Electro-purists
Unlikely heroes of Detroit’s booty deejays, local electro purists Aux 88 — Tom Hamilton and DJ Dijital — have caught on that their roots-of-techno electro sound is the “tech” to booty’s “ghetto” in the current Detroit bass scene. To that end, Hamilton favors faster tracks, more complex rhythms, even more up-in-the-club-styled vocals on Xeo-Genetic, Aux’s…
Pure Song
Not to make too much of a fuss about No One is Really Beautiful, but Jude Christodal is really special. The first thing to do is comment on his extraordinary voice which will surely be compared to the late Jeff Buckley’s, since hardly anyone else sings with this broad a range. Jude’s voice is a…
Prose garden …
Battlement of Rubies by Barbara Einzig 1 While all this was going on, they were trying to prepare for the event, the bat mitsvah, the rite of passage. It was not like anything they had done before, either singly or together. They were a family of two — a mother and a daughter, with the…
Living Out Loud
From its opening scene — in which 40-something couple Bob (Martin Donovan) and Judith Nelson (Holly Hunter) are having the final conversation of their marriage in a restaurant — through Judith’s shaky adjustment to being single again, Living Out Loud positions itself as a 1990s version of An Unmarried Woman. But as the film slinks…
By faith thus far
Dear Tess and Stewie: If you’re reading this, or having this read to you, you know me through your childhood memory, supplemented by pictures, songs and what other people have told you about me … Know this: Because of the mystery of birth and the grace of God, I’m in you… If the doctors are…
The Eel
The setting is present-day Japan. A man has been receiving anonymous letters informing him that his wife is being unfaithful. He decides to test the letters’ veracity by returning home earlier than usual from a customary fishing trip, only to find her and her lover in flagrante delicto. Enraged, he stabs the lover and then…
In one ear
METAL MENTAL TESTIMONY Like a Sabbath — Black, that is — for the new millennium, Detroit’s 500 Ft. of Pipe blasts bongloads of Moog-metal testifying to the ascension of The Electrifying Church of the New Light, the name of the band’s second full-length. 500 Ft. of Pipe drops bottom-heavy, MC5-informed, future-lingo-laden bricks of rock –…
The Other Side of Sunday
A Norwegian coming-of-age film set in the 1950s, director Berit Nesheim’s The Other Side of Sunday initially comes across as a bit of Bergman-lite. We have the corrosively strict Northern Protestantism, a doubting protagonist twining her metaphysical tendrils toward atheism and a man of God who himself cannot live up to his faith’s unrelenting tenets…
Newt leaves the water
What’s being missed, amid all the hoopla, is how much Bill Clinton has needed Newt Gingrich, and may need him still. Indeed, few realize how much alike they are. Each grew up in the hardscrabble postwar South, essentially without fathers; talented; nerdy; incredibly ambitious, incurably lusting after power. Both tried the conventional paths-to-success; Bill was…
The Siege
Hollywood has always flirted with history — revising, recycling or replacing the truth with hyperbolic narratives of patriotic behavior. This is the stuff that American heroes are made of, the ones who save the day while reminding the nation: that the President of the United States, human as he may be (The American President), is…
Letters to the Editor
On the record As a member of the board of directors of the Metro Detroit Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, I wish to thank Jack Lessenberry for raising SPJ’s profile &emdash; if not notoriety &emdash; with his column entitled “Journalists in disgrace” (MT, Oct. 21-27). Unfortunately, he violated a clearly stated rule that…
Luminous continent
Mention the word “surrealism” and chances are you’ll flash on Salvador Dali’s languidly blue soft watches or perhaps René Magritte’s ubiquitous man in a top hat quietly stepping out of a painting. If you’re a classic film buff, you might remember — though you wish you couldn’t — Luis Buñuel’s 1928 proto-slasher, Un Chien Andalou,…
Arsenic and laced walls
It was years before Renee Crouch learned that the tap water she and her family were drinking from a private well in Brandon Township was making them sick. Her symptoms — including peeling skin, fatigue, bleeding fingertips and memory loss — lasted through her pregnancy. Once the baby was born, Crouch mixed the water with…
Less is liberty
Cards on the table. I feel about architecture writing — most of it — like whoever it was that came up with the line about the little girl with the curl. Remember? “When she was good, she was very good; and when she was bad, she was horrid.” When architects decide to become writers, the…
New court worries trial lawyers
For injured workers, unions, those discriminated or harassed on the job or anyone who sues an employer for acting illegally, the Michigan Supreme Court election results are deeply disturbing. That’s what the Michigan Trial Lawyers Association and others are saying after the Republicans took control of the high court last week. “I think the people…
Leelanau lines
The Shape of the Journey collects a lifetime of the protean poetry of northern Michigan’s Jim Harrison. Rural scenes of, say, a solitary country cabin or a pond with frogs at dawn, are many in the eight books — since 1965 — represented. His writing is suffused with nature, but to call Harrison a nature…
Pitch’d
CINEMA RARITY After a weekend of Modulations at Ferndale’s Magic Bag, Detroit’s current home of techno, Motor Lounge, will screen Iara Lee’s electronic music documentary Friday night, with a reception following featuring Godfather of techno (and Detroit electro) Juan Atkins. Detroit scene insiders are grumbling at Modulations’ admittedly myopic nod to techno (no Plastikman, no…
Imaginary elegy
Jack Spicer died of drink in 1965. He was 40 years old, flat broke and all but unemployable. Though his work is increasingly recognized as among the most original of the postwar period, it was virtually unknown in his lifetime. While it must be acknowledged that Spicer himself contributed to this invisibility — not only…
Delusions in b & w
Few things are more pleasing than watching Newt Gingrich eat crow. Alas, Washington will soon bid him goodbye and he’ll be chowing down in the privacy of his bunker deep in the smug, antiseptic bosom of suburban Atlanta, from whence he came. Newt’s tumble into the pit of hubris coincides with the rerelease of The…
Forecful habit
Novelist, poet and essayist Harry Mathews is one of literature’s great modern treasures. The deft experimentation which characterizes his work must at least in part be attributed to his association with the Oulipo, a group of French writers and mathematicians devoted to exploring the potential of literature by applying sets of rules, simple and complex,…
Election hangover
It is election night. The polls have just closed and supporters of U.S. Representative David Bonior and several other Macomb County Democrats are rolling into a Mt. Clemens banquet hall for what they hope will be a victory party. They already know that there is no hope for their candidate for governor. Before the clock…
25 Years
After Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein made it interesting and sexy, not (heaven forbid) intellectual, to look at painting again — after Miles Davis rock ‘n’ rollified jazz with Bitches Brew and Live-Evil, making it possible to shake one’s moneymaker to dense improvisation (again) — after Robert Altman helped Hollywood catch on to those European…
Proportional representation
For many of us, the concept of proportional representation in the United States sounds like a new idea. But for proponents, it is more an idea whose time has come again. The basic premise of proportional representation is that our current “winner-take-all” electoral system is inherently flawed. When 49.9 percent of the voters can walk…
Trade-In Value
Charming, feisty Cadallaca cruises onto the scene in a rumbling ’66 Eldorado, and from the sounds of it, it’s in need of a tune-up. The engine, aggressive female vocal pop, perhaps an ode to the girl bobby sox music of the ’60s, although it’s more reminiscent of the spirited rocking ’50s. Cadallaca is none other…
Instant runoff voting
It is called instant runoff voting, or IRV for short, and proponents say it is a simple, doable way to make elections fairer and bring alienated voters back into the electoral fold. According to the Center for Voting and Democracy, IRV works like this: “Each voter has one vote, and ranks candidates in order of…
Paid in Full: The Platinum Edition
Only giving three and a half stars to anything associated with the seminal group Eric B. and Rakim could be considered downright hip-hop blasphemy — especially when we’re talking about the duo’s groundbreaking debut, Paid in Full. But, as in life, nothing is perfect. This reissue includes the original 10-track CD as well as a…
Literary Quarterly: Winter 1998
Cigarettes – Harry Mathews Reviewed by Lynn Crawford The latest of the Harry Mathews reissues is addicted to discovery through language. Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance – Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian Reviewed by Ted Pearson 33 years after his death, Jack Spicer haunts American poetry. The Shape of…
Next Moves
When these two indie-vators were the new kids on the block, mall-ternative rock had a very different face. In the context of the straight-faced, Marshall-stacked deck that the prevailing grunge game dealt them, Beck was immediately regarded as a one-hit, alterna-novelty act with “Loser” and Spencer was merely titillating the music crit-world and the hiperati…
Openings and a closing
FAWKES GOES PLATINUM Those rebellious and nutty patrons at Cranbrook stormed the gates Saturday night for the 20th annual Guy Fawkes Ball, a fundraiser for the Cranbrook Academy of Art and its scholarship fund. The event provides students and organizers with the opportunity to completely reinvent the museum for one night, all in the name…
Mutations
When these two indie-vators were the new kids on the block, mall-ternative rock had a very different face. In the context of the straight-faced, Marshall-stacked deck that the prevailing grunge game dealt them, Beck was immediately regarded as a one-hit, alterna-novelty act with “Loser” and Spencer was merely titillating the music crit-world and the hiperati…
Belly
Besides this reviewer, there are five other people in the house the day Belly is released. The film’s lack of exposure may account for that or, maybe, director Hype Williams’ well-known association with music videos. “I’m not going to see another movie like that,” says a film commentator. Another movie like what? The guy in…
One for the Money, Two for the Show, Marilyn Manson, Act III
Nobody ever dreamed a young man with no musical talent whatsoever could go this far and become our Antichrist Superstar. Certainly not Rolling Stone magazine whose first printed comments on Marilyn Manson called his cover of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” unnecessary. But hey, even if rock journalism cannot name its tune, it…
