E-mail gets active
In a recent column, I suggested to readers that they e-mail me if they were interested in participating in a mailing list for Web users in the Detroit area. Several of you replied enthusiastically. So I set out to discover what it takes to set up a group mailing list and found useful information for…
Walk his way
At 41, Ron Bachman has conquered his demons. He’s a single dad whose only child started college this fall. He’s a gifted speaker who sometimes does three engagements a day. He hobnobs with the likes of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler. And earlier this year, an Emmy Award-winning producer completed a short documentary about the Northville resident’s…
True life tale
Ron Bachman wanted to become a disc jockey. When a local station rebuffed the graduate of Specs Howard School of Broadcasting, he was devastated. “They said they’d be afraid to send me to a remote location because listeners would see me in person and get turned off,” says Bachman. “To get that kind of treatment…
Antz
Anyone who’s watched one of the smart, animated television shows of recent years already knows that cartoons aren’t solely the domain of children. But it’s taken the PG-rated Antz to bring this current sensibility to the big screen. Antz uses stunningly fluid computer animation to tell a hymenopteran version of Spartacus. In this case, no…
Arguing The World
There’s an old self-serving saying which goes that “a person who isn’t liberal when he’s young has no heart, and who isn’t conservative when he’s old has no brain.” Substitute “vested interest” for “brain” and you come closer to the truth — and to the story told by Arguing the World, Joseph Dorman’s meticulous documentary…
Somewhere outside the rainbow
San Francisco’s Caroliner takes the singing bull by the horns.
Insomnia
A door opens inside darkness and the light invades the screen, as a girl turns around and smiles. But then the darkness wins again and we lose sight of her for a moment. Then she’s back, different this time, a lifeless puppet with still eyes, a wounded butterfly. Careful hands — the same that arrested…
Seeing clear to forever
Poetic realist Ann Mikolowski paints the long and the short of it….
Urban Legend
“People who love movies are sick people,” declared François Truffaut in a moment of theatrical abandonment. What he would have said after the release of Urban Legend and Dee Snider’s Strangeland is difficult to imagine. Having screamed (twice) — still knowing what they did last summer — having survived Halloween and possible encounters with dead…
While the city sleeps
It’s generally agreed that director Fritz Lang made his best films during his early years in Germany. These are the ones that are constantly revived and revered, and rightly so. But the greater part of the director’s career was spent in America where, between 1937 and 1956, he made 22 films (as opposed to 13…
Strangeland
“People who love movies are sick people,” declared François Truffaut in a moment of theatrical abandonment. What he would have said after the release of Urban Legend and Dee Snider’s Strangeland is difficult to imagine. Having screamed (twice) — still knowing what they did last summer — having survived Halloween and possible encounters with dead…
A fraying safety net
The number of Americans without health insurance jumped alarmingly last year, according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau, and Michigan’s increase nearly led the list. The state’s uninsured leapt by 276,000 people from 1996 to 1997, second only to the increase in California. This brings the total number of uninsured Michigan residents to…
What Dreams May Come
When asked about religion in interviews, Hollywood glitterati offer the near-uniform answer that they’re spiritual but not religious. The distinction is important, especially when considering a film such as What Dreams May Come, a hybrid of traditional Hollywood romanticism and nondenominational New Age spirituality. A love story set primarily in the afterlife, What Dreams May…
Names and napkins dropped
BOSTON BAKED BASH Last Friday night saw the boulevards of Detroit’s tony Boston/Edison neighborhood fill quickly with society swells and dapper designers, as the Detroit Historical Society and the Michigan chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers hosted the 1998 Designer Showhouse Gala. This year’s recipient of the mansion makeover was the Albert Kahn-designed…
Everyday treasures
A cup of coffee and a newspaper, in most of the United States, can be had for a dollar or two. That price hardly seems, at least to author Leah Hager Cohen, to reflect the true value of these ordinary objects. And in this consumer-driven society, where it’s easy to walk into a café and…
Pitch’d
BOMB THE BASS Detroit electro-purists Aux 88 celebrated the release of the group’s new full-length Xeo-Genetic on Direct Beat Records with a rare live appearance at Hamtramck’s Motor Lounge Friday night. Aux main man Tom Hamilton, flanked by cut-and-scratch specialist DJ Dijital and bewigged flygirl dancers/female electro group X-ile, performed a surprisingly live set, replete…
Bold First Steps
Perhaps British non-Brit-pop outfit Gomez should have instead titled its debut Pour It On, Slowly. It’s just that kind of double-take album. Based equally upon cocky ’70s classic blues-rock and those underdog, underwhelming lo-fi sounds of today (with a hint, of course, of pure Beatle extract), Bring It On is nevertheless its own unsettling concoction.…
In one ear
Recorded bliss and misery Check the racks at your local record peddler for new releases by two of Detroit’s most-difficult-to-pin-down-and-therefore-all-the-more-engaging-cuz-of-it sonic armadas. The ever-evolving Larval (aka Larval Orchestra), with musical changeling Bill Brovold in the driver’s seat, unveils Larval 2 on NYC’s Knitting Factory Records. The album’s tracks are split in tone, tempo and texture…
Grungefeathers
Where have all the grunge bands gone? Come on, you know. Kurt Cobain got famous and every band in the Pacific Northwest signed with a major label in hopes of success akin to Nirvana’s Nevermind. Since Cobain checked out, bands such as Soundgarden and Alice in Chains either imploded, got bored or self-destructed otherwise. Second…
Hoffa II, Take 2
Ken Paff is something of a labor hero. He helped form TDU, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, when he was a truck driver in Cleveland in 1976. Back then, opposing the union’s corrupt national leadership could be physically dangerous. Today Paff is the TDU’s full-time national organizer, based in Detroit. He and his faction,…
Hillbilly Roots
There were two weeks in 1927 when Bristol, Tennessee was at the nexus of country music. This is when and where Ralph Peer initially recorded some of the most important and influential country music performers of all time, including Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family and the Stoneman Family. There was a raw, intuitive sense of…
Death and deception
“The way all these people look at it, the bad in Proposal B clearly outweighs the good,” viewers are told in a television commercial urging people to vote against a November ballot issue that would legalize physician-assisted suicide for Michigan’s terminally ill. The ad shows Prop. B on one side weighed against icons representing the…
The Zen of Sax
This wonderfully articulate album is saxophonist-composer Osby’s latest report from “the Zero Zone,” a condition of absolute concentration (samadhi) which he likens to the Buddhist state of “no-mind.” Osby’s musical grail is that “seldom experienced but extremely high level of communicative exchange” in which performers and listeners are able “to freely draw upon (their) complete…
Save-the-farms drive
“The way all these people look at it, the bad in Proposal B clearly outweighs the good,” viewers are told in a television commercial urging people to vote against a November ballot issue that would legalize physician-assisted suicide for Michigan’s terminally ill. The ad shows Prop. B on one side weighed against icons representing the…
Boycott aims at Edison
The Asian and Middle Eastern American Coalition (AMEA) is organizing a boycott of Detroit Edison in support of eight Arab and Asian employees, who filed a discrimination lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court against the company last February. The plaintiffs say they have been denied promotions and pay increases because of their national origins. According…
