Bent fabric
“This is a very tricky, very disturbing movie,” Todd Solondz said of his second film, Happiness, “and I think it’s not easy to categorize, perhaps, because there aren’t signposts. There is a moral underpinning — there is a moral anchor here — but at the same time it doesn’t tell people what is right and…
Dub Poet
So, what is a dub poet anyhow? In the last two decades, Linton Kwesi Johnson has written and performed some of the most politically charged songs to ever come out of Britain’s black culture or even Jamaica itself, and that includes the revered works of Robert Nesta Marley, thank you very much. Filled with biting…
Sorcerers with strings
It’s just plain magical … there’s no other way to describe it. Remember when you were a kid and you heard the story of Cinderella? You became the poor girl — or the wicked stepmother or the love-lost prince. No matter. It was impossible to walk away from the tale without taking part of it…
Agit-Pop Jungle Boogie
You don’t have to understand the history of Asian politics here to know something big’s going on in Rafi’s Revenge. Like an east Asian, junglefied Rage Against the Machine, Asian Dub Foundation takes a hard sound and uses it as a soapbox for even harder themes, all of which, while detailed in the liner notes,…
Labor movement
Not many women feel like Dearborn resident Colette Simkins felt immediately after giving birth. “I wanted to party,” exults the 37-year-old mother of seven. “I felt fabulous.” The arrival of seventh child Ellen Margaret last July was a radical departure from the “horrible experience” of delivering her first child in a local hospital 15 years…
Solo Solace
Isolation seems to be a calling for some — a restless state in which the mind is free to idle. Buckner’s plaintive country package, Since, is a strange black dot that has absorbed lots of that energy in the form of crooked song-poems and a general frustration with the reality that makes their misery flow.…
Little Hitlers
These must be sleepless nights for Augusto Pinochet. All the old desperadoes are gone — Mobutu, Papa Doc, Bokassa, Stroessner, Somoza. Only the wily Chilean with the stoic sag in his cheeks and virtuous gleam in his eyes was going to beat the clock and have a nice smooth ride into oblivion, all of Santiago…
Orchestrating Success
Mentoring and support from the likes of Tony Conrad — who performed with John Cale and Faust, Perry Farrell, the Chemical Brothers and members from the Band — bring us to Deserter’s Songs, Mercury Rev’s most accessible album to date. In the context of Rev’s history of three ambitious, pseudo-psychedelic albums, Songs does not break…
Downtown dusts off
DUST BOWL BLAST Yes, the Hudson’s building went down in a heap of dust … and in its place? A very impressive sign announcing the (to this point) illusory Campus Martius project. Ho hum, pardon my yawn, but haven’t we seen the big demolition-project-and-billboard two-step before? (Such as, oh, the Carmel Hall destruction and Brush…
Inventing a past
Old-town nostalgia inspires a “new” look in suburban planning….
Pint-sized politics
If there’s one thing we care about in our house, it’s voting. We make it a family affair whenever possible. I always carry the kids with me to the polls. My husband (who was born shaking hands and working rooms) never misses an opportunity to include the kids in Democratic Party politics. And “America Rock”…
Eenie, meenie … oh, hell, vote for Fieger
This is a tough election choice at the top of the ticket. On the one hand, we have John Engler, the sumo wrestler hell-bent on doing anything and everything for the pro-business lobby. On the other, Geoffrey Fieger, the fighter for you who talks a good progressive game but generally seems a loose cannon and…
East Palace, West Palace
The title East Palace, West Palace refers to the two public toilets on either side of the Forbidden Palace which, in contemporary China, are cruising grounds for young gay men. Periodically, they are routed by the police, humiliated in a ritualistic manner (e.g., told to squat and face a wall until their legs hurt), then…
For governor: the only choice
The amazing thing is there is no choice, really. That is, if issues and past performance matter. The challenger is on the right side of virtually every issue. He is rude, yes, crude, egocentric, but a positive pit bull for anything and anyone in which he believes. The incumbent is a career politician of marked,…
Happiness
In his ambitious second film, writer-director Todd Solondz captures a feeling of frustrated yearning — where happiness seems to exist just beyond the reach of grasping fingertips — in a group of characters who can’t see that what’s actually holding them back is themselves. Joy (Jane Adams) is considered the least successful of the three…
Letters to the Editor
Backlash on B Thank you, for your look at Proposal B with the most recent column by Jack Lessenberry (“The politics of life and death, MT, Oct. 14-20). However, we feel that Mr. Lessenberry misses out on a critical point in the discussion. Proposal B is more than a theoretical argument on medical ethics or…
Orgazmo
It must be magic working with actor-writer-director Trey Parker (“South Park”)! After all, the chance to be in a movie where nobody can act comes once in a lifetime. Then there’s the really good stuff: the topless 300-pound woman, with a voice that would make even Darth Vader shudder, drooling over Captain Orgazmo; Choa-Boy, Orgazmo’s…
Fixing the unbroken
When Detroit voters go to the polls next week they will be asked whether they want to eliminate a layer of public oversight that has never been implemented. Confused? You should be. City charter revisions approved by Detroit voters in 1996 included a provision to establish so-called Community Advisory Councils that would provide a direct…
Life Is Beautiful
Memorable appearances in Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law and Night on Earth, and the lead role in Son of the Pink Panther, have given American audiences only a small peek at the many talents of Italy’s comedic dynamo, Roberto Benigni. He utilizes many forms of humor in his work, ranging from low-brow sight gags to…
Third-party ballot fight
Electoral politics isn’t just about what’s on the ballot — what isn’t there is just as political. Consider the Green Party, whose representatives and lawyers say that it’s unconstitutional to bar them from local elections unless they qualify first for statewide elections. That rule limits all smaller parties, they argue. “There is an animosity among…
Pleasantville
It’s Sunday night and “The Simpsons” are on: the special Halloween episodes. The script is tight and the film references intelligent and amusing as usual. But then Bart and Lisa start fighting over the remote and, before they know it, they’re trapped on the other side of the television screen, inside a cartoon show. “Oh,…
Archer’s wage flip-flop
In a sudden reversal, Mayor Dennis Archer declared his opposition last week to the proposed Living Wage Ordinance on the Nov. 4 ballot. The proposal would raise wages paid by employers that receive city contracts or city-administered grants of more than $50,000. Archer had previously said he supported the measure because higher wages would attract…
See the Sea
Writer-director François Ozon has devised a nasty little horror film which seems both familiar and new. A normal person, a normal setting, a mysterious stranger, then turmoil and worse — shades of Polanski, Chabrol and Pinter hang over his tale while his control of its telling seems original and fresh. A young Englishwoman, Sasha (Sasha…
Fates of the planet, Dems
Jonathan Schell wrote The Fate of the Earth in 1982 to drive home the prospects of nuclear holocaust and, as one reviewer put it, to “slap us to our senses.” His recent A Gift of Time argues that the post-Cold War chance to avert that fate is being squandered. Schell is to discuss the book…
Roots Tunes
It is one of the most amazingly beautiful voices to emerge from one of the ugliest corners of existence that you’ll ever hear. But then, that’s the way it often is with the blues. This is a form of music studded with odd diamonds squeezed from the hell of circumstance and shaped by whatever awaits…
Pitch’d
THRILLER On the subject of All-Hallows’ Eve, it seems there’s a decided lack of parties around the end of this month. With the demise of Dean Major’s System goes the “System 666” party, while Analogue Systems’ Gabe, initially rumored to be picking up the slack, is instead concentrating on his New Year’s Eve all-electro party.…
Ruining Preconceptions
The self-titled debut by Julie Ruin — aka Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill — tweaks the boundaries of the she-artist and her place in patriarchal society. But to pigeonhole Hanna as a feminist is to ignore that she is really an artist, who chooses to express her emotions, uncertainties and beliefs through the universal, primal…
Pinned down
We weren’t expecting a typical candidate interview. After all, Geoffrey Fieger is anything but a typical candidate. The wannabe governor’s renegade campaign is slashing mercilessly at his incumbent opponent while trying to generate voter support with virtually no help from what remains of the state’s Democratic power structure. But even we weren’t prepared for the…
Eastern Classical Exchange
The ghazal is a lyric form of poetry. Widespread throughout Arabia, Persia and Turkey, particularly in the 13th and 14th centuries, it derives from an Arabic word for love-making, thus its meaning as “love song” or “love poem.” That it’s now the name of a musical collaboration between North Indian and Iranian musicians, major improvisers…
Exterminator of hypocrisy
Funnyman Will Durst, who is probably best known to Metro Times readers through his frequently appearing column, was born in Milwaukee. He left for San Francisco in the early 1970s, claiming “comedy was illegal” in his hometown. He is the only comic ever to be invited to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, writes a daily…
Aquemini
The East ignores them, and the West fronts on them, but one fact remains; Andre and Big Boi aka hip-hop duo Outkast have one million-plus believers hidden in the crevasses of the world, and with good reason. Consider that Outkast’s debut and sophomore albums have achieved platinum-plus sales, and the latter still moves 1,000 units…
