Payoff for Microsoft
Make way for the Gucci Gulch Gang! These gunslingers include Haley Barbour, former Republican Party chairman; Tom Downey, a former Democratic congressman; Vin Weber, a former Republican lawmaker; Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator; Jack Quinn, former White House counsel to Bill Clinton; C. Boyden Gray, former White House counsel to George Bush the First;…
Consider this
Oakland County needs votes supporting special education funds….
The writer’s craft
Creative writers are inspired at the Walloon Writers’ Retreat, and we’ve got the proof from one of last year’s Metro Times Fiction Contest finalists.
Don’t stop the presses
Joe Harris’ city parks report is no big surprise….
From rock to flick
This month, cable’s “IFC Indie Rocks” festival features films with musicians as film star or film subject.
All in the family
Whispering about the Williams sisters’ “rigged” matches…
Techno-rock showdown
Two writers reach deep into the heart of the musical experience, in search of the people’s music in a post-apocalyptic universe.
First-person Shango
A first-person account from the bullet-strewn prison riots.
Putting it on screen
Bonnie Garvin’s new film tells the story of two Detroiters who made history — progressive attorney Ernie Goodman and his client, Attica inmate Shango.
Killer band
Mystery has become such a cool, baggy genre. Career detectives remain alive and well (e.g. Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins and Elizabeth George’s Scotland Yard power-duo Tommy Lynley and Barbara Havers), as do fine literary works in which a citizen, out of the blue, is touched by a criminal act and becomes obsessed with solving it…
Terror’s aftermath
Everything really is different now, in a way no one could have imagined September 10. Psychologically, the nation is essentially at war — but how long will we be willing to fight?
Together
It’s Stockholm 1975, with the members of the commune Tillsammans (“Together”) immersed in a comfortably prickly existence. By turns earnest and bittersweet, comic and romantic, strident and forgiving, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson’s film is a joyous embrace of simple communal pleasures.
Art shows, ink stains, community ties
The people of Detroit come together to celebrate the multicultural Festival of the Arts … Eclectic local works (and tattoos) at the Detroit Artists Market … & the expanded galleries at the detroit contemporary.
Live or technology?
I don’t think that this is quite what they had in mind for a mix CD. Where most DJs are content with the straight-up, cross-faded, 20-cut segment, Richie Hawtin has, on this second installment of DE9 (short for Decks, Effects and 909), taken elements of more than 100 tracks of dub, techno and minimalism to…
Beyond our rage
It’s easy to get carried away by the anger that’s been felt so deeply by so many Americans. And Arab-Americans have more reason to be outraged than the rest of us.
Burden lifted
From essential work as Submerge distribution partners to downright revolutionary imagery and sound via Random Noise Generation, the brothers Burden (all five of them) have turned an address — like the 313 area code itself — into a deliverable cultural message. On Detroit Calling, Lawrence Burden plays his family’s mailman. Though more like a genre…
A hole in the sky
How the world changed overnight….
Pants on fire
John Schlesinger’s 1963 film is one of the pinnacles of that brief period in British films when kitchen sinks and the angry lower classes were being featured in an outburst of post-Empire reckoning. Tom Courtenay as Billy is a sharp mind in a dull landscape, hooked on the drug of his fantasies and totally lost…
Shango’s story
Thirty years after the Attica uprising, one inmate’s life is still an inspiration … and more will learn the story through a new film about Shango and his legal team.
The Glass House
In a glass house, a modern museum of deception and secrets, a girl (Leelee Sobieski) learns to be careful — and how to plot revenge. She loses her innocence before she loses her parents; and swaps her naiveté for getting mad and getting even — with Stellan Skarsgård.
Our nightmare
Politics, media, religion, human emotions … all aflame after what we witnessed the morning of September 11.
All Over the Guy
In this serious-minded romantic comedy, it’s clear early on that the lovers’ problems derive not from being gay, but from their own particular bundles of neuroses. The film presents a polysexual Los Angeles where a good relationship — no matter what the gender orientation — emerges as a small miracle.
The music stopped
Show cancellations and impromptu benefits in the wake of last week’s tragedies … Motor City brews and news … The incredible Barking Tuna Fest lineup … Brendan Benson’s latest … & more.
The Vertical Ray of the Sun
This film has the same poetic sense of place that Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung displayed in his debut feature, The Scent of Green Papaya, but what seemed rich and sensual in that film seems rather static here.
Dealing with tragedy
Metro Times editor W. Kim Heron invites you to join us as we survey the changes that have occurred in the world since last we met.
Hardball
When director Brian Robbins (Varsity Blues) actually focuses on young black players — both on and off the baseball diamond – his film comes to life. No matter how good Keanu Reeves or compassionate Diane Lane or scene-stealing John Hawkes may be, they’re a distraction from the real story.
What a drag
Q: For years, open male transvestites have been looked upon with disapproval by most people, although Jamie Farr’s character in the TV series "M*A*S*H" may have increased public tolerance to some degree. Similar disapproval is shown toward men who wear female garments beneath their male outer clothing. Is there such a person as a female…
Second place
A quiet victory party for primary candidate Gil Hill….
Power slams and short skirts
It’s almost certainly Anna Kournikova’s firm backside we see on the back cover of Venus Envy, L. Jon Wertheim’s account of the 2000 women’s tennis season, and what is presumably Venus Williams’ crotch on the front. These slices of cheesecake mirror exactly how women’s tennis itself works these days, exploiting players’ sex appeal to sell…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): If I advise you to use your libido to conquer evil, would you even know what the hell I’m talking about? Most of the time, I’m afraid, your urges to be wild and pursue pleasure are divorced from your longings for truth and beauty and goodness. But now is a perfect…
First place
Kwame Kilpatrick acts like a winner….
Rock Star
Hardballand Rock Star started off as the kind of thrilling, truth-is-more-compelling-than-fiction stories that get film executives excited, and both got the full Hollywood treatment. This means that whatever made them unique in the first place has been lost, replaced by too familiar tales of white men on that well-traversed road to redemption. In Hardball, Conor…
Letters to the Editor
Who’s your daddy? Khary Kimani Turner’s article, “I, Ike” (Metro Times, Sep. 5-11), places Ike Turner on much too high a pedestal. The real father of rock and roll was a much older and more experienced man who died just two years ago. His two names were Jesse Stone (real) and Charles Calhoun (psuedonym). He…
Union clues
What’s the holdup with unionizing Greektown Casino’s workers?
Make me feel fine
Listening to the reissued editions of the Isley Brothers classics The Heat Is On and Harvest for the World, brings to mind a comment made by Professor Griff of Public Enemy during a recent African World Festival panel discussion. According to Griff, contemporary music has grown dull because of two issues. The first is sampling,…
