313.JAC UPSTAIRS AT JACOBY’S CLOSES
Another local venue bites the dust. After 12 years, the downtown rock ‘n’ roll club 313.jac, located upstairs at Jacoby’s restaurant and bar, is being shut down by the owners of the establishment. Promoters Stirling and Sue Static were asked to cease bookings there and the last shows at the venue will take place this…
Clint Puts “Gran Torino” on a Trailer
This past summer, Clint “Dirty Harry”, “The Man with No Name” Eastwood was in town shooting a little film called “Gran Torino”. Check out the trailer! As your good pal Corey Hall, Metro Times reviewer and “First Friday Film Forum” co-host, says it looks like “Grumpy Old Men” meets “The Enforcer”. “Gran Torino” opens limited…
SERVICES SCHEDULED FOR NATHANIEL MAYER
Legendary Detroit singer Nathaniel Mayer’s memorial service is slated for Tuesday, November 11th, at Swanson Funeral Home, 806 East Grand Avenue, Detroit 48207. Family hour will be from 12 noon until 1 p.m., and the funeral will start immediately afterwards at 1 p.m The telephone number for Swanson’s Funeral Home is 313- 923-1122. Donations can…
YEE-HAH!!!!!
What a great day for America and the future of this country. Wooo-hoooo!!! For the first time ever, every candidate and every proposal I voted for actually won! We even voted out that Supreme Court dude who made it so folks in Michigan can’t sue the pharmaceutical companies (even if they have flipper babies) or…
Obama: The victory rally
A joyous crowd cheers President-elect Obama at the Renaissance Center’s ballroom. In Phoenix, Sen. John McCain had finished his concession speech. In the streets of downtown Detroit, the first notes of the celebratory car-horn symphony were being honked and tooted. Up several floors in the ballroom rented by the Democratic Party, lots of folks, including…
Growing our city
The Greening of Detroit’s Ashley Atkinson on urban farming
Night and Day
WEDNESAY-SUNDAY • 5-9 AVENUE Q CAN YOU TELL ME HOW TO GET TO … Childhood is rife with problems — sibling rivalry, overprotective parents, unfair teachers — that an abundance of pedantic TV shows teach kids how to navigate smoothly in just 30 minutes, complete with heartwarming hugs and schmaltzy music. But what about adults?…
What’s up with that steam?
It is an iconic image, one that can convey the sense of the industry and grit and struggle that lies at the heart of Detroit: Plumes of gray steam billowing from openings in steel manhole covers placed along the city’s streets and sidewalks, a sultry mist that conjures the possibility of a netherworld where mysterious…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
The son of ‘Big T’
Saxophonist Joe Lovano is a workhorse indeed. He’s just released Symphonica, his 27th album as a leader and his 20th for the Blue Note label. This year he’s co-led the SF Jazz Collective and Tenor Summit, along with saxophonists David Leibman and Ravi Coltrane. His touring with his new band has taken him as far…
Soul survivor
Samuel Jackson insists he’s never been much of a badass motherfucker, but that doesn’t stop him from playing one on the big screen. Over and over and over. Hell, he’s already played three BAMFs this year in Lakeview Terrace, Jumpers and (yes, it was a cameo) Iron Man. On Friday, he adds a fourth to…
The dead zone
Death brought the birth of this little west side enterprise. And death sustains it. Bryant’s consists of little more than a crumbling old house and a man’s little home next to it. After his wife of three decades died five years ago, owner Richard Bryant, 62, turned the couple’s home into a resale shop. When…
Shades of Gray
After 13 years of thrilling crowds throughout the Detroit area, garage-punks Grayling are calling it quits. The news comes hot on the heels of their fourth album, Spilling Over, a nine-song set released last month. Still, according to vocalist and guitarist Jarrod Wolny, this is a time for celebration and not mourning. Indeed, he’s never…
Got Milk?
On street corners and message boards around the world, rap fans have hailed 2008 as the year that Michigan’s underground hip-hop scene went “overground.” With some artists’ albums finding success on flagship indie labels (i.e., Guilty Simpson’s Ode to the Ghetto on Stones Throw Records and Buff1’s There’s Only One on A-Side Worldwide), others landing…
Dogged by doubts
Does my boyfriend really want me to get it on with a canine?
Cinema gabfest
Join WDET’s Rob St. Mary and Metro Times critics Jeff Meyers and Corey Hall for their monthly gabfest about cinema, on the big screen, on DVD and on the streets of Michigan. The on-air discussions will include talk of current and upcoming political films including Oliver Stone’s loved and hated W. The critics will also…
Polling numbers
Could prime-time TV be mirroring the U.S. economy? As the fall season drifts into its critical November ratings sweeps, we have been exposed to wild fluctuations — especially in terms of quality programs — as well as sudden layoffs and unexpected declines by proven winners. With few exceptions, taking stock of the current TV market…
Now: The hard part
Whoever has won, the job remains the same
On the Download
So, I was surfing around looking for something to match my shitty mind state the other day and I happened upon the Bulb Records website. In case you don’t have a way-back machine on your brain, Bulb Records was the genius Ann Arbor label that launched the careers of many a sub-underground legend. Among those…
Motor City Cribs
Chris Koltay’s badass Michigan Avenue studio-home
Scrap city
Wait. Don’t throw that away. A weathered matchbook, a handful of handbills, rubber collected from the freeway, and fabric swatches are the stuff of inventive creations for the 11 local artists in Soft Scrap: A Show of Scrap-inspired Art. Mary Carolan, an artist and Michigan native with a BFA in architecture from Miami University in…
Safe American home
Teen threatened with dangerous return to Togo now a proud American
Take charge
Detroit’s problems demand more than leaders, they demand citizen action
Letters to the Editor
Author, author! Regarding your cover story (“The guy who isn’t Elmore Leonard,” Oct. 29), not only is Loren Estleman a superb writer, he is a captivating raconteur and, in a business full of nice people, he is one of the very nicest — a generous, down-to-earth, good-humored man, and one of the world’s most civilized…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Who is burnin’ Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #191! SIZZLING REISSUES OF THE YEAR: Creedence Clearwater Revival – The 40th Anniversary Editions: Creedence Clearwater Revival; Bayou Country; Green River; Willy and the Poor Boys; Cosmo’s Factory; Pendulum (Fantasy) :: All six of these watershed recordings are so timeless and transcendent that they defy definition. Not only…
So goes Guantanamo
Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham: We all share blame for Guantánamo
Curtains
Along a desolate-looking strip of Michigan Avenue, off the beaten path of nearby Corktown, along a strip of industrial buildings, sits the Zeitgeist — a gallery and performance space that, for the last 11 years, has been a mecca for the aesthetically avant-garde, the challenging and the underground in art and theater. During those years,…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Only by the Night
If Kings of Leon were a book, Flannery O’Connor would be the author. The Nashville-based quartet has a compelling Southern Gothic sensibility — that is, a dark, rough-hewn dirtiness punctuated by firefly points of musical and lyrical beauty and melancholia. Oddly, it’s the Kings of Leon’s least-compelling album to date that’s finally thrust them into…
J.D. Souther comes back
Though he’s one of the most underrated composers of the rock era, J.D. Souther’s songs — especially those he wrote for the Eagles — are known and loved by people who may have never heard his name. A 24-year absence from the music business didn’t help, but the Detroit native is back with a new…
Saloon style
BlackFinn began its corporate life in 1994 as an Irish pub, but the only remnant of those origins is the Guinness sauce and marinade that appear on several dishes and the Bailey’s Irish Cream that enhances a mousse. Referred to instead as “an American saloon,” the pub theme is emphasized on the walls in vintage…
Changeling
In a story that feels like James Ellroy should have written it, Angelina Jolie plays Christine Collins, a 1920s single mom and phone-company supervisor in Los Angeles who comes home late from work one evening and discovers her 9-year-old son Walter is missing. At first, the police are indifferent, but suffering from mounting public distrust,…
RockNRolla
British mobsters and Russian gangsters come to unpleasant blows when a sexy accountant (Thandie Newton) recruits a trio of amiable thugs to intercept their money. Oh, and there’s also Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell), a violent, junkie rock star who’s the adopted son of limey mob boss Lenny (played with scenery-chewing panache by Tom Wilkinson). You’d…
Dirt Don’t Hurt
If, upon hearing Dirt Don’t Hurt, you refuse to believe that a Brit made this album, the denial is completely understandable. Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs clang, stomp and clatter their way through 14 old-timey, country-tinged, blues-based nuggets here like a couple of authentically backwoods Georgia peaches. But, in fact, only the “Brokeoffs” part of…
Pure genius
The prerelease announcement of the eighth in the official Dylan “Bootleg” series — this one covering 1989 to 2006, from Oh Mercy through Modern Times — was met with perhaps a tad less excitement and anticipation than the previous seven. Not that the bard hasn’t produced stellar material during the last two decades. Indeed, Modern…
Happy-Go-Lucky
Director Mike Leigh wants to test how cynical you really are, with Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a schoolteacher who’s defiantly free-spirited and optimistic. Known for his rigorous explorations of despair and kitchen-sink realism, Leigh’s deceptively sunny Happy-Go-Lucky takes its relentlessly upbeat protagonist seriously, asking whether a person can navigate the mean world with an open and…
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) take a break from their financial woes at a 10th high school reunion, where in a perverse inside joke on the geek community, Smith casts Superman Brandon Routh as Miri’s old crush, Bobby, who is not-so-secretly gay. The cat gets let out of the closet by his hilariously…
The Human Condition
Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi’s blunt and beautiful, black-and-white epic follows the metamorphosis of Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), a Japanese pacifist living in occupied China during the final years of World War II, adapting Jumpei Gomikawa’s six-volume novel into a trilogy of films made between 1959 and 1961. Part 1, No Greater Love, finds Kaji making a…
Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
The infamous ordeal of 16 Uruguayan soccer players who resorted to cannibalism in order to survive has already been chronicled in journalist Piers Paul’s best-selling Alive, its mediocre 1993 Hollywood adaptation (starring Ethan Hawke) and the 2006 survivor memoir Miracle in the Andes. Still, Arijon saw an opportunity to contextualize the event in broader social…
I.O.U.S.A.
The devoted policy wonks of I.O.U.S.A. explain how we’re a nation as addicted to easy fixes as to easy credit, and why tackling something as overwhelming as the national debt is going to take a major adjustment in not just actions, but attitude. That’s the concern of the subdued alarmists of I.O.U.S.A., led by U.S.…
I’M DAVID BYRNE AND I APPROVED THIS MESSAGE
Advertising dude Jim Cohen from downstairs sent this my way, suggesting it would be a good election day post. Frankly, I don’t remember ever hearing that Mr. Byrne isn’t an American citizen. If I did, I forgot. You do learn something new almost every day. I Can’t, But You Can Pardon the bulk mailing. I…
