Soul survival
Detroit has long been a hub for many styles of music. With jazz, basement funk, blues, hip hop and Motown all tugging at local music lovers’ heartstrings, it’s no wonder the Motor City would also harness its fair share of soul music addicts. Whether it’s local acts like Dwele and Amp Fiddler, or Jill Scott…
Katrina’s punch line
The great, late and Jewish Groucho Marx, a particular favorite of mine, was once confronted by some anti-Semitic nitwits who had barred his daughter from swimming in a country club pool. His response: “She’s only half Jewish. How about if she only goes in up to her waist?” He not only created a classic line,…
After the party
Hangover Theater is the Sundance Channel’s new weekend series of flicks, airing this fall at noon on Saturdays and Sundays. There are no period-piece costumes or pretentious accents; just men, women and children, as well as some aliens and undead, with problems. You and your migraine will be in good company here. The highlights: The…
Head cheese
Lucero began as an alt-country lark by a couple of basement punks in Memphis. Their four albums trace an arc from trad country to country-punk, highlighted by their latest, Nobody’s Darlings. Produced by Jim Dickinson (Rolling Stones, Replacements), the album is the band’s best — it heads further into tattered country rock following the trajectory…
Sweet suburbia
The Pop Project finishes its rehearsal in the basement of a small home in Ann Arbor. Moments later the creeeak-pop sound of cans opening fills the kitchen where Adam Kempa — the Pop Project’s resident computer geek and drummer — is passing out Molson’s. The Pop Project crew is here (guitarist-vocalist Dave Lawson, keyboardist-singer Zach…
Eat the Night
Crimson Sweet named their first album Livin’ in Strut. There’s a “Strut Report” on their Web site, which is a fabulous image even if it only turns out to be a tour diary, and “Blood Transfusion” from their new record Eat the Night slays with the line “Strutting down the street.” So the Brooklyn trio…
Nakedly posing a question
Q: A friend of mine is setting up a Web site with some of her friends for feminist (mostly queer) porn. I’m straight, and she asked me if I wanted to be in it, with or without my boyfriend of two years. After clarifying that I wouldn’t be making porn with people I didn’t want…
Escaping the lunch rut
Located near Wayne State. Lebanese and Middle Easter-inspired menu which offers over 90 dishes and includes quesadillas, Cajun salmon, fettucine Alfredo and fish and chips. Also has bargain prices of $3.75-$5 for wraps and sandwiches.
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Something we were withholding made us weak,” wrote poet Robert Frost. I hope you will consider the possibility that this describes your current predicament. It’s my astrological opinion that your strength is being compromised by a feeling you’re not exploring or an experience you’re denying yourself or a gift you’re refusing…
Futuristic flight of fancy
You’ll be hard pressed to find someone not transfixed by the lurid cinematic flirtations of master director Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, a rambling musing on memory, regret and the torture of unquiet love. A Bogart-like novelist is haunted by the memory of other women who’ve passed through his life, real or imagined, all tortured. Many…
America discovers its underclass
“So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working out very well for them.” —Barbara Bush, elderly rich aristocrat, visiting the Astrodome Suddenly, we found out that, gee whiz, everybody in America doesn’t have a fancy car, a cell phone that takes pictures or…
Murmur of the Heart
Masturbation, pedophilia and incest seem like topics intended to shock and outrage an audience, but not in Louis Malle’s hands. In what’s essentially a coming-of-age romp inspired by his own childhood, French filmmaker Malle follows the fumbling antics of a precocious and intellectual mama’s boy. Malle, with his keen eye and gentle touch, follows Laurent’s…
The road less traveled
Andy Friedman advises show bookers not to describe what he does as “spoken word.” He also cautions against publicizing him as a “poet” or a “storyteller.” Friedman has learned through experience that nobody will show up to see that kind of performance. But he also says it is not a good idea to call his…
Lila Says
Based on the scandalous French novella about an Arab teen’s flirtatious relationship with a French girl who counters her beauty with sexually brazen talk, this movie is all talk and no action. The actors are lovely to look at and director Ziad Doueiri is undeniably gifted, but the film has too little insight and too…
Media Blackout
250 guys just walkin’ down the road, just like that? Why, they’re gonna swoop down and scoop you up so fast it’d make your MB49 swim! • Led Zeppelin — Led Zeppelin (Atlantic) :: If he keeps on strainin’ the larynx gonna break. • Shelby — The Luxury Of Time (Gigantic Music) :: Steve McQueen…
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
Half courtroom drama and half fright show, this effective if overlong horror flick introduces something that’s been missing from the genre for years: serious, thoughtful themes and subject matter. Though it has some flat, uninspired stretches, stellar performances make Emily Rose a uniquely haunting horror-drama hybrid.
Inspired lunacy
Paxahau and its Detroit-Berlin dream team brought the underground back to life Labor Day weekend with two parties. And that’s as difficult to imagine as the parties are to actually execute: a BBQ Saturday at the Maltese-American Benevolent Society featured Chilean-Swiss super-producer/DJ Luciano, Clark Warner and Mike Clark; a huge event the next night at…
An Unfinished Life
This is not Swedish director Lasse Hallström’s (Chocolat, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) most singular work. The material is the stuff of made-for-TV-melodrama: A battered, widowed mom (Jennifer Lopez) runs back to her crusty old father-in-law, washed up Wyoming rancher Einar (Robert Redford). The one thing that truly feels fresh is the beautifully shot scenery (British…
See no lethal
Just four days before the 2004 presidential election, a prestigious British medical journal published the results of a rigorous study by Dr. Les Roberts, a widely respected researcher. Roberts concluded that close to 100,000 people had died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Most were noncombatant civilians. Many were children. But that news didn’t…
Everything but the truth
Tape, a play by Stephen Belber, opens with a spasmodic but likable young man named Vince alone in a Motel 6 room in Lansing. He is unsettled and erratic, a playful yet menacing man-child, jumping on the bed and fussing with a black duffel bag filled with cans of Molson. He opens two cans of…
The Man
Old white dudes trying to talk all gangsta-like are about as played out as taking cheap shots at Detroit. The Man is guilty on both counts. The movie – set in Motown but obviously shot on “kindler, gentler” Toronto soil – follows salesman Andy (Eugene Levy) on a business trip to Detroit. He gets mixed…
Censored — or bogus?
Some stories get ignored by the mainstream media because they’re too controversial, or too much of a challenge to the rich and powerful, or just too hot to handle. But some stories get dismissed because they’re just not credible — and unfortunately, one of the pieces Project Censored cites this year appears to fall into…
Hurricane relief — the lefty way
Alternative ways to help Katrina’s victims.
Barking dogs, beer and porch songs
Bulldog singer-songwriter Kenny Tudrick has seen some hard road, and has done many things in rock ’n’ roll (some hit, some missed) — enough that when he writes about his life you believe him. From the singer’s thin hips and Gram Parsons bangs-in-eyes shag to his sideways swinging Tele and lyrical tender mercies comes the…
Beyond the top ten
11. Mandatory Mental Screening Program Usurps Parental Rights Sources: “Bush Plans to Screen Whole U.S. Population for Mental Illness,” Jeanne Lenzer, Asheville Global Report, June 24-30, 2004; “Forcing Kids into a Mental Health Ghetto,” U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Truth News, Sept. 13, 2004. 12. Military in Iraq Contracts Human Rights Violators Sources: “Dirty Warriors:…
Goodbye to the girls
In which a keeper helps his bees bed down.
Smash Rockwell
After a solid stint of touring, Casual’s perfected his emcee style, and this — his third official album — is his best work to date. It’s a Bay Area anthem, complete with guest appearances by E-40, Too $hort, and Richie Rich. Though the album is filled with hella amounts of Bay Area slang, like “Hyphie”…
Art Bar
In this poem by New York poet Martin Walls, a common insect is described and made vivid for us through a number of fresh and engaging comparisons. Thus an ordinary insect becomes something remarkable and memorable. Cicadas at the End of Summer Whine as though a pine tree is bowing a broken violin, As…
New in nonfiction
Hunger: An Unnatural History Sharman Apt Russell Basic Books, $23.95 Imperial Ambitions: Interviews with David Barsamian Noam Chomsky Metropolitan Books, $15 Sore Winners: American Idols, Patriotic Shoppers and Other Strange Species in George Bush’s America John Powers Anchor Books, $14 Life’s Little Annoyances: True Tales of People Who Just Can’t Take it Anymore Ian Urbina…
Lightyears
Because Lightyears is Kathy Valentine’s first solo album, it naturally moves ambitiously through every style she’s likely wanted to try since falling for the guitar in 1972. “Retouch Me,” for example, offers a little spunky new wave (nodding to her tenure as the Go-Gos bassist), while the bluesy pop of “Happy Endingless” dukes it out…
Backslash
Arrr!! This Monday, when your boss tells you the reports weren’t satisfactory, you should tell the bilge rat to “swab me poop deck and walk the plank, ye land lubber!” It’s okay, you know, because Sept. 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day (talklikeapirateday.com). The seeds of this now international phenomenon were first sown in…
Letters to the Editor
Racist cartoon I would like to thank Metro Times for pointing out the racist cartoon (“Not so funny,” Metro Times, Aug. 24), as it was racist, contrary to one of your readers, Fred Nielsen, who responded. I would not expect most residents in Michigan (being that we are the most racially segregated state in the U.S.)…
The Stranglers — Live 1978 in San Francisco
When is something of purely historic interest neither historical nor interesting? When it’s the Stranglers videotaped on a crummy black and white camcorder with sound like it’s emanating from the belly of a pencil sharpener. People who long dismissed the Stranglers from the rest of the class of ’77 because they were old hippie misogynists…
Pimp my dome
Leo Gillis stands on top of his double geodesic dome home, pointing to the ghost that remains of his beloved neighbor, the Michigan Central train depot. On the other side of his southwest Detroit home the smell of fresh steamed corn wafts from a tamale shop. The Gillis home is hard to miss, snuggled into…
Night and Day
Wednesday •14 ZigiDee BooM Hip Hop Fest MUSIC Wayne State University rings in the 2005 school year with ZigiDee BooM, a fun-for-all hip hop concert. The festival, put on by Project A.R.T. and Detroit2La Entertainment, will take place from noon to 8 p.m. in front of WSU’s Student Center Building. Grab some grub and enjoy…
It’s your thing
All 5-foot-6 of Matt Welz is on the mic. Standing there in his trademark cranberry-colored leisure suit, eyes shining beneath little round glasses, he flashes a toothy grin and proceeds to let it rip. “It” is karaoke — but not normal karaoke, if there is such a thing. Welz, also known as “Millionaire,” is a…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch Comix – by Sean Bieri
