Hard-bop redux? Yes, please.
Another live set review from our man on the scene Charles Latimer. Young local players coming up and sounding like the hard bop pros of old? Yes, please.–JTL The Thaddeus Dixon Quartet 1/12/06 Baker’s Keyboard Lounge In their suits and neckties, the Thaddeus Dixon Quartet looked professional and sounded polished like the hard bop bands…
Smoke Break, vol. 7: Dance Dance Revolution
In this segment, Brian and I bring the pain on Campus Martius, and try to figure out why energetic poppin’ and lockin’ is so important to the kids. Is dancing really that great? JTL Watch all the Smoke Breaks here. As always, Smoke Break is brought to you with the help of the crack technicians…
Cages, camp & Camus
Women’s Prison The Global Film Initiative If you could please put your puerile mind on hold for a second, this is not the sort of women-in-prison movie that American audiences have become inured to thanks to the likes of Reform School Girls and Women in Cages. Crafted as a metaphorical statement on women’s life in…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Intervention needed, stat
Imagine a mentally ill person who persists in jamming a fork into an electrical outlet, badly burning himself. “Next time it will feel good!” he keeps saying. Finally, after getting out of the ol’ bughouse (and out of restraints) he calls a press conference to say he has changed. “Tomorrow I will jam a fork…
More than mugs
Like an upscale Ruby Tuesday’s or Applebee’s, the tavern serves sourdough bread and housemade desserts. All entrées also come with a soup or salad, adding to the affordability of the place. But when the menu yields to the public’s apparent demand to throw everything the chef can think of between slices of bread, the results…
Seashell sanctuary
“So, um … what’s your favorite place in Detroit?” For a reporter, that’s an embarrassingly lame way to start an interview. But honestly, where else, besides with the doll, do you begin when you’re interviewing a little kid? My question so happened to be the right one, because the girl’s one-word answer had real observational…
Butt funk, c’mon
Downtown Brown’s favorite fantasy burger would have to be the one laced with household chemicals, because for all of the fast-food fetishism on I Love Burgers, its latest, what this album really does is foam at the mouth. The Detroit quartet’s manic chord changes and stylistic switch-ups blister and pop like shrink wrap held to…
Cockeyed & cuddly
I know artists don’t keep bankers’ hours, but the point is hammered home during a 3 a.m. chat session, seated Indian-style on a vintage Star Wars sleeping bag on the floor of Mark Heggie’s home studio in Warren. We’re surrounded by a cheerfully cockeyed set of new Heggie pieces, in various stages of completion, all…
Wind-Up Canary
Growing up in the tiny fishing village of Sciutate, Mass., Casey Dienel learned to play piano, and likely explored the picaresque nooks and crannies of her neighborhood. Nowadays based in Brooklyn, the singer-songwriter pulls from that idyllic upbringing for Wind-Up Canary, her debut for Hush, and even brings along some of her New England Conservatory…
Fighting the Goodman fight
Bill Goodman is returning home but that doesn’t mean he’s giving up the fight. The life work of this native Detroiter and son of one of the city’s legal pioneers has included high-profile and far-reaching cases that have helped maintain civil rights and constitutional liberties for countless Americans and others. “I’ll be back in court…
The Scott Gwinnell Trio
Scott Gwinnell composes some amazing jazz music for his popular big band the Scott Gwinnell Jazz Orchestra, which can be heard on the 2002 album Basement Vibe and Wednesdays at Cliff Bell’s, so whenever the pianist drops a new album, you expect a handful of original compositions. That’s not the case for Gwinnell’s first trio…
Night and Day
Thursday • 11 THC Comedy Tour COMEDY Originally modeled after Playboy, the pro-cannabis mag High Times has seen a few incarnations. And whether in the throes of lefty politicking courtesy of one-time editor John Mailer (Norman’s kid) or tongue-in-cheek stoner rhetoric, this mag has always received mad props from the counterculture. But being cool to…
Immer 2
Michael Mayer is techno’s tasteful tastemaker. As one-third owner of Cologne-based Kompakt Records, he wields extraordinary power in the electronic music biosphere. And although he has his detractors, most critics and the techno illuminati think Mayer is a positive force. As a DJ-producer, he avoids technical flamboyance and stresses his selections’ inherent quality, which remains…
MEGA mistake?
Study says state tax credits drive sprawl.
No Future for you
Children of Men is like Sex Pistols lyrics come to life, with war, poverty, disease and racism choking the life out of a London on fascist lockdown, in a world with literally “no future.” The gimmick here is that for unknown reasons the whole globe has gone infertile, with no new births in 18 years,…
Booby reprise
John Conyers responds to alleged violations.
Notes on a Scandal
Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett go head-to-head in a sordid tale of blackmail, underage affairs, latent-lesbian stalking and gallons of streaming mascara. Dench plays Barbara, a self-proclaimed “battle ax” teaching at one of the worst secondary schools in London. Her life of solitude and misery is disrupted by the impetuous new art teacher Sheba (Blanchett),…
Bits & pieces
Honoring Bishop Gumbleton and helping vets.
Letters from Iwo Jima
This film about Iwo Jima, a companion piece to “Flags of our Fathers,” takes the Japanese perspective on the gruesome 36-day battle to take a tiny pacific island, where 7,000 American and more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers perished. Ken Watanabe is Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the brilliant commanding officer whose innovative tactics are somewhat at…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Let’s get a few things straight, Aries. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Facts are in the eye of the beholder. Logic is the opiate of those who are afraid of their feelings. Sorry if that sounds anti-intellectual. I’m exaggerating slightly in hopes of encouraging the free flow of your naked…
From Dreamgirls to city schools
That eternally brand-new beat is again calling out all around the world. The beat, of course, is Motown, and it’s burning up screens with Dreamgirls, a musical razzle-dazzle of truths, half-truths, truisms, unsubstantiated rumors, myths and plain-ol’ fictions loosely based on the house that Berry built. It’s told with good (and sometimes great) music. Moreover,…
Freedom Writers
This story is based on Erin Gruwell’s efforts to inspire a Long Beach, Calif., classroom of students, just after Rodney King went down. The first-time English teacher enters the school with high hopes of really reaching the students, but she meets administration naysayers and resistant students at every turn. She perseveres, however, and through journaling…
Lowering the barre
For several years I was happy to spend much of my small salary from teaching art history on buying the work of local artists and supporting the Detroit Institute of Arts and its oldest auxiliary, Friends of Modern Art. For my husband and me, a wonderful chunk our social life revolved around FMA events: too…
Head Cheese
Not only does Emily Haines not fit the model, she doesn’t want it. Knives Don’t Have Your Back, the first solo album from the Metric vocalist and member of Toronto’s Broken Social Scene, wears its piano hush like so many singer-songwriter albums. Its melodies are elegant sketches, perfect for exploring what gentle souls do after…
Miss Potter
The story of children’s author Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit etc.), this Victorian-era biopic is perfectly likeable but ultimately unnecessary. Surprisingly, gifted Australian director Chris Noonan spent an entire decade choosing it as follow up to his whimsically sublime Babe. The well-heeled daughter of a genial father and avariciously social-climbing mother, Potter (Zellweger) is a 30-year-old…
Free France
There’s a sublimely hilarious moment in the computer-animated hit Flushed Away where the amphibian assassin Le Frog (voiced by Jean Reno) accepts his mission with the declaration, “We leave immediately!” When his Franco-henchman queries, “What about lunch?” Le Frog announces, “We leave in five hours!” Could this casual commitment to hedonistic sensuality be the reason…
Motor City Cribs
Pastor Robert Jones’ small church has a big sound.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) is orphaned in grimy 18th century Paris after his fishmonger mother is hanged for trying to dispose of him. And Grenouille would be forever lost in the rotting underbelly of society if not for his amazing nose. A chance encounter leads to an apprenticeship with struggling perfumer Baldini (a hammy Dustin…
FOX gives chase
In recent years, as predictable as that first bracing blast of winter, every January the Little Network that Rupert Built undergoes an amazing metamorphosis. FOX (Channel 2 in Detroit) slumbers in the national ratings each September through December, and this season the snooze left it looking nearly comatose. Its medical drama House, led by the…
Letters to the Editor
Rock bottom I was encouraged to see you award Kid Rock “Boob of the Year” (Metro Times, Jan. 3). Beyond his personal missteps, I’ve always been galled by his phony patriotism. His early support of the Iraq debacle helped, in a small way, to send our soldiers there. If you really support the troops, don’t…
3.5MB Pop Shots
(myspace.com/friendsofdenniswilson) Is it possible local freaks Friends of Dennis Wilson actually recorded “Flowermaze” inside the cavernous fantasy tunnel that connects the drug habits of the 1960s to those of 1984 and Creation Records? Because that’s what this track sounds like. Echoes stir more echoes, and clouds of static obscure the weird whispered vocals, and just…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
A new year! A new beginning! The road to MB200 starts here! Everything seems to be ready, are you ready? Well he’s done the West Coast and he’s written for all sorts of places in America and now he’s in Detroit. For the first time in seven days, the greatest rock ‘n’ roll column in…
American Life in Poetry
Newborns begin life as natural poets, loving the sound of their own gurgles and coos. And, with the encouragement of parents and teachers, children can continue to write and enjoy poetry into their high school years and beyond. A group of elementary students in Detroit, Michigan, wrote poetry on the subject of what seashells might…
Questions about cuckolds
Q: I have some concerns about my cuckold fetish that you did not address in a recent column on the subject. Aspects of my particular fantasy are prevalent among people with this type of fetish, and they cause me guilt and shame. I am white and all of my cuckold fantasies involve my future wife…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
More than a feeling
Back in the 1970s, the members of Boston famously built their own basement studio. They wanted to freak out on their own shit, obsess over every nuance, write and rewrite every passage, and finally discover the ultimate sequencing for each song on their album. That was the only way they’d know that it was perfect.…
Pagliacci in the hood
Metro Times: We keep looking at Motown from different perspectives. There’s the "Berry Gordy’s production line" angle. The "ambitious stars" angle. The "background musicians" angle. Now your book is putting the focus on the lyrics. Herb Jordan: When I spoke with Smokey Robinson as I was putting the book together, he said, "I just want…
Something happened on the way to Sweden.
I won’t forgive Phil Collins for his role in applying a general anesthesia to the pop charts of the 1980s. No Jacket Required-era hits like “One More Night” and “Don’t Lose My Number” have all the staying power of Synsonics Drums, and the sickening balladry of “Another Day in Paradise” and “I Wish it Would…
Cheeze and Crackers.
“The king of suburbia;” “ghetto revival;” “I’m not a rapper, I’m an entity” — John Brown definitely made the kookiest impression during last night’s premiere of The White Rapper Show, the reality show collabo from Ego Trip, VH1, and show host (and ousted JLB morning guy) MC Serch. Everything Brown said was cryptic and “bonk-hairs,”…
