Funky values
Why should the conservatives have a monopoly on proclaiming family values? Can’t the left get in on the debate? Better yet, how about the funkateers? And to the musical minds of husband-and-wife team Fatin Dantzler and Aja Graydon — known as Kindred the Family Soul — rhythm has its very foundations in the lives they…
Fire flight
Some have described Roni Benise’s Nights of Fire! as a cross between Latin Riverdance and Cirque du Soleil. The man himself, who’s in the middle of his first national tour, chooses to describe his performance as the “United Nations of music.” No matter what you call it, Benise’s Nights of Fire! is big. The show…
Food Stuff
Volare Ristorante in Wixom will host a wine dinner featuring a talk from Phillip Wente, proprietor of Wente Vineyards — California’s oldest family-owned and -operated winery — in the Bay Area’s Livermore Valley. The dinner menu includes charred prawn and citrus risotto, and pan-seared Scottish salmon. Wednesday, May 17, begins at 6:30 p.m., at 49115…
Money, marches & immigration
There wouldn’t be an illegal immigration “problem” in America if there weren’t companies-who-hire-illegal-immigrants-at-dirt-wages-so-they-don’t-have-to-pay-workers-a-fair-wage problem. Like so many other major issues in America, this is all about the money. It’s one of the first things I was taught as a journalist: Follow the money and you’ll find your story. Last week, on May 1, hundreds of…
Vidale vindicated
McDowell civil suit ends, stings Detroit with $1.5 million settlement.
A cut above
The roadhouse-nightclub on Rochester Road, just south of Fourteen Mile, opened in 1958. It has remained in that decade for several generations of locals who flock there to dine on beef washed down with highballs or red wine, and to dance the night away to the rhythms of the Mark James Band. Aside from the…
Turn your love around
Q: I’m a 22-year-old woman with a 21-year-old live-in boyfriend of 11 months. My boyfriend loves eating my ass. He goes for my ass when I wake up, after I get out of the shower, when I get home from work. At first it felt good as hell, but now it’s too freaky. I can’t…
Wal-Dart
The UFCW takes on the discount giant.
A Page from the past
Mary Harron’s sumptuous but ultimately misguided and superficial biopic of Bettie Page is almost an insult to the pinup’s legacy, as Harron is more interested in waxing philosophical over the repressed sexuality and moral censorship of the 1950s, a subject that’s been tackled better elsewhere. Thankfully, Gretchen Mol as Page gives it her all, and…
Big time for little flicks
It used to be said that everyone — from the butcher to the banker — was secretly working on the Great American Novel. The fantasy of achieving best-selling fame and fortune led to countless workshops, classes, writers groups and literary journals to identify the elusive “diamond in the rough” — and earn someone a few…
Juan up
There’s a nasty war of words going on between University of Michigan history prof Juan Cole and journalist Christopher Hitchens. Cole, an expert on the Middle East and Islam who recently appeared on the cover of this rag (Feb. 22, see full article at metrotimes.com), is an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. Hitchens,…
The Sisters
In translating The Sisters — a theatrical update of Chekhov’s Three Sisters — to the screen, neither writer Richard Alfieri nor director Arthur Allan Seidelman has the faintest clue about how to make a movie. In adapting his play, Alfieri seems to make few (if any) concessions for the screen and delivers an overly stagy…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Give ’em enough MB70! The Clash — Sandradeesta! (Epic) :: They all laughed when Elton John re-formed the Only Band that Matters. Well, they’re not laughing now. Mick Jagger — Let’s Rob Mick Jagger (ABC) :: It’s about time. After all, he’s been stealing from us ever since the Stones released Keith’s Head Goof. Noisettes…
Arena rock
It’s 1989. The NBA Finals. Pistons vs. Lakers. The Bad Boys hold their own against Los Angeles and win the series in four games to secure their first championship. But what was it that drove them forward, besides mad-dog attitude, rock-solid defense and clutch scoring? In those moments when you could cut the tension in…
The Promise
Chinese director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) steps up to the plate to deliver the most expensive film in Chinese history, The Promise. Unfortunately, all the money in the world can’t make a tepid story and muddled script into a movie masterpiece. Bursting with exquisite photography, landscapes, costumes and battles, and laughably cheap special effects,…
A market for mom-juice?
Tell Capitalist Mom GFE (Google fucking exists). I hit Google myself after reading your article, and got a plethora of articles on milk banks, moms looking to sell and various shopping sites apparently pimping it. With a better-defined search I’m sure she can find something along her line. Alternatively, she could try asking at her…
Letters to the Editor
Another happy reader The cover stories of the Metro Times never cease to amaze me. I read with immeasurable curiosity culture editor Sarah Klein’s piece, “The Double Closet” (Metro Times, May 3). Although the last time I saw the topic of LGBT Arab-Americans and the cultural divide between the Muslim world and the United States…
La Mujer di mi Hermano (My Brother’s Wife)
This Spanish epic film is like the most lavish Univision soap opera ever staged; but it’s shot with the grave tone of serious art house drama, as if to bleed the fun right out of it. Though handsome and intensely acted, there’s absolutely nothing interesting happening under the sudsy surface.
Head cheese
Named for its proud Downriver hometown, South Gate manages to make the moniker their own. Part of a thriving local metal underground, the quartet aligns itself nationally with the “New Wave of American Metal.” But South Gate also has its own, refreshingly no-bullshit pummel, a sound designed not to empathize with your inner-child but to…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Mission: Impossible III
In the past, Ethan Hunt was much like James Bond: he had no personal history or investment, and the stakes were purely professional. By focusing III on Hunt’s personal dilemma instead of just another goofball global threat, the third film in the series provides an emotional backbone to the team’s struggles; it gives the series…
Writing on the wall
In the mid-1950s, Jesse Howard, who lived in Fulton, Mo., began posting signs on his house. He filled his home and yard with words written in a style alternating between graceful songs of religious prose and shit-can poetics, taking on everyone from the Lord to the local sheriff. The townspeople in Fulton never thought he…
Nomo takes on the world
Nomo is well-known for the ability to be elastic. The Ann Arbor ensemble regularly hits up bebop, hi-life, samba and polyrhythmic sounds, making classification difficult and dwelling on genres fruitless. The group’s multi-layered sound not only borders on Afro-beat, but it laughs at acid jazz and borrows from the improvisational sounds of Konono No.1 and…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 10 Gomez MUSIC If the time-space continuum could be meddled with, and one band had to be selected to be this generation’s Beatles, Gomez wouldn’t be it. No band would, fer chrissakes. But that doesn’t mean that these clever — if not adorable — Brits don’t hold an important rank in the world…
Rinôçerôse
Apple, together with its longtime ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day, is tops at tagging its iTunes/iPod campaign with tracks that scream “UNIQUE!” and “CATCHY!” at equally dangerous decibels. The chosen song needs to sound fringe and club-ready at the very same time, while being disposable like so many ones and zeroes. And by that rationale “Cubicle,” from…
‘Men in Black’
Cedric Biggs usually spends his nights sleeping in Detroit’s Hart Plaza and his days sitting on a stoop in the Greektown restaurant district, where he shakes a Styrofoam cup at passersby, hoping to catch a few coins. As long as the sun is out, he says, there’s typically no hassle. It’s when twilight approaches that…
Floating World
Anathallo writes lush pocket symphonies that make grand twists and take stately, Sufjan Stevens-worthy turns. Maybe it’s a west Michigan thing — like Holland’s favorite son, the Mount Pleasant collective has a penchant for mass-part harmony theatrics and arrangements that settle intricately around detailed storylines and subtle Christian themes. But where Stevens’ record explores the…
Out of the groove
Mellow is an odd dude, a savant of sorts. He’s thickset with deep, dark eyes and is, on one hand, a bit slow on the uptake. But on the other hand, he’s sharp as an audiophile’s needle-drop, sassy even, and can quickly rattle off the day, month and year of any star’s birth or death…
St. Elsewhere
Danger Mouse proved he could flip an unlikely beat and make it sing in 2004, when he sampled the White Album under rhymes from Jay-Z’s Black Album. Then he got even more colorful as the beat doctor for Gorillaz’ second album. Now Danger’s united with hip-hop eccentric Cee-Lo (Goodie Mob) for some knife-edge reassemblage via…
Why journalism is failing us
Last week one of the most incredible gatherings in the history of Detroit happened — three Nobel Peace Prize winners came to Wayne State University for a public conversation on the world’s most important issue. You could have been there, by the way; there was plenty of space left in the auditorium where they spoke.…
Davies’ picture book
Maybe it was getting shot in the leg by a mugger. Maybe it was lowered expectations brought on by the sad sales figures of the last few Kinks albums. Maybe it was the same baby-boomer peer pressure that saw the Stones cough up an album this century that didn’t suck. Whatever the impetus, the man…
Movements of all types
Techno bowl Movement ’06 is around the corner. But Hart Plaza won’t be the only downtown spot teeming with sound systems and toxins-fueled soft-shoe on Memorial Day weekend. Deep Groove Ventures, a Detroit-based production company, has announced plans for Tech-Plosion 2006: A Celebration of Detroit’s Electronic Music Legacy, an event apparently designed to complement the…
All That Is Tied
Is there a pianist out there who gets a bigger kick of clanging a fat chord and letting its sound swell, fill the room and fade away? Or who knows more about the shaded harmonies under his fingertips? Or who is better at stringing together spare notes of a melody, evoking those stock film scenes…
Art Bar
A worm in an apple, a maggot in a bone, a person in the world. What might seem an odd assortment of creatures is beautifully interrelated by the Massachusetts poet Pat Schneider. Her poem suggests that each living thing is richly awake to its own particular, limited world. There Is Another Way There is another…
Backslash
Highbrow, pierced brow — Highbrow culture for a lowbrow art form? Depends on what your definition of lowbrow is, but that’s how needled.com is trumpeting itself: an intellectual blog for connoisseurs of permanent skin art. It’s run by Marisa DiMattia, a heavily inked lawyer and self-proclaimed “tattoo snob” who’s married to acclaimed tattooist Dan DeMattia.…
Rock candy
Scotty Hagen hangs his head at the loss of the Goo Goo Cluster. The tasty mound of caramel, marshmallows, peanuts and chocolate is second on the Grande Nationals bassist’s list of top five favorite candies — yes, he has such a list — surrounded by such similarly vintage classics as Pez, Slo Poke and Razzles…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): I did something today that’s an apt metaphor for the task you have ahead of you. While driving my 1997 Honda Accord on the streets of San Francisco, I had to drive *very* slowly and gradually while ascending a steep hill. I kept my foot on the gas pedal just hard…
Force of nature
Ghosts have a terrifying weight, even as they float among the rafters. When artists show at the Scarab Club, they take on the ghosts of Rivera, Rockwell, Duchamp, and other famous artists whose signatures grace the beams of the venerable club’s second floor. Maybe the weight has been too much. For at least the past…
