Proactive
Here’s a first: Proactive is recommending its readers actually turn on their TV sets. Normally we’re inclined to dis all things tubal, but this week is different. Come 7 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 20, we plan on being glued to our sets so that we can watch Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and challenger Freman Hendrix engage in…
American Life in Poetry
Many of you have seen flocks of birds or schools of minnows acting as if they were guided by a common intelligence, turning together, stopping together. Here is a poem by Debra Nystrom that beautifully describes a flight of swallows returning to their nests, acting as if they were of one mind. Notice how she…
Separate Lies
Everyone admits to everything in Separate Lies, writer-director Julian Fellowes’ latest sardonic, upper-crust whodunit. Set in a privileged corner of the English countryside where the rich and powerful spend their ample free time playing cricket and drinking themselves silly, this is the kind of mystery that opens with a man dying on the side of…
Fringe benefits
Metro Detroit is a region divided. Whether it’s East Side vs. West Side, suburbs vs. city, players vs. haters, or just plain entrepreneurs vs. everybody else, these divisions leave a lasting legacy. They leave an area that could be working together for the common good mired in unproductive infighting. Instead of a vibrant, integrated region…
More from Midori
Midori answers more questions from Savage Love readers: Q: I have a GGG question. I like it a lot when my girlfriend calls me "daddy" during sex. In fact I’d like it even more if she would carry out the theme a bit. I want to hear what a bad girl she has been and…
The War Within
While big-budget Hollywood films are just now gingerly dipping their toes in the pool of complex, volatile issues surrounding 9-11, a slew of indie efforts are busy wading into the waters — usually way over their heads. The latest in need of a life raft: the new psychological thriller The War Within. Star and co-writer…
Letters to the Editor
Mich. Ave. “Slaughtered” I would like to thank Metro Times for its continued coverage of Corktown and southwest Detroit. However, I was slightly stunned by the opening sentence in Jane Slaughter’s review of Slow’s Bar BQ (“Heat of the moment,” Metro Times, Oct. 12): “There’s hardly a more blighted strip of street north of New…
Art damage
During its three years in Detroit, the Museum of New Art mounted a show titled kaBOOM! in March 2002. It was after 9-11, so the climate was ripe for a show about iconoclasm. It was assumed that within a controlled situation, actions could be controlled. Included in the show’s 100 works to be destroyed was…
Domino
Keira Knightley does her best in Domino to shake off the powder-puff girl-power veneer of her Bend It Like Beckham days, and lose the sickly sweet love-interest persona she earned in Pirates of the Caribbean and Love Actually. Armed with a new-wave hairdo, rifle, ammo slung across her chest and a newfound bad-girl ’tude fully…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Why we do it
To afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted. If anyone asks why we at Metro Times do what we do, why the alternative press does what it does, that’s as good, accurate and concise an answer as we can give. Oddly, it’s a tad old-fashioned. But the good stuff, the noble stuff, holds up, especially…
Elizabethtown
Quirky romance is usually writer-director Cameron Crowe’s strong suit (Almost Famous, Jerry McGuire, Say Anything), but he seems to have lost his flair with Elizabethtown. Orlando Bloom stars as Drew Baylor, a young man working for a mega shoe company in Oregon, who just had the career failure of a lifetime and learns his father…
25th Anniversary issue
Why we do it by Ric Bohy & the staff of Metro Times What keeps us in the game and a statement of aims. Flashbacks and fallout by Curt Guyette Looking back at stories that made a difference. Fringe benefits by Michael Jackman The letters section as circular firing squad. MT nest by W. Kim…
Dead can dance
George A. Romero’s horror classic about the undead, rising from the grave to dine on the flesh of the living, has been terrifying audiences for decades. But, apparently, what it really needed all along was a few toe-tapping musical numbers. So now, a magical night of singing, dancing and brain-eating awaits, as the Hastings Street…
Tracing the tracks
Boom and the Legion of Doom "Hate to Love, Love to Hate" 7-inch (Depression Records, 1986) "Detroit" b/w "Skate Thrash Grind" 7-inch (Depression Records, 1987) Detroit LP (Depression Records, 1989) Bllleeeeaaauuurrrrgghhh! The Record, a 7-inch comp with more than 40 bands performing more than 60 songs (Slap a Ham Records, 1991). Dale "Soulful Moaning" Single…
The raging moderate
Over the past 12 years, Jack Lessenberry’s written about 1,200 words a week in Metro Times. That’s almost 700,000 words. Readers know how he feels about Kwame (incompetent), Granholm (ineffective) and Dubya (criminally stupid). But most readers don’t know that he raises guinea pigs, likes Leonard Cohen and, given a choice, prefers blueberry pie to…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "Honey, This Mirror Isn’t Big Enough for the Two of Us," is the title of a song by the band My Chemical Romance. If you’d like to place yourself in alignment with cosmic rhythms, you should say the exact opposite of that to someone you care about — something like this:…
Farewell to all that
News flash: Detroit (AP) — Oct. 19, 1915 — Officials of the General Buggy Whip Corporation clashed today with the leadership of the United Buggy Whip Workers’ Union. The UBW protested the company’s announcement of huge cuts in pay and benefits, and threatened to go on strike. But a GB spokesman said the dramatic drop…
Proofreader’s marks
I came to work as a Metro Times volunteer proofreader in 1988. A picture of me at age 10, lying on a bed with book open and a finger in my mouth, demonstrates my major qualification to proofread: I read all the time. Proofreaders at the time cooperatively learned the skill around a large conference…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 19 The Bad Tuxedo Book & Music Tour MUSIC/LITERATURE For one of the most unusual book tours of the fall, check out Unbridled Books author Timothy Schaffert’s event, the Bad Tuxedo Book & Music Tour. Named for the powder-blue tux worn by piano-lounge crooner Hud Smith (a character in Schaffert’s new novel, The…
Loons like us
In 25 years, we’ve seen a hell of a lot of … eccentric characters pass through the doors at Metro Times. Some of them even work(ed) here. The newspaper biz is notorious for attracting strange characters, and our fair alt-weekly is no exception; it may even set the bar. Before coming to MT, many staffers…
Metro Retro
25 years ago this week in Metro Times: Associate editor Herb Boyd analyzes a three-way clash between Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, the police officers union (the Detroit Police Association) and an African-American officers group (the Guardians). Boyd describes a calamitous circle: “To improve the racial composition of the Police Department, the mayor launches an affirmative…
Flashbacks and fallout
From the outset, Metro Times has been committed to producing news that matters, and that the people of this area weren’t finding elsewhere. This commitment was made in an editorial that appeared in the first issue of this paper 25 years ago.“Every other major city in the country counts on such a paper for vital…
Where the hell are they now?
For this 25th anniversary issue, we decided to glance backward and uncover just few of many artists-bands who are, or likely will be, forgotten in Detroit’s ever-deepening well of musical history; those who were, in some way, integral to shaping local music’s future, beginning in 1980. We focused on the 25 years that Metro Times…
Detroit Rock Future?
Some call him the greatest prophet who ever lived, just to piss off the Jesus people. Others say a broken fortune cookie is right at least twice a day. And the rest just put their trust in the man behind the stars, Michel de Nostredame, better known to readers of Weekly World News as Nostradamus.…
A bite-sized bistro
The concept is “a new American bistro” — cutting-edge food served tapas-style, for sharing and grazing. It’s a good idea, one used more or less successfully elsewhere, but what makes this restaurant work so well is creative flair.
MT nest
No one’s ever tallied the scores of editorial staffers who’ve come through the doors of Metro Times, or the enormous number of freelancers; in all, they’ve filled papers that, if you could stack them, would make a pile more than 25 feet tall. Over the years, the writers and editors associated with papers have scattered…
Way out fest
The festival now happens earlier in the year, allowing Reel Pride to more quickly scoop up some of the most talked-about films on the festival circuit in this country and abroad. Now Detroiters don’t have to wait so long to see the lighthearted, screwball comedy The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green or the…
Paper view
For MT’s 25th anniversary, our request to area artists was simple: "Just make something that has something to do with Metro Times." Sure, we expected a few political statements and a whole lot of booty. But our artists really surprised us. There are simple explanations to the art you’ll see on these pages, like Gwen…
Lacombe, Lucien
In this 1974 Louis Malle film set during the waning days of WWII, a young man living in German-occupied France winds up working with the Nazis, which offers him, for the first time in his life, a feeling of empowerment. He relishes his newfound control and ability to evoke fear. When Lucien falls in love…
Deficit fending
Kilpatrick denies that insolvency looms for Detroit.
Gang of four
No one can accuse the Primary Space Gallery of being ostentatious. Located in a nondescript, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it one-story brick building on the corner of a residential street in Hamtramck, the only evidence of the place’s existence is the small “P” logo etched into the frosted glass windows. Gallery co-owner Jamie Latendresse says this is a calculated…
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Though set in the early ’70s during China’s Cultural Revolution, this film isn’t a gritty look at that horrendous period in history. Director Dai Sijie, who also wrote the novel the film is based on, lived through those times, and is less interested in focusing on the persecution (and sometimes flat-out murder) of writers, artists…
Owe and behold
Untangling the snarled finances of the Detroit Housing Commission.
25 on 25
Njia Kai is performing arts director for the Detroit Festival of the Arts; the 2006 festival will be her 10th year in that role. Kai is also programming and special events coordinator for Campus Martius Park, active in summer and after-school programs for city youth, the mother of four, and working on a short feature…
Good Night, and Good Luck
Directing his second feature film, George Clooney delivers a smart, restrained and timely examination of how TV news, once upon a time, fearlessly spoke truth to power. Good Night, and Good Luck is set in 1953, during the Communist witch-hunts that recklessly destroyed careers and lives, and traces the five episodes of Edward R. Murrow’s…
Cop out
An ASS fan who commutes down Jefferson Avenue on the city’s East Side sent us this pic of what used to be the Detroit Police Department’s 5th Precinct station house, but is now just another boarded-up building. Of the six precincts closed as part of the department’s budget-trimming restructuring plan, three will be reopened with…
When spouses give grudgingly
Q: Any words of wisdom on girlfriends, boyfriends and spouses who claim to be GGG, but systematically take away much of what they give by making it clear that they are not “into it” even as they fulfill their lovers’ fantasies? For years my wife has indulged me; however, she nearly always prefaces fetish sex…
Firecracker
Film crit kingpin Roger Ebert practically busted a nut over this film, stating it had “one of the most immediately gripping opening scenes I can remember.” True enough, the first five minutes of Firecracker immediately command your attention. Unfortunately, filmmaker Steve Balderson seems to have blown his wad on the opener, as the remainder of…
