Strong medicine
When Jaimie Hall isn’t spewing apocalyptic doom, he is a devoted healer, tending to Motown’s most vulnerable souls for the Detroit Public Health Department.
That Obscure Object of Desire
Luis Buñuel’s last film reflects the shifty and shifting mood of a seasoned absurdist, essentially jettisoning the femme fatale story for something more psychologically uncertain. It’s Buñuel’s last hardy chuckle at human folly and at the deluding veil of order we drape over our precarious lives.
Unwelcome home
Detroit City Council members can’t agree on seemingly simple committee appointments….
Monsoon Wedding
Mira Nair’s latest film steadily blows the melodrama of an upper-middle-class Punjabi family circle through romance, comedy, tragedy and irony, rustling and rattling the clashing cultures of old and new India on the way. But it’s an overly ambitious feast with too many dishes — their quantity degrading their quality.
Sneak attack
Threatening, anonymous flyers distributed near Ann Arbor Islamic center….
Last Orders
Since, given its all-star British cast, one approaches Last Orders expecting a feast, its proper-lunch quality can’t help but disappoint. The pacing is languid and the revelations are mostly muted, but this is a movie one may want to see for its once-in-a-lifetime ensemble: Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins, Tom Courtney, David Hemming and…
Haddad update
Updates on Rabih Haddad’s imprisonment: A visit from John Conyers, restrictions lightened somewhat, hearings set, and more.
Holy smoke
The Real Deal — its elusiveness, and its burial under plastic waste and cheap thrills — is Nick Tosches’ specialty. His numerous magazine articles, novels, and biographies (of Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, and Sonny Liston, among others) personify real smarts, real life, and real humanity, coursing with libido, wise beyond wise, and wearing a…
Dream house deferred
Just because a home is boarded up for years on end doesn’t mean it’s actually “abandoned.” A case in point is a prime piece of Cass Corridor real estate that has for some time now been a hangout for the neighborhood homeless population. The Victorian two-story at 477 W. Alexandrine is on the market for…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): There goes your exaggerated respect for gnarled chunks of complications. Here comes your now-or-never break for bubbly freedom. But you’ll need to travel light. Peel off that armor. Wipe that 40-pound sneer of resentment off your face. Bury your broken-down dreams by the side of the road and push temperamental contraptions…
Good grief
HBO’s addictive “Six Feet Under” is back in black.
A very handy man
Q: I am a 55-year-old widow who has been celibate for the past few years. A close friend recently surprised me with a very special gift. She hired a man in his mid-20s to come to my home to repair my bedroom light fixture. He was very handsome and well-built. I was completely astounded to…
Restaurant rebirth
“Upscale casual” is how chef Michael Schmidt characterizes it, with a new menu that ranges from hamburgers and pizza to high-end entrées. The revamped interior is whimsical and eclectic, and the menu is much the same: lots of good stuff without a unifying theme. Hamburgers mingle with port wine reductions and arugula-stuffed trout. Pizzas are…
Letters to the Editor
Family despair Jeremy Voas was kind enough to offer the shield of anonymity to his polyamorous interviewees in “Lovers leap” (Metro Times, Feb. 13-19). Unfortunately, their families were offered no such protection. One of your subjects, my daughter, is well aware of our feelings on premarital sex. She also knows that we and some of…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
Just because a home is boarded up for years on end doesn’t mean it’s actually “abandoned.” A case in point is a prime piece of Cass Corridor real estate that has for some time now been a hangout for the neighborhood homeless population. The Victorian two-story at 477 W. Alexandrine is on the market for…
Not quite what you think
Dan fills in the answer blanks with someone else’s advice, and offers a debauched weekend for anyone who can determine whom he’s plagiarized.
Ko & the Knockouts
An infectious combination of raw rock, charming pop and rollicking rhythm; breakup and love songs delivered in Ko Shih’s bittersweetly scratchy voice, often with harmony and vocal counterpoint provided by Eddie Baranek, over a bed of solid rhythm and riff.
Art all night
From miniature montage to a wall-sized installation … Making art in the wee hours, inside the Cranbrook Academy of Art studios.
Kittenz and Thee Glitz
Chicago’s Felix “da Housecat” Stallings Jr. is a glamour-puss extraordinaire and, quite appropriately, his Eurotrash electro licks and sweaty synths sound just how fashion functions. Which is to say that Kittenz and Thee Glitz may be a captivating catwalk down memory lane of 1980s new wave and house, but ultimately it’s just another accessory for…
Ko Ko Puffs
Spreading the gospel of Detroit’s rock ‘n’ roll scene, with new sounds from the internationally famous Ko & the Knockouts and a Dutch Webmaster who has a thing for the Motor City.
Geogaddi
After their debut with 1998’s sleeper hit, Music Has the Right to Children, the hype, it seemed, nearly outweighed Boards of Canada’s achievement. Combining the cloudy analog ambience of Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno with the detailed, crunchy trip-hop beats of Tri Repetae-era Autechre, Boards of Canada found their niche in the world of downtempo…
Dropping the bomb
There’s a near-universal sense that the war is going well and that President Bush and his team are doing an excellent job. Unfortunately, almost nothing could be further from the truth.
Is
Dubbed “Feminem” by critics who only acknowledge female artists as limitations of, or variations on, their male contemporaries, NYC’s Concetta Kirschner (aka Princess Superstar) is a pro-sex provocateur who’s not only defiantly fearless and peerless, she’s one of hip hop’s most scathingly hilarious and self-aware word-slingers. “Everyone tells me I’m the female Eminem,” she cracks…
Thieves of the soul
Five seconds into the fifth song on Steal Your Soul and Dare Your Spirit to Move, Johnny Walker calls off the band: “All right. Let’s hold it. Hold it, hold it. Let’s do this proper now.” And three seconds later, the Soledad Brothers start up again with Walker’s thickly overdriven guitar, Ben Swank’s swaggering midtempo…
Daniel Ash
Hopefully, Daniel Ash has a million dollars in the bank and more guitars than that guy from the Tiger Lilies and lives in a foreboding castle somewhere high atop Houdini Mountain with a landing pad for UFO’s on the roof. Hopefully, he spends his days dreamily wandering around the estate sipping absinthe and acoustically serenading…
Blowout, blow-off and blowhard
Searing sets and scads of scenesters at the Blowout pre-party … The usual suspects and a few new faces seen at duelling music fests … & Our dear Mr. Coston offers up the mother of all swan songs, forked tongue thoroughly planted in cheek.
Pyrosexual noir
"Gay noir" only begins to describe this film. It betrays a deep family resemblance to those World War II-era crime movies beneath its mid-1960s Argentine features. There are antiheroes, murderous crimes and a femme fatale — but, more profoundly, obsession, madness and doom, as it transubstantiates bullets and blood into something that may be love.
Smoked Hamtramck
Scattered highs and lows of Blowout 2002….
The Time Machine
It may lack the simple charm of the 1960 George Pal version, but this new Time Machine doesn’t err on the side of wretched excess like the dreadful Mummy remakes. It’s a middling variation on a theme whose essential awesomeness can’t help but still generate a few electric kicks.
Our fuelish ways
The mileage battle gears up … Senators Kerry and McCain fight for higher fuel efficiency as automakers and their allies campaign heavily against the bill.
Djomeh
Without melodrama or sentimentality, Iranian director Hassan Yektapanah has infused his first film with a realness that transcends any continental gaps, gently exposing the peculiar state of a human soul in a very different place. Beautiful!
