Stowaways
Not since World War II has history given Europe the old one-two. First the Fall of the Wall and then the EEC. And when things go weird on the Continent, inevitably, a lot of people hit the road because they know what happens to scapegoats. Stowaways (Clandestins), the first feature from two young Canadian directors,…
The Truman Show
Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) feels trapped, and he can’t quite put his finger on why. Like many people who have never left their hometown, Truman is restless to explore the great, wide world that lies just beyond the boundaries of Seahaven, an impossibly beautiful island community whose very name exemplifies shelter from everything vast and…
Wilde
One good thing about Brian Gilbert’s Wilde is that it doesn’t hedge on any facts of the playwright’s life. In one of the film’s opening scenes, Oscar Wilde is seduced by Canadian Robert Ross and forced to confront his homosexuality. Ross’ nude body is displayed prominently in both Wilde’s sight and ours. We grasp the…
Seoul Garden
The basics of Korean cooking are garlic and sesame. The bicultural selection ranges from broiled eel to tempura and sushi, spicy hot to coolly elegant. Try a raw fish dish or have marinated sirloin (bulgogi) barbecued at your table. A horizon-broadening selection of ten side dishes in wee white bowls accompanies every dinner. Alcohol is…
Taqueria Lupita’s
Though located smack dab on Mexicantown’s gringo-frequented strip, Lupita’s caters to a back-home crowd. Prices are rock-bottom; rancheras dominate the Rockola; vegetarians are out of luck. The pinto beans–not refried–are the best in the city. Carne asada or al pastor are tangy and delicious. No plastic or alcohol.
Hope Floats
That actress Sandra Bullock’s Birdee Pruitt is meant to be a sympathetic character is readily apparent from the opening scene of Hope Floats. She is dragged blindfolded into a television studio set and humiliated before millions, when her husband Bill tells her that he and her best friend are having an affair. And she doesn’t…
KEG-TAPPIN’ GOOD
Detroit via Kalamazoo outfit Fortune & Maltese (and the Phabulous Pallbearers, of course) preach to the gathered keg-tapping throngs tales of lust, Saturday night drag races and unspoiled tales of hot dogs, miniskirts and pizza pie from their pulpit center stage at Phi Tappa Kegga. Konquer Kampus is the band’s full-length manifesto of clean, hedonistic…
Literary Quarterly: Spring 1998
Vol 4, No. 4…
EXTRAECLECTIC
Too often it seems as though pop-rock albums could be retitled Variations on a Song. The charm of Talking With Ed, by Tangerine Trousers, is that it steers well clear of being one of those albums. The laid-back tunes, split between female and male vocals, range from a fun country-alternative track and a saucy number,…
A Mystery
prose garden . . . A Metro Times Literary Quarterly feature in which previously unpublished work by nationally acclaimed auth…
TECHNO TWO-STEP
OK, here’s the title of a new CD, name the artist: Innovator: Rythim is Rythim. If you guessed Little Richard, your music trivia and comedic senses are spot-on, but, unfortunately, dead wrong. Innovator is techno pioneer Derrick May’s new 2-CD release on his Transmat Records. The music encased in the digi-grooves is ethereal, spacey –…
AMBIENT DREAD
The oceanic metaphor echoing from one track to the next of Depths, Windy & Carl’s latest voyage (with titles like “Undercurrent” and “Set Adrift”) recalls a 1978 vinyl slice by minimalist David Behrman, On the Other Ocean (Lovely Music), which involved computer-generated tones in reaction to live soloists. Depths was no doubt put together otherwise,…
GENRE-BOUNCE
If you’re looking for a damn fine night out at the bar without all that pesky expense and travel, Chelsea trio 3 Speed is here to help you lock the door and crack open that bottle on top of the fridge. 3 Speed takes its time working through a set of tunes, finely honed during…
AVANT FUNHOUSE
As you might be able to tell from the title, this record finds local-unto-international acoustic prog-popster Frank Pahl integrating his whacked-out sounds with those of other mischievous musicians, a motley assortment from the Immigrant Suns to the Blue Sun Quintet to Pahl’s home base, Only a Mother. The fact that these collaborators are so different,…
PRETTY RITUALS As you might be able to tell from the title, this record finds local-unto-international PRETTY RITUALS
Ann Arbor’s Morsel has an unusual approach to both electronic and organic music. But the group seems just as savvy manipulating one as the other. On I’m a Wreck, tribal beats pound inside buzzing samples, and doctored vocals pump out of a web of deep bass and airy flutes. The result is no uplifting pop…
REAL LIFE ROCK
The perfectly Midwest feel of this record gives it its coherence. Where rock riffs, country twang and hard-boiled pop spin out of control, the “ex-construction worker” sensibilities bring things back to order. The Holy Cows (of Ann Arbor) offer up an enthusiastic, classic brand of rock that bespeaks a real passion for music with roots.…
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
They said it couldn’t be done, but here it is. Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 fact-ion exposé on a wild weekend in Las Vegas has finally been translated to the silver screen, by none other than that master of cinematic whimsy, Terry Gilliam. Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) aka Thompson and his sidekick Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del…
JAZZ
The idea of a pianoless quartet, proposed by Gerry Mulligan in the early ’50s, foreshadowed such brilliant combinations as Ornette Coleman with Don Cherry, the Sonny Rollins-Jim Hall sessions and angelic “free jazz” units too numerous for the head of a pin. Detroit’s Carl Michel, then, treads on hallowed ground with his latest CD and…
Godzilla
Wonders never cease. In the original Godzilla, a giant lizard was created from the radioactive fallout of Hiroshima. While the film was almost pure camp, the message was clearly serious: Thanks, GI Joe … for nothing. Now we have a new Godzilla, the millennium version, overhyped and undercooked. As this is can-do America, never too…
BEYOND FUNK
With a transfusion of crustaceous soul in the person of Bobby Beyond, the veteran Lovemasters roar back with their best batch of musical mug shots yet. There’s no shortage of traditional stoogezoid crud to shake your Bootsey to, including a double dose of the anthem “Genius From the Waist Down.” But we hear the future…
I Got the Hookup
Percy Miller, the man popularly known to the world as Master P, is something of a bona fide genius. Moving out of New Orleans to California in his early 20s, Miller opened his own record store — the company’s name, No Limit Records, would become prophetic. P the rap entrepreneur eventually turned filmmaker with the…
SPEAKING EASY
Jo Serrapere slinks, shimmies and bops her way through the first half of this record as she pays tribute to pre-Depression era folk blues and emergent jazz musicians. With her engaging and knowing vocal delivery, Serrapere would not be out of place in a Prohibition speakeasy. The lyrics have a ’90s, postfeminist spin that gives…
The Last Days of Disco
If the title of writer-director Whit Stillman’s third film has the ring of a serious examination of a lost civilization (akin to The Last Days of Pompeii), it’s because he treats the decline of disco culture with the seriousness of a verbose, thesis-wielding academic. Stillman’s films, Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of…
WORLDLY EXCURSIONS
This is a musical excursion that has reggae at its heart, but casts an eye to more worldly expressions &emdash; from the Felaesque Afro-beat of “Africa Is Calling” to the Hendrix-like guitar excursion of “Jamaican Nights.” More than stops on a whirlwind tour, these mostly instrumental cuts (featuring saxophones by Moe G and drumming by…
DARKWORLD ALTERNAPOP
On the Wing, the debut album by Motion Control, suggests that the Midwest may be fertile breeding ground for female festival participants. Fronted by singer-songwriter Brooke Ratliff, Motion Control’s album is filled with dark, alternapop ballads with a well-threaded world beat influence. Solid instrumental sounds back Ratliff’s Lorenna McKennittesque vocals. Her voice strains occasionally and…
Jumping the tracks
Of all the kinds of celebrity, one would think literary fame to be the best. After all, the writer can build a stack of books between himself and his public. Not so for Martin Amis. Born into the spotlight of his father, Kingsley Amis, little Marty was destined for the big time. Over a decade…
GOT THAT TWANG
The ongoing rockabilly revival isn’t all about DAs and extroverted couples dancing, you know. Take Detroit’s relative new kids on the rockabilly block, the Starlight Drifters, for example. The band, together a mere year-and-a-half, has managed to create a distinctive sound, reminiscent but not overly reverent toward all things hiccupy and twangy commonly associated with…
On the mend
The narrator of Gayl Jones’ magnificent new novel, The Healing, is Harlan Jane Eagleton, an African-American woman who discovers her ability to physically and spiritually heal herself and others. She tells her story against a backdrop of references to popular culture, sculpting a critical — and dead funny — discourse on identity and global politics.…
FLESH FOR FARFISA
This bassless trio boasts one of the more distinctive sounds on our (or any other) scene. Surf-size guitar, slaphappy organ and manic drums blur into nonstop pop delight, the musical equivalent of a blind-drunk skate date in the garage of some New Orleans frat house. This, their third long-player, sketches an appealing outline, but the…
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About The Waw And The Power Of The Way
“So many Tao Te Chings have appeared or reappeared,” writes poet and sci-fi novelist Ursula Le Guin, “that one begins to wonder if Lao Tzu has more translators than he has readers.” Indeed, I discovered a dozen versions of the ancient Chinese classic just at the Detroit Public Library; still on order is The Tao…
5-A-LIVE
Alt-rock outfit Fat Amy has worked its way out of East Lansing to a place on the first AWARE Records Michigan Compilation to a publishing deal with MCA and a disc on Rubber Records out of Los Angeles. 5-Way Switch is a solid first effort, though it leans a little too heavily on Live for…
Pop-up knowledge
Don’t you hate book reviews that are just a thinly disguised excuse for the reviewer to talk about something other than the subject at hand (which is reviewing a book, of course) — reviews that turn into an occasion for exorcising some private crank of the writer? For example, a piece that instead of discussing…
SURREAL ROCK
A quick diagnosis of the phenomenon that is Twitch: a kinder, gentler Frank Zappa in the House of Freaks to see Captain Beefheart on visiting day. This trio fits 18 songs on this CD, with no title over five syllables (an achievement to be applauded, make no mistake). Deliberately dissonant, a little theatrical and deceptively…
Blowing it
Armond White’s first book, The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shok the World (1995), a collection of articles written over a 10-year period for L.A. Weekly, Emerge, the Village Voice, Film Comment and the now-defunt City Sun, gave the impression that something new was afoot in the long antagonistic relationship between black and…
