That ain’t Aquafresh!
Savage Love reader responses regarding pubes on toilet seats and come on toothbrushes The guy who puts semen on his friends’ toothbrushes is committing sexual assault. No one should be forced or tricked into coming in contact with another’s semen. Once, in college, while perusing a campus online discussion forum, I came across a posting…
Live wires
At any high-profile contemporary art fair in the country, you can bet there’s an alternative art fair just around the corner — and a bit more back alley. Organizers solicit vendors who are artists rather than dealers by offering lower booth fees for showing and selling art. Usually the work is equally impressive, and the…
Doom
Since most video games are about action and atmosphere, when it comes to adapting the concept into a big-budget motion picture, you’d better have something new up your sleeve. Doom, unfortunately, doesn’t. Screenwriters David Callaham and Wesley Strick have basically thrown Aliens, Predator and Dawn of the Dead in a blender and written something a…
The bitch is back
Aaron-Carl wants to hurt you. He wants to see you suffer. Eyes closed, lips pressed up against a microphone in his basement studio called the Dungeon, he mouths such words to his track “Hateful” like he really means it. “I do,” he says looking up, brown eyes burning, a scowl crossing his round face. Then…
A typographer’s odd jobs
London-born artist Robert Brownjohn had a short but prolific career in Chicago and New York in the ’50s and ’60s as a photographer and self-taught freelance designer. His portfolio was all over the place; in addition to his experimental typography, he made his mark designing ads for Bachelor Cigarettes and Pepsi-Cola, as well as rock…
Stay
Marc Forster is a young director who’s had an incredible string of luck, helping Halle Berry win an Oscar for the resolutely dour Monster’s Ball, and snagging top-notch talent for his restrained crowd-pleaser Finding Neverland. All of his films have at least one false moment, but never have they been as 100 percent bogus and…
Playing it strait
Demetri Vacratsis doesn’t mind being part of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd — as long as you’re talking about the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, that is. The 34-year-old Windsor resident is co-founder of the Breathe Art Theatre Project’s Open Borders Initiative. The goal is to unite Windsor and Detroit theater communities by presenting contemporary, socially…
Neat art
If you ever want to be mystified by the masterful, check out howtofoldashirt.net, a Web site that may even astound origamists with a clip from a Japanese promotional video. The otherwise-gimmicky site features the wizardry of a three-step process that transforms the mundane act of folding T-shirts, dress shirts and sweaters into a piece of…
Daydream believer
Nineteen-year-old Molly-Jean Schoen is a junior English major at Michigan State University who picked up guitar at 15 and played in some “crappy high school girl bands.” At best, Jean’s young-girl lyrics are whimsical like diary entries; she’s a balladeer of innocence and adolescence whose folk pop is peppered with moments of girl-group bubblegum (“So…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
What do we want? MB52! When do we want it? Now! • Various Artists — Run The Road (Last Gang) :: This clever compilation contains enough speed rap to give you whiplash. And although it may not be socially responsible to use the sampled sounds of jacked chambers and gun blasts as percussion on “Terror…
Just the fax, ma’am
Troubled PAC Vision 05 goofs again.
Live 1984 Starland Ballroom
Looking for technical proficiency or a high-quality, remastered, digitally enhanced DVD? Don’t bother. This is the post-Misfits, pre-Danzig band in all of its glory; raw, pissed-off and scary as hell. The footage trembles with fear as Glen Danzig’s voice skips like scratched vinyl. The band is literally in the frenzied crowd’s faces, and Danzig is…
Night and Day
Thursday • 27 Dolly Parton MUSIC She’s been the darling of the country music world since she was a little girl, but Dolly Parton is a whole lot more than a pretty face. Not only has the big-haired, ample-bosomed songstress written some hauntingly beautiful ballads, she is a savvy entrepreneur, theme park owner, one heck…
Detroit’s big tow
Auditor Joe Harris blasts city for overpaying towing contractor.
Lost Horizon
In their earliest incarnation, Friends of Dean Martinez were sort of a cactus league Ventures, writing spiny, windswept instrumentals that imagined the Rat Pack carousing in the Mojave. Ten years and numerous lineup shifts later FoDM is now a trio led by Texas-based steel guitarist Bill Elm. And while vestiges of that tumbleweed lounge music…
Doodler’s galaxy
Whether drawing in ink or painting in oil, artist Faina Lerman spontaneously follows a line as easily as a train of thought. Her art finds its form like an ordinary day made from many small choices, or a stone rippling calm water. Lerman, 30, and recently married to artist Graem Whyte, studied sculpture at Oakland…
Evictims
HUD sends intimidating letters to Detroit seniors.
Searching For Soul: Rare & Classic Soul, Funk & Jazz From Michigan 1968-1980
Alcohol is a killer vice, and Robert Jay knows it. When the Detroit funk legend wrote the infectious “Alcohol” in 1969, he was hungover and mad as hell. Yet Jay’s blues-funked “Alcohol” became one of the most beloved, and nearly impossible-to-find sides in the funk music canon. While a few 7-inch singles can still be…
Strung out on rock
Maybe it should be on the controlled substances list. Certainly as many lives have been frittered away in its pursuit as hard drugs. How many of our country’s best minds have been lost to the quixotic allure of style, racket and performance? “It’s such a critical age when you’re 15 or 16, and so much…
Backslaps
Props to our award-winning writers.
Do They Know It’s Hallowe’en?
Cue spooky music and chaotic, spliced-together vocals from a cast of thousands explaining, probably, that Halloween is either A) under attack; B) evil; C) something kids in Africa don’t celebrate. Tearing a page from the Harlequin Romance-Goth Book of Love manual, this all-star, single-song, four-mix disc reaches for parodic ’80s-styled trib greatness and falls somewhere…
Treats & tricks
Searching for the perfect Halloween sack-stuffer.
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Time for a retrospective already?
Odds ’n’ sods anthologies are, invariably, mixed bags — the iPod Nation’s fractured attention span and shuffle aesthetic notwithstanding. Not even the granddaddy of the genre — the Who’s Odds and Sods, duh — is totally listenable. This two-CD collection from the Dirtbombs, however, sidesteps the odds ’n’ sods jinx. Here’s how: 1.) It primarily…
Head cheese
Leslie Feist’s first show was opening for the Ramones, after winning a battle of the bands while still in high school. A decade removed, Feist is established. Her lovely voice steals in with a gentle, buttery grace, which colors her jazzy, cabaret-pop beautifully. Feist’s monomanias come in her waking moments: 5. I’ve been asleep on…
A desk job
Evil, wrote British true-crime author Brian Masters, “is something you recognize immediately when you see it. It works through charm. One of the things you hear most often about Kwame Kilpatrick is his charisma. I agree. I’ve seen it up close. When he sat in our offices, twice, for interviews in consideration of Metro Times’…
The slum of their parts
When a group is as fabled as Slum Village, history becomes a kind of invisible instrument. Four years of lineup changes, bouts with troubled members, struggles to indoctrinate replacement players, all led to this, their fifth (and tellingly self-titled) album. And the one question their fans want answered is simple and direct: What shape is…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Some of the most confounding enigmas about the human condition might be explained if the theory of reincarnation were valid. I invite you to spend the next week trying it on for size. There’s no need to become a true believer. Just experiment with the possibility. Imagine that you’ve lived many…
Speaking for the voiceless
Remember Jefferson, the steer who escaped from an Eastern Market slaughterhouse at Christmastime two years ago? He careened down city streets for more than a mile, stopping traffic and fascinating onlookers. Eventually, police cornered him, and he was shot with a tranquilizer dart. A lot of sympathetic people then fought to save him. Anyone who…
Upscale, down-home
Power breakfast — what a concept. It’s clearly designed for downtown movers and shakers to start their workdays by impressing each other over the most important meal of the day. The upscale Southern cooking is complemented by dishes that borrow eclectically, drawing on everything from Mexican and Italian (the “Santa Fe frittata”) to Creole to…
Why the levee broke
It looks like Hurricane Katrina is continuing to cause just as much emotional disruption along racial lines as it did physically throughout New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. Anyone who was hoping that this particular element of the disaster would fade away once the rebuilding started can pretty much forget about that. The city…
Proactive
Mental health — On Wednesday, Oct. 26, The Guidance Center of Southgate will host an informative open house for adults living with mental illness and their loved ones. The event’s purpose is twofold: to initiate a campaign to challenge the stigma associated with adults living with mental illness and to celebrate and encourage consumer involvement…
Schlock therapy
William Castle was a director who discovered he had a knack for cheap science fiction and horror and an uncanny sense for publicity. He’d pull such stunts as taking out a $1,000 insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London for any viewer who died of fright while watching a film, or placing oversized joy buzzers in…
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry Naomi Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio, Texas. Here she perfectly captures a moment in childhood that nearly all of us may remember: being too small for the games the big kids were playing, and fastening tightly upon some little thing of our own. Boy and Egg Every few minutes, he…
Letters to the Editor
Independent voices needed Congrats on your first quarter-century of leading-edge alternative newspapering from a former managing editor of an upstate New York free weekly also born as a progressive voice in a city with two chain-owned dailies. The Syracuse New Times now is in its 36th year. The alternative press, initially a fringe representative of…
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
What really sets this movie apart from the legions of clumsy ’50s drive-in flicks that ended up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 is its blunt, almost primal simplicity, combined with a low-budget technical skill that was, at the time, unseen in the genre. Adapting Jack Finney’s tale of “pod people” bent on human destruction —…
Liberating Aunt Jemima
Mammies, coons and Uncle Toms shuckin’ and jivin’ are fair material for Betye Saar. The artist doesn’t hold back. She is known for mixing racism with the genteel — juxtaposing stereotypes with cherished images of black life overlooked by society. Her assemblages are also diatribes against racism and sexism that still pervade American popular culture.…
Every day is Halloween
The fight is about to begin. With tentative steps that crunch the multicolored carpeting of leaves below, two gangs slowly creep toward each other. Their lips curl back, revealing menacing scowls as they face off, jutting forth their weapons and issuing the occasional taunt. Tension hangs in the crisp autumn air, so thick you could…
The Nomi Song
The Nomi Song, written and directed by Andrew Horn, is a documentary featuring home video footage, interview clips with Klaus Nomi and the requisite talking heads — band mates, journalists, friends, fans and fellow artists who jumped onto Nomi’s back as soon as they saw his incredible act. But Horn cleverly makes a concerted effort…
Metro Retro
19 years ago this week in Metro Times: Mary Wreford interviews Joseph Collins, co-founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, about the Reagan administration’s role in world hunger. Collins comments on Reagan’s economic program, which stresses private ownership, reliance on market forces, and increased trade: “Relying on market forces does not work in…
Drawn together
Cartooning can be a lonely business, one that requires hours and hours of slaving over a drawing board with nothing but pen nibs, bottles of ink and a vivid imagination to keep you company. And being a fan of cartoonists — especially those artists whose bodies of work rest far outside the shiny walls of…
Forty Shades of Blue
The two recent Bill Murray ennui-fests, Broken Flowers and Lost in Translation, illustrate how quietly introspective moments of passion and betrayal can have a cumulative emotional effect as devastating as the soapiest tear-jerkers. In that vein, Ira Sachs’ sophomore feature, Forty Shades of Blue, is a similarly pure, distilled vision of romantic denial, familial angst…
Saving a marriage with adultery
Q: My wife and I were married straight out of college. At the time I knew she suffered from a potentially debilitating mental disorder, so I came into the relationship with my eyes fully open. Since then, nine years and two children have followed. About two years ago her disorder began to get worse. Suicidal…
Confess your fears, toll-free
While it’s not terribly unusual to find a business card with an 800 number in waiting rooms, bus terminals or at payphones, it may be to find one offering a chance to express one’s deepest fear. For the past couple of years, Chicago-based artist Deborah Stratman’s FEAR project has been offering callers the possibility of…
North Country
If it weren’t a major studio release, North Country would be the best Lifetime movie ever made. That’s not necessarily a slight. True, the film’s schematic script may be little better than the ripped-from-the-headlines issue movies shown on basic cable, and the idea of casting a slew of A-list stars as “simple folk” may smack…
The Oracle of Delphi
“Delphi is simply a flashpoint, a test case, for all the economic and social trends that are on a collision course in our country and around the globe,” says Steve Miller, the CEO of Delphi, the auto parts giant that recently filed for bankruptcy. With pressure on unions to accept painfully deep pay cuts —…
Masterful missives
A page from More Than Words (Princeton Architectural Press, $24.95), a gorgeous 190-page book by Liza Kirwin featuring intimate illustrated letters to lovers, friends and professional acquaintances by the likes of Man Ray, Alexander Calder and Frida Kahlo, from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Rebecca Mazzei is Metro Times arts editor. Send comments to…
Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story
Starring Dakota Fanning, Hollywood’s most prolific 11-year-old, this a kid-and-pony show that’ll have equestrian-obsessed youngsters slumbering with visions of horses prancing in their heads for weeks. Dreamer, however, is like Seabiscuit for the SpongeBob set — extremely satisfying for horse lovers but less so for general audiences, at least for those who can tolerate unapologetic…
