Playing it unsafe
The men begin parking along the quiet residential street in Redford around 9 on Saturday nights — and the last leave around 6 Sunday mornings. In the intervening hours, some 40 to 85 men pay $12 to engage in orgy-style sex in the basement and ground-floor rooms of the ranch-style home. There are few rules.…
Instant hope
In much cheerier election news, we direct your attention to the burg of Ferndale, where kudos are much deserved. Thanks to a group of local activists who campaigned like hell, voters there last week approved Proposal B, amending the city charter to allow for instant runoff voting, or IRV, when choosing their mayor and city…
The Incredibles
The Disney/Pixar collaboration — which brought you Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc. — strikes gold again with this tale of superheroes returning to their normal, everyday existence. There’s a stellar lineup of stars lending their voices, among them Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson, Wallace Shawn and Jason Lee. Oh yeah, and Craig T. Nelson.
Teenage swingers
Inside a rehearsal room at the Max M. Fisher Music Center, 17-year-old baritone saxophonist Tony Lustig kicks off a jam session with a handful of students from the Civic Jazz Orchestra and the Civic Jazz Band. They play Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning.” Rehearsal doesn’t officially begin until 6 p.m., but as usual the kids are 30…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
Primer
"Murky" is the word for this intelligent but too thickly plotted low-budget sci-fi effort by Shane Carruth. Two friends dicking around in their garage invent something sinister; but the interesting elements are marred by the abnormally high scientific mumble-jumble quotient. However, Carruth deserves some credit for making this occasionally interesting puzzle with a miniscule budget,…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Got me a date and I won’t be late! Pick her up in my MB8! • Ciara — Goodies (La Face) :: Lady sings the cooze. • Bury Your Dead — Cover Your Tracks (Victory) :: This bruising metal may not be what Mickey Spillane had in mind when he wrote about the white noise…
N&D Center
friday • 12 The Rockabilly Ball MUSIC Lovers of hair grease unite: For one night only, in the tradition of old time honky-tonks and roadhouses, Ann Arbor’s much-loved music venue, the Ark, will be transformed into Arkie’s Roadhouse. The reason for this lowbrow reformation? The Rockabilly Ball, hoss. There will live entertainment from outlaw poet…
A buyer’s remorse
Q: I am sunk into a depression over the election results. I started out Anyone But Bush but actually came to like John Kerry, which makes his defeat even harder. I feel like I am looking at four years of prison and share this country with a pack of baboons. Everywhere I look I see…
Standing up and spittin’ blood
Unavoidably, I’ve been fretting. Not about the election. Fretting about what ended when Ohio went red. It was then quite clear that better than half of this country believes that a none-too-bright man who sends kids to die in a war born out of some personal, clandestine, money-driven agenda is our better moral guardian. That’s…
What does it all mean?
Get this straight: George W. Bush won this election, without any doubt. No hanging chads, no rigged machines, no ideologically crooked judges this time. No. He won narrowly but clearly, in an election that saw a record turnout. He beat an opponent who had more integrity, class, experience and intelligence. The selected president who didn’t…
Workweek fare
Other entrées include fettuccine Alfredo, fish and chips (made with whitefish instead of the usual cod), mesquite-grilled shrimp, grilled ham steak (with fresh pineapple and golden raisins in a coconut butter), grilled chicken breast with chili mole, and, of course, steak. Hamburgers are made from sirloin steak, ground right in the kitchen.
Night & Day
The Rockabilly Ball MUSIC Lovers of hair grease unite: For one night only, in the tradition of old time honkytonks and roadhouses, Ann Arbor’s much-loved music venue, the Ark, will be transformed into Arkie’s Roadhouse. The reason for this low brow reformation? The Rockabilly Ball, hoss. There will live entertainment from outlaw poet laureate/Texas songsmith…
Game, Dames, and Guitar Thangs
Late Funkadelic legend Hazel’s lone solo album was recorded in 1977 for Warner Brothers shortly after he got out of Lompoc prison (for a drug-induced freakout during an airline flight). In a sense, it’s a P-Funk record in all but name; despite Hazel having left the Clinton compound in 1974, the crew nevertheless rallied around…
D-I-Y Lit
Not since the heyday of urban literary icon Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press has Detroit’s collective pen wielded such power. A publishing house that thrived in the 1960s and ’70s, Broadside printed works by such critically acclaimed authors and poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez and Haki Madhubuti. Few companies in the Midwest have rivaled the…
Gold Medal
Let’s face it: Chicks with guitars are a dime a dozen these days and finding the right combination of rock ’n’ roll bombast and high school hip-sway can be as arduous as looking for water on even the hottest of Sahara nights. That said, fleshy California cuties the Donnas have always prided themselves on their…
Art Bar
One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish … Take a peek into the surreal dreamscape of Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. The Art of Dr. Seuss features a seldom-glimpsed side of Seuss, including his early work, poetry, editorial cartoons and items from his personal archives. This is a national touring exhibit;…
The Elevations
To watch the Elevations live is to see some bizarro-world version of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Except instead of bringing historic legends like Napoleon and Socrates into the now, the Elevations have plucked out the very best in a long line of faceless Motown performers to show tight-assed indie-rockers how it’s done. The band’s…
Hot wired
Music is fine if you want to let the head wander, and TV is a great way to kick back and surf that alpha mind state, but sometimes all that passivity grates on your nerves. Maybe in real life you can’t shoot the shitty driver who cut you off, or shiv the waitress who insulted…
Guilty Pleasures
Industrial music isn’t all PVC and zipper masks. Sure, the genre’s dangerous. It’ll cut out your kidneys, wrap you in plastic and ship your straight-laced ass off to Real Sex #38. But if its more extreme elements are cut with equal parts danceability and rock ’n’ roll, industrial can kick up a kinetic and irresistibly…
Everything is wonderful?
For a lot of bands, this would be the perfect moment to clock out — with a retrospective compilation, a final ragged tour and the security of knowing that your place in pop music history was fairly set. Everclear’s Art Alexakis knows from endings. When he was a kid, his brother and girlfriend both died…
Head cheese
Joey Shithead’s been around since the primordial punk rock ooze, kicking up activist dust with aplomb as frontman in Canuck tune-and-clank merchants D.O.A. Odds are that one of every three crusty punks drawing a breath has a D.O.A. tat. In fact, it would behoove Green Day, the Offspring and Sum 41 to toss some royalty…
The Grind Date
The Grind Date, by De La Soul. Brought to you by three dudes who have been chronically normal for 16 years. Hear De La as they abandon their penchant for concept albums. This is a party record. You’ll dance to it. Happily. It’ll renew your faith in hip hop’s sense of creativity. It’ll soothe your…
Food dot com
Unless you’ve been living under a cyber-rock, you already know that Google is the hottest way to find the most information about almost anything in the shortest time. I type in “food” and Google finds 121 million Web sites within .25 seconds. The word “recipes” renders 28 million choices in .26 seconds. Anything you might…
Guy walks into a mosque…
At least to workaday knuckleheads like you and me, comedy seems to be one of the most difficult art forms to master. Sure, it’s easy enough to make the fellas chuckle after a couple of gin and tonics, but to make an audience full of people laugh out loud, that’s just brutal — especially when…
MTV2 Presents (Short-list) 2004 Nominees
The Shortlist Music Prize has been awarding groups of cool-people approved cool people since 2001. Each year the event’s organizers tap a cross-section of the usual suspects — Beck, Mos Def, Waits, ?Uestlove — to nominate their musical faves, the only stipulation being a cap on total units sold. (Memo to Usher and Nickelback —…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): In 2001, a man was out walking his dog alongside the River Ivel in England when he stumbled upon an unexpected treasure: a 1,200-year-old gold coin bearing the image of King Coenwulf, who ruled the long-defunct kingdom of Mercia from 796-821. The coin was auctioned off three years later, earning its…
Dark shadows
The political party animals that we are, it was hard not to notice the convergence — within a recent four-day period — of two of the most unholy days on the Western calendar: Devil’s Night and Election Day. We definitely needed a day of rest in between, so we chilled on All Saints’ Day. Finding…
Return of the mack
The world of the Casanova has changed a tad since the original Alfie, featuring Michael Caine in the title role, came out in 1966. Feminism and AIDS has definitely taken the luster off the image of free-wheeling, free-banging swingers whose only care in the world is the right lighting in their “bachelor pads.” But the…
Losing your mind in Berlin
Berlin. October 2004. — Here, where time and place exist in blurry, indistinct partnership, and where day and night pass largely unnoticed through the perpetually bleak environs, Richie Hawtin is glowing in the ambient light. A muted blanket of artificial sunshine brings color to his face and reveals tone in his arms, which he uses…
The heal deal
We are being told that now that this bitterly divisive election is finally behind us, it’s time to let the healing begin. For the good of the country, it is said, we must unite behind the president elected to lead us and give him our support as we set aside our differences and forge ahead.…
Sideways
Wine, food, the California landscape, life, the meaning of it, your ability to drink from its goodness — these are little bits of what Sideways is about. The entertaining, brutally honest and sometimes hilarious flick follows an odd couple of men in the middle of their lives who go on a road trip and end…
Shrinking Cities
The careful observer will notice, by looking up when walking through the courtyard of Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art, a small tree in a bubble sticking out from the side of the building. The tree, a “ghetto palm” fetched from the weed forests that have so virulently reclaimed the earth within the city limits…
Gassed out
Amidst the high weeds, gang graffiti and signature Tyree Guyton “demolish me” dot near the windows of this abandoned service station at 8147 E. Warren is a bright yellow sign nailed to the doorframe from the activist group Motor City Blight Busters, reading “We can help.” Help, obviously, is much needed. Neighbors in this East…
Fade to Black
Fortunately for Jay-Z, the twists on his roller coaster of a year can’t derail the energy that crackles throughout Fade to Black. The documentary tracks the recording of his latest album and captures his groundbreaking Madison Square Garden concert last year, which sold out in two hours. The rapper’s narration peppers the film with reflections…
Motown Idol
When it comes to telling it like it is, American Idol’s Simon Cowell has nothing on the mentors at the Mosaic Youth Theatre. This nonprofit organization was founded in 1992 to provide free professional training — in singing, acting and technical theater — to Detroit-area youths ages 12 to 18. “The kids say I’m worse…
Proactive
Vent event Few notices promoting an event are as touching as one received this week. It begins: “Since Tuesday, November 2nd, the staff at Affirmations Lesbian and Gay Community Center have seen a tremendous amount of sadness, grief, and anger at our recent elections. We’ve seen it in the eyes of those walking into the…
Ju-on
This Japanese film is the basis of the new American remake The Grudge, widely panned by critics. However, the original isn’t much more than a well-oiled ghost story machine, more creepy than frightening. It succeeds well enough to make it a solid if not especially memorable genre entry.
Postcards from the edgy
If you find yourself receiving a postcard from Detroit artist Michael Segal, you’re apt to see paradoxes from the world of physics. You’ll see abstract philosophical constructs as cartoon characters, and cute little kitties dressed as cute little kiddies. And with the current total number of postcards he’s produced now well into the hundreds, plenty…
Letters to the Editor
Divided we stand Since the election there have been many calls for America to unite behind the president. It is easy to make this sound poetic and noble, but we must not forget that the views of the losing side still have merit. Those who have legitimate concerns about issues should not abandon them in…
Undertow
Director David Gordon Green’s latest poetic excursion into the grotesque rural South may not provide much in the way of thrills, but for viewers with a taste for the willfully obscure, it might satisfy. The story of two white-trash teenage boys on the run from a sadistic uncle who covets their father’s stash of gold…
