No shield from the Sixth
A Detroit Free Press reporter had a legitimate claim to a Fifth Amendment defense, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. Veteran journalist David Ashenfelter had been ordered three times to submit to a deposition in a former federal prosecutor’s lawsuit against the U.S. Justice Department. The former prosecutor, Richard Convertino, is seeking the identity of an…
Make sure you sit down when you watch this
Slate has a devastating interactive map that chronicles the progression of national job losses over the past two years, showing county by county where they have been cut and where they are growing. It is like watching a time-lapse version of an accident in the process of unfolding. With shades of blue showing areas of…
MOCAD DIGS ON POETICS TONIGHT & THURSDAY!
Barrett Watten This is what you’re doing tonight: MOCAD, April 15, 7:00 p.m. FREE!!!! Poetry is an oft-overlooked art. It’s a bastardized one, too. You hear people liken visual art, even dance, to poetry — but exactly what are they talking about? Aesthetic quality? The artist’s ability to cleverly “tap into” something emotional? Fine. It…
On the Download
Seems like every week a new service claiming to revolutionize the online music space — or at least take another chunk of market share away from MySpace — appears. Whether it’s RCRDLABL, Virb, SecretRemixes or one of the others on the Web, everyone’s just one niche-play away from kicking some start-up arse. Enter the latest…
Food Stuff
TAX BREAK — People don’t normally long to return to the economic climate of 1933. (For obvious reasons!) But with a one-day deal from Detroit’s Dakota Inn Rathskeller, the Depression never looked greater. For three hours, 11 a.m.-2 p.m., on tax day, Wednesday, April 15, the Dakota will run a tax-day lunch special, rolling their…
In tent city
Local activists to make Grand Circus Park their home
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Rock ‘n’ roll jobs lost vs. jobs created in the ‘New Depression’
JANUARY ’08 JOBS LOST John Stewart, singer-songwriter and one-time member of the Kingston Trio, dies. The Striped Shirt Manufacturers Union of Newark, N.J., which has kept afloat since the folk boom died by selling the three-quarter length sleeved striped shirts popularized by the Kingston Trio to referees, took the news rather badly. “Although largely a…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Snikt! Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #213! Snikt! X-Men Origins: Wolverine — Stolen Work Print (FOX) :: Y’know, if everyone was on dial-up like I am, most illegal downloading would pretty much grind to a halt. Mark Olson & Gary Louris — Ready For the Flood (HackTone) :: I know you won’t believe it, but this…
Municipal bankruptcies?
It could happen here
Big World
A little girl who’s allergic to the sun plays with her dolls in the dark. An empty pill bottle rolls around on the floor of an old car. An emaciated dog limps in the snow. Out of small pieces of ordinary lives, Mary Miller creates a truly Big World. Her mini-book of 11 short stories…
Extreme survival
With foreclosure rates and unemployment rates reaching highs we haven’t seen since acid-wash jeans were in style (the first time), most people have given up on just living life and have turned to simply surviving it. But don’t cancel your electric service and rush off the grid just yet; your best teachers might just be…
Terrible Ted dukes it out
Metro Times has certainly taken its share of perhaps deserved potshots at the Detroit Music Awards over the years. And, of course, “Terrible” Ted Nugent has been in not one but the last two of our year-end “Dubious Achievements of the Year” wrap-ups, more for his often repugnant politics than for his music (which hasn’t…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY • 15 QUINTRON AND MISS PUSSYCAT ORGAN GRINDING Quintron wails on an organ tripped out with the grill and headlights of an old car (and, yes, they actually work!) while his puppet-wielding wife, Miss Pussycat, shakes her maracas and sings backup like a banshee. Accompanied by the Drum Buddy, a light-activated synth of his…
30 artists, 3 hours, 1 winner
The Art Battle hits the Russell Industrial Center
Prole pulp
Lots of people don’t realize it, but, during the Great Depression, Detroit finally became a genuine literary location, thanks to writers who came to town to document the economic upheaval in a working-class town. And they left stories that shed light on the city during those troubled times, with maybe even a few lessons to…
Private eyes
Is it really wrong to video my hot roommate having sex?
Framing the issues
Cradle Will Rock 1999 After he finished his “Detroit Industry” mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Diego Rivera decamped to New York to make an even more stridently political mural for Rockefeller Center. In one of his historical sleights of hand, writer-director Tim Robbins shifts that fiasco — in which Nelson Rockefeller had his…
Under the hammer
Since you’ve likely not yet seen Sacha Gervasi’s new documentary, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, you’re just gonna have to take our word for it that both the band and the movie (see our review) rule. The missing link between Slade and Mötley Crüe, Anvil will be hitting the Crofoot in Pontiac for a live…
Jail Guitar Doors
Some old punks are getting together this weekend to appeal for clemency for one of the Detroit punk scene’s storied promoters. “Scary” Cary Safarian is currently in jail in Muskegon County and has spent the last 19 years in prison on charges related to an armed robbery. The proposed “Graystone Hall Reunion” fundraiser has a…
Key insights
“This Land Is Your Land” Woody Guthrie Certainly one of our best-known folk songs, many of us learned the words of this rousing tribute to America in elementary school music classes. But little did any of us suspect as kids that the tune was once considered “subversive” and perhaps even the work of a “Commie.”…
Hard lines
Angela’s Ashes Frank McCourt, 1996 As with the current economic meltdown, the aftereffects of 1929’s crash were felt around the world. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Frank McCourt provides an unflinching look at the horrific conditions of his childhood in Ireland during the Great Depression. Constant hunger, dying siblings, slum housing, the stench of open…
Music you can kiss!
Showing support on National Record Store Day
Hard times
OK, so maybe it’s unfair of us to call what’s going on now the “New Depression.” Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that George W. Bush was sidestepping the issue of whether it technically qualified as a recession. (It does). And, as bleak as things are today, our national situation really doesn’t equate to the…
Used pol for sale
One politician, slightly tarnished, will take best offer
Going green, saving cash
Ghost loads and other tips on cutting your power bill
Safety nets
A quick primer on using social programs
Collective efforts
Fighting the slump with communal living and urban farming
Letters to the Editor
Up in smoke Thank you, Metro Times, for once again taking a pragmatic, forward-looking stance on marijuana and hemp (Larry Gabriel’s “Home-grown $$$,” March 11). The war on drugs has been a dismal failure, yet, at the same time, a boon for law enforcement, providing them with seemingly endless, no-questions-asked funding for the “demons” they…
Couch Trip
Parker and Stone ‘sharkwatch’ and a repo musical
Observe and Report
Ronnie Barnhardt (Rogen) heads security at a suburban mall, where a flasher has started terrorizing shoppers in the parking lot. The delusional and likeably creepy mama’s boy sees it as an opportunity to show his law-enforcement skills and land the job of his dreams as a police officer. Even better, Brandi, a vapid makeup counter…
What he is, is what he is…
Robyn Hitchcock never became the mainstream star some of us once thought he would be. Maybe his stuff was just too damn intelligent for its own good. Whatever the case, he’s basically remained a cult artist, albeit one with a very large following, despite his immense influence on various forms of ’80s psychedelia and alternative…
Rock ‘n’ roll (suicide)
For Steve “Lips” Ludlow and Robb Reiner of Toronto metal monsters Anvil, no amount of dashed career promises, failed record sales or hand-to-hand combat (these two like to manifest their “creative differences” physically) were going to keep them from the teenage dream. In 1974, the two made a pact to rock their way to the…
12
Much like writer Reginald Rose’s 1955 liberal, kitchen-sink drama, 12 uses a seemingly open-and-shut case — a Chechnyan teen accused of murdering his adoptive Russian father — as a window into the cultural mind-sets and mores of the 12 men who must decide his guilt or innocence. But, unlike the original, the accused’s life is…
Hannah Montana: The Movie
Miley Cyrus stars as Miley Stewart, a gawky teen girl who dons a blond wig and becomes singing sensation Hannah Montana, a superstar character Cyrus also performs in real life, and whose image is plastered on all manner of posters, toys, pencil boxes and Trapper Keepers as far as the eye can see. This despite…
OK, so maybe it’s unfair of us to call what’s going on now the "New Depression." Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that George W. Bush was sidestepping the issue of whether it technically qualified as a recession. (It does).
Seemingly assembled from the remnants of better movies, but with its own weirdo energy, Mysteries is undermined by the chalkboard blankness of its hero, played listlessly by handsome cipher Jon Foster (The Informers). The son of a tasteful, upscale crime boss (Nick Nolte), Art Bechstein is a college grad headed for a prepackaged stockbroker career…
