duma, the Swahili word for cheetah. Xan and the purring, snuggly, spotted little guy bond, but as the cheetah grows bigger, stronger and…
Shared Sonic Mania
The SSM rock ‘n’ roll fable begins like so many: Two music-loving dudes putting back beers at a house party following a rock show in a desperate Midwestern town. In this instance, the dudes were John Szymanski of the Hentchmen and the Paybacks, and Marty “Mother” Morris of the Cyril Lords. And they were plotting…
Security holes
Bullets in your bag? Come on in to City Hall anyway
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
Fans of alt-country musician Jim White know he’s a true oddball genius, a Southerner who’s equal parts Tom Waits, Johnny Cash and Johnny Knoxville. The lyrics to his songs are loaded with fire-and-brimstone tales of love, death, sin and redemption. You could spend weeks trying to figure it all out; luckily, at least one of…
Inking in
One of the most hackneyed and overused sayings of the ’90s: “Tattoos aren’t just for sailors and bikers anymore.” Um, duh. Still, the mainstreaming of permanent body art has continued — culminating in the inevitable: tattoo reality TV. Between the two current series, A&E’s Inked and the Learning Channel’s Miami Ink, the message is colorful…
Standing room only
Michigan groups line up to oppose “civil rights” initiative by News Hits staff
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
The straightforward concert film is an increasing rarity these days, so the arrival of Neil Young: Heart of Gold should be cause enough to inspire music buffs and cinephiles alike. Not to mention, 1) it’s Neil Young, dude, and 2) it’s directed by Jonathan Demme, whose 1984 film Stop Making Sense, detailing the Talking Heads,…
Raw dog
Stand up, Seven Mile! When you come from one of the most storied roads in the Motor Gritty (a term appropriated for hip-hop correctness), you’d better learn to represent it well. Interestingly enough, repping your hood tends to land Detroiters — rap artists particularly — in hot water. But the members of Raw Collection manage…
Book clubbing
New tome takes Dubya to task
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
With a script by Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams), the film presents a stoic and evocative contemporary Western that pleads for racial tolerance — while allowing Tommy Lee Jones to let his inner crackpot run wild. In a contemporary Texas border town, the body of illegal immigrant Melquiades Estrada is discovered in a shallow grave. When…
Art Bar
Outside art — Shan Sutherland’s “Wall of Water” is one of a few recent projects by local artists — some Cranbrook students, some not — that are spreading throughout the city. Sutherland is also currently involved in building a series of bus-stop benches for the city of Ferndale with some of his fellow students, Yuji…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Running Scared
Running Scared is just the latest entry in the hyperviolent scuzzball genre that Quentin Tarantino started more than a decade ago. From True Romance to Boondock Saints to Domino, these flicks all have the same ingredients: triple-gun standoffs with bullets that fall like rain, ridiculously hard-boiled dialogue and endless references to other, better movies directed…
A visual feast
Disconnected body parts, airplane fuselages fused with human torsos, fantastical machines with spatula attachments and a giant roll of duct tape all dance across a backdrop that could be from Star Wars’ Cloud City. Such are the delicately rendered aspects that cascade across the space between the two panels of Rollin Beamish’s wildly imaginative painting…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): After viewing Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1662, diarist Samuel Pepys called it "the most stupid, ridiculous play I ever saw in my life." French philosopher Voltaire had an equally dim view of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. "One would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage," he wrote…
Thinking big
In the back corner of the parking lot at Cranbrook Art Museum lies a flatbed trailer, large and lazy, hogging more than a few parking spots designated for students. If it weren’t for the pointed arch in its spine, the kind that looks like it belongs in an ancient Indian temple, there’d be no sign…
It’s dumping time
Q: I am a 26-year-old female, and I’ve been with my boyfriend for almost five years. Our relationship is pretty good, for the most part, but I’m having a few reservations. I don’t really know how to broach this subject, because I feel like I’m just being a bratty little princess. But here it goes:…
Backslash
Dude, you suck — Pessimism, brutal honesty or simply a dark sense of humor? One thing’s for sure, you’re not going to get huge shining rays of sunshine blown up your ass at www.itwillfail.com, a “full-contact creative writing” online forum created by a handful of graduates of Oakland University’s journalism program, founded in 2001. Although…
Attire on tracks
Sarah Lapinski and Sarah Lurtz, designers of the local menswear label Wound, wanted a unique venue to show off their new collection. The Sarahs asked themselves: What’s the biggest engineering feat we could pull off? During their perpetual search for the cheapest place to park in the city, the duo developed an affinity for the…
Head cheese
Sessionmaster Dennis Coffey hits his five monomanias
Slithering horns
Standing against a wall, trombone dangling from his arm, Glen Morren fidgets from side to side. He’s tall, thin, bearded, wearing thick glasses and has freshly coiffed, mid-’70s-style hair. A young woman steps up to ask what kind of music his band plays. “Uh, um, …” Morren starts. “Is it jazz?” she presses, looking down…
Living in the zoo
Barrels of ink have been spilled over the Detroit zoo controversy, and nearly everyone who has written about it has missed the real meaning. This is not really about the zoo. Not at all. (The zoo will be saved in the end.) What this is actually about is one central blinding and horribly dismaying truth…
Blowout drive-bys
Asylum 7 Primordial ooze: Asylum 7 got his start making music on the infamous Runyon Avenue on Detroit’s east side. His blue-collar style of hip-hop is rooted in fact, not fiction, and this dude is one of the most socially aware MC’s in the area right now. Why you should really care: “Because the music…
Night and Day
Thursday-Sunday • 2-5 A Thousand Clowns THEATER Playwright Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns finds free-spirited writer Murray Burns raising his 12-year-old nephew in a small New York City bachelor pad. When his unorthodox parenting techniques draw the attention of two social workers, the sparks fly: Burns falls in love with one of the social workers…
Ask the Food Dude
Separating eggs, aluminum pots and “monkey-poo coffee.”
Dilla: The real deal
Whether they knew him first as James Yancey, or later as John Doe, Jay Dee or J-Dilla, many were touched by his talent and personality. The Motor City hip-hop producer, who passed away Feb. 9, in Los Angeles, from complications of a kidney ailment, was a Detroit legend. On the eve of Metro Times’ biggest…
Margin walkers
Sean Hoen’s eyes are red-rimmed. The Holy Fire vocalist-guitarist is clad in black from head to toe, which makes his fair skin appear nearly translucent; a mess of twisty white-blond hair completes the icy look. Hoen’s just lugged open the heavy industrial door that guards the entrance to a cavernous Trumbull Avenue warehouse. It’s home…
Rough trade
It’s like a hot day in the Antarctic: I actually find myself agreeing with the Bush administration. They’re right when they say that criticism of the UAE port deal is based largely on racism (I would have said xenophobia, but that has too many syllables for Bush). It’s sad to see so many in Left…
