Just the dirt
Wash your sins away (literally)…
Milan madness
In a David-and-Goliath struggle, Milan Area Concerned Citizens fight against building a General Motors parking lot in their community.
My Brain
My Brain provides a silly, sweet soundtrack for lo-fi fans to plug into — a variety show of poppy songs about bunny rabbits and candy bars punctuated with drum machine beats and spiked with synthesizers. It’s a wonderful world filled with happy-ending TV reruns and pretty girls who work at the Dairy Queen. These smarty-pants…
Hot-rodding art
Fanciful flake-metal flames…
Hell on Halloween
DJ Hell comes to Detroit on Halloween (with a bunch of fantastic friends) … the Plus 8 world tour hits home with one of the year’s best parties … & the new crew of Bay Area electro-artists.
Big Mouth strikes again
As one of the converted to whom Tom Tomorrow preaches, I feel awkward criticizing his comic, “This Modern World.” Calling “TMW” wordy and graphically uninteresting is like saying Ralph Nader is adenoidal and needs a haircut. But the air-quotes irony of Tomorrow’s 1950s clip-art style is played out, and some of his more verbose and…
Holiday holdout
Be Scrooge for Halloween…
Movers, shakers, art makers
Walk & Squawk’s open house hints of more enjoyable, arty things to come … Detroit’s celebrated ruins to be featured in a national travel mag … & more.
Bizarro Part 2
Cinerama is the brainchild of the ever-prolific David Gedge, former main man of the Wedding Present. Gedge has always had a strange position among the Britpop set over in the UK — a small devoted following but, among the masses, the attitude that he’s merely a sub-Morrissey or Robert Smith. Perhaps that’s because there’s a…
P.S.
Best bet for basketball…
Fright night
The Witches’ new CD casts a universal spell, with melodies that are low on gimmick and high on innovation.
Hitmania
It’d be easy for cynics to dismiss Fastball as a one-and-a-half-hit wonder. If the Grammy-nominated “The Way” and “Out of My Head” held potential, certainly the band’s latest effort, The Harsh Light of Day, delivers on it. No doubt, this record will come as a revelation to music heads who have been singer-songwriters. Miles Zuniga…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): You’re as soaking wet with briny emotion as a Pisces on a binge. You have the potential to be as skilled and calculating a listener as a Scorpio who’s trying to find secret vulnerabilities in valuable allies. And like all those beautifully twisted Geminis who are too smart for their own…
Watermelon man
Spike Lee gets in your face with blackface in his newest film Bamboozled, which explores America’s legacy of minstrelsy and its present manifestations.
Body voicings
Within the private rooms of Jason Molina’s past Songs:Ohia albums, listeners have often found themselves bound to the dramatic confessions of an acute musician and theatrical craftsman. The Lioness, last year’s album, exposed such haunting melodies: The grave instrumentation was devastating when stripped bare by Molina’s characteristically stark, wavering voice. Each song was inevitably a…
Serfing lessons
Q: I have a twentysomething friend who needs to have some sense knocked into her. She has this thing for geezers old enough to be her father who take complete advantage of her. The latest guy is no exception. She painted his house and goes to watch him play sports, while he never picks her…
Letters to the Editor
Justice Nobody Your article on the Supreme Court race (“Justice at any price,” MT, Oct. 11-17) could have looked into the working of the court. The Engler-appointed Justices on the Michigan Supreme Court who are running for election (Markman, Taylor and Young) are hypocrites. They preach personal responsibility, but do not practice it. Our Supreme…
Advert nutrition
Spend a minute figuring out whether this magazine is really titled “Issue” or if the publisher is just being sneaky by withholding its “real” name, and you’ll have entered into the vertigo-driven world of advertising. (Or you’ll just notice how deep you’re already in it.) Issue tugs down the curtains separating fine art from its…
Playing by the rules
Q: My roommate and I are in our 30s and (up until a few months ago) have been strictly platonic friends. One night, we were having some wine and she was in a very short nightshirt. Because I was in my sweatpants and nothing else, she noticed when I became aroused from the revealing way…
All-by-my-self
A vote for Proposition A means arts for all…
Smooth lit
What’s a gigolo to do? So much untended pussy and so little time. Pity poor Malcolm. When he isn’t jetting from LA to Chicago to “Hotlanta” to offer phallic comfort to lonely sistas with MBAs, he’s struggling to keep hope alive for true love and a retirement gig as a jazz pianist. The guy just…
Realm of shades
Forget Scream 2 and the Blair Witch … rent one of these Japanese ghost films and bring the chills back into horror.
Nader deserves more than votes
Much soul-searching has gone on at the Metro Times as we’ve debated which presidential candidate to endorse. But when it comes to the issues, Ralph Nader has our wholehearted support.
Scarier than thou
Imagine trick-or-treating at Martha Stewart’s fabled country house, with its winding lanes and perfectly manicured shrubberies. You’d have to be wearing the Most Adorable costume, carrying a Perfect Treat Sack fashioned from moiré silk or handmade paper. Oh, the pressure. Would Martha think your costume worthy? But think of the goodies! Maybe pumpkin cookies, cut…
More revolutions per decade
Plus 8 Records celebrates 10 mind-altering, body-moving years … co-founders Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva reflect on the label’s beginnings and look forward to an unpredictable future.
Phone help
Ameritech works through customer backlog…
Scrap heap sentiments
Conventional wisdom says that almost all first novels are autobiographical. If this is true, say a prayer for Detroit writer Michael Zadoorian. His protagonist, a day-dreaming nerd called Richard, has been on the ropes for a while. He runs a secondhand shop, Satori Junk, in what one assumes is Ferndale. Business hours are somewhat haphazard…
Singled out
Being contracted to love someone else is as romantic as a sandbag. So outside of religious belief or buckling to social pressure, why would anyone want to get married?
Keeping secrets
Government whistle blowers outlawed?
For dear life
Director Bahman Ghobadi’s quietly devastating film is storytelling at its unvarnished best. The subject is an orphaned family of Iranian Kurdish children struggling to survive amid political upheaval. Their quiet determination and dignity are reflected in the beautiful simplicity of Ghobadi’s visual style.
A whole lotta comics
The Small Press Expo was a gathering of innovative talent – one-stop shopping for the mad medium’s finest.
Council class clowns
City council members like to kid around…
Coming To Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians
Photographer Edward S. Curtis, in Anne Makepeace’s documentary of his life, comes across as someone sincere but realistic, who embarked on an obsessive project to document as thoroughly as possible the quickly disappearing traditional life of the Native American.
The Krazy-est
The Small Press Expo votes to decide the best of the year’s alternative comics.
Hotown?
Detroit prostitutes movin’ on up…
The Yards
Trapped in slippery morality and cycles of crime, Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix and Charlize Theron are a triptych of good intentions gone awry in James Gray’s strikingly old-fashioned, beautifully nuanced tale of corruption.
AP1 wherewhenbox
WHERE & WHEN "From Our Minds to Yours" Plus 8’s 10th Anniversary Party Sat., Oct. 28 St. Andrew’s Hall 431 E. Congress, Detroit Call 313-961-MELT. Live netcast via plus8.com. MUSIC
Talkin’ trash
Toronto garbage on its way to metro Detroit?
Goya in Bordeaux
Director Carlos Saura’s Goya (Francisco Rabal) is alternately avuncular and cranky, deaf but still vital and prone to slipping into a dream world of bittersweet memories. Saura’s biopic is a lushly filmed wallow in the loves and tribulations of a long-suffering artist.
Government cuisine
The USDA had a tough task putting together its new cookbook: Coming up with recipes that met their own nutritional recommendations, tasted good and were dirt cheap.
Brainless thingamajigs
Technology is getting sillier. Here are a few examples of wacky gizmos available now for all your gift-giving needs.
Foot-in-mouth disease
Environmental disputes escalate…
Two Family House
Sometimes playing like a laughless episode of a revisionist "The Honeymooners," this House is a fixer-upper. Its plot is slow to build, with little motivation for the extreme actions of its main characters. But it focuses on cultural, racial and marital relationships in ’50s America in a fresh, surprising way.
Blonde bum-shell
Marilyn Monroe sat here?…
Just say war
Misguided strategy gives kids more access to drugs — and a more dangerous world….
Spence, Debbie & the money
Race spurs calls for reform….
Pay It Forward
Director Mimi Leder actually makes this treacle go down easy. But this cloying, scattershot film could stand more verisimilitude, instead of falling back on the easy comfort of shallow platitudes — with Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment.
Wear her
Pam Anderson gets close to you…
Weirder than you think …
George W. Bush’s apparent lead is rather baffling, even to ol’ cynical pants. But what could happen with the Electoral College vote this year is even stranger.
Justice Nobody
A reader responds with another angle on Michigan’s Supreme Court.
Kosher sex
Incest and opera might be equally repulsive to some. Notions of inbreeding, immorality, and Italian overtures could undermine the comic potential in either subject. Luckily, Daniel Handler’s successful sophomore effort shows that combining these oft-distasteful subjects can yield rich rewards. Opera is the form and sex is the primary activity in Handler’s Watch Your Mouth,…
