Cover Story
Dan Savage: All-American
Dan Savage would be the first to admit that, when he started his column 20-plus years ago, he had no idea he’d be where he is today. Roving the country doing speaking tours, maintaining a weekly schedule with his podcast, author of several books, writer of opinion columns for such newspapers as The New York…
City Slang: New J Dilla releases
Delicious Vinyl and Yancey Media Group have announced the joint release of records from J Dilla’s Lost Souls archive. A statement says, “Storied hip-hop label Delicious Vinyl (Tone-Loc, Young MC, The Pharcyde) proudly announces a new partnership with Yancey Media Group, the family-operated company administering the catalog of late, great producer James Yancey aka Jay…
Twilight: Breaking Dawn — Part 2
Twilight: Breaking Dawn — Part 2 | C- For about 15 minutes, near the end of Twilight — Breaking Dawn — Part 2, I found myself thinking, "I can’t believe it, they’re finally going to introduce some real peril, some honest to goodness dramatic stakes." After all, when you see prominent supporting characters and sneering…
Chasing Ice
Chasing Ice | B+ Climate change skepticism stubbornly persists in certain quarters, despite mountains of rapidly growing scientific data, largely because holdouts refuse to see the world as it, only as they wish to understand it to fit their political agendas. This alarm bell polemic of a documentary presents visual proof compelling enough to…
Starlet
Starlet | A- Here’s a sweetly effecting, and weirdly endearing story of inter-generational friendship set against the seediest of backdrops; the San Fernando Valley. This vast expanse of mini-malls, drive-thru joints and modest stucco-walled homes, is generally well off those maps of stars homes, but it is home to the adult video industry, or at…
Burn
Burn | B+ There is a point in Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez’s excellent documentary Burn when one of their subjects describes Detroit as "Katrina without the hurricane.” When a city loses more than half its population and just as many businesses over 50 years, there’s a lot of empty real estate. And beyond the…
City Slang: New Striho video
Local songstress Carolyn Striho has posted a new video for her single “Promised Land”. The video can be seen here. In addition, the Striho camp says that, “We will be appearing on 12.12.12 at North Star Media’s showcase at UDetroit Cafe – a terrific live venue, studio, restaurant and bar in Detroit’s Harmonie Park. North…
City Slang: Alice joined onstage by Depp
Alice Cooper was joined onstage in LA by actor Johnny Depp. Weird, but totally true. The show, part of the “Raise the Dead” tour, took place at the Orpheum Theater in LA on Thursday evening. According to a press release, Depp helped the band rip through covers of The Doors’ “Break On Through (To The…
SubSprawl /-/ Mittenfest /-/ Belle Ghoul
Suburban Sprawl music, a local label perennially propping the cutting edge of Michigan’s indie-pop masses, always delivers around the Holidays… As punctual as St. Nick himself…via their Holiday Samplers…Herding bands must at least be as trying as herding flying reindeer, but each year, SubSprawl’s able to curate two dozen (or more) bands, songwriters and special one-time collaborative…
City Slang: Stirling’s birthday bash
A host of Detroit musos will be turning out to help local aficionado, promoter and all-round good guy Stirling celebrate his birthday on Friday, December 14, at the Corktown Tavern in Detroit. According to a statement, “Some of Detroit’s finest rockers are getting together to celebrate local music/club promoter/rock aficionado Stirlings’ birthday. Stirling has been…
The House I Live In
The House I Live In | B+ Unlike his last film, Why We Fight, which examined America’s industrial-military complex, Eugene Jarecki’s absorbing The House I Live In is not a political indictment disguised as reportage but rather a comprehensive and mostly journalistic examination of our country’s failed War on Drugs. That campaign moniker was…
Vision Crimes
Child Bite’s searing timbres and bent-up tones are wrought and wound-together with a delirious delicacy, as though each distorted riff and guitar-neck creeping crescendo were pliant copper-wiring tempered to their signature noise-rock deformities, to the point-of but just-barely-not, snapping apart at each swift hook. Gnarly, knotty, hair-raising and hectic, but still structured: that’s Child…
City Slang: The Sights have a Christmas Waltz
The Sights will be having a Christmas Waltz in the Magic Stick Lounge on Thursday, December 27. According to a statement, “It started as a concert idea. It’s becoming a celebration. Be a part of that legend. The Last Waltz was a concert by The Band, held on Thanksgiving Day in 1976. The Last Waltz…
You Should Be a Fan: Cold Men Young
Fire on the streets…Fire on the dancefloor…Fire on the In-ter-net ~ Real Rap uproar Burnin… …and Kopelli, Blaksmith, Mic Write and Phenom are fanning the flames to charm some burgeoning fan-dom for their new album… You Should Be A Fan… Counted among the Fans of this rousing rock-kicked R&B-grooved rap collective are many notable…
Revoir – Wondertheist
Heart-on-the-sleeve synth-pop sets a dazzling rollick throughout this E.P. – danceable without raving, more of a musing sort of roll… Local singer/songwriter Jason Revoir refines his keenness for cool, gleaming shimmies, all-shimmered-up here on his 2nd LP (multi-insrumentalist John Dion). Beatific blips, syrupy bass blushes and various other mellifluous meteorite showerers of reverb-shushed timbres and dreamy delay-spurted drums. But…
City Slang: Black Christmas is coming
The Majestic complex will host a punk extravaganza on Friday, December 28, called Black Christmas. The bill features some of our best local contemporary punk bands, including the Suicide Machines, Grand Rapids, Koffin Kats, Golden Torso, PT’s Revenge, and Snakewing. Also on the bill are Continental, Kid Brother Collective, the Swellers, We Are the Union,…
Council’s grape expectations
The wild ride that is Detroit politics hit full throttle last week, careening from the bizarre to the stupefying before slamming headfirst into a wall of pure insanity. We’re talking about the marathon session City Council held two days before Thanksgiving. The craziness started from the get-go, with people arriving more than an hour early,…
Heavy rock business plan
The doorbell rings on the other end of the line. Scott Hamilton — head of the nearly 20-year-old Royal Oak-based heavyweight, heavy rock label Small Stone — excuses himself from the conversation. "That was a neighbor bringing back a cooler," he reports. "I loaned it out loaded with Pumpkin Ale. It came back empty. Naturally,"…
Mars rising
Michael Mars & the God Particle play Friday, Nov. 30, at the M&M Sports Bar (13887 Conant, Detroit; 313-455-7482) with Electric Corpse, Julian Paaige, and Bloodz.. When Marco Polio & the New Vaccines burst onto the Detroit music scene a half-decade ago, they confused and confounded as much as they excited and enthralled. When we…
Going it alone
Q: What’s the etiquette around (nonpenetrative) sex toys after a breakup? I bought restraints, a blindfold, etc. for my ex, and she left them behind. It seems a waste to throw them away. Is it a bit squicky for a guy to bust out an arsenal of old toys when a new gal comes along?…
Jim Crow’s drug war
Attorney Michelle Alexander has been shaking things up across the nation over the past two years, yet you may not have heard of her. Her book, The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, takes on race and the War on Drugs in ways few people would dare to approach. The point…
Saving Detroit
Detroit, contrary to what some think who never come here, is anything but dead. Last Saturday we went down to Eastern Market for lunch and found that, even in the blustery cold, there was an hour wait to get into Vivio’s, and a line even longer for the Russell Street Deli. So we fled to…
A bad dad’s dead
Michael Kimball’s new novel, Big Ray, is a slim book about a big subject: fathers and sons and death. Big Ray, the father at the heart of this novel, is a big man, a fat man; "morbidly obese always seems the right term for my father," the narrator’s son tells us, and he is as…
Bridge over troubled cliques?
The Dead Letter Label Showcase is 9 p.m. Nov. 30, at P.J.’s Lager House (1254 Michigan Ave., Detroit; 313-961-4668; pjslagerhouse.com) with McBee and Frye both celebrating birthdays. Featured bands will include Carjack, Crappy Future, Superbomb, the Disinformants, Future Slang, Eugene Strobe, Jeff Jablonski and Mike Anton; $6 admission at pjslagerhouse.com and deadletterofficemi.bandcamp.com. Detroit needs another…
Hitchcock was ‘the ultimate voyeur’
As any artist will tell you, reinvention isn’t easy. For filmmaker Sacha Gervasi it’s been both an inevitable professional trajectory and a personal test of will. The one-time assistant to British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes has made several unlikely creative leaps over the last two decades. For a brief while, Gervasi was a fill-in drummer…
Food Stuff
Epicurean heights The Epicurean group has announced a top-flight wine dinner for this week at its newest outpost, Gastronomy. The six-course meal features pours from the highly rated Spire Collection, which includes such reds as Cardinale and Vérité, wines that regularly flirt with a 100-point rating. The event will feature not only Gastronomy’s chef Adam…
Modern Greek
Santorini Estiatorio 501 Monroe St., Detroit 313-962-9366 santorinidetroit.com Lunch, dinner and drinks: $10-$30 The last place you might think to look for a new Greek restaurant is Greektown, where, in the last several years, many of them have closed, with decidedly non-Greek chain restaurants opening along Monroe. Leave it to the owners of the pan-global…
City Slang: Weekly music review roundup
Remember – if you send it, it will get reviewed. That’s the City Slang promise. It doesn’t matter what genre the music is – as long as it has a Metro Detroit connection, it’ll get in. Preferably, we’d like to concentrate on new releases but, while we’re getting warmed up here, feel free to send…
