N&D Center
12-14 FRI-SUN • DANCE Motor City Jam — Got the need to boogie? An itch to twitch? Then the Motor City Jam has got what you need: Enjoy workshops, dance classes and competitions in several styles of dance, including balboa, blues, the Charleston, the hustle and the Lindy and the live musical accompaniment of Wixom…
Detroit mulls museum for contemporary art
Detroit is one of few major American cities without a contemporary art museum, to the chagrin of the local arts community. Many cities have several; even Toledo has one. Detroit’s status might soon change. Richard Manoogian, a major patron to the Detroit Institute of Arts and CEO of the multinational Masco Corp., is considering building…
Kevorkian, remember him?
Both Bush, a mendacious bewitcher And sly Cheney, his policy pitcher Scheme for taxes and oil And will let nothing foil Their slick plot for the rich to get richer —Jack Kevorkian, from prison, 2004 These days, when you mention Jack Kevorkian in conversation, you get the sort of mildly startled look you’d…
Old faithful fare
Gigantic burgers with slightly spicy secret sauce. Try the fish and chips. British tavern atmosphere.
Bush’s flippy economist
If you happen to be passing by your favorite McDonald’s restaurant anytime soon and you see a row of smokestacks replacing the golden arches, don’t fret. I have it on good authority that McDonald’s is now manufacturing its hamburgers and fries. By now you may have heard that the Bush administration’s chief economist Gregory Mankiw,…
Touching the Void
In 1985, a pair of English mountain climbers decided to climb the western face of a peak in the Peruvian Andes. This powerful documentary is their fascinating and moving survival story, one that is at times excruciatingly hard to watch. Within its simple framework it tells a remarkable tale about choices and repercussions and a…
Unconventional country
If you ask Raul Malo, lead singer of the Mavericks, about country music, he’ll tell you that he never really found it so much as it found him. Born in Miami, Fla., during the sweltering summer of 1965, Malo’s parents — musically inclined Cuban immigrants — would expose him to more kinds of music than…
Monsieur Ibrahim
Set in a poor, ethnic neighborhood in Paris in the early ’60s, this film tells the story of a kindly old Muslim grocer who befriends a young Jewish boy. This all sounds appallingly heartwarming, but generally the movie is a pleasant surprise, telling its story with an unexpected panache and wit. Omar Sharif’s Ibrahim always…
A soldier’s story
The death of Specialist Artimus Demone Brassfield is succinctly laid out in an official Army “Certificate of Death (Overseas).” It states that Brassfield died at 11:06 a.m. on Oct. 24, 2003, in Samaria, Iraq. It notes that he was a male, born on March 28, 1981, which means he was 22 when he died. It…
Starsky and Hutch
At the start, Hutch is robbing bookies and Starsky is by-the-book irritating. But once they get into the red machine, Starsky’s famous candy-apple-red Ford Gran Torino, their differences dwindle and the post-’70s-aware, tongue-in-cheek dialogue begins. Although he’s almost too cool for the role, Snoop Dogg wears Huggy Bear’s fur coats and back street poetics well…
Guess what blew in at the Blowout
First off, a little business. It should be noted that proceeds from the seventh annual Hamtramck Blowout will benefit the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts to help replace instruments that were damaged, destroyed or stolen during a February break-in. Other monies will go to WDET public radio. And for the first…
Blind Shaft
A combination of social critique and muckraking expose, Blind Shaft is a totally unromantic view of how the poor live and hustle in the China’s post-red era. Little surprise that despite considerable acclaim this tale of scam-artist mineworkers is banned in the country of its setting. In Chinese with English subtitles.
Hip-hopcrisy to the Max
A gap between rhetoric and reality yawned wide last week when Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick took the stage at the Max M. Fisher Music Center in Detroit to enthusiastically introduce economist Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class. It’s easy to see why Mayor hip hop is a big fan of the Carnegie…
Horse tales
Hidalgo
is Disney’s version of the story of Frank T. Hopkins and the mustang he rode to victory in a 3,000-mile race through the Middle Eastern desert in 1890. Viggo Mortensen shows up looking like a Ralph Lauren model who was kidnapped from a shoot for the fall catalog. The race itself sets up a…
Ferndale pirates
Tom Ness is ready to throw down the gauntlet, but before he does he wants your support — especially if you are at all famous or influential. Those familiar with Ness — a longtime Green Party activist, tireless supporter of homegrown music and advocate of all things liberal — won’t be surprised to hear that…
Taxing situation
With the hammer dropping, tax-delinquent property owners in Wayne County are rushing to pay their bills. Two months ago, there were 11,000 parcels in Wayne County threatened with foreclosure. By last week the number had fallen to 7,000 parcels that would be sold at auction if back taxes weren’t paid by March 31. On Monday,…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The opportunity that’s available to you may not be entirely appealing to your pride. It would require you to place yourself in service of a force that’s greater than you. I compare it to the role played by Steve Williams, the caddie for golf superstar Tiger Woods. Carrying around a bag…
Porch squatter
The first time the Abandoned Structure Squad checked the dwelling at 282 E. Palmer in Detroit, it was uninhabited. Last week, box springs, a sleeping bag, clothes and a pillow appeared on the front porch. ASS can understand someone camping out on the front porch rather than moving into one of the six spacious rooms…
Indie film alive in Ann Arbor
Two words are heard at every Academy Awards ceremony. They are thrown out like beads at Mardi Gras. Spoken with self-conscious solemnity, they force the eyes to roll and the lips to form a tired and disdainful raspberry. They provoke queasiness with their phony self-importance. They inspire mocking grunts of laughter as the night wears…
Out of the ordinary
Of no special quality or interest. Commonplace. Unexceptional. If you want to piss off an artist, use any of these definitions to describe their work. Tell them their sculptures and paintings, their “installations” and their mobiles and their 373 turkey drumsticks soaking in rat’s blood are regular and plain and customary. These are not the…
Letters to the Editor
Star power Thank you for covering the town hall meeting in Ferndale regarding the issue of same-sex marriage (“Blunting the wedge,” Metro Times, March 3). You make several great points in your article, but there is one glaring error that needs to be corrected for the readership of the Metro Times. In the second paragraph…
Bizarro business
Note: this is an expanded version of the story that appear’s in this week’s print edition. It’s 1977: Nick Nicholis, twentysomething frontman for Akron’s Bizarros, is up late one night busily stuffing album mailers. His band’s new record, which he’s releasing on his newly-established Clone label, is just back from the pressing plant and…
Old school fresh
Mary Herbeck, the new curator of the Ellen Kayrod Gallery, has joined the upstarts who have the gall to argue that actual culture can thrive in Detroit’s Cultural Center. The gallery — a stone’s throw away from the more visible and better-publicized Detroit Institute of Arts and CPOP and Detroit Artists Market — is located…
How a lass passes gas
Q: I just finished reading the letter from Forced Air Ruined the Sheets and frankly I’m shocked! Not at FARTS’ disgusting problem — a fart “went between the lips of [her] vagina” after sex — but shocked at you, Dan. Haven’t you ever heard of a pussy fart, Mr. Savage? Queefs? After all the pumping…
Live, uncensored and unCAGEd
What would John Cage do? It’s a question that generations of electronic musicians have had to live with as they try to walk the righteous path. That’s our boy right there, you know. Hammers on pianos and the whole nine … Cage had it goin’ on and every experimental musician since owes him some praise.…
Phat Kat tales
Inside an Oak Park recording studio, a director yells, “Action,” and from the shadows, three strippers from 8 Mile Road’s newest “establishment,” City Heat, appear from nowhere and drape themselves over all 260 pounds of one of Detroit most revered rappers. One girl pours a drink and hands it to him. As he begins to…
A pain in art’s ass
A few years ago, a young scholar in London mailed a note to a group of freethinking artists, inquiring about the loose and contended identity of their international social art network of the ’60s. He penned one question: “What is Fluxus?” Some weeks later, New York City Fluxus artist Alison Knowles returned an envelope containing…
Creation station
A sleepy-eyed Adriel Thornton takes a long drag on his cigarette, standing in front of the Max M. Fisher Music Center at 8 a.m., explaining why he had to cut his evening festivities short the night before. “I’m not a morning person,” says the civic activist and event promotions whiz, “and I knew I had…
Public art for Detroit/Windsor
Chicago did cows. Toronto did moose. Cincinnati did pigs. New Orleans did fish. In Oakland County, Rochester did ewes. Tourists came to bear witness. Corporate moneybags dished out major bucks and in doing so, raised money for charities and artists. Detroit is next. In coming weeks an international committee will announce a public art project…
