In The Flesh
Hentchmen, May 13, Asheville, NC When a Detroit band arrives in Asheville, it’s a big fucking deal. Now, this artsy-touristy mountain burg I call home has a thriving music scene, but there’s no denying the whiff of Motor City exhaust fumes. Such was the case on when the Hentchmen, touring with the Black Keys in…
2005 fiction issue
ENTRY FORM Metro Times invites you to show off your talent. Every year we hold a summer contest for fiction and poetry, and publish the winners in a special issue of the paper. This year we’re offering a new category: McOndo for Americans. Named after Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional village Macondo in One Hundred Years…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): A judge in Los Angeles was peeved when a potential juror let out a loud yawn during the jury selection process. "I’m sorry, but I’m really bored," the man confessed. The judge found him in contempt and fined him $100. Similarly, Aries, the universe will find you in contempt if you…
Mamma jamma
Would it be a grievous understatement to say that Detroit has a serious dearth of bona fidecabaret acts? Alrighty, then. Now, when one of ’em — in this case Sunshine Doray — goes on hiatus for more than a year, the “tee many martoonis” set really feels the absence. The good news for nighthawks is…
Letters to the Editor
Glossing over Wellman Re: “Comrade in arms” (Metro Times, May 18), if hagiography — the lives of the saints — is the most banal form of literature, why shouldn’t we judge cinematic efforts similarly? If all there was to the film Professional Revolutionary: The Life of Saul Wellman was solely a feel-good video for the…
Backslash
Bless me, server, for I have sinned… The World Wide Web can be a dirty, dirty place, bursting with more than its share of all seven deadly sins — and probably some new ones you’d never have thought of, proving that there truly is a porn site for every fetish you can imagine (or wish…
Bob Saget is the devil
A quick Internet search of the name “Bob Saget” yields a staggering number of hits, almost evenly divided between effusive praise and sites claiming that the lanky comedian is in fact the Antichrist set loose on the mortal plane. Could there really be such outrage over the former host of America’s Funniest Home Videos? Indeed,…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat
Wining and refining
Suffice it to say, there are members of metro Detroit’s African-American community who would not consider wine tasting a common activity in urban enclaves. That might be changing. The Mahogany Tasters is a group of Detroit area oenophiles looking to bring wine education to the African-American community. It was formed last year after the African-American…
Art Bar
Inspired by trends in figurative painting — a resurgence in portraiture due in part to the popularity of artists Gerhard Richter, Elizabeth Peyton, John Currin and even Damien Hirst, who has washed his hands of formaldehyde to take on photorealism — the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has announced the premiere of a portraiture competition, the…
The Detroit legends
Many of these guys cut their artistic teeth in Detroit’s West Side neighborhoods. Juan Atkins, who will perform as Model 500 at this year’s festival, spent a lot of time on Seven Mile, producing records at Buy Rite Records that sonically addressed technological progress vs. the realities of the black condition. Kevin Saunderson (see profile…
American Life in Poetry
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of poems have been written to express the grief of losing a parent. Many of the most telling of these attach the sense of loss to some object, some personal thing left behind, as in this elegy to her mother by a Nebraskan, Karma Larsen. Moonflowers Milly Sorensen, January…
State of grace
Kevin Saunderson reclines at his desk, clasping his muscular brown arms behind his head. He’s looking through a window, which frames white and black clouds shifting across a windy Michigan sky. Muted sunlight streams into this small office, on the second floor of a building belonging to Detroit’s Submerge record label. At 40, Saunderson has…
Where’s my line?
About a month ago, local actress Jennifer George did something surprising. After accepting a prominent role in a Detroit production of the internationally award-winning play Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, by Stephen Adly Guirgis, she quit. It was two weeks before the show was to open. On a Tuesday evening, citing creative differences, she walked…
Style station
For almost a year now, Michelle Lobsinger has been quietly staking out the local fashion frontier in her Birmingham boutique Michelle Rachelle; introducing indie lines commonly carried in the Soho boutiques she fell in love with while interning for designer Cynthia Rose in New York City. And paying clients are starting to take notice. Lobsinger,…
Point and crit
Ubuweb.com is an outrageously useful Web site that explores the last 50 years of avant-art through sound, poetry, essays, video and film, all free for the taking. For people on the ragged edge of the marginalized alternative cultures, it’s a dream come true. Things that have been nearly impossible to find since their creation are…
The Jong Show
Is there any reason the precocious daughter of a feminist literary star should publish a novel at 21 and a memoir before most of us land jobs with health insurance? Moreover, is there ever a reason for anyone under AARP age to even consider writing a memoir? You might want to contemptuously chuck Molotovs at…
Talking trash
Jason Polan, the 22-year-old University of Michigan graduate known for an art show in a portable potty last year in Ann Arbor, is getting dirty again and inviting us to dig in. The artist, who commutes between New York and Detroit, recently spent a few days in our city picking up 1,000 pieces of trash,…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 25 Exhibitionist featuring Mark Heggie ART Tattooists are usually the forgotten stepchildren of the art world, but Mark Heggie, an artist at Name Brand Tattoo in Ann Arbor, has broken through to the mainstream. Heggie’s collective work in fine art paintings, illustrations, posters and cards has been known to both delight and sicken…
American showdown
The ultimate allegorical Western makes a return appearance for a new generation of fearmongers. The tale of a vulnerable hero (Gary Cooper) standing up to fight a pack of thugs all by himself was meant to invoke the Communist witch hunts, but it’s surprising how well it holds up as a metaphor for current events.
Media Blackout
It’s the 17-minute flip side of MB34! • Iron Butterfly — In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (Atco) :: Miles Davis, eat your heart out. • Princess — Princess (Tony Chaos) :: A clogged overflowing toilet is more melodic. • Discordance Axis — Our Last Day (Hydra Head) :: The final album by these significant screamaniacs is so techno-guttural it…
By the beat
It’s here, party people: three days of bars, beats and booty. Fuse-In will sprawl over four stages at Detroit’s Hart Plaza, May 28-30. The big names are all ace: They include Mos Def, Richie Hawtin, Terrence Parker and festival producer Kevin Saunderson. But some performers less well-known might be just as good, or better. Here…
Fearless Freaks: The Wondrously Improbable Story of the Flaming Lips
You’ll be hard pressed to find a film that captures the history and the personality of a band more honestly, or more movingly, than Fearless Freaks, director Bradley Beesley’s 14-years-in-the-making documentary on the Flaming Lips. Fearless Freaks is a genuine triumph, far less a boilerplate "band profile" than a fully developed narrative about how a…
Safe sex is more important than civility
Q: I was cruising for sex online and made a date to meet up with two guys for anonymous play. When we arrived at the one guy’s apartment, he asked us if we would fuck him bareback. I said no, but the other guy said he would. The bottom then asked us if we were…
The intercontinentalists
So you’ve looked over the list of performers at Fuse-In and paused at names like Bangkok Impact, Cobra Killer, Luke Eargoggle, Marco Passarani, Jacek Sienkiewicz and Sten. Who are they, where are they from, and what does their music sound like? There are more names, even more obscure: Apparat, Pheek, Phon.o, Serge, DJ TRL and…
Brothers
Hollywood beauty Connie Nielsen returns to her homeland of Denmark for this tense, gut-wrenching drama. Playing a woman who thinks she’s lost her soldier husband in the war in Afghanistan, Nielsen heartbreakingly evokes a complex range of emotions that few of her previous parts have allowed her to explore.
Technical English
Everyone knows that electronic music jargon is blatantly ridiculous and impossible to understand. Admit it, we all have to pretend to know what the next big thing is talking about when we hear, “I thought that knarzy rockno was the deepest shit when I heard it last November, but now it sounds just like IDM…
The right profile
It’s telling that, when young Søren Christensen, the sharp-beaked organist of Danish quartet the Blue Van, is asked what he’d like to explain to Americans about his homeland, he gives a wistful lesson on Freetown Christiania, an independently governed, egalitarian hippie commune by the sea in Copenhagen. The walled-off borough, intersected by the regionally famous…
Layer Cake
California director Matthew Vaughn is clearly trying to relive the thrill of producing his best friend Guy Ritchie’s great British crime adventures, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. But with this effort, Vaughn hits closer to Ritchie’s bomb Swept Away. The acting is decent, but the characters are light as air and unsympathetic,…
Library in limbo
A sense of melancholy hangs in the musty air as Glen Walker walks through Highland Park’s shuttered McGregor Public Library. It’s a sadness that comes from seeing grandeur fall victim to decay. Walker, who worked as the library’s sole maintenance man for 13 years, has watched this architectural gem on Woodward Avenue steadily deteriorate. Even…
Blasphemer purge
A group of Troy residents is seeking to oust City Council members who recently voted against letting a Christian group hold services on the grounds of City Hall as part of the National Day of Prayer. Now, Judgment Day may be nigh. The Troy Committee to Protect Free Speech formed earlier this month with the…
Ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb
Juliette Lewis isn’t really a celebrity, you know. She’s more like the lank-haired girl in gray acid-wash and unbloused high tops: cute enough in the rec room light, but she wouldn’t warrant your Iron Maiden bar mirror money if you met her at a carnival. Even bad girls won’t, but she will. And Lewis’ debut…
Afterglow
You say you want to escape the Groundhog Day grind of 9 to 5? Sick of spending another two hours on the interstate making that commute from Harrison Township to Dearborn? Well! The Fuse-In festival, featuring more than 120 acts on four stages in Hart Plaza, and a vibrant official (and unofficial) after-party scene might…
House of cards
With legal obstacles finally cleared for Detroit’s three casinos to begin construction of permanent facilities, there’s a follow-up question we think is pertinent: What’s to become of the temporary sites? Much to our chagrin, when it comes to two of the casinos, no one seems to have an answer. Will empty hulks be a dark…
Inflammable Material, Nobody’s Heroes, Hanx!, Go For It
Straight outta war-torn Belfast, Stiff Little Fingers, fronted by larynx-shredding vocalist-guitarist Jake Burns, dived headlong into the punk fray in 1978 with a Clash-worthy, neutron bomb of a single, “Suspect Device.” Signing to Rough Trade, the group quickly assembled its debut LP, and Inflammable Material sounds as fresh now as it did in 1979. No…
The Killers vs. Keane
Although it will only earn me the same pathetic stares people reserve for numerologists who count too many bubbles in the wine, I have an obligation to point this out. Two new bands at equal strength on the same bill is reason enough to reach for palpitation medicine. But two new bands at equal strength…
United artistry
With demolition of the Madison-Lenox building begun last week, it seems worthwhile to report what that building’s owners had planned for another Detroit landmark — the United Artists building at 150 Bagley. It is a storied structure. Scouring the Web and old newspaper articles, this is what we found about the history of what has…
The Hard Lessons
No offense to the Funk Brothers, but trundling out Joan Osborne to wail through “Heatwave” for the Sunday evening panini crowd just doesn’t seem that soulful anymore. Now, don’t go getting shitty about the comparison. No one’s saying Gasoline is on par with history’s masters. But hear this: The Hard Lessons’ debut LP pricks skin…
Head cheese
With chunky guitar lines that reprise the sprightly verve of classic snotty chord ’n’ clang dealers — from Buzzcocks to Propaghandi — Chicago’s Lawrence Arms blow doors on their paint-by-numbers peers. With a melodic cushion pierced with witty social and political commentary, they could be the bratty cousins of John Samson’s post-Propaghandi band, The Weakerthans.…
Mighty real
Trained in the ’80s, I learned to be skeptical of representation. But Julie Heffernan can really paint. That alone would be insufficient, but her virtuosity is married to idiosyncratic vision. Old Master figures, Renaissance landscape perspective, and the convincing illusion of Dutch genre painting combines in an effect-driven mannerism that feels natural. Then one feels…
One Cheer for the Free Press
Thanks in large part to excellent reporting by the Detroit Free Press, it’s clear that it might be necessary to support Kwame Kilpatrick for re-election. That is, we may have to support him if one of the other candidates turns out to be Adolf Hitler in disguise, and if ol’ Adolf, who would now be…
Proactive
Water work The Michigan Clean Water Corps wants you! Or, more precisely, it wants your organization. But only if that organization is involved in monitoring the quality of Michigan’s waterways. MiCorps, as it is affectionately known in bureaucratic circles, was established through an executive order issued by Gov. Jennifer Granholm. It is intended to assist…
12″ pop shots
John Arnold Feat. Paul Randolph "Rise Up" Ubiquity Recordings Just in time for summer, third-party co-candidate John Arnold rides dance-floor shotgun with in-demand vocalist-bassist Paul Randolph. This teaser track from the upcoming HVW8 (pronounced “heavyweight”) comp, Music Is My Art, showcases an increasing interest in blending electronic elements with live instrumentation. Part dance, Latin,…
Up in your grill
We love to rend flesh, most of us. Those chisel-shaped incisors at the front of our choppers aren’t designed merely to nibble at lettuce leaves. We don’t need our vestigial fangs, our canines, to tear into hummus or collards; the dual-duty bicuspids behind them do just as well. The nearly flat molars at the back,…
