Proactive
Feed bag — It makes perfect sense, in a circular sort of way. Fill your belly with a fine spaghetti feast and, in the process, help those who have neither roof overhead nor table to lay their vittles on. We’re talking about the Macomb Homeless Coalition’s 15th annual spaghetti dinner to aid that county’s homeless…
Media Blackout
Clear the track, here comes MB23. • Dave Cooper – Underbelly: Additional Observations On The Beauty/Ugliness Of Mostly Pillowy Girls (Fantagraphics Books) :: This coffee table art book contains erotically singed paintings of large ravenously mandibled women who have the bug-eyed visages of Sandy Dennis in leering lolling heat. Roll over Bill Ward, and tell…
Leaves of song
Enthralled as he was with the sounds and songs of his 19th century America— from minstrel tunes to Stephen Foster to opera — Walt Whitman, no doubt, would have dug jazz had he hung around for the 20th. Enough of his admirers and disciples certainly did. Take Langston Hughes, a poet whose work reflects America…
Metalology
Shadows Fall The War Within Century Media Records Welcome to the new wave of American heavy metal. Shadows Fall’s latest shot (their fourth; the third with vocal cord-abuser Brian Fair) is a metal wake-up call. It proves that some bands still believe in mixing badass musical chops with kickass songwriting. Here the Massachusetts five-piece fuses…
N&D Center
Wednesday • 9 Faina Lerman ART Artist Faina Lerman’s works are often invited to hang in Detroit art exhibits, and this week, her gouache, pencil and ink works can be seen at This Week in Art — the only event in town that truly mixes the brews with the views. Enjoy Lerman’s organic and subtle…
Don’t have a cow
Moo Moo’s is serving inexpensive breakfasts, salads, entrées and sandwiches, half of them vegan, all of them as healthy as a brisk walk around the block. Even when a dish includes a bit of cheese, it may be soy cheese.
Let’s roll
Believe it or not, roller derby — burly girlies in short shorts, kneepads and helmets demolishing one another in a skating race — has regained popularity in America. In fact, the craze that launched B-movie madness in the ’70s has developed its very own counterculture in towns like Austin, Tex., and Phoenix, Ariz. These days,…
Finding life in death
The story of a terminally ill man’s struggle with the Spanish courts to allow him to commit suicide may sound like a real downer, but The Sea Inside is poetic, devoutly humanistic and ultimately life-affirming film. We watch a man suffer through the indignities and loss of independence that’s inevitable with his condition, but we…
The tragedy of the aquarium
Nicole hasn’t had an easy life. Her mother is an alcoholic; her father a drug abuser who is in and out of jail. They do nothing to help her financially, and very little to help her little sister, who isn’t old enough for school yet. So she does what she can to support herself and…
Hearts and Minds
Winner of an Academy Award in 1975 for best feature length documentary, Peter Davis’ anti-Vietnam war classic Hearts and Minds still has the power to outrage and dismay. The film has been restored — the color components were beginning to seriously deteriorate — and it arrives during a period when we’re in the mire of…
Open your mouth, solve your problem
Q: I am a 21-year-old bisexual male who recently moved back home to Canada. For the last two months I was overseas, I was involved with my first male partner. He was a virgin, I was not. He knew about my bisexuality and one night propositioned me. I refused because I was not really all…
Crimson haze
In recent months, as the extent of Detroit’s deepening budget crisis has become more and more apparent, the City Council’s primary response has been to utter the word “don’t.” As in, don’t close Belle Isle Aquarium, don’t curtail bus service, don’t lay off any more workers this fiscal year. It doesn’t help that seven of…
Born Into Brothels
A New York-based photojournalist was recording the life of prostitutes in Calcutta when she came up with the idea of starting a photography class for a group of their children. The crux of Born Into Brothels revolves around her efforts to save a few of these children from their fates, but her humanitarianism obscures the…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Some freaks of nature, like four-leaf clovers, are considered good luck. Others, like six-legged frogs, are omens that something is amiss. Then there are the prodigies that are a little scary because they’re so extraordinary, even if they’re also signs of hope. A few years back, for example, some Native Americans…
The Savage debate continues — on drug support payments
Dear Readers: Needless to say, I’ve been buried by the mail coming in about my drug-support payments idea. Here’s a selection. Q: If something like "drug-support payments" were ever implemented, when people discover they are HIV-positive they will be afraid to let their past and present sexual partners know for fear of being sued…
The Jacket
Adrien Brody recovers a little bit of his dignity after his embarrassing turn in last summer’s The Village with this psychological thriller. Despite the actor’s best efforts, however, the film remains a convoluted freak-out puzzle not worth solving.
God bless the grass
Think Sermon on the Mount. Think Beats. Think St. Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians. Think Faulkner’s sentences and Coltrane’s sheets of sound. Like, for instance, “And he opened his mouth, and taught them …” Like Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night …”…
Blowout 2005: Fits and pics
Look, we’re not here to crook our backs and give ourselves head, but we must say, if anything, Blowout 2005 showed us this: There’s a new generation of fresh-faced kids coming up in Detroit making admirable racket; they’re full of new ideas, new hope and, best of all, new, unjaded energy. And while we hastily…
Imaginary Heroes
Writer and director Dan Harris (who also penned the X-Men sequel) lays it on thick in Imaginary Heroes, so thick, in fact, that the movie comes off as an inauthentic bundle of soap-opera-worthy revelations bound together with indie movie clichés about angst and the suburban family. Jeff Daniels is refreshingly cast against type as a…
Does this make my labia look fat?
The names of the patients interviewed for this story have been changed. Kim is a 27-year-old woman with a shy face and perfectly shaped pink acrylic nails. She’s naked from the waist down, wrapped in a flimsy paper gown, perched on the edge of an examining table. Looking nervous and uncomfortable, she wraps her…
Crackpot commentary
News Hits has finally discovered the secret to being a successful right-wing pundit: insanity. This reality dawned on us last week as we read about the slur heaved at one-time Detroiter and Wayne State University graduate Helen Thomas, grand dame of the White House press corps. Doing the heaving was partisan hack Ann Coulter, who,…
Be Cool
A highly disappointing follow up to Get Shorty, the 1995 of the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name. Flat, chaotic and sporting none of the snap, crackle and, pop of the first installment, this drab adaptation of Leonard’s follow up novel Be Cool is remarkably uncool, bogged down by a lifeless and muddled script…
Self-serve theater
For something so relatively new, it’s surprising how quickly the public has tired of reality television. In fact, people may find themselves immediately suspicious at so much as finding the word “reality” in a title. But don’t let any contemporary associations with the word cast a negative light on the theater troupe Motoprism’s production, The…
Road overkill
Comments by Michigan House Speaker Craig DeRoche (R-Novi) urging House Transportation Committee Chairman Phil LaJoy (R-Canton) to hold additional hearings regarding Michigan’s road plan are drawing fire from a prominent Michigan public advocacy group and Ferndale’s city manager. DeRoche wants to hold more hearings in outlying areas such as Canton, Grand Rapids and Waterford. Why?…
Heart-shaped boxers
Mark Dignam is a Dublin-born singer-songwriter who nowadays calls Pittsburgh home. Box Heart Man is his fourth full-length — his first for Royal Oak imprint Times Beach — and it displays his thoughtful, smart lyrics over a pop-rock and folk-derived set featuring the talents of local faves Ethan Daniel Davidson, Audra Kubat and Gold Cash…
A classless action
To listen to the bill’s supporters, the class action bill that recently was passed and signed into law is a mere procedural fix designed to prevent national class actions from being heard in state courts. The truth is the Republican bill will not only federalize nearly all state class actions, it is loaded with special…
Bush’s bully pulpit
Were they the types to actually pay attention to such things, playground bullies and other youthful scofflaws would probably be cheering some of the cuts being made in President George Bush’s proposed budget. Among the many things likely to end up on the chopping block thanks to planned cutbacks in federal spending are two programs…
I Have the Room Above Her
The late Bill Evans once said that he couldn’t claim to understand Zen Buddhism — he just found it comforting “and very similar to jazz … It’s got to be experienced because it’s feelings not words.” Those were Evans’ musings around 1960 when he was pioneering a new kind of openness and expressiveness in his…
Club floor gawk
While we waited for more thrilling Movement festival updates and wrung our hands in anticipation of the DJ/production talent that Derrick May promises for the Motor City Music Conference in April, we did a tour of the growing number of late-winter parties helping to bring this 303-year-old city out of its slumber. We witnessed the…
Waiting for the fall
This two-story house at 4509-4511 Avery, in the historic Woodbridge neighborhood, has been a strain on residents’ eyes for as long as most can remember. Peter Jablonski, who lives across the street, says the house has been abandoned for at least 19 years — as long as he has lived on the block. “The porch…
Set Yourself on Fire
You know how sad beauty can be? How beautiful a broken heart can be? With this, their third full-length, Montreal-based Stars have created a work of astonishing gorgeousness that grabs hold of those ambiguities of life and lovingly beats you over the head with them. The band is another part of Canada’s Broken Social Scene/Arts…
Signs of life
With the expansion of corporate behemoths like Starbucks, Wal-Mart and Blockbuster, there’s something significant — and almost sacred — about discovering a privately owned shop, or even the colorful remnants marking a bygone dream. Such a discovery is all the more powerful if the shop happens to be located in an economically devastated neighborhood. It’s…
Let’s finish off the death penalty
According to the ACLU, 113 inmates have been released from death row as of February 2004, and more than half of them within the past 10 years. A study by Columbia University Professor James Liebman, which examined every capital case nationwide from 1973 to 1995, concluded that 82 percent of death row inmates did not…
Art Bar
Projected changes The theater business is hell these days, what with the DVD craze eating ticket sales. Last year was the most profitable year for Hollywood but saw the lowest theater attendance ever. The art-film haven at the DIA’s Detroit Film Theatre has suffered less than most, due to healthy ticket sales for art-house releases,…
Head Cheese
Troy Gregory’s songwriting and multi-instrumentalist skills have made him D-town’s Man in Black, and his integrity has ensured that he still fights to cover his mortgage. This sonic Svengali — best known for the Witches — here talks up his beautiful little headfuck he calls Troy Gregory and the Stepsisters: Imagine, if you will, a…
New days bang
“What I like, I lick, and this ain’t no bullshit, and those looking for bullshit are gonna get full of bullets and shiiiiiit,” Kalimah Johnson says, or, rather, roars, as she closes out another packed poetry night at the Meetery Eatery, where she’s the host. Later, Johnson trades hugs for smiles as she thanks a…
Letters to the Editor
How Ron sees it This is the letter Ric Bohy referred to in his March 2 editorial, “Hizzoner, the real one.” I am writing this letter to address the Feb. 23 columns of Ric Bohy and Jack Lessenberry. Ric Bohy’s characterization of Detroit as being similar to a notorious slum in Rio de Janeiro is…
Some spice advice
Wealth and power, of course, are why humankind fights wars, and usually one begets the other. But in the history of erect, two-legged saps doing unspeakable things to each other in the pursuit of increasing their stores of both, one other thread runs through it. Sir Walter Raleigh referred to it in 1605. Besides “the…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
