NATHANIEL MAYER UPDATE
We just heard from Nathaniel Mayer’s wife, Marie, who tells us that Nate Dog is on the road to recovery. “Today he was able to whisper a little and talk,” said Marie of her husband, who toured Europe late last year. He’s at Receiving Hospital now. Marie said the support of fans who’ve heard, and…
TIME OF THE SEASON: CITYFEST SCHED ANNOUNCED
Sixty musical acts were named today for the upcoming 2008 Comerica Cityfest (formerly Comerica Tastefest) which takes place July 2nd through the 6th. There will be four stages in Detroit’s Historic New Center, presenting artists simultaneously, including the Motor City Casino Stage (presented by the Detroit News), the Pure Detroit Stage (presented by Real Detroit…
NATHANIEL MAYER AILING
We were very sorry to hear that Detroit musical legend Nathaniel Mayer suffered a stroke on April 13th and is currently recuperating in a local hospital. The 64-year-old R&B powerhorse is best known internationally for his 1962 hit single with his Fabulous Twilights, “Village of Love” (which hit No. 22 on the national pop charts…
MOONLIGHTING BOBBY HARLOW
The Go’s Bobby Harlow is currently in Tempermill Studios (owned by Dave Feeney of Blanche, American Mars and Loretta Lynn fame) producing an album for New York rocker Neil Nathan. Nathan sought out Harlow after hearing the Go’s last album, Howl on the Haunted Beat You Ride, and asked the Motor City rocker to put…
QUEEN MAKEBA HEADS TO DETROIT
Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba are hands down the king and queen of South African music. The onetime husband and wife gained worldwide pop cred as hit-makers in the ’60s while agitating for the end of the apartheid regime back home — which, in recognition of their work, banned both them and their records. Of…
DANNY FEDERICI, R.I.P.
Sad. He did not look well when Springsteen and the E Street Band played the Palace last fall. Danny Federici, for 40 years the E Street Band’s organist and keyboard player, died yesterday afternoon, April 17th at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City after a three year battle with melanoma. “Danny Federici, the…
REMEMBERING PROOF
We’re a little late on this…but better late than never… Slain Detroit hip-hop legend Proof was honored by fans and family last Friday (April 11th) to commemorate the two-year anniversary of his death. A candlelight vigil was held during the late afternoon at Woodlawn Cemetery, where the artist was put to rest six days after…
VON BONDIES, SLOAN HEADLINE ROCK CITY FEST
Detour Magazine has finally released the schedule for its upcoming first Rock City music festival, which takes place June 12th through the 14th. In addition to numerous local unsigned acts, the festival will feature sets by Canadian popmeisters Sloan and a homecoming performance by the Von Bondies (although, at this point, it’s hard to say…
WHEN IT COMES TO STUPID CROOKS…
Maybe somebody just needed more cash on tax day… Whatever the case, local hip-hop station HOT 102.7’s official station vehicle was stolen via a hijack early yesterday afternoon, as an employee re-fueled the vehicle at an area gas station less than a mile away from the station. Keith “Shug” Gillespie, fleet manager for HOT 102.7,…
The goose-steppers
Biggest U.S. neo-Nazi group sets up shop in Detroit.
Sister act
As half the city’s residents have moved away over the years, long stretches of Detroit’s main roads that were once packed with mom-and-pop businesses have become desolate and abandoned. What’s left now between empty lots are hundreds of closed little buildings, boarded up or broken into, reminders of how dense the city really once was.…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Tales of the tape
About seven years ago, Steve Christensen bought some used cassette tapes at a flea market. He took them home, and when he popped one in, heard a bunch of people singing “Take up thy Cross.”Little did he know he was about to discover an incredible story. “Virginia, it’s nearly seven o’clock and Hazard Jordan and…
Blasts & epiphanies
"Rockets! Rockets! Rockets!" were the dreadful words piped over loudspeakers just before a siren sounded and thunderous explosions filled the damp, hot, night air. It was August 1969 that I began my yearlong survival against fear and depression at Da Nang Air Force Base, Vietnam. In my senior year in college I was notified that…
Poetic spirit
M.L. Liebler celebrates a new book around town.
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Don’t ask! Just read Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #167! Jack Kirby — Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus: Volume Three (DC Comics) :: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The greatest comic book creator in history was, and forever will be, Jack "King" Kirby. The first two volumes of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World…
Sweet and upscale
Douglas Cale’s chocolate-dipped café.
Honored
Metro Times picked up second and third place awards plus an honorable mention in the Detroit Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2007 Excellence in Journalism Awards announced this week. Features Editor Brian Smith took second place in feature writing for "Jesus of Suburbia: A holiday tale, of sorts," a first-person piece about his…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Mama said
An interlude of classic Savage columns.
Fraser’s gambit
Eulogizing a great labor leader.
Spice of life
This informal, bare-tabled restaurant, can seat as many as 200. The menu is encyclopedic, beginning with 40 appetizers (mezza) and salads that average around $7 for substantial shareable portions. A combination mezza platter for two, which goes for $27.45, will satisfy four people yearning for hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh, labne, grape leaves, falafel, fried kibbeh…
Home girl
Ads for new flick Forgetting Sarah Marshall have popped up all over the country, white posters and billboards proclaiming in thick black ink, “I’m so over you, Sarah Marshall,” “My mom always hated you, Sarah Marshall,” and, “You do look fat in those jeans, Sarah Marshall.” Thing is, Kristen Bell, the Detroit-born actress, couldn’t be…
Controversy
A record of Prince covers by just-under-the-radar beat collectives like Soulwax and Peaches collaborating with 7 Hurtz should make for some decent homages, ribald if not reverent interpretations, maybe even some groovy iconoclasm. Instead, it makes for oddly disembodied versions of his Purple’s reign that feel alternately stale and half-baked. Not that it had to…
R.I.P., Chuck
As borderline fascist, right-wing gun nuts go, Charlton Heston was a pretty cool guy. When Heston died last week at the age of 84, almost all obits noted him for that jutting jaw, for playing Moses, and as the booming baritone voice of the nation’s loony gun culture. It’s true; Heston was elected president of…
Street Kings
Keanu Reeves’ latest turn as a vigilante cop in Street Kings has him channeling Clint Eastwood circa ’73: Cop Tom Ludlow is a clever mix of pokerfaced violence and wide-eyed sincerity; he’s simultaneously a babe in the woods and an unstoppable killing machine. Too bad director this flick from David Ayer (wrote Training Day, directed…
Buckets of melody
There’s been a major movement in jazz to mine the pop of the ’60s and later for new songs to play alongside such standard fare as "All the Things You Are" and "Take the A Train." And there’s been a minor movement to dig into old-as-the-hills tunes, from Robert Johnson’s blues to spirituals to Stephen…
The Grand
Following in the footsteps of Best in Show, director Zak Penn’s ad-libbed send-up of Vegas-style poker championships manages to land a few good laughs but ultimately suffers in comparison. Even with with a quirky cast that includes everybody from Woody Harrelson to Werner Herzog, the film never attains the heights of Guest’s improvisational humor. It’s…
Declaration of independence
It’s easy to forget that a guitar can sound this simple, this rustic and yet simultaneously universal and sophisticated. People tend to forget that a single instrument like the guitar — when bent to the will, skill and imagination of a dedicated craftsman — can create and populate entire valleys, mountains and burbling riverbeds. After…
Last Year at Marienbad
A man known only as “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi), approaches a married woman called “A” (Delphine Seyrig) at a mammoth, opulent resort, insisting that they met the year before, possibly at Marienbad, where she promised to run away with him. She denies it and rebuffs him, though not strongly enough to really turn him away, and…
Couch Trip
Warner Gangsters Collection Vol. 3 Warner Home Video Like last year’s Film Noir Collection Vol. 3, Warner Home Video’s Gangsters Collection Vol. 3 is characterized as much by its deviation from its alleged genre as its adherence to it. Of the six Depression-era films collected here, not one can really be considered a gangster movie…
Hope floats
Creating an effective homage is a tricky thing, but Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien has found the right balance of reverence and independence in Flight of the Red Balloon. There are constant echoes of Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon throughout Hou’s meditative interpretation, including sequences that capture the whimsy of the 1956 original, which follows…
Motor City Cribs
Mick Bassett wants to hang your doodles in his digs.
Smart People
When misanthropic college lit professor Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) suffers a seizure, he’s stripped of his driver’s license for six months and agrees to take in his unreliable (but not uncaring) adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) to help out. Since the death of his wife, Lawrence’s overachieving teenage daughter (Ellen Page) has stepped in…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY • 16 POETRY @ THE ZEITGEIST FALSE ADVERTISING? This dependably engaging monthly poetry series at this venerable Detroit art-performance space delivers something different this time around: lectures instead of verse. Scheduled are Edward Griffor, the author of Handbook of Computability Theory (Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics); James Hart II, both an…
The Odd Couple
Credit Danger Mouse for not trying to make another “Crazy” on his and Cee-Lo Green’s second album together. To do so would’ve been not only nearly impossible, it would’ve indisputably cast Gnarls Barkley as a quirky but forgettable one-hit wonder. Instead, on The Odd Couple, the duo takes a steadier approach, with Cee-Lo forgoing anything…
Tragedy and litigation
More than a decade has passed since a limousine crash in Birmingham ended the careers of Red Wings star Vladimir Konstantinov and team masseur Sergei Mnatsakanov, but the complicated legal battles could just be nearing a conclusion. The final lawsuit stemming from the crash goes to trial later this month in federal court in Detroit,…
Mountain Battles
At 13 songs in less than 37 minutes, Mountain Battles, the first Breeders album since 2002’s Title TK, happens quickly and, like their best work, almost isn’t happening at all. In the end, it’s all a dream, a moment that disappears when exposed to the light. Their most accomplished work has always had a half-finished…
Letters to the Editor
Booing Brewer Lessenberry’s right about all the arrogant power games of Michigan’s Democratic and Republican parties (“Our disgraceful Dems,” Metro Times, April 9). Again we suffer from Mark Brewer’s ongoing disastrous leadership of the Democratic Party hacks. They wasted taxpayers money on this botched primary (Republicans came out OK), made Democrats look really bad to…
It’s a Shame About Ray (Collector’s Edition)
Why It’s a Shame About Ray is receiving an expanded collector’s edition now is anyone’s guess. The album was originally released in 1992, so we’re celebrating its 16th anniversary. In its original incarnation, Ray was a 12-track CD that barely lasted a half-hour. Coming at a time when albums were expanding to fill up the…
AS SEEN ON MTV…
Well, the MTV webcast site, anyway. It’s not often that Detroit superstars like the Go or the Muldoons get mentioned on MTV, but former Detroiter (and Ramrods leader) Ivan Suvanjieff (aka Mark Norton) did his part to promote those local bands — literally wearing them on his chest — when he recently did an interview…
