Entertainment Section

Dear Ann Arbor Chronicle Readers,

We’re sleeping in this morning. But we’ve programmed two replacement staff to fill in for a few hours while we enjoy some holiday nog. After the jump you can verify that The Chronicle is still in capable hands.

Thanks,

Mary and Dave [Full Story]

Every year, we say we’re cutting back on Christmas presents. And every year, we go a little crazy anyhow.

So December 25 has always been one big bloated day of blatant materialism. Even the dog had her own little pile, which she mounted and guarded for dear life.

It’s been great fun.

But this year, we mean it. We’re cutting back.

My oldest daughter, Christie, in fact, declared some months ago that because she had enough stuff and we all had enough stuff, she no longer wanted to exchange gifts. For the rest of her life.

She’s still very generous. It just doesn’t translate into things you buy at the mall. Last weekend, for instance, she treated her sisters to dinner at Olive Garden followed by “Holiday Nights in Greenfield Village.”

And this Christmas morning, without spending a dime, Christie will come by with a surprise gift we’ll always remember. [Full Story]

Old Man Winter is back with a vengeance. That’s okay. I like the snow – and I love the hockey.

You can play pond hockey, drop-in hockey or beer league hockey, but for me, the best hockey is the pick-up game at Michigan’s Yost Arena on Tuesday nights.

The game features some of the best players in the area, most of them former Michigan players, many of whom played pro hockey. But a few wannabes, like me, have gotten regular spots. It’s by invitation only, and I only got invited because I knew the guy who started it. Jeff Bourne – known as “Tiny,” thanks to his 5-6 frame – cared as much about attitude as ability. As he said: If you don’t pass, you’re an ass. [Full Story]

The Michigan Wolverines might have the most wins in college football history, and the highest winning percentage, but the Wolverines have never captured the nation’s imagination like the Fightin’ Irish of Notre Dame.

Notre Dame’s success is partly the Wolverines’ fault. Knute Rockne wanted to get his Fightin’ Irish into the Big Ten in the worst way – but Michigan’s Fielding Yost wanted to keep them out even…worser.

Yost probably expected Rockne to take his team and go home – but Rockne had other ideas. He took his team to Chicago and Boston, which had large Catholic populations, and built a following. He also scheduled games in Yankee Stadium – in front of the national media – and in Los Angeles, in front of Hollywood hot-shots.

And that’s why Notre Dame didn’t shrink without the Big Ten, but grew into the only college team with a national following. The sports writers told tales of The Four Horseman, while the movie makers immortalized the Irish with films from “Knute Rockne: All American” – starring young Ronald Reagan as the Gipper – to “Rudy.” [Full Story]

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Champagne price wars? Sacre bleu! What blasphemy!

But recessions produce unexpected consequences. The New York Times – while observing that “bargains are a crass notion for the industry, which carefully cultivates its image of luxury and glamour” – nonetheless reported recently that U.S. retailers are starting to discount high-end Champagne labels.

Price decay has already spread downmarket in Britain, where consumers are reaping the benefits from a glut of unsold bottles in Champagne’s massive underground caves. A full-throttle price war rages at the lower end of the market, and brand-name Champagne under $20 is the new normal.

Are we likely to see such dramatic price cuts locally? No bets – but in an early bellwether, Costco recently dropped the price on its Kirkland Champagne by $4, to $22. That nabbed it a spot in the Vinous Posse’s holiday roundup of under-$25 bubblies. [Full Story]

From the day Tiger Woods was born, his parents groomed him to become the best golfer in the world.

Incredibly, it worked. Woods’s uncommon ability to hit a golf ball landed him on the Mike Douglas show – when he was two. He got his first hole in one at six, and two years later he won his first international tournament. Tiger Woods has been the best golfer in the world for his age every year of his life.

Woods’s unequaled ambition also earned him a few bucks – about a hundred million of them last year alone, almost all of it from endorsements.

Perhaps more surprising, the guy seems normal. He’s got brains – he went to Stanford – he has a sense of humor, friends, a beautiful wife and two kids. If anyone had it all, it was Tiger Woods. [Full Story]

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At Thanksgiving, a flesh eater’s fancy turns heavily to thoughts of a dead bird. What better time of year, then, for cartoonist Jay Fosgitt to serve up a pair of them?

Meet Dead Duck, the title character of Fosgitt’s debut graphic novel, and his sidekick, Zombie Chick. They work for the Grim Reaper (aka J. P. Yorick); their task is to haul the reluctant chosen over to the other side (aka Rigormortitropolis) by any means necessary.

Happily for us all, bringing in the dead has always been a rich lode for historical references, literary allusions and rude humor.

“Dead Duck” takes off on all three, with riffs on the Salem witch trials, Beatlemania, the Canadian health care system, the Crusades, Punch and Judy, the “Vagina Monologues,” Chaucer, SCTV’s Doug and Bob McKenzie (Fosgitt has great affection for the Great White North), Nazi porn and blaxpliotation flicks, just to skim the colorful surface.

“Dead Duck,” Fosgitt freely advises, is “not profane, but it’s certainly not for little kids.”

The book, published by Ape Entertainment, is due out next month – though Fosgitt is expecting a FedEx delivery of 200 copies to his home today, according to his blog. The weekly comic also has been appearing since February at Apecmx.com. That’s where you’ll find Fosgitt’s commentary on his inspirations for that week’s strip and the technical aspects of cartooning, as well as other observations. And you’ll find Fosgitt at Ann Arbor’s Vault of Midnight on Main Street from 5-8 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 2, where he’ll talk about “Dead Duck” and sign copies of his book. [Full Story]

Last Friday, The Chronicle took a break from reporting on government meetings to pay a visit to Live at PJ’s on the western edge of downtown Ann Arbor at the corner of First and Huron.

The occasion of our visit: The release of Dave Sharp’s Secret Seven CD. The music, self-described as “Jazz, World Music and Rock together with a grooving sound for all ears” was available for sale on CDs as well as re-usable, eco-friendly USB drives – because, as Sharp put it, “This is Ann Arbor, right?”

Sharp, of course, knew right where he was, because he teaches bass at the Ann Arbor Music Center on Ashley Street a couple of blocks away from PJ’s.

His students, as well as the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority, were represented in the crowd. After the jump, we share some photos to document the evening. [Full Story]

On Nov. 25, Thanksgiving eve, NBC will air a special show that catches up with the lives of former contestants of “The Biggest Loser,” a series in which people compete to lose weight. Pete Thomas of Ypsilanti was a contestant in the show’s 2005 season, and he’ll be among those featured in the upcoming special.

What you probably won’t see on that show is a segment shot on a cold October morning at Food Gatherers. An NBC film crew spent a couple of hours taking footage of Thomas at the Food Gatherers warehouse and gardens off of Dhu Varren Road, on Ann Arbor’s north side. The segment was originally intended to be part of a broader profile of Thomas, who dropped 140 pounds during and after his appearance on “The Biggest Loser.”

But a couple of weeks after the shoot, NBC told Food Gatherers that their segment was being cut from the show – instead, producers planned to highlight a marathon that Thomas going to run. The Food Gatherers spot might air on NBC.com, but that’s uncertain.

The Chronicle got to tag along during the Food Gatherers portion of the shoot. Here’s a look at what goes into making a reality-ish show – even the parts that might never make it on TV. [Full Story]

Michigan plays Ohio State tomorrow, for the 106th time. The Buckeyes have already wrapped up the Rose Bowl, while the Wolverines are fighting to secure a bowl bid. But ESPN viewers still consider this rivalry the greatest in American sports. What most sports fans don’t know is, this one goes back before football even existed.

In 1833, Michigan was still a territory, while Ohio had already been a state for three decades. When Michigan started making its pitch for statehood, the surveyors had to figure out exactly where Michigan ended, and Ohio began. They soon discovered they’d gotten it wrong the first time: Toledo should have belonged to Michigan all along.

No big deal, you say? Well, don’t forget: at that time, the main thoroughfare between the Northeast and the Midwest was the Erie Canal – and Toledo was a major stop.

When Michigan claimed it for its own, Ohio blocked Michigan’s bid for statehood. Former president John Adams, who had returned to Congress, wrote, “Never in the course of my life have I known a controversy of which all the right was so clearly on one side and all the power so overwhelmingly on the other.” [Full Story]

Last year, The Chronicle asked readers to give us their best bets for places to eat out on Thanksgiving Day, given that most restaurants would be closed. We recently checked in with those restaurants to make sure they’d be open this year too, and have added a few to the list.

We’ve also listed several restaurants that we thought might be open on Thanksgiving – but, it turns out, aren’t. Finally, we’ve included some of the spots that will be serving free meals on Thanksgiving Day to people in need.

All of this, after the jump. [Full Story]

When the Red Wings drafted Steve Yzerman in 1983, he was 18 years old, but he looked even younger – less a Boy Scout, than a Cub Scout.

But his baby face didn’t prevent him from notching a stellar 91 points his rookie season. Two years later, the coach named him team captain – the youngest in the Red Wings’ history – though he hadn’t really earned it yet.

Oh, he could score. In his twenties, Yzerman rattled off six seasons of 100 points or more – including 155 points in 1988-89. In the history of the game, only two players have ever surpassed that mark: Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky. Not bad company. [Full Story]

I’m wedged in the corner of a west side Ann Arbor basement amongst a jumble of musical instrument cases. The cases belong to the six musicians of Orpheum Bell. There’s more than one case per musician – they each play an array of different instruments. During a break in the rehearsal, I have to ask: What is that? It’s a Stroh violin, “spelled like the beer,” explains Annie Crawford.

The rehearsal is geared towards a CD release show at The Ark on Dec. 4. I’m soaking in the sounds of the basement practice mostly because of that CD, the group’s second – “Pearls.”

Serge van der Voo had sent along a review copy of the CD to The Chronicle. In a world of MP3 files flung around the Internet, a physical CD is an awfully clunky way to deliver musical data. But when I unfolded the heavy card stock CD cover into its 16-inch total length, I noticed one of the folds was not exactly uniform and regular – not the way you’d expect if a machine had produced several thousand of them.

An even closer examination revealed that the print quality was not the laser-like rigid perfection that a modern digital printer delivers. Which is not to say it was sloppy. On the contrary. It was more like trace-evidence that human hands had played a role. Who were these people with the apparently handcrafted CD case? To get some insight, I had crammed myself back amongst those instrument cases in the corner of a basement for two hours. [Full Story]

Some time in the mid-1970s, waiter Larry Behnke pinned a large sheet of paper to the bulletin board that hung in the kitchen of the Del Rio Bar. Behnke, also an artist, had written at the top in bold, psychedelic lettering: “What the Del Rio Means to Me.”

After a few days the sheet was filled with responses, ranging from the thoughtful to the droll to the pitiable – with some that were just plain wacky.

“A nice corner bar that suffers from delusions of grandeur.”

“A place where you get paid to have fun, where you can be crazy without being committed, and where customers and employees are more important than money.”

“It’s my substitute home where people are nice to me.”

“The Del Rio means a million things to me, which I refuse to limit to the narrowness of words and the confines of space.”

“The Del Rio is benevolent despotism.”

Probably a majority of Ann Arborites never walked through the door of the funky old saloon that used to sit at the northeast corner of Ashley and Washington. But for plenty of those who did, the Del Rio was more than just a bar. It was a state of mind, a way of life, a second home – a tiny world unto itself. [Full Story]

Eat your heart out, John U. Bacon. While the football Wolverines plummet weakly toward the depths of the Big Ten, a very different Michigan eleven just beat up big time on its arch-rivals from Ohio.

This squad doesn’t strut its talents in the Big House or cavernous Crisler. Its slightly smaller – but decidedly more refined – field of combat lies a couple of miles north on Main Street, around a crystal-bedecked tasting table at Vinology Wine Bar.

Earlier this week, the second annual Ohio vs. Michigan Wine Clash turned into a rout, as eleven of Michigan’s finest wines drubbed a like number of Buckeyes during back-to-back judgings in both Ann Arbor and Columbus. [Full Story]

Fifty years ago, Michigan football looked a lot different from what you see today. Most Saturdays, the stadium was half-empty. Freshmen were not allowed to play, and sophomores rarely did. The starting players on offense also served as the back-ups on defense, and vice versa. So, most of the better players got tuckered out pretty fast.

Michigan started the ‘59 season right where it left off the last one, by losing two games to extend their losing streak to six. The last of those was an embarrassing loss to Michigan State, 34 to 8.

Desperate, head coach Bump Elliott took a chance: he created a “third unit” of young back-up players to give the older guys an occasional rest. Elliott had no idea what he had created. [Full Story]

I don’t willingly leave my comfort zone. And don’t tell Oprah, but I’m comfortable with that.

I don’t skydive. I don’t sign up to melt in a Sedona sweat lodge. And I do not speak to big groups of people if I can possibly help it.

It’s not that I mind being the occasional center of attention. This picture of me, for instance, was taken on my last day at The Ann Arbor News minutes after my boss had left the building.

I am lying on my belly on his desk.

But I was among friends. It just sort of happened. And I didn’t actually say anything. (Unless you count: “If this had been my desk all along, this paper would not be closing!”)

All this is to explain why nothing within me wants to be among those speakers at Friday night’s Ignite Ann Arbor.

And why I already admire the 15 people who will. [Full Story]

[Editor's Note: HD, a.k.a. Dave Askins, editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle, is also publisher of an online series of interviews on a teeter totter. Introductions to new Teeter Talks appear on The Chronicle.]

Longtime Ann Arbor resident Metta Lansdale was recently hired as director of the Traverse Area District Library in Traverse City. Her first day on the job is today, Nov. 2. I talked to her on the teeter totter just before her move north. [Full Story]

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Start with some quick history: Josef Stalin’s campaign in the late 1930s to consolidate his control of the Communist Party spun into a terror that counted both old Bolsheviks and a new generation of party faithful among its victims. The leadership of the Red Army was decimated. Intellectuals were seized and interrogated and, like so many others under torture, falsely denounced others.

Inevitably, the masses caught on to the madness; pointing the finger at a neighbor could suddenly open up that three-room apartment next door. By the time the rampage was reined in, some 1.5 million people had been arrested and imprisoned; half again as many were executed or perished in the gulag.

Fast forward to the present: You’re a 29-year-old with an MFA, in Moscow to do research for your first novel. Lev Mendelevich Gurvich, himself caught up in the purges, has welcomed you into his apartment and has agreed to tell you his story. Gurvich, in his 90s but still with a sharp mind, had in the 1930s been editor of the literary magazine of the Komsomol, the Communist youth movement of the U.S.S.R. He was arrested, interrogated, sent to a labor camp.

You tell him about your novel, the story of a disgraced teacher of literature who now works as an “archivist” at Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. Pavel Dubrov’s guilt and sorrow threaten to deaden him into numbness until a brief, official encounter with the prisoner Isaac Babel stirs him to rescue the condemned writer’s last manuscript from the prison’s furnace. Pavel smuggles it out of Lubyanka under his coat.

I met Babel, this survivor of the gulag tells you. I was at Stalin’s rallies; yes, I heard Stalin speak. But at one point the old man stops to ask, pointedly if not unkindly: Who are you to write this book?

“I wasn’t insulted,” Travis Holland says. “It was a question I asked myself.”

A more than fair question. But Holland’s answer, “The Archivist’s Story,” proved that his audacity was matched by his gifts. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: In what has now officially become an annual Chronicle tradition, we’re delighted to document this year’s Main Street Halloween Treat Parade through the eyes and lens of Myra Klarman, a professional photographer who lives and works in Ann Arbor. Downtown merchants handed out treats to dozens of spooks, superheros, puppies and princesses. If there were tricks, we sure didn’t see any – other than a little rain. Happy Halloween.

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Last week, Bill Martin announced he would step down as Michigan’s athletic director, effective right before next fall’s first football game.

I was a little surprised Martin announced his retirement in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, in the middle of the football season. But, as surprises go, it wasn’t much of one. Martin has already put in a decade as the Wolverines’ athletic director, which is about average by contemporary standards. And he’s accomplished more during that time than anyone could have reasonably expected – perhaps including himself.

The big surprises happened years ago. [Full Story]

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In a lobby filled with well-dressed young men, proud parents and assorted siblings, Gene and Sue Salaniuk stood back together and took in the scene.

They watched as Michael Paliotta, one of two teenage hockey players who currently lives in their house, talked with his parents amid a cluster of family members – two brothers and a sister – who’d made the trip to Ann Arbor from Westport, Conn., just to watch him play.

Six-year-old Will Paliotta stuck close, quietly playing with the buttons on his big brother’s suit jacket.

“I think Michael misses his brothers and sister,” Sue said softly, leaning toward Gene. He nodded and said, “Look how Will won’t let go of him.”

Two months ago, these people were strangers. But for the Salaniuks, Michael is now one of “their” kids; Will and the rest of the Paliottas are one of “their” families.

The Salaniuks have been hosting hockey players from the USA Hockey National Team Development Program in their Ann Arbor home for 13 years. Every few years they’ll tell the program’s housing coordinators that this will be their last. Then another bunch of 16- and 17-year olds come in and, well, they haven’t said, “no” yet. Their hockey family just keeps growing. [Full Story]

David Alan Grier is an actor and comedian who became famous as a member of the cast of the groundbreaking TV series “In Living Color” from 1990-1994, and went on to land roles in a range of movies and TV shows. Born in Detroit in 1955, he started acting while attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the mid-1970s.

Grier has another Ann Arbor connection, too. In 2007, he hosted an NBC improv show, “Thank God You’re Here” – a cast member of that show, Nyima Funk, grew up in Ann Arbor and is the daughter of former city councilmember Wendy Woods.

Grier recently authored the book “Barack Like Me: The Chocolate-Covered Truth,” which he will be promoting at two appearances in Ann Arbor on Sunday, Oct. 18. From 10 a.m. to noon he’s scheduled to appear at the Arthur Miller Theatre in the Walgreen Drama Center on UM’s North Campus. From 2-3:30 p.m. he’ll be speaking and signing books at the Ann Arbor District Library’s downtown branch.

In a phone interview earlier this week, Grier talked about his experiences in Detroit and Ann Arbor, and reveals – among many things – which local icon inspired one of his “In Living Color” characters. [Full Story]

At the dedication game of Michigan’s new 84,401-seat stadium in 1927, the Wolverines sent new rival Ohio State home with a 21-0 thumping. In that informal era, it was perfectly natural for athletic director Fielding Yost to walk back to campus with the game’s star, Bennie Oosterbaan.

“Mr. Yost was feeling pretty good,” Oosterbaan told author Al Slote. “We’d won, and the stadium was completely filled. He turned to me and said, ‘Bennie, do you know what the best thing about that new stadium is? Eighty-five thousand people paid five dollars apiece for their seats – and Bennie, they had to leave the seats there!‘”

While no one can be certain what Yost would think of the luxury boxes that are going up right now (and no matter what the university is calling them, that’s clearly what they are), the record suggests he would approve it – and for the very reasons he pushed to build the Big House in the first place. [Full Story]

One summer, Lea Detlefs spent her time going to a mixed martial arts gym where the rest of the clients were male. She recalls an atmosphere of homophobia. They blasted music with lyrics she found sexist. But she never complained.

“I was afraid to speak up,” Detlefs said. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

Detlefs – a facilitator from CommonGround, part of the University of Michigan’s social justice education program Intergroup Relations – shared that anecdote with a group of students as an example of how sex, among other things, can put up invisible walls between people. The students had gathered at the UM Alumni Center to identify, discuss and break down those barriers artistically as part of the University Musical Society’s Freedom Without Walls project.

The idea for Freedom Without Walls started with one partition in particular: the Berlin Wall. In November 1989, Germans took sledgehammers to the wall dividing their capital. Now, in celebration of the 20-year anniversary of the Wall’s fall, as well as of the UMS presentation of the Berlin Philharmonic on Nov. 17, students will design public art installations meant to tear down the less visible walls that still exist in their southeastern Michigan communities. [Full Story]

And so, it’s done. The Detroit Tigers’ once promising season ended Tuesday in a cataclysmic collapse.

In the American League’s Central Division, Sports Illustrated had picked the Tigers to finish next to last. But by September, they had built a seemingly insurmountable seven-game lead. The team was a tonic for a troubled town in a troubled time. Some pundits even claimed the Tigers season was a metaphor for a Motown renaissance. They started comparing this team to the 1968 Tigers, and the role they played in healing a city that had been torn apart the summer before.

On July 23, 1967, the long-simmering tensions between the police and the people finally boiled over into a full-blown race rebellion – or riot, depending on whom you ask – that lasted five days, the worst in American history.

Enter the 1968 Tigers. [Full Story]