Blowout Update!
Blowout tickets are on sale now at ticketweb.com! Don’t waste precious Blowout time standing in line at the Majestic or at the Knights of Columbus. Buy them through ticketweb and you can pick them up fast. Metro Times is happy to announce that the Ypsilanti-based Lightning Love will be featured on FOX2 on Sunday, March…
Talking shield law
Without a journalist revealing who leaked a CIA operative’s identity, Scooter Libby wouldn’t have been convicted of four counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators. And aren’t such cases — this one involving the former aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney — a compelling argument against journalists invoking their privilege not…
Free Money for Artists!
With the Big Three tanking and the economy in a shambles, metro Detroit artists find themselves in an increasingly tight spot. If they have day jobs, they’re wary of layoffs; if they make a living selling their work, they’re a little jittery about their patrons’ purse strings in these lean times. Which is why the…
Green Italian
Pizza crust made with bran, biodegradable dishes and soy candles, no smoking, no TV, 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 all, and it’s hard to say whether patrons are more interested in the…
Jimbo’s circus
We step down a small set of stairs and each creaks beneath the feet. Making our way past Kafka and Castaneda, who keep company with spines that read of psychic powers, of mushrooms and fungi, and Men, Ships & the Sea, my mutton-chopped host points out an essential member of his assembly: Dungeons & Dragons.…
‘Mother of the band’
A few Saturdays ago, bassist Marion Hayden’s 12-year-old son Michael sat at a desktop computer in the combination rehearsal space and living room of the family’s arts and crafts-style home in Highland Park. Hayden’s upright acoustic bass was propped against a wall next to a framed drawing of Harriet Tubman. While his mom made coffee,…
Sugar, sugar
As we gear up for another Paczki Day — our local Polish version of Mardi Gras, this Tuesday, Feb. 24 — we thought it best to provide a listing of Eastern European restaurants. Some will serve the fabled paczek, some will not, but all will serve the sort of hearty, calories-be-damned fare that’s a perfect…
Night and Day
THURSDAY • 19 BEN KWELLER POP-PRODDING PRODIGY Since his 2002 debut, Sha Sha, Ben Kweller has gained a reputation as a precocious indie kid able to fashion endlessly exuberant and seemingly effortless hook-heavy pop treats that are impossible not to adore. Now on his fourth release, Changing Horses, the Texas native has traded in the…
No heroics, please
It’s a damn-near-balmy Thursday night (for February, in Detroit), and 50 or so folks have gathered at Oak Park’s Book Beat. They’re seated on folding chairs before a lanky, bespectacled, clean-headed, soft-spoken dude in an Army surplus jacket and jeans who’s suddenly been transformed into an elderly woman whipping her wig out the window from…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Couch Trip
A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich Koch Vision Alice Childress took it upon herself to write the screenplay for the 1978 cinematic adaptation of her 1973 young adult novel, and it’s easy to understand why. That book, of course, inculcated thousands of white, suburban high schoolers with the notion that their urban black peers…
Ballad of a thin man
The Ypsilanti-Ann Arbor area has such a glut of talent loosely defined by the term "folk" that it almost seems unfair to expect the casual listener to keep everybody in that particular scene straight. Still, Matt Jones’ debut album is certainly a standout among his talented brothers and sisters in arms. The album is defined…
Woodland Scenics
Woodland Scenics plays like the still warm body of a great art-rock dinosaur. The album is the only studio document from the short-lived Ann Arbor band, Elm From Arm, a collaboration between a previously instrumental four-piece and area folk mainstay Matt Jones. For anyone familiar with Jones’ solo material, this project’s sound is far from…
The International
You gotta hand it to Hollywood, they sure know how to capitalize on the public’s anxiety. Serial killers and scarf-wearing terrorists are now officially passé. It’s time to focus on the truly evil villains of our time: bankers. In the tradition of ’70s paranoid thrillers like The Parallex View and Three Days of the Condor…
Class war
You’d think a film giving away the outcome of its conflict in the title couldn’t build suspense. But that’s exactly what Kevin Rafferty’s entertaining, no-frills documentary does. A generational anecdote that celebrates Ivy League folklore, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 reels you into its 1968 football faceoff while spooning on a pile of cultural and political…
Friday the 13th
The nearly indestructible and hockey mask- wearing killer, Jason Voorhees, is back to his tricks, plodding about the woods, sharpening knives, ready to make teen tartar of any nit unfortunate enough to stumble into his path. The updated freak’s a bit smarter than before, setting traps and devising schemes in his underground lair, though the…
Motor City Rides
Lightning Love fits it all in an Escort
The Leisure Seeker
The Leisure Seeker follows the odyssey of the elderly Detroit (technically, Madison Heights) couple on a last fling in their RV, an ultimate road trip from Detroit to Disneyland along Route 66. Ella’s body is cancer-stricken, but her mind remains sharp (save for when she’s hopped up on “the dope,” as she affectionately refers to…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Speedy, sassy summaries of music of note
Shine on
Time stands still inside a little building on a dead street.Red’s Jazz Shoe Shine Parlor is a living museum of an old way of life, a relic from a bygone era when the neighborhood it’s in was a city within the city, and Detroit movers and shakers got together and told stories over a shoe…
On the Download
In case you’re not one of the several dozen or so folks who read the local music blog circuit over your morning (or afternoon) cup of coffee — or over your late night fifth beer — there’s some news springing forth from Detroit’s fertile and circle-jerkulous blogosphere. Jay Carrol (aka JRC) and his pseudonymous partner…
College try
Dan fields questions from the university set
Deathwatch
Sitting up with the Big Three
Letters to the Editor
Grandma knew This message is for Monica Conyers, Kwame Kilpatrick, members of the Detroit City Council, the Detroit Board of Education, mayoral candidates Freman Hendrix and Kenneth Cockrel. The ancestors are watching, listening and shaking their heads. They taught us better than what we are seeing today. I know, because they taught me as well.…
Charity’s limits
Philanthropy can’t do it all
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Shield the presses
Former federal prosecutor Richard Convertino can’t win his case without the information: who leaked word of an investigation into the attorney’s conduct that was part of a Detroit Free Press article in 2004. The author of that article, David Ashenfelter, can’t say who it was without burning that source or perhaps incriminating himself. And now,…
