Incinerator update: Deal could end up in court
Earlier today I was at the studios of WDET, where I listened to an interview with Charlie Beckham, the chief administrative officer for Detroit Mayor Dave Bing. Beckham, speaking earlier in the day to Detroit Today host Craig Fahle, said it looks like the city is locked in to using the massive incinerator on the…
Ghost song
He pursued the story as a son, curious about why his mother hid the existence of her sister, and as a journalist, navigating bureaucracies, locating records and interviewing people who might explain both the social and cultural forces at work on his mother and what his aunt’s life was like locked away in a mental institution.…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Imagine Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #222 and you, I do! SIZZLING ROCKUMENTARY OF THE WEEK: Bill Fishman — My Dinner With Jimi (Rhino Films) :: I’d say that this was the greatest rock ’n’ roll movie ever made — except for the small fact that my name happens to be on the back cover of…
Time for real change
There’s a great temptation to say that, hey, the system works after all! Monica Conyers has pleaded guilty and is presumably on her way to the slam. Kwame Kilpatrick was found out, thrown out, convicted, jailed and run out of town. What more proof do you need? But if you think that, you are wrong. …
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Cheat Code
Wanted: Weapons of Fate Universal Gaming Xbox 360 Ps3 Wesley Gibson is the living embodiment of the revenge fantasy. His life’s rife with everything you’d hope that your life ain’t. Dead-end job? Check. Girlfriend cheating with your best friend? Check. No future? … Look, you get the point; Wesley’s is a shit life. That is…
Backlot
Pawn Shop Who stars: Garrett Morris (original SNL alum), Joe Torry (Poetic Justice), local radio (WJLB) jock Robert "MC Foolish" Spearman Jr. and Flavor of Love 2 winner London "Deelishis" Charles. What is it: A $525K, homegrown attempt to emulate the success of Barbershop set in, you guessed it, a Detroit pawn shop — except there’s…
Sloppy seconds
Bootsey X 15 Favorite Second Rock Releases: 1) Fun House — The Stooges 2) White Light/White Heat — The Velvet Underground 3) The Slider — T. Rex 4) A Quick One (Happy Jack) — The Who 5) 12 X 5 — The Rolling Stones 6) I Know You Fine But How You Doin’ — The…
Thrilled to death
First you learned to crawl, then you learned to walk, and after that you probably spent eons attempting to moonwalk. For many of us X-geners, that’s just how it went. But Michael Jackson’s friction-defying signature move was as elusive as he was, and lord knows he was as mystifying as he was iconic. And,…
‘Beat It’
D’Anne: Well, we went to the MOCAD’s "Midsummer Nights in Motown" show, but obviously we’re now going to have to turn this column into a Michael Jackson tribute. Laura: I don’t think people are looking to us to pay tribute to the King of Pop. Let them grieve the old-fashioned way, by digging out their…
Couch Trip
Le Jupon Rouge Strand A bizarre love triangle with niche interest, Genevieve Lefebvre’s Le Jupon Rouge centers on the crippling jealousy suffered by an aged linguist and Holocaust survivor (Alida Valli) when her secretary (Marie-Christina Barrault) falls in love with her young protégé (Guillemette Grobon). There are a few levels of potential interest here, but…
The ghost in the mirror
You know death don’t have no mercy in this land. — The Rev. Gary Davis Singer Michael Jackson, 50, is gone. The suddenness of his passing was shocking. Not that anyone entertained the fantasy that Jackson could defy death. Just as the old blind bluesman Davis sang, you know that someday death will overtake all…
Bay watch
This second installment in the Transformers canon is a shapeless, insulting, special effects-driven pile of crap. Michael Bay blows things up real good, has a decent eye for scale, and is shamelessly pornographic in his leering over hot babes and military hardware, but fabulously canted angles do not a good film make. To recant the…
Motor City Rides
Petite and charming 18-year-old dynamo and Pennsylvania Amish country transplant Kate “Hayley Jane” Nickerson doesn’t seem at all like she’s from Detroit. Yet she definitely belongs here. Not many other cities can let you delve into so many forms of expression on a shoestring budget. The multitalented, renaissance-fair loving Nickerson is an actress-costumer-fire breather-makeup artist-burlesque…
Meat kills
Welcome to America 2.0 — A government by corporations, for corporations. It’s a Matrix-like reality; only instead of machines we’re ruled by Monsanto, Tyson, ConAgra, and Wal-Mart, companies just as determined as the Matrix to keep the truth secret. If you doubted the fix was in, Robert Kenner’s documentary Food, Inc. makes it crystal-clear that…
3 national awards for MT
Metro Times picked up three awards for 2008 work at last week’s convention of the 130-member Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in Tucson, Ariz. MT competes in the class for large weeklies with a circulation 50,000 and up. The team of design director Sean Bieri, news editor Cut Guyette and editor W. Kim Heron won a…
My Sister’s Keeper
Voiceover narration is the surest sign of desperation, so imagine a movie with seven narrators, all struggling to resuscitate author Jodi Picoult’s deathly purple prose and let it breathe onscreen. This adaptation of the weepy bestseller excels at maudlin histrionics, in the tale of a girl (Abigail Breslin) born and bred to be a living…
Letters to the Editor
Ditch Mitch In a recent online column, Jason Whitlock wrote that "no one writes unintentional fiction as profitably or award-winningly as Albom." The truth is that he hasn’t written a piece of relevant journalism in years, and Lessenberry isn’t the first to call him out on it ("Time to honor," May 20). Back about six…
Little Ashes
Shot like a cologne ad for queens who long for the ruffled shirts and repressed sexual longings of yesteryear, Little Ashes (after one of Dalí’s paintings) is a florid soap opera of unconsummated “bromance,” starring alabaster heartthrob Robert Pattinson (Twilight) as the 18-year-old Salvador Dalí. At the prestigious School for Fine Arts in Madrid, the…
Creative fellows
The numbers are staggering. In 2007, the state of Michigan went deep into the bank, pulling out $10.1 million for arts and culture funding, but in April of that year, Gov. Jennifer Granholm put a moratorium on grants, which, with the help of groups such as ArtServe, was lifted that June. Not without consequence, however:…
Asian merger
With a wide-ranging menu, striking presentations and quality cocktails, Inyo has sparked a buzz in Ferndale’s dining scene. The dishes have not just flavor, but pleased texture contrasts within a dish. Take the cold appetizer maguro yookwhe: Strips of raw, lean tuna are deepened by a quail-egg topping and served with crunchy sliced Asian pear…
Questionable conviction
After spending nearly half his life in prison for the rape of a 9-year-old Detroit girl, a 54-year-old Michigan inmate is asking a Wayne County judge to release him because new lab tests purportedly show he could not have been the attacker. Last week, attorneys for Karl Vinson filed a motion in Wayne County Circuit…
Rudo y Cursi
Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal star as squabbling sibs, rivals in life and on the soccer pitch, whose ambitions extend beyond their humble little village. Beto (Luna) is an intense, risk-taking goalkeeper while brother Tato (Bernal) is a sensitive daydreaming striker. Plucked from jerkwater obscurity by a shady scout (is there any other?) they’re…
Bridge battles
As the stretch of Interstate 75 closed by the Gateway Project is set to reopen this week, improving access to the Ambassador Bridge, legal squabbling over the project continues. Last week, the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) filed a lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court against the Detroit International Bridge Co. (DIBC), owned by Grosse…
Weird science
If via some weird science experiment, the wonderful voice of Phil Alvin could’ve been grafted onto the songwriting brilliance and guitar prowess of Dave Alvin (with possibly the addition of a little more hair on top), Dave Alvin might’ve been one of the greatest and biggest rock ‘n’ roll stars of the ’80s, if not…
Tickled
For the last several months, we’ve been following federal law enforcement news on a new website, ticklethewire.com. It’s the post-newspaper-career project of veteran journalist Allan Lengel, a former Detroit News and Washington Post staff reporter. The site is named after the term describing how investigators create a situation that will encourage targets of a probe…
’Cause I Sez So
From a pop standpoint, New York Dolls singer David Johansen sounds like shit — shit in that abstract singer way; intangible like Dylan or, say, Shane McGowan. Truly. See, sounding like shit can be a beautiful thing and Johansen isn’t a very good singer; he’s a fucking great one. His is a huge voice that…
Tasting sustainability
Under the guidance of owner Mike Plesz, the folks at Mind Body & Spirits strive to reduce their collective carbon footprint with the use of sustainable practices, whether for procuring food or for restoring their 1890 building. From solar panels on the roof to gathering rainwater to irrigate their on-premises herb garden, from laying cork…
Food Stuff
Hip bacon — Just in time to rescue bacon from hipster fatigue, Zingerman’s co-owner Ari Weinzweig has written Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon, a deep history of the subject. Want to find out if it sizzles? Weinzweig will celebrate the book’s release with a tasting at 7 p.m. Wednesday, July 1; upstairs in the Next…
Backwash
Any record whose opening is a piquant version of Bill Withers’ wonderfully promiscuous "Use Me" gets mad points, certainly — and considering the year this 10-song album hit shelves (1972), that song, with its gender reversed, becomes a feminist aphorism as much as it is a sexual confessional in Esther Phillips’ hands. The singer also…
Tie me down!
Q: I’m a 25-year-old straight female. I’ve been dating my boyfriend for only a few months, but we fell in love fast. He is a caring person, and I want to make this last. However, he doesn’t turn me on. It has nothing to do with looks — he’s gorgeous — but rather with the…
Hello, it’s Todd
We came up our own theme for Cityfest this year — namely, second acts or second chances. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said there are no second acts in American lives … but Fitzgerald was a bad drunk and never met Kwame Kilpatrick. So what the hell did he know? Actually, the theme came up due…
Tyvek
Let’s get this out of the way up front: Tyvek is one weird band. With a herky-jerky drummer who plays while standing up and stream-of-consciousness lyrics that are shouted more than sung, the five-piece has a certain awkwardness that can actually be charming. So, their inclusion as a recent Sub Pop Singles Club release and…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY JULY 1 Tour de Troit Pre-Registration Kickoff HEY, LANCE ARMSTRONG! The annual Tour de Troit lets Motor City cyclists take over streets for a two-wheeled tour of historical sites and notable city scenery. This year’s event — on Sept. 19 – is expected to attract 2,000 bikers, and early birds can get a jump…
Take 2 nurses and …
I recently completed an extended work assignment for a college of nursing and got to know many nurses in professional and casual situations. TV has taken a few years to catch up to the notion that nursing’s a booming and valuable profession worthy of dramatization, but clearly its time is here. The nurses I met…
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
If you seek an exhilarating, imaginative and genuinely emotional experience in 3-D animation, go see UP. If you’re after action, cheap thrills and mild giggles that’ll amuse the kids for an hour and a half, then Ice Age is it. This third entry in the popular franchise is stuffed with cuddly characters, colorful backdrops and…
DWELE’S TRIBUTE TO “THE KING”
An off-the-cuff tribute from one of Detroit’s current heavyweights. As Dwele posted on youtube: “june 25th, at home washing clothes for upcoming tour. . .had 45 minutes to set up the camera and have some fun in tribute to mike, mistakes and all, all in fun. R.I.P. mike!! “
