Art Bar
Barely legal – The year 2004 marked the 20th anniversary of Parkett, the invaluable multilingual artists’ publication that adorably positions itself as a “small museum and large library.” To celebrate two decades of nothing less than perfect work, the staff has recently produced the catalog Parkett – 20 Years of Artists’ Collaborations ($39, 248 pp.).…
Letters to the Editor
Swimming upstream I read with interest Jack Lessenberry’s editorial, “The tragedy of the aquarium” (Metro Times, March 9). Everyone occasionally says or does something they wish they could take back. Much of the time these actions are due to incomplete information, and I suspect this may be the case with parts of this particular article.…
Patron saint
Though the Cass Corridor Artists’ Workshop pretty much ran its course by the 1970s, industrialist James Duffy — a generous and savvy art collector — helped to preserve much of the genius that this progressive group produced. The collector, who once turned his pipe- and valve-fitting company into a makeshift museum, is widely known as…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat
From George, with love
I’m going to take the high road this time, which for me is a road less traveled. I’m not going to come out and say, “President Bush couldn’t give less of a damn about black people. So why does he care so much about convincing us that his efforts to transform Social Security are in…
Ready, aim…
ENTRY FORM The medium of photography has many histories. It’s as personal as a shoebox of Polaroids stuffed beneath the bed, as practical as a Xerox, as historical as war footage and as scientific as an X-ray. But it’s time for Metro Times’ 23rd annual photo contest, and all we’re interested in is artistry. The…
Ghostly shots, Miami & more
People in Detroit’s underground dance scene know it is governed by a marvelous but perplexing rule: All or nothing. In some ways this is perfect for the peculiarly organic creative process of Detroit artistry. Play hard. Work hard. Shout it out. Rest. Recharge. Repeat. As we leave winter behind, we enter into a new cycle…
Color-coded politics
Call it beating a dead horse, if you want. But if that was the case, I’d end a hot, lifelong affair with my hometown, declare Detroit doomed in fact, not colloquially dead, and go look for a better place to live. There are such places, you know, plenty of them, a point not lost on…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Party over at Morgan’s all weekend! His folks are away so let’s crash it and celebrate the 25th installment of Media Blackout! Pass it on! • Rosemary Clooney — “Come On-A My House” (Columbia) :: Who invited all these people? • KISS — “Rock And Roll All Nite” (Casablanca) :: Oh, man, that’ll never wash…
Notes from the underground
Hitomi Kanehara’s Hebi ni Piasu, translated as Snakes and Earrings, has won the 2004 Akutagawa Prize, the top Japanese literary award for new writers. Kanehara, a 21-year-old female, shares the award, historically taken by men, with another young woman, Risa Wataya. Much (perhaps too much) has been made of this. But Ryu Murakami, member of…
Condemned to a living hell
Nothing shows the sickening hypocrisy of George W. Bush and the Republican Party more clearly than their attempt to trample on the laws and the courts in their efforts to keep Terri Schiavo a living corpse. They want to use her, or what remains of her, as some sort of repulsive cultural war trophy, with…
Spill the wine
Carla Bruni’s Quelqu’un M’a Dit walked all over Europe and the UK in 2004, making the former supermodel a singing sensation among music geeks and casual listeners alike. With the album’s American debut, it’s easy to hear why. Bruni’s songs brush easily along in conversational French, and the acoustic guitars usually require only the slightest…
N&D Center
P> Wednesday- Saturday • 23-26 WDET Fundraiser MUSIC/FUNDRAISER For several years now, WDET 101.9 FM and 313.JAC have teamed up at pledge-drive season for a musical festival. Proceeds from the event go to WDET’s spring fundraiser. This year — in accordance with years past — many amazing local artists will perform, including Nomo, Holy Fire,…
Re: Definition
Michigan’s musical architect Zo! is back with a remix project of some of the hottest soul-house and hip-hop tracks heard in the past few years. From Slum Village and Little Brother reworks to Jill Scott and Vinia Mojica classics, this album proves that Zo!’s been hard at work redefining the sound of urban lounge. Sidestepping…
This old house
Edgar Allan Poe may be so well remembered for his stories of horror that contemporary readers might regard him as a sort of steam-age Stephen King. But a new play, Usher, uses his chilling work as a point of departure for examining the writer as a thinker and an artist ahead of his time, as…
Weekly Fecal
Sludgy-sounding, ’70’s-influenced barroom guitar bands are a dime a dozen these days, and for every one that interprets the style well (Black Crowes) there are 20 others (Silvertide, Tantric, Jet, etc.) serving up half-assed, blandly inoffensive crap disguised as rock ’n’ roll. This album places Dirty Americans solidly among the latter. The band’s racket isn’t…
Forbidden rice?
How’s this for neurotic? Many years ago, I read about some guy who had either painted or carved an improbable amount of a classic text on a single grain of rice. For a time, I harbored a little concern that at some point I had eaten such a thing without benefiting in any way from…
Cartoon heaven
If you’re looking for a collection of animated fart jokes, severed penises and flights of sadistic violence à la Spike and Mike, The 2005 Animation Show may not be your cup of tea. It’s not that Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt’s collection of twelve animated shorts doesn’t cross the line into the profane; it’s just…
Ashlee doesn’t suck
Ashlee Simpson, as Joan Jett once said, doesn’t give a damn about her bad reputation. In fact, if her performance last month at the sold-out Event Center in San Jose, Calif., was any indication, the 20-year-old singer is reveling in the fact that she’s become music’s most reviled star. Why else would she suddenly crib…
Outsider pitches
The field of outsider art has too many problems to count, but the major issue is this: It’s based on a romanticized biography of the artist. Some dealers exploit personal stories in order to make money, and often self-taught artists are labeled merely according to their race and class. Of course, this happens in most…
Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
Director Robert Stone’s taut, riveting new documentary doesn’t treat the kidnapping of Patty Hearst as just another historical punch line, and makes it relevant for a whole new generation of politically divided, terror-obsessed Americans. Though the subject matter has been analyzed to the point of self-parody over the course of the past 30 years, Stone…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) was a virtuoso violinist as well as a master showman. Not content to dazzle audiences with his technical wizardry, he sometimes resorted to tricks to evoke even greater levels of astonished appreciation. Before one concert, he partially sawed through three of his violin’s strings. When they broke in…
Florence Nightingale meets Sherlock Holmes
When Andrew Michael Warshaw drew his life sentence for murder, it was a nurse who helped put him away. A 32-year-old drifter, Warshaw had befriended and then raped a woman while staying in a Sterling Heights motel in the spring of 2002. Selling cleaning products door-to-door at the time, he was already wanted for a…
Gunner Palace
Filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker present a surprisingly intimate, if highly disjointed, account of the Army’s 2/3 Field Artillery Unit, a company of “gunners” who operate out of the former pleasure palace of Uday Hussein, patrolling the streets of Bagdad and routing out insurgents. Populated with wisecracking jokers, jaded hip-hop poets and midwestern farm…
Backslash
The rise of instant messaging has ushered in a new era of slang, with such acronyms as LOL, BTW, AFAIK, WTF, and so forth. If “weblish” has you tied up in knots, pay a visit to slangsite.com. It’s an online dictionary comprised entirely of slang; but slangsite.com has a special emphasis on web-speak, a new…
Eat your young
The ad is edgy. And, in the not so humble opinion of News Hits, it’s also over the top, rhetorically speaking. But does that mean it should be censored? The answer to that question, according to the companies that own Detroit-area billboards, is a resounding “yes.” Which is why a People for the Ethical Treatment…
The Upside of Anger
Though this film from Birmingham native Mike Binder is problematic, its greatest virtue is in the heart of its leads, as they gingerly dance around each other’s emotional baggage, hoping to find a little comfort and grace. As a dysfunctional couple, Kevin Costner and Joan Allen have a genuine chemistry that avoids the clichés of…
Battle of the binge
Jeff Neville is not the kind of guy you could imagine being called “Abu the Gormandizer.” He doesn’t appreciate the handle. A retired police officer and father of two from Goodrich, Mich., Neville is a stout, jovial man, his round face framed by a pair of respectable specs and a freshly shaved head. Well into…
Send them to … Detroit!
It’s a classic case of who watches the watchman. The Office of the Special Counsel, the federal agency that’s supposed to stop other federal agencies from engaging in shady dealings, is itself being accused of doing bad things. The OSC, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is an independent executive and prosecutorial agency with…
Millions
Alexander Nathan Etel makes his remarkable film debut as Damian, a kid obsessed with the history of the saints of the Catholic Church. When he stumbles across a bag of money, he wants to save the world, like the saints who went before him. This is quite a departure for director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28…
Head Cheese
Swedish singer Ebbot Lundberg began his career fronting Stooges-inspired Union Carbide Productions, whose brutal riff attack (with spates of free-jazz skronk) on their 1987 debut, In The Air Tonight, may be the closest anyone has come to actually nicking the thunder of the first two Stooges albums. But by the 1992 Steve Albini-produced Swing, UCP…
Al fresco dining
The defunct “Exchange” diner and bar at 8939-8947 Grand River Ave. on Detroit’s West Side has definitely seen better days. The front of the building is still standing, but has, for the most part, succumbed to the forces of gravity. The left side wall and ceiling have caved in, offering great sunlight and a pleasant…
Vodka Lemon
Set in a small Armenian village, there’s a current of ambiguity toward the post-Soviet era underlying Vodka Lemon. It’s not exactly nostalgia, but more like the feeling that history has played some weird joke on the populace and then moved on. Hamo and Nina are two struggling widowers with bleak outlooks — but the filmmakers…
Frankly, my Dears
Murray Lightburn actually wept when he got the phone call to open a few Morrissey shows last year. And why not? The 30-year-old Dears frontman has often been called the “Black Morrissey,” and growing up, the Smiths and Morrissey meant everything to him. “I think more than anything, finding Morrissey made me feel like I…
A South by Southwest 2005 timeline
The five-day, 19th annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Music and Media Festival in Austin, Texas (March 16-20) was one long emotional money shot; well over a thousand bands from around the globe (16 from the Detroit area) came to play, either at an official club show at one of 50-some venues or at one of…
The Ring Two
In The Ring Two, Hideo Nakato, director of the original Japanese Ringu series, picks up six months after the first film left off. Though Nakata eschews the tinted, otherworldly cinematography favored by Ring director Verbinski, the plot lacks the gruesome sense of order that made the first film so haunting. Nakata does manage to orchestrate…
The Wishful Thinking Syndrome
Q: I am a 34-year-old woman. I recently became reacquainted with a boyfriend from college and we write each other daily e-mails. He lives in Alaska and I live on the East Coast. We hadn’t seen each other since 1993. We only broke up then because we were both graduating and headed our separate ways.…
Proactive
Winging it — How many conferences offer the opportunity to meet a live red-tailed hawk? Damn few that we know of. There is at least one, however, and it’s coming up on Saturday, April 2. Given the hawk angle, it should come as no surprise that the get-together is being put on by the folks…
