Live Jazz Roundup
Metro Times jazz scribe Charles Latimer checks in with a roundup of last week’s jazz gigs.—JTL Don Mayberry 12/6/06 Jazz Forum Gross Pointe Unitarian Church Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan There have been some memorable concerts at the Jazz Forum concert series over the years, but Wednesday night’s set from bassist Don Mayberry and friends wasn’t…
Smoke Break, vol. 3
The latest Smoke Break is here, after a bit of foot-dragging due to Thanksgiving. It features MT features editor Brian Smith and I rocking a few minutes on Blowout X, which will overtake Hamtramck this coming March. Note: we’re accompanied by 1970s corporate foliage. JTL Watch previous Smoke Breaks: vol. 2 vol. 1
Put a cork in it, Zane!
Justin Timberlake is on a catwalk in the center of the Kodak Theatre, mugging to the vocal of “Sexyback” as the track booms from everywhere. Gisele Bundchen appears in panties and saffron gargoyle wings. And V-E-R-Y S-E-X-Y is spelled out in letters three stories high. But, you know, it isn’t. Really — and this is…
Cuckolding conundrums
Q: My boyfriend and I are currently doing the long-distance thing, as I’m finishing up some schooling. About two months ago during some dirty phone talk he said he’d been masturbating while thinking about me fucking another man while he watches. This was unexpected. In the past, I’d screwed around on boyfriends. He knows this,…
Letters to the Editor
Let Japan pay In his column “The Big Three are driving on ‘E'” (Metro Times, Nov. 29), Jack Lessenberry points to unfair competition and currency manipulation, among other factors that have hurt GM and Ford. Subsequent quotes from automotive journalist Jerry Flint imply that the U.S. government should do something about it. This would be…
The germinator
Wash those hands — she’s watching.
Good one gone
Former MT editor Kaplan wrote of early rap and the homeless.
One popular poplar
Judge Gwendolyn Gage (Patsy Hudson) has issues with her daughter’s romantic choices. Her oldest daughter, Lilly (Leah Smith), wants to marry a Republican, and the younger one, Laurel (Imani Turner) is a tree hugger, literally. Laurel is infatuated with the massive poplar that shades the alley behind their big city brownstone, showing some freaky affection…
School’s in … or out?
A cloud over special Detroit schools for dropouts.
Historic undertaking
No matter what you feel about undertaking, you must admit that it makes for a steady business. The firms that bury us tend to be almost immortally durable. For an example, look no further than Birmingham’s William R. Hamilton Company, one of the oldest going concerns in the state. How old? Real old. Like, when…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Critic vs. critic
It turns out Kingdom Come, Jay-Z’s big “I’m back” album, is his return to so-so-ness. The beats are mostly predictable and the rhymes are too safe; Jay settles for outside shots when he really should come strong to the hoop. There’s also the issue of his one-man genre: mogul-rap. How do you co-own an NBA…
Loud loonies of God’s creation
No, it’s not about inline skating or Moto X. Extreme metal is a catchall term for musical subgenres like death metal, black metal and doom metal, all of which descend from the pounding, screeching and punkish spirit of 1980s thrash. Death metal is accelerated thrash, singing swapped for guttural growls, with lyrical ideas straight from…
Generation Now
Editor’s note: Last month, at a Cranbrook Peace Foundation event honoring historian Howard Zinn, Berkley High School senior Emma Fialka-Feldman, of Huntington Woods, helped open the evening with an inspiring message we thought deserved a larger audience. “We are the generation that we have been waiting for.” That’s the slogan for Free The Children,…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Art Bar
This wistful poem shows how the familiar and the odd, the real and imaginary, exist side by side. A Midwestern father transforms himself from a staid businessman into a rock ‘n’ roll star, reclaiming a piece of his imaginary youth. In the end, it shows how fragile moments might be recovered to offer a glimpse…
Jonesin’ for eggnog?
Try some Burroughs and Disney for a holiday double-header.
Head Cheese
What’s best about a HafLife Head Cheese are the local quartet’s vice-checking stage handles. MD2020? Mogen David Winery resets are always welcome. (The brain pan-fried hangovers aren’t.) Handi J? That sounds like something that’s sold next to the Micro-Kitty Strap-On. Haflife are Detroit’s only gasmask-wearing, thrill-killing industrial hard rock heroes (and heroines), and they give…
Foam, fare & flair
Those who prefer the grape to the grain or even food to drink, should not be put off by the Detroit Beer Co.’s name. Like many “beer companies,” Detroit’s version on Broadway across from the Detroit Opera Theatre is more a full-service restaurant than a microbrewery, although it does offer a half-dozen unique quaffs. They…
Terrorist State: The USA
Here is something you need to think about today, and every day, as long as it continues: The United States is engaged in a totally immoral and evil war in Iraq, and has been for nearly four years. It is a war we cannot win, and have indeed already lost. The insurgents, who have so…
10 Items of less
It’s hard to remember the last time Morgan Freeman really acted. In recent years he seems content collecting checks for playing “the Morgan Freeman type,” a wise, grandfatherly presence, or that narrator with a comforting honey smooth baritone. So it’s easy to savor the irony that his liveliest performance in ages sees him simply playing…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 6 Don Mayberry Music There’s an informal backstage contest at the annual Detroit jazz fest to see which sideman can claim the most gigs. We haven’t seen final scores, but we know bassist Don Mayberry has ofttimes been a front-runner. So it’s notable when he plays front man, particularly in the good company…
New York Doll
VH1’s Behind The Music set the template for the rock documentary: hardscrabble rise leads to success too soon where tragic character flaws fuel fantastic excess and eventual ruin. Seattle filmmaker Greg Whiteley’s New York Doll works hard to avoid crusty rock clichés in telling the surprisingly affecting story of Arthur “Killer” Kane, the bassist for…
Frozen in time
When White Christmas hit theaters in 1954 as a semi-remake of Holiday Inn (the first movie in which Irving Berlin’s Oscar-winning holiday anthem appeared), it was almost immediately recognized as an American classic. And despite the fact that the film often gets panned by critics as fluffy, viewing audiences have made it a holiday perennial…
The Nativity Story
Mel Gibson may be preparing to unleash his Apocalypto on an unsuspecting public this Friday, but in some small way, he’s responsible for another sense-assaulting epic currently showing in theaters. Just in time for Christmas, The Nativity Story is a big-budget retelling of the struggles of the virgin mother Mary, the journeys of the Three…
Hardcover hero
To change the world is an audacious goal, but a small group of environmentally minded journalists in Seattle have bravely claimed that very objective as their own. Their Web site, WorldChanging.com, was started three years ago, motivated by writers just plain tired of reporting global gloom and doom scenarios that, while deserving of press, tend…
Remixed and Reimagined
Nina Simone’s stylized covers of everyone from Leonard Cohen to the Five Stairsteps made her pop’s first true remixer and re-interpreter, spanning the jazz era’s taste for revisiting standards and foreshadowing the irony of today’s pop world and its unlikely covers. On this disc of remixes and reimaginations, Simone’s aura is as much a reference…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Everybody … of all the columns in this series, this particular edition of Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout will remain with me the longest because … not only is MB96 the latest column to appear … but it’s the last column I’ll ever write. Thank you. Phil Ochs – Rehearsals For Retirement (A&M): Look inside this…
Montreal pure blood
Montreal’s Les Georges Leningrad works entirely in its own world, a place of crudely hand-drawn cover art, song titles that span four languages, lengthy musical romps that lead everywhere and nowhere, and an overall indifference to whatever may be happening on the outside. “Outside” being our own universe, of course. Fortunately, Sangue Puro, its second…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the ancient Hebrew text known as the Second Book of Enoch, the author describes his trip through the 10 heavens and a meeting with God. He’s surprised to find that hell is here, located in the northern regions of the third heaven. Why is this relevant to you? Because I…
Backslash
Weirdos with time on their hands lip-synching gleefully to their favorite songs is a tradition on YouTube, the video clip clearinghouse that seems to spawn a viral hit every five seconds. And buried inside this visual Internet landfill, underneath all the attempts at reformatted karaoke, are a series of lip-synch clips devoted to — what…
Minions Dominion
Trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis isn’t as well known as his brothers Wynton and Branford. But he’s just as accomplished, with a fine reputation as a sideman and production credits on albums from Nicholas Payton, the late Elvin Jones, Harry Connick Jr., and Marcus Roberts. Minions Dominion is Marsalis’ third disc as a leader. But his wealth…
Merchants of Death
No one escapes death alive. Unless, of course, they’re just visiting. Attended annually by some 3,000 morticians, embalmers and funerary exhibitors, the National Funeral Directors Association’s Convention and Expo is the largest congregation of deathcare professionals in the world. And while Michigan has been a hub for undertakers-turned-bureaucrats (its political graveyard boasts two former mayors,…
Motor City Cribs
Andrew W.K. comes home to Ann Arbor.
3.5MB Pop Shots
Opening with a plaintive set of piano chords that check both gospel and the blues in their tenor (so appropriate for a track about New Orleans), P-Gruv and McShyzt’s “Katrina’s Song (My Prayer)” reflects on the hurricane and its aftermath as the drama unfolded on the national news. “Aug. 29, 2005 — America was devastated…
Go west, young gal
Dear Detroit, We need to talk. We’ve had some pretty good times together throughout the years. But lately things have been different — the passion, magic and excitement that I felt when I first fell in love with you have been slowly dying for a long time. Neither of us are the same as when…
Heating up
Tucked away in a Dearborn office, Kathryn Savoie is preparing her arsenal to fight a global war on Michigan battlefields. She follows a leader who says he’ll do battle until the world changes. She’s had intensive training to help her take on the powerful forces that have plentiful economic and political resources — forces that…
Sexual healing
Has there ever been a more perfect, more tragic, more mythic fusion of actor and character than Louise Brooks’ Lulu in Pandora’s Box? The girl with the “black helmet” hairdo may not have been German, and she certainly didn’t go on a date with Jack the Ripper, but just about everything else in Brooks’ life…
