Ebony and Ivory
Saturday Looks Good To Me’s Fred Thomas and rapper Bareda aka Mr. Wrong, would never in this lifetime be captured sitting in a room together yakking about music or larger issues such as musical segregation in Detroit. I mean, rap shows in Detroit are mostly all-black affairs. Rock shows are mostly all-white. A good rap…
Local faves
Liz Copeland Remember that sexy chick radio DJ from The Warriors? The one whose warm intonations could, if it were any other flick, lull you to sleep or put unclean thoughts in your head? Well, she’s got nothin’ on WDET’s Liz Copeland. Though the music Copeland plays is certainly swell — a smooth and thoughtful…
Stone aged
When label head Scott Hamilton founded Small Stone Records, he wanted it to be the Sub Pop of the Midwest. A decade later, the label still hasn’t had any cash cows as fat as Nirvana or David Cross. But, come this Saturday, Small Stone rings in anniversary No. 10 at the Magic Stick with three…
Motor City Rides
The Sights’ Eddie Baranek and his cherished 1997 Ford Escort he got off Ko Melina. “It’s never been washed, like me,” Baranek says, grinning. Todd Osborn with his sporty 1992 Lincoln Town Car and 1967 Citabria Aerobatic plane. “When I’m not flying in the air, I need the luxury air suspension of a Town Car,”…
Detroit’s future, and ours
You, dear reader, hopefully now know the results of this week’s Detroit election, unless the mess in the city clerk’s office was even worse than feared. Unfortunately, thanks to our deadline schedule, I had to write these words before the votes were counted. Naturally, the easy thing would have been to write instead about fishing for…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Flav, elected?
This guy Kenny Flav has come a long way from crashing in the fetal position on Juan Atkins’ Metroplex studio floor. For one thing, Flav wants to be the mayor of Detroit. Or something like that. But if the mayor thing doesn’t happen, Kenneth “Kenny Flav” Dickerson will settle for being Wayne Kounty. After all,…
I scream, you scream …
In 1968, after visiting the Munch Museum in Oslo, filmmaker Peter Watkins wanted to portray the artist’s life without embellishment, employing nonprofessional actors and setting claustrophobic scenes within dank beer halls and dusty sitting rooms so cold you can see every breath like smoke. The result is 1973’s Edvard Munch, a detailed dramatization that lays…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 9 Melville: His World and Work LITERATURE Critics have called Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work remarkable, shrewd, engaging, beautiful and the finest on its subject. Delbanco documents Melville’s arduous life as well as his transformation from sophomoric storyteller to author of such masterpieces as Moby Dick and “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Meet…
The World
“See the world without ever leaving Beijing” is the slogan at Beijing’s World Park, a surreal, low-rent Epcot that features small-scale replicas of the Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal, London Bridge, the Pyramids and even Lower Manhattan. Encircled by a monorail and hiding labyrinthine underground tunnels for its workers, the theme park promises visitors “a new…
2005 Music Issue
Metro Times music staff Salutations and guffaws The MT anti-awards, er, best in Motor City show! by Metro Times music staff Local faves Area celebs pick their fave local cuts. Don WallerTop of the pops Renaldo “Obie” Benson had the world dancing, and then he shook it with “What’s Going On.” Doug Coombe Motor City…
The beauty of balance
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Artist Jennifer Reeves’ latest work, now on view at Birmingham’s David Klein Gallery, cagily balances opposites to seamlessly form a unique aesthetic…
Nine Lives
Director Rodrigo García does more with 10 minutes than other writers and directors do with 90. The son of Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez, whose prose is rich and lush, the younger García has a more minimalist touch. In Nine Lives, we get the stories of nine very different women, with each tale spun in…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): I don’t think you’ll become the equivalent of a king or queen in the coming weeks, but you could be instrumental in determining who becomes a king or queen. And that would ultimately be fun for you. Likewise, I doubt that you yourself will be the beneficiary of a windfall or…
Backslash
Misunderstood URLs — Normally we here at Backslash absolutely detest e-mail forwards, but for once we got one that was pretty damn funny — and true. The e-mail pointed out a handful of URLs — some registered by real, honest-to-gosh businesses — that just don’t read as they should (trust us, we can sympathize, especially…
Jarhead
For all its great lines, potent images and nuanced performances, director Sam Mendes’ Jarhead, an adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s first-person account of life as a Desert Storm marine, isn’t the definitive statement on the Gulf Wars that it aspires to be. Admittedly, it’s part of the movie’s design to resist easy answers: It’s about the…
Snoop frets over dad’s ads
Q: My stepdad is gay. He fell in love with and married my mom anyway, and they appear to have a strong relationship despite his sexual preference — they love each other, had a baby together and seem to be committed. A few days ago I found a search for “men seeking men” on his…
Sez who?
The first production of a new work by the award-winning playwright Jane Martin comes this month to the Marygrove College Theatre. The promise of a great show is sure to entice theatergoers, and so will the shadow of a dramatic mystery: Nobody really knows if Jane Martin actually exists. Martin’s plays were a mainstay of…
Shopgirl
Pity the jester who longs to be a poet. Once the most popular comedian on earth, Steve Martin has dabbled with serious dramatic aspirations since 1981’s Pennies from Heaven, often with mixed results. This time he’s adapted his own novella into a screenplay that gropes for cosmic resonance in a story better suited as a…
Metro/Retro
17 years ago this week in Metro Times: Chuck Wilbur talks to author Gary Ruchwarger about Nicaragua’s democratic evolution under the Sandinista government. Ruchwarger’s research indicates that the democratic movement isn’t a product of U.S. military pressures, but rather of Sandinistas studying the parliamentary systems of Chile and France. He suggests that the American view…
Dishing it up
Howard Kottler, self-described “decalcomaniac,” has been outed at Cranbrook. His decorated plates from the ’60s and ’70s have been sprung from shelves and china cabinets, so visitors can chuckle as they scan the riffs on gay life and other cultural puns on porcelain. Kottler cuts, alters and pastes store-bought decals of clichéd images onto shiny…
Chicken Little
Zach Braff voices the plucky Chicken Little, who brings shame to his family by setting off panic in his small town by telling everyone that the sky is falling. Only, the sky really did fall, but no one, not even his dad, believes him. Alas, it’s stale in the wake of two folk- and fairy-tale-skewering…
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry Descriptions of landscape are common in poetry, but Kurt Brown adds a twist by writing himself into “cowboy country.” He also energizes the poem by using words we associate with the American West: Mustang, cactus, Brahmas. Road Report Driving west through sandstone’s red arenas, a rodeo of slow erosion cleaves these…
Talkin’ turkey
The first time a hunter told me that wild turkeys fly low to the ground and as fast as a rocket, I thought he’d spent more time in the beer trailer than the brush. It also sounded like an alibi for the fact that he never seemed to come home with anything but an empty…
His never-ending story
Childhood experiences shape the way human psyche develops. For fantasy writer George R.R. Martin, it was an early interest in H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien that set the tone for his career. “I read all kinds of imaginative fiction,” says Martin, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M. “Weird stuff, as my dad used to call…
Letters to the Editor
Gets a bang out of ID Re: “The deity’s advocate” (Metro Times, Nov. 2), it was amusing to read about the attempted defense of “intelligent design” by Richard “Feiger made a monkey out of me” Thompson. The only reason why real scientists bother to argue against ID is because it has been thrust in where…
Trainers on the brain
“So many sneakers, so little time,” writes Simon Wood, the founder-editor of Sneaker Freaker, a Melbourne, Australia, magazine dedicated to the pervasive trainer trend. Each of the six issues he’s published since launching the mag in 2003 have sold out fast, becoming nearly as collectible as the shoes they commemorate. It makes sense then that…
Proactive
Policing the police — A conference titled “Reshaping Community: Ending 50+ Years of Police Brutality” will open with an awards dinner at 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 18, and continue with a full slate of workshops and presentations beginning at 9 a.m. the following day. The event is sponsored by the Detroit Coalition Against Police…
After the farewells
Perhaps the most amazing thing about Rosa Parks’ funeral was the parade of speakers. I’m willing to bet good money that this will be the last time any of us sees such a diverse collection of assorted bigwigs on the same stage at the same time for any occasion. Who would have ever imagined the…
Wait not
Last Wednesday, as mourners gathered by the thousands to pay tribute to civil rights icon Rosa Parks, about 150 people honored her memory in a different way, standing on the corner of Woodward and Warren avenues in Detroit, declaring that now is the time to drive George W. Bush from office. The protest wasn’t intended…
Unconventional wisdom
Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis should have been to the ’90s what Michael Harrington’s The Other America was to the ’60s — a book that galvanized the nation to see a problem and act. If it fell short of that mark, it hardly went unnoticed. Subtitled Race and Inequality in Postwar…
Shacked out
News Hits recently learned that Michigan is one of seven states that still has a law on the books against “lewd and lascivious cohabitation.” To clarify: That’s the kind of living arrangement where you’re unmarried but getting it on with someone, not the kind of cohabitation you do with your mom (unless you live in…
Top of the pops
“I Can’t Help Myself.” “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” “Standing In the Shadows of Love.” “Bernadette.” “Ask the Lonely.” “Baby I Need Your Loving.” “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever.” “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got).” “When She Was My Girl.” “It’s the Same Old Song.” You can hear at least one of…
Soul casualty
It’s a surprise that Uncle Tiny’s Soul Food at 10220 Mack Ave., on Detroit’s East Side, didn’t stay in business with such a prime location. After all, it occupied a fire-engine red brick box located between an empty field and the long-abandoned Silver Leaf Bar. Perhaps the mural on the side of the building depicting…
I’m with stupid
Last week, the squeaky-clean, yet oh-so-dirty retailer Abercrombie & Fitch found itself steeped in controversy once again. On Nov. 1 a group of high-school girls in Pennsylvania announced they were staging a “girlcott” of a series of the retailer’s baby Ts, emblazoned with such phrases as “Who needs a brain when you have these?” and…
Salutations and guffaws
Awards? Bah, who needs ’em, right? They’re boring and they signify nothing, really. Shit, Alice Cooper would let his kids play in the bathtub with his gold records. And those are gold records! I mean if you win some kind of local music award, at best, if you’re lucky, you get some kind of gilded…
