Published: 4/28/2010
Types: Arts, Photography
Just recently established by 39-year-old Detroit-by-way-of-Japan photog Kyohei Abe (director and chief curator), in anticipation of its inaugural opening, the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography named the Museum of New Art's Jef Bourgeau as co-director, and local photographic auteurs, teache...[MORE]
Published: 6/3/2009
Types: Arts, Literature
Hilarity by Patty Seyburn New Issues Poetry & Prose, $15, 75 pp. Poet Patty Seyburn, a Detroit native who now teaches at Cal State and co-edits the Los Angeles-based poetry journal POOL, offers a new collection of playful but sharp ruminations on Detroit, Judaism, insomnia, mythology and hu...[MORE]
Published: 12/31/2008
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Behind the Bedroom Door Edited by Paula Derrow Delacorte Press 334 pp., $25 If you're looking for stories that sizzle like one of those erotica collections you place next to the penis cake at a bachelorette party, don't read this book. Magazine editor Paula Derrow has put together a co...[MORE]
Published: 12/10/2008
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Tomorrow by Graham Swift Knopf; $23.95, 255 pp. If you enjoy rambling, outsized ruminations of a self-centered, somewhat paranoid, middle-aged woman, then seek out Brit author Graham Swift's Tomorrow. The novel revolves around the early morning hours of "tomorrow," in which the main characte...[MORE]
Published: 4/23/2008
What is your current state of mind? I'm just trying to make sense of everything going on around me while still having time to chill and have fun with my life.What is your idea of good fashion sense? Being true to yourself in fantastic color combos.What is the trait you have that has helped you t...[MORE]
Published: 4/23/2008
What is your current state of mind? Chaotic.What is your idea of good fashion sense?Knowing what looks good on you. Confidence in your own sense of style. When did you begin designing clothing?I started coming up with ideas for clothes my senior year of high school. I didn't start sewing, though...[MORE]
Published: 4/23/2008
What is your current state of mind? What do you mean?What is your idea of good fashion sense? Knowing the rules and knowing how to break them properly.When did you begin designing clothing? Technically, when I was in high school. My mom is an incredible seamstress and would make some of the stu...[MORE]
Published: 12/26/2007
Types: Arts, Literature, Poetry
This lovely little verse fluttered down unto me like a cursing rabid locust drunk on whiskey with a black heart. War news on TV meets online holiday shopping, and voilà, a poem that I hope will be rendered moot soon. shop_pentagon.com by Robert Fanning Today another flag-covered box arrives ...[MORE]
Published: 8/15/2007
Types: Arts, Literature
BILL HARRIS Was there a particular turning point when you really committed yourself to writing? After I realized that my career as a visual artist wasn’t going to happen. How would you describe your writing to those who aren’t familiar with it? Concerned with the issues of being a...[MORE]
Published: 4/11/2007
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Seeing red — As recently as 2002, Michigan was ranked fourth-highest in the nation in arts spending per capita. Five years later, we're ranked 35th and falling fast. At $10.1 million dollars a year, the state currently invests $1.07, per citizen, in the arts. That amazing film you watched...[MORE]
Published: 4/11/2007
Types: Arts, Literature, Poetry
The Delicious Taste of Crab Legs I must say I come from a horrid taste When I had olives I had to get rid of that horrid taste by Eating some of my mom's delicious crab legs They were so delicious that I could probably Celebrate, jump up and down, give my brother A dozen kisses — even th...[MORE]
Published: 2/28/2007
Types: Arts
Class acts — Wayne State's Center for the Study of Citizenship is holding its fourth annual Conference in Citizenship Studies, themed "Race and Citizenship." If the papers presented live up to their titles, the conference will be a serious examination of the nation's past, present and fut...[MORE]
Published: 1/31/2007
Types: Arts, Literature, Poetry
Bright eyesThe DIA just got big bucks to show hot stuff this year. The institution just heard word they're included as one of a handful of organizations across the Midwest to receive a $50,000 award from the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation. The money supports the museum's upcoming installation ...[MORE]
Published: 12/20/2006
Types: Arts, Literature, Poetry
Anyone can write a poem that nobody can understand, but poetry is a means of communication, and this column specializes in poems that communicate. What comes more naturally to us than to instruct someone in how to do something? Here the Minnesota poet and essayist Bill Holm, who is of Icelandic ...[MORE]
Published: 11/29/2006
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Outta sight — An incredible thing about working in a world-caliber museum, besides the prestige and the pay (well, it for sure ain't the pay), is hanging out with Greek statuary as the sun rises in the morning and the whole place is a silent palace. And when quietly wandering through afte...[MORE]
Published: 9/20/2006
Types: Arts, Visual arts
For the fall arts issue, the task at hand for a few Metro Times critics was to simply pick artists they favor and explain why. I never expected six essays about Jim Henson’s severed limbs and machines that mock and mess up mankind, but that seems to be the shape of things to come this se...[MORE]
Published: 7/12/2006
Types: Arts, Literature, Poetry
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 One in a series of elegies by New York City poet Catherine Barnett, this poem describes the first gathering after death has shaken a family to its core. The father tries to help his grown daughter forget for a moment that, a ...[MORE]
Published: 6/14/2006
Types: Arts, Literature, Poetry
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 Remember those Degas paintings of the ballet dancers? Here is a similar figure study, in muted color, but in this instance made of words, not pigment. As this poem by David Tucker closes, I can feel myself holding my brea...[MORE]
Published: 5/24/2006
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Torn down — Maurice Greenia Jr. is a local "poetician" with lots to say about the city in both pen and paint. So make time in these next few weeks to check out his latest exhibition: Drawing on the Hudson Building 1996-1997. It's a show of photographs and other materials related to the ar...[MORE]
Published: 4/12/2006
Types: Arts, Literature, Poetry
Poet Ruth L. Schwartz writes of the glimpse of possibility, of something sweeter than we already have that comes to us, grows in us. The unrealizable part of it causes bitterness; the other opens outward, the cycle complete. This is both a poem about a tangerine and about more than that. Tang...[MORE]
Published: 4/5/2006
Types: Arts, Photography
ENTRY FORM The medium of photography has many histories. It’s as personal as a shoebox of Polaroids stuffed beneath the bed, as practical as a Xerox, as historical as war footage and as scientific as an X-ray. But it’s time for Metro Times’ 25th annual photo contest, and all we’re interested i...[MORE]
Published: 3/22/2006
Types: Arts
I'm guilty of looking at a couple of them like they're freaks in a funhouse. Upon visiting one home, I couldn't hold back a crack about the ritual room in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Teetering over the boxes, bags and bins, I wondered: How can he live like this? It's so tempting to try to fig...[MORE]
Published: 2/8/2006
Types: Arts, Literature, Poetry
Parking in Chinatown You parked it in a nosedive on the steep and shadowed hill, the curb-ward facing wheels pathetic safeguards for your brokedown heap, where strips of ceiling cloth like sunk kite tails went riffled by the window breeze—it wouldn't last, my body turned contortionist to ...[MORE]
Published: 2/8/2006
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
You can smooch a man all you want in the Hoosier State — as long as you’re clean shaven. It’s illegal for a man with a mustache to "habitually kiss human beings" in Indiana. "Kiss my ass!" It’s a rare and special insult that still packs a punch after hundreds of years. This on...[MORE]
Published: 9/21/2005
Types: Arts
Last Thursday, a conversation with Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick at Detroit’s GR N’Namdi Gallery opened with the announcement of plans for a new art center in the Wayne State University cultural district. The 50,000-square-foot space, featuring 20 to 30 commercial galleries, a small theater...[MORE]
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