Metro Times 10/11/2023

Editor in Chief - Lee DeVito Investigative Reporter - Steve Neavling Staff Writer - Randiah Camille Green New Voices Fellow - Eleanore Catolico

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NEWS & VIEWS

We received comments in response to Lee DeVito’s cover story about the historic UAW strike. For the first time in its history, the autoworkers’ union is on strike against all Big Three companies simultaneously. Among SUAW boss Shawn Fain’s demands are a four-day, 32hour workweek.

many companies get away with not giving employees healthcare by only hiring them for 3039 hrs a week. This would immediately classify them as full-time employees, as they should be.

—@andrewcharlesedman, Instagram

We should all be on a 32-hour workweek — but paid the same. Has anyone bothered to question why 40?? How much more could each of us do

with an extra 8 hours?? Dr appts without missing work, time with your children, time to actually make a meal and have a leisurely dinner with your family? People saying less than 40 is lazy — all critical thinking has been extinguished in your brain.

—@hpinorec, Instagram

Nobody got weekends off until the unions stepped in.

—@damn_son_whered_you_find_this_, Instagram

Lol it’s time for a 10 hr work week. Y’all don’t even understand how exploited you actually are.

—@lextratime, Instagram

Comments may be edited for length and clarity: letters@metrotimes.com

NEWS & VIEWS

Curtis Chin tells Detroit history with a side of Chinese food in new memoir

By Randiah Camille Green

Most parents tell their children not to talk to strangers, but writer and filmmaker Curtis Chin’s parents gave him the opposite advice.

Chin’s parents owned Cass Corridor’s famed Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine in the 1980s until it closed in 2000, and there was a never-ending supply of intriguing characters for the young American-born Chinese boy to interact with. Drag queens, drug dealers, and Detroit’s first Black mayor Coleman Young were all enticed by Chung’s’ pagoda-style awnings. Plus, as many Detroiters will tell you, Chung’s had the best almond boneless chicken and egg rolls in the city.

Readers relive the story of Chung’s in Chin’s memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, due out on Oct. 17. It’s been named one of Time’s most anticipated books for the fall of 2023. In the book, Chin talks about the array of customers who visited the restaurant, seminal moments in Detroit’s history, and even what it means to be a Detroiter. In all that he learned watching his parents run the restaurant, however, the most important lesson was treating people with respect.

“I don’t think I ever saw my parents acting differently, based off the customer, who they were, or how they were perceived on a race, class, or even a queer spectrum,” Chin tells Metro Times. “It was more like how you treated my parents when you came in… definitely with my dad, everybody that walked into the door was a potential friend for him.”

Chung’s former building at 3175 Cass Ave. sat vacant for two decades before being sold earlier this year. The new owners plan to open an Asian-inspired restaurant in its place, which leaves Chin with mixed feelings.

“Part of me was a little sad that it wouldn’t be Chung’s that would be reopening in that place,” he says. “But part of me was happy that somebody

would be taking over and hopefully they would have the same success that our family had.”

In the 1980s, the neighborhood was a bustling Chinatown and gayborhood that helped Chin understand both the world around him and himself. Everyone knew they were welcome at Chung’s. The former mayor was a regular, so Chin and his family got used to seeing him. But when Academy Award-winning Russian actor Yul Brynner hosted a private party there, Chin remembers his father’s face lighting up.

“My dad was really excited because he’d always thought that people looked down on Chinese food,” he says. “So the fact that this Hollywood celebrity wanted to have his private party — he could have gone to Joe Muer’s or London Chophouse, or any of these other fancy, places, but no, he wanted to do it at our restaurant — that made my dad feel really good. Oftentimes, I remember customers based off of how it made my parents feel.”

Detroit’s former Chinatown has all but faded over the last few decades except for the Peterboro, a Chinese fusion restaurant that opened in the neighborhood in 2016. A 140-year-old building at 3143 Cass Ave. that housed the Chinese Merchants Association in the 1960s was also demolished for a parking lot earlier this summer, despite pleas from Detroit’s Asian American community and historical preservationists.

The book is not just an ode to Chung’s, but a picture of a bygone Detroit, for better or for worse. Readers see Chin’s memories of Hudsons’s Department Store in downtown Detroit (which is now being turned into Dan Gilbert’s multipurpose Hudson’s site tower) and the Devil’s Night arsons in full swing.

“It was that time period of being in Detroit and seeing Detroit in, some might say, the worst of it,” Chin remembers. “In the ’80s you did have Devil’s Night and the city literally burning

down, and the crime rate was probably worse in the ’80s than it is now. There was crack that was just coming up and AIDs that was just coming up. There were all these new things to kill you.”

And yet, Chung’s was a sort of container. Despite the city’s volatile state, when you walked through those doors, nothing else seemed to matter. Chin doesn’t shy away from talking about the negative things happening in Detroit when he grew up, but says “Hopefully, it’s done in a loving way so that people can see that, yes, we had some terrible times in Detroit, but it was still a loving, great city to grow up in.”

Chin, who now lives in Los Angeles,

had already left Detroit when his dad called to tell him he was closing the restaurant. He was shocked by the news, as Chung’s had been in his family since the 1940s, and he couldn’t fathom not being able to go there. He says the restaurant was still financially viable, but the cost of repairs was weighing on his dad’s shoulders. Chung’s closing felt abrupt.

“I was picturing always being able to go home to Detroit and go to the restaurant,” he says with a sadness and twinge of anger seeming to grow in his voice. “After I wrapped my head around it, I said to my dad you really should have a giant send-off because you’ve

Curtis Chin stands outside his parents’ former Chinese restaurant, Chung’s. SE7ENFIFTEEN

had decades of customers that would probably want to come back for a last meal or at least to say thank you, or goodbye. But my dad just didn’t want to do that. He closed within a week.”

Chin continues, “I feel like maybe he was embarrassed that he had maybe let the family down because the business had closed underneath his watch. But I was saying to him, like mad, ‘I will come help you with this. Just keep open for a couple of weeks longer. We’ll do a giant press release. We will have a giant celebration. Let’s just make it a party and thank the city and all of our customers.’ But he just didn’t have the heart for it and that sort of broke my heart in some ways.”

Everything I Learned… also serves as an inspection of what it means to be a Detroiter and who gets to claim the city. Chin’s family technically lived in Troy, but they spent the majority of their time in Detroit at the restaurant.

Chin still claims Detroit as his home, though not everyone considers him a “real Detroiter.” Once a skeptical woman at the University of Michigan challenged Chin’s assertion that he was from Detroit by asking what high school he went to. Of course, he didn’t lie and admitted that he went to Troy High School.

“And she’s like, you’re not from Detroit,” he remembers. “But we went there almost every day. So is being from Detroit where you slept or where you lived? Because I spent more waking hours in Detroit. I know the streets of Detroit better than I do the streets of Troy. But to me, I don’t know if I have the liberty or not to say I’m from Detroit. I mean, technically I am, because I was born there in the hospital,” he laughs.

He had a similar confrontation recently at The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists’ 2023 National Convention in Philadelphia. Chin doesn’t take offense to people calling out the fact that his family lived in Troy, but he claims the city because that’s where his heart is.

“I also understand that there is this idea that yes, it is quite different living below or above Eight Mile,” he says. “But as I say in the book, we’re one of those few families that actually traverse that because most people don’t go one way or the other. But if you had to ask me as a kid which library did I go to more, I went to the Detroit Public Library.”

He adds, “My parents even like, sent us to Burton [International Academy] for a little while, because they lied and said that we lived in Chinatown. It was easier for me to go to school there because they could just drop us off before work. So, yeah, there are weird little things that put this little asterisk

about whether or not I actually am from Detroit or not, but I like to claim it. I feel like that’s where my heart is. That’s where my identity is. My most vivid memories of my childhood are all from below Eight Mile.”

Chin initially started writing the book as a way to tell his family’s history for younger generations who didn’t have a connection to Detroit since the family moved to California after his father died. As he began writing, however, the focus soon became telling Detroit’s story rather than his own.

“I actually did write the book for the city of Detroit in general,” he says.

“I feel like it’s a love letter to the city because so many of the things that happened in the ’80s that really define the city, but also America, I really tried to weave them into my story. My hope is that if you pick up the book, you think you’re just learning about this Chinese-American family growing up in the Corridor, but you’re really learning about Detroit.”

When we ask whether Chin would ever consider returning to Detroit to reopen Chung’s, he says he hadn’t ruled it out completely.

“With my book coming out and some of these other writing projects I have out here in Hollywood, it just doesn’t seem like the right time,” he says. “Would it ever happen? I wouldn’t close the door on it because I just know that beyond all of our customers that would love for me to reopen the place, I myself would love to reopen it. I just always thought it was a great place and I love what the restaurant stood for, not just for my family but for the city of Detroit.”

Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant aims to offer a cross-cultural connection so that people from different walks of life can come together in unity, much like they did at Chung’s.

Share space and laughter with people who don’t look like you. Spend a few extra seconds getting to know someone for who they truly are outside of their race, gender, or sexual orientation. And as Chin’s parents told him, talk to strangers.

“Who they were talking about were the people in our dining room,” Chin says about his parents’ advice, which sticks with him to this day. “My mom didn’t graduate high school, my dad went to community college for maybe two semesters — they didn’t know what life was like outside of those four walls because they worked all the time. But they knew there was this dining room full of people that had access to these other opportunities and other lives. They wanted me and my siblings to know that we could live those lives too.”

and the crime rate was probably the ’80s than it is now. There crack that was just coming up and that was just coming up. There these new things to kill you.” yet, Chung’s was a sort of conDespite the city’s volatile state, you walked through those doors, else seemed to matter. Chin shy away from talking about the things happening in Detroit grew up, but says “Hopefully, in a loving way so that people that, yes, we had some terrible Detroit, but it was still a lovgreat city to grow up in.” who now lives in Los Angeles,

had already left Detroit when his dad called to tell him he was closing the restaurant. He was shocked by the news, as Chung’s had been in his family since the 1940s, and he couldn’t fathom not being able to go there. He says the restaurant was still financially viable, but the cost of repairs was weighing on his dad’s shoulders. Chung’s closing felt abrupt.

“I was picturing always being able to go home to Detroit and go to the restaurant,” he says with a sadness and twinge of anger seeming to grow in his voice. “After I wrapped my head around it, I said to my dad you really should have a giant send-off because you’ve

had decades of customers that would probably want to come back for a last meal or at least to say thank you, or goodbye. But my dad just didn’t want to do that. He closed within a week.”

Chin continues, “I feel like maybe he was embarrassed that he had maybe let the family down because the business had closed underneath his watch. But I was saying to him, like mad, ‘I will come help you with this. Just keep open for a couple of weeks longer. We’ll do a giant press release. We will have a giant celebration. Let’s just make it a party and thank the city and all of our customers.’ But he just didn’t have the heart for it and that sort of broke my heart in some ways.”

Everything I Learned… also serves as an inspection of what it means to be a Detroiter and who gets to claim the city. Chin’s family technically lived in Troy, but they spent the majority of their time in Detroit at the restaurant.

Chin still claims Detroit as his home, though not everyone considers him a “real Detroiter.” Once a skeptical woman at the University of Michigan challenged Chin’s assertion that he was from Detroit by asking what high school he went to. Of course, he didn’t lie and admitted that he went to Troy High School.

“And she’s like, you’re not from Detroit,” he remembers. “But we went there almost every day. So is being from Detroit where you slept or where you lived? Because I spent more waking hours in Detroit. I know the streets of Detroit better than I do the streets of Troy. But to me, I don’t know if I have the liberty or not to say I’m from Detroit. I mean, technically I am, because I was born there in the hospital,” he laughs.

He had a similar confrontation recently at The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists’ 2023 National Convention in Philadelphia. Chin doesn’t take offense to people calling out the fact that his family lived in Troy, but he claims the city because that’s where his heart is.

“I also understand that there is this idea that yes, it is quite different living below or above Eight Mile,” he says. “But as I say in the book, we’re one of those few families that actually traverse that because most people don’t go one way or the other. But if you had to ask me as a kid which library did I go to more, I went to the Detroit Public Library.”

He adds, “My parents even like, sent us to Burton [International Academy] for a little while, because they lied and said that we lived in Chinatown. It was easier for me to go to school there because they could just drop us off before work. So, yeah, there are weird little things that put this little asterisk

about whether or not I actually am from Detroit or not, but I like to claim it. I feel like that’s where my heart is. That’s where my identity is. My most vivid memories of my childhood are all from below Eight Mile.”

Chin initially started writing the book as a way to tell his family’s history for younger generations who didn’t have a connection to Detroit since the family moved to California after his father died. As he began writing, however, the focus soon became telling Detroit’s story rather than his own.

“I actually did write the book for the city of Detroit in general,” he says. “I feel like it’s a love letter to the city because so many of the things that happened in the ’80s that really define the city, but also America, I really tried to weave them into my story. My hope is that if you pick up the book, you think you’re just learning about this Chinese-American family growing up in the Corridor, but you’re really learning about Detroit.”

When we ask whether Chin would ever consider returning to Detroit to reopen Chung’s, he says he hadn’t ruled it out completely.

“With my book coming out and some of these other writing projects I have out here in Hollywood, it just doesn’t seem like the right time,” he says. “Would it ever happen? I wouldn’t close the door on it because I just know that beyond all of our customers that would love for me to reopen the place, I myself would love to reopen it. I just always thought it was a great place and I love what the restaurant stood for, not just for my family but for the city of Detroit.”

Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant aims to offer a cross-cultural connection so that people from different walks of life can come together in unity, much like they did at Chung’s.

Share space and laughter with people who don’t look like you. Spend a few extra seconds getting to know someone for who they truly are outside of their race, gender, or sexual orientation. And as Chin’s parents told him, talk to strangers.

“Who they were talking about were the people in our dining room,” Chin says about his parents’ advice, which sticks with him to this day. “My mom didn’t graduate high school, my dad went to community college for maybe two semesters — they didn’t know what life was like outside of those four walls because they worked all the time. But they knew there was this dining room full of people that had access to these other opportunities and other lives. They wanted me and my siblings to know that we could live those lives too.”

Chin stands outside his parents’ former Chinese restaurant, Chung’s. SE7ENFIFTEEN

NEWS & VIEWS

Lapointe

Lions’ latest win signals end of Detroit’s decade of decay in pro sports

With a 42-24 victory over the Carolina Panthers Sunday afternoon at jam-packed and raucous Ford Field, the Lions not only raised their record to 4-1 but also displayed how their extraordinary revival might lead the four local sports teams from a group recession into a group renaissance.

Can the Lions end Detroit’s decade of decay in pro sports by qualifying for the Super Bowl tournament for the first time since 2016 and win a postseason game for the first time since 1991?

Can the Tigers next summer reach the World Series tournament for the first time since 2014 and win a round for the first time since 2013?

Can the Red Wings — opening this week — reach the Stanley Cup playoffs

By Joe Lapointe

for the first time since 2016 and win a round for the first time since 2013?

And can the Pistons — worst team in the NBA last season and starting their exhibition schedule — reach the postseason for the first time since 2019 and win a round for the first time since 2008?

If one or two come through, it will help revive the spirit in a community that long has considered pro sports a major identifier with four bedrock franchises.

But no city with teams in the top four sports has suffered like Detroit, which has not had a post-season game in what have been so far the Snoring Twenties on the local sports scene.

The Lions are leading with quarterback Jared Goff, a lethal passer when

he has time to read the coverage from the blocking pocket; with Sam LaPorta, a rookie tight end who caught one of his two touchdown passes Sunday on a brilliantly conceived trick play; and Aidan Hutchinson, the defensive end who added a one-handed pass interception to his quarterback sack portfolio.

His turnover was one of three by the Lions and also the key play of the day.

As for the other three teams:

The Tigers finished strong, with first baseman Spencer Torkelson finding his power swing for 31 home runs. Riley Greene is an inspirational hitter and outfielder but suffered his third major injury in two seasons and needed more surgery. That’s a concern. In center, Parker Meadows is promis -

ing but unproven. The team seems to be under wise leadership with president Scott Harris, the current whiz kid in the baseball biz. And they might be ready to make a major move in a mediocre division. One worry: The expensive and enormous contract for shortstop Javier Baez — and his alarming decline — could become an albatross like that of Miguel Cabrera.

The Red Wings are improving under general manager Steve Yzerman, who needs to make whatever moves are necessary to reach the playoffs. Even in Detroit, which loves him, and even under the Ilitches, who love him, Motor City patience isn’t infinite. This is Year Five of his era. Last season, Yzerman’s team played like a skilled bunch that could be roughed up when the going

On Sunday, defensive end Aidan Hutchinson of a resurgent Detroit Lions had the key play of the day.

CAL SPORT MEDIA / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

got tough. Mo Seider one day might win the Norris trophy as the NHL’s best defenseman.

The Pistons have nowhere to go but up as the NBA’s (and Detroit’s) worst team. They say Cade Cunningham is healthy after missing most of last season. He’s the sort of player who makes others better. They will go as far as he takes them.

Sir Richard stars in a sweet Masonic night

Some years back in New York, I saw a one-man show off-Broadway about a bartender who voiced opinions on all things, including the Beatles.

“John Lennon,” he said. “Intellectual Beatle.”

“Paul McCartney,” he said. “Cute Beatle.”

“George Harrison,” he said. “Spiritual Beatle.”

“Ringo Starr,” he finally said. (Pause): “Best job ever!”

In that the singing drummer Sir Richard Starkey of Liverpool’s Dingle district is currently age 83 and is the second-greatest living Beatle, I felt it my Beatle-fan duty to purchase a ticket for his “Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band” concert Saturday night at Masonic Auditorium.

Boy, am I glad I did. I expected maybe a C-minus oldies show with guys like Colin Bay of Men at Work and Toto’s Steve Lukather singing their old hits and helping Starr with his hits from both his Beatles’ days and his solo career.

Instead, I got a B-plus show of sweet nostalgia that ended with a medley of “A Little Help From My Friends” and “Give Peace a Chance.” Starr’s bandmates — senior stars in their own right — seemed cohesive and enthusiastic, loose in their stage presence, tight in their playing.

This bunch of old pros seemed to have as much fun as the audience, which filled about three-quarters of the 3,500-seat Masonic. One was Edgar Winter, who I’d seen, oh, a mere 50 years ago, at the old Eastown Theater. I’d forgotten how versatile and entertaining he was and still is.

Winter raised a few goose bumps with an energetic “Johnny B. Goode” in honor of his late brother, Johnny. Both were born albino and Winter joked to the audience that his bandmates tell him “Hey, Edgar, lighten up!”

Starr looked fit, trim and spry, having overcome many childhood illnesses and adult addictions, as he has discussed. His hair is dark and full, his face bears a mustache and short beard, his eyes with glasses that tint under light. Ringo looks like a hipster.

He wore black pants and a sparkly black T-shirt under a black jacket decorated with silver stars. The audience was heavily senior, although some younger adults brought children. A mother and a dad with two young kids danced down the center aisle with their children in their arms.

Of course, Starr delighted the singalong audience with “Boys” and “Act Naturally” and “Yellow Submarine” and plenty more over two well-paced hours. But the highlight of the night came for me in “Octopus’s Garden,” and it had nothing to do with the music or the singing.

When the song ended, Starr walked toward the front of the stage, bent toward the audience and said to a young boy at the front “What’s your name, big guy?”

“Camden,” the boy replied, his name echoed by his parents.

“Camden, like the town?” Starr said.

Yes, it was confirmed.

Then Starr explained to the audience: “He was singing along all the way through that. Yeah! Good lad.”

The crowd cheered.

Next, Starr noticed something behind the boy.

“Go back to mummy now,” Starr said. “She’s crying.”

The last line drew warm laughter from the audience on a night for happy tears, sincere nostalgia, and some firstrate, senior-citizen rock ’n’ roll.

How far should gun guilt go?

The family name “Crumbley” evokes characters out of a Charles Dickens novel. But the Crumbleys of Oakland County are real people and their real issues are hardly fictional.

With any luck, the recent decision by the Michigan Supreme Court in the Crumbley murder matter might lead to significant gun-safety reform. In this good cause, at least, Michigan might lead.

You remember the Crumbleys from two years ago, when the mother, Jennifer, and the father,

James, bought a gun toy for their boy, Ethan, who attended Oxford High School.

Young Crumbley — then 15 years old — took his hand-held murder machine to school and slaughtered four fellow students and wounded seven others, including a teacher. Demons made him do it, he said, although demons didn’t buy him, sell him, or make him the gun.

He has pleaded guilty to firstdegree murder and other charges and faces life imprisonment without parole. But his parents also face 15 years behind bars and this is more significant in one way.

When the high state court ruled last week that the parents can be tried for involuntary manslaughter for what their kid did, it was believed to be the first time that family members have been charged by extension in a mass school shooting.

Gun nuts who advocate “Second Amendment rights” should be concerned, with good reason, about this prosecution under the “slippery slope” theory. If parents can be found guilty for killings done by their son, why not extend the blame in the chain of custody to the gun store which sold the weapon?

And if a gun store can be found liable for what its customers do with its easily-obtained, over-the-counter products, why not sue or prosecute the manufacturer as well for making a mechanical device that, when used as intended, may result in death?

But don’t get too optimistic. No matter the result of the Crumbleys’ trial, a case like this could end up before the right-wing United States Supreme Court, which is now packed with religious fundamentalists and gun groomers thanks in large part to the cynical appointments of former President Donald Trump.

This problem can be quickly fixed only by expansion of the Supreme Court from nine seats to 11, 13, or 15. Absent a Democratic wave in 2024, this necessary progress is probably out of the question.

Tigers TV needs a fresh breeze

No tears here over the firing of Matt Shepard as the television play-byplay announcer for Tigers’ games on Bally Sports Detroit. But Shepard was hardly the only problem for a stale baseball production that badly needs refreshment both in the booth and on the screen.

One major problem is too many voices in the rotating “color commentary” role. Bally needs to settle on one person — Dan Petry? Craig Monroe? — as the primary analyst so that the new play-by-play person can find a rhythm and cadence with a regular partner.

Next, cut down on the gushing and cheerleading from the booth, from the studio and from the roving reporters. It’s OK to be an honest, clear-eyed, critical thinker and notice obvious mistakes. Besides, you can’t fool the fans.

An announcer, even a former player, can still support the local team without shouts of “C’mon, buddy!” as if still on the dugout bench. And we could do without all the yuk-yuk-yuk that forces itself during the yakity-yak on “Pick the Stick” predictions.

And, for goodness sakes, in the control room, try to get the name of the batter on screen before the second or third pitch. And if he hits the ball, please leave his name on the screen (perhaps blinking, like a “Don’t Walk” sign) until the end of the play.

As the Tigers improve and look promising for 2024, a bigger problem for their stay-at-home fans might be finding all the games. More of them in all sports are leaking away from channels like Bally over to “streams” like Peacock that cost extra money beyond a traditional cable package

Local fans will notice it painfully on Jan. 30 when Michigan plays at Michigan State in basketball televised exclusively on Peacock. Both teams will have four other games exclusively on Peacock. As for Red Wings’ hockey, 13 of their 82 regular-season games will be on channels (or streams) other than BSD.

All this assumes companies like Bally in Detroit will even stay in business. Its parent company has declared bankruptcy and is backing out of several long-term deals around the country. Customers without cable who have tried to buy Bally’s streaming app have reported many technical difficulties.

This industry is in flux. TV sports (especially its delivery systems) might be approaching the biggest upheaval since the cable revolution took hold in the 1980s. This ride will get bumpy and more expensive.

When the high state court ruled last week that the parents can be tried for involuntary manslaughter for what their kid did, it was believed to be the first time that family members have been charged by extension in a mass school shooting.

WhiteW

The contradictions of corporate-sponsored mural art in Detroit

Washed

Down the street, at the police-sponsored baseball diamond, condos are on sale for $600,000, not far from where the big car company is rehabbing the old train station for its fancy new offices. You can walk a little further and see where the local energy monopoly is paying to whitewash a substation — and their image — with a new mural. When I look at the new painting, I think of the seven days last winter where the company left tens of thousands of people without power, just weeks after paying their shareholders $750 million. It seems like it will take a lot of paint and PR to cover up those memories, but perhaps not.

Around the corner another new mural is being added to a hotel that refused to hire union labor for its construction. It’s a bit hard to see because of all the smoke from the wildfires up north, but this mural seems to show a community of people working and living in harmony through a shared history. I wonder if the people in the mural are worried about their rent.

The city proudly announced that there will be a lot more public art soon. They tell us that the work will be funded by the negligent energy monopoly and the local billionaire’s foundation — in partnership with an art business that helped gentrify the market district. Sometime around 2008, as part of the city’s renaissance, the line between billboard and public art faded. We all have to pull together to ensure that the billionaire can get a return on his generous investment of buying the city. Soon, all the profitable areas will have new murals, depicting happy diverse people who don’t question where their tax dollars go, how much they’re paid, or who owns the land.

In February, the city of Detroit announced plans to add 200 new murals in neighborhoods across the city. The announcement was a highwater mark for the role that murals have played in the city for more than 10 years, expanding with festivals like Murals in the Market and official government programming like City Walls. Increasingly, money has flowed from public, philanthropic, and corporate coffers into these programs, demonstrating a commitment to public mural art as an important slice of the city’s cultural space. Murals have long been touted as a truly public art form, speaking directly to people, bypassing the gallery or museum. One of the most popular and revered artworks in the city is Diego Rivera’s courtyard mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts — a painting depicting the working people’s struggle, crafted by a communist and honoring the workers of Detroit. However, beyond the press releases,

something important seems to be happening with this new emphasis in cultural funding. While publicized as an investment in art and beautifying the city, the location, impact, and funding sources of these murals seem to correspond closely with private real estate and corporate investments. This opens up a number of contradictions and questions worth exploring: Why has a mayor who spent years persecuting graffiti artists embraced public murals as a centerpiece of this cultural programming? Why have corporate sponsors lined up behind this new push? What impact does this investment have on the city — both culturally and materially?

It all leads to a fundamental question: what role are murals playing today, and how could — or should — our communities approach them?

I want to be clear from the start, that this problem is not primarily the fault of artists, and this is not a call for some purity test around mural work. I have

painted murals in the past, and likely I will do so again. Murals present a way to pay bills and support an artistic practice — and they remain a contested site to be fought for. However, the massive investment in murals and their use in racialized capitalist development means that we need to question how our communities should approach this struggle. We need a coherent analysis of what is happening with these corporate mural projects, and we need to step back from the universal celebration these projects have enjoyed. It’s important for us to consider what is happening with public-private sponsored mural projects, identify some criteria for evaluating the impact of a project, and explore how artists and our communities can engage in controlling our cultural production.

First, we must look at the material foundations of what is happening both with the city and the mural push in particular. The city today is experiencing a prolonged period of private investment, targeting and developing key areas of the city for a classic cycle of gentrification to the benefit of real estate and corporate interests. Large funds are being committed to very specific areas of the city — downtown, Midtown, Corktown, Eastern Market, and West Village. These investments are spurred by public funding and tax breaks to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and land deals that allow business interests to buy up real estate for pennies on the dollar. The results of this are predictable: rising property values, rising rents for both long-term residents and small businesses, and displacement and further investment as higher property values mean the land becomes more profitable for another round of investors. Further contributing to displacement is the high costs and low quality of

By Ian Matchett

utilities like DTE, who offer some of the least dependable and most expensive electricity in the nation to Detroit residents, while reaping enormous profits. All this is accompanied by targeted, racialized policing, perhaps best exemplified by the city’s Project Green Light program, which essentially pushes small businesses to pay protection money for the police to surveil their property and respond to crimes. The goal is the exploitation and manipulation of real estate values, for the profit of extremely wealthy investors.

As noted above, these plans have been signed off on and directly guided by city officials. The mayor’s office, as well as the majority of city council, have played key roles in pushing public dollars into private hands, through both direct grants and tax subsidies. This is at a scale that dwarfs new public investment in the city, and that actually has taken funds away from critical infrastructure like schools and libraries — all in order to subsidize billionaire developments. While there are innumerable examples, this tendency is best exemplified by the District Detroit, starting with a $1.5 billion subsidy of its anchor Ilitch-owned hockey stadium, supported by city council and accompanied by huge property transfers to the Ilitch family. This was followed by a decade of failed promises before the family returned a decade later to ask for another $1.5 billion in order to complete the developments they failed to follow through on the first time. By a vote of 8-1 the city council voted to hand more tax dollars and subsidies over to the Ilitches.

This approach has become a norm for the city — and can be seen in its dealings with billionaire Dan Gilbert, just as much as the Ilitches, with projects like his oft-revised and heavily subsidized Hudson site development. City council and the mayor’s office repeatedly choose to conform to the needs, timelines, and budgets of corporations,

Can corporations like DTE burnish their image by sponsoring murals? VIOLA KLOCKO

over those of long-term residents and the neighborhoods.

As we look at the roots of the renewed push for public murals in the city, we find many of the same corporate actors outlined above playing a critical role in starting and guiding these programs. Today the city-sponsored City Walls program partners with private corporations like DTE and foundations like the Gilbert Foundation to fund the creation of murals across the city. The city has also maintained a long-standing relationship with 1xRUN, a company responsible for formalizing and expanding the Murals in the Market Festival in Eastern Market. Across all of these programs, the placement of art projects closely aligns with the real estate and corporate investments of the companies funding them. While murals do occur throughout the city, they are highly concentrated in locations like Eastern Market, Midtown, and Corktown — areas that have simultaneously experienced extreme property speculation.

So we have established that the city is working closely with private capital to create special investment zones through public funding and subsidies, and that these corporations, along with others, are partnering with the city to fund murals in areas that they are investing in, as well as the city more broadly. What does this matter? The wealthy, after all, play a decisive role in almost every branch of our cultural institutions — what makes murals different? Beyond a general distaste for corporate control of our society, what specifically is happening here, and what consequences does it have for our cultural space, and our city?

There are several contradictions that lie at the heart of the city’s push for public mural-based artwork over the past decade. A closer look can help us understand the particular role that corporate murals play in today’s landscape, and try to grasp how we might respond

strategically.

Repression and expansion

On the surface it seems ironic that the Duggan administration, which has spent years persecuting graffiti artists and even the owners of buildings that are tagged, should now be engaged in a public mural campaign. But this is obviously only a false division — the repression of graffiti artists and expansion of officially sanctioned works are part of the same unified policy. This policy seeks to reclaim public space for private capital, and ensure that capital controls the art that is created on the city’s walls. Space needs to be held open for the official murals, and once created, artworks need to be protected to ensure that the “correct” art remains in place. The scale of the new vision dictated the scale of the repression. This goes beyond just the physical control of artists and space to include stylistic and messaging control. The city program does not accept graffitistyle murals — despite the deep roots of the scene in the city and the deep roots of the style for Black and Latino artists. Hugely impactful graffiti works such as the “Free the Water” piece painted on a water tower in 2014 in response to the horrendous state of infrastructure in the state provoked felony charges from the city. One group of artists, messages, and styles are lifted up, the other is attacked.

Public art controlled by private corporations

The question of what makes one style desirable, and another punishable,

brings us to the second contradiction. These ostensibly “public” artworks are in fact selected, directed, and placed by private capital. The city’s public artworks are not crafted by public engagement and collaboration, but via official sanction and guidance of private capital, and in particular several of the city’s largest corporations and wealthy families.

The fundamental goals of a corporation are distinct from those of the public at large. Corporations seek to expand shareholder value, and the mural push offers two routes toward this goal. First, it is a classic opportunity to burnish a corporation’s image. DTE left hundreds of thousands of households without power this past winter just weeks after paying their shareholders millions of dollars. This spring we see a DTE-sponsored art fair and a $75,000 commission to paint a substation. These acts serve to literally whitewash the face of the company, deflecting and dampening criticism. These measures are far cheaper than paying their fair share of taxes or reinvesting in its infrastructure in order to maintain basic standards of living for city residents, and allow the company to continue its exploitation of the community with less overt criticism.

The second way that murals expand value for the rich is by their specific role in the modern process of gentrification, a struggle by the rich to expand the value of land and businesses by manipulating real estate markets and private investment. Murals have taken on a role as part of this process as a tool of propaganda, demarcation, and appreciation. Propandistically they serve

to spread a certain image to residents and newcomers about who the neighborhood is for and what values it is built around. As a tool of demarcation, murals serve to help delineate and coordinate where capital investment should be concentrated — creating a feedback loop where corporate murals are used, alongside anchor investments and public plans, to lay out what areas are desirable, indicating to other capitalists where to invest money, and helping to coordinate the individual property investments of second- and third-wave transplants to a neighborhood. Thus, murals become a tool of appreciation, where a certain density of them becomes a way to raise property values, encouraging additional investment. This does not mean that gentrification is started by murals, but it does mean that corporate-backed mural festivals and programs have a strong tendency to develop into work that acts as visual propaganda for the rich — and indeed the struggle for control over messaging indicates that what is painted or created remains of great importance.

This framework helps us understand both the aggressive push against not just graffiti as a practice, but also graffiti-style works, and the dynamics of control of content that develop in these “public” murals. Graffiti artwork is rejected not because of its lack of artistic merit, but because it does not allow the corporate sponsor to expand shareholder value. A neighborhood with tags does not communicate to private investors to add additional investment, and it is not racially or economically coded to the white upper

The central element of the recent Murals of Islandview festival was the decoration of a DTE substation. VIOLA KLOCKO

middle class clientele that these areas are meant to serve.

Furthermore, the content of the murals in general becomes an important site of control. It seems natural that one can hardly expect a large-scale mural critiquing Duggan, Gilbert, DTE, or the Ilitch family to be produced by one of these programs, much less one that questions the extractive nature of capital investment in the city, or the broader trends of displacement, exploitation, and degradation in our society. Nor is this the fault of the artists, who participate primarily as paid hands selling their labor — they are submitting work that they believe will be accepted, just as you would say what someone wants to hear in a job interview. However, the broader effect of so much visual space, artistic funding, and cultural capital being allocated to these projects means that the city and these corporations are exercising a heavy influence on the artistic community in the city. With largely apolitical corporate murals being an on-ramp into an artistic career, the city and corporate sponsors have a key role in deciding what artists and work become valuable in the city. And by extension, these artists will tend to be ones whose messages are more comfortable to corporate sponsors, and whose work more easily aligns with the financial goals of the city and these sponsors. Even subconsciously, artists may begin to tailor their messaging to conform to the needs of these groups — and thereby the norm of cultural production takes (yet another) step toward corporate control. In this way the control of public art by private capital operates as a gravitational well in the cultural and political space of the city. It distorts first the placement, then the content, and finally the career landscape of cultural production in the city — all of which are turned in service of financial goals, not community or cultural ones.

A look through the City Walls and Murals in the Market catalog shows a series of works that have indeed beautified their areas, but precious little content that speaks to the history or present of struggles in the city. And most of this political content operates at the level of racial and ethnic representation, but steers clear of structural critiques, shared histories of struggle, or potential solutions. While representation is an important goal of culture, it hardly seems an adequate endpoint considering the stark divisions in city funding, water and power shut offs, and decades of radical organizing in the city. This omission is itself a critical form of propaganda and suppression: An image of shared success and happiness is constructed in neighbor-

hoods struggling to get reliable utilities and maintain affordable housing. By omitting structural critiques, and monopolizing public spaces, these works contribute to a mythology of shared prosperity and individual failures — where the root causes of problems are obscured, and the solutions are implicitly about individual choices.

No matter how beautiful, a mural can not lower a rent check, and interpersonal kindness can not break Gilbert’s influence over city council. Ultimately the push to create “non-political” art is itself a political choice by these corporations, a strategic part of their control over culture, land, capital, and government. The walls are made beautiful, but seem to say only that everyone is fine, that life is good, and that our future is united. As capital flows into the neighborhood, the work of representation becomes darkly ironic as investors seek to attract disproportionately white upper middle class residents that feed into their development model.

We are left then with a “public” art that is in fact propaganda and a tool of a very specific class interest. While it may beautify space, it does so not on behalf or with the true guidance of residents — or even on behalf of the new more wealthy residents who will take their place — but on behalf of capital, with the goal of speculation, and a return on its investment.

Public art that displaces the public

This then brings us to the final contradiction evolving out of the unity of

repression and expansion and of corporate control of ostensibly public art. That is, even as the artwork is brought out of the gallery and into the public space, it contributes to the transformation of who is part of that “public.” Rather than escaping the gallery where the wealthy have long held sway, it has brought the same speculative, exploitative logics of the gallery into the public square.

A strong case study is the Murals in the Market festival, launched in 2015 in Eastern Market. Initiated by the art gallery and print house 1XRUN in alliance with the local development corporation, the mural festival’s stated goal was to create an opportunity for local and national artists to show work on a grand scale, increased foot traffic, additional economic development, and increased safety. This stated goal includes many euphemisms that become clear the more of these documents that you read, but you can see each of the contradictions that we have analyzed at play in the description. There is the idea that the murals will bring security, without mentioning who provides that security and against who it is exercised; the euphemism of increased foot traffic and additional economic development, both standing in for forces of gentrification; and the implicit assumption in all of this that a corporate-backed mural festival is the best voice to be guiding and curating a festival of public art, in a space where public art already existed.

While Murals in the Market has indeed painted a vast number of murals, and provided a platform for many local

artists, it is worth looking at what has happened to the neighborhood since the launch of the project. The most impactful change was the 2019 purchase by real estate investor Sanford Nelson of more than 20 buildings in the Eastern Market district for $30 million. Within the year eight small businesses had closed or relocated, as Nelson increased rents and pushed out long-term tenants. While claiming to want to preserve the character of the neighborhood with an emphasis on culture and dining, this apparently did not extend to preserving the people who lived in the area, the businesses that operated there, or the affordability of any of the real estate involved.

Of course, it would be absurd to blame the Nelson buyout and expulsions on Murals in the Market, as there are a variety of factors that made the area a potential site for re-investment, but it seems clear that the festival’s stated goals and impact — increased security, foot traffic, and economic investment — all would have contributed to making the area more ripe for this sort of destructive transformation.

As a short side note: After 1xRUN sold its Eastern Market storefront for $1.2 million and relocated to the Islandview neighborhood, it announced a new “Murals in Islandview” festival, which launched last month. The central element of this festival was the decoration of a DTE substation in the Islandview neighborhood, an area that has experienced rapid increases in property values over the past few years. Again, we are faced with an area already feeling the pressures of speculation

One of the most popular and revered artworks in the city is Diego Rivera’s mural tribute to workers at the Detroit Institute of Arts. COURTESY OF THE DIA

and displacement, being selected for the gift of murals, programming, and culture they have no control over, by an entity they did not invite — ultimately to the benefit of investors.

Within our current system, the process of real estate speculation and development means that these sort of public art projects rely upon corporate support to exist, and that the city itself relies upon this sort of speculative exploitative investment to expand its tax base. The only answer being offered in response to decades of displacement, marginalization, and under-investment is a new round of investment and tax breaks that make rich people richer at the expense of working people.

Large-scale corporate mural projects are not bad because someone decided to make murals, but rather because of the main criteria our system has for financing public art: does it in some way enhance corporate profits or prestige? The desire to create murals is not wrong, the desire to expand public art and build a visual culture is not wrong, and the drive to find support for public art in an under-resourced city is often admirable; but the reality is that these projects are deeply contradictory. Even as they reach out to the public, the act of reaching out helps drive up rents, replace businesses, and exile neighbors. The targeted utilization of public art by corporations and the city means that murals are not and can not be neutral.

Taken together, these contradictions show the distance between the stated goals of the city’s mural project, and the actual impact of this program on our city, our culture, and our neighbors. It shows not the escape from a gallery scene dominated by the wealthy, but the expansion of this domination to fill even more of our public space. The art created draws far closer to billboards for redevelopment than a rooted culture connected to city residents. The community first faces increased policing, then unilateral investment, and finally a rise in the cost of housing. The murals serve less as a mark of beautification than as a sign of corporate control.

Ultimately the public is given a series of murals that tell them that life is good, that problems are about individual struggles, and that their rent is about to go up.

What is to be done?

And so we arrive at the most difficult question of any polemic: what do we do about it? As we have just spent many paragraphs reviewing the structural issues with these programs, we must resist the urge to suddenly lapse into individualism and prescribe a moral solution devoid of context. An indi-

vidual artist will not make much of a difference by refusing to paint corporate murals, particularly if a main way to have a career involves doing so. In a city so long bereft of arts funding, and particularly funding that offered opportunities to young local artists, a politics of purity and denunciations is both unstrategic and a bit silly. Similarly, begging corporations to not exploit our communities, or to stop supporting their real estate investments, goes against their entire reason for existing. While good people may work for these companies, they ultimately exist not to help our communities, but to produce a profit. No amount of moral suasion will change this.

Our struggle is not with a choice of medium, or Dan Gilbert personally, but with the institutions of capitalism intertwined with racism that condition the way resources move in our city. There is no easy escape from this, there is no life hack, or individual practice that will allow us to be exempt from this system. We should not hate corporate art because it is ugly, we must hate racial capitalism because it means we will never be free.

All this said, there are immediate tasks that I believe begin to confront issues with mural-making, and indeed cultural production more generally. At the foundational level I believe there must be a move to separate city cultural funding from corporate partnerships, and to push decision-making away from development-minded city institutions and toward community residents. Rather than investing in large-scale murals in neighborhoods that didn’t ask for them, the city should be investing in democratic resident-led arts institutions that speak to the culture and needs of these communities. Some communities may prefer different content or artists, others may prefer different mediums; some may use funding to support existing “graffiti” artists with developing their practice, others may invest in public performance or recording spaces. Fundamentally, these institutions must have the ability to say “no” when offered a new proposal or project for their community. Too often consultation is portrayed as power, when the real decisions happened long before the public was invited to give input. What beautification means should emerge from the neighborhoods, not be dictated from downtown or the boardroom. Indeed, there are already respected cultural institutions like Garage Cultural that have walked some of this tightrope, and could be expanded and multiplied to fill this role. All of this would help attack the core contradictions of repression, corporate control, and displacement

outlined above, prioritizing the voices and needs of the community ahead of whitewashing a company like DTE’s image, or boosting the property value of the Ilitch family.

Second, artists should work to organize and radicalize ourselves. An individual refusing a project means little, but an organized union of artists would have some hope of rejecting some of the more odious corporate projects. We have seen some actions like this in the past with artists for some time refusing to paint the Fiat-Chrysler plant in solidarity with residents who were left out of redevelopment. Working to bring artists into a tighter community of practice and helping raise our shared level of analysis opens up space for other actions. This must go beyond simple peer pressure, or casual critique — artists must become active participants in the struggles and life of our communities. This means joining organizations, understanding how these displacement schemes work, studying the issues we face, and showing up outside of our art. Organized collective action and protest may actually enable us to turn some of these attempts to artwash on their heads, drawing greater attention to the impact these corporations are having on our communities.

Finally, and most critically, we need public policy that means “development” does not exile those who currently live in a neighborhood. This means rent control that keeps tenants in their homes, public subsidies and policies that allow people with low incomes to buy their homes before investors, reparations payments to Black residents, and a government whose first call isn’t to Gilbert or Comerica Bank, but to the working people that built our city. This is perhaps the goal that seems furthest away today, as our entire system is built to exploit people for the benefits of profit margins. But if we truly believe that art and culture should benefit our communities, we must create a world beyond the dictatorship of the wealthy.

While always riven with contradictions, public art once felt like a threat to those in power. The same Rivera mural that adorns the DIA faced opposition due to its critique of the middle-class public and the Ford family. Another of Rivera’s murals was chiseled off the walls of Rockefeller Center in New York City when he refused to change its message of solidarity with the working class struggle. Today, with all our tools, all our technology, and all our talents, we must strive to reclaim a public art that does more than just adorn the real estate projects of the rich.

We need a public art that fights for public power.

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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, Oct. 11

An Evening with The Church 7 p.m.; Magic Bag, 22920 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $45-$165.

Band of Horses 7 p.m.; Royal Oak Music Theatre, 318 W. Fourth St., Royal Oak; $39.50-$79.50.

Civic, Show Pink, The Stools 7 p.m.; Sanctuary Detroit, 2932 Caniff St., Hamtramck; $17.

Everything Everything, Pierre Kwenders 7 p.m.; Magic Stick, 4120 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $25.

Molly Burch, Christelle Bofale 7 p.m.; The Loving Touch, 22634 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $18.

NoCap: The BirdNest Tour 8 p.m.; Saint Andrew’s Hall, 431 E. Congress St., Detroit; $32.50-$55.

Foxxy Gwensday 7-10 p.m.; Aretha’s Jazz Cafe, 350 Madison St., Detroit; $35.

Ashley Cooke, Vincent Mason 7 p.m.; District 142, 142 Maple St., Wyandotte; $65.

Thursday, Oct. 12

Cayucas, Matt Costa, Strange Heart 8 p.m.; Lager House, 1254 Michigan Ave., Detroit; $20.

Joe Nichols, Audrey Ray 7 p.m.; District 142, 142 Maple St., Wyandotte; $35-$55.

Noname 7 p.m.; Magic Stick, 4120 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $30.

Protest the Hero, The Callous Daoboys, Moon Tooth 7 p.m.; The Loving Touch, 22634 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $25.

Scotty McCreery 8-10 p.m.; The Capitol Theatre, 140 E. Second St., Flint; $65 - $100.

Superheaven 6:30 p.m.; Tangent Gallery, 715 E Milwaukee Avenue, Detroit; $25.

The Wonder Years, Anxious, Sweet Pill, Action/Adventure 6 p.m.; Royal Oak Music Theatre, 318 W. Fourth St., Royal Oak; $29.50.

Tobi Lou- The Perish Blue Tour 7 p.m.; Saint Andrew’s Hall, 431 E. Con-

gress St., Detroit; $25.

Blue Hawaii 8 p.m.; Marble Bar, 1501 Holden St., Detroit; $18.

Friday, Oct. 13

Adeem The Artist, King Ink 8:30 p.m.; Lager House, 1254 Michigan Ave., Detroit; $15.

Atlus, Starletta 7 p.m.; The Loving Touch, 22634 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $15.

Brahms Symphony No. 4 8-10 p.m.; Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty St., Ann Arbor; $25-$90.

Citizen Soldier, Hollow Hill 7 p.m.; The Token Lounge, 28949 Joy Rd., Westland; $16.

Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin 6 p.m.; Redford Theatre, 17360 Lahser Rd, Detroit; $30-$100.

Country Nights Halloween

Dance Party! 7 p.m.; District 142, 142 Maple St., Wyandotte; $5.

Dirty Dancing in Concert 8 p.m.; Caesars Palace Windsor - Augustus Ballroom, 377 E. Riverside Dr., Windsor; $28-$58.

Eagles - The Long Goodbye, Steve Miller Band 7:30 p.m.; Little Caesars Arena, 2645 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $149.50-$499.50.

Ironsnake, Revelations - Iron Maiden Tribute 8 p.m.; District 142, 142 Maple St., Wyandotte; $18.

Kevin Gates - Only The Generals Tour 8 p.m.; Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre at Freedom Hill, 14900 Metropolitan Pkwy., Sterling Heights; $39.50-$99.50.

Kickstand Productions Presents: Emo Nite 8 pm; Magic Bag, 22920 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $16.

Machine or Mannequin (70s / 80s Cover Band) + Open Bowling w/ DJ BForeman 9 p.m.-midnight; Bowlero Lanes & Lounge, 4209 Coolidge Hwy., Royal Oak; no cover.

Raphael Saadiq Revisits Tony!

Toni! Tone! Just Me and You Tour 2023 8 p.m.; Fox Theatre, 2211 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $55-$199.50.

The Brook & The Bluff 7:30 pm; Saint Andrew’s Hall, 431 E. Congress St., Detroit; $20.

The Holy Nothing, MACHO, and more 9 p.m.; Sgt. Pepperoni’s Pizzeria & Deli, 4120 Woodward Avenue, Detroit; no cover.

Thundercat, TiaCorine 8 p.m.; Ca-

thedral Theatre at the Masonic Temple, 500 Temple St., Detroit; $160+. Tommy Emmanuel, Larry Campbell, Teresa Williams 7 p.m.; Royal Oak Music Theatre, 318 W. Fourth St., Royal Oak; $35-$75.

Boiler Room with Beige, Father Dukes, Huey Mnemonic, Julion De’an, Max Watts, Rimarkable, Sheefy McFly, Sinistarr, Stacey Hotwaxx Hale, Whodat 9 pm-3 am; Russell Industrial Complex-Exhibition Center, 1600 Clay St., Detroit; $47.07.

Saturday, Oct. 14

John-Allison Weiss “Say What You Mean” 10 Year Anniversary, Lester 8 p.m.; Lager House, 1254 Michigan Ave., Detroit; $15.

80s vs 90s Hallowen Hellabaloo 8 p.m.; Magic Bag, 22920 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $20.

Brahms & Beethoven 7:30-9:30 p.m.; The Whiting, 1241 E. Kearsley St., Flint; $13 - $65.

Genesis Owusu, Godly the Ruler 7 p.m.; The Loving Touch, 22634 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $20.

Gino Fanelli: Detroit Meets NOLA 7-10 p.m.; Berkley Coffee & Oak Park Dry, 14661 W. 11 Mile Rd., Oak Park; $10.

Green Jelly, Silver Spork, Plethora, No Class Assassins 7 p.m.; Harpo’s, 14238 Harper Avenue, Detroit; $25-$50.

Hellmouth 7 p.m.; Sanctuary Detroit, 2932 Caniff St., Hamtramck; $25.

Hollywood Casino @ Greektown Presents WAR 8 p.m.; The Music Hall, 350 Madison Ave., Detroit; $25-$60.

Jerry’s Tone: Jerry Garcia Band Tribute 8 p.m.; The Blind Pig, 208 S 1st St, Ann Arbor; $10.

POLARIS: The Fatalism Tour with Currents, Varials, Paledusk 6 p.m.; Saint Andrew’s Hall, 431 E. Congress St., Detroit; $25.

Pre-Sweetest Day Blues Concert 8 p.m.; Flagstar Strand Theatre for the Performing Arts, 12 N. Saginaw St., Pontiac; $60-$100.

Prude Boys 8 p.m.; Outer Limits Lounge, 5507 Caniff St., Detroit; $10.

Reneé Rapp 7 p.m.; The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $39.50-$79.50.

Winger 6 p.m.; District 142, 142 Maple St., Wyandotte; $25-$45.

DJ/Dance

DISCO BOWL – ALL VINYL

DISCO CLUB TRIBUTE w/ DJ Eric Kacir & friends 9 pm-1 am; Bowlero Lanes & Lounge, 4209 Coolidge Hwy., Royal Oak; no cover.

Kyle Watson, Versace James 9 p.m.; Magic Stick, 4120 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $25.

Sunday, Oct. 15

Afternoon Hardcore: Hellmouth, S.N.A.F.U. 3-5 pm; Berkley Coffee & Oak Park Dry, 14661 W. 11 Mile Rd., Oak Park; $25.

Colter Wall, Red Shahan 7 p.m.; The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $39.50-$79.50.

Get the Led Out 7:30 p.m.; Sound Board, 2901 Grand River Ave., Detroit; $34-$48.

Holy Fawn, Caracara, Lowheaven 6:30 p.m.; The Loving Touch, 22634 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $15.

Nick Cave 7 p.m.; Cathedral Theatre at the Masonic Temple, 500 Temple St., Detroit; $85-$225.

Perspective, a lovely hand to hold, Thumper, FinalBossFight! 8 pm; Lager House, 1254 Michigan Ave., Detroit; $15.

Sky Covington’s Sunday Night Jam Sessions every Sunday with band Club Crescendo 8 pm-midnight; Woodbridge Pub, 5169 Trumbull St., Detroit; suggested donation.

Teddy Bear Orchestra, Bathroom of the Future 7 p.m.; Sanctuary Detroit, 2932 Caniff St., Hamtramck; $15. The Darkness: Permission to Land 20 6:30 p.m.; Saint Andrew’s Hall, 431 E. Congress St., Detroit; $39.50.

TV Girl, Pearl & The Oysters 7 p.m.; Royal Oak Music Theatre, 318 W. Fourth St., Royal Oak; $27.50.

Monday, Oct. 16

Amigo The Devil 7 p.m.; Saint Andrew’s Hall, 431 E. Congress St., Detroit; $25.

Chamber, Tracheotomy, Mafia Birdhouse, Splinters 6 p.m.; Sanctuary Detroit, 2932 Caniff St., Hamtramck; $16.

Jervis Campbell, Nathan Colberg 7 pm; The Loving Touch, 22634 Woodward Ave., Ferndale; $15.

DJ/Dance

Adult Skate Night 8:30-11 p.m.; Lexus Velodrome, 601 Mack Ave., Detroit; $5.

Tuesday, Oct. 17

Monowhales, glimmers, Get Tuff, Searching For Closure 6 p.m.; Pike Room, 1 S. Saginaw, Pontiac; $18.

Static-X, Sevendust 5:30 p.m.; The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $30-$59.50.

Stephen Sanchez, Lily Meola 7 pm; Majestic Theatre, 4120 Woodward Ave., Detroit; $29.50.

THEATER

Performance

Detroit Opera House Madame Butterfly. Shows at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 13 and 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 15; Detroit Opera, 1526 Broadway St., Detroit; 313-237-7464; detroitopera.org. Tickets are $90-$140.

Hilberry Gateway - STUDIO

Silent Sky. The true story of 19th-century astronomer Henrietta Leavitt and a team of female “computers” who made groundbreaking discoveries about the fluctuating brightness of stars, enabling fellow scientists to map the Milky Way and beyond. $15-$25. Friday, 8-10 p.m., Saturday, 2-4 & 8-10 p.m., and Sunday, 3-5 p.m.

Matrix Theatre Company The Open Door: A Three-Act Theatrical Experience of Poetry and Writing. $18. Saturday, 8-9:30 p.m. and Sunday, 3-4:30 p.m.

Meadow Brook Theatre KEN LUDWIG’S MORIARTY $37. Wednesday, 8 p.m., Thursday, 8 p.m., Friday, 8 p.m., Saturday, 2 & 8 p.m., and Sunday, 2 & 6:30 p.m.

The Music Hall Lightwire Theatre The Tortoise And Hare. $15-$25. Sunday, 3 p.m.

Spot Lite House of Orfeus. Blends opera, house music, and theater. No cover. Wednesday, 7 p.m.

Musical

Black Cat: A New Nightmare

Featuring the NTG Haunted House Band. Friday, 8 p.m. and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Riverside Arts Center, 76 N. Huron St., Ypsilanti; $15 online, $12 students, and $20 at the door.

Company Tuesday, 7:30 p.m.; Fisher Theatre, 3011 W. Grand Blvd., Detroit; $39-$135.

Jesus Christ Superstar In celebration of its 50th anniversary, a new mesmerizing production comes to North America. Tuesday, 8-10 p.m.; The Whiting, 1241 E. Kearsley St., Flint; $30-$85.

COMEDY

Improv

Go Comedy! Improv Theater Go Comedy! All-Star Showdown. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. $25.

Critics’ picks

Spooky Spirits

BOOZE: The Detroit Zoo will host a spooky adults-only night on Friday, Oct. 13. Spooky Spirits at the Detroit Zoo is a 21-and-up costume party complete with drinks, a movie screening, and live entertainment. Specialty cocktails with Halloweeny names like “Grim and Tonic” and “Pino Grave-gios” will be available along with a complimentary welcome drink courtesy of Griffin Claw Brewing. There will also be a haunted trail full of pirates, themed photo opportunities, habitat chats with Detroit Zoo animal care staff, and a screening of Friday the 13th in the zoo’s 4D theater. VIP tickets included access to a lounge with small plates like pierogi, mushroom tarts, French onion soup, sausage and cabbage, and apple pie, but those are all sold out already. General admission is still available for $50 a person which includes six drink tickets. There is also a $35 “designated driver” ticket for the sober amongst us who still want to get their freak on.

—Randiah Camille Green

From 6-10 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 13; Detroit Zoo, 8450 W. 10 Mile Rd., Royal Oak; detroitzoo.org. Tickets are $50 for general admission or $35 for non-drinkers.

Taylor Tomlinson

COMEDY: Rising comedian Taylor Tomlinson will perform two shows at the Fox Theatre on Saturday and Sunday as part of her “The Have It All Tour.” Following her first two

is recommended to order online in advance to ensure availability. Preorders will be accepted until noon on the day before each event.

—Layla McMurtrie

From 1-5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 14 and Sunday Oct. 15; Beacon Park, at 1903 Grand River Ave, Detroit; ciderinthecity.com.

Madame Butterfly

Netflix stand-up specials QuarterLife Crisis (2020) and Look at You (2022), which center on life in her 20s, Tomlinson is now exploring the quest to “have it all” when people hit their 30s. Tomlinson, who was featured on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2021, is known for sharing relatable, hilarious stories about her personal life, while also deconstructing religion and mental health. She often weaves life’s bigger questions into her own experiences. In May 2022, The New York Times wrote that Tomlinson “demonstrates tight joke writing, carefully honed act-outs and a ruthless appetite for laughs.”

—Steve Neavling

Starts at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 14, and Sunday, Oct. 15 at the Fox Theatre; 2211 Woodward Ave., Detroit; 313presents.com. Tickets range from $29.75-$79.75.

Cider in the City

FAMILY FUN: Cider in the City is set at Beacon Park two weekends this month to celebrate autumn and bring cider mill favorites to the heart of Detroit. This event, presented by the DTE Beacon Park Foundation and programmed by the Downtown Detroit Partnership, aims to offer visitors a taste of classic fall traditions. Guests can enjoy a variety of seasonal treats, including hot cider, pumpkins, and caramel apples, courtesy of Blake’s Farm. Food trucks will be on-site to provide a range of meal options, and Lumen Detroit will serve fall cocktails, craft beer, and cider selections. Preorders for event items are available, and it

THEATRE: Calling Puccini’s 1904 opera Madame Butterfly problematic would be an understatement. The wildly popular Italian opera takes place in Japan when a 15-year-old Japanese girl, Cio-Cio-San (aka Madame Butterfly), falls in love with an American naval officer stationed in Nagasaki named B.F. Pinkerton. The two are married and have a son but Pinkerton goes back to the United States. When he returns to Japan with his new American wife, he intends to adopt the child and raise him back home without Butterly. Butterfly commits suicide in the end. Not only is the opera offensive in its portrayal of Japanese women as exotic and submissive, but it also fetishizes Japanese culture and reinforces stereotypes. Some productions have even included white actors in “yellowface.” But not this time. When Madame Butterfly comes to the Detroit Opera House this month, it’ll be helmed by an all-Japanese and Japanese-American creative team. Directed by Matthew Ozawa with a set by design collective dots, this production of Madame Butterfly reinvents the tragic opera while putting the fetishized white male gaze of the original production on full blast. In this version, the piece is presented as Pinkerton’s fantasy in a virtual reality setting.

Kimie Nishikawa, one of the members of dots, tells Metro Times the creative team decided to play up the stereotypes in the opera to satirize the original material. “Instead of turning the story into like giving one of the characters agency, we actually zoomed out even a little bit more, saying this doesn’t have anything to do with Japan,” she says. “It was all these European white men fantasizing about this Japanese woman who was 14, and so we’re like wait a minute. That’s the concept, that this is not real. That this is all a fantasy.”

—Randiah Camille Green

Shows at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 13 and 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 15; Detroit Opera, 1526 Broadway St., Detroit; 313-237-7464; detroitopera. org. Tickets are $90-$140.

Taylor Tomlinson will perform two shows at the Fox Theatre. ANDREW MAX LEVY

LIONS GAMES SHOWING ON OUR BIG SCREENS ALL SEASON!

PATIO BAR OPEN FRI-SUN THROUGH OCTOBER!

Happy BELATED Birthday, Chris Turner!

Fri 10/13

Happy 248th Birthday to the US Navy!

Superdevil/I Are Citizen/ Pepper and the Heavy Boys (hard rock/metal/punk)

Doors@9p/$5cover

Sat 10/14

BANGERZ & JAMZ (monthly)

DJ AIMZ & DJ EM mixing 90’s & 00’s

Doors@9p/$5cover

Sun 10/15

Happy Birthday, JO-JO!

Mon 10/16 FREE POOL ALL DAY

Tues 10/17

B. Y. O. R. Bring Your Own Records (weekly)

Open Decks@9PM NO COVER IG: @byor_tuesdays_old_miami

Coming Up: 10/20 Blatsy’s Backroad/Bores/ Cheapshow

10/21 Big B&The Actual Proof/ Miller&The Other Sinners/ Matt Bastardson

10/23 Friendship Commanders/At Water

10/27 Circus Boy/Stomp Rockets/ Cinecyde/Spitvalve

10/28 Pink 50’s Halloween Bash wsg. Sick Like You/Permanently Pissed

10/29 ANNUAL PUMPKIN CARVING CONTEST

11/03 Elspeth Tremblay/Antibuddies/ Electric Huldra

11/04 PARKHOUSE NIGHT (funk/soul/hip hop)

JELLO SHOTS SPECIAL $1

WE ARE SEARCHING FOR A PERMANENT GENERAL MANAGER

Contact us: theoldmiamibarjobs@gmail.com

Local Buzz

By Broccoli and Joe Zimmer

Got a Detroit music tip? Send it to music@metrotimes.com.

Printed matter gets the spotlight: This weekend, the ninth installment of the annual Detroit Art Book Fair is happening at Trinosophes (1464 Gratiot Ave., Detroit; trinosophes. com), which has hosted the event since its inception in 2013. It’s a chance for all Detroit-area publishers, artists, printers, and designers to congregate in one space, overflowing with zines, fine art prints, risograph ephemera, photo books, independent magazines and other miscellaneous art objects. Every year that I’ve attended, I discover new creators and organizations that have since come to shape my experience in the city’s endless art scene. Whether you’re in need of practical paper goods like calendars or daily planners, or you’re looking to fill your home with local art, there’s no event quite like the

Detroit Art Book Fair. Hit up Eastern Market this Saturday morning, Oct. 14, and then stroll over to Trinosophes between noon and 6 p.m. to get the best selection during the first day. Return on Sunday, Oct. 15, between noon and 4 p.m., for anything you missed. —Joe

Double header at the DSO: If spookiness isn’t your jam, but you still want to get as close to the astral plane as possible, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra has quite the cosmic lineup this Friday, Oct. 13. First up is Detroitraised Endea Owens and her band The Cookout, returning to Orchestra Hall (3711 Woodward Ave., Detroit) many years after Owens was a member of the DSO’s Civic Youth Ensembles. Owens is a Grammy-winning jazz bassist and composer, who can most often be seen in the house band on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She brings with her a love for Detroit hard bop and virtuosic bass solos, repping her city throughout the world. If that weren’t enough, the DSO is also hosting torchbearer of modern jazz Makaya McCraven, who will drum along with the

local phenoms in Urban Art Orchestra. UAO conductor De’Sean Jones has been accompanying McCraven on his recent project In These Times on sax and flute, so expect a tight performance and a musical journey that pushes the boundaries of sounds past and present. Tickets available via DSO.org. —Joe

Constant Smiles and Idle Ray:

Music collective Constant Smiles has accomplished quite a bit in their relatively short time together, and their debut album Paragons from 2021 earned them some critical acclaim that continues to this day. Their forthcoming record Kenneth Anger, engineered by Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, Liars, Dougie Pool), builds on the momentum of that debut release, and the collective is celebrating the occasion with a show at Third Man Records (441 W. Canfield St. Detroit) on Thursday, Oct., 12. They’ll be joined by local indie-pop outfit Idle Ray for a show that is just right for the turn of the season. Tickets available on the Third Man Records website and on Dice.FM —Broccoli

Endea Owens and her band The Cookout come to Orchestra Hall. COURTESY PHOTO

MUSIC

the band more than a year ago, is actually their fourth drummer to date.

But perhaps they were too aware of what was at stake when making that crucial first impression. All together, the completion of Prude Boys’ Greatest Hits took three full years, rife with rerecording, remixing, re-overdubbing, and remastering of several songs (from several eras), including a little bit of their own experimentations at home helmed by Quennton, (a considerably experienced audio engineer in his own right), and then two different 10-song sessions with producer Adam Cox at his Hamtramck studio. “And then we even started from scratch entirely with a couple songs,” Quennton adds.

“We just couldn’t seem to land on a layout,” Caroline says “that we were happy with – or a list of songs that we felt were really worthy of being put out on a first full length.”

First impressions are important Prude Boys’ Greatest Hits

“It definitely is the ‘story of us’ in a lot of ways,” Caroline Thornbury says of Prude Boys’ first full length album, titled Greatest Hits. “It’s a lot of our memories and experiences. We’ve toured on some of these songs and we’ve put so many late nights and fights into writing and recording them.”

Caroline is the bassist and lead singer of this Detroit-based threepiece band, which she co-founded with guitarist Quennton Thornbury back in 2013. And to answer both of your questions, firstly, these bandmates started sharing that surname five years ago when they were married and, secondly, yes, this is their first full-length, first LP, first “album,” per se, after 10 years of existence (while still notably having released several singles and a couple of shorter playing EPs over that span of time).

As Caroline indicates, though, this is an all-encompassing compendium of songs, which is why it felt both sincere and satisfyingly tongue-in-cheek to title the record Greatest Hits. The album is available via Outer Limits Lounge Records, and the band, along with their new drummer Evan Ecklund, will be celebrating with a performance — where else but at the Outer Limits Lounge, this Saturday night.

Quennton is quick to confirm that

By Jeff Milo

each one of these songs, even “the fun ones,” are very “personal” to them, while several have a disarmingly heavier subtext having been penned by Caroline during a period of grieving after her sister passed in 2016. But Quennton also notes that when Caroline mentions any “fights” that may have occurred during this album’s creation process, that it was actually singular, only one fight, really, and even then, not only was it kinda cutely frantic, but also brief.

“I’d been compiling some of these grieving songs,” Caroline says, “and we did try to release those in 2018, but the recordings didn’t end up sounding the way we wanted and we kinda put them on the back burner. But, then, I suppose it was over quarantine when we started feeling like: We gotta get these fucking songs out, man! These songs are too important!”

Prude Boys have been around long enough for local music fans to potentially already feel acquainted with their sound: an exhilarating blend of surfy, strutting, ’60s pop rock and grimy, riffy ’70s sludge, made indelible by their sensibilities for a perfect hook and a super sweet melody. The aesthetic was always a little bit cool, a little bit greasy, and a little bit nostalgic, but always embossed with a ton of heart and emotional earnestness. Their

tumbling rhythms and reverb-soaked guitars were always sweetened quite poignantly by Caroline’s angelic lead vocals, often curled at the ends with a distinctive vibrato.

The band’s been around for a decade and they’ve already played more shows than they can even recall at this point. But Caroline and Quennton are well aware that this album could quite likely be the very “first impression” that many listeners will have of the band. “A full length, an LP, is really putting your stamp down,” Quennton says. “There probably will be people discovering us for the first time with this record, even though it’s been 10 years in the making. It’s a bunch of different eras, over the course of which we’ve been building up this catalog…”

“We’ve just been practicing for 10 years; we’ve really only just started!” Caroline jokes and they both share a laugh. “But, no, there really have been so many different little eras of our band,” she says, going on to reference how their true origin goes back to early 2012, when she and Quennton first met in Ann Arbor and initially started making music under a different yet similar sounding band name, before eventually moving to Detroit. Quennton estimates that they’ve had, roughly, about “five specific formations, or eras” over the years. Evan Ecklund, who joined

“We wanted our first LP,” Quennton says, “to have a bit of a jukebox feel, where not every song was produced the same. So having all these recordings at our disposal gave us different options, but we were just being picky…”

Anxiety eventually crept in, Caroline admits, and they perhaps started being a little too shrewd or over-analytical about every little detail. “And you tell yourself that nobody will notice if something’s slightly off-key for just one second,” she says, “but then realize, months into it, no, Caroline, in fact, it’s very noticeable…”

“I didn’t realize we were like this,” Quennton chuckles at their mild perfectionism. “I always had that punk mentality of just wanting to get an album out as quick as possible. But our better sensibilities told us that we could do it all a little bit better.”

Plus, like any independent band or artist, this is an entirely DIY operation. “And if we’re putting all of the band’s resources into it,” Caroline says, “we’d better be fucking happy with it.”

And they are happy with it — especially, Quennton adds, due to the assist from Cox. But as they look ahead to the release party this Saturday, they both admit to feeling a mixture of triumph and sentimentality.

“There’s a chance I’ll cry on stage,” Caroline says, and it sounds like a quip at first, but an undertone of absolute sincerity lingers after, as though an echo from her earlier quote is threaded like a whisper underneath: “...these songs are important.”

Prude Boys’ Greatest Hits album release party starts at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 14l Outer Limits Lounge, 5507 Caniff St., Detroit. With Mango Star, 208, and DJs Ava East and Jamie Spiker. Tickets are $10.

Prude Boys are gearing up to release their first LP, 10 years in the making.

OUTER LIMITS LOUNGE CREW

Advertorial/Sponsored Content

New Dequindre Cut wildlife mural carries conservation message

AS WITH MOST PIECES of art, there’s more to the new Michigan Wildlife Council (MWC) mural on the Dequindre Cut Greenway than meets the eye.

Sure, at one level, the depictions of eight notable Michigan wildlife species by Detroit-based artist and muralist Ed Irmen are simply cool to look at it, said Nick Buggia, MWC chair.

“But we’re hopeful that the artwork also prompts viewers to dig deeper into its meaning and consider how all Michiganders — whether in urban, suburban or rural communities — have a stake in wildlife management and protecting the outdoors,” he said.

“We like to say that ‘beauty lies in the balance,’ meaning that conservation work creates opportunities for outdoor recreation and connection with nature that promotes both physical and mental well-being for all Michiganders,” Buggia added.

The Michigan Wildlife Council is a nine-member, governor-appointed body created by the state legislature in 2013. Its purpose is to administer a public education

campaign on how conservation efforts benefit both wildlife and people throughout Michigan.

To that end, this summer it — along with the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy — commissioned Irmen to create an eight-paneled mural located roughly in the 1800 block of Lafayette Street near where it intersects with St. Aubin Street along the Dequindre Cut Greenway, the urban recreational path that opened to the public along and near the riverfront in 2009. The completed piece of art was unveiled during the Detroit Harvest Fest & Food Truck Rally on Oct. 7 and 8, when attendees had an opportunity to add their personal touch in frames around each portrait to illustrate their connection with wildlife, conservation and the outdoors.

“A wide panorama”

The mural features eight species: lake sturgeon, pheasant, porcupine, cottontail rabbit, elk, monarch butterfly, turkey and black bear.

Some of those species are plentiful in Michigan’s wild, while oth-

streams.

They have also installed rocky reefs on the bottom of the Detroit and St. Clair rivers where lake sturgeon can lay their eggs.

The ultimate goal is to create a healthy, self-sustaining population on par with elk and wild turkeys. Both of those species had largely disappeared from the Michigan landscape decades ago before management efforts, including importing members of each species from other states, replenished their numbers to the point that regulated hunting of both is now allowed.

Sometimes specific conservation efforts benefit multiple species. Both pheasants and monarch butterflies have lost habitat to agriculture and other development. But the DNR, Pheasants Forever and other governmental and conservation entities have worked to restore grasslands that each species likes through the Michigan Pheasant Restoration Initiative.

Hunting and fishing pay for wildlife conservation Michigan’s beautiful tapestry of wildlife is in no small part thanks to hunting and fishing, Buggia noted.

ers have seen their populations rebound thanks to relatively recent conservation efforts. Still others, like the monarch butterfly, are benefiting from ongoing attempts to stabilize their numbers.

“We deliberately selected a wide panorama of wildlife to demonstrate the teamwork and array of management techniques — including hunting and fishing — required to maintain healthy ecosystems,” Buggia said.

Consider, for example, the lake sturgeon. It can live up to 100 years, reach seven feet in length and weigh as much as 200 pounds. But despite its mighty size, it’s considered a threatened species in Michigan because of past overfishing and habitat degradation.

Michigan conservationists — including governmental agencies such as the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and volunteer groups of anglers — have helped repopulate lake sturgeon through measures such as prohibiting commercial fishing and stocking fry in rivers and

“Not everyone realizes it but hunting and fishing — not state taxes — are by far the primary source of funding for conservation activities throughout the state,” he said, citing how all proceeds from Michigan hunting and fishing license sales go into the DNR’s conservation coffers, as does a percentage of the revenue generated by equipment purchases for each activity.

Hunting and fishing also are important conservation tools for keeping wildlife in proper balance with their habitats, Buggia said.

“Just think about how many more deer you’d have darting in front of your car as you traveled throughout the state or, depending on where you live, dining on the plants in your backyard if hunters weren’t helping to regulate their population,” he said.

So if you happen to find yourself passing Irmen’s mural on the Dequindre Cut, know that a lot of hard work — and teamwork — has gone into ensuring that wildlife are here to add meaning to all Michiganders’ lives. n

PHOTO COURTESY OF DETROIT RIVERFRONT CONSERVANCY

FOOD

Two years ago folks around here went nuts when the New York Times included AlTayeb in Dearborn on its list of the country’s 50 exciting restaurants. I was one of many who flocked there for “breakfast” — available until 4 p.m. — and loved it.

The Dearborn store was actually the second AlTayeb, the first a tiny flagship having opened in 2017 in Garden City. Now the GC OG, not to be outdone by its famous sister, is pioneering a dinner menu, offered until 8 p.m. I liked AlTayeb’s less breakfasty, non-chickpeabased dishes better anyway, so dinner was good news for me.

The new dinner menu is short and to the point. It includes five meat dishes, three salads, eight sandwiches, seven appetizers, and no eggs or bean dishes such as fool, a popular Middle Eastern comfort food. To make the most of the evening hours, I suggest going with the meats, but vegetarians can still find something to love.

Bear in mind that as in Dearborn, free dishes magically appear on your table, for me one time spicy potatoes, another time hummus.

Perhaps my very favorites were the baba ghannouj and those potatoes. They are chunks deep fried to a crisp

AlTayeb does dinner

By Jane Slaughter

exterior and sprinkled with tons of cilantro, an excellent combination of crusty and fatty with a cooling herb. The baba is deeply smoky and perfectly creamy, with a pool of olive oil in the center and some tomato cubes for garnish. A lot of work goes into baba ghannouj and it is worth paying for, especially here.

Hummus is also fine, though less garlicky than I prefer, also pooled with olive oil and parsley. It’s thick rather than creamy. Falafel bites are about an inch in diameter, and lighter than most, according to Samir Hamade, chef and co-owner. He serves them (I counted 18 in my order, so a lot) with a light tahini sauce.

Though you can get a grilled kafta skewer, just like anywhere else, I recommend three dishes that are less common: makanek, sujuk, and harhoura. Harhoura is thin strips of beef fried with jalapeños and onions, so it’s both hot and sweet; tahini sauce is on the side. Sujuk Hamade-style is ground beef cooked with tomatoes, garlic, and 16 spices, and served with big chunks of lemon — nothing is done stingily here.

Makanek is 20 baby beef sausages, prepared the Lebanese way with no casing, dressed with your choice of

pomegranate syrup or lemon juice. The sticky-sweet pomegranate is what lifts this out of the ordinary. Hamade says that in Lebanon, sujuk and makanek are felt to complement each other and “go hand in hand” — people might put both in a sandwich.

All these dishes, including the potatoes, are also available on sandwiches.

In the salad category, I found, as so often in restaurants, too much dressing. Fattoush and tabbouleh are made to order on the spot, so you can request a lighter hand, or on the side. For fattoush, it’s the pita chips that make the salad, because they are the very best, deep brown and crisp, with far more flavor than elsewhere. They’re brought separately so you can crumble in your own. One salad I hadn’t seen before is fattoush atop hummus, where we found the bounteous dressing soaked the hummus — but maybe you like that!

The only place AlTayeb doesn’t match up to a few other Lebanese restaurants is the pita, which does not come warm and puffed from the oven but room temperature, folded and bagged. You will, however, get a complimentary plate of tomatoes, pickles, pickled turnip, and mint leaves.

The drinks menu is catch as catch

AlTayeb

873 Inkster Rd., Garden City altayebrestaurant.com

Appetizers $6.99-$13.99, sandwiches $5.49-$7.99, entrees $4.99-$14.99

can; what’s listed isn’t necessarily always available. You can’t get tap water, only bottled. I liked fresh mango juice, which is deep golden, sizable and extracted in-house, and laban, tangy liquid yogurt, 16 oz. for $2.99. I’m waiting for strawberry juice, mint lemonade (which in a different Middle Eastern restaurant was out of this world), and especially jalab. Our server gave up on trying to describe jalab, starting with raisins and ending with “it’s smoked.” The world wide web says it’s made from carob, dates, grape molasses, and rose water, then smoked with incense. Hard for me to imagine, but could be a knockout.

Garden City AlTayeb continues to offer its long breakfast menu with eggs, chickpeas every way you can think of, fool, and fatteh till 3 p.m. The other, much larger AlTayeb is open 8 a.m.-4 p.m. every day at 15010 W. Warren in Dearborn; 313-633-1752.

Beloved for its brunch, AlTayeb’s new dinner menu includes sandwiches.

COURTESY PHOTO

FOOD

On that note, I’ll wrap. Pepperoni rolls speak to this city’s food religion. To hell with Jeno’s and Totino’s. I wandered forty years in the desert (Southwest), tempted over time by everyone from stoner friends to my own children to accept less and give up on God’s perfect Italian grab-and-go grub as some prandial paradise lost. Even so, I held out a hope; praying for that taste of home again. These days, for just a few shekels more than I shelled out before leaving Dearborn in ’83, I’ve gotten back one of the blessings money can buy a guy who’s back in Heaven over one of his hometown’s purest and simplest pleasures.

And hat’s off to this lady for feeding the universe this rebuttal-worthy morsel: Google reviewer “Brenda” posted a three-star review for Mad Nice recently (Oct. 4), put out over the restaurant’s dress code policy:

Chowhound

A bit about how we roll

By Robert Stempkowski

Chowhound is a weekly column about what’s trending in Detroit food culture. Tips: eat@metrotimes.com.

For starters, let this Dearborn boy make a clear distinction: Pizza rolls are freezer food manufactured by soulless mega-conglomerates as subsistence fodder for the populace feedbag; bite-sized, cardboard wonton-wrapped fritters piped with mush a pizza-eating mother bird might readily regurgitate for her young. A proper pepperoni roll is a different story: A somewhat-appropriated, working-class rite of dietary passage which generations of suburban Detroiters cut their teeth on as a staple of local food culture.

Some say the prototype rolls were a 1927 original construct of one Giuseppe “Joe” Argiro, a Fairmont, West Virginia bakery owner who saw an untapped market in the many Italian immigrants working up midday appetites in his coal-mining community. Others speculate these same miners’ wives may have cooked up the idea themselves; packing an easy-to-bake, portable, affordable, and homemade meal of high protein, fat, and carbs all rolled into one readyto-eat handful back in those days when lunch pail, pre-union and federal labor law workforces were afforded a mere

15-minute meal break. Whatever happened down there, pepperoni rolls became a thing up here a few years later. With Ford’s Rouge Plant employing thousands including émigrés from down South, an enormous, better-paid workforce created opportunity in Dearborn for food and beverage entrepreneurs. As streetcars and affordable Model T’s trafficked masses yearning to be fed and watered, bars, restaurants, and bakeries started lining the roads leading to and from the factory (Schaefer, Miller, Michigan). Roma Bakery (opened in 1930) is generally granted pepperoni roll pioneer status; its heyday as singular purveyor of the product stretching from the ’50s until the early ’70s, when my old neighbors on Reuter Street, John and Virginia Errigo, turned things into a competition by opening Capri Bakery. (4832 Greenfield Rd.; 313-5844449.) Virginia — daughter of Hugo Imperi, Roma’s founder — started jumping off the back of her dad’s work trucks at ten to deliver bread orders. Her husband John — one of those Ford Motor Company employees — couldn’t resist all the Imperi family had to offer, apparently. The rest is history. They debuted Capri in December of 1973. This Christmas, their ongoing fam-

ily business will gift us with its 50th anniversary. Astride those two success stories, Dearborn Italian Bakery (nicknamed “D-I-B” by its loyalists; 24545 Ford Rd., 313-274-2350) and its Livonia sister (“L-I-B”) stand as tenured, equal thirds in the triumvirate pantheon pepperoni roll purists pledge undying allegiance to in these parts. While Roma Bakery continues to thrive, the incarnation I remember is but a memory (a change of ownership years ago took an interpretive turn with the ‘ole rolls I recall, unfortunately for me). Capri remains Capri. Smelling their goods again, I’ve floated from the front door to the counter like Bugs Bunny on the wafting scent of fresh carrots. I had to choke down becoming choked-up at my first Capri pepperoni roll order in decades, and cried seeing the Errigos again in press photos framed there on the wall. They’re both gone now. Still, I’m guessing God’s got Virginia baking again, at least for Sunday dinner. As for Hugo; namesake grandson of Roma’s founder, whom I was once used to seeing behind the counter licking the self-inflicted wounds of a young man who liked living the life of a pepperoni roll empire prince: I trust he’s up there as well; a wing man of his now-off duty guardian angel.

“Not happy with the no hat policy for women,” Brenda specified. “As a black woman hats are often part of our ensemble… Seems discriminatory to me. The hostess said this was what the owner wanted. What is the reason?”

Granted, B.; the answer you got wasn’t much to go on. Still, owners can make those calls. Next, Brenda cited kitchen staff wearing baseball caps as a double standard, but sanitation requires those, of course.

“How does that help when their hair was falling from under the cap?” she challenged, suggesting hair nets instead. I’m with her on that one.

“I have a problem with this policy and so do my Facebook friends. Some say as a result they will not try the restaurant.” Brenda insinuates that she’s rallying some troops against Mad Nice over their stance. Then she appeals to reader empathy over bad hair days and such before dipping back into the prejudicial well:

“It feels, looks, and little (sic) discriminatory to me.”

Between you and me, B., I can’t see a reasonably minded restaurateur establishing a policy likely to restrict and/ or offend large populations of potential customers. Gender prejudice seems unrealistic. Perhaps she was suggesting another kind. In the end, after making that worldly traveler argument many resort to (she’s eaten in New York without ever being asked to doff a cap), she finally gets around to asking the question she should have asked first, and directly to a manager or owner rather than out into the angry and vengeful, rhetorical ether of social media:

“What is wrong with a stylish hat and I am not talking about a baseball cap?”

But did you do that, B.? It doesn’t look like it. Maybe next time.

Dearborn Italian Bakery is among the pantheon of pepperoni roll purists in the Detroit area. RANDIAH CAMILLE GREEN

Artist of the week

In MOCAD fall exhibitions, Mark Thomas Gibson stands apart

By Randiah Camille Green

Mark Thomas Gibson’s Town Crier has something to tell us.

“Hear Ye, Hear Ye,” the character starts in every drawing before yelling a mess of headlines that would be obscene if they weren’t real. Or, perhaps, the fact that they’re based on real events makes them even more obscene.

“White nationalists marched in Philadelphia streets last night! Happy Fourth of July! 11 armed Moorish Americans were arrested without firing one shot… progress! Critical race theory is being banned in schools because it makes some white people feel bad! I never knew this was about feelings,” he yells in one panel. “In the south, they say ‘bless your heart’ when they really mean f*ck off! So for Texas, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh bless your hearts!” he says to the Supreme Court Justices in another.

Gibson’s “Town Crier” series anchors his A Retelling exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. It’s part of MOCAD’s recently opened Fall/Winter exhibition lineup alongside work by

Kesswa, Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye (aka Spirituals), and a collection of archival materials that celebrate past exhibitions across MOCAD’s 17-year history.

Kesswa presents a sound installation and two “immersive” API experiences via QR codes that left us asking, “Is that it?” We can’t exactly figure out what’s going on in Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye’s exhibit, but during the opening reception, he ran around the museum, babbling nonsensically while a videographer followed him. He gave us a tiny cup of water and said “This is generational wealth. Hold on to it, and one day it will become valuable.”

Gibson’s show stands out amongst the underwhelming lineup, mostly for his Town Crier character. He’s meant to be a play on a 19th-century anchorman who is seen as a public authority figure. He’s a modern-day version of the newsboys who used to stand on the corner and yell “extra, extra!” before telling the whole neighborhood the latest headlines. Except modern-day news gets more bizarre and shameful as the

years creep on.

For this series, Gibson appropriated real headlines from various news sources and added his own commentary to make fun of the way information is produced and passed on from news sources. It’s a retelling of the news cycle with the “what the hell is going on around here” that we’re all thinking when it comes to things like critical race theory, police brutality against unarmed Black men, climate change, and the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

“Jeff Bezos floats in space while the weight of the world is on warehouse workers! Germany has been hit with deadly floods! Oregon’s streets buckle from the heat wave! The Cleveland Indians are now the Cleveland Guardians! Hell freezes over!” he says wearing the same pair of breeches and long coat in every drawing.

Although he once appears as the Grim Reaper and proclaims “Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice while the Supreme Court sides with climate change apocalypse over EPA! Six people should not be able

to damn the entire world!”

A few other paintings outside the Town Crier series present a mess of limbs as the clash of ideas and struggle to make sense of it all in our current political landscape. His painting, “Suspension of Disbelief” tackles the Jan. 6 riot on the Capitol by showing a Black janitor cleaning the mess left by the predominantly white mob. It shows the racial disparity in “access to constitutional rights and law enforcement” because we know good and damn well that if Black people stormed the Capitol, they would have been met with extreme police presence and violence. Imagine looking at a history book or newspaper archives and seeing Gibson’s work instead. That would be an appropriate retelling of history.

Where to see his work: A Retelling is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit until Feb. 4, 2024. The museum has new hours and is closed on Wednesdays during ongoing renovations; 4454 Woodward Ave., Detroit; mocadetroit.org

Part of Mark Thomas Gibson’s Town Crier series at MOCAD. RANDIAH CAMILLE GREEN

CULTURE

Fair Play

Rated: R

Run-time: 113 minutes

As the idea of a healthy work-life balance grows more and more unfathomable in this era of late-night emails, weekend remote work sessions, and work-from-home productivity monitoring, it’s unsurprising to see personal relationships take a serious hit. When we’re expected to do far more than ever before, for far less than what we’re worth, all from the comfort of our houses, there’s naturally going to be a change in dynamic with our loved ones. Financial worries, job insecurity, the pressure to meet unrealistic goals that someone above you will inevitably take the credit for once completed … It’s a lot.

Chloe Domont’s debut feature Fair Play explores the burden of this reality to its most catastrophic potential. But despite a bullish start, the film ends up in a bear market.

As the story begins, Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) are in love. At the bar, out to eat, on the dance floor… It’s abundantly clear to anyone who spends but a few seconds observing their connection. At least, when they’re in the real world. At work on the floor of a high-stakes hedge fund, where the two work as stock analysts, they might as well be strang-

As the tables turn

By Kayla McCulloch

ers. It’s a violation of company policy to date, and neither is about to screw up the other’s skyward trajectory at the firm — especially when a highly coveted position just opened up under the formidable Campbell (Eddie Marsan). Inside the confines of their New York City apartment, they’re engaged to be married. Among the office’s maze of glass walls, computer monitors, and stock market tickers, they’re nothing more than colleagues reaching for the same rung of the corporate ladder. They’ve worked out a pretty successful system, all things considered. Emily and Luke are good at playing their parts, and no one suspects a thing. That is, until a rumor derails their entire way of life. When Emily overhears that Luke is the one who’ll get the prized spot with Campbell, the pair celebrate as if they’d just won the lottery. Reasonably so: this is the kind of gig that rewards quick thinking and smart moves with half-million-dollar checks and a professional high like no other. It’s the jackpot. But when a 2 a.m. phone call drags Emily out of bed instead of Luke, it’s apparent she misheard the gossip. She’s getting the gig, not Luke. The miscommunication about the promotion undermines everything that was working so well for the couple before. Emily must learn how to be a part of the boys’ club, while Luke must adjust to his new role underneath his fiancéeturned-manager.

It’s the perfect setup for an erotic thriller: gender, power, money, sex, the public versus the private. Nothing that would feel out of place in a classic from Adrian Lyne, Paul Verhoeven, or Brian De Palma in the 1980s and ’90s. That’s not Domont’s angle, however. She’s a veteran of what I’d dub Dad TV — a writing credit on HBO’s Ballers, directing credits on USA’s Suits and Showtime’s Billions — and her first film is unsexy by design. When the structure changes, Emily and Luke go celibate. There’s a direct correlation between the number of days since they were last intimate and the amount of tension growing between them. Television is mostly sexless by necessity. You can only show so much before the network or the FCC raises concerns. Here, Domont’s picture is sexless by spite.

When Luke loses out on the job he thought he’d secured, sex becomes the one object he can hold over Emily’s head. She may have the bigger salary, the better benefits, the superior office, and the best portfolio, but Luke gets to vindictively deprive her of the only thing she doesn’t have: him. The higher she climbs, the further away he shifts — instead burying himself in pseudointellectual seminars that boil down to business tips by way of pickup artistry. Domont has constructed a not-so-subtle metaphor for the rise of celibate altright misogynists fighting back against the female empowerment movement.

At the same time, by thrusting Emily into the role of the cutthroat, sex-hungry magnate, Domont reveals how the corporate girlboss functions to uphold the patriarchy — not topple it.

And yet the film struggles to rally for long. Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich do a commendable job with the disappointingly shallow characters they’ve been given. (Ehrenreich in particular gets a handful of moments that remind viewers how capable he could be in a meatier role.) Depth has never been a requirement for the pawns on the chessboard of this genre and so naturally, Domont’s subversion of it would be guilty of the same surface-level characterization — but there needs to be a little bit more for an audience to grip onto here. Instead, we get brief scenes of normalcy with Emily and Luke before they’re tossed in the pressure cooker. The final result is a tad underdone, not to mention unsatisfyingly vapid. Still, it is enjoyable to watch Domont tighten the screws on these two for the first couple acts.

Like the riskiest stocks on the market, Fair Play dips and rallies in patterns I could never truly pin down. Just when it appears to be trending upward, it plummets even lower. While thrilling for a spell, you may wish you’d settled for something with a more dependable return on investment. Luckily, this one only cost me 113 minutes.

Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) are in love — but work is a complication. NETFLIX

CULTURE

: Q I’m a 57-year-old guy, married but separated, in reasonable shape. I usually masturbate at night as a “sleeping pill.” Over the past few years, it’s gotten more difficult to orgasm. I get hard, I vary my technique, but I just can’t come. Sometimes I’m up for hours jerking it before trying to fall asleep. Toys like sleeves sometimes help, but they’re messy since they need lube, so that’s not my first choice. Any magic suggestions for things to try?

A: Fire on all cylinders — use sleeves and lube (keep a small stack of hand towels on your nightstand), put clothespins on your tits (whether they’re wired or not), get a powerful vibrator with a sleeve attachment, slip a plug in your ass (flared base!), read some erotica, and/or watch some porn. Past a certain age, you may need to really crank things up to meet your production goals.

: Q Best lube for anal sex?

A: Adrenochrome when available, ivermectin if adrenochrome is in short supply, and the blood of Christian babies in a pinch.

: Q What is the most common cause of bickering in long-term relationships?

A: There are four: the unbelievably stupid shit your partner insists on doing (despite being asked not to do that shit), the bleedingly obvious shit your partner refuses to do (despite being asked to do that shit), the stupid shit your partner likes (despite it being explained to them how stupid that shit is), and the amazing shit your partner doesn’t like (despite it being explained to them how amazing that shit is). Basically, it’s them.

: Q Is sexual compatibility in a relationship a prerequisite or an achievement?

A: Establishing some basic/bedrock/ baseline sexual compatibility at the start is a prerequisite; sustaining sexual compatibility over time is an achievement.

: Q What’s the best threesome position? (Do not say “The Eiffel Tower.”) The Three Gorges Dam.

: Q My rent went way up and I’m thinking about starting an OnlyFans account for extra cash. Thoughts?

A: You submitted your question via Instagram DM, so I took the liberty of

scrolling through your feed… and the answer is yes.

: Q Online romance novels help me get off. Lately, I’ve been reading about BDSM, as some of the lighter versions of that practice are featured in novels I’ve recently read. So, I searched for photos using Google. Nothing I’ve found looks anywhere near as pleasurable as what I read. How do guys keep an erection while enduring things that appear to be painful? Do they take a drug?

A: Lots of male porn performers take drugs — ingestible or injectable ED medications — to stay hard during porn shoots; while some may take boner drugs to keep an erection while enduring something they may not enjoy (although lots of porn performers, like lots of regular people, enjoy BDSM), most take boner drugs so they don’t lose their erection during the tedious parts of the shoot, e.g., lining up shots, repositioning cameras, getting into bondage, etc.

: Q How does one re-train their dick to stay hard for another person during partnered sex after decades of self-pleasure?

A: One incorporates self-pleasure into the partnered sex one is fortunate enough to be having with another person — one might also wanna lay one’s hands on some boner pills.

: Q Former fat girl here. How do I not hate my body compared to the cute girl my boyfriend and I play with?

A: “Comparison is the thief of joy,” as someone or other once said. “Stop comparing bodies” is a lot easier said than done, I realize, and taking “yes” for an answer isn’t always easy either. But if I could learn to do it — I’m a former fat kid myself — so can you.

: Q Thoughts on the person who went to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco covered with his own feces?

A: Fucking disgusting.

: Q What is the etiquette when you puke on a sex partner during a deepthroating session?

A: Shower off, towel off, get off — perhaps in a more reliable orifice.

: Q Someone I met on Biggercity moved across the country to my city. He then changed his Biggercity name to one that

includes my BC name. It’s hot as fuck. But I just realized he might be a stalker. Within the last hour I left him a bunch of flirty texts. Stupid and horny. TBH, now I’m a bit scared. Any suggestions?

A: Moving across the country to be closer to someone you met on a dating app and taking his name… does seem a little stalky. It also screams “I don’t have a job or friends” (broke and won’t be missed back home) or “I don’t need a job or friends” (wealthy and is an asshole). If your gut is telling you to block him, block him.

: Q Straight cuck here. I did the one thing a cuck should never do and blew up at my girlfriend for doing what I’d asked her to do. I found a kink-positive therapist, did the work, and now I am ready to try this again. But I’m single now. Advice?

A: Um, this seems kind of obvious that I’m sure your therapist covered it with you, but… go find a new girlfriend and don’t fuck it up this time?

: Q This is too off-topic for a regular column, but perhaps you could treat it in one of your Quickies columns, or turn it over to your readers? Which currently active English-language advice columnists would you recommend to someone who has a question that doesn’t have enough to do with sex or relationships?

A: My short list: Carolyn Hax, Miss Manners, Lizzie Post and Dan Post Senning, Lori Gottlieb, Meredith Goldstein, and Alison Green.

: Q Is it possible to learn to squirt or is it either you’ve got it or you don’t?

A: I’ve spoken to women who’ve tried to learn and couldn’t — they unsurprisingly tend to believe a woman either has it or she doesn’t. I’ve also spoken to women who’ve tried to learn and succeeded — they unsurprisingly believe squirting can be got.

: Q Any advice for a burgeoning masochist?

A: Don’t let anyone do anything to you that they haven’t let someone else do to them — also, masochists make the best sadists.

: Q Are “gynosexual” and “androsexual” real sexual identities or are they like “sapiosexual”?

A: A gynosexual is someone who is attracted to women and/or femme traits and/or people and an androsexual is someone who’s attracted to men and/

or masc traits and/or people — and seeing as there are people out there who fit those descriptions, I guess we’ll have to concede that those are real sexual identities… unlike “sapiosexual,” which is some made up bullshit.

: Q Is it unethical to attribute lack of wish for romantic and sexual intimacy to menopause when it’s quite a bit more complicated? It’s a partial truth. Should I feel guilty about this?

A: Sparing someone is one way of loving someone.

: Q Boxers or briefs?

A: I don’t care what my Christmas presents come wrapped in, so long as my Christmas presents keep coming.

: Q 20. Ever since we built our dungeon, my parents have been trying to bust their way into it. We are out of excuses as to why they can’t see our room renovation. They are both very religious and probably don’t know what the word “kink” means. Part of me just wants to say “FUCK IT” and let them see it.

A: If you tell your parents they can see your room renovation after they watch every episode — every single one — of How To Build a Sex Room on Netflix and your parents actually watch every single episode of How To Build a Sex Room on Netflix… your parents won’t want to see your sex room.

: Q 21. I want to pull your pants down and lay you over my knee and spank your bare butt so hard with my hand on your bottom over my knee that your bottom is red from the spanking you get from me. I live in Concorde, New Hampshire, and I am serious about doing this.

A: Unless you’re willing to move across the country to be near me and take my name, I won’t ever think you’re serious about laying me over your knee and spanking my bare butt.

Magnum Subs! Savage Love Live is THIS THURSDAY, Oct. 12 at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. EST. Savage Love Live is a live Zoom show where I hang with Nancy and the Tech-Savvy At-Risk Youth and answer your Qs LIVE, exclusively for Magnum subs. Sub curious? Want Sex and Politics, Struggle Session, the Magnum Lovecast, and the longer Savage Love? You can experiment with being my sub for just 8 bucks right now at Savage. Love/subscribe.

Send your question to mailbox@savage. love. Podcasts, columns, and more at Savage.Love.

CULTURE Free Will Astrology

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES: March 21 – April 19

The Indigenous Semai people of Malaysia have an unusual taboo. They try hard not to cause unhappiness in others. This makes them reluctant to impose their wishes on anyone. Even parents hesitate to force their children to do things. I recommend you experiment with this practice. Now is an excellent time to refine your effect on people to be as benevolent and welcoming as possible. Don’t worry — you won’t have to be this kind and sweet forever. But doing so temporarily could generate timely enhancements in your relationship life.

TAURUS: April 20 – May 20

Taurus author William Shakespeare reshaped the English language. He coined hundreds of words and revised the meanings of hundreds more. Idioms like “green-eyed monster” and “milk of human kindness” originated with him. But the Bard also

created some innovations that didn’t last. “Recover the wind” appeared in Hamlet but never came into wide use. Other failures include, “Would you take eggs for money?” and “from smoke to smother.” Still, Shakespeare’s final tally of enduring neologisms is impressive. With this vignette, I’m inviting you to celebrate how many more successes than flops you have had. The time is right for realistic self-praise.

GEMINI: May 21 – June 20

I hope beauty will be your priority in the coming weeks. I hope you will seek out beauty, celebrate it, and commune with it adoringly. To assist your efforts, I offer five gems: 1. Whatever you love is beautiful; love comes first, beauty follows. The greater your capacity for love, the more beauty you find in the world. —Jane Smiley. 2. The world is incomprehensibly beautiful — an endless prospect of magic and wonder. —Ansel Adams. 3. A beautiful thing is never perfect. — Egyptian proverb. 4. You can make the world beautiful just by refusing to lie about it. —Iain S. Thomas. 5. Beauty isn’t a special inserted sort of thing. It is just life, pure life, life nascent, running clear and strong. –H. G. Wells.

CANCER: June 21 – July 22

I read a review that described a certain movie as having “a soft, tenuous incandescence — like fog lit by the glow of fireflies.” That sounds like who you are these days, Cancerian. You’re mysterious yet luminous; hard to decipher but overflowing with life energy; fuzzy around the edges but radiating warmth and well-being. I encourage you to remain faithful to this assignment for now. It’s not a state you will inhabit forever, but it’s what›s needed and true for the foreseeable future.

LEO: July 23 – August 22

The published work of Leo author Thomas de Quincey fills 14 volumes. He inspired superstar writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Nikolai Gogol, and Jorge Luis Borges. Yet he also ingested opium for 54 years and was often addicted. Cultural historian Mike Jay says de Quincey was not self-medicating or escaping reality, but rather keen on “exploring the hidden recesses of his mind.” He used it to dwell in states of awareness that were otherwise unattainable. I don’t encourage you to take drugs or follow de Quincey’s path, Leo. But I believe

the time is right to explore the hidden recesses of your mind via other means. Like what? Working with your nightly dreams? Meditating your ass off? Having soul-altering sex with someone who wants to explore hidden recesses, too? Any others?

VIRGO: August 23 – Sept. 22

Virgo journalist H. L Mencken said, “The average person doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be safe.” There’s some truth in that, but I believe it will be irrelevant for you in the coming months. According to my analysis, you can be both safer and freer than you›ve been in a long time. I hope you take full advantage! Brainstorm about unexpected feats you might be able to accomplish during this state of grace.

LIBRA: Sept. 23 – Oct. 22

Libran philosopher and writer Michel Foucalt aspired to open up his readers’ minds with novel ideas. He said his task was to make windows where there had been walls. I’d like to borrow his approach for your use in the coming weeks. It might be the most fun to demolish the walls that are subdividing your world and preventing free and easy interchange. But I suspect that’s unrealistic. What’s more likely is partial success: creating windows in the walls.

SCORPIO: Oct. 23 – Nov. 21: More and more older people are transitioning to different genders. An article in The Guardian (tinyurl.com/ GenderMeaning) describes how Bethan Henshaw, a warehouse worker, transitioned to female at age 57. Ramses Underhill-Smith became a man in his 40s. With this as your starting point, I invite you to re-evaluate your personal meanings of gender. Please note I’m not implying you should change your designation. Astrological omens simply suggest that you will benefit from expanding your ideas. Here›s Scorpio singer Sophie B. Hawkins, a mother who says she is omnisexual: “My sexuality stems from an emotional connection to someone’s soul. You don’t have to make a gender choice and stick with it.”

SAGITTARIUS: Nov. 22 – Dec. 21

Sagittarian author Mark Twain said that in urgent or trying circumstances, uttering profanities “furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.” I will add that these magic words can be downright catalytic and healing — especially for you right now. Here are situations in which swearing could be therapeutic in the coming weeks: 1. when people take themselves too seriously; 2. when you need to escape feelings of powerlessness; 3. when know-it-alls are trying to limit the range of what can be said; 4.

when people seem frozen or stunned and don’t know what to do next. In all these cases, well-placed expletives could provide necessary jolts to shift the stuck energy. (P.S.: Have fun using other surprises, ploys, and twists to shake things up for a good cause.)

CAPRICORN: Dec. 22 – Jan. 19

In Roman mythology, Venus was goddess of love, desire, and beauty. Yet modern science tells us the planet Venus is blanketed with sulfuric acid clouds, has a surface temperature of 867 degrees Fahrenheit, and is covered with 85,000 volcanoes. Why are the two Venuses out of sync? Here’s a clue, courtesy of occultist Dion Fortune. She said the goddess Venus is often a disturbing influence in the world, diverting us from life’s serious business. I can personally attest to the ways that my affinity for love, desire, and beauty have distracted me from becoming a harddriving billionaire tech entrepreneur. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. How about you, Capricorn? I predict that the goddess version of Venus will be extra active in your life during the coming months.

AQUARIUS: Jan. 20 – Feb. 18

Thousands of heirloom food species are privately owned and hoarded. They once belonged to Indigenous people but haven’t been grown for decades. Descendants of their original owners are trying to get them back and grow them again — a process they call rematriation — but they meet resistance from companies and governmental agencies that commandeered the seeds. There has been some progress, though. The Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin has recovered some of its ancestral corn, beans, and squash. Now would be a good time for you Aquarians to launch your own version of rematriation: reclaiming what was originally yours and that truly belongs to you.

PISCES: Feb.19 – March 20

I like Piscean poet Jane Hirshfield’s understanding of what “lies at the core of ritual.” She says it’s “the entrance into a mystery that can be touched but not possessed.” My wish for you right now, Pisces, is that you will experience mysteries that can be touched but not possessed. To do so will give you direct access to prime riddles at the heart of your destiny. You will commune with sublime conundrums that rouse deep feelings and rich insights, none of which are fully explicable by your logical mind. Please consider performing a homemade sacred ritual or two.

Homework: What burden are you too attached to?

So is it the Kansas City Swifties or the Swiftie Chiefs? I really don’t wanna…. regardless I figure eventually it’ll be the Kansas City Bad Break Ups. “He left me standing on the goal line, while he played his silly games.”

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