The maple-flavored slut
Q: My boyfriend of three years cheated on me with a girl in Canada. He came home and had a phone and e-mail relationship with her, then he went to visit her in Canada again. I offered him an open relationship and he refused. He promised to never speak to this Canadian woman again and…
Euro intoxication
Dwayne Hayes is a thoughtful, meticulous fellow with two silver hoops in one earlobe. On a recent night in his spotless Farmington Hills condo — the unlikely home to the nation’s singular journal of contemporary European writers — Hayes carefully pours from a Czechoslovakian bottle of The Green Fairy, otherwise known as The Green Devil,…
Presents from tinsel town
Chestnuts roasting on the open fire? Get real. You’ll be doing well to have microwave popcorn in front of the television set. And while we’ll leave you on your own to pick your popping material, we do have some ideas on what movies you should — and shouldn’t — share during the holidays. Home…
November 19-25, 2003
19, 23, 24 WED, SUN, MON • MUSIC Ilona Knopfler — There’s no mistaking where Ilona Knopfler sees her generational roots when you check out the songs on her debut record. Rather than Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Cole Porter, Some Kind of Wonderful, on Mack Avenue Records, is a jazz vocal record that pays…
Silent night, sober night
Staying on the wagon is hardly a joking matter for many during the holiday season. The barrage of festivities — office parties, family gatherings, happy hours — can test the strongest-willed person. “The holiday season is ushered in on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving,” Muriel Van Houten, intensive outpatient therapist at St. Mary’s Hospital in Livonia,…
Taking a leak
Sure, News Hits is in the information business. But we don’t usually expect to be a conduit between congressmen. That, however, is exactly what happened when we began looking into a letter U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Detroit and other Democrats recently sent to House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner. The letter asked Sensen-brenner,…
Overcoming hangovers
It was wine coolers — cherry-flavored, I believe — that first drew me into the world of booze and its unfortunate consequences: dry heaves, headaches, bad decision-making. The next day I told myself I would never drink again. Little did I know I would find myself uttering this phrase frequently in the years to come.…
Condo-mania
Owners of the Riverfront Towers apartments in Detroit are poised to cash in on a recent real estate trend and convert at least two of its three skyscrapers to condos. The towers, located just west of Joe Louis Arena, might go condo early next year. Philanthropist Max Fisher and disgraced businessman A. Alfred Taubman own…
Passing in present tense
I haven’t seen or heard from my friend Eddie in about 20 years, ever since I left Chicago and moved back to Denver. We had some pretty wild times on Chicago’s South Side, but my mother might be reading this, so I’ll leave it at that. What brought Eddie to mind was when a friend…
Oblong box
Abandoned Shelter of the Week This oblong-shaped building stands as a giant in Royal Oak Township’s meager 0.7 square miles. The 17,200-square-foot property, located at 10060 W. Eight Mile near Wyoming, is located in the heart of the area covered by the township’s evolving Downtown Development Authority (DDA). Once the popular Duke Theater, it is…
Minor-league grub
Fans would probably rank this a three-and-a-half star experience, but there’s no reason for hockey agnostics like myself to visit Cheli’s. It’s a barnlike, underheated space with 14 TVs in one room (and one in each restroom) and a familiar menu whose execution ranges from poor to average. For red-and-white-jerseyed boosters, though, it’s a place…
Pass (on) the stuffing
Get ready, folks: We’re about to embark on that wild holiday ride that’ll have everyone rolling in the aisles by New Year’s Day. Literally. It is feasting time, and who among us isn’t anticipating an excuse to nibble, nosh, munch and crunch our way to 2019? Mmmm — turkey, chocolate, candy canes, those delicious, menorah-shaped…
Borders skirmish
It’s a Saturday afternoon in Ann Arbor’s downtown retail district, and the holiday shopping season is gathering steam. The din of normal activity is broken by the drumming and chanting of strike supporters outside Borders’ flagship Ann Arbor store, helped along by sympathetic motorists, bus drivers and truckers giving a horn-pounding thumbs-up. The stream of…
Streetcar named disaster
Brazilian director Jose Padilha re-examines a tragic June 2000 bus hijacking, cutting back and forth between footage of the event and a meditation on the society that it grew out of. The lone gunman turns out to have been a quiet boy, a classic time bomb waiting to go off. It’s an impressive piece of…
Blue for Christmas
This time of the year makes me sick to my guts. All this good cheer is a pain in the nuts. When it’s your career that’s down in the dumps Tidings of comfort and joy really suck. —Excerpt from “This Holiday Season” by Porn Orchard Every year, just after the Halloween decorations are tucked…
Letters to the Editor
Healthy attitude I want to thank Khary Kimani Turner for listening to the MichUHCAN position at the Detroit City Council where unanimous approval for a resolution on universal health care was passed (News Hits, Metro Times, Nov. 5-11). We need all the media support we can get. Thanks to the Metro Times staff for being…
Tupac: Resurrection
A documentary portrait of the late rapper Tupac Shakur as a talented ball of confusion. Shakur has an incredible presence on screen, but the film is somewhat less impressive. At an hour and 45 minutes, it feels longer and still leaves points of view unexamined, questions unasked.
Season for sharing
This year, the Food Bank of Oakland County is in the unenviable position of having to do more with less. Corporate contributions, which make up about 10 percent of the charity’s annual $2 million budget, have fallen sharply because of our slumping economy. Likewise, half the hospitals that made commitments last year have discontinued their…
Spirituality 101
The Autobiography of Jesus Christ Neil Elliott $18.00, 228 pp. Cork Hill Press A Travel Guide to Heaven Anthony DeStefano $18.95, 208 pp. Doubleday It’s the end of the world … or at least that’s the overwhelming sentiment these days. In the wake of the Sept. 11 atrocities, the garish war thereafter and the perpetual…
Shattered Glass
Hayden Christensen proves Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones wasn’t his fault by playing hall-of-shame journalist Stephen Glass with the right mix of supplication, enthusiasm and sorrow. Writer-director Billy Ray plays to our fascination with natural-born con men.
He’s got next
The following is an excerpt of a voice mail from a month ago:“Yo, Dave, this is Shoes. How you been, baby? I just heard the new Jaylib[Jay Dee and Madlib collaboration] joint … Listen, all I gotta say is: I’m focused … I’m focused.” And just like that, DJ House Shoes picked himself up by…
Tycoon
In this fictional version of the rise and fall of post-Soviet businessman Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Mashkov plays a charming schemer with the ratty appeal of a young John Cassevetes. But director and co-writer Pavel Lounguine gives us a film too talky, too long and so laden with arcane references as to need not only subtitles…
Poet of the losers
It would be safe to say that letters from your creditors are more threatening than some bald dude with an acoustic guitar. Some downcast misanthrope crooning stories over folk chords is hardly what anybody might call a menace. Well, Ed Hamell is the exception. With a ’tude rooted in punk and a hair-singeing wit, Hamell…
Suicide notes for geeks
Site: Mylastemail.com Site Unseen is a new feature at www.metrotimes.com. It highlights any sites that provoke weird, enlightening, introspective, eerie or downright repugnant reactions. Happy thoughts also frequent the piece. If you have clicked on an amazing site and would like to share it with our readers, please email suggestions to elauer@metrotimes.com.
The Singing Detective
As demons of the mind ravage Dan Dark and he rots in his hospital bed, the crime novelist creates B-noir flicks in his mind. The Singing Detective is an inspired re-creation of film noir, brilliantly executed, with a strong showing by Robert Downey Jr. and Mel Gibson. Despite annoying, occasional singing and dancing, The Singing…
Amyre miss
There is plenty of the “familiar” in the production of Here and There, a play running at the Detroit Repertory Theatre. From a former local broadcaster making her stage debut to the poignant lessons about living in the past while dealing with grief in the present, there is a familiarity and warmth that is easy…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): To prepare you for your upcoming encounters with inexpressible mystery, I offer you the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. "Not everything has a name," he said. "Some things lead us into a realm beyond words … to revelations unattainable by reason. It is like that small…
Soiling the nest
John Ganis makes pictures that are at once beautiful and profoundly disturbing. They are photographs constructed to document the devastating results of American culture’s profit-motivated development and exploitation of its own painfully gorgeous body, of its own landscape. Sometimes the photographs act as witness to the insensitive, reckless manner of corporate work practice; other times…
Family matters
Things to look forward to during the holidays: time off work, food, drink and — you may wince or smile here — the family gathering. Whether holiday gatherings of relatives are a highlight or lowlight in your clan, one thing’s usually true of many area kinfolk. It’s a pretty big deal that commands some degree…
Oh, holy naught
Only a few years ago, every country and MOR singer in their respective Top 10s was raiding composer Johnny Marks’ catalog (“Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” etc.) and, with umpteenth and dumpteenth covers of “The Christmas Song,” the Mel Torme estate was collecting more Yuletide royalties than “Travis Trout” and “The Pocket…
Jingle boots
As I walk along I wonder: What went wrong? With our love, that is. My beautiful young bride split after walking in on me unexpectedly last night and discovering my dirty little secret. There I sat, slack-jawed and drooling, in front of the computer, pants around my ankles and typing in my credit card number.…
Past last call
State Rep. Bill McConico has a plan to attract more people to Detroit’s fluctuating nightlife: hold off last call for two hours. The president of the Detroit City Council and a spokesman for Mothers Against Drunk Driving both denounced the plan to allow bars to stay open till 4 a.m. House Bills 5201 and 5202…
Avoiding Xmas bling bling
Ah, it’s that time once again — ’tis the season to fork over ungodly amounts of cash for chintzy trinkets that allegedly represent our priceless affection for our loved ones. I’m sure you’ve heard more than one bitter, jaded neo-hippie froth at the mouth with a diatribe about how the holiday season has devolved into…
And every man should try
Last summer I visited the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, which is in a beautiful but somewhat out-of-the way part of Boston, for the first time in many years. And what I saw there startled and surprised me, and even gave me hope. There are still people who know who JFK was, and…
Giving on the cheap
My most memorable Christmas shopping experience was about 12 years ago when I was nearly broke. I had a little more than $100 to spend. That meant about $10 per gift per person. It may sound daunting to come up with a decent gift for a sawbuck, but I managed quite well. In fact, it…
Bow-dacious bassist
They say that great musicians play like a dream. In the case of Richard Davis, one of the finest bassists in jazz or any genre, the playing began as a sort of dream. “My first bass was a broomstick. I practiced on it for six months. I just imagined that I was playing the bass,”…
