Out of nowhere
The evolution of jazz is largely a story of titans rearing up out of the bands of those before them: Louis Armstrong came out of King Oliver’s group, Charlie Parker out of Jay McShann’s, Miles out of Parker’s and ’Trane out of Miles’. On it goes. But among major jazz artists, Ornette Coleman is the…
Kitchen Stories
Written and directed by Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer and set in the early ’50s, it’s a satirical yet gloomy comedy assailing the postwar belief in benign and quantifiable progress. The Swedish Home Research Institute studies the kitchen habits of Swedish housewives and bachelors. Bachelors are assigned observers from the Institute who examine the subjects as…
Haddad breaks his silence
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Rabih Haddad crosses the marble floor of his five-bedroom apartment in a suburb south of the Lebanese capital. He peeks out glass doors that open onto a balcony to a sweeping view of the Mediterranean Sea. Haddad doesn’t want to miss the sunset. “It’s really amazing some nights,” he says. “It looks…
Secret Window
Johnny Depp’s big-screen charisma and a typically macabre Stephen King yarn can’t quite fill out this lazily directed thriller about a dysfunctional writer (Depp) who finds himself accused of stealing one of his stories. The plagiarized author (John Turturro) starts a campaign of homespun terrorism and ups the criminal ante to arson and murder. Screenwriter-director…
N&D Center
20 SAT • MUSIC Bookie’s Reunion — Though it still lingers as a doppelgänger spirit, punk rock in its truest form is a thing of the past. The vibrancy and originality of the scene that spawned the hard-nosed ethos of the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones and the New York Dolls simply had to…
What Alice Found
The film starts in New Hampshire, where young Alice (Emily Grace) is packing her things and getting the hell out of town. Fresh out of high school and hating her job at the grocery store, she steals some money from work, and splits town. When her car dies, she unwittingly accepts the generosity of a…
Family matters
There’s something about family that touches a nerve. Even if we extol the virtues of home and hearth, it’s often the source of our later handicaps and hang-ups. It’s not all Norman Rockwell or the syrupy lyrics to “The Faygo Song.” No matter how idyllic your childhood, chances are you’ve wanted to give your family…
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
Writer and director Larry Blamire brilliantly nails every bad horror and sci-fi convention in The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It’s been done before, but so what? Dr. Paul Armstrong (Blamire) and his bouncy and terminally Caucasian wife Betty (Fay Masterson) are pitted against evil scientist Dr. Roger Fleming (Brian Howe). Both scientists are looking for…
Speaking of God & country
Henry David Thoreau, the story goes, was once mooching Sunday dinner off old Ralph Waldo Emerson. The older man thought maybe he’d get his money’s worth of good conversation from the world’s most famous semi-hermit. “Henry, what do you think about the hereafter?” the sage of Concord supposedly asked the Walden Pond wonder. “One world…
Addiction in Ann Arbor
The gritty, cramped and closed-in-on-the-action-right-in-front-of-me filming of this indie flick mirrors a NYC junkie’s world, so realistic it seems autobiographical. Acts of Worship portrays addicts as a sea of agitated vultures haunting the streets. Successful cinematic elements are counteracted at times by predictable plot turns, when ex-addict Digna, now a sought after photographer, takes our…
Jack White’s spittle spat
News Hits learned a few things watching Jack White’s performance at a Detroit courthouse last week. Lesson No.1: If the leader of the White Stripes ever wants to engage you in a conversation, you’d do well to chat along. Lesson No. 2: A little spittle can be an honorable thing. White, along with about a…
Supremes spread hope
The U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling last week that could have a profound effect on the case of Vidale McDowell, who is serving a life sentence for a murder the 20-year-old Detroit man says he did not commit. In a decision that is expected to have far-reaching implications, the court issued a 9-0 opinion…
Year of the bomb
Oh, what a year it’s been. A country invaded, a despot deposed, and a grateful population that has responded by killing several members of America’s occupying force each week. The Bush administration may want us to believe that it’s all over over there in Iraq, but we all know the truth. Which is why rallies…
Letters to the Editor
World-class fiasco I don’t usually like what Jack Lessenberry has to say, although, more often than not, I respect it. It is only rarely that he enrages me, still he gets me thinking nearly every time. His article on the State of the City address (“Detroit’s state of madness,” Metro Times, March 3), though, is…
I shot the serif
Elliot Earls is king of a world most can’t fathom. The head of Cranbrook’s graphic design department is a beloved hero, a star, in an international universe of art-school designers, of trendsetters and their hip design magazines, of computer geeks obsessed with fonts and typefaces. A Blueprint magazine writer recently anointed Earls “the hottest designer…
For soup nuts
Rich broths and bisques are celebrated with exuberance at Le Soups! in Ferndale. Chesapeake cheddar and crab, gumbo, lobster, mushroom and tomato basil bisques, creamy artichoke and chicken, beef barley, green chili corn chowder … you can enjoy a different soup every day, and it’ll take a while before you repeat yourself because every day…
Here Come the Brides
Just when you think that nothing could possibly be achieved in the field of heavy metal that hasn’t already been done to death decades ago, here come the Brides Of Destruction to single-handedly confirm that the moribund old genre has absolutely nothing left to offer. Now before you start waving your dope-stained copy of Vinnie…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): For too long, grace has eluded you; you have had to fight your way through life. But now your luck is about to turn; your soul will get the refreshment it needs. To celebrate, imagine you’re the one speaking in this poem by Theodore Roethke: "Near the rose, in this grove…
Fabulous Muscles
His stage name is Xiu Xiu. He pronounces it Shoe Shoe. His album is called Fabulous Muscles. He appears on the front cover ecstatically holding a kitten. He writes lyrics like: “Cremate me after you cum on my lips.” His father killed himself last year. Discuss. E-mail Jeffrey Morgan at letters@metrotimes.com.
Pants on fire
When Liars’ second album dropped a couple of weeks ago, it didn’t quite receive the praise that their 2001 debut garnered. In fact, reviews this bad almost never happen in grocery store shelf tastemakers like Rolling Stone or Spin, especially in both at the same time. But there’s a lot to be said about being…
If We Can’t Trust the Doctors
You have “I Love Lucy” video slots in Michigan? Whoa. Now that’s thrown me. Dan Miller is a smart man — a saddened man, a man driven by personal heartache, fear of disease, a yearning for the more civilized depths of nostalgia, several hundred good-time show tunes performed by singers as disparate as Cab Calloway…
A bird in the hand
Q: As an avid reader of your column, I thought of you and only you for help with this problem. My grandmother, 78 and widowed, is a kind, generous woman who has seen her share of difficult times. She is a bit offbeat, but extremely conservative and religious. After my grandfather passed on, she purchased…
The Only Son
In Son, a widowed mother reluctantly decides to further her young boy’s education though she knows she can barely afford it and will have to continue to toil in a silk factory. The boy leaves their provincial home for Tokyo, and 12 years later she visits him there. Although she tries to, she can’t hide…
