UAW defiant in Pontiac
They won’t back down. That appears to be the stance of UAW Local 594 at GM’s Validation Center in Pontiac. On two recent Tuesdays, hundreds of workers marched at the plant to protest what they say are contract violations by management. Local 594 Vice President Larry Trandell says that the 1996 contract prohibits visitors from…
Other side of the movement
Simply perfect and simply impossible. And that’s just the title of this newly reissued little book, a work possibly more important now than when first published. Today, you could no more imagine calling a book Negroes With Guns than one could imagine asking about the president’s semen back in 1962 when this book first appeared.…
Skin flicks
Body art, that variant of performance art which utilizes the living human form, has been with us all along. From the 5,300-year-old frozen “Iceman” recently discovered high in the Italian Alps to the Tahitians encountered by Captain Cook in the 18th century, tattooing has been practiced across the globe from time immemorial. This is evidence…
The Acclaimed Haydn Recordings
The keyboard music of Haydn not only doesn’t get any respect, it’s virtually ignored. Granted, it isn’t on the same level as his symphonies, masses or even his chamber music, but there is great purity and uncluttered, classical structure in his sonatas that often go unacknowledged. This marvelous reissue by Ivory proves that, in the…
Naturally different politics
Fred Rosenberg is fighting an uphill battle he’s destined to lose, at least in the short term. He’s undaunted by the fact that he has no chance of defeating well-funded mainstream politicians in the election to determine who represents Michigan’s 12th District in Congress. Joining him in this struggle are 15 other metro Detroit-area candidates…
Emo-To-The-Core
Sunny Day Real Estate makes soaring melodic indie rock the way the Good Lord intended it — literally. Singer Jeremy Enigk found God a few years back and broke up the first incarnation of this Seattle quartet soon-after, only to carry on his anthemic(!) songwriting with a chamber orchestra(!!) to make 1996’s Return of the…
Park it elsewhere
“He has the money, we don’t,” said Detroiter Nathaniel Griffith as he mused over the recent closing of Dodge Pits Dock and the Bill Muncy Memorial Park at the request of Roostertail owner Thomas Schoenith. “I ask maybe once a year for the park to be closed on time,” said Schoenith. “Now I’m labeled a…
Cuban Wonder
Fred McDowell, John Hurt and Bukka White all became better known later in life than they had been at any time previously. When they were rediscovered, after years of farming and/or working in rough-hewn, blue-collar surroundings, their art connected a more modern age with part of its past. The same thing has happened in Cuba…
INS: What arrests?
After recent reports that Latinos were being unfairly harassed and arrested for alleged immigration law violations, Detroit City Councilmember Kay Everett decided to investigate. She invited representatives from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, U.S. Border Patrol and Detroit Police Department to a City Council meeting last week. Each was asked about reports that three Latinos…
Beach Blanket Bolshy
I hate to admit it, but the original motion picture soundtrack to Six String Samurai is actually kind of cool. Interpolating an evocative score written by Brian Tyler, actual dialogue from the movie and music by some Russian-born group of musicians called the Red Elvises, Six String Samurai (the soundtrack) is offbeat, whimsical and extremely…
Fighting TV with TV
There is a crucial difference between Leslie Touma and the other Republicans who have tried to pry Sander Levin loose from his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Unlike her predecessors, Touma has enough cash to challenge him on TV. Touma, a 40-year-old auto industry executive from Ferndale, is running television ads that accuse…
Player Haters In Dis House
As one of the Detroit bass scene’s heaviest hitters (DJ Assault is the other), DJ Godfather (Brian Jeffries) churns out the hookiest booty tracks you’ve heard on all the radio mix shows (without knowing who penned them). On this debut full-length, Jeffries lets us know, compiling his best singles, from the summer ’98 anthem title…
Tort and Retort
You might think the Nov. 3 election to fill two seats on the Michigan Supreme Court is about which candidates will better serve the cause of justice. That’s about half right. Barely behind the scenes, the powerful Michigan Trial Lawyers Association and the state’s business interests are mobilized with two radically divergent definitions of justice.…
New age breakout
It’s raining. We take the alley behind Ferretti’s loft. In the background is the concrete-and-steel Detroit skyline. In the foreground is a vegetable garden. We approach the mound of earth where Ferretti’s cat is buried. He has wrapped the corpse in aluminum foil and wired a TV antenna to its head. The antenna pokes through…
He said, she said
When Democratic attorney general candidate Jennifer Granholm was asked what sets her a part from her Republican opponent John Smietanka, she answered, “besides honesty?” Her response characterizes the tone of this campaign which turned sour this month after Smietanka accused Granholm of supporting Democratic gubernatorial candidate Geoffrey Fieger’s crime plan. With the polls showing a…
Don’t start me talkin’
The Bill T. Jones-Arnie Zane Company says it all with dance….
Playing opossum
NEW INK, OLD STORY Detroit is fast becoming the DIY publishing capital of the Midwest. I can’t seem to walk out of a downtown bar or restaurant without skipping over yet another complimentary ink-smearing monthly publication devoted to documenting the local “scene.” Usually, this means a piece about the Heidelberg Project, a few stories about…
Ghosts of horrors past
Beloved challenges America to confront the legacy of slavery which still haunts us….
Beloved
In the hands of director Jonathan Demme, Beloved is a tale of possession. The film deals frankly with the psychic and physical scars left from a legacy of human ownership, which linger long after a former slave is “free.” But it’s also very much a ghost story. Whatever ambiguities Toni Morrison created in her novel,…
International music of mystery
In a global pop market place, Le Grand Magistery is the karaoke lounge.In a global pop market place, Le Grand Magistery is th…
More Than Food
The corner of the world containing Albania, Armenia and other Balkan, Crimean and Eastern Mediterranean homelands has been a cultural melting pot for centuries. All of these places are on the way to somewhere else and, as a result, have repeatedly been stomped on and through by empires (Macedonian, Ottoman and Russian) on the make.…
In one ear
RISING SUN It’s been a helluva year for Jill Jack — and the extended community of musicians, muses and cohorts that comprise the Jill Jack family. Since emerging on the Detroit singer-songwriter and rock radar two years ago, Jack has become one of the few musicians who has managed to walk the tightrope between hardworking…
Junk Mail
Roy, a mailman in Oslo, Norway, doesn’t seem to take his job very seriously. Once a day he lugs a pound or two of junk mail he’s been given to deliver and stuffs it into a hole in the wall of a train tunnel where, it appears, about half a ton of the stuff lies…
Journalists in disgrace
“You’re too good for the Boston Globe!” — Local board member, Society of Professional Journalists, admiringly addressing Patricia Smith, fired lying columnist Yeah, right. Granted, these are not great days for journalism. A few vast conglomerates own most media. Corporate culture has taken over news operations, even newsrooms. Standards have been sacrificed, news budgets cut.…
Practical Magic
“There’s no devil in the craft,” Sally Owens (Sandra Bullock) says to Gary Hallet (Aidan Quinn) about the witchcraft that’s practiced by the women in her family. That’s too bad, because one thing Practical Magic could have used is a little wickedness or, at the very least, a stronger point of view. The film starts…
Watching the waves
It never fails. The moment I think I’ve got things all figured out, things change. You’d think I’d learn not to be so naive, dealing with new technology and living in Detroit. But a recent moment of self-imposed sentimentality caused me to rethink everything. A friend asked if I thought the technology industry would be…
Shadrach
Narrator Martin Sheen’s honeyed Southern drawl announces Shadrach as a genteel tale based on the memories of Paul Whitehurst (Scott Terra): As a 10-year-old in the summer of 1935, he hears the tragic echoes still reverberating through his native Virginia. Paul, the only child of an affluent family, wants nothing more than to head to…
Pitch’d
END CONSTRUCTION Party promoters Detor will be leaving their posts as programmers of Motor’s VIP back room study at the end of this month. As visiting Tokyo/NY scratch master Hitoshi cut things up two Fridays ago, Detor man Derrick Ortencia detailed his and partner Jason’s reason for ending their residency at the club. “We’ve done…
Slam
It’s like this. The first thing you’re gonna do when you get to D.C. is forget about the Washington Monument. Forget you’re a goddamn tourist in your own country. Tell yourself this ain’t no test of good citizenship, you’re no hero. Live — for once — outside the televised version of American history, see what…
