He’s so sorry
Mitch Albom must have spent much of his brief paid suspension hanging out in cut-rate delis, because the Sunday column that marked his return to print was jam packed with cheap cheese and rancid baloney. News Hits isn’t certain what turned our stomachs most about the piece in the Free Press — Mitch’s absolute refusal…
Letters to the Editor
Paper won’t fold Jack Lessenberry speculated in last week’s Metro Times that The Detroit News will be closed in three years (“Our changing newspaper world,” Metro Times, April 27). Nothing could be further from the truth. The Joint Operating Agreement that allows The News and the Detroit Free Press to share business operations guarantees that…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
Choosing Michigan’s future, for dummies
Here’s a widely held local belief, half of which is dangerous myth: Detroit is a cesspool of urban and social blight that is collapsing toward receivership; the rest of the state, however, is doing just peachy, though most of the nation doesn’t know it because of all the negative media coverage centered on Detroit. Unfortunately,…
A new breed of Panther
Sitting outside a run-down barbershop on Detroit’s West Side, Malik Shabazz is in his usual Sunday spot, serving up home-cooked barbecue and laying groundwork for the revolution he envisions. Even when wearing sweats and kicking back in a lawn chair, calling out to the folk in cars that slow when passing by, Shabazz radiates charisma.…
Budget overhaul
In a normal budget year, the process works like this: Detroit’s mayor presents his budget for the upcoming fiscal year to the City Council, which holds hearings that focus on the operations, expenditures and revenues of each department. The council makes minuscule amendments — usually about 1 percent of the total spending package — and…
Brush with history
At first, the Abandoned Structure Squad gave this roofless wonder at 205 Alfred St., in Brush Park, our usual treatment — a few angry quotes from neighbors here, some sarcastic commentary there. In this town, we thought, there’s nothing all that remarkable about a beautiful mansion fallen into ruin. We were wrong. “The history of…
Blah, blah, blah
Not to devalue pussy in any way, but call us pussies if you want. See, we here at MT have decided to move our own Metro Times Music Awards show, which we hyped to happen on May 14. Well, now it’s going down in the fall, November, specifically. Why, you might ask? Well, call it…
Proactive
Riveting arts — This column doesn’t usually spill much ink in the direction of the arts, but we’re willing to make an exception for something as worthy as the 8th annual Detroit Worker Writer and Artist Festival taking place Saturday, May 7. What caught our attention was a flier for the event, which declares: “The…
Media Blackout
It’s not over! It’s never over! You’re the disease! And I’m the MB31! • George P. Cosmatos R.I.P. (1941-2005) :: First he directed Rambo. Next he directed Cobra. Then he made history when he directed one of the 10 greatest Westerns of all time, Tombstone. • The Raveonettes — Pretty In Black (Columbia) :: They’re…
Backslash
Libation publication — We here at Metro Times understand the true key to creative and artistic excellence. Perseverance? Nope. Voracious ambition? Nuh-uh. The driving force behind all successful writers, artists and musicians? It’s drinking! Duh! Just ask Hunter S. Thompson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, just about any great musician … shall we go on? For years,…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The planning for a typical wedding lasts from 7 to 12 months. Getting ready for the birth of a child usually requires every minute from the time people find out they’re pregnant until the delivery day. I foresee you experiencing an event in early 2006 that will resemble both of these…
Contrived cool
A while back, I returned to Detroit, my former hometown, for a holiday visit. One of my first stops was the newly reopened lobby of the Guardian Building. It was there, amid the jewel-toned tiles and glittering metal gate, that I was accosted. As is always the case when one is blindsided, the particulars are…
The lady upstairs goes down on me
Q: I am a 25-year-old SWM who lives in a large apartment complex. Over the past several months, the woman who lives upstairs from me has fallen into the habit of coming downstairs once or twice a week and giving me a blow job. She seems fairly normal, and is about 10 years older than…
Club in, club out
We have been practicing being everywhere at once. Time-traveling into the past has been fun, lingering in the power and the glory of Detroit’s vast musical underground; less so the near-future, where we alternately bite our fingernails and try to chill as we count down the hours, days and weeks until Fuse-In ’05. But we…
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate Though many of us were taught that poems have hidden meanings that must be discovered and pried out like the meat from walnuts, a poem is not a puzzle, but an experience. Here David Baker makes a gift to us through his deft description of…
Lore & gore
Murder, destruction and mayhem wait at your fingertips. What a wonderful feeling of power. Oh, to be godlike. Thus, the thematic thread that runs through God of War. Based thoroughly on Greek mythology, it follows the ruthless Spartan warrior, Kratos, through a twisting tale of vengeance. Kratos is a lean, tattooed killing machine, with an…
Makeshift elegance
Carolyn “Diamondancer” Ferrari is a poet. She talks rapidly and emotionally, sometimes with her hands, and her words are strung together like pretty little beads on a necklace. It’s fitting, then, that her jewelry is crafted with the expression and detail of an intricate poem, born out of necessity and a stroke of serendipity. Two…
Folk this city
The prospect of fame, or “making it” in the music business, is something Audra Kubat’s been thinking about a lot lately. About a year ago, the singer-songwriter left Detroit to try to step into the limelight in New York City. “I don’t know how long I can go on working as hard as I am…
Dyson disses Cosby cause
In his most recent book, author and Detroit native Michael Eric Dyson — aka the No. 1 “hip-hop intellectual” — wants to know Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? Since Dyson makes it clear from Page 1 that he thinks Cosby’s well-publicized attacks on the black poor are…
Adult. grows up?
It stands for Death Unto My Enemies,” Adult.’s Adam Lee Miller says of the title of the band’s new EP, D.U.M.E. His comment seems odd because watching him tip back in his chair in his sawdust-scented, recently purchased Detroit home and studio, it’s hard to imagine him or his wife, Nicola Kuperus, having a negative…
Sober origins
Actual conversation overheard at Los Galanes, May 5, 2003. “Sho, what’s Shinco de Mayo mean anyway? Whassit for? “Dunno. Hey, we need more margaritush!” Perhaps the Irish feel vindicated, as they now have another ethnicity to commiserate with. I don’t have a lick of Irish in me, but if I did, I’d probably be really…
Head cheese
You could say that Atlanta’s Mastodon smashes to bits the extreme metal mold. Like peers Dillinger Escape Plan, Mastodon’s testes-shriveling bottom-end serves as a leap-off point for a din that mixes the prog sense and technical wizardry of, dare we say, King Crimson, with the blunt face-blast of Slayer. Yet their ear-bending time changes and…
From Jerusalem to Dearborn
Even in a crowded downtown area, a museum is usually a giant concrete-and-marble palace set on what seems like an acre of land. Getting to the front entrance is supposed to be a sort of metaphysical journey, like a trip down the aisle to an altar. The idea is that by the time you’ve walked…
Gawky rock
Where I come from isn’t all that great/My automobile is a piece of crap/My fashion sense is a little wack/And my friends are just as screwed as me. Weezer’s been writing guitar anthems to the geek race since 1992, so, from the power chords to the sentiment, “Beverly Hills” is nothing new. Still, as the…
Crossing boundaries
In 2000, video and performance artist Nick D’Angelo culminated his graduate studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art with a painstaking final project. In the video “I’m Sorry Britney Spears,” the artist, clad in a diaper and long curly blonde wig, dances haltingly to “Baby One More Time” while desperately and repeatedly wailing “I’m sorry, Britney!”…
Living protest
Ready? Here’s how it went. Several years back, Utah Phillips — folksinger, storyteller, raconteur, 51-year card-carrying member of the International Workers of the World, and ceaseless labor advocate — wrote a song called "The Orphan Train." "The Orphan Train" grew out of Phillips’ conversations with the now-grown kids who’d been shipped out West between the…
The king of sandwiches
A few years ago, a traveling version of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival came to town and set up shop at Chene Park. It was the genuine article, a live sampler of Nawlins music, culture, art and food. There were crawfish pies — the real deal; killer gumbo, dark and thickened with filé…
XXX: State of the Union
XXX: State of the Union 2 stars Ice Cube has the sneer and the biceps, but he still falls short of being a convincing action hero in this sequel to Vin Diesel’s “extreme” secret-agent flick. State of the Union boasts a slew of cool explosions and a surprisingly left-wing plot, but in the end, Cube…
Our major export
Bullshit, as a topic, is getting a lot of attention lately. Renegade magicians Penn & Teller just started their new season with the cable series Bullshit!, in which they debunk such energetic disseminators as PETA and the recycling movement. Jon Stewart has become an enormous star for doing the same thing to politicians. The word…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 4 Brighton Beach Memoirs THEATER Neil Simon’s quirky New York humor has been an American favorite for years. The playwright’s award-winning works often draw from his own life experiences as a young Jewish man trying to find his place in ’40s New York. And whether on Broadway or in the film adaptations of…
The accidental ornithologist
Judy Irving’s intimate portrait of a sweet-natured hermit and a flock of wild parrots in San Francisco earns its sentimentality, becoming an invaluable testament of human kindness. Surprisingly engaging and thoroughly charming, her feel-good documentary does something quite remarkable: It makes you happy you saw it.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Alex Gibney’s engrossing documentary lays out the particulars of the Enron scandal in fascinating, sordid detail. What emerges is not so much anti-conservative, anti-corporate screed as it is a fascinating look at ambition, greed and power run amok.
The Last Laugh
German director F. W. Murnau’s 1924 silent film wasn’t the first to use a freely mobile camera and expressionistic backdrops, but it was the most influential, one where all the directorial flourishes served to tell the tale, presenting a coherent intensity and gloom. The story is very simple, telling of a proud doorman at a…
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The film adaptation of Douglas Adams’ 1979 novel follows the adventures of Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), a rather ordinary bloke who discovers that aliens intend to destroy the Earth to make way for an intergalactic freeway. Rescued in the nick of time, whisked aboard a Vogon spacecraft, he and a group of heroes zip from…
Palindromes
Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) invites you to partake in his ever-bleaker view of humanity. This blacker-than-black comedy follows the grotesque misadventures 13-year-old Aviva, a naïve young girl who wants to have a baby. Played by seven actors of varying race, age, gender and appearance, she partakes in a grim American fairy tales: one…
House of D
If it were somehow possible to look past Robin Williams’ performance as a mentally challenged janitor, House of D could be seen as a saccharine yet creative coming of age film, hardly perfect but enjoyable enough. David Duchovny’s fist stab at directing and writing a feature takes on the story of an almost teen who…
Color, flavor & fire
Bright colors, rich flavors, exotic aromas. With more than 150 items on its menu, Ashoka wanders from the North to the South, with more legume-based recipes and fiery spice blends. There are even sections of the menu devoted to Indian-Chinese food, a style with a following in India. Full-service bar.
