Rock and rubble
A valiant attempt to save the Book-Cadillac hotel from the wrecking ball … The Sights, one of Detroit’s finest protopop trios … Beautiful sights and sounds at the State Bar … Local filming for the Eminem biopic … & yes, there’s more.
Riding in Cars with Boys
Penny Marshall’s film tells the story of how a young woman’s desire to escape her small town, get a college education and become a professional writer is thwarted by her teenage pregnancy and subsequent marriage to a likable but burdensome loser — with Drew Barrymore.
The Last Castle
This is an odd pastiche of genres, a prison story crossed with a war film, an action movie about pride not reward. Yet director Rod Lurie (Deterrence, The Contender) is unable to inject this story with the gravity it so desperately needs, making it seem little more than an elaborate game of capture the flag.
Blank slate
Detroit’s mayoral candidates are largely mum about who will be filling key administrative posts should they win.
Iron Monkey
Directed by Woo-ping Yuen — the kung fu choreographer of The Matrix — this film has Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s look and action animated by a classic kung fu plot (in Cantonese with English subtitles) with moments of Jackie Chan-like comedy.
Bones
The legend of Jimmy Bones (Snoop Dogg) is Frankensteined together from pieces ripped off from decades of American pop culture. The true horror is that Ernest Dickerson (Spike Lee’s right-hand cinematographer from his NYU grad school days to Malcolm X) directed this B-movie.
Letters to the Editor
The 100-yard war I really enjoyed Curt Guyette’s article, "Bombs Away" (News Hits, Oct. 10-16). I laughed out loud when he kept dropping football references throughout the story. It seems ridiculous that Americans would rather watch a football game than watch a constant stream of "missile-cam." But this isn’t as silly as it seems. No…
Rock, sweat & fears
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to sell all my records, cancel never-ending dentist appointments and just float for a few years. I’ve always envied the mobility and seemingly carefree instability of the laid-back musicians I write about every week. How did I get so stable, I ask myself, especially when a year…
The blue gardenia
You can’t get more than a sentence into any writing about Billie Holiday, aka Lady Day, without being ambushed by the word tragedy. She is, in fact, often used to make the point that fame is a bitch. The implication being that the fame-challenged can take heart that they’ve been fortunate not to have been…
Undead melodies
Philip Glass sets Bela Lugosi’s Dracula to an eerie, chilling score….
It ain’t me, babe
Who hasn’t picked up a rocker’s biography, only to put it down after 10 pages knowing full well that the subject was being made an obvious devil or a saint? Mick Jagger is not Winston Churchill. And Altamont was most certainly not the Battle of Britain. There’s a silliness, an irrelevance that haunts pop music,…
Rock, sweat & fears
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to sell all my records, cancel never-ending dentist appointments and just float for a few years. I’ve always envied the mobility and seemingly carefree instability of the laid-back musicians I write about every week. How did I get so stable, I ask myself, especially when a year…
Union dues
Teamsters Local 372 elects union reformer….
Scoundrels’ progress
Mimi Baez once said that neither Bob Dylan nor Richard Fariña knew how to ride a motorcycle, and she was right on the money: Both men suffered serious crashes that affected them in profoundly different ways. David Hajdu’s Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard…
Four days of hell
Nations that ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Case in point: Nearly 20 years before the horrors of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, American soldiers shot down hundreds of unarmed, innocent refugees–many of them women and children — at a railroad trestle in South Korea during the beginning of what came to be…
Loving the older woman
Q: I am 62 years old, very fit, clean, healthy and safe. I own my own home, am retired and financially secure. I belong to a few social clubs but have not been able to find or meet very many sexually attractive women. I wish there were a gentleman’s club where I could go and…
Booted
Radio host’s plug is pulled after questioning Afghan bombing….
Glam outback
“Who the fuck are these guys? And — more importantly — Are these guys even guys?” These thoughts raced through the mind of a young Chuck Klosterman when he laid eyes on glam-metal band Mötley Crüe for the first time, as we learn in the opening anecdote of Fargo Rock City. Klosterman’s curiosity eventually overcame…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Whether you call it your adversary, your bugaboo or the influence you love to hate, it’s mutating. Soon you’ll no longer be able to play off this familiar foil to generate so much perversely enlivening energy. What’ll you do then? Search frantically for a new candidate to serve as the focus…
Think again
News Hits agrees (with a Republican, no less): State should postpone tax cuts and save programs. ….
Straight Out Tha Trunk
Reviewing a ghetto-tech mix CD isn’t easy. What would someone like Ernest Hemingway say about it? Well … he liked drinking, womanizing and, like ghetto-tech producers, his power stemmed from concise language. Likewise, Disco D drops tracks such as “Shake dem titties” and “Take yo panties off,” which leave no ambiguities in their wake. Obviously,…
No surrender
Keeping the faith and digging deeper into rock’s back pages….
Talking heads
Metro Times news editor can’t predict the future….
Weird Revolution
Unlike the focus-grouped “naughtiness” of bands such as Blink-182 or the Bloodhound Gang, the Butthole Surfers’ obscenely bizarre rock wasn’t calculated to offend; it was just made by genuine freaks who got their kicks making a racket and saying whatever they pleased. After years of lingering in major-label limbo, however, the Buttholes’ new album, Weird…
It’s a cover-up
Liz spends a few frustrating hours in a burqa — the head-to-toe shroud Afghan women are required to wear under Taliban rule.
Feeling our cam-pain
Detroit’s mayoral candidates duke it out in some crappy TV commercials….
The Days of Wine and Roses (1982)
While hip hop was coming out of NYC streets, the Dream Syndicate was hammering against LA studio walls in the name of rock ’n’ roll, attacking songs such as “Tell Me When It’s Over” and “That’s What You Always Say” with the vigor of a conniption fit and the pained skronk of rigor mortis. The…
In search of bright ideas
The 18 candidates for Detroit City Council’s nine seats offer up their best plans for the city.
The Saudi connections
Saudi Arabia has a formal allegiance with the United States — and quiet ties to terror.
Dyed in the Wool
Goddamn, the human heart’s a twisted piece of work. Just when you think it’s OK, safe to be cynical again, in rushes a sound, a fury and a muso-lyrical poet that upsets the apple cart and sends you reeling back to square one. Just like that, Shannon Wright — via her latest full-length, Dyed In…
Good for the soul
Drew Barrymore’s latest film is a tell-all tale of a teenage mom who (sort of) makes good.
Words to live by
The Writer’s Voice offers up a literary feast of poetic and fictional readings….
Short Stories
What makes the music of Marvin Thompson Jr. special is the way it calms you down and slows your pace. It’s the kind of jazz that automatically conjures pictures of warm weather, warm memories and better days. Believe me — in the times we live in, it helps to have some sounds like this around…
What’s a new mayor to do?
Less than two weeks from now, Detroiters choose a new mayor. And for the first time in many years, Jack’s not certain who will win — or who should.
Rockin’ and Readin’
Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids & Life in a Half-Changed World – Peggy Orenstein Review by Evelyn Aschenbrenner The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War – Sang-Hun Choe, Martha Mendoza, Charles J. Hanley Review by Michael Anft Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth…
Razmataz
As Italian singer-songwriter Paolo Conte’s debut American CD, Best Of Paolo Conte, made evident, Conte’s unique gift is writing and singing songs that combine such influences as the French cabaret and Tin Pan Alley, and adding his own distinctive twist that results in imaginative and impelling music. Conte’s slightly raspy voice perfectly transcribes the sometimes…
Anthrax anxiety
Today’s scare could be tomorrow’s nightmare….
Sweet sophistication
In the shadow of the Fisher Building, Cuisine is a fine place for a celebration, and also attracts a bustling theater crowd. Inside, the 1920s house is simple but elegant — there’s a full bar and seating both upstairs and down. The French-American menu is ambitious and creative, sophisticated and memorable. Each entrée on the…
Toxicity
In 1998, System Of A Down released its self-titled debut album, enjoyed measured amounts of success both on radio and video, and then hovered quietly within the underground fusion-metal scene. Now, some three years later, SOAD finds itself roaming the country with Slipknot on the Pledge of Allegiance Tour and promoting one of the most-sought-after…
Opera monstro
Deliciously spooky stagings from beyond the grave … The Great Lakes Lyric Opera’s The Canterville Ghost, and Abreact Playhouse’s Night of the Living Dead.
The Ruiners
Watch out for these scarily fun bad-boys — the band’s collective maniacal grin is highly contagious, and its ever-so mashable goth-a-billy surf-punk will take a stab at your heart and infect you with its wild, hyphenated-hybrid sound. Flamboyant costumes and antic stage personas certify that for the Ruiners (and those who surround the stage), every…
10 Hits To Bliss
The first moments of Milk and Honey advance long beams of warring lights on a dance floor fit almost for a Chelsea boy. The vocodered intro and call to have it “goin’ on and keep the people satisfied” almost make the first tune fit into the listening spaces of Manhattan’s gay muscled men who often…
I am the cosmos
Nine years and still counting down, the indescribable Man or Astro Man? keeps trekkin’ the electro-surf-punk planet.
Waking Life
Director Richard Linklater’s beautiful film is an experiment in lucid dreaming, a controlled trip through the unconscious threads of a community linked by thought. What makes it so utterly hypnotic is the way the animation team led by art director Bob Sabiston took the live-action footage shot by Linklater and utterly transformed it.
Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids & Life in a Half-Changed World
Somewhere after the 1970s feminist movement, women are still struggling to define what it means to be a woman. In a world that hasn’t completely changed, author Peggy Orenstein concludes that woman are still wrestling with the fissures between “you can be anything” and “you can’t have it all.” Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love,…
Iconoclastic classics
Dopplereffekt, Shake, Carl Craig and Moodymann: By stepping outside the predefined notions of the music, these artists and their records have forever changed the course of electronic music.
From Hell
Directors Albert and Allen Hughes (American Pimp, Dead Presidents) illustrate the legend of Jack the Ripper with ironically dark brilliance as an allegory, a grimly entertaining tale that cuts like a surgeon’s scalpel to reveal the progressively profound implications hidden within — with Johnny Depp.
Toujours l’amour
Charlotte Rampling plays a relatively ordinary woman who loses an extraordinary love and finds herself beyond the limits of reality in an attempt to recover it. Director François Ozon once again proves himself to be a cinematic fabulist. He brings the fantastic and the uncanny into the mundane and allows his fiftysomething heroine to be…
