Porn again, and again …
Q: My boyfriend looks at porn and it freaks me out. I’m not jealous, but I am insecure. You’ve been really insensitive toward girls who feel strange about porn. I think that’s unnecessary because you have to see, even if we are flawed, where we are coming from. —Average Girl A: All men look at…
Locations:
Herbert Henck Festeburger Fantasien Kim Kashkashian Hayren — Music of Tigran Mansurian and Komitas György Kurtág Signs, Games and Messages Valentin Silvestrov Metamusik/Postludium ECM New Series This end-of-summer batch of New Music sides is almost too beautiful for words. German pianist-composer Herbert Henck’s twofer includes one of the best renditions of Cage’s Sonatas on record,…
Mayer of the Motor City
Call the cops! Nathaniel Mayer’s back in town, and he’s looking for just one more hit. The former slugger for Detroit’s legendary Fortune Records — who scored big in 1962 with “Village of Love” and made an indelible mark on rock ’n’ roll history three years later with “Love and Affection” — has come out…
Comic (strip) relief
Sean Bieri is a freelance designer totally immersed in comics culture. E-mail him at letters@metrotimes.com
Youth & Young Manhood
I hate to name drop but, just like my old pal Martin Luther King Jr., I once had a dream myself. I had a dream that li’l chillun would one day hold hands and listen to a band that sounded like an inspired cross between Pere Ubu and the Ramones via Bob Dylan; I had…
September 24-30, 2003
Ongoing • ART Yoko Ono Exhibit — Driving along Woodward, you might ask yourself, “What is that big blue boxcar doing on the lawn of the DIA with lights and music pouring out?” That, friends, is Yoko Ono’s newest work in her quest for cultural relevance, a sculpture called Freight Train. It’s a German boxcar…
Memories and mayhem
Lately, Detroit’s late-night mind-numb contingent has seen the best of times and the worst, as Mark Renton would say, cdrapp. The bigger clubs remain on a steady diet of wankster rap, cottage-cheese emptiness, imitating each other and, at best, booking DJs with crates fulla house tracks that should’ve been pawned off on ebay four years…
Lester leaps back in a new anthology
It’s hard to say whether Lester Bangs was queer for Lou Reed. Granted, among the hundreds of musicians he profiled in his lifetime, Lester did seem to reserve his most colorful comments, bons mots and epithets alike, for Reed — and at uncommon length too. The Lester ’n’ Lou Show was not your typical interviewer-rock…
Murality play
The great Detroit debate over graffiti — art or crime? — shows no signs of simmering down. Not only artists and business owners but also police officers, Wayne County prosecutors and now a downtown landlord are in the midst of the controversy. The most recent flare-up is a piece of graffiti on the exterior wall…
Bar tyme
Just look for the bulbous white edifice that protrudes onto Cass Avenue in the heart of Wayne State University’s campus and you will find Circa 1890. Both a restaurant and bar, this favorite among WSU students and staff has a reputation as a great place for pizza and beer, but the full menu, great drink…
No Escape From The Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions
Producer Vernon Reid got James Blood Ulmer into Jimi Hendrix’s old studios with an electric sitar, banjo, a melodica and some electronic geek-box called a Samchillian Tip Tip Tip Cheeepeeeee. The result is a weirdly compelling recording mixing blues standards and a couple original tunes that’s well worth your time and money. The disc starts…
Look what I found!
It’s harvest season again. The records put together in bedrooms, recording studios and any other safe haven over the course of the last year are being whacked by the thresher of indie commerce and are ripe and ready for purchase at your local sound emporium. (That oughta cover the obligatory tortured metaphor for this column,…
Franken takes aim
The title of Franken’s latest book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (Dutton), was not intended to slip under the radar, and it didn’t. The former “Saturday Night Live” prankster got himself another No. 1-selling book in no time, due in large part to the…
10 years of laughter
Second City Detroit, the region’s premiere purveyor of improvisational social satire, is marking 10 years downtown with a new show, Ten. The two hours-plus of entertainment reprises past skits, a collection of faithfully re-enacted crowd-pleasers that could just as easily be an introduction to new fans. And there is much to laugh at. The special…
Not lost on us
Bill Murray was always a better actor than his comedy-heavy career implied — and this film brings out his best. Murray plays Bob Harris, a middle-aged actor who is huge in Japan. Depressed and lonely, Bob arrives in Tokyo for a commercial shoot. There he meets college graduate Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson), who seems just as…
Your guide to Tiki Detroit
Nothing around town comes even close to the glory of the Chin Tiki in its heyday. However, here’s a select guide to the remaining Tiki — both good and bad — to be found. Chin’s 28205 Plymouth, Livonia 734-525-CHIN The precursor to the Chin Tiki; Chinese restaurant with bamboo and rattan furniture, plastic foliage,…
Masked and Anonymous
Bob Dylan is experiencing a pop culture renaissance. This film apparently attempts to bring his beloved song lyrics to life on the silver screen. The idea of a movie where Dylan plays himself sounds promising, but this isn’t it. Dylan just can’t act. The screenplay is loose, and none of the all-star cast makes much…
Thieves in high places
Nearly everyone now admits that Mike Ilitch, a seriously bizarre character best known for selling cheap pizza, has been a howling failure as owner of the Tigers. Even the most docile monopoly newspaper columnists have begun to plaintively beg him to sell the team, which is, now, after a decade of his running and ruining…
Hotel
Occasionally using split and quadruple screens and offering a variety of color and visual distortion, Hotel is an uneasy mix of horror movie grotesqueness and improvisational psychodrama. Mostly, Hotel is so meandering and self-consciously arty that about halfway through it disappears amid its own aspirations.
The state of a union
Music is a lot more fun than cancer. While most touring rock bands administer themselves carcinogens at terrifyingly steady pace, drummer Jason Hammel must be conscious of his lifestyle. This indie rocker used to make his living as a cancer researcher. Hammel and his wife/bandmate, Kori Gardner (a former elementary school teacher), both had “normal”…
Cold Creek Manor
The title alone summons the gothic tradition. Cold Creek Manor parodies the genre — at times with wry humor. It’s an intelligent thriller with tense moments of suspense that seems to paraphrase and sometimes parody thrillers from Hitchcock classics to Silence of the Lambs.
Letters to the Editor
Editor’s note: We received an unusually large number of letters concerning Jack Lessenberry’s column, “The worst president in history” (Metro Times, Sept. 17-23). Here is a representative sampling: Fired and flogged Well, Jack, you had to say it, didn’t you? You had to call the bumpkin in chief “the worst president this nation has ever…
In This World
In this fictional (or is it?) documentary, a scrappy 12-year-old orphan plays himself on a treacherous journey with his cousin to escape Pakistan. As the two head to London, innumerable dangers enter their path. The film ends with dozens of refugee children smiling and prancing for the camera. Jamal is a vision of hope and…
Audit red flag
An audit examining Wayne County’s payments to the private owners of the Old Wayne County Building, which houses the county’s administrative offices, is scheduled to be released next week. Just how critical that audit will be remains to be seen. However, documents obtained by the Metro Times reveal that the county’s auditor general complained earlier…
Decasia
Decasia is an avant-garde film that boils away narrative, concrete images and even sound to create pure and often abstract art from the moving image onscreen. The effect is intoxicating, hypnotic and soporific by turns.
Is that a conga in your pocket?
It won’t bring most of his stuff back, but there’s been a break in the investigation of the fire that destroyed R.J. Spangler’s east-side Detroit home during the blackout last month. Spangler — a much-revered blues drummer, promoter and manager — lost his home and its contents, including a vast and painstakingly compiled library of…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): This is a perfect moment for you to become more receptive. That doesn’t mean you should become a lazy do-nothing waiting around passively for whatever happens to come along. The receptivity I’m advocating is ferocious, a robust readiness to be surprised and moved, a vigorous intention to be awake to truths…
All guts and glory
If News Hits were to hand out a “Tenacious Reporter of the Year” award, it would surely go to Michigan Citizen staff writer Diane Bukowski. She has been relentless in her attempts to reveal what the City of Detroit learned when it investigated its most notorious killer cop. Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Wendy M.…
Bongs, songs & the truth
When you’re young, you’re cocksure, you know everything, and you will live forever. But this is a front. Underneath this bravado, you’re not convinced about anything, certainly not your own abilities or your place in the world. Personally, I spent an inordinate amount of time convincing the world and myself that I was the person…
Lost in translation
Talk about a short-lived victory. Last week, The Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) held a press conference to protest the fact that the Michigan Department of Transportation was refusing to include Arab-Americans in the environmental justice portion of a study involving the proposed expansion of a truck and train terminal in…
Left end of the dial
On a warm September night, Origix and D.C. are holed up inside the Henry Ford Community College student center in Dearborn, “making waves” — as the WHFR-FM 89.3 slogan attests — during their recently expanded four-hour time slot. Origix commands the main mic, silver chain and Lions hat bobbing to the beat as he thanks…
Second City’s tragic news
Former Second City cast member Eric Black, 36, in town for Saturday night’s gala premiere of the improv group’s 10th anniversary show, Ten, was killed after being struck by a car on I-75 near Nine Mile Sunday morning. Details of the accident were unavailable at press time. Black, originally from Great Britain, was a cast…
Awed by Shock
By now, if you paid any attention at all to the WNBA playoffs, the phrase “from worst to first” is probably starting to wear on that frazzled part of your exposed last nerve. It was cute, in a ballsy sort of way, the first time around, but it’s time to move on. But you know…
Where’s everybody?
Abandoned Shelter of the Week According to Nell Martin, a 25-year resident of the neighborhood of this week’s featured structure at 498 Peterboro, only two people live on the block where the house is situated. ASS (Abandoned Structure Squad, buddy) is thus astounded when Martin tells us how the nearly vacant block conducts such a…
