Bands across the water
A musical oasis lies just across the Detroit River. There, a collection of Detroit-based indie rockers, unlike many of their peers, grew up fascinated not by Canada’s lowered drinking age, but by the rock ’n’ roll sounds that sprang from the somewhat socialistic country’s sometimes greener pastures. We’re not talking Brian Adams and Celine Dion…
Moog
This documentary on Robert Moog, the inventor of the analog Moog synthesizer, could’ve very easily been a film directed at keyboard nerds of the dullest hue. Fortunately, it puts a human face to those warm and wiggly sounds we’ve known for all these years, and the man who helped create them.
A hair above
Detroit is the capital of many things — cars, Motown, garage rock … and hair entertainers. That’s right — not barbers, hairdressers or even hair care specialists. Hair entertainers. This genus of performers was spawned by the one, the only and the original Hair Wars, a Detroit-born collision of hair, fashion, dance, competition and a…
Faust
This silent F. W. Murnau classic from 1926 isn’t as compelling as some of his other works, but the director’s visuals flourish, even when the story sags. This version of Faust seems a little distant, a morality tale told with a heavy hand and peopled by archetypes. Still, Murnau’s visual imagination is working full throttle…
Tom Hayden: Fighting to end a second war
Tom Hayden was Royal Oak’s original bad-boy student radical — co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society, ferocious anti-Vietnam War activist and member of the Chicago Seven, later husband of “Hanoi Jane” Fonda. So it’s a bit startling to realize that Hayden is now older (65) than his old adversary Lyndon B. Johnson was when…
Fever Pitch
A likeable if instantly forgettable date movie, this latest adaptation of author Nick Hornby’s work is strictly a minor league affair. Trading soccer for baseball, the story pits a Red Sox fan’s fanatical passion for the game against the love of a cute girl. Eschewing emotional risk in favor of formulaic smiley-faced romance, Fever Pitch…
Why a duck? (Part II)
When we left off last week, we’d broken down the duck (chef talk for cutting it into pieces) and were ready to turn it into several deeply flavored dishes. The best thing about what follows — it’s easy. First, preparing the breast halves. Heat a very heavy fry pan — (cast iron is best) on…
Mondovino
The gist of this lengthy documentary on the state of the wine industry: big corporate fat cats are leading to the death of the old tradition of winemaking from small family vintners. It’s informative, but unless you have a previous interest in the subject, not very entertaining. At 131 minutes, its repetition can be a…
Proactive
Working for peace — The Detroit Labor Committee for Peace and Justice will hold a forum to discuss “how and why the labor movement should become more involved in the anti-war movement.” The event will be held at 1:30 p.m., Saturday, April 30, at UAW Local 22, 4300 Michigan Ave., Detroit. Speakers include Donald Boggs,…
Sahara
Matthew McConaughey tries once again to be the next Harrison Ford with this would-be franchise based on the plot-laden Dirk Pitt adventures by author Clive Cussler. If you thought National Treasure would’ve been better if it only had some unsavory third-world politics thrown into the plot, then Sahara is the movie for you. For most…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): I think you’re ready for your once-a-decade reminder from Anais Nin about the hazards of not growing. I first brought her pithy quote to the attention of the Aries tribe back in 1993. It had a salubrious effect on many of you. Let’s hope it works the same magic this time:…
N&D Center
Wednesday • 13 Quincy Troupe: Little Stevie Wonder LITERATURE Biographer, memoirist and poet Quincy Troupe has joined the ranks of children’s authors. His latest book, Little Stevie Wonder, is a children’s biography on the life of the Michigan-born pop star. Spanning Wonder’s life from the age 11 (when he first signed with Motown) to today,…
Cartoon nightmare music
Despite having already dropped albums cheekily devoted to science fiction and film composition, and another consisting solely of one 74-minute noise-rock track, Fantomas may have managed to out-strange itself. This 30-song disc is a surreal, violent exercise in musical schizophrenia — a split-concept album that serves as a tribute to both cartoon music and the…
Art Bar
As seen on TV — After eight years in the gallery business, Grosse Pointe’s Maniscalco Gallery will close its doors in May. Robert Maniscalco and his family are moving to Charleston, S.C., so the artist-writer-gallery director can pursue his career in portrait painting, but he is planning to continue as weekly host of Detroit’s ArtBeat…
Got what you want
In a bed, under a Union Jack coverlet, Sights drummer Mike Trombley, keyboardist Bobby Emmett and singer-guitarist Eddie Baranek are writhing nearly naked between the sheets. They’re in the small, “Keith Moon”-themed bedroom of Siren singer Muffy Kroha’s Indian Village home, and the Metro Times photo shoot finally begins because the band has its lube…
Arular
On Arular, Sri Lankan Londoner M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam) speaks in dizzying multinational slang over beats jury-rigged from U.S. hip hop, dancehall riddim tracks, mech-tech weirdness and the hyper-amateur thrill of South American baile funk. In “Bingo,” steel drums compete with spluttering laser beams and thumping bass. The lyrics of “Pull Up the People” have a…
Backslash
So, unless you’ve been lurking under a cyber rock, you know all about friendster.com, the Web site that kicked off the e-trend of “social networking” (and the site has been dying for some time, having been eclipsed by its flashy, lascivious competitor, myspace.com). But why should 15-year-old webcam hussies and desperate thirtysomething men have all…
Mitch slaps
News Hits is fascinated by the published apology Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom made last week. The best-selling author, radio talk-show host, TV personality, playwright and all-around star issued a short mea culpa for, in his words, making an incorrect “assumption.” Far be it from us to disagree with a wordsmith of Albom’s caliber,…
Pepper Live
They’re the first punks out of Hawaii since the Waikikis but anyone expecting a night of luau music can just leave their expectations with the cardboard palm tree cutouts onstage. An aggressive power trio with occasional flashes of instrumental brilliance, Pepper’s rock-reggae mix is harder than the Police and more mannered than Sublime, especially when…
Revenge of the dorks
Hey, kids: Here they come, walking down the street, coming at you from the wrong side of midnight, heading straight for the heart you didn’t know you had. At first glance, this gang of four looks like your average late-20th century, black-clad, middle-class, paranoid hipster posse that a few years ago became fashionable in downtowns…
Class dismissed?
Trouble has been brewing in the hallowed halls of Wayne State University ever since Provost Nancy S. Barrett proposed closing the College of Urban, Labor and Metropolitan Affairs. The controversial idea is drawing closer to becoming a reality, much to the chagrin of many of the college’s students and professors. According to the university’s Web…
Good Things
Beginning with 1993’s Rise Above, Epic Soundtracks (formerly of Swell Map) released three solo efforts rich in tasteful songwriting and high on a traditional approach his old post-punk outfit couldn’t use. It wasn’t the hookiest music, but perfect pacing and a wry veneer helped Epic own his trad-pop pieces. Soundtracks died unexpectedly in 1997, and…
The Dorkwave Playlist
What are the songs that Les Infants Michael Doyle, Jon Ozias, Mike Servito and Rob Theakston find essential? Here are what those four after-hours tastemakers say are the tunes that should be rocking your world. Each Dorkwaver added saucy commentary to his 10 selections. Michael Doyle “Just What I Needed” — The Cars: I can…
Letters to the Editor
Brother’s a keeper Thanks to Rebecca Mazzei for the great article about my brother Russell “Uncle Russ” Werden (“Man of steel,” Metro Times, April 6). He is overwhelmingly generous to me and all his friends and family. He is as tough as they come but he is my precious baby brother. His cuts and bruises…
Shooting into the sun
When Hungarian-born photographer Balthazar Korab looks at landscapes, he finds their silence. It’s in the long religious lines of shadow, the knotted knuckles on an old tree and concrete demigods holding up the sky. His photos offer room to breathe inside Image Circle Gallery, a new photography gallery owned by Justin Maconochie, located above Revolution…
Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
Children of Doom
A grim night punctuated by the report of automatic weapons fire and distant explosions. The walls are pocked with bullets like in a Sunday afternoon western. Tracers whiz overhead as you scuttle through bombed-out buildings, popping up from your cover to drop another joker with a headshot. It appears you’re in some war-torn near future,…
The shtupperware party
It’s 8 p.m. on Friday night in a quiet neighborhood near Nine Mile Road in Ferndale, and an unassuming house is filling up fast. Guests arrive every few minutes and are encouraged to relax and grab some snacks before the presentation starts. After viewing the wares, everyone will jot down their products of choice on…
Workin’ the Car Wash
Motor City bloozoids the Howling Diablos are such stalwarts of the Motor City music scene that it’s almost easy to take them for granted. Sure, they’ve won armloads of trophies at the Detroit Music Awards and helped give li’l Bobby Ritchie his start. But they’ve been around so long, and have been so ubiquitous, that…
The esteem of religion
With the death of John Paul II still dominating much of the news, it’s time for us to weigh in. The fact that Il Papa appears in several critical pieces in this issue will be taken by some to mean that we’re anti-Catholic, which we are not. We’re not anti-anything except fools, scoundrels, pop-up ads…
Head cheese
British-born industrial music impresario-drummer Martin Atkins got his start with Johnny Rotten’s Public Image, and bailed to launch Pigface and the pioneering Chicago label Invisible Records. There he released albums by seminal genre linchpins Killing Joke, Revolting Cocks’ Chris Connelly, Sheep on Drugs, plus his side projects Murder Inc., Rx and Damage Manual. He’s also…
A journalist’s notebook
Liberation, invasion, occupation; whatever you want to call it, the Iraq war is now two years old. (Contain your feelings, please.) With the chaos, bloodshed and occasional glimmers of hope have come more than a few books. At first, the majority were polemics on why the war was a necessary evil, or why it was…
Media Blackout
I say it’s MB28 season and I say fire! • Carl Stalling — The Carl Stalling Project (Warner Bros.) :: Two, I say, two volumes of the greatest animated film music ever heard in the history of the human eardrum! • The Dan Band — The Dan Band (Side One Dummy) :: Even Bowie at…
Bringing back Bonnie
The “kitchen” here is a place where you can eat in for lunch or take out dinner or just stop by for cappuccino and a piece of one of the memorable pastries. Point to what you’d like from their refrigerated display cases and pay by the pound. A place where carnivores, vegetarians and vegans can…
Blight buster
It has long been one of the Detroit’s most intractable problems: dealing with properties acquired when taxes aren’t paid. With 10,000 people a year moving out, there’s little demand for the homes and land the city acquires through tax foreclosures. At last count, there were some 38,000 such parcels in the city’s inventory. And that’s…
The agony & the ecstasy
To ignore this passionate, uncompromising and brutal love story would be a grave mistake. Director Fatih Akin takes a conventional romantic-comedy storyline and spins it into something compellingly unexpected. A pair of mismatched Turkish lovers in Germany are alienated from both cultures, and careen through life as damaged souls, testing the strength of love with…
