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Vol. 44 | No. 13 | JANUARY 17-23, 2024
EDITORIAL
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Review ................................. 30 Chowhound ......................... 32
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NEWS & VIEWS Feedback We received comments in response to Robert Stempkowski’s column, “Restaurant resolutions.” One reader responded by email to say workers should be paid more. Here’s Stempkowski’s response. I agree. Compensation commensurate with consistent, professional contribution and effort should be the essential foundation of a rocksolid working relationship between employers and employees. Sadly, we know things are far from that ideal in our world. Having said that, in this workforce-challenged market, anyone with saleable work skills has some real worth to negotiate with these days. Everybody needs to make their own deal. Most employees are afraid to negotiate terms of payment (and raise requests)
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with employers. Get over that is my best advice. The worm has turned. Workers have leverage now. They need to exercise it, plain and simple. I won’t ever assume the role of wage advocate for the working men and women of food and beverage, nor would I ever argue against them on behalf of ownership. That’s everybody’s personal business. Too many people on the working side choose not to conduct it, frankly, and to their own income detriment, in my opinion. Employers are all too happy to ignore the subject/prospect of paying out more if employees don’t come to the table prepared to discuss the matter on the merits of their capabilities, contributions, and commitment. More’s the pity, cause now’s a great time for good, reliable people to get themselves paid more. Comments may be edited for clarity. Sound off: letters@metrotimes.com.
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NEWS & VIEWS Weed work
Detroit’s Ganja Clergy teaches conscious consumption with religious cannabis ceremonies Nydia the Ganja Clergy has tried pretty much every religion out there in search of a deeper connection with the divine. She’s been baptized as a Catholic, a Seventh-day Adventist, and by several different sects of Christianity, but none of them made as much sense to her as cannabis. Where she found hypocrisy in other religions, in cannabis she found acceptance. “She don’t judge. The smoke doesn’t care. She’ll anoint and bless you regardless,” Nydia says, personifying cannabis as female. “You know that hypocritical nature that a lot of these churches have? It’s like, ‘Do unto your neighbors as you would do unto yourself. You know you’re gonna die of sin, right?’ Like, what the fuck? Cannabis doesn’t have that voice. Cannabis tells you it’s OK.” Nydia offers monthly “religious cannabis ceremonies” in metro Detroit where she invites people to foster a deeper connection with both the plant and themselves. At a January ceremony, an altar of roses, selenite sticks, white candles, and chunks of quartz sits in the middle of a dimly lit room encased by a circle of black beans. “Divine love flows through every cell in my body,” a recording of mantras says on repeat as we settle in. “Perfect health is my divine right and I claim it now,” it continues. “I am healed now.” During this “9 Puff Ceremony,” Nydia leads us through a journey of smoking and breathwork as we take an increasing number of puffs — three for the third round, four for the fourth, and up to nine — before settling into a sound bath where she asks us where we feel certain emotions in the body. We call in the directions of North, East, South, and West and salute Father Sky and Mother Earth before lighting our joints like a stick of incense, allowing the smoke to purify our bodies. The counting starts from zero. “Zero is a profound concept that embodies immense potential, infinite possibilities, and the state of existence before transformation occurs,” Nydia
explains. “It’s the nothingness. It represents the delicate balance between life and death, encapsulating the very essence of creation from nothing.” Elaborating on a phone call after the ceremony, Nydia explains that “Zero is pure creation energy. As humans, we have this concept of life and we see it as this timeline [where] the first thing is the beginning. And then you have life and then death. I see it totally different. I see death, I see creation, I see birth, and then I see life.” Nydia is a certified death doula, reiki practitioner, qi-gong teacher, and former physical therapist, in addition to being an ordained cannabis clergy. In her search for connection, she says she first became an ordained clergy “in two minutes for $25” from the nondenominational Universal Life Church online. Then she found her mentor Micheal Myers (no, not the villain from Halloween) who was offering ganja clergy certifications. “It involves practicing, believing, documenting, and declaring that cannabis is your sacrament and you use it to commune with the higher spirits or whatever god you believe in,” she explains. “When I found the clergy [certification] and understood that using this plant as my sacrament and being able to weave in and out of history and religions, and spiritual practices, and rites, that that was my mine as well as anybody else’s who decided to declare this as their plant, I knew that this is what I had to do.” Nydia found herself drifting away from traditional religion and into the arms of cannabis due to what she calls “profound religious wounds” including an exorcism at the age of 14. Now she finds these religions as hindering most people from reaching their true potential. “This became my unconventional rite of passage, an experience I can be grateful for after healing from it but a rite I received nonetheless,” she says about the exorcism. “The collective has been largely wounded by this new-age religion we call Christianity and the patriarchal values that evolved along with it. Stories of our past collective
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Nydia the Ganja Clergy.
coming-of-age practices, rites, and traditions have largely been removed from our storybooks and oral traditions and replaced by shopping, secular holidays, [and] with scarcity mindset pushing everyone along into mental slavery.” The nine-puff experience feels like a psilocybin ceremony except with weed, and it sort of is. Nydia adopted it from a ceremony she participated in at the Detroit Psychedelic Conference led by Mikaela de la Myco, where attendees took nine sips of the psychoactive mushroom amanita muscaria. The room quickly fills with smoke by round two. “The number three represents the maiden, mother, and crone, or mind, body, and spirit,” Nydia tells us, reminding us that we can stop smoking and just take the breaths if we’ve reached our limit. We end up taking 45 puffs by the end. “The number six represents selfacceptance,” she says as the guy to my right sounds like he’s going to cough up a lung. Laughter is highly encouraged, and unavoidable, as we’re all high by the end, but everyone is sunken into a silent state of bliss by the time we finish the 45 puffs and go into a guided meditation. Nydia goes by Ganja Clergy but also “Kishar Assyria Sumer Ezizi Du Anatu,” a spiritual name she was given by Mistress Mehmuna Melchizedek during a twelve-week program on sacred
KENDALYN LIEBZEIT
femininity. It involves self-love practices like lighting a candle and staring at yourself naked in the mirror for 20 minutes, she tells me. The name means “goddess of the underworld who walks from ancient lands and protects the spirit of fire.” “Cannabis allowed me to step into my divine feminine,” she says. “ I always thought divine feminine was this flowy, sexual, sensual woman who’s always nurturing and kind but [cannabis] allowed me to see that my divine feminine is dark. We grow in darkness. Plants grow in the dark. Growth, that’s exactly what cannabis is about.” Azmera Elena Abai Masdegu Lelochi Itege T Aytiu, another student of Mistress Mehumna’s and a fellow Ganja Clergy, is helping take care of participants during the cannabis ceremony. Her name means “empress of the Nile River whose harvest holds the light that nurtures others.” A registered nurse for 14 years, Azmera got into the healing properties of cannabis after using it for pain from nine back surgeries she endured after being hit by a drunk driver in 2013. The first surgery had failed, and after complications with subsequent surgeries, her doctors realized she was allergic to the titanium rods they had placed in her body. To deal with the extreme pain, her doctors prescribed her a series of opioids, which she didn’t like taking. “After I had the last back surgery in October of 2018, I started looking at
what cannabis could do because I left the hospital with 120 Percocet and after those ran out they gave me Norco and Gabapentin,” she says. “I took myself off the medication and started doing cannabis regularly.” Before her own health struggles, Azmera was a caretaker for her sister who passed away from cancer in 2013. She remembers convincing her sister to try cannabis to help with her appetite. “My sister smoked a joint with me one day, and when I tell you when we smoked that joint, I cooked her everything in the kitchen,” she says laughing. “She wasn’t eating at that point. I would take her food and it would just sit there. They were giving her Marinol pills to get her appetite up, but they didn’t help. So I said, you know what, let’s smoke a joint, and she asked for a pork chop [and] I made her a smoothie. I was shocked. It helped.” Azmera also tried to convince her mother, who had cancer, to try cannabis but she was resistant because of the stigma attached to being a pot smoker. “I feel like approaching it spiritually makes people more comfortable,” she says. “If you go back and look you’ll see that this is something that’s been around for thousands of years, and it’s been used in thousands of healing practices. And why did we stop? Because the government came in and couldn’t get their money? I don’t know, but why did we stop this natural way of healing?” The cannabis ceremonies cost $77 and are held monthly at an undisclosed location. Each month has a different theme and the next one is a goddess ceremony on February 2. March’s ceremony will revolve around the story of Kali and Shiva from the Hindu tradition. Nydia’s goal is to end the stigma of cannabis consumption for people of all faiths and to take the ceremonies to cities beyond Detroit by 2025. “By the time I die, I want to see the rows of corn and wheat replaced by hemp plants,” she says. “I need people to understand how valuable of a resource this plant is and I need the industry to understand they are standing on the back of a religious sacrament. This industry took a sacred plant medicine and they’re moving it like alcohol just like they did with tobacco.” She adds, “I want people to know, no matter what their faith is, whether they are Christian, Jewish, whatever, they should not be ashamed of their consumption. For god’s sake, they have an entire system in their body that interacts with this plant.” More info can be found at her website, urwellnessllc.com. —Randiah Camille Green
28 clergy from Diocese of Gaylord accused of sexual misconduct Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel revealed Monday
that her office investigated sexual abuse allegations against 26 priests and two deacons from the Discose of Gaylord in northern Michigan. The 130-page report details disturbing allegations of sexual misconduct by clergy between 1951 and 2021. Despite the numerous accusations, no charges have been filed as part of the report, largely because of the statute of limitations, which requires charges to be filed within a certain period of time after a crime occurs. Nessel said the report is intended to shed light on a dark corner of the Catholic church and to provide assurances to the victims that the allegations were fully investigated. “Our promise to the victims was that every case of sexual abuse and assault would be thoroughly reviewed and that the results of the investigation would be transparent,” Nessel said in a statement. “I especially want to thank the survivors who have shared their stories, sometimes for the first time after decades of silence. Their willingness to come forward has helped bring attention to an issue that has affected so many in our state and our country, especially children.” Of the 28 clergy listed in the report, 16 are believed to be dead. Three of them are still active in the diocese, one as a pastor and the two others in retired ministry. A vast majority of the cases stem from allegations prior to 2002. For the investigation, the Attorney General’s Office seized more than 20 boxes of records and reviewed more 700,000 digital documents. In some of the cases dating back decades, the diocese allowed alleged abusers to remain in the ministry, a practice that was common nationwide until 2002, when The Boston Globe exposed the Catholic church in a series of bombshell reports that gave way to thousands of new allegations. One priest, Ronald Vincent Gronowski, was allowed to remain in the ministry until May 2002, despite what the diocese admitted were “credible” accusations that he sexually
abused three teenagers from 1969 to 1981 while at the Diocese of Gaylord. One of the victims received a settlement for $50,000 in 1995. A condition of the settlement was that he never reveal the alleged abuse. Nevertheless, Gronowski continued his ministry. In a letter to the diocese’s bishop in April 2002, one of the alleged victims wrote, “I am disgusted that you have allowed him to live the good life in Hawaii, then return to the Diocese of Gaylord to serve the church and find this to be totally irresponsible on your part as Bishop. You swept me under a rug, and you brought the perpetrator back to serve as a priest. You covered this up by hiding him in a small town, and from what I observe right now, you should no longer be serving in the church.” Gronowski resigned a month later “to avoid further scandal.” In response to Nessel’s report, Jeffrey J. Walsh, bishop of the Diocese of Gaylord, said at a news conference Monday that he wanted to express “deep sorrow and shame” to the victims. “I humbly offer an apology to each victim survivor who has been violated by anyone affiliated with the Catholic Church,” Walsh said. “Many of you have suffered in darkness for years, and I am truly sorry for that.” Walsh said the diocese “fully cooperated” with Nessel’s office and has taken steps to prevent abusers from remaining in the diocese. Of the 28 priests and deacons in Nessel’s report, the diocese acknowledged that 14 of them were “credibly accused of abuse of minors.” They are Gronowski, Patrick Barrett, Lionel Harnish, James Holtz, Fr. Benedict Marciulionis, Fr. Raymond Pilarski, Terrence Raymond, Fr. Robert Gordon Smith, Fr. John Tupper, Theophane (William) Goett, Denis (Joseph) Hall, Wilbert (Norbert) Hegener, Leo Olschaysken, and Laurus (Raymond) Rhode. Although most of the cases are decades old, some of them are more recent. In January 2017, Fr. Sylvestre Lincoln Obwaka, of Kenya, was a pastor at St. Ignatius of Loyola in Rogers City when he invited a man to celebrate mass for children at the church. According to prosecutors, Obwaka sexually assaulted the man while both of them were inebriated. “He started to position himself with my legs over his shoulders and he kept saying ‘fuck me,’” the alleged victim recalled. “The other thing he kept saying was “you voted for Trump, you want me deported, don’t you?” He continued, “He penetrated me
and I was frozen. I didn’t say anything or try to run away. I should have tried to run away. But he stayed awhile.” According to the report, Obwaka claimed he had “blacked out” and did not remember what had happened. In February 2017, Obwaka was charged with criminal sexual conduct and suspended from the diocese. While prosecutors were preparing for the trial, another alleged victim from Africa told the Diocese of Gaylord that Obwaka “sodomized” him in 2003. The victim said sexual abuse in the Catholic Church was rampant in Kenya. A jury acquitted Obwaka in July 2017. One of the most recent cases involves Fr. Bryan W. Medlin, who was pastor of the National Shrine of the Cross in the Woods in Indian River. A group of teenagers said he used social media to send them “profane, inappropriate, embarrassing, and racist comments.” In one message in 2021, Medlin allegedly said he had recently attended a wedding and saw “at least 17 pairs of full blown Cleavage in my face.” “It was beautiful, fought back the temptation to bury my head in them,” Medlin wrote. “I’m a man of true celibacy.” He continued, “Hell I wanted to motorboat everyone of them. If there were three more pairs of tits in my face I would have had no choice but to use my two hands afterwards, if you get my drift. But I fought back.” Saying there were Muslims at the wedding, he quipped, “At least the Muslims didn’t blow up the shrine.” The diocese placed Medlin on administrative leave, and he was released from ministry in March 2023. Prosecutors did not file charges because he wasn’t accused of committing a crime. The sole clergyman still serving as a pastor is Donald Robert Geyman, who was accused of inappropriately touching a woman in 2012 and exchanging sexually graphic text messages with another woman in 2021. After receiving a photo of a woman’s breasts, Geyman allegedly responded, “Man I want to feel them” and “I would be so gentle.” No charges were sought in that case. Nessel said the report was an important step toward helping victims heal and preventing future abuses. “We must break down the walls of silence that so often surround sexual assault and abuse,” Nessel said. “In the end, we hope this investigation provides a voice to those who have suffered in silence for so long and shines a light on those alleged offenders whose actions allowed them to evade true accountability.” —Steve Neavling
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Blood or pizza sauce? Charlie LeDuff’s version of 2009 arrest contradicted by police report Nearly 15 years before controversial Detroit journalist Charlie LeDuff was arrested for allegedly hitting his wife in December, a similar incident brought police to his house in Pleasant Ridge. Shortly before midnight in July 2009, LeDuff’s wife called 911, and the operator heard screams in the background before the phone hung up. When police arrived, the officer said LeDuff’s wife bore the hallmark signs of abuse: There were scratches and slight swelling to her right eye, blood around her nose and left arm, and abrasions on her forehead, lip, and arm, according to a police report obtained by Metro Times. Though the name of the victim was redacted in the police report, LeDuff, 57, wrote about the episode in his 2013 best-selling book, Detroit: An American Autopsy. But his narrative differs substantially from the police account. In his book, LeDuff claims he “smeared pizza” on his wife’s face after she said she was tired of hearing about murder victims he had been writing about. LeDuff wrote that he told his wife that his reporting was “putting pizza in your fat mouth.” After she told him to fuck off, LeDuff wrote, “I jumped out of my chair, took her by the wrist and smeared the pizza in her face. She slapped me.” She dialed 911, and “then, like a spoiled sorority girl, hung up the phone,” LeDuff wrote. According to LeDuff, the pizza sauce resembled blood, prompting police to falsely believe he assaulted his wife. But that’s not how police described what happened. When they asked LeDuff’s wife about the abrasions and blood, she told them she had cut herself shaving, according to the police report. There was no mention of pizza sauce. According to police, LeDuff’s wife, who was crying, denied being assaulted and said they were just having an argument, adding, “he’s a great guy.”
Charlie LeDuff’s mugshot after he was arrested for allegedly assaulting his wife in December 2023.
Shortly before midnight in July 2009, LeDuff’s wife called 911, and the operator heard screams in the background before the phone hung up. When police arrived, the officer said LeDuff’s wife bore the hallmark signs of abuse. LeDuff was arrested and refused to answer questions from police or be fingerprinted, according to the police report. He was never charged. In his book, LeDuff said he was hauled off to jail, wearing nothing but “striped blue underpants.” According to the police report, LeDuff was wearing a gray Polo shirt and blue jeans. In his book, LeDuff also said he was “good and loaded” on red wine and that he consumed alcohol because “drinking was the only thing that would make Detroit go away.” “My life was populated with dead men and liars and desperate people who would call me at all hours of the evening, and the only door of escape I could find was at the bottom of a bottle,” LeDuff wrote.
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Last month, on Dec. 18, LeDuff was arrested again and accused of assaulting his wife. He was charged with domestic violence and is scheduled to appear in Oakland County District Court on Feb. 13 for a pretrial hearing. LeDuff declined to comment for this story. When asked about the different versions of events, LeDuff texted, “You’d have to ask her.” LeDuff has been ordered not to contact his wife. Metro Times couldn’t reach his wife for comment. LeDuff, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories for The New York Times in 2001, is no stranger to controversy. In October, he was fired from his job as a columnist at the Detroit News after using a vulgar, coded phrase aimed at Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. In a social media post, LeDuff wrote to Nessel, “See you next Tuesday,” a backronym for the word “cunt.” It’s often written, “C U Next Tuesday.” The accuracy of his writing and reporting have also come under scrutiny. In 1995, he conceded that he plagiarized a story while working for The New York Times. He also has been accused of manufacturing quotes and featuring inaccurate descriptions. After 12 years at The New York Times, LeDuff took a reporting job at the Detroit News, where details in some of his stories were called into question. In one story that made national news, LeDuff accused Detroit police of failing to respond to his call about a dead body discovered lodged in ice in an abandoned warehouse. Metro Times and the Detroit Free Press both published stories
PLEASANT RIDGE POLICE
contradicting LeDuff’s accounts of what happened. In October 2010 LeDeuff left the Detroit News to join Fox 2 (WJBK), where he was known for using bizarre antics to report on serious issues, making him a household name. His show The Americans with Charlie LeDuff was syndicated to Fox stations across the country, reaching even more viewers. In 2011, a Detroit police officer sued LeDuff over two of his Detroit News stories that claimed she moonlighted as a stripper and danced at the longrumored, never-proven party by thenMayor Kwame Kilpatrick at the Manoogian Mansion. In the lawsuit, which was eventually dismissed, Officer Paytra Williams alleged LeDuff got facts wrong in the story and disputed that she moonlighted as a stripper. In 2013, LeDuff was accused of urinating in public, biting a security guard at a St. Patrick’s Day party, and calling three policewomen “whores.” He left Fox 2 in November 2016. LeDuff wrote two critically acclaimed books, Detroit: An American Autopsy (2013) and Shitshow!: The Country’s Collapsing and the Ratings Are Great (2018). In October 2018, LeDuff launched his ongoing podcast, The No BS News Hour, where he built a conservative following by attacking Democrats and taking a hardline position against immigration and President Joe Biden’s administration. He frequently appears on Fox News and podcasts hosted by far-right conservatives. —Steve Neavling
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Detroit may not be getting a Target after all, and we’re annoyed Well, there go our hopes for
Detroit getting a Target. Target Corp. told Crain’s Detroit Business that it has abandoned its plan for a location in Midtown on the corner of Woodward and Mack Avenue. A spokesperson for the retail giant told Crain’s in a statement last week that the company is “no longer pursuing a store in this location” due to “ongoing delays and complications.” The Target, announced in 2021, was supposed to go inside a new development that includes a planned 300 residential units. The residential and Target portion of the nearly sevenacre project is being helmed by City Club Apartments. Apparently, the people over at City Club Apartments are still somehow holding out hope for the Target. “We have a legally binding lease,” City Club Apartments CEO Jonathan Holtzman told Crain’s in a statement relayed through a representative. “We don’t have a letter from Target expressing their intent to cancel or modify the lease. We continue to move forward with our plans for this exciting mixed-use apartment and penthouse development.” We should have known better than to get our hopes up that Detroit would get a large retail store. Especially since one of the banks in financing talks with City Club Apartments has
already backed out from funding the project. It’s been two decades since Detroit had a Target in the city. That store, in the east-side Bel-Aire shopping center, closed in 2003. The planned Midtown Target wasn’t even a full-scale store — it was only a “small format” location at 32,000 square feet. Meijer opened a similar “small-format” location in Detroit dubbed Rivertown Market, on East Jefferson in 2021. In a city as large as Detroit, what exactly is the reason that we can’t have full-sized retail stores? We are all for shopping locally, but where do you go when you need to buy basic goods? Instead of big box retail shops and grocery stores, like most major cities have, Detroiters are often left to shop at chaotic dollar stores that look like a tornado has blown through them (we’re looking at you Family Dollar) or travel to the suburbs. An investigation by Bridge Detroit found Dollar Tree, which owns Family Dollar, has earned over 2,400 blight tickets since 2020, amassing over $740,000 in unpaid fines. We’re talking unkempt grass, trash-filled parking lots, and barren shelves with products sitting in boxes on the floor. These dollar stores add more blight to neighborhoods, taking up space that could be occupied by a more useful option for Detroiters.
Why exactly is it that we can’t have nice things?
Detroit has an estimated 24 square miles of vacant land in a 139-squaremile city and, according to the Detroit Free Press, that only includes “structure-free parcels” and doesn’t account for lots with abandoned buildings. So it is ludicrous to suggest there isn’t space in the city for retail stores. (Meijer also has two larger stores on the north side of the city.) Maybe there isn’t enough space in downtown Detroit, but we cannot keep ignoring neighborhood
Detroit police captain with checkered past suspended after allegedly choking his wife A recently promoted Detroit police captain has been suspended with pay after he was charged with domestic violence for allegedly choking his wife, who is also a cop, in their Birmingham home. Capt. Scott Hall was promoted to captain in August, despite racking up 56 citizen complaints during his 23-year career with DPD. Police Chief James White demoted Hall to lieutenant but allowed him to continue collecting pay while he’s on leave. Hall was arrested on Jan. 2 after his wife called 911 and said her inebriated husband choked her. She told police she had feared for her life and that Hall left the house in his police-issued vehicle.
Police in Beverly Hills pulled him over and arrested him. For reasons that remain unclear, Hall was not charged with drunken driving. During a Detroit Board of Police Commissioners meeting in August, White defended his decision to promote Hall, despite the dozens of citizen complaints against him. “Officer Hall had a significant number of citizen complaints,” White told commissioners. “I met with him, and we talked about that. We talked about some very personal things he was going through and how proud he is that he’s overcome those.” White said he was “confident” in his decision.
“I look at who he has been since he’s become a leader in this organization, and I also look at how he engages with our citizens. … I will tell you, I proudly make this recommendation despite who he was. I make this recommendation because of who he is. And I make this recommendation because I am confident he can save officers who are going down the wrong path. Leadership is what happens when no one is watching, and he is a leader, and he is a good leader.” On Thursday, Detroit police said they would answer questions from Metro Timesabout Hall, but later failed to respond. Police Commissioner Willie Burton, who was the only member of the board to
SHUTTERSTOCK
residents as if the downtown and midtown areas are the only ones that exist. I moved to Dearborn Heights last year and there are two Targets, two Krogers, and a Meijer all within a few miles. Granted, some of these are in neighboring suburbs, most of which are smaller than Detroit. But if these smaller suburbs can have a range of retail shops what’s the issue in Detroit? Don’t we deserve nice things too? —Randiah Camille Green
vote against Hall’s promotion in August, says he had concerns about Hall’s past. “This wasn’t a surprise,” Burton tells Metro Times. “He had a lot of citizen complaints.” Asked why he voted against the promotion, Burton says, “I felt like Scott Hall was not ready to move forward with a promotion. We want our officers to have the same love and compassion for our residents as we do.” Burton also questioned why Hall, who is white, was suspended with pay, while another officer, who was Black, was suspended without pay following similar allegations. “It would be nice to see the chief be more consistent,” Burton says. “One of the officers was demoted but got to keep his pay, but the other officer was demoted and was suspended without pay. Where’s the consistency?” —Steve Neavling
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Legal action threatened after cannabis dispensary prepares to open in Highland Park ALL YOUR TEAMS PLAYING ON OUR BIG SCREENS!
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Highland Park City Councilman Khursheed Ash-Shafii couldn’t believe his eyes. After a judge struck down the city’s problematic recreational cannabis ordinance in July, a Michigan-based marijuana company went ahead and transformed a vacant building in the city into a dispensary anway. Nar Cannabis paved a new parking lot, renovated and painted the building, and installed signs and lights on Victor Street near Woodward Avenue. The building hasn’t opened yet, but Ash-Shafii says representatives from the company were handing out T-shirts at the city’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony last month. Ash-Shafii is suspicious that something “sinister” is happening behind closed doors. To renovate a building and erect signs, the company would need various permits from the city. “So why would you allow someone to come into this city, pull a permit for electrical, plumbing, construction, and signage for a dispensary you know is never going to open, unless you have something sinister going on in the background and you found a loophole to open the dispensary,” Ash-Shafii tells Metro Times. “A dispensary is not a cheap investment. You are talking about at least a $100,000 investment to get the building ready. Who spends that kind of money unless they were promised something?” Mayor Glenda McDonald declined to comment, citing “litigation that is pending.” Nar Cannabis did not respond to Metro Times’s calls and emails for comment. In May, Highland Park activist Robert Davis filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging the ordinance violated the Michigan Zoning and Enabling Act because city officials failed to get approval from the city’s Planning Commission to create eight zones where cannabis businesses were permitted to open. Davis claimed the past city council created the zones to benefit donors who had property in those areas. Wayne County Circuit Judge Susan Hubbard agreed that the ordinance violated the act and struck down the ordinance in July. The Michigan Cannabis Regulatory Agency has not approved a license for the dispensary. Without a valid ordinance, dispensaries are prohibited from opening. “Why would someone spend an
unknown amount of money refurbishing a building, putting up signs, and advertising for a dispensary that has already been determined to be unlawful? It’s very suspicious to me,” Davis tells Metro Times. “I think there may be some corrupt conduct behind the scenes between elected officials in the city and the proposed building owner because it’s obvious from Judge Hubbard’s ruling that no such dispensary can open in Highland Park.” In an email to the judge and the city’s attorney on Jan. 5, Davis said the city should be “held in civil and criminal contempt of Judge Hubbard’s order” if it tries to open. Four minutes later, the city’s attorney, Anthony Chubb, responded to Davis, saying Highland Park had not authorized the dispensary to open and would take the issue to court if Nar Cannabis attempted to open. “We are both on the same page [Nar Cannabis] should not be operating and if it attempts to do so, you are welcome to concur in my motions to stop the same,” Chubb wrote. Chubb did not respond to Metro Times’s request for comment. The mystery behind the building is just the latest eyebrow-raiser over Highland Park’s defeated cannabis ordinance. Last year, the newly elected council tried to amend the ordinance to make it legal and to remove sections that council members said were ripe for corruption. The ordinance, for example, gave the clerk sole authority to dole out licenses. Typically cities give that responsibility to a board that can be held accountable. The ordinance also included five zones where dispensaries were permitted to open. One was a two-block area of Woodward Avenue, where “a major funder” to city officials has a building, activists said. The donor also has a cannabis processing license. Ash-Shafii says he’s not willing to create a new ordinance until illegal grow facilities in the city are forced to shut down. He alleges that police are looking the other way as illicit grow operations are cropping up in previously abandoned buildings. “I made it clear to the mayor and the other council members that I won’t discuss a new ordinance until these illegal grow houses are shut down,” Ash-Shafii says. “And when we do discuss an ordinance, I want to do a referendum and let the people decide if they want it or not.” —Steve Neavling
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NEWS & VIEWS
It was a heroic return to the Motor City for Rams’ Matt Stafford.
ALLAN DRANBERG / CAL SPORT MEDIA / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Lapointe
Lions’ victory a Sunday night TV thriller By Joe Lapointe
Matthew Stafford was a
battered Ram and a marked man. Early in Sunday night’s Lions’ 24-23 victory at raucous Ford Field, the NBC television camera zoomed into a closeup of Stafford’s bloodied, bandaged right hand, the throwing hand for the Los Angeles quarterback who used to play the same role in Detroit. He’d accidentally gashed his knuckles on a Lion’s helmet on a followthrough after a pass. Later, a camera showed him laughing with the lineman about the wound. After he threw a different pass, the replay cameras showed two Lions’ defenders crashing into Stafford, one of them meeting him helmet-to-helmet. Then Stafford’s own helmeted head bounced off the turf, sending him to the sideline medical tent for observation.
It was the sort of thing Motor City football fans wanted to see earlier when they booed Stafford and chanted the name of Jared Goff, the Detroit quarterback obtained in a trade to the Rams for Stafford three seasons ago. As medics checked Stafford, his backup got loose on the sideline. But back came Stafford, game for more game. And, despite all the noise inside the stadium and the pounding from his former teammates, Stafford played the starring role in a losing effort. He completed 25 of 36 passes for 367 yards and two touchdowns. Despite early domination by Detroit, Stafford kept bringing his team back and showing why he stayed around Detroit for 12 seasons and won a Super Bowl in L.A. in his first of three seasons. In a post-game interview on Fox 2, Lions’ center Frank Ragnow reflected
on why Goff and the Lions needed a final completion for a first down in the final minutes to keep the ball out of Stafford’s hands for a final drive. Stafford used to pull them off to win close ones for the Lions. “He’s had a lot of those comebacks, we knew that we had to finish out,” Ragnow said of his former teammate. “I’ve just got to say this about No. 9: He’s one of the best. He’s one of the classiest dudes of all time. One of my favorite teammates.” Stafford’s return to Detroit was the best angle for the national audience, and NBC played it up early and often and wisely stuck with it. The cameras showed him with his four daughters on the field before the game with his wife, their mother. At the opening of the pre-game show, NBC used a tracking camera
to trail Stafford onto the field for his warmups. On the audio, you could hear the fans roaring their disapproval and chanting the name of Goff. Later, when Stafford took the field for the first play of the L.A. offense, they used the same camera and audio techniques to trail him again, to the same effect. However, in between came a timing error that must have frustrated the production truck. With Stafford about to lead his team onto the field, the camera trained on him for 53 seconds. Just as he started to run to the boos of the crowd, the crew switched to a string of commercials and missed the moment. Somebody missed a cue. Once play began, color analyst Cris Collinsworth noted that the Rams struggled early and seemed to be
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“moonwalking,” that is to say, walking backward. Wouldn’t you know it, a few minutes later, Stafford dropped back to pass — stepped backward three steps — and tripped over the turf. He fell on his rear end. An omen? No way. Even the boo-birds had to admit to his grit. After the game, the cameras showed Stafford embracing several former Lions’ teammates as well as Goff. For both the local spectators and the national audience, this one was a gem. Stafford had led his team into a hostile road barn and almost pulled off an upset, losing by one point. Call this show a win-win. Next week it’s either the Eagles or the Bucs back downtown. Football in January. Interesting.
Streaming TV and NFL greed Sports television crossed a murky Rubicon Saturday night when a playoff game in the National Football League appeared exclusively on the streaming service Peacock, owned by NBC. It was a “Wild Card” game, and that card was a Joker that brought confusion and widespread technical trouble. The game — between the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins — was the first postseason playoff telecast in the four major professional sports to be sold this way in the United States. The Chiefs won, 26-7, and will move on next weekend to the second round of the four-round Super Bowl tournament. NBC and the NFL probably won, too, while some customers shelled out money they never before had to spend for grief they never before experienced. They’d better get used to it. Although some saw perfect telecasts Saturday night, others in many parts of the country saw a glitch-filled transmission. The Peacock picture stream often froze, rebooted, turned blurry, or lost sync between sight and sound while lagging several minutes behind play in real time. Imagine the frustration of the TVbound gambling addicts who couldn’t bet their “in-game parlays” when their dopamine cravings demanded them. Even non-gamblers had to be aggravated and annoyed at a substandard product at a premium price. Chiefs’ defensive end Charles Omenihu was so disturbed by the greed of the NFL, that he bought and gave away 90 gift subscriptions to Peacock so blacked-out fans could see the game. “Us playing on Peacock ONLY is insane,” he wrote on social media. “I won’t lie.” At the time he said it, he didn’t realize how “insane” it might become as customers around the nation tried with mixed results to tune it in on
their televisions, their lap-tops, their iPads, and their smartphones. According to Forbes, NBC paid $110 million for the right to inflict this one game on these terms. The lowest bargain price offered for the telecast was $5.99. The league fertilized the soil over the last couple years with Thursday night games streamed on Amazon Prime. You have to wonder what those TV and NFL executives have next up their cuff-linked sleeves, what with the NFL reportedly interested in buying an equity stake in ESPN, presumably to vertically integrate their service and possibly pave the way for pay-per-view. And if you’ve already bought into the shell game of streaming sports, you’ve probably found that some streams are hard to locate and that they are cumbersome to use when trying to channel surf. Customers in Detroit denounce the quality of the app for the local Bally Sports Detroit. This marketing trend in sports TV has snuck up over the last few years. For instance: A financially troubled local provider like Bally has seen some of its product — Tigers, Red Wings, Pistons — leak over to national cable outlets and, sometimes, to extra-cost streaming channels. That makes this era one of a major paradigm shift, an inflection point, and a potential fumble by leagues like the NFL. In the past, when customers got socked with increased fees to TV providers, they got more than they were used to getting. Think of national cable channels like ESPN in the 1980s and local services like ON TV, then PASS, then Fox Sports Detroit and, now, Bally. Gradually, in a stealthy way, programmers are taking away something viewers used to see as a matter of course and charging you more for it. At least the NFL was smart enough to allow free, over-the-air telecasts of Peacock coverage in K.C. and Miami. But fans of those teams elsewhere were out of luck without the streaming service. That’s why Omenihu bought those gift subscriptions. Imagine if NBC and the NFL had tried this stunt with the Lions against the Rams. With so many former Michiganders having scattered through migration all over the American map in the last halfcentury, the backlash would’ve been even angrier. As for the bigger picture: Is the NFL move to streaming a farsighted or short-sighted vision? Remember, this league once insisted on blacking out telecasts of home games in the home market even if they were sold out far in advance. That included the Lions’ 1957 NFL championship victory over the Cleveland Browns
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in Detroit’s Briggs Stadium. But they also pioneered the socialist concept of shared national media revenues, a formula that raised pro football to the exalted status it enjoys today. Despite the NFL’s occasionally unenlightened moments in TV policy, this sports business-entertainment juggernaut remains exceedingly profitable. For the moment, at least, that goose is still laying those golden eggs.
Harbaugh’s champions suit a shifty and shifting era By winning the national college football championship with a victory over Washington in Houston last Monday, Jim Harbaugh’s University of Michigan Wolverines left objective football fans with mixed feelings, as expressed by ESPN’s Chris Fowler. “There are people out there that believe that whatever Michigan does is tainted,” Fowler said toward the end of the telecast. “That’s up for you to decide. But, hail, hail, Michigan, they are champions of college football, 2023.” Fowler referred here to the two suspensions of head coach Harbaugh this season as investigations continued for various infractions of the rules of both the Big Ten and the National Collegiate Athletic Association regarding both recruiting and scouting. Further discipline of Harbaugh is possible, assuming he doesn’t hustle this success into another job in the NFL. Several of his staff aides left this season under investigative clouds. This may be Michigan’s most talented-buttainted sports team since the “Fab Five” basketball scandal of the 1990s. And, perhaps this is the appropriate football year for Michigan to win it all, an era in which professionalism and cynicism have streamed into the college sport at unprecedented levels. Players change teams like free agents, just like their coaches. Conferences break up and merge, just like the pro leagues. How soon before they, too, stream pay-per-view telecasts? Next year, Michigan will be defending champions of what amounts to the Big Eighteen. Their 15-0 season was almost as long as an NFL schedule. Hail, yes.
Mixed feelings about a great sport So how much bigger can football get? Is it now at its peak and headed for a long but steady decline? Curiously, during college championship week, the Washington Post published a long piece headlined “Even in Michigan, the land of Go Blue, tackle football is slipping.”
Regarding football participation, the report stated: “Michigan’s drop of 13 percent, adjusted for public high school enrollment, is larger than that of the nation as a whole (10 percent). Experts blame the downward trend on safety concerns because of the game’s link to brain damage” as well as other factors. In Michigan, those factors could include an aging population. Another reason nationwide is the rising popularity of soccer. This global sport probably will never overtake football in popularity in the U.S. But it is making strides, decade by decade, as a safer alternative for kids. Like most football viewers, I cringe when players suffer injuries and writhe in pain on the field. But I never turn off my television. Although often brutal, football also is intelligent, complex, and, at times, a marvelous spectacle to behold. In print media, I’ve covered several beats of major football teams, including the Chicago Bears of 1977, the Michigan Wolverines of the early 1980s, and the New York Giants of the late 2000s. No team sport demands more risk and devotion from its participants. I admired the players I wrote about while I feared for them. But I acknowledge that football’s inherent pain and violence is something many find appealing and peculiarly American. And the sport has its heartland defenders, like one famous author, who saw football as vital to the human spirit. “It makes one exceedingly weary to hear people object to football because it is brutal,” the famous author wrote. “Of course it is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi.” The author also called football “one of the few survivals of the heroic . . . there must always be a little of the barbarian lurking . . . when the last trace of that vital spark, that exultation of physical powers . . . that fury of animal courage dies out of the race, then providence will be done with us.’” The author was Willa Cather, who wrote these words in the 1890s while still a student at the University of Nebraska. This was before President Theodore Roosevelt called a meeting of college football leaders in the White House in 1905 to crack down on the brutality of the game. This was before the NFL existed. Cather’s philosophical — and debatable — observations on football appear in an edition of her masterpiece My Antonia, a novel originally published in 1918. They are included in an introduction written by Stephanie Vaughn of the Department of English at Cornell published in 1994.
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20 THINGS TO DO during a weird, unpredictable snowy season By Metro Times staff
Winter? What winter? This season in metro Detroit has been warmer
than usual with little snowfall to speak of. In fact, global temperatures reached historic highs in 2023, the warmest year on record by far. Climate scientists have long warned that greenhouse gasses are causing temperatures to warm and making weather patterns go haywire, with wildfires, severe storms, and flooding across the world. What remains to be seen is if global warming is accelerating and if these patterns will continue this year. Given the state of the world, it feels a bit silly to be writing a winter guide, but we already committed to this, so here we are. And of course, just as we were putting this together we finally got snow — not enough to really go sledding or do anything fun, but enough to make us second-guess this entire concept. As meteorologists like to remind us, you just can’t predict the weather, so who knows what the rest of the season will bring. But just in case, here’s our list of things to do in the Detroit area when the winter weather just won’t cooperate.
Get medieval at Royal Oak Winter Blast Royal Oak’s annual Winter Blast is still happening, winter be damned. The
free outdoor festival is set to return to Centennial Commons from Friday, Feb. 2-Sunday, Feb. 4 and will feature a mix of fun activities including ice skating,
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a zip line, ice sculptures, bonfires, live music, food trucks, and more — no snow required. New this year is a “Medieval Village” set to include activities like jousting, archery, and storytelling, because why not? See winterblast.com for the full schedule.
Get steamy and warm at the Schvitz Whether it’s cold or hot outside, you can always take a spa day. When it’s a little too freezing, head over to the Schvitz (8295 Oakland Ave., Detroit; schvitzdetroit.com) for steamy sauna rooms that are sure to warm you up. There’s also Oasis Hot Tub Gardens (2301 S. State St., Ann Arbor; oasishottubs.com) where you can rent indoor
and outdoor hot tubs in different themed rooms by the hour.
Take a hike Put down your phone and go outside. It might be too cold to go touch grass as the kids like to say, but taking a stroll in nature is always a great way to exercise and unplug. Metro Detroit has a number of great hiking trails — see metrotimes.com for our list of 20 places within driving distance of Detroit.
Go on a road trip Up North If you head north, you’ll have a better chance of frolicking in the snow. Maybe this is a good opportunity to take a mini Michigan road trip to cozy cabins or family cottages Up North. Plus,
the minimal amount of snow and ice means driving a few hours might be a little easier than it would otherwise.
Try new restaurants In 2023, metro Detroit foodies were blessed with a bunch of new restaurant openings, plus more to look forward to in 2024. If there are some or many you haven’t tried yet, winter is a great time to eat some good, comforting food with friends and family.
Take the Polar Plunge Strip down for a good cause. The annual Polar Plunge is set for Friday, March 1 at the Detroit Yacht Club (100 Clairpointe St., Detroit; classy.org). The event is presented by the Law Enforcement Torch Run and encourages Polar Plungers to register and raise funds to support year-round sports training and athletic competition for the Special Olympics Michigan. Those who raise $100 or more get a sweatshirt and sliders — that should help warm you back up.
Enjoy ice cream While ice cream in the ice cold might not be the best idea, the winter is also a good time for comforting sweets. On days when it’s not too freezing, head over to metro Detroit’s essential ice cream shops that do business yearround.
Check out activities at Valade Park Family-friendly events on the riverfront don’t stop when it’s cold outside. The Detroit Riverfront Conservancy hosts “Winter at Valade” activities and themed weekends at Valade Park (2670 Atwater St., Detroit; detroitriverfront. org/winteratvalade). Visitors of all ages can enjoy bonfires, sledding, s’mores, games, food, warm drinks, and more. Plus, every Friday will include special programming such as open mic nights, trivia, and board games.
Play indoor sports This historic Cadieux Cafe on the city’s east side is the only home to feather bowling in the nation, a Belgian game where you roll balls down a lane toward a feather target (4300 Cadieux Rd., Detroit; cadieuxcafe.com). Another bowling alternative in metro Detroit is fowling, where you throw a football at bowling pins. There are Fowling Warehouses in Hamtramck and Ypsilanti (3901 Christopher St., Hamtramck and 3050 Washtenaw Ave., Ypsilanti; fowlingwarehouse.com), great for an after-work get-together or a day of family fun.
Get your game on The quirky, old-school Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum is at risk of demolition, so if you haven’t done so in a while perhaps now is a good time to pay a visit (31005 Orchard Lake Rd., Farmington Hills; marvin3m.com) and enjoy vintage and antique arcade games and other oddities and Americana. Some other gaming options include Barcade (666 Selden St., Detroit; barcade.com) and Pinball Pete’s (1214 S. University Ave., Ann Arbor; pinballpetes.org).
Enjoy the arts When the outdoors become a sloppy, gray mess, there are other ways to appreciate beauty. The Detroit Institute of Arts is free for residents of the tri-county area (5200 Woodward Ave., Detroit; dia.org). Of course, there are plenty of smaller galleries and exhibition spaces in the Detroit area, too.
Visit a local bookstore If you’re a bookworm, winter can be the best time to cozy up and get lost in a story in the comfort of your own home. If you need something new to read, metro Detroit has plenty of great places to get a book. Some new spots include the newcomer Next Chapter Books (16555 E. Warren Ave., Detroit; nextchapterbkstore.com) and the fancy bookstore bar Flyleaf (92 Kercheval Ave., Grosse Pointe Farms; flyleafgp. com). And of course, there’s always the long-standing John K. King Used & Rare Books (901 W. Lafayette Blvd., johnkingbooksdetroit.com).
Go ice skating downtown Downtown Detroit is bustling with activity all winter long. Aside from ice skating at the Rink at Campus Martius (800 Woodward Ave., Detroit; downtowndetroit.org), there’s also the nearby Monroe Street Midway (22 Monroe St., Detroit; deckedoutdetroit. com/midway) with a slide, “puck putt,” bumper cars, and more.
Enjoy botanical gardens Belle Isle’s beautiful Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory is closed for much-needed repairs, but if you want to escape the winter doldrums to enjoy plants there’s the Matthaei Botanical Gardens (1800 N. Dixboro Rd., Ann Arbor; mbgna.umich.edu) and the Taylor Conservatory & Botanical Gardens (22314 Northline Rd., Taylor; taylorconservatory.org).
See a drive-in movie Cuddle up with your boo in the car for
a double feature at the Ford-Wyoming Drive-In (10400 Ford Rd., Dearborn; forddrivein.com), a metro Detroit tradition since 1950.
Listen to live music If you know, you know: the Detroit area has plenty of great places to experience live music, from soulful sets at the Raven Lounge (5145 Chene St., Detroit), sweaty metal shows at Sanctuary (2932 Caniff St., Hamtramck; sanctuarydetroit.com), country line dancing at District 142 (142 Maple St., Wyandotte; district142live.com), the next big thing at El Club (4144 Vernor Hwy., Detroit; elclubdetroit.com), and too many others to list here.
Tailgate for the Detroit Lions In recent years, Detroit Lions fans have celebrated their team’s home games with tailgate parties in Eastern Market’s Shed 5. And the Sunday, Jan. 21 game might be the biggest one ever, following the team’s first-ever home playoff win at Ford Field, where they beat ex-Lion Matthew Stafford on his new team the Los Angeles Rams. Tickets to the VIP tailgate party start at $125 for adults ($60 for children) and include food, open bar, music, and lounge seating and TVs to watch the game.
Go bar hopping Winter time is the best time to post up at the bar, knock back a few cold ones, and meet new people (or listen to the regular barfly tell the same stories over and over). Tropical-themed spots like Mutiny Bar (4654 Vernor Hwy., Detroit; mutinybar.com) and Eastern Palace Club (21509 John R Rd., Hazel Park; epchp.com) offer a make-believe getaway from Michigan, but there’s nothing like a solid neighborhood dive bar.
Winterfest The Detroit Shipping Co. is hosting its first-ever Winterfest LGBTQ+ pride event. Set for noon-9 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 17, the event will feature a DJ dance party, hot cocoa bar, drag bingo, vendors, and more. (474 Peterboro St., Detroit; detroitshippingcompany.com)
Do some introspection Now’s the perfect time to do some soulsearching. Meditate and reflect on your life and the new year with tarot card reading at the Boston Tea Room (1220 Woodward Heights, Ferndale; bostontearoom.com), metaphysical photo portraits from Aura Aura (9226 Kercheval, Unit 2, Detroit; auraaura.co), or flotation therapy at Sirona (21510 Harper Ave., St. Claire Shores; sironamichigan. floathelm.com).
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WHAT’S GOING ON Select events happening in metro Detroit this week. Be sure to check venue website before events for latest information. Add your event to our online calendar: metrotimes.com/ AddEvent.
MUSIC Wednesday, Jan. 17 Flint Under the Stars: Waylon Hanel 7-8:30 p.m.; The Capitol Theatre, 140 E. Second St., Flint; no cover with registration. Foxxy Gwensday presents Southern Soul in the Motor City 6-10 p.m.; Aretha’s Jazz Cafe, 350 Madison St., Detroit; $35. Will Downing, Marcus Johnson 7:30 pm; Sound Board, 2901 Grand River Ave., Detroit; $42-$55.
Thursday, Jan. 18 Dominant Hand 6:30-7:30 p.m.; Cranbrook Art Museum, 39221 N. Woodward Ave., Bloomfield Hills; no cover. Najee, Pieces of a Dream 8 p.m.; Sound Board, 2901 Grand River Ave., Detroit; $56-$68.
Recital Hall, 1025 E Kearsley Street, Flint; no cover with registration.
DJ/Dance Mikey Lion, Kevin Knapp, Dantiez 9 p.m.; Magic Stick, 4120 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $15-$30. Exotic Shotz Bash Pt. 2 with DJ Eternal, DJ Casper 10 p.m.-2 a.m.; Bleu Detroit Night Club, 1540 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $10-$50.
Saturday, Jan. 20 Carmel Liburdi , The Picassos, The Plutophonics, Central Dogma 6 p.m.; Sanctuary Detroit, 2932 Caniff St., Hamtramck; $10. Dirk Kroll Band 8 p.m.; Trinity House Theatre, 38840 W. Six Mile Rd., Livonia; $20. Gimme Gimme Disco 8:30 p.m.; Saint Andrew’s Hall, 431 E. Congress St., Detroit; $15-$25. Hot Red Chili Peppers (tribute to the Red Hot Chili Peppers), Lou Fighters 8 p.m.; Emerald Theatre, 31 N. Walnut St., Mount Clemens; $20-$200.
Sunday, Jan. 21 Big Head Todd & the Monsters 6:30 p.m.; Saint Andrew’s Hall, 431 E. Congress St., Detroit; $35. Leela James 7:30 p.m.; Sound Board, 2901 Grand River Ave., Detroit; $39-$51. The New Year Kick-Off 2024: J. Michael & the Heavy Burden, Crafted Conviction, the Half of Itm Wayne Byrum, Loxodon, Toed 5 p.m.; Sanctuary Detroit, 2932 Caniff St., Hamtramck; $12.
Monday, Jan. 22 Adult Skate Night 8:30-11 p.m.; Lexus Velodrome, 601 Mack Ave., Detroit; $5.
Tuesday, Jan. 23 Djangophonique 6:30-8 p.m.; Alpino Detroit, 1426 Bagley St, Detroit; $10.
DJ/Dance B.Y.O.R Bring Your Own Records Night 9 p.m.-midnight; The Old Miami, 3930 Cass Ave., Detroit; no cover.
Friday, Jan. 19
Jump - America’s Van Halen Experience 7 p.m.; District 142, 142 Maple St., Wyandotte; $18-$28.
42 Dugg - Welcome Home Party 7 p.m.; Little Caesars Arena, 2645 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $59.99-$179.
L’Rain 8 p.m.-midnight; Red Door Digital, 7500 Oakland Ave., Detroit; $15.
Performance
Blue Note 85th Anniversary two shows) 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.; Majestic Theatre, 4140 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $38.50.
The Class of ‘98 Band 8 p.m.; Magic Bag, 22920 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $15.
Fisher Theatre - Detroit Champions of Magic. Saturday, 3 p.m., 8 p.m. and Sunday, 1 p.m.
Shelby Raye: Nashville Hits the Roof! 8 p.m.; Tin Roof, 47 E. Adams Ave., Detroit; no cover.
Matrix Theatre Company 47 Chairs by Ziggy Klett. Ziggy Klett talks about live, loss, and surviving stage 4 cancer. Ziggy’s special blend of traumedy will leave you in stitches and tears as you hear his heartwarming tales. $20. Friday, 6:30-9 p.m. and Saturday, 6:30-9 p.m.
Broadway Rave (18+) 8:30 p.m.; Saint Andrew’s Hall, 431 E. Congress St., Detroit; $15-$25. Chanté Moore 8 p.m.; Sound Board, 2901 Grand River Ave., Detroit; $36$49. George Michael Reborn - A Tribute to George Michael 8 p.m.; Andiamo Celebrity Showroom, 7096 E. 14 Mile Rd., Warren; $35-$69. Lowdown Brass Band, JonPaul Wallace, Killer Diller 8:30 p.m.; Lager House, 1254 Michigan Ave., Detroit; $15. MEGA 80s 7 p.m.; Magic Bag, 22920 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $20. Swing Syndicate Big Band, DJ Stashu 9 p.m.-midnight; Bowlero Lanes & Lounge, 4209 Coolidge Hwy., Royal Oak; no cover. United States Air Force Brass Quintet 7-8:30 p.m.; FIM McArthur
Tamar Braxton, Teairra Mari 8 p.m.; Sound Board, 2901 Grand River Ave., Detroit; $57-$70. The British Invasion Years 8 p.m.; Andiamo Celebrity Showroom, 7096 E. 14 Mile Rd., Warren; $35-$65. Wilson Thicket, Annie Bacon 7:30 p.m.; MAMA’s Coffeehouse at the Birmingham Unitarian Church, 38651 Woodward Ave., Bloomfield Hills; $17.
DJ/Dance Nostalgix, QURL, Cass, Juicy 9 p.m.; Magic Stick, 4120 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $15-$20. SORTED! MOD Club – 60s Lounge Dance Party: DJ ALR!GHT, DJ Mike Trombley 9 p.m.-1 a.m.; Bowlero Lanes & Lounge, 4209 Coolidge Hwy., Royal Oak; no cover.
THEATER
Detroit2L.A. Competition. The Detroit to L.A. Comedy Challenge gives local comics a chance to audition for a shot at being flown to L.A. and perform at some of the top clubs in the country. Each round two comedians (one audience choice, one judges choice) will move on to a semi-final show. 7:30 p.m. $10. Andiamo Warren Motown Mark Comedy for Charity with Mike Green, Ron Rigby An evening of laughter and mouthwatering cuisine at Andiamo’s! $50. Thursday, 6 p.m. Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle Cousin Tiera With Carl Merrick, Drew Canada, Osama Basal, Nicole Melnyk, JeCorey Hawkins, Rahm Kely, Adam Majors, Vivian Burgett, Timothy Karl, Amanda Dalka, Greg Sharp (emcee), Esteban Touma (close). $35. Sunday, 7:30-9 p.m.
Continuing This Week Standup Blind Pig Blind Pig Comedy Mondays, 8 p.m. No cover. The Independent Comedy Club at Planet Ant Tonight vs Everybody: Thursday Open Mic. A weekly open mic featuring both local amateurs and touring professionals. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. and the show begins at 9 p.m. The evening always ends with karaoke in the attached Ghost Light Bar.
ARTS
Meadow Brook Theatre Father of the Bride. $43. Wednesday, 8 p.m., Thursday, 8 p.m., Friday, 8 p.m., Saturday, 2 p.m. & 8 p.m., and Sunday, 2 p.m. & 6:30 p.m.
COMEDY Improv Go Comedy! Improv Theater Go Comedy! All-Star Showdown. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30p.m., 9:30 p.m. $25.
Stand-up Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle
Artist talk Woodward Lecture Series: Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd: “Turning Poetry Into Film.” Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd will discuss how two art forms converge in The Black Unicorn: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press by illustrating how verbal imagery was transferred into cinematic language to reflect the creative complexity of a poet. Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd, a native Detroiter, is the 2023 Kresge Eminent Artist, a Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Michigan. She is a poet, biographer, editor and filmmaker. She is the author of two biographies, nine books of poetry, and the editor of two poetry anthologies. Tuesday, 6-7:30 p.m.; College for Creative Studies Wendell B. Anderson Auditorium, 201 East Kirby St., Detroit; no cover.
Art exhibition Color & Ink Studio UNIFIED a Keto Green Solo Show Maus Haus Gallery is taking over Color I Ink Stu-
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dio for a solo show featuring contemporary Detroit artist Keto Green. His paintings at first feel familiar through the use of figures and objects, but upon closer look the materials prove interesting as well. Keto paints on surfaces and with found objects. No cover - dontations welcome. Fridays, 5-8 p.m., Saturdays, 12-3 p.m., and Sundays, 12-3 p.m. Through Jan. 28. PARC Art Gallery The Art and Soul Exhibit & Sale. The Art & Soul Exhibit display includes over 50 works from artists including Al Bonacorsi, Allen Brooks, Cheryl Chidester, Winnie Chrzanowski, Susan Clinthorne, Jan Dale, Ellen Doyle, Lulu Fall, Kelsey Fox, Brian Fritz, James Guy, Tim Haber, Laura Johnson, Krisjan Krafchak, Mary Lane, Michelle M Beaupre, Christine Minderovic, Stephanie Onwenu, Wendy Scarbrough, and Joan Witte. No cover. Through March 4. University of Michigan Museum of Art Unsettling Histories: Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism. Installed across four different galleries at UMMA, this exhibition explores that history and tracks the influence of blue and white ceramics across the globe. No cover.
Dance CE Detroit Opera House Compañía Nacional de Danza: Carmen. Wednesday, 7:30 p.m. $30-$140. The Whiting Hiplet Ballerinas Hiplet fuses classical pointe technique with African, Latin, hip-hop, and urban dance styles that are rooted in communities of color. It was specifically designed to make ballet accessible to all, by mixing it with current popular songs that will be familiar to audiences who don’t normally attend ballet performances. Performances may incorporate the rhythms of African drums with Tchaikovsky, arabesques and beat-boxing or even Tango en pointe - all while showcasing Hiplet’s trademark sass, hip movements, and struts against popular music audiences will recognize. Friday, 8-9:30 p.m. $21-$65.
LITERARY EVENT Books Sheraton Detroit Novi Hotel Labrynith of ConFusion Science Fiction Convention. Starting in 1974 ConFusion is the longest-running fan-run science fiction and fantasy convention in Michigan, and a premier event for publishing professionals and fans alike. $70 for adults, $50 for teens,
$40 for kids (no cover for children age 4 and under). Friday, 6-11 p.m., Saturday, 9 a.m.-11 p.m., and Sunday, 9 a.m.-noon.
MISCELLANEOUS Drink Chelsea Whiskey Club The Chelsea Whiskey Club convenes every fourth Monday of the month at Robin Hills Farm. Each month a new group of fine whiskies are tasted. Members score the whiskey as they taste them and are then treated to a fifth pour of their favorite. Every fourth Monday of the month, 7-8:30 p.m.; Robin Hills Farm, 20390 M-52, Chelsea; robinhillsfarm.com. $45. The Official Onesie Bar Crawl - Detroit Join The comfiest party of the year! Tickets include 2-3 drinks, food and drink specials, and an afterparty. Finally: A reason to wear your onesie in public. Saturday, 4-11:45 p.m.; Brass Rail Pizza Bar, 18 West Adams Ave., Detroit; $5-$25.
Food Movie Night at Detroit Shipping Company Enjoy free popcorn and happy hour drink specials all night. No cover. All ages welcome. Dogs on a leash are welcome in any of our outdoor seating areas. Wednesday, 5-10 p.m.; Detroit Shipping Company, 474 Peterboro St., Detroit; no cover. Onesie Brunch It’s like pajama day at school but with better food. Come in your onesie, pajamas, robe.… just make sure you’re comfy and ready to enjoy good food and drinks to the tunes of DJ Alwayz Believe. Featuring food and drink specials, board games, and movies for the whole family in our Bridge Lounge and heated beer garden. Sundaym 12-3 p.m.; Detroit Shipping Company, 474 Peterboro St., Detroit; no cover.
Games Bowlero Lanes & Lounge Pop Culture Trivia (with a retro spin). Every THIRD Thursday of each month. This game has a retro spin and covers the decades of ’70s-2000s. Expect lots of fun categories touching on music, movies, TV, books, celebrities, advertising, toys and games, and news events that shaped the decades. Your trivia host, Scott Zumberg, will ask a series of questions over seven rounds, and tally up scores between rounds with a prize going to the winner at the end. You can organize into teams or if you don’t have a team, you can play individually. Trivia begins at 8 p.m. No cover.
Doughboyz Cashout will join 42 Dugg at his big Detroit show.
Critics’ picks 42 Dugg MUSIC: Here’s one for Detroit hip-hop heads: Motor City rap groups Doughboyz Cashout and Team Eastside are set to reunite onstage for local rapper 42 Dugg’s big “welcome home concert” on Friday. “ I told you this will be the turntest shit Detroit ever Seen,” 42 Dugg wrote on Instagram. “TeamEastside x Doughboyz cashout, the only people who lose is the mufuckas that miss this show !!!!!!!!!” A flier for the announcement bills the event as “Team Eastside vs. Doughboyz Cashout,” playing up the city’s famous east-west rivalry as well as a previous beef between the groups. But we’re told it’s all in good fun and that it has been long in the works. “It just showed the maturity of Doughboyz Cashout as well as Team Eastside as a whole to put aside our differences to look at the bigger picture as far as blossoming and making money,” Doughboyz Cashout’s Clay told Metro Times contributor Kahn Santori Davison in a 2022 cover story. Doughboyz Cashout also told our resident rap correspondent that new music is also on the way, though that hasn’t yet come to fruition. We’re hoping this high-profile activity is a sign of things to come. —Lee DeVito
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Starts at 7 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 19; Little Caesars Arena; 2645 Woodward Ave., Detroit; 313presents.com. Tickets start at $59.
Ann Arbor Bicentennial FUN: It’s Ann Arbor’s 200th birthday, and the city is celebrating with special events all year long. Festivities will kick off on Friday with an event at the Michigan Theater featuring a silent auction, snacks, cocktails, music, and bicentennial poetry recited by resident poetjournalist Aaron Dworkin. Dworkin was chosen in 2023 to create six poetry compositions that reflect Ann
KAHN SANTORI
Arbor’s two centuries of history with emotionally expressive insights into Ann Arbor’s past, present, and future. Tickets to the celebration benefit Ann Arbor’s Bicentennial Legacy Project, which includes Bicentennial Park and the James L. Crawford Elks Lodge. More information will be provided about the new developments at the event. As another way to kickstart the bicentennial festivities, Ann Arbor Restaurant Week is returning from Jan. 21-26. Over 30 restaurants are participating and will provide chef highlights, menus for two, family meals to-go, and bicentennial specials. —Layla McMurtrie From 6-8 p.m on Friday, Jan. 19; Michigan Theater; 603 E. Liberty St., Ann Arbor; a2bicentennial.org. Tickets are $50.
Vintage Electronics Expo GADGETS: Retro gear is having a bit of a moment. The Vintage Electronics Expo claims to be the largest vintage gear expo in the U.S. and last year moved its annual gathering to the larger Southfield Pavilion, where it is set to return this Saturday. Organizers say that they have seen an influx of younger attendees in recent years who are drawn to the equipment as vinyl record sales have increased steadily over the past decade or so, and add that old radios can be retrofitted with auxiliary inputs for Bluetooth technology and other modern updates. Others simply like to use beautiful vintage radios from the 1930s-40s as indoor decor, or repurpose console cabinets from the 1940s-50s as storage. This year’s event is set to feature silent auctions, a presentation on stereo repair, and DJ Del Villareal will be spinning records throughout the day. —Lee DeVito From 9 a.m.-4 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 20; Southfield Pavilion, 26000 Evergreen Rd., Southfield; thevee.org. Tickets are $5.
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FOOD
Kitab Café’s owners initially set out to open a bookstore, but its coffee and food offerings have become popular.
VIOLA KLOCKO
A warm welcome in Hamtramck By Jane Slaughter
Kitab Café 2727 Holbrook Ave., Hamtramck 313-285-8089 kitab-cafe.com Coffees $2-$4, lattes $5.50, sandwiches $4-$7.50, pastries $1.75-$5.99
Kitab Café is what you want in a coffee place if you’re looking not just for caffeine but for a welcoming environment, literally for everyone, from rough-hewn old white guys to teens in hijab. Counter workers might be showing some shoulder (it’s warm inside) or be in hijab themselves. Traffic is steady, with lots of tables taken by singletons at work. Huge windows let the sunshine in. Food prices, if not coffee prices, are lower than many others’. And the baked goods and baguettes for sandwiches are from Zingerman’s. Say no more. Wife and husband co-owners Asma Almulaiki and Ahmed Alwhysee, born and raised in Hamtramck, opened Kitab in January 2023 with the idea of creating a space for the diverse Hamtramck community, and that’s what it is. They thought they’d be more of a bookstore, but quickly learned coffee would rule. They thought 5% of their sales would be food; now it’s more like 50-50. Close to a year in, they moved to full halal. Certainly not alluding to any billiondollar, 9,000-shops, union-busting coffee shop chain you may have heard of, Almulaiki said the goal was to make
their store as unpretentious as possible, both fast for those seeking a quick in-and-out and welcoming for those who want to stay. “We invested in good electric outlets, good Wi-Fi,” she said. Each sandwich is put together when ordered and can be customized. Eggs for the breakfast sandwiches are scrambled in a skillet, not turned into rubber in a microwave. I found my caprese sandwich memorable, with generous amounts of basil pesto and melty fresh mozzarella on a toasted baguette — lots of bright flavor. Pastrami was underwhelming, with not enough pastrami flavor. But a breakfast sandwich with turkey on a crisp-ish croissant was fresh as could be, with a tomato slice actually playing a noticeable role — virtually unheard of for a winter tomato; I’d upgraded from American cheese to chipotle gouda. For an egg-and-cheese on baguette, a steal at $4, we added some chipotle sauce for 50 extra cents, and that produced a nice kick. Other sandwiches offer Buffalo chicken, turkey, provolone, pepper jack and mozzarella in various combinations, with spinach as the green, a good choice. Baguettes are the usual sandwich bread but some days there’s sourdough or Zingerman’s rolls. Regulars should not get bored. Zingerman’s vegetarian soups change every few days; they are thick enough for your plastic spoon to stand up in with no wobble. Butternut soup was welcomingly nonsweet, with a little spicy buzz; tomato was summertime
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pure-tomato flavor. Anyone familiar with the Zingerman’s oeuvre will know to expect the best from the pastries. New to me was Bostock, a version of French toast made with a tall slice of brioche, brushed with orange syrup and sprinkled with toasted almonds, then baked. I thought I could detect a hint of anise, though it wasn’t on the ingredients list. Apricot rugelach (this was during Hanukkah) was manylayered and cinnamony. Olive oil cake was beautifully moist; it uses orange juice and orange liqueur. Zingerman’s calls the texture “luxurious” because “olive oil retains more moisture than butter.” No argument from me. Expect a good variety of Zingerman’s favorites, including the humble brownie. As to coffee, you can of course get regular La Colombe espresso in all the variations or a list of dessert-like lattes with caramel, salted caramel, milk chocolate, white chocolate, honey, vanilla, cayenne, brown sugar, or cinnamon. If it’s sweet comfort liquid, it’s here. The double shots come with a generous 10 oz. of milk. A Spicy Mocha Latte, for example, was mild, my friend said “more spiced than spicy,” with notes of ginger and molasses. A Five-Spice Latte with almond milk (the other choices are cow’s milk and oat milk) was also mild, with clove and ginger out-competing the cardamon, cinnamon and nutmeg. A creamy Chai Latte was plush with foam. None of these were sickly sweet, thank god. But the people do like their
sugar. Most popular latte for fall was salted caramel. Kitab has a kegerator to keep iced lattes on tap; various syrups (vanilla, caramel, five-spice, brown sugar) are infused with coffee and oat milk for a foamy result. They’re popular even in winter for those spending the day. The shop was temporarily out of Adeni Chai, a Yemeni tea, when I visited, but it’s my next pick: the five iconic spices steeped with sugar and black tea, plus milk. Kitab means book. The café’s book collection is....specific. Most of the titles relate to Islam, in English, with a smattering of others mostly of the selfhelp or uplift variety: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography, Cheryl Strayed conquering the Pacific Coast Trail, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Marie Kondo. There’s a big children’s section with titles like This Is My Hijab. But there’s a lot more laptop work going on than traffic in paper-and-ink books. I first visited Kitab December 1, when it hosted a showing of the documentary From Under the Rubble with the Handala Coalition, about destruction in Palestine in an earlier war. The woman sitting next to me lived down the street and frequented the café all the time. Almulaiki plans more such events, working with the neighbors. Kitab will soon open a second location, in the former Avalon Breads space at 422 W. Willis St. in Midtown. I predict it’ll be just as neighborly in a different kind of neighborhood.
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FOOD
Jeremy Allen White plays Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto in The Bear.
Chowhound
Borderline unbearable, but still That’s Hulu’s The Bear for me. After wincing and scoffing my way through the first few episodes of this damnably addictive “dramedy” cookedup around a tortured genius chef and his cliched supporting cast, my claws came out early, ready to shred this ludicrous portrayal of restaurant life as anything approaching reality. Still, I find myself unable to tune out all its mess for some reason. Years ago, a guy still enjoying a halfcentury run as a restaurateur (Rich Huie, owner of the Salt Cellar in Scottsdale) offered me a bear metaphor in summing up one’s day-to-day fortunes, while pulling me aside one night after a long, hard shift I’d worked as his rookie waiter. “This business is a bear, son,” he said. “Sometimes you eat bear. Sometimes the bear eats you.” Seeing the opening, dream sequence of Hulu’s vision of that same premise — a scene in which chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto finds himself coaxing just such a beast from its cage, I thought, “No way. Super cool. I get it. Let’s go.” Sadly, by the end of S1 E1, the show seemed about as convincing a portrayal of life and lifers in the restaurant business as some old B-movie stuntman in a bear suit wrestling a rhinestone cowboy. For starters, stereotypical characters abound. There’s a ponytailed Mexican dishwasher, a cynical prep cook of a certain age, a hot-tempered Puerto Rican line cook (single mother, of course),
and assorted other subordinate players who fit roles that outsiders looking in on restaurant life have likely heard infest that world (cokeheads, semi-shady investors, hapless ne’er-do-wells). Chef Carmy himself is talent and torment personified through tats and tussled hair, while Sydney — his late-Millennial sous — plays reluctant co-hero resigned to her generationally definable skepticism that manifests in constant, stammering snark. Sometimes, honestly, I just want to put her over my knee. Despite the preliminary pablum in character establishment, I’ve found myself suspending disbelief and spending more time watching The Bear. Not surprisingly, the kitchen crew came into a small fortune socked away in a stock of Campari tomato cans that’s financing the repurposing of their beat-to-death Chicago Beef sandwich shop into Sydney’s vision of a Michelin starship. And that’s where I’m at with The Bear to date. So, will Jeremy Allen White (Chef Carmy) earn his Golden Globe golden boy status (best actor) in my eyes continuing to mimic a stoic, young Dustin Hoffman? Will Sydney realize her culinary dreams or simply come to the realization that we are, in fact, just living in the simulation proposed by Elon Musk? And will everyone else in The Bear’s ensemble continue to merely appear in career lifesupport cameos or as profiled caricatures of people purported to inhabit the food
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Courtesy of Hulu/FX
hospitality universe? Please, readers: Though I’m late to the game in becoming a (reluctant) fan of the show, don’t email me any spoilers. I intend to sit through all 18 episodes, whether I ultimately get The Bear in the end or it gets me even more irritated than I was to begin with.
Another whipping post Consider slander versus libel. As I understand the essential difference, slander is falsely stating defamatory accusations while libel puts the effort to defame in writing. In taking Corktown’s Alpino restaurant to task a month or so ago, Google reviewer Marjorie Marr may have toed that line and then some. Between what she alleges in her beef over service she received there and how professionally and diplomatically the restaurant’s owner, David Richter, articulated his response to Marr’s charges, reading both sides of this story warrants sharing as not only a potentially glaring instance of overstepping one’s right to an online review rant, but also a shining example of admirably-put reply by a restaurant operator to reputation-threatening comments made under dubious auspice as an online consumer review. “I came in with a good group of friends a little while ago.” Marr led in. “I’m just now getting to review this place because I have the time.” Got it, Marjorie. You brought in some business a while back and you’ve been a busy little bee since. She goes on: “I remember my server her name was Robin and she was drunk while serving us. When I notified management or who I thought was management they were just as rude and standoffish. I believe his name was Jason. The food is OK. The atmosphere is pretty decent. It
has a live fireplace however, the service could be better. I believe the staff needs to be retrained, and I also believe that a no drinking or doing drugs policy (wait, what?) before work should be implemented. This woman reeked of wine and was extremely talkative.” Hmmm. Sounds like Marjorie waited a while to get this off her chest online. While one might wonder why, it’s all out there now. She’s insisting server Robin was drunk on the job, and that Alpino management — as she perceived it — proved unacceptably responsive to her complaint somehow. And in as much as Marr mentioned at-work drinking and drugging as issues in need of address, may we deduce that her “reeked of wine” comment speaks to one while “and (Robin) was extremely talkative” strongly insinuates the other? Just imagine: a restaurant server chatting up customers. Clearly, that server must be on drugs or something. Enter Alpino proprietor Richter, whose response to Marr’s hard charges is softly and deftly spoken: “Thank you for choosing to dine with us,” is his first retort. “I don’t see a reservation under your name.” (I see what you did there, David, nicely done.) He continues, “I’m hoping you’ll email me the date and reservation name to further investigate your perception of our staff’s behavior.” Then, Richter fully responds, and I heartily recommend you read his words in their entirety, as they reflect exemplary qualities of proprietary responsibility, reserve, and restraint in the face of all the social media strafing restaurateurs suffer without taking full recourse, as they sometimes should.
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CULTURE
Tylonn Sawyer’s “Autorama” is part of Beyond Topography at Janice Charach Gallery, opening on Jan. 14.
Arts spotlight
During a gloomy January, here are some Detroit art shows worth leaving the house for By Randiah Camille Green
I can’t lie, January kind of sucks.
It’s cold and dreary, making it hard to find the motivation to leave the warmth of the house. In nature, winter is the time to slow down as animals and plants take rest. Modern humans don’t quite have that luxury. But we can also see January as a time of infinite possibilities as we set our plans in motion for the future with anticipation for what will spring forth in the new year. Metro Detroit galleries are already buzzing with exciting shows to sloth off the winter funk. If you’re ready to get out of hermit mode, here are a few shows I’m looking forward to checking out in hopes they’ll stoke the fire of creativity and get my ass off the couch.
Interpersonal — M Contemporary Art This Ferndale gallery is opening the year with a group show featuring figurative work by Andre Barker, Kaleigh Blevins, Alicia Brown, Cydney Camp, Gregory Johnson, Bowen Kline,
Joshua Rainer, Mieyoshi Ragernoir, and Shonobi. M Contemporary Art; 205 E. Nine Mile Rd., Ferndale; mcontemporaryart.com. Through Feb. 10.
Beyond Topography — Janice Charach Gallery Curated by Detroit artist Clinton Snider, Beyond Topography features the work of 23 artists with different interpretations of the American landscape and where it’s headed in the future. In addition to Snider, it includes work by Taurus Burns, Mitch Cope, Joel Dugan, Bakpak Durden, Denise Whitebread Fanning, Adrian Hatfield, Scott Hocking, Andy Krieger, Michael McGillis, Lucille and Jim Nawara, Rebecca Reeder, Tylonn Sawyer, Graem Whyte, Anthony Maughan, Milee Tibbs, Alison Wong, Alex Martin, Mel Rosas, John Charnota, Faina Lerman, and Ivan Montoya. We’re most intrigued by Tylonn Sawyer’s new futuristic AI pieces that are included in the show.
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COURTESY PHOTO
Janice Charach Gallery, 6600 W. Maple Rd., West Bloomfield; gallery.jccdet.org. Through Feb. 21.
four themes: Mapping Space, Social Networks, On the Move, and Activating Built Space.
Stones and Heavy Metal — Scarab Club
Opening reception from 5-7 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 25, including a talk by Andrew Thompson at 6 p.m.; Stamelos Gallery Center, 1st Floor, Mardigian Library, UM-Dearborn, 4901 Evergreen Rd., Dearborn; library.umd.umich.edu/ stamelos. Through April 21.
Less heavy metal in the vein of Judas Priest and more heavy metal in the sculptural sense, this show features work by the likes of Austen Brantley, Sergio De Giusti, Adnan Charara, Todd Erickson, Safell Gardner, Alvaro Jurado, Taru Lahti, Adam Shirley, Lois Teicher, and Chris Turner. Scarab Club, 217 Farnsworth St., Detroit; scarabclub.org. Through Feb. 10.
Taru Lahti, Nascent — Detroit Contemporary Taru Lahti presents paintings on metal made from a process of cutting, forming, fastening, and welding sheet metal into a canvas. Detroit Contemporary; 487 W. Alexandrine St., Detroit; detroitcontemporary. com. Through Jan. 28.
Andy T’s Urban Vision 2001-2024 — Stamelos Gallery Center Andrew Thompson uses everyday objects to sculpt installations exploring cartography, social mobility, urban renewal, food sourcing, waste recycling, fashion, information management, and the art industry. This mid-career retrospective showcases over two decades of his work and is divided into
Mario Moore, Revolutionary Times — Flint Institute of Arts Detroit native Mario Moore presents paintings, silverpoint drawings, and works on paper about American History and the connection between past and present. It includes work from his 2021 series A New Republic about Black Union Soldiers in the Civil War, his 2022 Midnight and Canaan series on the relationship between Detroit and Windsor on the Underground Railroad, and his newest work on the parallels of the Detroit fur trade and the use of Black enslaved bodies for the export and transport of products. Moore will give a lecture at the museum’s 17th Annual Community Gala at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 20, a blacktie event and Black History Month celebration with hors d’oeuvres, live entertainment, and a cash bar; Flint Institute of Arts; 1120 E. Kearsley St., Flint; flintarts.org. Tickets are $100 in advance or $125 at the door. Through April 14.
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CULTURE
Adam (Andrew Scott) is isolated in the big city.
CHRIS HARRIS, COURTESY SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES
Film
He sees dead parents By Cliff Froehlich
All of Us Strangers Rated: R Run-time: 105 minutes
In its entwining of a love
story and a ghost story, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is scarcely without precedent, with forebears including The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Truly, Madly, Deeply, and, of course, Ghost. Those films, however, involved romances between the living and the dead, with all of the inevitable complications. All of Us Strangers instead takes an oddly bifurcated approach, with the movie toggling between the developing relationship between Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) and Adam’s visits with the spirits of his long-dead parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell). Although the two plotlines eventually converge — with unexpectedly tragic results — All of Us Strangers often plays like two distinct films, with Adam serving as the thinnest of connecting threads. A writer struggling with a semi-autobiographical screenplay, Adam lives in
London but seldom ventures from the dark, enveloping cocoon of his apartment, which is situated in a recently opened tower that remains weirdly depopulated. In fact, the building’s only other resident appears to be Harry, who initially glimpses Adam framed in his upper-story window from the sidewalk below. Having somehow intuited from that fleeting look that Adam is gay, Harry later shows up, outlandishly drunk if charmingly convivial, at the writer’s door. Reserved and wary, Adam gently rebuffs this first approach, but the next day, when a sober Harry returns to offer an apology, a mutual attraction becomes clear. The extroverted Harry even manages to coax Adam from his solitary, ascetic existence for a night out at a gay dance club, which helps loosen the tight bonds that constrain him. As the men’s connection strengthens, they share not just sex but real intimacies, with Adam opening up about a particularly shattering, life-altering event: his parents’ death from a car crash 30 years before. For those familiar with Haigh’s film-
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ography, this strand of All of Us Strangers’ story will evoke memories of the writer-director’s breakthrough work, Weekend (2011), which traces a brief but intense romance between two similarly contrasting men over the course of several days. Haigh essentially grafts a variant of Weekend’s narrative onto his new film’s source, Japanese writer Taichi Yamada’s Strangers (1987), which focused exclusively on ghostly doings with no romantic elements. Although the Adam-Harry plot avoids simply recapitulating Weekend — and the deepening relationship is deftly rendered by the filmmaker and the actors — All of Us Strangers on occasion comes perilously close to self-plagiarism. Fortunately, the film’s parallel story — Adam’s discovery of Dad and Mum’s ghosts — proves not only more original but also far more compelling. In an effort to unblock his writing, Adam attempts to reconnect with his past by traveling to his childhood home in the suburbs. He succeeds beyond any realistic measure when he encounters his father, exactly the age he was before
death, in the field behind their old residence. (In a disconcerting bit of misdirection, it at first appears as though the figure Adam sees at a distance is trying to hook up with him.) Adam accepts this supernatural occurrence with surprising equanimity and understandable joy, and after this initial visit, he embarks on regular journeys to his former home to talk with his ageless parents, who continue to “live” in surroundings entirely unchanged since their deaths. Adam’s conversations with Mum and Dad, both singly and together, comprise the emotional core of All of Us Strangers. Although delighted to see their adult son — who’s now essentially their “age” — they also worry that Adam will end up lonely and unfulfilled when he reveals that he’s gay. Reflecting the attitudes extant at the time of their deaths, when AIDS was still an irrevocable death warrant, and unaware of subsequent societal changes, Mum and Dad (especially Mum) struggle to accept Adam’s sexual identity. Given Adam’s solitude at the film’s outset, his parents are perhaps right to fret over his romantic prospects, but his growing relationship with Harry offers the promise of a hopeful future, which he’s eager to share with Mum and Dad. As Haigh has amply demonstrated in Weekend, 45 Years, and Lean on Pete, he’s particularly adept at revealing dialogue, and Adam’s hushed, intimate exchanges with Mum and Dad and with Harry have a heartbreaking quality that verges on but never tips over into sentimentality. At times, they’re almost unbearably moving. The film’s scenes with Mum and Dad are particularly effective (and affecting), and they also appear acutely personal: Haigh actually shot this material in his own childhood home, which he discovered had the same trapped-in-amber 1980s-era vibe as Adam’s parents. Haigh benefits from his extraordinary quartet of actors — Scott (Fleabag, Birdy), Mescal (Normal People, Aftersun), Foy (The Crown), and Bell (Billy Elliot) — who deliver naturalistic, utterly believable performances despite the film’s fantastical premise. Given those enchanting qualities, it’s regrettable that the film so utterly botches the landing. Haigh certainly isn’t known for traditional happy endings — though both Weekend and Lean on Pete offer conclusions of at least qualified optimism — but All of Us Strangers is altogether punitive in its despairing finish. Saying more would require spoilers, but Haigh badly missteps, choosing to exit with an out-of-the-blue shock that feels entirely unearned and illogical. Especially for a filmmaker as generally accomplished and subtle as Haigh, the finale of All of Us Strangers feels like a crass betrayal.
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CULTURE Savage Love Script Doctor By Dan Savage
Q: I’m a cishet woman, married twenty
years, three kids at home. My marriage is generally happy but it’s also sexless. Being “companionate” was his decision, not mine. The absence of sex is driving me crazy, so my husband has given me his blessing to get sex elsewhere. It’s tricky, though, as it’s hard for me to be sexually attracted to someone without feeling a special connection. I’ve tried the apps, but the thought of discussing the mechanics of sex with someone I’ve just met on Hinge or Bumble or whatever leaves me cold. The thing is, I periodically develop crushes on male colleagues. I work in a project-based industry where everyone works on three-to-four-month contracts. We come together, work hard, get to know each other quickly, and then head off to new jobs. So, fucking someone I met at work feels like the perfect solution. And there is currently a guy at work that I’m having the most intense flirtation with. The flirting is off the charts and it’s driving me insane. But he’s happily married with a child at home. So, how do I find out if he wants the same thing I do? I get the impression he desires me as much as I do him, but this doesn’t mean he wants to have sex with me. I also don’t want to cause drama or accidentally blow his life up. I just want to have sex with him. There must be other people out there in sexless marriages or open marriages who have hall passes like mine but how do I find out if he is one of them? Do I have to ask? Can you give me a script? I don’t want to offend him or make things awkward, even if the awkwardness only lasts the few weeks until the end of our contracts. I would also hate to be accused of inappropriate workplace behavior. What can I do? —Workmate Only Wonderland
A: On the one hand… your workplace
crush could be flirting with you because you’re a married woman with a husband and kids at home and he assumes your marriage is monogamous — most straight marriages are — and regards flirting with you as harmless because 1. he hasn’t been paying attention to evolving standards of workplace conduct and 2. he doesn’t think there could be any repercussions, personal or professional, because [see 1] and you’re a married woman, WOW, and so nothing sexual and/or dramatic and/or actionable
can happen. On the other hand… your workplace crush could be flirting with you because he wants to fuck you and he may even have his wife’s OK to fuck other people — he may, like you, have the hall pass he needs — but he’s kept the flirting within the zone of plausible deniability because 1. he actually has paying attention to evolving standards of workplace conduct and 2. he doesn’t know if you’re allowed to fuck other people and doesn’t want to cause drama or accidentally blow your life up. On the other other hand… he may not be flirting with you at all, WOW, and your sexual deprivation (and desperation) has induced a really bad case of clitful thinking. If you wanna make something happen — if you wanna fuck this guy or even know if fucking this guy is a possibility — you’re gonna have to risk asking him if he wants anything to happen. And seeing as you asked me to script this for you, WOW, I’m gonna assume you’re willing to run the risk. So, I’ve written your lines for you, WOW, now you all have to do is memorize them (and your best impression of Meg Ryan, circa 1993): “We’ve been flirting — at least I think we’ve been flirting — please stop me if I somehow got the wrong impression — but if we have been flirting, I wanted you to know — before our contract ends and we go our separate ways — that my marriage is open. I don’t want to leave my husband — I truly love my husband — which means I’m no threat to your marriage. So, if your marriage is open or companionate or something close, we’d be a really good match — as affair partners go — since I don’t want to take you away from your wife and child. I just want to fuck your brains out and I’m pretty sure you want to fuck mine out. What do you say?” Finally, WOW, since hitting on coworkers isn’t a risk you’re gonna wanna take regularly, and since this particular workplace crush is going to leave town when your contract ends whether he’s down to fuck or not, I’ve taken the liberty of drafting some suggested language for your profile on Binge or Humble or whatever: “I’m a loving, stable, companionate marriage and I’m not looking to leave my husband. But I don’t feel sexual attraction in the absence of actual affection. So, if you’re willing to meet up at least twice to make a real connection, we might be a match. If you’re not willing to make even a minimal investment of time and energy, we’re definitely not a match.”
Q: There’s a chance I’m engaging in
some dickful thinking here. I’m a late 30s, non-binary, queer transmasc who passes as a man. I have a circle of outdoor “activity
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buddies.” It’s not a sexual thing, more of a we-go-hiking-and-camping thing. I took a shine to one of these friends on our first group trip. He’s strong and an athlete, and yet he’s incredibly sweet. This friend is a few years older, divorced, with nearly grown kids. He’s one of the few in the group that I’ve told I’m trans. After a recent overnight group trip, I realized that I have a crush on my cis and probably het after he opened up to me about his kids (one of whom is nonbinary!) and a recent date with a woman. I don’t know if it’s insane to want to tell him how I’m feeling. For what it’s worth, my spouse also likes him and telling Spouse how I was feeling inspired us to talk about moving toward a more open marriage. Now I keep having daydreams about landing this guy as a FWB and sharing him with Spouse. Am I, as the kids say, completely delulu here? Is there a chance in hell that my friend would be down for a little experimentation with my exotic self? (I haven’t had bottom surgery.) Is this a case of “you can’t know until you ask”? If so, can you give me a script? —Longshot Longing
A: So… you’re not only hoping Crush is
attracted to men and/or is willing to make an exception for a man with a vagina — which some online types consider transphobic — you’re also hoping you’re that man, LL. And that’s not all: you’re hoping your marriage can smoothly transition to not just open, but poly, and that Crush is just as into Spouse as Spouse is into Crush. That’s a lot to hope for. While Crush could be bi or pan or open to sleeping with trans men who haven’t had bottom surgery, LL, it sounds like he’s straight. And if Crush joined this we-gohiking-and-camping-but-not-fucking group because he was seeking meaningful friendships with other men — too many straight men report having no friends at all and more straight men should join groups like the one you describe — your “ask” may not only derail your friendship, LL, but ruin this group for Crush and Crush for this group. Given the odds that Crush is heteroflexible or bi or willing to make an exception for a trans man who hasn’t had bottom surgery — and you’re that man — are slim, and given the odds that, even if he’s into you, he’d be into Spouse, whom he’s presumably never met, are even slimmer — I would urge you to keep your mouth shut for the time being. If he begins to telegraph any interest in you at all, if he gives you some unambiguous sign, then you can make the first move. (First moves are asks, not lunges; use your words, not your hands.) And even then, LL, you should open by asking for the “no” you’re hop-
ing not to get: “I have a crush on you — if you’re not interested for any reason, please tell me and I will absolutely take your no for a final answer. And if this makes things awkward between us, I’ll do whatever you need me to do to get past the awkwardness, including giving you all the space you need, including skipping the next few overnight group trips.”
Q: I’ve recently entered into a long-dis-
tance relationship with someone six years younger. This may not seem like a huge age gap, but since we’re both in our twenties, it feels significant. I’ve been told by everyone in my life that I’m too old for him and that the affection, support, and commitment he’s flinging my way is due to his age and lack of experience. All my friends say that once he’s gotten older, he’ll move on to someone else. So far, it’s been the most loving and serious relationship I’ve ever been in, despite the fact that it’s long distance. I think if we were in our thirties the six-year age gap wouldn’t be important, but since the difference between 22 and 28 can be vast, I don’t know how to proceed. I feel some overwhelming judgment from close friends, and everyone is telling me to get out because he’ll probably leave me anyway. He’s very committed and looking for ways to move to my city, even though it’s only been a little over a month. Should I take him seriously? What do I tell my friends? And what if they’re right? —Continental Age Difference
A: Tell your friends this: “Most relation-
ships don’t work out. People meet, hookup, feel like they’re really into each other, and then it fizzles out for whatever reason. But it can’t work out — nothing ever works out — if we aren’t at least willing to give it a chance. And I’m going to give this a chance.” That said, CAD, this boy’s willingness to move to the city where you live after four weeks is a pink flag. Tell him you want to keep seeing him but unless he was already planning to move to your city for some other reason (work, school, whatever), you wanna keep doing long-distance thing for at least another six months. Because as good and right as this may feel four weeks in, it’s too soon for a move that big. If he can’t hear that without melting down, that’s a bad sign. If he’s willing to wait, that’s a good sign. P.S. I met a guy when I was 30 who was only 23 — and we’re still together 29 years later. P.P.S. Find better friends.
Got problems? Everyone does! Send your question to mailbox@savage.love! Podcasts, columns, and more at Savage.Love.
metrotimes.com | January 17-23, 2024 41
CULTURE Free Will Astrology By Rob Brezsny ARIES: March 21 – April 19 Aries chemist Percy Julian (1899–1975) was a trailblazer in creating medicine from plants. He patented over 130 drugs and laid the foundation for the production of cortisone and birth control pills. Julian was also a Black man who had to fight relentlessly to overcome the racism he encountered everywhere. I regard him as an exemplary member of the Aries tribe, since he channeled his robust martial urges toward constructive ends again and again and again. May he inspire you in the coming weeks, dear Aries. Don’t just get angry or riled up. Harness your agitated spirit to win a series of triumphs. TAURUS: April 20 – May 20 Taurus actor Pierce Brosnan says, “You struggle with money. You struggle without money. You struggle with love. You struggle without love. But it’s how you manage. You have to keep laugh-
Drinking whiskey will not warm you physically, you only feel warmer. Yet, isn’t it all about how we feel during these chaotic, narcissistic, irrational times…so, I guess you are warmer.
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ing, you have to be fun to be with, and you have to live with style.” Brosnan implies that struggling is a fundamental fact of everyday life, an insistent presence that is never far from our awareness. But if you’re willing to consider the possibility that his theory may sometimes be an exaggeration, I have good news: The coming months could be less filled with struggle than ever before. As you deal with the ease and grace, I hope you will laugh, be fun to be with, and live with style — without having to be motivated by ceaseless struggle. GEMINI: May 21 – June 20 Gemini author and activist William Upski Wimsatt is one of my role models. Why? In part, because he shares my progressive political ideals and works hard to get young people to vote for enlightened candidates who promote social justice. Another reason I love him is that he aspires to have 10,000 role models. Not just a few celebrity heroes, but a wide array of compassionate geniuses working to make the world more like paradise. The coming weeks will be an excellent time for you to gather new role models, dear Gemini. I also suggest you look around for new mentors, teachers, and inspiring guides. CANCER: June 21 – July 22 I want you to fulfill your desires! I want you to get what you want! I don’t think that yearnings are unspiritual indulgences that divert us from enlightenment. On the contrary, I believe our longings are sacred homing signals guiding us to our highest truths. With these thoughts in mind, here are four tips to enhance your quests in the coming months: 1. Some of your desires may be distorted or superficial versions of deeper, holier desires. Do your best to dig down and find their heart source. 2. To help manifest your desires, visualize yourself as having already accomplished them. 3. Welcome the fact that when you achieve what you want, your life will change in unpredictable ways. You may have to deal with a good kind of stress. 4. Remember that people are more likely to assist you in getting what you yearn for if you’re not greedy and grasping. LEO: July 23 – August 22 I regard Leo psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961) as a genius with a supreme intellect. Here’s a quote from him that I want you to hear: “We
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should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.” You may already believe this wisdom in your gut, Leo. But like all of us, you live in a culture filled with authorities who value the intellect above feeling. So it’s essential to be regularly reminded of the bigger truth — especially for you right now. To make righteous decisions, you must respect your feelings as much as your intellect. VIRGO: August 23 – Sept. 22 Poet Rainer Maria Rilke exalted the physical pleasure that sex brings. He mourned that so many “misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant to the tired spots of their lives and as a distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.” At its best, Rilke said, sex gives us “a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing.” It is a sublime prayer, an opportunity to feel sacred communion on every level of our being. That’s the erotic experience I wish for you in the coming weeks, Virgo. And I believe you will have an expanded potential for making it happen. LIBRA: Sept. 23 – Oct. 22 Even if you are currently bonded with a spouse or partner, I recommend you consider proposing matrimony to an additional person: yourself. Yes, dear Libra, I believe the coming months will be prime time for you to get married to your own precious soul. If you’re brave enough and crazy enough to carry out this daring move, devote yourself to it with lavish abandon. Get yourself a wedding ring, write your vows, conduct a ceremony, and go on a honeymoon. If you’d like inspiration, read my piece “I Me Wed”: tinyurl.com/SelfMarriage
no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?” I suspect that in 2024, you may go through a brief phase similar to his: feeling blank, yet quite content. But it won’t last. Eventually, you will be driven to seek a passionate new sense of intense purpose. As you pursue this reinvention, a fresh version of happiness will bloom. For best results, be willing to outgrow your old ideas about what brings you gladness and gratification. CAPRICORN: Dec. 22 – Jan. 19 We all go through phases that feel extra plodding and pedestrian. During these times, the rhythms and melodies of our lives seem drabber than usual. The good news is that I believe you Capricorns will experience fewer of these slowdowns than usual in 2024. The rest of us will be seeing you at your best and brightest on a frequent basis. In fact, the gifts and blessings you offer may flow toward us in abundance. So it’s no coincidence if you feel exceptionally well-loved during the coming months. P.S.: The optimal way to respond to the appreciation you receive is to ratchet up your generosity even higher. AQUARIUS: Jan. 20 – Feb. 18 In the fall of 1903, The New York Times published an article that scorned human efforts to develop flying machines. It prophesied that such a revolutionary technology was still at least a million years in the future — possibly 10 million years. In conclusion, it declared that there were better ways to apply our collective ingenuity than working to create such an unlikely invention. Nine weeks later, Orville and Wilbur Wright disproved that theory, completing a flight with the airplane they had made. I suspect that you, Aquarius, are also primed to refute an expectation or prediction about your supposed limitations. (Afterward, try not to gloat too much.)
SCORPIO: Oct. 23 – Nov. 21: Talking about a problem can be healthy. But in most cases, it should be a preliminary stage that leads to practical action; it shouldn’t be a substitute for action. Now and then, however, there are exceptions to this rule. Mere dialogue, if grounded in mutual respect, may be sufficient to dissolve a logjam and make further action unnecessary. The coming days will be such a time for you, Scorpio. I believe you and your allies can talk your way out of difficulties.
PISCES: Feb.19 – March 20 Your sweat and tears are being rewarded with sweets and cheers. Your diligent, detailed work is leading to expansive outcomes that provide relief and release. The discipline you’ve been harnessing with such panache is spawning breakthroughs in the form of elegant liberations. Congrats, dear Pisces! Don’t be shy about welcoming in the fresh privileges flowing your way. You have earned these lush dividends.
SAGITTARIUS: Nov. 22 – Dec. 21 Sagittarian cartoonist Charles M. Schulz wrote, “My life has no purpose,
Homework: Indulge in “Healthy Obsessions” — not “Melodramatic Compulsions” or “Exhausting Crazes.”
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