State your claim
The state of Michigan is going to have to get in line if it wants to recover the $5 million it doled out to the partnership that was operating the Central Wayne waste-to-energy incinerator in West Dearborn. With more than 200 companies already queued up, the wait could be a long one. Last August the…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): For months now, you’ve been cultivating a more mature relationship with obstacles. You’ve begun to see them less as punishments doled out by an unfair universe and more as interesting, growth-inducing challenges provided by a generous universe. If you do nothing else but master this perspective in the next eight months,…
Sent packing
Detroit Public Schools and Teach For America, a national nonprofit that recruits recent college graduates to teach in “underserved” school districts for two-year stints, are going their separate ways. With drastically declining enrollments, Detroit’s public schools are anything but “underserved” at this point. Instead of having trouble filling vacant teaching slots — the type of…
It’s quitting time for working-class band
“Three chords and a cloud of dust. Unadulterated rock and roll,” is how Immortal Winos of Soul songwriter/guitar player Kevin “Chopper” Peshkopia describes his band. Aside from a great name, the Winos were/are a seriously rowdy, kick-shit-up Detroit rock ’n’ roll band steeped in (truthfully) Let It Bleed-era Stones, pre-Diet Pepsi Ray Charles and the…
Well of an ending
For nearly a decade, Romulus-area residents, civic leaders, business groups and just about anyone interested in protecting the Wayne County community have opposed a plan to dump millions of gallons of hazardous waste into deep-injection wells (“Well Hell,” Metro Times, Aug. 8. 2002). Up to now, they have been successful in delaying an effort by…
Guise & dolls
Q: Early last year, my married girlfriend deployed to Iraq. Prior to her leaving she told me she was having problems with her husband. Being a good friend, I supported her. I learned via e-mail that she had fallen in love with another man. When she came home and asked her husband for a divorce,…
Poets who know it
Hot news. Last week a state lawmaker introduced a bill that would create a poet laureate for the state of Michigan. News Hits couldn’t resist reporting the news in verse. Since this was written on St. Patrick’s Day, we’ve chosen the highest form, the limerick: There once was a fine legislator Who pined to…
Detroit-sploi-tation
Bam! Myrtle Goines and her daughter Joan sit terrified listening to the violence coming from behind a bedroom door in their northeast Detroit home. Bam! The man locked in the bedroom is Myrtle’s only son, Joan’s big brother. He’s in there at his own request. He’s instructed his family not to open the door, no…
Washed out
Well, dear reader, after more than two years, the ASS (which, as you should well know by now stands for the Abandoned Structure Squad) is hanging up its pad and camera. Our swan song is the Hand Car Wash at 5901 Grand River in Detroit. The patrons who pulled in to spray the muck from…
N&D center
25-28 THU-SUN • ART Artrain USA — As the nation’s only traveling art museum on a train, Ann Arbor-based Artrain USA has chugged its way around America since 1971, bringing visual art exhibitions and programs directly to communities with limited access to museums or collections. Its new exhibition, Native Views: Influences of Modern Culture, uses…
Upholding rock rules
Wildhearts singer-guitarist Ginger sounds exhausted as he answers the phone at his home in London. But the long-distance connection still telegraphs the enthusiasm he feels on the eve of band’s departure for its American tour supporting fellow UK rockers the Darkness. It’s the band’s first full-fledged U.S. tour in its 15-year history. “‘Kids at Christmas’…
Letters to the Editor
Long but wonderful? Re: “Haddad breaks his silence” (Metro Times, March 17), that story was absolutely a pleasure to read. I had been following his case very closely, being a Muslim in Ann Arbor, but with this article I was surprised at what I didn’t know. I’m very happy to see that he and his…
Spirits find refuge
According to the myth of the 36 Unknown, anonymous individuals exist in the world to assist mankind in times of peril. They can be found in firefighters and medics, mail carriers, clerks, cousins, bosses, bus drivers or neighbors. Any individual — someone we know or one of the nameless faces we encounter everyday — may…
Navel gazing
Believe it or not, belly dance is a folk tradition not originally used to attract men. With ancient roots in North Africa and the Middle East, the dance was a female-centric childbirth tradition, associated with happiness, fertility and femininity. Today, it’s America’s new exotic dance trend, hailed as a great cardiovascular workout. Belly dancing’s isolated…
Detroit masters show
Jay Holland’s memory is sharp, his elocution crisp as he recounts his 75 years in Detroit during a visit to his funky little Oak Park house/studio. We’re surrounded by sculptures and an amazing library of classical records. A cat ignores us from its perch on the coffee table. “That’s not my cat,” Holland quips. It’s…
Unblemished
This impossibly difficult to describe, wholly brilliant film has many surprises. Jim Carrey’s character Joel meets Clementine Kruczynski, portrayed with punk-rock exuberance and a perfect American accent by British actress Kate Winslet. The pair has had their minds erased by Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, who specializes in specific memory removals. It would be a crime to…
The terrors of Putte
PUTTE, Belgium — It’s a quiet winter evening in a small village about 30 miles north of Brussels, where Nabil Sayadi and his wife, Patricia Vinck, live with their four children. Sayadi, who was born in Lebanon, sits at the dining room table with his 1-year-old daughter, Rouqayah, on his lap. Omer, their eldest child,…
Good Morning
Ozu spoofs the linguistic cliches that lubricate everyday conversation, the "good mornings" and "nice weather" exchanges that adults use to make safe contact and which the children think a bunch of bunk. The parents of two boys wish the kids would shut up, and to retaliate the two boys take a vow of silence, with…
Guided by voices
Sonny Landreth takes a moment to ponder the question. Like most naturally gifted people, he fails to see what the fuss is about, and answering the inquiry about his status as a “guitar hero” just makes him feel weird. It’s not to say that Landreth — one of the finest living bluesmen — isn’t honored…
Good Bye, Lenin!
Alex’s mother was in a coma for eight months, precipitated by a heart attack that took place in October 1989. By the time she awoke East Germany was no more. Alex, informed by his mother’s doctor that she was still in shaky health and that the slightest surprise could be fatal, set about to protect…
Potholes on the campaign trail
Never in modern political history have Democrats been so united, so early, on a candidate and on a conviction that the incumbent president has to be beaten, for the good of the country as much as for their own selfish desires. But many — maybe most of them — secretly fear that they can’t possibly…
Yossi & Jagger
A camp of Israeli soldiers are stationed on a snowy hill not far from the Israeli-Lebanese border, and two of the soldiers are carrying on a homosexual love affair. Yet, it merely plods along with a detached and cold eye and enough foreshadowing to spoil any tension that its emaciated plot attempts to rouse. The…
Ain’t integrating no more
After laboring mightily, the U.S. Supreme Court finally decided Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case, in May of 1954. I was born four Mays later, a post-Brown baby, supposedly entering a world that would be irrevocably different from what had been before. Then, as now, Denver was a predominantly white city.…
Power Trip
Leeka Basilaia is an investigative journalist for Rustavi-2 Television, and a resident of Georgia, a former Soviet Republic. Electricity used to be provided by the government, but in January 1999, an American corporation bought the system. Director, editor and producer Paul Devlin’s Power Trip documents the difficulties the American multi-national underwent in implementing their capitalist…
Arts expansion
To the uninformed observer, the modest building at 955 S. Eton in Birmingham’s Rail District might appear to house a small insurance firm. But last Saturday night, so many people packed sardine-style into the former office space that it was hard to move, let alone take in all the art — which is the place’s…
Dollops of SXSW 2004
It’s spring in Austin, Texas. Redbuds and bluebonnets are in bloom, adding fragrance to the balmy air. By late afternoon last Saturday, however, the springtime aroma on teeming Sixth Street was usurped by hurl-inducing, hangover-produced bodily scents oozing from the salty pores of thousands of people. There were prison tats and trucker hats, pristine chicks…
Texas confab timeline
Wednesday, March 17 9:14 PM: The Narrator @ The Copper Tank The drive across the desert has left us faded. Thanks to ephedrine (read: shitty trucker speed), dirtweed and a diet consisting of taco meat and energy drinks, we’ve been awake for 42 hours. Faded isn’t extreme enough; we’re subhuman and hollow, like the candy…
