Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. To Drop “It’s A Corporate World” LP April 26
It’s a corporate world after all… One of Detroit’s most stunning new acts heading into the new year, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr, have announced the release of their anticipated full-length debut, It’s A Corporate World on Quite Scientific Records on April 26th. This oil painting of DEJJ members Daniel Zott (left) and Josh Epstein (right) shown above…
The Decemberists’ ‘King’ Lives
The latest release from Portland’s Decemberists, who will appear at the Royal Oak Music Theatre Wednesday evening [now postponed until April 22 due to inclement weather], is charted by Billboard as the top-selling album in America this past week. A cult band with a passionate fanbase hitting #1 after a decade of persistent hard work…
Literary star Bill Harris named 2011 Kresge Eminent Artist
The Kresge Foundation crowned renowned local author and educator Bill Harris this year’s Kresge Eminent Artist, a distinction that recognizes both an artist’s professional achievement and his contribution to metro Detroit’s cultural community. The award and accompanying $50,000 prize honor Harris’ output as an author, playwright and poet, and his work encouraging up-and-coming writers as an…
States most likely to go bankrupt: Surprise! Not Michigan!
The Daily Beast website posted an extremely depressing article earlier this week ranking each of the 50 states on their likelihood of declaring bankruptcy in the near future, the composition of which must’ve been only slightly more fun than ranking one’s family members on their likelihood of an expeditious death. The list was based on…
The Company Men
The Company Men GRADE: D+ Hear that sound? It’s the world’s smallest violin. And it’s being played by Emmy-laden TV producer John Wells (ER, The West Wing, Southland). See, the first-time filmmaker has composed a cinematic ballad for our nation’s financial woes because, well, rich white corporate execs are suffering too. Yes, he’s asking all…
The Mechanic
The Mechanic GRADE: B- Why so serious? The main thing action flicks featuring Jason Statham (aka "the Stath") have on their side is their sly sense of humor. Between the frenzied fisticuffs and gravity-defying gun duels, there’s been an eye-winking cheekiness to lighten the dramatic load. The Transporter and Crank films are gleefully kinetic popcorn…
The Rite
The Rite GRADE: C- Satan isn’t the kind of dude to be in a mellow mood, but, saddled with a PG-13 rating, the dark lord prevaricates in a low-key manner, avoiding the salty language and free-spewing vomit we expect from this sort. The closest this lugubrious chiller comes to real demonic histrionics is a woman…
RIP Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes
Gladys Horton, pictured top right, with the Marvelettes News is breaking that Metro-Detroit native Gladys Horton, former lead singer of the Marvelettes, died late Wednesday evening at a nursing home in Sherman Oaks, CA. Her son, Vaughn Thorton, said she’d been recovering from a recent stroke. Horton was only 66 years old. My mother died…
Myth buster: Blogger takes on the one about Detroit grocers
The oft-repeated “fact” that Detroit lacks a grocery store owned or operated by a national chain reminds me of something a wise source once told me: “Statistics are like a bikini. They reveal what’s appealing but hide what’s relevant.” Thanks to Detroit blogger James Griffioen’s article at the Urbanophile website, the world has a better…
Cop fakes cop. WTF?
So says this Fox 2 news report. Seems Detroit cop James Markham enjoyed his off-duty hours last year patrolling local streets in his cop-like black Dodge Charger — one fitted with tinted windows and custom red and blue lights! — and meting out some kind of horseshit justice. Sheesh, where’s old Robert Urich when you…
Red Bull Emsee Battles From Detroit Now Online
You probably heard about the Eminem judged freestyle competitions at St. Andrews back in August, and hopefully, you were there. But in case not, here are a couple of Red Bull produced videos of the entire thing. What’s above is the final featuring FowL vs. DNA. That’s easily the best material. After the jump, check…
Dwele Plays on a Snow Day
But Dwele is not playing in the snow, he’s playing inside of his home studio where the multi-talented musician and vocalist loops a bunch of instruments and turns them into a Fela-esque beat. One thing I can say from my numerous chats with Dwele is that he can get down on drums, bass, guitar, piano,…
Desolation angel
They stagger in one by one — each with a story, each with a life of problems. First comes the prostitute. Then comes a drinker. Every swing of the door brings another desperate person from the street outside. People with addictions, with diseases, people living on the street. And people who suffer from none of…
Woodward axis
BERKLEY Amici’s Pizza and Living Room 3249 W. 12 Mile Rd.; 248-544-4100; amicispizza.com; $$: Pizza crust made with bran? Biodegradable dishes and soy candles? No TV? Gluten-free beer? Even a couple of organic vodkas? Amici’s manages both to be virtuous and to pull it off without a hint of self-righteousness. It is a bar, after…
Motor City Five
Lyrics Born The half-American, half-Japanese, fully Bay Area alliterative anomaly Lyrics Born recently dropped his best yet, As You Were; the Francis & the Lights ditty warmed our rap-loving loins. Here are the emcee’s five favorite wintertime listens. 5. Eminem’s Discorgraphy His shit is so gritty, cold, and vivid. I always picture him out there…
The Dirtbombs – Party Store
The Dirtbombs – Party Store In the Red Mick Collins has always seemed a little resentful of his rock ‘n’ roll hero status. As the Dirtbombs’ frontman and member of forefront garage-ists the Gories, Collins has found himself repeatedly downplaying his relationship with garage rock specifically, insisting his musical interests lie all across the map.…
Cheat Code
Venetica Rombax Games PC, Xbox, PS3 It’s been a while since we’ve seen a newly released, action-RPG for the console. In this day and age the PC dominates the RPG genre, leaving the rest of us with consoles to weep and mourn. I hadn’t heard of this title until I picked it up last week,…
The Illusionist
The Illusionist GRADE: B+ If you’re not familiar with the work of French director and actor Jacques Tati — and that’s probably the majority of those reading this review — then Sylvain Chomet’s (Triplets of Belleville) soulful and melancholy adaptation of an unmade Tati script is a lovingly animated homage to the silent film era.…
Couch Trip
The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff Intervision DVD (1973) Legendary (and ridiculed) Spanish low-rent director and lesbian vampire aficionado Jess Franco brilliantly decides to make his protagonist in this, the fifth sequel to 1961’s The Awful Dr. Orloff, Melissa (Monsterrat Prous), possessor of a most impressively heaving bosom, paralyzed from the waist down. Melissa spends…
Dark and stormy
Night Scales: A Fable for Klara K by Chris Tysh $14, 71 pp., United Artists Books Last April, Detroit poet and playwright Chris Tysh confronted us with her mother’s hopscotched Holocaust history in the play Night Scales. Written and performed in verse, the poetry itself is a central character — a time-traveling hypnotist. The play…
Deerhoof – Vs. Evil
Deerhoof – Vs. Evil Polyvinyl Records The San Francisco noise rockers of Deerhoof have gradually made an eccentricity-shedding move toward friendly accessibility, edging ever closer to mainstream acceptance; Vs. Evil, the band’s 11th (!) album, could be timed perfectly to become a breakthrough. The sophisticated rhythmic experiments and playfully chaotic production style remain, but there…
Smoke-a-doke
Here at the News Hits desk we receive a steady stream of press releases, most off which immediately get deposited in the recycling bin after getting a cursory glance. But we recently received a release that demanded our attention. Every once in a while someone or something has the ability to cause us to open…
The Decemberists – The King Is Dead
The Decemberists – The King Is Dead Rough Trade/Capitol The charm of the Decemberists’ literature class whimsy and scrappy barroom folk-rock became stretched on 2009’s outlandish The Hazards of Love, making its follow-up a pivotal moment. Rolling back song cycle ambitions with The King Is Dead, they offer their best since moving to Capitol, and…
Howl
Howl GRADE: B For as much lip service as the beat generation gets from the ink-stained hordes, try finding a beatnik costume on the shelves come Halloween time, when bellbottoms and Afros easily outnumber bongos and berets. The flower-power movement traipsed barefoot down the paths blazed by the beats, and stole much of the credit,…
Lemmy
Lemmy This new rockumentary on the life of the storied Motörhead frontman got a huge reception at last year’s SXSW, and it’s finally coming to Michigan. Conveniently, these two screenings are just a couple of weeks before Motörhead’s show in Royal Oak. Lemmy directors Greg Olliver and Wes Orshoski have, by all accounts, done a…
‘She’s twice my age’
Q: I’m from the other side of the country, but I’m sitting in my lover’s San Francisco apartment wondering what I’m doing. I flew out here to spend five glorious days with her. We connect sexually (she’s a Dom stone-butch top, I’m a queer femme sub), we connect intellectually, and we make each other laugh.…
The three-headed Salinger
J.D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski Random House, $27, 464 pp., hardcover There were, as it happens, three J.D. Salingers. There was the reclusive, apparently stingy Salinger who, beginning in the 1960s, shut himself and his manuscripts away from public view and retained lawyers in a failed effort to curate the world’s perception of…
Farewell
News Hits is sad to report that a good man has died. Leonard Grossman of Bloomfield Hills passed away Monday, one day shy of his 89th birthday. The official cause of death was respiratory failure, but he had suffered from Alzheimer’s the past few years, daughter Luanne Grossman tells us. A native Detroiter, Leonard Grossman…
Spun
FRIGHT FROM THE BINS The Ohman Brothers The Glorious Sound of Brass (1967) In the ’60s, everyone was horny for the sound of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Knockoff TJB albums sprung up everywhere, and now rummage sales are still vying for your confused south-of-the-border attention. "The Maraichi Brass (featuring jazz legend Chet Baker),…
Letters to the Editor
Truth a casualty The entire drug war becomes absurd when we realize that drug warriors are inveterate liars who have never told the truth about any drug. If they can get away with it, they’ll tell you that marijuana is a "death-dealing drug" — even though there has never been a marijuana caused death in…
Folk you!
The Avett Brothers At first glance, the Avett Brothers could be cut from the same fake indie-country mold as roughly contiguous bands, such as the fairly decent Blitzen Trapper and the mildly annoying Old Crow Medicine Show (whose ubiquitous "Wagon Wheel" is used by drunken rural college students and West Hollywood gym instructors to pretend…
Law and disorder
Even though it’s not an election year, when it comes to medical marijuana, you have to consider Michigan a battleground state. The battles over who, where, when and how medical marijuana can be used and distributed are being fought in the courts, and although some of them may be settled this year, it will probably…
Time keeper
Tell him he looks cool up there, up on the risers in the back row of the most prominent big band of the era, Wynton Marsalis’ Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Tell him he looks cool like, say, Papa Jo Jones with Basie or Sonny Greer with Duke. And he could give you some nonchalant…
Green it up
To Stanley "Skip" Pruss, the coming green energy transformation will cause a bigger societal upheaval than personal computers and the Internet. And Michigan businesses, he says, are starting to foster it. Their lithium-ion battery manufacturing plants, plans to construct wind turbine parts, and simmering efforts to capture wind for energy are part of the state’s…
Food Stuff
Hearts and flowers — Is it too early to talk about Valentine’s Day? The good people at BRIO Tuscan Grille are planning a Valentine’s Day menu with special cocktails for you and your special one. It will be available all weekend, Feb. 11-14, after 4 p.m. The Tuscan-themed fare will include primavera formaggio, beef medallions…
Glazed donuts
This past Saturday night, the Wonder Twins set off for a free night of Detroit rock with House Phone, the Hounds Below and Illy Mack in the new Magic Stick Lounge. In addition to great music, the twins also met the real Illy Mack, who plucked their souls from their bodies and embedded them into…
A statesman emerges
Joel Thurtell, the man who has done more than anyone to raise our consciousnesses about the troll who owns the Ambassador Bridge, was driving across Pennsylvania last week. He and his wife were going to visit their son in Connecticut (the boy got a job!), so he wasn’t paying attention to the new governor’s State…
Looking up
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds 115 Kercheval Ave., Grosse Pointe Farms 313-640-1700 Lucy used to be on the Hill, and now she’s in the sky. Both ways, her restaurant has remained a Grosse Pointe neighborhood favorite, filled with happy folks enjoying a fireplace and a pub-like atmosphere: lots of dark carved wood but plenty…
Throwback Tuesdays: Intimate Slum Village Footage with J. Dilla
Any fans of J. Dilla and the classic Slum Village trio of Baatin, T3, and Dilla will appreciate this recently unearthed clip. It’s been making the internet rounds for the past few days only but probably dates back to 2000 or 2001. I’ll let you know if I get more info, but for now, just…
Lady Te Says She’s the “Princess of Detroit”
If you’ve never heard of the fetching-but-tough 21-year-old Detroit rapper named Lady Te (and you won’t be alone if you haven’t), she’s hoping you’ll know her name by the end of this week. The 2008 Cass Tech graduate and current Wayne State student just released a new music video yesterday claiming that she’s the “Princess…
FowL’s New Music Video — “Ambassador Bridge”
I’m not sure how I missed this when it came out a couple of weeks ago but I’m just getting around to checking out FowL’s latest vid for the song “Ambassador Bridge.” Folks should remember FowL for outrapping all of his opponents in that Red Bull Freestyle Competition in front of local luminary Eminem several…
