Girl heroes
“When I listen to the trash on the radio or see all this kind of crap on MTV where the girls have no clothes on, I’m like, ‘Eww, I’m not feeling this,’” says Hesta Prynn. Speaking over the phone from her New York City apartment, the de facto frontwoman of female rap trio Northern State…
Art Bar
The art and culture desk at MT gets all kinds of wacky, useless and wonderful stuff week in, week out, including occasional pieces of fiction and poetry. We thought we’d share this letter and poem from a reader with you: Hello Metro Times, I have been writing poetry for over ten years, most of it…
Cowards Bend the Knee
This typically unique offering from Montreal-based auteur Guy Maddin began as an art installation: a series of short, filmed chapters, each to be viewed through separate peepholes. A kinky story of love, murder and revenge, it runs just over 60 minutes. The film is silent, shot in black and white with a few blue-tinted scenes…
Look what I Found, ma!
“We do get lots of pictures of peoples’ private parts. I didn’t realize how many people were out there, taking pictures of their genitals and then losing the photos,” says Davy Rothbart, who, at 29, has become a bit of a national phenomenon via his magazine, Found, and its recently published coffee-table book counterpart. Rothbart…
Proactive
Rock on — For a good time with a purpose (and, no, that’s not an oxymoron) head out to Wayne State University on Thursday, Oct. 14, from noon to 5 p.m. Why? Because that’s when the Rock the Vote tour bus rolls into town to get us all excited about, you know, this whole election…
Rosenstrasse
On a little street in Berlin, a group of gentile women stood up to the Third Reich and demanded the release of their Jewish husbands. Many of them were successful. This fictitious story based on true events is compelling, even though the director’s telling is disjointed at times.
Morrissey vs. Clay Aiken: Who’s Rock’s Greatest Celibate?
While candidates debate and pundits recap what is the measure of a man, the rest of us with shallower gene pools hear that phrase and wonder if Clay Aiken still hasn’t gotten laid. Even his name sounds like some Dutch translation for “the sex eludes me still.” God bless that spiky-haired nerd from Raleigh with…
Chalk one up
The issue of contamination at the Roberto Clemente Learning Academy in southwest Detroit is never going to be fully laid to rest as long as classrooms remain on the site of what used to be the New Beard School. With arsenic, lead, PCBs and lots of other nasty stuff in the ground there, vigilance will…
The Yes Men
This outrageous documentary tells the story of Andy and Mike, high-level pranksters who pose as World Trade Organization representatives at lectures and symposiums. Although the scenes of these irrepressible agitators raging against the WTO machine are entertaining, we are plagued with endless details of each individual stunt’s arrangement. Were they an older and more established…
Unfunny man
Stand-up comedians have raided just about every gimmick available: Carrot Top’s goofy props, Chris Rock’s filthy mouth, Margaret Cho’s imitation of her mom. … It seems like it’s all been done. Neil Hamburger, however, has found one stone left unturned in the comedy world. This funnyman’s shtick: He’s not funny. Really not funny — which,…
Skivvie scandal
It seems that Michigan Republicans have their panties in a bunch over … undies. Free, vote-swaying undies, to be specific. When News Hits reported on the appearance of filmmaker/provocateur/certified Bush nemesis Michael Moore last week at Wayne State University, we noted that the rotund one tossed out a handful of Bowling for Columbine DVDs to…
Taxi
They’re no Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, of Lethal Weapon fame, but Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah manage a comical chemistry. The most lethal thing about this film is Belle’s (Latifah) wicked driving skills, as she chauffeurs a reject cop (Fallon) through some of the most thrilling high-speed chase scenes ever caught on film. This…
From rags to Redford
Take yourself back a few years to a time when there wasn’t a silver-blue light to transfix us every evening. Back to a place when entertainment wasn’t something you ripped from cellophane-wrapped packages and stuffed into CD players and DVD machines and computer towers. It may be difficult to comprehend a reality where music sprang…
Take-home fancy man
The films of Detroit-born Allen and Albert Hughes resist generic categories, their work spanning everything from coming-of-age urban dramas to stylized historical thrillers. If a single theme pervades, from Menace II Society to From Hell, it’s the nature of power — how those with it burn to keep it, how those without it burn to…
Friday Night Lights
Director Peter Berg brings the camera down to turf level, right in the middle of painful hits and disappointing fumbles in this movie about high school football in small-town Texas. It’s based on the book by H.G. Bissinger, and you likely won’t be wiping tears or chanting “Rudy” by the end, but you will have…
N&D Center
Wednesday • 13 State of Hip Hop and Politics MUSIC Hip-hop artists are becoming more and more vocal about politics; witness the success of Detroit’s second Hip Hop Summit. Now hip-hot artist the Blastmaster KRS-ONE will present a lecture on the state of hip hop and politics, on Wednesday, Oct. 13 (tonight), at the Charles…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive! Here’s MB5! • Blue Skies At War – You Pour The Gasoline I’ll Light The Fuse (Curve) :: If you only buy one album this year, make sure it’s not this one. • Keith Levene – Murder Global (Underground) :: I mean it, maaaaan: One listen to this phony…
When sex is a gross-out
Q: I’m a 35-year-old straight male and my sex drive is all but dead. I find sex tedious and repulsive. The odors of sex disgust me; I find the grunts and positions absurd. Lately, whenever I meet a woman I immediately size her up: Is her skin leathery? What about cellulite? Weight distribution? Stained teeth?…
Witch’s brew
It used to be that fantasy fiction was for dweebs. Now, thanks to Harry Potter, not just dweebs, but mothers, businessmen, lawyers, regular Joes and sullen teenagers read fantasy fiction. Enter Brit debut novelist Susanna Clarke, whose breakout debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a tale of two magicians in Europe in the 1800s,…
Brinkman does Bricktown; Wasacz goes gangsta in Berlin
Building utopia Thomas Brinkman, techno-percussion expert, heard Rufus Thomas’s unifying voice on the Wattstax album (recently rereleased on DVD), a voice he would later sample liberally while growing up in Germany. For one night on Saturday, Sept. 25, Brinkman’s call to his audience — a predominantly white, young, sweaty and ready-to-be-delivered set — was another…
Grub heaven
Zingerman’s Roadhouse presents “unusually good American food,” declares a neon sign over the roof, in a setting that harks back to the day when weary travelers could recharge with a comforting meal by the roadside. The Roadhouse is a sprawling place with a semi-open kitchen, full bar, two dining rooms and very good food.
Head cheese
Har Mar Super-star’s soulful R&B crooning, b-boy style, and outsized sexual appetite would make him a peer of R. Kelly were he not a portly, balding white dude with pasty skin and a penchant for stripping down to his tighty-whities. Fact is, Har Mar is more Bobby Brown, mining the same sleazy and misogynist territory…
Cruising with Castro
Frank guides his pride and joy, a white 1953 Chevrolet with original red interior, to its place among the other classics at the rally. To belong to Frank’s club, one’s car must be at least 90 percent original; the vehicles parked around his Chevy are classics, including a red 1956 Ford Thunderbird convertible, a 1951…
Reading, writing and politics
The most passionately debated issue on Detroit’s November election ballot isn’t whom to choose for president. That, in a predominantly black and Democratic city, is a foregone conclusion. Instead, it is the question of how to govern Detroit’s ailing public schools that has stoked the fires of this city’s voters. It’s known as Proposal E,…
Painting a Burning Building
Singer-songwriter Brandon Wiard’s got a pop savant’s sensibility but shows enough breadth of imagination and balls to throw out the power pop rulebook before someone starts calling him the next Matthew Sweet. He opens with the quirky walloper “Already In Amazement” that sets you up for a frivolous poppy romp (it’s probably the “cello” and…
Bedroom ayes
Michigan lawmakers have decided to help Michiganders help their marriages by sending them to school. But Gov. Jennifer Granholm says the solons are butting too far into people’s personal affairs, and will likely veto a 13-bill package that passed in the Senate on Sept. 29. It’s expected to reach her desk soon after the presidential…
Universal Audio
Glasgow’s Delgados began this decade with two expansive, orchestral albums that helped guide 21st century indie pop in a tasteful and mature creative arc. Universal Audio, their latest, is less grandiose, especially compared to 2003’s Hate. But the quartet hasn’t yielded to convention, or issued some kind of dud. Audio’s still alive with craft and…
Gone to weed
Truth is, the Abandoned Structure Squad takes a fairly liberal approach to the word abandoned. Take, for example, this week’s home at 18162 Greeley on Detroit’s East Side near Seven Mile Road and I-75. It’s for sale, actually, and its doors and windows are well-secured to stave off intruders. But it’s a nuisance nonetheless, with…
Fountain of Youth
While Tommy Rivers has been an Atlanta scene mainstay since the early ’80s when he shared a band with future Georgia Satellite Rick Richards, in terms of national exposure he’s remained doggedly — criminally — under the radar. Since forming the Raw Ramps a couple of years ago, however, his profile has slowly but steadily…
Stemma staccato
If you think of jazz as a tree, you can imagine the keyboard player Craig Taborn as someone who can keep his balance on the springy outlying branches, maneuver back closer to the trunk as need be and all the while understand the deep roots holding the whole shebang upright. The breadth of jazz, the…
Every Day is Better than the Next
Local boys Porchsleeper open Every Day is Better than the Next with “Bulletproof,” a rocker with bittersweet twinges that summon vintage Buffalo Tom. That the quartet would recall a mature, melancholic sound from a decade ago isn’t surprising — maturity and its cousins jaded and cynical run throughout this encouraging debut. “Where You Been” brings…
12″ pop shots
Numark PT-01 Portable Turntable This record bag-ready, battery-operated portable turntable with a kicking little internal speaker destroys any excuse for not owning a record player. At a mere $99, it’s time to get down to Vibes New and Rare records (145000 8 Mile, Suite 203) and start buying R&B 45s and disco 12”s! Allen Gamble…
Letters to the Editor
We’re keepin’ it real Re: “Murder Rap” (Metro Times, Oct. 6), I just wanted to tell you that I really was feeling the article on Wipeout. The young people in the city need to see what’s really going on behind all this violence. Otherwise they just get caught up in the hype. So thank you…
The DEFinition
It’s nice to imagine that a vet could salvage some ol’ skool zeal, since hip hop’s been wallowing in its shallow end of late. LL already has 10 albums under his belt and has an acting résumé as impressive as Ice Cube’s. He’s like rap’s Jagger, a mix of balls and sex appeal (though unlike…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The guy in front of me in the grocery store checkout line today was wearing a T-shirt that said, "Sublimely tacky, yet refreshingly unrefined." That’s a perfect lead-in to the astrological advice I’d like to convey to you this week, which is: You’re most likely to be happy and successful if…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat The Comix
Film revolution
Jonathan Caouette’s epic home movie is a queasy, harsh, sometimes exhilarating look at his own personal hell. Cauoette began videotaping himself, his family and friends when he was 11. For the next 19 years he kept a record of his turbulent life, growing up gay with a schizophrenic mother. He’s edited the footage into a…
As American as…
If you’re looking for a snack that is tasty, healthful, transportable and cheap, an apple is your best bet: sweet, tart, juicy and crisp, but most of all, delicious. Even kids like them. With autumn suddenly approaching, apples are in season and abundant in numerous varieties at grocery stores, farmers’ markets, u-pick orchards and cider…
Gambling on our future
You have to admire the brashness of the creatures who own Detroit’s casinos. Having moved heaven and earth and spent vast sums to persuade the voters to allow “gaming” in Detroit a few years ago, they’re now fighting hard to prevent anyone else from getting a piece of the action. That, in a nutshell, is…
The Motorcycle Diaries
Who would’ve thought that a film depicting the early years of Ernesto “Che” Guevara could be so amiably good-humored and studiously tenderhearted? Inspired more by Easy Rider than, say, Malcom X, this film is based on Guevara’s journals and chronicles his 8,000-mile journey in search of fun and adventure with his friend. The film is…
