SO LONG TO AN UNDERDOG
Very sorry to hear of the death of Michael Morgan, who passed away from lung cancer last Friday, March 28th, at the age of 59. I met and knew Michael during the final Detroit days of CREEM Magazine, when he worked at the publication in ad sales and marketing. Perhaps Morgan’s most memorable role in…
GATHERING MOSS…
Well, never let it be said that our own Jack White doesn’t know how to be a rock star. That’s always been one of his greatest talents, after all. And in celebration of Martin Scorsese’s new Rolling Stones documentary, Shine A Light (hitting theaters this Friday), which features a guest appearance by Mr. White, Detroit’s…
Motor City Rides
Marvwon’s 2007 Chevrolet Impala.
Justice done, election law undone
ACLU prevails in suit over voter rolls.
Couch Trip
Them Dark Sky Films A middle-school teacher and her writer boyfriend are assaulted in their home by … what, exactly? They can’t figure it out, but if they don’t escape, they’re surely dead. This Romanian horror film uses common genre conventions to establish terror: garbled phone calls, car doors that just won’t stay locked, power…
Shake some action
The Singles are a great fucking power pop band. But first, some definitions are in order …History suggests that Pete Townshend originally coined the term during an interview, referring to the Who’s “I Can’t Explain.” Late great critic and rock ‘n’ roll renaissance man Greg Shaw then used the term to describe a certain form…
The big burn
The deadline is fast approaching. Within the next three months, Detroit must make a monumental decision regarding the 1 billion pounds of waste its residents produce each year. To burn, or not to burn — that is the question. Confronted with that same dilemma more than two decades ago, the city responded by constructing the…
Letters to the Editor
How long, oh, Lord? The Iraq War has been five years of tears for both Americans and Iraqis (“Blood & Greenbacks,” Metro Times, March 19). I believe that the true cost of the war is the lives of the innocent. Thanks for informing and opening my eyes to the truth. As it states, 4,000 American…
Night and Day
Thursday • 3 Haale PERSIAN RAWK The (gorgeous) Bronx-born Iranian singer calls her music “psychedelic Sufi trance rock,” and indeed it’s an interesting hybrid: Drawing influence from artists like Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix — whose ’60s and ’70s psychedelia at times nodded to the Middle East, especially in the case of Zep — and…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
He’s the boob
A thought for I Miss Her Boobs (hubby of breast-cancer survivor): Turn off the light. —Greg ••• As a woman, I think you went a tad too easy on IMHB’s wife — understandably, though, given what she’s been through. She had my total support until he mentioned that she will wear prosthetic breasts to formal…
In praise of paint
In an age when you can pretty much make whatever art you want, however you want, by sitting in front of a computer screen, artists choose to paint because it is a sensual experience. There’s nothing that gets the creative juices flowing like squeezing that gooey stuff from a tube and smearing it across canvas…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Phantom of the outré: Nash the Slash is back.
More power pop action
Finding the musical style where you’d least expect it.
You’ll never wank alone
In the old days, if you wanted porn you had to go buy it at a seedy store or watch it at a peep show among the raincoat crowd. Though most of them were put out of business by home media and the Internet, Detroit — long a destination for vice — still has several…
Girl Friday
Long before Renee Zellweger’s brief marriage to country “singer” Kenny Chesney, long before Jack White married model Karen Elson while floating down a Brazilian river, the movie star and the rock star were, as your grandparents might have called ’em, an item. Zellweger spent much time in Detroit, in fact, which was a shocker to…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Powers of 10
1) "Please Please Me" — The Beatles 2) "Biggest Gossip in Town" — Rockin’ Horse 3) "Shake Some Action" — The Flamin’ Groovies 4) "Tonight" — The Raspberries 5) "I Can’t Explain" — The Who 6) "I’ve Got a Flair" — Fountains of Wayne 7) "Cruel To Be Kind" — Nick Lowe 8) "Do Anything…
Couples’ night
Some things are too much for these twosomes.
Dr. K’s bad idea
Why Jack Kevorkian shouldn’t run for office.
In due season
Fiddleheads is one big room with well-spaced tables and floor-to-ceiling windows. Their “contemporary” menu puts forward a dozen entrees with such dishes as bobwhite quail and apple-port stuffing with toasted almond risotto; mussels in a hot and sour broth; smoked trout, and squash soup. At the same time, there’s a reassuring rib-eye steak with mashed…
Ego Trippin’
Originally intended as a purely solo effort — i.e., no guests — to showcase only Calvin Broadus, Snoop Dogg’s ninth studio album, Ego Trippin’, is instead a mish-mash of different styles that — with its assortment of guests and influences — never quite manages to give any kind of definitive picture of anything or anyone.…
Retribution Gospel Choir
In his full-time outfit Low, Alan Sparhawk spent the last 15 years disassembling rock music to its basest elements and reconstructing it in the slowest manner possible. With his new side project, Retribution Gospel Choir, he reimagines his career as if he’d opted for joining the ’90s alt-rock crowd instead of doing everything in his…
Gea
Mia Doi Todd is a sensitive singer-songwriter who can make a listener nervous. A classically-trained Yale graduate, the daughter of a judge and a sculptor, blessed with a strong, authoritative voice that tends toward over-enunciation and the stiff interpretive instincts of Judy Collins, Todd evinces a high-art ideal, a life of culture and privilege. She…
Long shots
To many young black men growing up in distressed urban areas, basketball would seem to offer a route to financial solvency and upward mobility. Rap titan and ex-drug dealer Jay-Z said it best, in “Some How, Some Way,” a track on 2002’s Blueprint 2: “Whether we dribble out this motherfucker/ Rap metaphors and riddle out…
Gangsta gangsta
On that single titular day when Sudhir Venkatesh “ran” a Chi-town ghetto gang for a day, he didn’t have to shoot, rob or threaten anyone. Instead, the grad student got a choice glimpse at the kinds of decisions the manager of a large-scale “community-minded” criminal enterprise must make: how to determine who’s in the wrong…
Run, Fat Boy, Run
The pairing of Simon Pegg and Thandie Newton truly boggles the mind. Newton is Terrence Howard’s hot wife in Crash and Simon Pegg is … well, the pasty-skinned little guy in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. As it is, Run, Fat Boy, Run is so clumsy and bland that it’s almost pointless to…
Real Emotional Trash
While history states that Pavement broke up in 1999, the band’s fans would place the official termination date some time between 2001’s Stephen Malkmus and 2003’s Pig Lib. Those two albums were the first solo records from ex-Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus, and while the former felt in many ways like a sonic continuation of his…
Flawless
Demi Moore plays Laura Quinn, the lone female exec at a major London diamond broker, who discovers that nasty internal politics are about to ruin her and she hasn’t a pillow soft enough to cushion the blow. Enter Caine’s Mr. Hobbs. He’s the night janitor — a dog track-loving cockney widower with a hidden agenda…
Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings
Adam Duritz wants us to feel sorry for him. We may see him in magazines and on television hanging out with beautiful people, attending lavish parties and sipping whatever it is that rich people drink — it ain’t Boone’s Farm, I know that — but according to the song “Los Angeles,” after you see all…
21
In translating to the screen Ben Mezrich’s bestseller, Hollywood egregiously transforms a gaggle of nerdy Asian MIT students into young, mostly white, OC clones. But what’s more disappointing is how writers Peter Steinfield and Allan Loeblet let blackjack, rather than poker, be their guide. There’s Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess), the scruffy-handsome genius who’s good enough…
Assemblage 1998-2008
The label began with an ambitious project: to honor and document the legacy of the West Coast bassist Eric von Essen, who died leaving a huge cache of lovely, unrecorded compositions. Three volumes of the von Essen project, 37 other discs and 10 years later, there’s more than enough for a two-CD retrospective. But how…
Stop Loss
The story centers on a U.S. hero of Iraq and Afghanistan who’s forced to return to combat after thinking he’d done his duty — so he goes AWOL. It becomes a road trip, not to safety or salvation, but to a string of metaphoric scenarios, from a V.A. hospital full of shattered warriors to slums…
The Duchess of Langeais
Antoinette de Langeais (Jeanne Balibar) enjoys the title and wealth provided by her absent husband, and she frequents Parisian soirees, enjoying the company of the newly resurgent French aristocracy. When she encounters Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), a morose army general scarred from defending the Empire in far-away battles, she senses his immediate interest and…
Vision quest
When we first see Youssef (Parvis Parastui), he’s a man immersed in a world of words and thoughts of the divine. He teaches the work of the Sufi poet Rumi, and his home office is filled with volumes of scholarship typed in Braille by his devoted wife, Roya (Roya Taymourian). At once, in his life…
Shake more action
Fortunately, this reviewer got to spend three entire days with the Raconteurs’ new album, a luxury many critics didn’t get, due to its much-reported rush release. Fortunate because, on the first two listens, the initial reaction was there really isn’t much there there; the album’s so eclectic in terms of musical influences and genres that…
