Talking ruins
It’s a common sentiment among residents and outstaters that Detroit is a mess. But the layman, the homeless man and the dejected Detroiter may not know that for the last 30 years or so, the Motor City has been a petri dish for sociologists studying urban blight. This week, the University of Michigan Institute for…
Out of the past
Let Them Drinkis the record’s name, but are the Capitol Years talking about us or themselves? Probably both. It’s the Philly combo’s official studio debut as a band — previous outings were mostly just ringleader Shai Halperin — so Drink is a bursting and eager statement of uncut rock ’n’ roll joy. The stomping “Mounds…
Staying sharp in the kitchen
The best way I know to separate an egg, after trying many others, involves nothing but the most important tool you have in the kitchen — your hands. I don’t remember where I learned it, just that it was many years ago and has been my favored technique ever since. It works like this: Using…
Tijuana Hercules
John Forbes has been doing the guit-blooze boogie thing for two decades, although his prematurely aged soul always tended to be obscured behind the Jesus Lizard-like walls of noise erected by his previous outfits Phantom 309, Dirt and Mount Shasta. The raspy-voiced singer-guitarist strips it all down to the gristle now, however. Joining him in…
Art and noise
Local DIY venue, the 555 Gallery, recently moved from its old digs in Ypsilanti to a gritty old awning factory at Warren and Grand River avenues in Detroit. Open since October, the nonprofit collective offers a space for everything from after-school art programs and educational workshops to poetry readings and live performances. It has turned…
Old 97’s Live
Dallas alt-country rockers Old 97’s damn near tear up the joint when they have the right size crowd, and this rowdy, sweaty, downright charming DVD is as close as you’re gonna get to the real thing without paying a cover. Taped at Hollywood’s venerable Troubadour just before the release of last year’s Drag It Up,…
Dying behind closed doors
Helen Thomas has been fighting for information the public needs to know longer than the vast majority of the public has been alive. She has covered the White House since the Kennedy administration, mostly as a straight reporter. These days, she’s a columnist, but still works her beat hard. “I’m self-propelled, really. I care about…
What Will it Take
Island View Drive’s multi-word name points to that curiously heartsick subgenre generally labeled emo. Predecessors include Sunny Day Real Estate and Dashboard Confessional, but the form’s newer bands have taken it to a place where lyrical melodrama and stop-start guitars offer a secret language for suburban teens sitting dreaming in their computers’ blue light for…
N&D Center
Thursday-Saturday • 17-19 Stop Blaming Columbus MUSIC It’s about time someone wrote an opera for the layman. Enter Stop Blaming Columbus, a homespun opus by composer Stephen Rush and University of Michigan Art & Design professor Michael Rodemer, the librettist-designer. This modern-day opera will be performed by the U-M Creative Arts Ensemble, with seven soloists…
Weekly Fecal
Not very long ago, in a galaxy quite nearby, a guy came up with a not-very-clever concept for a really stupid band. San Francisco’s Captured! By Robots was (get this) allegedly conceived by a robot maker named “JBOT,” who fashioned robot-musicians with names like “GTRBOT666” and “The Ape Which Has No Name.” JBOT’s creations (ho…
Constantine and Shadow of Rome
It’s no coincidence that the most recent successful video games have been sequels: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on PS2, HALO II on XBox, Doom 3 and Half Life 2 on PC. Not only are they building on established audiences and the goodwill generated by the originals, but they signal another chapter in the story.…
The last word on tango
In about 30 minutes, Yale art history professor Robert Farris Thompson wrecks practically every conventional wisdom about the Latin dance of love, the tango. For starters, it wasn’t always a dance between two people. Also, the best male dancers learn their moves with other men. And it may have taken off in Argentina, but it’s…
From bratwurst to the Bayou
As German polka player Schultze (Horst Krause) settles in to face his forced early retirement, the dreariness of it all is shattered when, by chance, he stumbles upon zydeco. The central theme of Schultze Gets the Blues is that “you’re never too old for a revolution.” Director Michael Schorr carefully executes the revolution, slowly, cautiously…
Sculpture is like a journey
“To go west or not to go west?” may be the question in the minds of art lovers in southeastern Michigan, lured by an 85-item Henry Moore exhibition on the other side of the state — but less enthusiastic about the two-and- a-half-hour road trip to get there. To go would be wise. Inaugurating its…
Striking out
For a city bleeding red ink, it would seem the perfect pitch: An offer that would save Detroit at least $200,000 this year. Doing the pitching was Peter Comstock Riley, who, for nearly six years, has been trying to become a player at Tiger Stadium. The facility has been vacant since 1999, and almost from…
Dear Frankie
Director Shona Auerbach holds the reins tight in Dear Frankie, creating a sentimental family drama that rings true, even in at its most unlikely turns. A single mom hires a stranger to pose as the father her deaf son Frankie has never known but writes to constantly. Young Jack McElhone does much to keep the…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Many supposedly scientific debunkers deride astrology but have done almost no research on the subject. That’s one reason why these ill-informed "skeptics" spread so many ignorant lies. For instance, they say that astrologers think the stars and planets emit invisible beams that affect people’s lives. The truth is, most astrologers don’t…
Art Bar
It’s difficult to get a decent arts job. Museums never have money to hire. Galleries hire frequently, only because employees are underpaid and overworked. Professors teach a lifetime before getting tenure. Arts writers are usually freelancers with full-time jobs. It’s rare, but there’s been reshuffling in the field locally, leaving a few vacancies and filling…
Days of Being Wild
Released in 1991, Days of Being Wild was Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s second feature as a director, and seems, in retrospect, to be a template for the best of his later movies. Wong imbued Wild with the kind of moony green-tinged scenes that convey a feeling of lassitude and foreboding, as though his characters…
Cruel couture
As a child of the ’80s, I remember the days when fur was a formidable fashion faux pas. Stepping out into the streets in a floor-length mink was an open invitation to having a can of red paint chucked at you. Models and celebs participated in splashy, sexy anti-fur campaigns. It seemed the sartorially inclined…
The alternative to success
In an upstairs bedroom in an unassuming Victorian row house on a block of unassuming Victorian row houses on Detroit’s East Side, Dean Fertita, singer and guitarist for Detroit psychedelic-pop band the Waxwings, is standing stock straight, fingers poised on his keyboard, his inquisitive stare waiting for affirmation from the home’s owner, singer-songwriter Brendan Benson.…
Steamboy
Katsuhiro Otomo’s groundbreaking Akira was the first, and arguably most influential, big budget Japanese anime; he now emerges after sixteen years with this over-the-top “steampunk” epic. Touted as the most expensive anime ever made, Steamboy impresses, deafens and bores its audience in equal doses. The animation is stunning and flawless, but story and character development…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
The following column takes place in real time between MB23 and MB25! • 24 (FOX) :: Muslims see racism, I see Andy Warhol’s Empire. • John Cale & Lou Reed — Songs For Drella (Sire) :: Everything they’ve done separately, no matter how good, is mere artifice compared to this sincere, monumental work of art.…
Warren’s ringmaster
It’s long been common knowledge that televised Warren City Council meetings provide the same sort of high-quality entertainment found on The Jerry Springer Show. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. After all, News Hits hasn’t seen the Warren Council debate the merits of sibling love affairs (although, to be fair, we could have…
Robots
Blue Sky studio’s Robots comes close — but no cigar — to capturing the kind of magic created by rivals Pixar in movies like Finding Nemo and Toy Story. Director Chris Wedge creates a world not of high-tech, futuristic machines, but of robots with mechanical springs, cranks and bolts. Where Robots — and Pixar succeeds…
How to get chicks
Q: I am a 15-year-old boy and I’ve never had a girlfriend and I wanted to ask you personally, how do you get girls? Like, the best way to get them, so they think I am interesting. I await your orders. —Teenager Going To Waste A: There’s nothing I enjoy more than ordering around the…
The King’s gone
The ink-stained wretches here at News Hits are generally disdainful of local television news. The emphasis on coverage of crime and catastrophe provides little fodder for those who want their news to have real value. Which is why we were chagrined to hear that veteran anchorman and political correspondent Emery King last week lost his…
Hostage
Hostage, the first English-language movie for French director Florent Emilio Siri, is a far more stylized and serious action drama than anything in Bruce Willis’ Die Hard franchise. Based on a Robert Crais novel, Willis plays a burned out hostage negotiator who moves to a small town for relief, but finds himself involved in another…
‘Get into the flow’
Tad Weed spends a lot of time nowadays teaching and recording in his home studio in Ypsilanti. It’s a change for the 48-year-old pianist who for 20 years toured nonstop with such A-listers as saxophonist Charles Lloyd, bandleader Woody Herman and lots of singers: Anita O’Day, Carmen McRae, Jack Jones, Paul Anka, Chaka Khan. Weed’s…
Orange crush
A few weeks back News Hits promised to keep y’all updated on a class-action lawsuit brought against the makers of Agent Orange, an herbicide used by the U.S. military to denude the jungles of Vietnam during our war there. Vietnamese who say they are suffering ill health as a result of exposure to the defoliant,…
42 Annual Ann Arbor Film Festival
Don’t let the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s longevity fool you into thinking it’s grown stodgy. The digital video explosion of recent years has caused a major shift in the fest’s focus, turning what was once a purists-only festival into a showcase for some of the most cutting-edge work in the world, whittled down from some…
Head Cheese
As rap shamelessly chomps its tail, few can stay atop the game. South Bronx-born Fat Joe is an exception; as one of the few Latinos to chisel a legacy in hip hop, he continues to hit — from 1993’s “Flow Joe” to last year’s “Lean Back.” One of the first hardcore rappers (after NWA), Joe’s…
Delray dump
“2:30 a.m., drunk as phuk, eatin’ shroomz,” reads one of the hundreds of pieces of graffiti that cover this former medical clinic at 7036 W. Jefferson in the industrial neighborhood of Delray in southwest Detroit. Many of the other artworks on the building boast similar activities, and the piles of broken liquor bottles and empty…
Who’s next?
OK, we’re moments away from an underground rock bum-rush of the mainstream, one that will fill music biz hunger (read: not fan hunger) for the stupid Next Big Thing. Which means, of course, lots and lots of faceless and dull-looking white dudes preening at you from every magazine stand the world over, and even more…
Letters to the Editor
A disturbing trend I really enjoyed “Does this make my labia look fat?” (Metro Times, March 9). In a society that has become more and more obsessed with appearance and instant gratification, I find it quite disturbing that this and other plastic surgeries are becoming more mainstream. What ever happened to growing old gracefully? —David…
Proactive
Hash it out — An informational meeting and rally in support of reforming U.S. drug policy (and we ain’t talking prescription meds here, folks) will be held at 8 p.m., Wednesday, March 23, at the Innate Healing Arts Center, 18700 Woodward Ave. (south of Seven Mile Road) in Detroit. The event will bring together a…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
Backslash
Launched just a few weeks ago, mapdetroit.com is a new, interactive site that allows users to participate in a virtual map of Detroit’s downtown. Log on, and you’ll be presented with a map of downtown Detroit — by clicking on the map, you can zoom in on specific locations, or you can search by different…
The sponge lobby
If this is truly a country in which the majority of citizens feel threatened or offended by an animated sponge that wears square pants and may be gay, then I’m ready to head to Zihuatanejo and set up shop on the beach as an expatriate T-shirt, fish taco and Vioxx vendor, waiting patiently to discover…
