Literally Ann Arbor
The very old, kind-of-old and fairly new musings in the appropriately titled Writing Ann Arbor [University of Michigan Press, $39.95, 24 pp.] chronicle the city’s “cultural evolution, the ever-unfinished portrait of its shape-shifting identity,” in the words of its editor, Laurence Goldstein. Part memoir, part history lesson and part University of Michigan recruiting catalog, Writing…
Land bank limbo
A proposal to create a land bank authority in Detroit has been before City Council since spring. But with the council in recess until next year (when four newly elected members will be seated), disagreements over the makeup of the authority’s governing board, and staunch opposition to the entire idea from at least one council…
Rent
True to the play but utterly unimaginative, Rent may pacify the scores of high-school drama troupes who saved up their allowance to see the traveling production of the live show, but it’s unlikely to win over any new converts.
Postcards from a failing empire
What would you think if another country involved in a free-trade agreement with us announced that it wasn’t going to live up to the treaty’s terms? Let’s say the other nation announced they were happy for us to pay the normal price for everything they were selling — as we had formally agreed in a…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Pulse
Kurosawa’s tale of specters invading our world through the Internet comments on the alienating effects of technology. With haunting imagery, the director captures the loneliness and despair that plague disaffected youth and posits a depressingly apocalyptic outcome.
Caroling on
Detroit’s annual Noel Night, now celebrating its 33rd anniversary, is one of the most communal festivities of the year. Not only does this one-night event bring together people from all over southeast Michigan in celebration of the Motor City’s diversity and spirit, it’s one of the only times of the year that the Cultural Center’s…
Day of the dead
Looking for some laughs over the weekend, I re-watched the gruesome but hilarious zombie-movie parody, Shaun of the Dead. It was supposed to be a diversion. But inevitably, as the dead trudged across the screen, I wondered if any of them were registered to vote in Detroit. Thanks to some tasty reporting by The Detroit…
Two-part harmony
As newlyweds, some 28 years ago, pianist Buddy Budson and vocalist Ursula Walker had promising futures in the music biz. They were also madly in love, recently wed and parents of a newborn. For jazz stardom, that was a problem. Budson was the quintessential accompanist with phrasing as precise as an architect’s measurements, a style…
A chain of noodles
Noodles & Company’s fast food is made with fresh vegetables and organic tofu. The menu is internationally inspired, and includes specialties from China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Russia (mushrooms stroganoff with egg noodles), the Mediterranean, the United States and, of course, Italy.
Proactive
Strike back — If you look at what’s going on in the labor market and fear that all blue collar workers will soon either be laid off from what used to be good-paying factory jobs or left toiling away for little more than minimum wage, then you should hit the Crystal Gardens Convention Center in…
Glass city rockers
Glass Heroes hail from Arizona, but their motorcycle jackets and black jeans are more suited to New York City’s all-night bustle, or the overcast skies of Keith Jackson’s Detroit roots. (Jackson played in Shock Therapy before heading west, while “Get Out Alive” and “Long Hot Summer” date from his time with the Rogues.) Still, the…
Viewing the world
A British woman surveys the grand vistas of Icelandic landscape around her, and says bitterly, “I see nothing but stones, and beyond that more stones.” In Deborah Stratman’s film From Hetty to Nancy (1997), the woman goes on an expedition with four schoolgirls. Stratman humorously contrasts caustic commentary with exquisite compositions of beautiful landscape and…
American Primitive Volume 2
The record biz enjoyed a golden age before World War II — everything was so damned new that producers were willing to try anything once, and sometimes captured brilliance. There are too few laudatory words in the English language to lay on this collection of stunning and overlooked American music. The performers here were usually…
A few of my favorite things
At this time of year, when we should all pause to reflect on the things for which we’re thankful, can the TV guy get in on the action? Unlike some TV critics who take their title far too literally, I love this medium. Always have. Long before the notion of an “electronic babysitter” was deemed…
Mi & l’Au
The bad news barraging our culture at mid-decade encourages a lot of looking inward for comfort, of finding solace in romantic escape. Vashti Bunyan’s recent return to recording is no surprise; her placid folk music is a healing salve for our collective social wounds. Mi & l’Au’s self-titled debut isn’t as powerful as the Bunyan…
Art Bar
Massachusetts poet J. Lorraine Brown has used an unusual image in “Tintype on the Pond, 1925.” This poem, like many others, offers us a unique experience, presented as a gift, for us to respond to as we will. We need not ferret out a hidden message. How many of us will recall this little scene…
One Man’s Treasure
As musical director for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds throughout the 1990s, multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey did a credible job helping others find their voice. And as post-punks maturing into musical purists in the days after the riotous Birthday Party, Harvey and his collaborators strove both for immediacy and timeless arrangements, replete with strings and…
Backslash
Gorged yourself to the bursting point this holiday, did you? Tired of trying fad diets and cheap speed knock-off diet pills that never help you shed the weight? Well, now there’s finally salvation for your thunder thighs, in the form of … divine intervention! That’s right, even though there are children starving in foreign lands…
Weekly fecal
Need a remedy for insomnia? Then dig the plodding grooves on songstress Cindy Bullens’ sixth record, the aptly titled dream #29. You’d think a collection of soft-rock tunes featuring friends and guest contributors Delbert McClinton, E Street bassist Garry Tallent, Elton John and Red Sox knuckler Tim Wakefield (?) should be, um, diverse? Think again.…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): As I meditated on your immediate future, I got a vision of you making your way through an obstacle course — scurrying across booby-trapped terrains, shimmying through tunnels, climbing over barriers, leaping across ditches. Curiously, there was not the least bit of stress etched on your face. On the contrary, your…
Re-bop
Way back in 1984, before fans had blogs and Internet forums to express their hunches about career longevity and artistic redundancy, I told anyone who would listen that Lauper could sing the pants off her rival if Ms. Ciccone didn’t so readily drop trou first. I also proposed that the higher quality of hooky songwriting…
Simulated Progress
Reimagining Vijay Iyer Savoy Simulated Progress Fieldwork Pi Dear record execs: Here’s a question: How many more easy-listening jazz anthologies do you guys have in the pipeline? After Jazz for a Lazy Day, Jazz for Romantic Moments, Jazz for a Summer Night, Jazz for a Mellow Morning, Jazz at Night’s End, Jazz by the Fire,…
On drama queens and their enablers
Q: My boyfriend, Jason, is having problems with a boy named Roger who is obsessed with him. But because Roger is friends with Jason and Jason’s friends, Jason won’t just tell him off. Roger had the audacity to call Jason today and ask about our sex life. Roger is not only making Jason’s life hell,…
Head cheese
Bettye LaVette has worked in show business since she scored a hit with her debut single, “My Man — He’s a Loving Man.” She was 16 years old. Though she’s an extraordinarily expressive vocalist and skilled interpreter of others’ songs, chart success has largely eluded her, despite a wealth of goosebump-raising releases. With the 59-year-old’s…
The Valley of the Shadow of Death
Irish drinking songs and punk-rock fury go together like thongs and dollar bills. So does Southside Chicago and the Irish — having one of the highest concentrations of Celtic folk this side of the Emerald Isle. Influenced by the Pogues and Jameson Whiskey, the Windy City’s Tossers take a more traditional stance on Celtic punk…
A stoner’s quandary
Courtney Taylor-Taylor and pal Pete Holstrom formed the Dandy Warhols in 1994, Taylor says, “to meet cooler people to drink beer with — fucking that was it.” Over the last decade theirs was an adventurous sonic streak that has extended beyond their early influences (Ride, Velvet Underground) to embrace a musical smorgasbord of sounds. Along the…
Conflicting views
At each video game’s core is a conflict. Whether it’s the simple task of rescuing a princess from certain doom, or manipulating blocks into groups to clear screens, these conflicts and the methods of resolution are the game. And the methods developers use to resolve conflict ultimately becomes the whole deal. Shadow of the Colossus…
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: 25th Anniversary
While the focal point was always their shock-value, overwhelming politics and the terse vibrato of lead singer Jello Biafra belligerently delivering it all, the Dead Kennedys were much more of an ensemble than their blazing speed initially indicates. Their debut, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, is their most tame and organized affair. Guitarist East Bay…
Metro Retro
23 years ago this week in Metro Times: Lynn Orr covers the rise of “new right” activists, who have shifted their focus to the local arena, targeting local school boards in particular. Terry Todd, chairman of the “Stop Textbook Censorship” committee, argues that textbooks have been censored to omit traditional values such as “respect for…
Letters to the Editor
Fleeing crushing costs Re: Keith Owens’ “The real exit poll” (Metro Times, Nov. 23), my wife and I are going to leave Detroit; we’re in one of those “higher” brackets you talk about in your article right now, but we won’t be when I retire next year (she retired this year after 35 years in…
Odditorium or Warlords of Mars
Assessing this hootenanny without mentioning Dig! or the Brian Jonestown Massacre is like writing about Lee Harvey Oswald without using the word patsy. Like it or not, that cinematic bitch-slap defined both bands for a lot of folks who otherwise might’ve gone on confusing them with Love and Rockets or Spacemen 3. Next to the…
Sony vs. iTunes
Somebody does you a favor, and this is how you treat them? It’s true that Apple has done more for legalized downloads than a thousand RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) lawsuits, but suddenly it finds itself engaged in a territorial pissing match with all the elements of a Sopranos subplot. The major families, er,…
Party on!
When an invitation to something called “Detroit Kiss and Make-Up” arrived at our offices last week, News Hits first thought we were being asked to attend an orgy. The accompanying photo explains why. (Make sure to take your eyes off that cleavage long enough to notice that the man is reclining on a bearskin rug.)…
Filming the unfilmable
Adapted from a short story by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, the film brilliantly captures the emotional displacement and dreamy tone of the author’s best work. Generally considered unfilmable, his fiction is more concerned with the experience of reading than the literal implications of plotlines. The linguistic calisthenics and emotional flights of poetry of his stories…
Still standing
Detroiters don’t look up enough. Some of us have worked for decades in a remarkable building downtown and can’t explain why it’s remarkable. There are way too many of us who can’t remember what the building across the street even looks like. A couple of years ago, two guys on assignment for The New York…
Back off, Jack
Does Detroit need the likes of Jack Brandenburg, a Republican state rep from Macomb County, to be meddling with the way Motown residents select their City Council members? Brandenburg earlier this year introduced a bill that would require all Michigan cities with populations of more than 250,000 and city councils elected on an at-large basis…
Saraband
Reunions aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, especially if the reunion in question involves two characters from a 30-year-old Ingmar Bergman movie. Endless talk of death, cancer, regret, betrayal, disability and emotional impotence: It’s all just another night at the movies for the famed Swedish master of mortality. Although he’s been churning out the…
Night and Day
Thursday • 1 Sinéad O’Connor MUSIC She said she’d had it with the music business back in the ’90s, but angel-voiced Irish tough girl Sinéad O’Connor is back. And how. In a recent interview on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, O’Connor said, “I wanted to come out of the mainstream rock and pop thing,…
Cop talk
In November 2003, the Detroit Police Department, under Chief Ella Bully-Cummings, issued a Teletype informing its officers that they were prohibited from talking to the news media without first receiving approval from the brass. Almost a year after that directive was issued, David Malhalab, then a sergeant on the force, was disciplined for making “an…
Just Friends
Over the course of a decade, portly, maladroit teen Chris (Ryan Reynolds) transforms himself into a callous, hunky record exec. Stranded in his New Jersey hometown for the holidays with Samantha, his multiplatinum brat of an ex-girlfriend, Chris tries to win the affections of "best friend" Jamie (Amy Smart), who rebuffed his advances in their…
