Blue greens and beans
Chow! Spring 2002 Dining Guide: Misha’s is "home cooking" with a rich and moving past.
Inks, Witches & Birds
All-star rockers from Colonel Parker get inked up at Electric Superstition tattoo studio … Live music and sublime beer at Motor City Brewing Works … & Paul Keller’s jazz band gets a new name and a new gig.
Harrison’s Flowers
A script that expects us to buy a 1940s-style love story in the middle of 20th century war realism is a paradox with a pretty face, analogous to the gap between its title and the gruesome subject matter it contains — with Andie MacDowell and David Strathairn.
Gourmet to go
Chow! Spring 2002 Dining Guide: Dish packs another (and another) helping of the East Side’s finest cuisine.
Too late to die young
The sad tale of the much-storied yet wickedly unheralded songwriter-guitarist Cranford Nix Jr.
Tea and empathy
Chow! Spring 2002 Dining Guide: There are no mad hatters at Fiona’s Tea House, only scones and assorted wonders.
Shadow of Dow
Midland, Michigan has a mean dioxin level about 12 times greater than the rest of the state. Does this have anything to do with Dow Chemical Company’s presence in the town?
Cooking by heart
Chow! Spring 2002 Dining Guide: New Yasmeen Bakery’s Souad Bazzi serves up Lebanese cuisine "naturally."
Detroit time warp
Techno, garage, hip hop, electro… Motor City tastes have always been a little ahead of national curves — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes just maddeningly oblivious to them.
All together now
Chow! Spring 2002 Dining Guide: Food for a small planet’s working week at the Small World Café.
Disc One: All Their Greatest Hits (1991–2001)
Canada’s BNL have somehow managed to get a pass from critics who normally have no qualms about savaging, say, a Steve Perry solo disc. It’s the old David Lee Roth-on-Elvis Costello-and-critics adage: what fatso, geeky dork who looks like his mama still dresses him would presume to pass negative judgment upon a band composed of…
Questions of cover-up
Blacked-out documents and ever-changing “acceptable levels” fuel the dioxin controversy in Midland.
Singing on the range
Chow! Spring 2002 Dining Guide: Chef Jeffrey Kalich makes Twingo’s a full-spectrum experience.
Live at the Aquarius Theatre: The First Performance
When one argues the relative merits of Jim Morrison the conversation invariably turns on the hoariest of the, um, whore: “The End”-generated oedipal hooey, wee-wee wiggling in Miami, a bloated bathtub full of Parisian Jim, etc. In order to tell the alternate story of the Doors — the concert tale — the three surviving members…
Letters to the Editor
The art of trash Good story from Lisa M. Collins about a real piece of political and environmental trash ("Ill wind," Metro Times, March 20-26). She is one hell of a writer and reporter. As someone who was a better reporter than a writer, I’m always kind of awed when I see both skills so…
Diagnosis: Undefined
Clinic’s four surgical-masked lads are pillaging the pop-rock past with an audacity that’s both daunting and haunting.
Sha Sha
We should all subscribe to Ben Kweller’s disarming ideologies. Let’s drop the pretense common to oversensitive, badge-wearing, 7-inch-buying, “I liked ’em before they were big” music geeks. Let’s forget about the makeoutclub.com kids. Let’s forget all about tweemo indie culture. On the unabashedly melodic Sha Sha, Kweller is the first to come clean. He’s uncertain…
Freeze for all
Wayne County predicts deficit of over $20 million this year….
Hoops all in your face
Backstage with the b-ball techies at the Palace of Auburn Hills….
Now that’s kosher
Located inside the Jewish Community Center, Milk and Honey is a gourmet restaurant that just happens to be kosher. The menu is seafood and vegetarian, and the food is as good and as varied as at any comparable restaurant. Our reviewer loved the lusciously red ahi tuna and the pistachio-crusted sea bass, both perfectly prepared.…
Casino quagmire
Legality of all Detroit casinos now in question….
Harder than you thought
Readers challenge Dan on his ongoing plagiarism contest (three high-rollin’ nights in Vegas for the lucky winner) … & A sampling of reader fantasies (one man’s titillation is another man’s bore).
Land 1975-2002
When Patti Smith swaggered onto a Chapel Hill, N.C., stage in January of 1977 to broadcast live over Radio Free Ethiopia at least one kid in the audience was terminally scarred — not just by her androgynously sensual Keith Richards / Marlene Dietrich prowl, and not just by her band’s outrageous punk / garage /…
Dairy dreams
Dairy farmers lured to northeast Michigan despite widespread cattle disease….
Life starts here
Welcoming cult status, Bob Pollard and Guided by Voices are poised for a new beginning.
Rescue mission
The artist who calls himself “Seth” is obsessed with the elusive past. His illustrated stories (“comic books” seems too flimsy a term) dwell heavily on regret, the struggle of modern life, the yearning for a more innocent and perfect yesterday. It is no surprise, then, that Seth’s private sketchbooks feature so many portraits of nostalgic…
Educational outrage
Our City Council just can’t seem to get it together….
Chow: Spring 2002
Chow Spring 2002: In this special collection of features, we chat with seven of the area’s finest chefs in their studios of creativity.
Room with a veil
At first, Alison Wearing’s view of Iran is obscured by the native attire she dons, her Western upbringing (she’s Canadian), and a romanticized view of the Middle East. But by the end of her journey, Wearing — and readers of Honeymoon in Purdah — may be surprised to learn that basic human ideals are the…
Lock down
Metro Times editor gets himself into a Real jam….
March 27-April 2, 2002
27 WED • MUSIC — Ben Kweller The words "get there early" have never had more importance than when talking about Ben Kweller’s upcoming two-night stand with the criminally popular emo-carpetbaggers, Dashboard Confessionals. Kweller’s brilliant pop songwriting and youthful exuberance will make the headliners seem like a contrived joke in comparison. Those unfamiliar with Kweller…
Hip-hop sidekicks
As director Doug Pray’s documentary points out in all its proud, goofy glory, hip-hop DJs are another breed of musician altogether. It’s in capturing their nerdy, underdog charm that Pray finds his groove — with Grandmaster Theodore, Stevie Dee, DJ Babu, Cut Chemist, et al.
Drop in
This week’s abandoned house once had an address, we assume, but no longer has one. It’s located on East Vernor; its photo was sent to us by Tom Lonergan, who informed us: “Last September, as I was driving my son Vince to school, I told him, ‘I bet that house is still there in April,…
Asian fusion
Chow! Spring 2002 Dining Guide: Eastern paths meet Western ways at the up-to-the-minute Eurasian Grill.
Blade II
Blade (Wesley Snipes) – a blend of vigilante gunslinger, Bruce Lee, samurai and vampire wrapped in the black skin and leather of Shaft-meets-Batman — is back. Harder, darker and deeper than its predecessor, director Guillermo del Toro’s film abandons the day-walking gleam of the first Blade for shadowy lairs. But this sequel is still sharp…
Between the beats
An online exclusive: Just prior to a rare Detroit-area appearance, Dan Bell weighs in on genre-clash, Detroit and ’80s geekdom.
An American classic heats up
Meadow Brook Theatre’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof stays true to Tennessee Williams’ emphasis on dark undercurrents and corruption.
Spike & Mike’s 2001 Classic Festival of Animation
This is the respectable annual Spike & Mike, not that Sick & Twisted crap, and the offerings this year are of a consistently high quality. The funny stuff may not be as funny as it could be and the poignant stuff may border on the precious, but it’s a well-paced 90 minutes that’s continually impressive.
Hey, sexy mama
Q: I think pregnant women are the sexiest women around. I have never personally experienced the joy, thrill and beauty of a pregnant woman first-hand but would like to. It’s been a fantasy of mine for a long time. I realize most pregnant women are either married or involved with someone, so how do I…
Functionality
Pewabic Pottery celebrates beauty and usefulness with 53 vases that are a joy to behold … while Sybaris Gallery hosts Nick Cave’s mixed-media sculptures, functional only in the erotic imagination.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
After 20 years, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. is back, with “never-before-seen footage, state-of-the-art computer-generated enhancements and a digitally remixed sound track." But go see it because it’s a film geared toward kids, without lowering its standards because of it.
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Unless you buy my sacred Atlantean no-stick talisman, you will suffer from arachibutyrophobia, a fear of peanut butter adhering to the roof of your mouth. If you refuse to order my ancient Egyptian hemp dream catcher, you will contract myxophobia, a fear of slime. If you don’t obtain my book, How…
Name dropping for fun and profit
Jack’s not sure if Daniel Granholm Mulhern’s sales tactics seem proper. But they don’t seem to bother Mulhern or his wife, the attorney general.
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
This 1999 addition to the anime corpus, directed by Hiroyuki Okiura, postulates an alternate ending to World War II — in which Japan is conquered by Nazi Germany, not the United States. With its hyper-real animation and mildly speculative storyline, it actually flattens out the possibilities of the form.
