Sound track to youth
Rock…
Winged Migration
With only a little trickery, this documentary presents a mostly up-close look at, well, winged migration. Full of how-did-they-get-that shots, it makes you see something familiar in a different way, while capturing nature’s enduring grace, mercilessness and mysterious persistence.
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Advising you to be patient is like commanding a bonfire to burn in slow motion. Nevertheless, I am at least going to make the effort. If you would like to place yourself in maximum alignment with cosmic trends, you should find a way to be perfectly content as you watch and…
Go mesmerized
How many times have you heard an unfamiliar album, with no preconceived notions of its contents, and found yourself immediately devoted? It may not have been since you were a child, when you rummaged through your parents’ records and discovered your first Beatles LP. Or perhaps it was when you first moved into your college…
Sister Helen
There’s no shortage of dramatic developments in this 90-minute documentary about a 69-year-old Benedictine nun who runs a home for recovering addicts in the South Bronx, plus a surprising and very moving ending. It’s a tribute to an intrepid soul, minus any maudlin crap and served up straight.
Heroes — Country
I remember sitting cross-legged in front of my parents’ cabinet phonograph; the darkly stained behemoth was always stacked high with classic country albums as my mother hurried about the house. I remember holding the thick, heavy discs of black plastic with grooves like deep rings in the trunk of an ancient tree. I vividly remember…
Freedom fury
For everything there is a season, a time to love, a time for peace and a time to take rifles into your own hands. When it came to abolishing slavery in the mid-1850s, white abolitionist John Brown was convinced blood had to spill, whereas black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, an escaped self-educated slave, considered transforming the…
Irreversible
French director Gaspar Noé’s effectively repulsive piece of work is such a raw and determined outrage that it seems pushy and self-indulgent. It may be philosophically trite and gratuitously over the top, but it also offers a startlingly original method of generating serious empathy for unexceptional characters.
Sunday in the park with Trey — Rock
The din of Joe Cocker’s bass growl fills the beat-up old truck as we pull into Patriarch Park, a nondescript playground where little kids frolic on swings and suburbanite teens come because they don’t have anywhere else to trip. Next to me, enjoying a smoke above the roar of an old muffler, is the stuff…
May 7-13, 2003
9 FRI • THEATRE Manny and the Mirror: A Rock Opera — What better place to birth a rock opera than Motown? Manny and the Mirror has returned to the Detroit stage, charged and ready to roll after a short sojourn in an extended form. The opera, which tells of the unusual relationship between a…
Blossoms of Fire
Myths about the women of southern Oaxaca, Mexico have conjured notions of Eden and the existence of a matriarchal utopia. Determined to crack open the reality beneath the region’s fanciful aura, documentary filmmakers Maureen Gosling and Ellen Osbourne try to project a more realistic picture on-screen.
Quelling Springsteen’s The Rising — Rock
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising came out almost a year ago. So what? It was the first major work in almost six years from a man who is perhaps the greatest American recording artist of the last quarter century, a work that admittedly, if not explicitly, dealt with the greatest American tragedy…
Witness for the prosecution
FBI expert says what looks like a tourist video is really terror "tradecraft."…
XX/XY
Mark Ruffalo stars in this then-and-now tale of the volatile sexual and romantic relationship between a businessman and a couple of Sarah Lawrence girls. It moves at a snail’s pace through love triangle motions so obligatory and expected that there’s little reason to stick around to see what happens.
White people, black music
Hip hop…
Officials like Karr crash
Jubilant Detroit and Wayne County officials gave each other hugs and high fives Friday as they stood in front of a house owned by one of slumlord Ernest Karr’s companies. The officials were at 19153 Cardoni on Detroit’s east side for a news conference trumpeting an April 25 decision by Circuit Court Judge Michael Sapala,…
Breathe
Hip hop…
Support our troop trains
Patriotic hyperbole is the tactic du jour for garnering public support — no matter how insincere the sentiments. This transparent strategy has been employed by lots of individuals (George W. Bush) and institutions (Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc.). Now you can add the Michigan Department of Transportation to the list. For more than a decade,…
Breaking the sister habit
Q: I am a 19-year-old guy with a problem. When I was 15, I was a lonely virgin who had never even kissed a girl. My sister, who is a year younger than me, had never had a boyfriend. One day we started talking about this and we decided to practice kissing on each other.…
Mayoral labor pains
Is the Kwame Kilpatrick administration retaliating against union leaders who urged their members to reject the City of Detroit’s recent contract offer? The mayor’s office says no, but you’d have a hard time convincing members of AFSCME Local 312 that City Hall isn’t applying some punitive muscle to the malcontents. About 45 workers picketed the…
Raving madness
Local party promoters felt a collective chill last week when President George “I’m not a real fighter pilot but I play one on TV” Bush signed into law what’s commonly known as the RAVE Act. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden, D-Delaware, allows law enforcement to hold promoters/ planners personally responsible for drug use…
Bubbling under
15 Detroit bands/ artists you should know about….
Nightmare after Christmas
It’s Christmas all year long at 3417 Cochrane St., where the Abandoned Structure Squad found the latest gem in Detroit’s gleaming crown. Apparently, taking down strings of lights is sort of pointless when the rest of the house is falling apart. And this house isn’t the only one. Cochrane Street is lined with comparable wrecks…
Waxing on Detroit
A hands-on guide to Detroit-area vinyl stores….
Letters to the Editor
Poetic thoughts Great piece, Jeremy Voas, on the Prez (Screed, Metro Times, April 30-May 6). Somewhere in Detroit someone is a little less alone in resisting the Axis of Drivel that threatens to engulf us all. Last weekend I was at the Los Angeles Book Festival attending a symposium which included the Nicaraguan poet Gioconda…
Corpus selecti
Art worlds collide in Detroit Artists Market’s new show….
Linkin Park’s Meteora — Rock
Oh, how I wanted to love this album. In my dreams, I envisioned it all — taking the CD home from the store, removing the cellophane that surrounded it, cuddling with it by the warm fire, starring into the jewel case longingly, knowing that for that moment it was just us, just me and Meteora.…
Runoffs, this instant
Last month, one of my brightest former students came to see me; she was disillusioned. After some time working for Detroit City Council, she was navigating between cynicism and despair. “I think I better get out of this before I become the ashtray man,” she sighed. Gil Hill, she explained, had an aide whose sole…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
It’s Christmas all year long at 3417 Cochrane St., where the Abandoned Structure Squad found the latest gem in Detroit’s gleaming crown. Apparently, taking down strings of lights is sort of pointless when the rest of the house is falling apart. And this house isn’t the only one. Cochrane Street is lined with comparable wrecks…
Kwame’s wake-up
Detroiters have managed to get the full attention of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick like never before — at least for the moment. Last week, a handful of Detroit voters sent a shock wave through City Hall when they rejected Gil Hill, the mayor’s preferred candidate for an empty City Council seat, and chose JoAnn Watson. And…
Let’s get greasy
A little neighborhood place with all the virtues and vices of down-home cooking. Entrees include chicken (fried, smothered or barbecued), pork chops (ditto) country-fried steak, catfish, perch, wing-dings, shrimp, meat loaf and ribs. All the usual soul-food side dishes can be found here. If you don’t want gravy, be sure to say so.
Amateurs write, like, prose
The “Everyone’s A Critic” contest exceeded expectations on all levels. We received more than 100 entries in the older-than-18 category, and a dozen entries from those under 18. The high percentage of quality work presented was damn near startling; many entries that clearly needed a good deal of work still had heart. The subject matter…
Mutants unite!
Geezer: HHH / Weezer: HHHH
The leadoff hit of the summer lineup, is one of the most anticipated comic-to-movie transformations ever. Directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men), this carnival of mutant souls and superheroes holds up the mirror of "difference" to an uncomfortably multicultural America.
Canned art
If one lived at once like an eye opening on a full field of light — If the eye itself was a world at the speed of light out every direction from every direction — Taken from a musically charged poem by Detroit poet Kevin Rashid, these lines appear on the latest…
Levity
Veteran comedy writer Ed Solomon has plotted a subtly ironic, modern redemption fable for his directorial feature debut — with Morgan Freeman, Holly Hunter and Billy Bob Thornton (as a secular monk inwardly compelled toward salvation even as he denies it).
