WHY CAN’T DETROIT CASH IN ON ITS MUSIC?
Interesting piece on NPR this morning about our great Detroit musical legacy. The thesis? From the piece itself: “You might assume the music business is a big element in Detroit’s economy, just as it is in other cities that have made an industry out of their local music scene. Memphis has Beale Street. In Austin,…
Big dreams have led him to a big band
Ask a jazz musician with Steve Wood’s stellar credentials — and a reputation as a saxophone sage — why he plays with the Scott Gwinnell Orchestra gig after gig, year after year, and you’ll get a sense of what makes the band so great for listeners too. “First of all, Scott’s writing and arrangements are…
Best Hot News Anchor: Carmen Harlan
SHE’S OUR ANCHOR (Sung to the tune of “She’s a Lady” by Tom Jones) Well, she’s all that we could want, She’s the kind we like to flaunt, And watch on TeeVee. We love to see her face, She’s got style, she’s got grace, She’s a beauty! She’s our anchor, Whoa-wo-woh, she’s our anchor, Talkin’…
Public Square – Reader Picks
BEST LOCAL MUSIC FESTIVAL Metro Times’ Hamtramck Blowout You came, you partied, we conquered. In the dead of winter in (the supposed dead of) Detroit, and in the shadow of South by Southwest, Blowout for the first time this year got some love beyond our corner of the Mitten, including nice airtime on National Public…
Night Life – Reader Picks
BEST PICK-UP BAR BlackFinn Restaurant & Saloon 530 S. Main St., Royal Oak; 248-582-9460; blackfinnroyaloak.com We weren’t sure what to make of BlackFinn when its doors first opened; was it a sports bar or a family restaurant with a dance floor? Was it a swingers club? And why would so many miniskirts and shiny-shirts wait…
Nutritional Value – Reader Picks
BEST NEW RESTAURANT BEST RESTAURANT UNDER $15 PER DINER BEST GREEK RESTAURANT Kalamata Greek Café 3149 Crooks Rd., Troy; 248-643-2600; kalamatagreek.com We don’t dare discount Kalamata’s win just because of their (admittedly successful) online pleas for votes. Hey, they made it easy, and the following spoke loud and clear in favor of this busy shop,…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY • 22 ROCK LOTTERY A SOUND GAMBLE In celebration of Earth Day and to benefit the Greening of Detroit, the Magic Stick will host Detroit’s first-ever rock lottery. Basically, members from a bunch of local bands, including Silverghost, the Gories, the Dirtbombs, the Fondas and more, were organized — for better or for worse…
Best way to cure the blues
$$$ Directly To American People: 1 $1.00 Beers In Southwest Detroit: 1 $tylumus Funds: 1 2 Coneys: 1 80s Night At Luna In Royal Oak: 1 A Bullet!: 1 A Concert At Dte: 1 A Decent Light Rail Into The City: 1 A Decent Light Rail Into The City From Both North And West: 1…
The Real Deals – Staff Picks
BEST WAY TO SHOP FOR SEX TOYS AND AVOID BEING SEEN Private House Party You might be shy, so you don’t want to be seen publicly trying to discern the difference between a bullet and other buzzing buddies. You might just need an excuse to get your girlfriends together for drinks and dinner. Either way,…
Best and the rest
Good times, bad times — and then there’s Jenny
Activate!
Editor’s note: If you read Metro Times online, particularly the Music Blahg, then you’re familiar with the Wonder Twins, D’Anne and Laura Witkowski. Their humorous commentaries from local shows have grown increasingly popular with our readers, so we thought it best the sisters have a regular column in the paper as well. And what better…
Get it right
The many paths to district elections for City Council
Home rules
For Jorge Chinea, it was predictable. Michigan’s economy went sour, unemployment rose, state spending tightened, and who got blamed?”Whenever we have an economic downturn in the United States, we scapegoat the immigrants,” says Chinea, director of the Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies at Wayne State University. But what’s different in this recession is that state politicians,…
Letters to the Editor
Hit the road, Jack! Jack Lessnberry’s April Fools column demonstrates that, after 16 years, he should be summarily retired. As a professor of journalism, he is living proof that ‘those that can’t do teach.’ Every Detroiter should be outraged by his hollow and callous analysis of what is happening to our lifeblood industry: automobiles and…
Simply the best
Into every Best Of issue a little drama must fall. Perusing the results of our reader’s polls, often two or three esteemed eateries will battle neck and neck for years, only to find a newcomer snatching away the laurels. Or our panel of food critics will spurn a beloved fixture to embrace some stylish young…
Nutritional Value – Staff Picks
BEST SPLURGE The Lark 6430 Farmington Rd., West Bloomfield; 248-661-4466 Jim and Mary Lark’s eponymous European country inn has been around for more than a quarter-century, winning awards for its French-oriented kitchen and vast wine cellar. In the exquisite but simply decorated room, with only 12 tables, discriminating guests dine on a prix-fixe that averages…
Motor City Cribs
Chris Pottinger’s Royal Oak pad
Grow green or else
Other countries race ahead toward green economy
Tops at 20
For 20 years, Showtime Clothing has been a kind of staple for Detroit’s boho underground — a not-so-quiet treasure trove of original and idiosyncratic garb, a winning collection of new retro, ersatz couture, rock ‘n’ roll, slutty, vintage, killer footwear and more — for nearly every rank of artist and musician. Its walls and racks…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Couch Trip
Travels With Hiroshi Shimizu Criterion Eclipse Like its previous Eclipse box sets of Raymond Bernard and Larisa Shepitko, Criterion deserves countless kudos, thanks and hosannas for bringing to yet another virtually unknown director the notoriety he has long deserved. Hiroshi Shimizu rose to prominence in prewar Japanese cinema alongside his much-better-known contemporary Yasujiro Ozu. Shimizu…
Kung fu fighting
Clara Bradley’s ex once punched her face so hard he cracked her cheekbone. Then he broke a couple ribs. A good relationship went bad because of booze, and the whiskey made him violent. She escaped to a safe house and eventually moved on, but the assaults led her to take self-defense classes at the Yellow…
Drunk drunk drunk
A poetic memoir haunts the gardens and the graves
Night Life – Staff Picks
BEST CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION BAR Temple Bar 2906 Cass Ave., Detroit; 248-547-3331 This delectable dump is imperfectly central to everything. It’s across the street from the hulking, though largely empty, Masonic Temple, almost equal distance between Wayne State University and downtown proper — and dangerously close to the hearts of anyone who has survived…
The Real Deals – Reader Picks
BEST VINTAGE CLOTHING Lost & Found Vintage 510 S. Washington Ave., Royal Oak; 248-548-6154; lostandfoundvintage.com Stop digging through your eccentric aunt’s closet for vintage clothing and accessories. Lost & Found has enough backward-gazing apparel to teleport you into the past faster than a Family Guy flashback. The eager-eyed, gracious staff makes even the most inexperienced…
Best of Detroit 2009
OK, last October’s Best of Detroit issue, aka the MT Stimulus Package, didn’t turn things around — the stock market tumbled another 2,000 points before beginning its tentative (cross fingers) rebound; unemployment and foreclosure rates are today far more devastating than six months ago. So with the help of more than 1,000 of you who…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
That’s J-e-double-f-r-e-y Morgan’s Media Blackout #214! Sum 41 — All the Good Sh**: 14 Solid Gold Hits 2000-2008 (Aquarius) :: I’ll say what these smug dealers are too pussy to spell out on their album cover because they’re afraid of losing valuable Wal-Mart sales: This juvenile generic angst rock is shit. Johnny Winter and ……
Our best news
Just in time for the Best Of issue, we received some very good news from the Detroit Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists: We’d won 10 awards and an honorable mention in the chapter’s Excellence in Media competition for dailies of circulation 100,000 and more, and weeklies of circulation of 50,000 and more. Those…
The F-word
Out-of-ideas right-wingers sling the slime
Editorial
In two weeks Detroiters will select their next mayor. Three months after that they will go to the polls again and vote in a mayoral primary for the second time this year. And three months after that they will again vote for a mayor; the winner of this contest will have the luxury of serving…
Translation: Asshole
When your friends says you’re ‘intense,’ they probably mean …
Half Japanese
Though its menu is Japanese — or perhaps “Japanese-inspired” — there’s nothing subtle about Katana Steakhouse. For teppanyaki — “hibachi table cooking” — diners are seated around big cooking surfaces, each manned by an aproned and toqued Chinese chef. There are 10 chairs at each cooking station, so you’ll end up sharing with others. The…
State of Play
Russell Crowe is Cal McAffrey, the romantic stereotype of a rumpled, hard-drinking, morally flexible but still noble investigative reporter, the one every keyboard news jockey secretly imagines themselves to be. He’s up to his Chee-tos-stained beard in dirt, digging into a mysterious D.C. double homicide that turns into a juicy political scandal when a pretty…
Three for the show
Invited to offer their view of Tokyo, Michel Gondry, Léos Carax and Bong Joon-ho have created a triptych of exaggerated urban alienation and estrangement. First up is Michel Gondry’s “Interior Design,” a surprisingly restrained doodle that follows the rudderless girlfriend (Ayako Fujitani) of an ambitious young filmmaker. Marginalized and friendless, she undergoes a surreal Kafkesque…
Freep reporter keeps secrets, freedom
A Detroit Free Press reporter had a legitimate claim to a Fifth Amendment defense, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. Veteran journalist David Ashenfelter had been ordered three times to submit to a deposition in a former federal prosecutor’s lawsuit against the U.S. Justice Department. The former prosecutor, Richard Convertino, is seeking the identity of an…
USA WELCOMES MICHIGAN MUSIC CHARACTERS (Deastro, Kroha, Case & More!)
USA Network is all about characters — and, somewhat surprisingly, not just the fictional kind. Sorry, Monk … The cable TV station recently launched the Character Project — an artful attempt at capturing a sense of Americana. They sent 11 world-class photographers to various corners of the country to shoot away and tell a story.…
