May 14-20, 2003
15 THU • MUSIC Damo Suzuki — Any music elitist worth his weight in 7-inch vinyls will tell you that the band Can was one of the greatest semi-underground rock bands of all time. So you may want to know that former Can lead singer (and poet) Damo Suzuki is making his way to D-town.…
The Shape of Things
What evils are normal? It’s hard to believe, but Neil LaBute (Your Friends and Neighbors and In the Company of Men) seems to be getting even more insidious. His latest embraces the morally despicable, disheartening and intriguing elements of human nature — with Paul Rudd and Rachel Weisz.
When crime pays
Macomb County embezzler cons his employers, then the system….
Te Amo (Made in Chile)
Tattoo, a Love Story
HHHH
Madstone Theaters present two indie films for hungry eyes, May 15-28. In Te Amo, rude teenagers trail disrespect behind them as they drive mom’s Mercedes through urban Chile. Then Tattoo, a Love Story is a felicitous and actually feasible "opposites first irritate, then share the seat of a Harley" film.
Pressure drop
Adult. redefines ‘dance punk’ on Anxiety Always….
Sweet Sixteen
Director Ken Loach’s neo-realist film transcends melodrama into true modern tragedy with the more bitter than sweet story of a hard-knock Scottish "wee man" from a working-class Glasgow suburb who’s fated for the domestic catastrophe he finally plays out on his titular birthday.
Demolition dollar wads
Demolition costs have spiked upward under the Kwame Kilpatrick administration, according to budget documents the mayor’s office has forwarded to the City Council. The average cost of tearing down a vacant structure in Detroit has gone from $6,900 in fiscal 2000-01 — under the Dennis Archer administration — to as much as $16,500 last year.…
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary
Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin’s version of Dracula, like F.W. Murnau filtered through David Lynch, is a throwback to the days when horror movies had a certain visual grandeur. And while one may miss a modern frisson or two, there’s still a great deal of dreadful beauty to relish.
Banished for a day
Media sources tell News Hits that Dickens, spokesman for the Kwamster, ejected a UPN 50/ CBS 62 cameraman from a press conference last week in retaliation for the station airing a segment featuring the mayor. Tara Wall, station spokeswoman and talk show host, confirms that her cameraman was kicked out. The ouster stemmed from an…
Sweet Sixteen
Sweet Sixteen ends up as an ironic title. This is more a bitter than sweet story of a hard-knock Scottish “wee man” from a working-class Glasgow suburb who’s fated for the domestic catastrophe he finally plays out on his titular birthday. When we first meet 15-year-old Liam (Martin Compston), his shenanigans — aided and abetted…
Underground triple-threat
Comic-creator superheroes from the depths of Hamtramck….
Pie are squared
In this week’s update on Detroit’s turtle graffiti saga, Detroit Artists Market Director Aaron Timlin was hit in the face with a dairy-free pie last week, at the opening of the gallery’s “Selecti” exhibit. The gallery raised $550 in a raffle for pie-throwing rights; gallery board member Tracy Lark won. The event was an attempt…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Whenever I hike up to the ridge near my house, I feel a surge of admiration for an oak tree I pass. Unlike its companions, which are pointed skyward, it’s growing sideways out of the hillside. I call it the Aries oak, because it reminds me of what you’re like when…
Fulsome prison blues
News Hits reported months ago that a record number of people entered Michigan prisons last year. We also said that the Michigan Department of Corrections hadn’t a clue why this was, but was busy studying the issue. Russ Marlan, MDOC spokesman, now tells us there are several reasons why MDOC admitted 11,000 new inmates in…
Pick a card, any card
Q: Being a big fan of your book, Skipping Towards Gomorrah, you can no doubt imagine how delighted I was to read all about William J. Bennett’s gambling “problem.” America’s No. 1 moral crusader lost millions of dollars in Las Vegas casinos. I realize that it’s not cool to laugh at the misfortunes of others,…
Well done
How do you like your building cooked? This charred eight-unit apartment dwelling at 3511-13 Third St. is a shell of what it used to be. It slouches on the corner of Third Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, sandwiched between vintage liquor bottles, single-serving tennis shoes and discarded doll heads. Raymond Hines, owner of…
Bluegrass home companion
Roots champion Ricky Skaggs is country music’s past, present and future….
Letters to the Editor
Not a black thing, Part 1 Noah B. Stephens’ article (“White people, black music,” Metro Times, May 7-13) does not so much expose a cultural phenomenon as it catalogues the social naïveté of a group of white college students. His article straddles the precipice of a broader generalization about white kids who happen to like…
Choosing the next president
I have every right to rent a tuxedo and a top hat, shove all my cash into my cummerbund, and walk the meanest streets of Detroit’s Cass Corridor carrying a half-filled martini glass in the wee hours of the morning. Nevertheless, the intelligent would see this as a bad idea, and few or none would…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
How do you like your building cooked? This charred eight-unit apartment dwelling at 3511-13 Third St. is a shell of what it used to be. It slouches on the corner of Third Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, sandwiched between vintage liquor bottles, single-serving tennis shoes and discarded doll heads. Raymond Hines, owner of…
Flowers of evil
There are lots of ways to look at David Deutsch’s “New Paintings and Photographs” at Susanne Hilberry Gallery. There’s the simple fact of their content, based upon a look at the evidence of people’s private lives. Both the photographs — a wall of 120 8 1/2 inch-by-12 1/2 inch black-and-white prints and six large gelatin…
To record and reveal
Even as the aftermath of war continues to shock and unsettle, dialogue about what is happening falls into a meaningless buzz: news, pictures, protest, conflict, fear, death. Answering the need for an audible voice, poets organize, as Poets Against the War (www.poetsagainstthewar.org), for example, where the unspoken challenge is to be anti-war and true to…
Open cinema
Downtown is rising from the ashes, slowly but surely — OK, sometimes more slowly than surely, but who’s counting? Certainly not the Detroit Filmmakers Coalition, which is celebrating its 10-year anniversary (coming up in September) by moving from its off-the-beaten-track digs on Library Street to a new storefront in the Book Building. Currently littered with…
American Life
The Mother of (re)Invention might’ve better served her sucklings by actually releasing her phony mp3 files instead of the actual American Life tracks. Hot on the heels of yet another film flop, a withdrawn music video and a showdown with freeloading Kazaa-nauts that ended up like a Revenge of the Nerds finale, it’s no wonder…
Grunge survivors
Despair not. Though we are subjected to the villainous drivel that drips from mainstream radio and soils our spirits, we can be cleansed. Though we may be stricken deaf and left blind by the devils that rule the airwaves, take heart, brothers and sisters, for the gods of rock hath bequeathed us the Melvins. Or…
Graphic dissidence
Open the book. Turn the page. Turn the book horizontal so the Earth draws closer to us — then there’s a city, just awakening, wiping the nighttime from its eyes. We’re introduced to a little boy fashioning a red mask and pressing it to his face excitedly. His mother is taking him to the “Classic…
Campbell’s kid
Unlike most souls who spent decades, sometimes entire lifetimes, fumbling about in search of their life’s calling, Michael Kallio figured his out pretty early on. “I saw Star Wars when I was 6 1/2 and knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” says the local filmmaker. “And from there I…
Boring and correct
Not to oversell it or anything, but this is an important book, one worthy of rank alongside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in how it should galvanize public attention and move the vox populi to some sort of action. Is anybody listening?Its author, Diane Ravitch, deserves the attention. She’s a historian of education and research professor…
Squeezed and pleased
Only Fresh Lemons mixes up a mad, juicy evening of satire….
Night of the old-timers
Christopher Guest (whose Spinal Tap has become iconic, even prophetic, in metal circles) spoofs New Christy Minstrels-type ’60s folk in a manner similar to Tap’s skewering of Uriah Heep-inspired prog-metal. The cast captures a group of once-revered musicians who had caught their time, and that time has stood still.
Foul play?
Defense accuses government of underhanded tactics….
Only the Strong Survive
The prevailing mood of this documentary, by Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, is celebratory of the old soul singers of the ’50s and ’60s, particularly those associated with the Memphis-Stax sound — and it isn’t about to let in too much downer material to spoil the fun.
