THE BLOOZE IN FERNDALE…& FIVE YEARS OF MOTOR CITY BLOG
We’d be lax if we didn’t mention the 16th annual Anti-Freeze Blues Festival, which takes place this Friday and Saturday night, January, 15th and 16th, at the Magic Bag (22920 Woodward Ave) in Ferndale. (We actually had planned a Night & Day blurb on it….but things didn’t go quite the way we planned, so we…
Night and Day
THURSDAY JANUARY 14 Detroit Lives! The Exhibit FIST PUMPING FOR THE D! The mission of Detroit Lives! is to spread positive vibes about Detroit through traditional and social media, public art and an apparel line. The group’s efforts to date will be highlighted as part of Detroit Lives! The Exhibit, a showcase for some of…
Moody’s mood
Come out to hear saxophonist James Moody and you know he’ll play that song. "I can’t stop playing it. It wouldn’t make sense. The song is why people come to my shows," Moody says over the telephone when asked if he ever gets sick of playing "Moody’s Mood for Love." It’s the song that put…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Stop the madness!
I think shitty music should be wiped clean from the earth. Especially the kind made by insensitive cultural freeloaders like Diddy. But the attempts to reconcile the difference between the way the culture is and the way you think it should be never ends, which is one reason — I know from experience — why…
Peters, principally
People did vie to shake his hand and share his lunch table, but having U.S. Rep. Gary Peters at a homeless shelter last week for a meeting of community group leaders wasn’t exactly a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many people there. After all, the first-term Democratic congressman from Bloomfield Hills has been making the same rounds…
Getting charged at the Auto Show
News Hits scurried through the snow early Monday morning, eager to arrive at Cobo Center for the big North American International Auto Show. Unlike most assignments, covering the event is actually something we look forward to every year. At least we used to. With the possible exception of the annual conference held on Mackinac Island,…
A tale of two cities
Bob Bruner is like a lot of young guys in downtown Ferndale. He’s in his early 30s, married, and is the proud father of a wonderful little daughter named Audrey. He’s also a little different from everyone else in the city, however: He runs the place. Next month, he’ll celebrate his third anniversary as the…
Food Stuff
Fresh pie — Downtown Armada’s Achatz Handmade Pie Co. has just remodeled and will host a grand reopening party on Sunday, Jan. 17. The first 50 customers will get a free slice of pie every week for an entire year, and Achatz will also raffle off the grand prize at noon: one free pie a…
Motor City Cribs
It’s fitting that multi-instrumentalists Ryan Gimpert and Scott Michalski live in a 1920s American craftsman-style house. Both are genre-straddling musicians who are responsible for crafting an inordinate amount of worthy, ear-bending Detroit music. Both play in the country-rock Volebeats (Gimpert on pedal steel, Michalski on drums), who have a new double album in the can…
Untying your tongue
Q: I am a 34-year-old straight, single female. I have a fantasy I can’t find much about online, so I figured I’d ask you for advice. My fantasy is to be blindfolded, bent over a table, couch or whatever, and fucked by whoever happens to walk by. I realize this would have to take place…
In the midnight hour
Every time television’s favorite action figure appears ready to get out of CTU and its dizzying world of espionage, betrayal, torture and murder in the name of patriotism and blowing up big-ass stuff, they pull him back in. As the eighth season of Bauer’s Hours, 24, dawns with a four-hour, two-night "event" at 9 p.m.…
Chasing the buck
Years and years ago, Aaron Burr set the mold for "ruthless banker." Hell, he was murderous. Burr was the third Vice President of the United States and founder of the Bank of the Manhattan Company. In one of our nation’s most infamous duels, he gunned down his rival Alexander Hamilton, who was the founder of…
Adaptive Obama
I fall solidly on the "L" side of the political spectrum. You can translate that to liberal or leftist, however you please. Let’s just say that I’m not ashamed to come from that side. Never was, even when folks tried to hide behind the "P" (populist or progressive) monikers back in the 1990s after Republicans…
Letters to the Editor
Our big three-ohhh You may have noticed a recent addition to the cover of Metro Times: our 30th anniversary logo. That’s an occasion for thanks to you, the readers, as much as an occasion for pride on our part. Thanks to a community that’s taken to heart an upstart, scrappy little paper that launched in…
Honesty
Longtime Detroit singer-songwriter Carolyn Striho really needn’t have bothered naming her new album Honesty. After all, it should be apparent to anyone who listens — not just hears but really listens — to the lovingly constructed record that there’s barely a note played or sung that Striho doesn’t really mean, from the depths of her…
House of the Devil
Ti West’s retro-flashback creepfest goes like this: Nubile but sweet-faced college sophomore Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is in desperate need of cash. She’s got a pig of a roommate and the perfect relocation spot, but needs $300 in less than a week. No easy task in ’80s America; minimum wage is $3.35. Answering a flyer ad…
Sunset/Sunrise
"The past is never dead," William Faulkner once wrote. "It’s not even past." This adage is especially true of music, perhaps necessarily so, given the finite universe of chords, tempo and melodies. The past deeply informs the present, which is why musicians always return to early touchstones. For Jesse Lortz and Kimberly Morrison of the…
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Terry Gilliam’s latest cinematic sideshow is biography as metaphor, an exhilarating, deranged and indulgent mess of a movie that giddily reflects both the filmmaker’s strengths and weaknesses. For anyone who knows Gilliam’s work (Brazil, 12 Monkeys, The Fisher King, etc.), it’ll come as no surprise that his movie is filled with delightfully acid-laced visuals, vaudevillian…
Leap Year
With her singsong disposition and chipmunk cadence, the always likeable Amy Adams glimmers like a golden-age matinee starlet. It’s too bad her scripts seem stuck in the 1940s as well. This fish-out-of-water yarn finds Adam’s trademark cheerfulness tested by inclement weather and the twinkly folk of Ireland, an enchanted place which turns out to be…
Ignore the Ignorant
It’s quite a career move to get guitarist extraordinaire Johnny Marr, co-architect of the Smiths, to join your band. But it’s the smart move that’s finally getting the Cribs some notoriety in this country. Immensely popular in their native UK, the band is perhaps the least-known of the last great wave of post-Britpop groups such…
Dagwood central
What do Funyuns, soft-shell crabs, bananas and grilled cheese sandwiches have in common? They’re all ingredients in one or another of Phat Sammich’s 60 selections, a mishmash of retro and stylin’-five-years-ago sandwiches with a decided tilt toward the calories-be-damned. Yes, grilled cheese sandwiches are an ingredient. Open since 2009, Phat Sammich is the brainchild of…
Propose a toast
Playing a boozed-up, down-and-out country legend who finds love, loses love, then struggles for redemption, Jeff Bridges is a miraculous and soulful train wreck of a character. After years of successfully collaborating with a rising country star (Colin Farrell), crusty old Blake is in professional and personal freefall. He has so abused his musical gifts…
Red Cliff
Using dirt-cheap labor, repatriated director John Woo outfits 10,000 actor-extras in ancient weaponry for Red Cliff, the most expensive Chinese-language movie ever produced. Of course, by Hollywood blockbuster standards, its $80-million budget is chump change, but in today’s global economy, Woo gets to work his hyperkinetic magic on a truly epic-sized canvass. Magnificent battle sequences,…
Broken Embraces
Pedro Almodovar’s latest film is both ravishing and ridiculous, introducing us to blind screenwriter and former director Harry Caine (Lluis Homar), who is visited by mysterious young filmmaker Ray-X (Rubén Ochandiano). He’s making a documentary about his father, a jealous and controlling millionaire (José Luis Gómez) whose gorgeous young wife (Penelope Cruz) had an affair…
Gray-suited man
As 50-year-old gay college professor George Falconer, Firth is buttoned down and bottled up, a precise man who keeps his emotions as deeply buried as his sexuality. His lover (Matthew Goode) of 16 years recently died in a car crash. It’s a loss George can’t begin to mourn in public nor private. Firth delivers a…
NEW BOOK CALLS BONIOR ‘CLUELESS’ IN 08 CAMPAIGN
Game Change, a behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 presidential campaign, has already made the news several times over in recent days: • For Sen. Harry Reid’s comments about then-presidential hopeful Barack Obama as electable because he’s “light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one” — prompting a Reid apology this week. •…
Wednesday night, Don’t miss: DIA Gallery talk with artist Matthew Barney (Bjork’s brilliant hubby).
He’s back … Boundary-pushing artist Matthew Barney is in the midst of producing a series of performances and music (with composer Jonathan Bepler) for his new project, which, we hear, is a seven act, seven location, opera that draws its inspiration from Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel, Ancient Evening. One act, “Khu,” is set in Detroit.…
FREE IS GOOD! MAJESTIC CUSTOMER APPRECIATION NIGHT
Our friend Anthony Morrow over at the Majestic complext has alerted us to the fact that this Friday, January 15th, is “Customer Appreciation Night” at the Magic Stick. The venue will be serving up complimentary food and domestic draft beer from 9-10 p.m. The Sugarcoats, Gardens, Liquor Store and Highest Power (we’re betting at least…
