Browse Stories

George's hooptie: 1982 Olds Delta 88: a survivor's tour of a carriage of yore.

By George Tysh

Published: 1/19/2000

Types: Arts

1. Under the hood “The best damn motor that GM ever made,” said Marion (my Hamtramck mechanic who’d been fixing cars since the ‘30s) when I first bought this ride from a friend seven years ago. Then there weren’t any liver spots of rust on the side panels and the power windows were still working gr...[MORE]

Burning bright: Arts editor George Tysh celebrates the Winter Solstice with a big bonfire and a little swig of holiday cheer. It's a nontraditional celebration, but his kids love it.

By George Tysh

Published: 12/8/1999

Types: Culture

Say what you want — '60s legacy, old hippie shit and all — but the bonfire that my kids have come to expect each December at the Winter Solstice is a pagan ritual that nobody in my childhood hometown would've known about. Back ...[MORE]

www.hotnheavy.org: Clicking the night fantastic on the Internet.

By George Tysh

Published: 11/17/1999

Types: Culture, Love & sex

Log on, stud puppets! Get wired, marionettes of desire! If, as they say, sex is 90 percent mental, then what better party for your throbbing insatiability than the ultimate zipless liaison? No fuss, no muss, no unwanted conversation, no sloppy pe...[MORE]

Progressive Heroes: Terry Blackhawk: Doors to imagination

By George Tysh

Published: 11/10/1999

Types: Arts, Literature

The fact that Mike Banks’ Submerge records even exists is reason enough to celebrate. Submerge and Banks’ militant electronic music collective, Underground Resistance (formed with techno luminaries Jeff Mills and Rob Hood), have, in just nine ...[MORE]

Diamonds are forever: Each memory joins millions and millions of others.

By George Tysh

Published: 9/29/1999

Types: Arts, Visual arts

Summer, 1945-1985 (Self-Portrait @ Tiger Stadium). Photographer Carl Schurer saw his first Tigers game as a kid in 1945, then kept going back for more than 50 years. He took the 200 shots of this large (5'x7') photo-collage during four games in the summer of '85. Frank Lary, th...[MORE]

Lyrical lakes: Composer-in-residence Ned Rorem makes the words sing.

By George Tysh

Published: 6/16/1999

Types: Music

"A song is not a poem; it’s a song. It’s a third thing. It has music and it has words, and it also has meaning which nonvocal music does not have," says Ned Rorem by phone from Massachusetts. Rorem’s ideas on the subject come fro...[MORE]

City of night: A "Big Heat" love affair with the metro streets.

By George Tysh

Published: 6/9/1999

Types: Culture

It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. She’d said to meet her at Talal’s on the west side – and sure enough there she was, wrapped in a tight strapless thing that, along with earrings, mascara and spiked heels, tried hopelessly to c...[MORE]

Summer Fiction 2000: A soulful crew of wordifiers if we’ve ever had one.

By George Tysh

Published: 7/12/2000

Types: Arts, Literature

Light Among Clouds The weather for writing is always right. Whether you’re holed up in a cabin up North or relaxing from a hard eight on the job or steaming in a club downtown, when the feeling hits, the need to wr...[MORE]

Light leaves: An extended summer evening is an awesome thing.

By George Tysh

Published: 5/5/1999

Types: Arts, Visual arts

"The light lies layered in the leaves." James Schuyler once began a poem called "Song" with that line. He was writing about watching people play tennis on a summer evening, how the light kept changing for the longest time, until final...[MORE]

Fasting down: The Tao that can be eaten is not the eternal Tao.

By George Tysh

Published: 11/25/1998

Types: Food & Drink

In the spring of '73, I spent a week in a cabin in the Cévennes, an isolated region in southern France. For three of those days, in what seemed like an extension of reading old Zen texts and poems, I fasted. I guess the ide...[MORE]

A Gift at Year's End: The DIA’s new 20th-Century Galleries are (almost) just what we needed.

By George Tysh

Published: 12/30/1998

Types: Arts, Visual arts

In a year that saw the birth of three innovative downtown spaces — detroit contemporary, foundation and JRainey Gallery — as well as the arrival of administrative “good guys” Michele Spivak at the Center Galleries and James Steward at the University of Michigan...[MORE]

WDFN, "The Pan": Detroit's AM "Sports Radio" juggles ignorance, insult, and insight.

By George Tysh

Published: 4/21/1999

Types: Culture, Sports

The balls are in the air: The big red one of stupidity, like a clown’s nose defying common sense, the snarly green one of misogyny, and the crystal ball of true sports expertise. WDFN-AM (1130) keeps all of them levitated, as if choosing just one to ...[MORE]

Sublime paperwork : Dean Carson opens the mind’s eye at AGW

By George Tysh

Published: 7/25/2007

Types: Arts, Visual arts

One of the more seductive propositions made by visual art is that what we see in a gallery or museum has the power to change how we experience the all-too-visible, everyday world. Not only do habits of seeing die hard, they tend to make us oblivious. Then along comes an artist to get down inside...[MORE]

A mind for dance: Merce Cunningham's multiple inspirations plug into the Power Center.

By George Tysh

Published: 2/10/1999

Types: Arts, Performing arts, Dance

As we sit before a bonfire or a waterfall, our eyes follow the changing shapes of flame or foam, so unique every second, yet so hypnotically familiar. This is a pleasure which continues as long as we let it, as long as we pay attention. Somehow the violence of burning wood or flowing water is a co...[MORE]

Working as you go: Harvesting legal tender around the next bend in the road.

By George Tysh

Published: 1/27/1999

Types: Culture, Travel

France in the mid-’60s was a real shock to my college boy-beatnik system. When the boat train from Le Havre dropped me at the Gare du Nord in Paris, I could see that just about everything was going to be different and that francs, even in the smalle...[MORE]

Auto-gratification: Fantasy rides are limp revenge in a world gone mall-istic.

By George Tysh

Published: 1/6/1999

Types: Culture, Lifestyle

Remember that time, crossing the street, when you got strafed by a New World Order hulk behind the wheel of a Ford Explorer? Running down jaywalking squirrels was just his way of telling imaginary wimps in the home and studio audiences to "Suck it!" For this grunti...[MORE]

Don’t look away!: “Models of Avant-Garde Film” get four screenings at MOCAD

By George Tysh

Published: 6/27/2007

Types: Screens, Film

The idea that contemporary art actually wants to have a conversation might seem strange to a lot of us Tiger fans, American Idol viewers and Anna Nicole Smith buffs. After all, artists always come up with some weirder-than-ever riff on the world we think we know, and art often looks so foreign, so n...[MORE]

Three degrees of saturation: Susanne Hilberry offers up a trio of unsettling photographers

By George Tysh

Published: 4/4/2007

Types: Arts, Photography

"Astonish me!"According to a 20th century legend, that's what Ballets Russes impresario Serge Diaghilev once said to young Jean Cocteau, as he explained to the budding poet and filmmaker what he wanted from art above all. For viewers who expect the same kind of aesthetic jolt today, Outpost, t...[MORE]

City lights: Lemberg Gallery joins the metropolitan conversation

By George Tysh

Published: 2/28/2007

Types: Arts, Visual arts

Stepping into Ferndale's Lemberg Gallery these days means taking part in an intimate, wordless conversation on the state of America's urban soul. There, a small but powerful show, Contemporary Urban Landscape (bumped up in the gallery's schedule to coincide with Cranbrook Art Museum and MOCAD'...[MORE]

In The Flesh: Alice Coltrane, Sept. 23, 2006, Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor

By George Tysh

Published: 1/24/2007

Types: Music, Jazz

It was transcendent, which is fitting, given her life-long spiritual concerns. Roy Haynes in his 80s had the energy of a twentysomething, the muscles of an Elvin Jones in his prime and the lightning precision of a Tony Williams. Bassist Charlie Haden spread out a huge bottom sound, and spun out one ...[MORE]

Summer Fiction 2003: Writing, writing, everywhere … enough to make you think.

By George Tysh

Published: 8/13/2003

Types: Arts, Literature

Floating in reverie’s cool darkness, our minds drift with the tide. On the imaginary shore, just beyond our reach, strangely familiar things start happening to people we recognize (let’s call them “characters”) as we tread water and feel the words and phrases flow together. What the hell’s going o...[MORE]