Woe begot top spot
Detroit has the highest rate of syphilis in the country.
Got What We Want
Not content to simply sit back and rack up a mountain of press kudos for its explosive live show and a razor-sharp 2000 debut Are You Green?, the Sights now deliver the kind of knockout punch that leaves the listener staggered, raving and drooling. It’s like a virtual history tour of both Nuggets box sets,…
Appreciate the decay
See a Victorian dream home gone slumming at 619 W. Willis. This 512-square-foot, two-story house was built in the early 1900s. Surrounded by overgrown shrubbery, trees and tall grass, the house may seem to jump out at the visitor. Creeping vines help the house blend into its surroundings. The building maintains a classy style, despite…
21 Singles
In spite of all its arrogant Velvet Underground posturing, corny little drum machines, and foo-foo coifs, the Jesus & Mary Chain flat-out fucking rocked. Marrying VU noise-damage and depressing drug poetry to ersatz Brian Wilson melodies is just about the most ingenious formula I can imagine for any rock band to affect. From the avalanching…
Over the border
A half hour after the second plane sliced through the glass-curtained tower, I went south to the Mexican line and stopped watching what I already felt in my bones. The mesquites were in leaf after the summer rains, the hills green, and when I arrived at the ranch four miles from the border there was…
Who’s Next 2.002
Cover songs: “Guilty pleasure” cop-out or not, you know you love ’em, or my name ain’t Louie Louie. Tribute albums: A mixed, and usually horrid, bag; anyone who’s ever thought about assembling yet another Hendrix, Beatles, Zeppelin, Kiss or Pink Floyd trib, see below. Full-on remakes: Unless you’re Phish (each Halloween the band covers a…
When darkness swallows the sun
A year ago. I am asleep when the killing begins, and when news of it reaches the desert city where I live. The airports close, the offices empty and the city soon has the feel of a Sunday morning. When she leaves her office, she comes home and finds me asleep. She shakes me awake…
Führer follies
One of the best cinematic comedies of all time, director Mel Brooks’ first film turned out to be his most inventive and sophisticated. The film’s comic and emotional momentum discharges out of a gallery of gags, and lives and breathes with Zero Mostel, one of the most outrageous talents of the 20th century.
Michael and me
Savage humor as security in a time of American insolence and bellicosity….
Les Destinées
This unexpected film from director Olivier Assayas (Late August, Early September) is an ambitious period piece that spans 1900–30. Its distillation of a historical epoch into a single man’s droning life story is well-acted and well-appointed, but, despite the occasional surge of feeling, emotionally distant.
One year later
Views from across the spectrum….
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Before we can receive the unbiased truth about anything,” wrote Ann Davies, “we have to be ready to ignore what we would like to be true.” Are you prepared to do that? Nothing will heal your frustration or dissolve your tension better than getting to the bottom of the enigmas that…
Drunken Angel
Although this 1948 film, Akira Kurosawa’s seventh directorial feature and his first collaboration with Toshiro Mifune, has been often referred to as a film noir, its gritty depiction of a city’s underbelly seems closer to Italian neo-realism — it’s the first classic in the Kurosawa canon.
Human rights and wrongs
“When the first 200 letters came, the guards gave me back my clothes. Then the next 200 letters came, and the prison director came to see me. When the next pile of letters arrived, the director got in touch with his superior. The letters kept coming and coming. The President was informed. The letters still…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Before we can receive the unbiased truth about anything,” wrote Ann Davies, “we have to be ready to ignore what we would like to be true.” Are you prepared to do that? Nothing will heal your frustration or dissolve your tension better than getting to the bottom of the enigmas that…
The Chateau
Two California natives claim a chateau in France left to them by their deceased uncle. But just as the brothers continually fail to connect with their French employees, this film is never quite able to overcome the cultural moat surrounding its ludicrous and contrived plot.
Koko is a knockout
The first time Koko Taylor performed at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in 1972, most of the young white kids busily discovering the blues there had never heard of her. But — back in her sweet home Chicago, and in smoky, bawdy, hard-rocking, shot-and-a-beer, black blues bars around the country — she was…
Give her a raise
Q: I am a single woman in my 40s working at a small construction company. I have developed a relationship with some of our subcontractors through the years. From time to time, I deliver supplies or plans to the job sites. Some time ago, after arranging to meet a particular sub at a particular site,…
Swimfan
Anyone over 30 could spot this tepid thriller as inbred fifth-generation Hitchcock bobbing around the shallow end of the cinematic gene pool. It floats into something that could be called Fatal Attraction: The Next Generation before sinking into a fairly ridiculous she-Psycho-lite.
Beyond the mourning
By now you’ve probably seen the planes crashing into New York City’s twin towers all over again. And again. And again. You’ve seen and listened to the city’s firemen as they reflected on the horrors of their rescue efforts a year ago. You’ve heard the tearful stories of so many average citizens who were on…
A poet’s gratitude
Li-Young Lee’s "natural religion" at the Detroit Festival of the Arts….
Circuit
Circuit
mostly follows the standard plot line of soft-core porn, using light-gauge narrative to jump between low-voltage scenes of gratuitous sexploitation, its energy drained into beefcake and ineffectual hopping from storyline to storyline. In better hands, it could have been a powerful ensemble piece.
A little dub’ll do ya
Linton Kwesi Johnson looks back — and forward….
Lit Fest on the Lawn
Detroit Public Library, facing Cass Avenue
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the 20 Million
Martin Amis’ account of the terror imposed on the Soviet Union by Josef Stalin completely recounts the genocidal horrors of 1930s collectivization, paints a morbid picture of the gulag camps and their absurd inhumanity, and clearly lays out the atrocities that exemplified the sheer failure of iron-fisted communism. It serves as a high-minded memorial to…
Waiting for Sweeney
If you’ve ever been where Joey Sweeney lives, everything he sings might sound different. He walked us to his apartment after the first time I played Philadelphia — a show that was part of the first tour I had ever been on with a band, probably to a whopping 12 in the audience. We stayed…
With friends like these …
Q: When I was in the ninth and 10th grades I had no friends and I felt alone. When I entered the 11th grade I started to hang with cool kids. Before school let out last summer, some of my friends came over to my house for a party. My uncle and his boyfriend showed…
Letters to the Editor
Regaining balance I read Jack Lessenberry’s “Tickets, balanced or not” (Metro Times, Aug. 28-Sept. 3), and thought it was interesting. Correction: the Democratic Secretary of State candidate in 1998 was Mary Lou Parks, not Mary Sue Parks. Although I agree her candidacy was embarrassing, she’s actually a very nice woman so we should at least…
Superconductors
Super Furry Animals make ringtones for the new rock millennium….
Sept. 12-17, 2002
13 • FRI MUSIC Kathleen Battle & William Omar Lateef Butler — Few in classical music have made as many waves as Kathleen Battle. Her life story has all the melodrama of anything Verdi could have penned: she was an elementary school teacher who got a big break and became one of the most famous…
Radically wholesome
The day of my visit to the Trumbullplex, a Cass Corridor anarchist collective, is idyllic. Birds sing under the clear blue summer sky here as anywhere else. Many people fear the concept of anarchism, which advocates a radical shift in government, to put it midly. This is not to say that anarchism is readily understood,…
Angels? Devils? Ready or not?
The mayor’s office seems prepared to offset Angel’s Night mayhem.
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
See a Victorian dream home gone slumming at 619 W. Willis. This 512-square-foot, two-story house was built in the early 1900s. Surrounded by overgrown shrubbery, trees and tall grass, the house may seem to jump out at the visitor. Creeping vines help the house blend into its surroundings. The building maintains a classy style, despite…
Trash, cash & green dreams
A grassroots organization rallies to shut down the city’s downtown trash incinerator.
Deli pleasures
Everyone has their own yardstick for measuring the quality of a deli. For me it is a pastrami sandwich. Like corned beef, pastrami starts as a brisket pickled in brine, but then the two meats part company. Pastrami is coated with cracked peppercorns, garlic and other spices, then smoked. Steve’s makes a great pastrami sandwich…
Write away for peace
Local Internet programmer launches a pre-emptive strike on a rush to war.
Lifted or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground
To the chagrin of most everyone old enough to realize that their high-school diaries weren’t full of really deep thoughts, bozo journos have recently pegged Bright Eyes’ singer/songwriter Conor Oberst as the successor to Bob Dylan’s throne. One listen to the Nebraskan rock-folkie’s teen-angst emo anthems and the sprawling, pretentious gibberish title of his band’s…
