Pitch’d
COULD-BE-BETTER DAYS Arguably the best club night Detroit’s had in a long time, Saturday night’s "Go Deep" at Club Better Days, is taking an unplanned spring vacation, as Better Days has been closed down indefinitely following a police raid two Fridays ago during another promoters’ regular Friday night party. "Go Deep" resident DJ Mike Clark…
Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
Welcome to May 19, the pop culture equivalent of D-Day. So a few questions answered before anything else. After all the carefully stoked anticipation-hysteria, is The Phantom Menace an earth-shattering, second coming experience? No. Is it a good movie, as solid and entertaining as the other three Star Wars episodes? Definitely yes. For those few…
Food stuff
PRESERVE THIS! Food preservation has come a long way in the 3,000 years since Andes Indians dried their potatoes for leisurely winter consumption. We’ve progressed too, it seems, from our cockeyed belief in decades past that chemical preservatives act in the body as they do in food – to preserve tissues and help us live…
Black Mask
There is one intriguing statement that producer Tsui Hark (A Better Tomorrow) makes about Black Mask. "Love," he says, "is very difficult to express in Chinese culture, so in my films I like to have a romantic touch where non-humans look for love." With the nostalgic movements of a subjective camera, Wong Kar-Wai and John…
Society of the spectacle
Thanks to Marilyn Manson and video games, television no longer has to take all the heat from those who think sex and violence are born out of the entertainment industry, rather than out of people. As it is, television is much too busy being inundated with amateur video footage to be bothered. Most reality shows…
This is how we do it
Partly a compendium of biographical sketches, partly a social-political history of the last half of the 20th century in America and partly a consumer’s guide to recommended recordings, A Change is Gonna Come is a very detailed, heartfelt, sometimes inspirational and sometimes annoying book. It is, in its author’s words, "my attempt to help renew…
Return of the iron horse?
Railroad lover Peter Maiken, who grew up in the Midwest half a century ago, recalls the joy of traveling by train. Just going to the bustling station was a thrill, says the 64-year-old retiree, now living in southern Wisconsin. Now it could happen again, in light of a new proposal to bring the iron horse…
Bitches, hos and strongblackwomen
If a black, male, Gen-X journalist can respectfully say so, it appears that feminist thought in the ’60s and ’70s was more easily defined than it is in the ’90s. For today’s young African-American women, the clarity of feminist-womanist philosophy is clouded by the conflicted doctrines of hip-hop culture. Feminism, in theory, requires strength and…
Cuss fuss redux
A Macomb Community College professor suspended for cursing in class and related matters is back to square one after suffering a setback in federal court. John Bonnell, an English professor for 32 years at MCC, filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the college after being suspended with pay indefinitely in February. Earlier this month, a…
Orpheus rocks
As in a standard thriller, what moves the plot in Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, is death. Oh, not any kind of death, mind you, but the earth-splitting, rolling-thunder, gasping and cracking kind; an ass-whipping, merciless eviction notice from the skies; a celestial rave party gone boffo; the final supernova exploding…
Gunning for deer
A proposal to use hunters to thin deer herds in some southeast Michigan parks sparked heated debate at a public meeting held last week in Oakland Township. After a yearlong study, the Wildlife Management Advisory Committee for the Huron-Clinton Metroparks recommends that deer at three parks be killed to deal with what the committee calls…
Shakin’ moneymakers
Popular music in the 20th century has been defined by its own constant reinvention, a process which has only accelerated as the century has drawn to an end. But perhaps nowhere more than in popular music have we allowed this reinvention to proceed so completely under the auspices of its own media hype. Countless stories…
Sustainable reality
In the wake of a mega-mortgage company’s collapse earlier this year, some members of a Detroit task force studying the issue fear that more than 3,000 rental properties could end up in the hands of another company unable to handle them. The task force, which includes city officials, representatives of nonprofit groups and residents of…
Acoustic Swing
Cross Django Reinhardt with Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks and you might come up with the oddly effective mix of jazz and vaudeville that the Asylum Street Spankers purvey. It is always difficult to consider musical clowning an art, but this is one of the few bands — Manhattan Transfer and the aforementioned Dan…
Prose garden …
Babyprints by Michael Salinger The girl was making baby footprints on the passenger side window. She contrived a fist and pressed the pinky side of her right hand against the cool wet glass leaving the impression of a 2-1/2 inch sole stamped, dripping in the condensation, then she took her thumb and added toes. The…
Mixed Results
In today’s remix culture, there is no better subject or subjector than Japan’s Cornelius. Last year’s American debut, Fantasma, somehow managed to rearrange seemingly every possible musical genre into a dizzying blur of pop wizardry. Cornelius turns the studio into an amusement park for one heck of a wild romp. Cartoon themes, the Clash, Bach,…
Who do you love?
Norene Cashen Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs I love Lester Bangs because he fooled me into wanting to write about rock. But with this book as a standard, I’ll never be able to do it. Early Work 1970-1979 by Patti Smith For those too young to experience Patti Smith during this high…
Art Trippers
Good omens haunt the record shops when not one but two records by Japan’s masterful and mystical musical travelers, Ghost, arrive simultaneously. Ghost’s mixture of cosmic Krautrock, medieval song forms, ethnic psychedelia and fragile balladry has placed the group at the forefront of underground sounds ever since its 1990 debut. For this set of recordings,…
Literary Quarterly: Summer 1999
This is how we do it Review by Richard C. Walls Reconsidering 40 years of great black music in the U.S.A. Bitches, hos, and strongblackwomen Review by Khary Kimani Turner Essays on rap mysogyny and desire by a hip-hop feminist. Orpheus rocks Review by Chris Tysh The world goes pop, with death as designated driver.…
Strengths In Numbers
Interesting fact about Reykjavik: Even in the biting-cold dead of winter, you won’t find snow on the Reykjavik sidewalks. Heat from the lava boiling under the surface of Iceland — despite its name a volcanic island — is harnessed via steam, and piped underneath the city streets, keeping them perennially warm. Similarly, in the glacially…
RAIN OF DIAMONDS
Shifting creative gears is no problem for Frank Pahl. He moved like lightning from the wildly experimental country dirges of his full-length In Cahoots to this, a random storm of résumé items, which includes many of his own compositions for theater. Mention of ukuleles, whistles, bagpipes, animal sounds, glockenspiels, bike horns, banjos, bells, chimes, and…
Silently Screaming
Listen carefully, for after almost three years of silence and the murmur that was Songs for a Dead Pilot (1997 EP), Minnesota’s indie-acclaimed Low brings us yet another quietly provocative album, Secret Name. Recorded with Steve Albini, husband-and-wife team guitarist-vocalist Alan Spearhawk and drummer-vocalist Mimi Parker have perfected the art of dramatic tension. Having taken…
Deli-fresh chatter
This chattery Eastern Market deli serves lunch on weekdays and lunch and breakfast on Saturdays to a loyal crowd. The customers are happy because they’re eating really good food, and there’s something about sharing tables with who-knows-whom that brings out the best in people. Both breakfast and lunch menus offer up original combinations of fresh,…
Musical Abduction
Hey! This performance was recorded live at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival in 1973! Not only that, it was preserved by Detroit’s favorite rock ’n’ roll revolutionary, John Sinclair. While the old White Panther’s hair is turning gray down in New Orleans of late, Sinclair’s document of Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Orchestra…
CAVIAR & CHITLINS, INDEED!
While the Atomic Fireballs may have been the beneficiary of swing music, retro culture and roots music reclamation’s extended stay in our collective cultural consciousness, they neatly sidestep it all with this — I’m just gonna say it now — sick, excitable jump blues slab, Torch This Place. Sick in the dope sense, sick in…
Down Boyz
By breaking the barriers between rock and rap, the Down Boyz eschewed the norm playing shows with punk and rock bands, not just rap, reaching out to a bigger audience. White boy hip hop with a twist of old school, Run-DMC hardcore guitar, 808 bass and beats that will make your whole street bounce!
Loverboy in the ring
Loverboy Steve stalks into a wrestling ring wearing tights, a loud, jumbled, rainbow-colored vest, and a pink feather boa around his neck. The PA blares out Living Colour’s "Cult of Personality," and the crowd starts chanting "Urkel!" — his hated nickname. He grabs the mike from the emcee. "Stop calling me Urkel!" he shouts. They…
Election
Finally, MTV Films and director Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth) give us what we’ve always wanted: a coming-of-age satire, not fluff, not sentimental mishmash, not absurdly idealized characters. Her name is Tracy Flick. She’s bold, unapologetic, vindictive. Don’t be fooled by her blue, unflinching eyes; don’t trust her rehearsed smile; don’t underestimate the power of her…
In quest of plot
The Lizard of Fun is twitching with excitement, holding a pair of Phantom Menace advance tickets in its paws. It looks at them with a mixture of reverence and frustration. "I can’t stand it anymore," it says, its eyes bugging out like Jar Jar Binks. "I’ve gotta know everything." "You can’t wait even just a…
Lovers of the Arctic Circle
The idea that love originates somewhere outside of us is an old one. Whether because of destiny or simply Cupid’s errant arrow, the travails of star-crossed lovers are a storytelling staple. In our more cynical times, this usually ends up as high-end Harlequin mush such as Message in a Bottle, but occasionally filmmakers are willing…
Do the clothes have an emperor?
Increasingly, when I inspect Our Newspapers, works of journalistic art that they are, it seems they treat most of what really matters the way Victorian novels did sex. Lots of fluttering around the edges, but the main issues are never quite addressed. Now one of the advantages of being a pariah, and being beyond hoping…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The idea that love originates somewhere outside of us is an old one. Whether because of destiny or simply Cupid’s errant arrow, the travails of star-crossed lovers are a storytelling staple. In our more cynical times, this usually ends up as high-end Harlequin mush such as Message in a Bottle, but occasionally filmmakers are willing…
