Ex-Detroit saxophonist Scott Petersen loses battle with cystic fibrosis
A year and a half ago, MT jazz scribe Charles L. Latimer gave us the story of saxophonist Scott Petersen. The former Detroiter, a veteran of the J.C. Heard Orchestra and other aggregations, had relocated to San Francisco in 1995 as a better environment for coping with his congenital cystic fibrosis. There he worked with…
City Slang: Motor City Tap Fest this month
Between August 18-21, the 4th annual Motor City Tap Fest will be held at Wayne State University’s Old Main Building. In the past, the event has attracted attendees from as far away as Honduras, Central America, Niagara Falls, Canada, and Phoenix, Arizona, all coming to Detroit to dance. You can’t knock that. According to a…
City Slang Reads: Dancing in the Street
There are a lot, a lot, of books out there about Motown records, Berry Gordy and the many wonderful artists that were signed to the label in its Detroit heyday, which makes it all the more impressive that there aren’t any books like Suzanne Smith’s Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of…
City Slang: Prussia to release album in segments
Moody, atmospheric indie locals Prussia has announced that the band will release the new Poor English album in three parts, starting on August 16. Tuesday will see the release of Poor English, Part 1. Parts 2 and 3 will be release in September and October. All three will be released on 10” and digital download…
Idiot wind
30 Minutes or Less C+ 30 Minutes or Less is a pretty good description of what works in this 83-minute potty-mouthed action-comedy. Don’t get me wrong; it’s an entertaining, if scattered, 30 minutes, but the stuff in-between doesn’t do a whole lot to impress. The premise was made for TV Guide listings: A Grand Rapids…
City Slang: Früt plays Frutstock this weekend
On Friday and Saturday this weekend, Grande Ballroom rock veterans Früt play the annual reunion show at the Rec Bowl in Mt. Clemens. Also on the bill is Strat Axis featuring Little Leon. There’s no cover, and two great posters for the event have been designed, by Gary Grimshaw (above) and Carl Lundgren (below). I…
Gleefully deluded
Glee: The 3-D Concert Movie C+ Glee, at least in the first season, was the rare pop culture phenomenon that was smart, edgy and transgressive — a high school satire with bite and heart. Then it started taking itself seriously, creator Ryan Murphy contracted messianic diva syndrome, and media oversaturation began to drive all but…
No rain today
Nostalgia for the Light A "I’m convinced that memory has a gravitational force." —Filmmaker Patrico Guzmán Think of the view of Earth from space. In South America’s peninsular tail, there’s a brown spot, an earthen blemish on the face of our globe. It is Chile’s Atacama Desert, a place where the rain never falls.…
Zero hour
Point Blank B Ah, what taut direction, a galloping pace, and a sympathetic protagonist can do. Fred Cavayé’s brisk Point Blank (not to be confused with John Boorman’s brilliant 1968 noir) is astutely focused yet undeniably disposable, a snappy suspenser that’s refreshingly free of huge stunt effects, melodramatic theatrics or absurdly convoluted plot mechanics. This…
City Slang: Bits and pieces
On Thursday, August 25, the New Dodge in Hamtramck will host a benefit for Jerry Younkins, “Detroit’s first hippie”. The evening will include music, poetry and art from, among others, Michigan Basement, Catlistening, Gary Quackenbush and Karen Neal. The poster has been designed by Carl Lundgren Younkins was an active artist in the LA, San…
Crow’s nest
The Help B Set in the early ’60s, when sleepy Mississippi was just waking up to the nation’s festering civil rights struggle, The Help carefully measures out the comfortable distance from which to judge the past and to make us feel better about ourselves. It hardly seems far enough; the naked bigotry shown here is…
City Slang: “Brick by Brick” revisited
With the exception of Blah Blah Blah, the ‘80s weren’t particularly kind to our Iggy, not musically and certainly not commercially. The magnificence of the Stooges’ body of work, plus Kill City, The Idiot and Lust For Life had been replaced with the likes of Soldier, Zombie Birdhouse and Instinct. By the time the ‘90s…
Food Stuff
Edible roots Drop in at Leopold’s Books this Saturday evening for a reading and book signing of A Tiger in the Kitchen, by author Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan. The book is about a year the author spent traveling to Singapore, the land of her birth, to rediscover her native culture by learning how to cook Singaporean…
The Staple Singers – Be Altitude: Respect Yourself (Stax)
After shifting from true gospel to their own "soul-folk" in the mid-’60s, covering Dylan and hanging with Martin Luther King, the Staple Singers hit a skid until signing with Al Bell’s Stax Records in ’68. A pair of Steve Cropper-helmed underachievers ensued and it was Jesse Jackson who suggested Bell produce Be Altitude, the group’s…
Letters to the Editor
Fix the people first Re: Larry Gabriel’s "Arms Around the City" (Stir It Up, Aug. 3), I applaud the efforts of ARISE Detroit and the nearly 170 organizations participating in the Fifth Annual Neighborhoods Day celebration. The work that is being done, the people who volunteer time, the money spent, and the sense of community…
Mortgage mess
If you have lost your home to foreclosure, this is a story you will want to read. It is possible there could be a payoff in your near future. Keep in mind, though, that the key word here is possible. But within that possibility is a stunning fact: Tens of thousands of Michigan residents who…
Rugby World Cup 2011
Xbox 360, PS3 HB/505 Games The wonderful world of rugby! Fabled as one of the more violent competitive sports, the world unites to compete in this exotic ball-tossing past time. Here you get a pretty standard introduction, you hit "start," you select your game type, you edit game settings (difficulty, length, etc.) and —…
Crank
Melissa Bryan Return of the Woman Rock Haus Records 3½ Stars Riffing: This girl’s hittin’ it for sainthood, working a real-world gig advocating for victims of domestic violence. She was weaned on Leif Garrett, girlish fright wigs and teen-boy power riffs. Reference points: Best line ever: "Street walkin’ cheater"! If you like:…
What we should fear
"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering … they are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred." —Franklin D. Roosevelt, running for re-election, 1936 Don’t you wish that President Obama had said those words?…
Joining the fight
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People passed a resolution calling for an end to the War on Drugs in no uncertain terms a couple of weeks ago during its national convention in Los Angeles. "These flawed drug policies that have been mostly enforced in African American communities must be stopped and replaced…
Pink Lightning
A disco beat under a funky space-rock guitar and a grooving bass with an accordion’s old-world-wheeze. Thus forms the dance-rock of the quintet Pink Lightning — galvanized by a suspender-sportin’ frontman. After a full year playing, these former Eastern Market buskers are famous here for their live shows and mix of funk, Cuban, surf or…
You scream! I scream!
Ashby’s Sterling Ice Cream Parlor 46540 Van Dyke, Shelby Twp.; 586-268-6222: This old-fashioned ice cream parlor serves 44 flavors of premium, hand-dipped ice cream. No shortcuts here: Ashby’s starts off with the creamiest 14 percent butterfat ice cream mix and adds your favorite ingredients. In addition to ice cream, choose from shakes, malts, floats and…
Soul Suited
Everyone’s looking at him. James Hewlett sits in a west-side McDonald’s, nursing a small bag of fries. He’s drawing stares because it’s early afternoon and he’s dressed like he’s about to hit the stage of the Apollo Theater. Fifty years ago. "People, they ain’t used to people lookin’ like this," says the best-dressed man within…
1-2 crush on you
Passalacqua Thursday Magic Stick What to expect: Considerable potential that this hip/hop duo will engage masks, will create a mess and will unload your head with their uncannily articulate motor-mouthed verses. Said masks are likely to include wobbly cardboard likenesses of Bootsy Collins and Tom Waits. Said mess might be a crumbled newspaper, a pizza…
Almost Famous
"I wait in dismal Detroit gray February freeze. No radio. Silent, concentrated calm. Just want to see Charlie’s arm reach and open the passenger door, then we can split. The gig was to take this shit-load of coke and trade it for heroin. Took that to the west-side suburbs, saving some blow for the big…
Working out the kinks
Q: I’m a 23-year-old male who has never been in a relationship. I have had many crushes but never the courage to go ask anyone out. I dread rejection. Compounding this problem: I might be bisexual. I’m afraid to reveal this to anyone. Some girls might be OK with it at first, but they are…
Under the bridge
Trollhunter B+ The shaky-camera monster movie as fictional documentary is a niche genre if there ever was one. In the dozen years since The Blair Witch Project, the form has seen a slew of cruddy knockoffs, and even a few hits (Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity), yet none have been as awesomely weird and compelling as…
Field of dreams
Opposite a four-lane highway, an expanse of manicured gardens winds up to a meandering lagoon. A single narrow bridge leads across the water to the neatly trimmed front yard of a 16-room colonial mansion known as Plantation House. Also boasting a pool, security guardhouse, guest residence and helipad, the Plantation House is the residence of…
Johnny Mathis sings the Hits of Bacharach & Kaempfert
You can never get away with double-disc concepts like this anymore — two long players, each devoted to two different composers whose name is Burt. Or Bert, as Bert the K spells it. Maybe before the bottom fell out of the coke-sniffing record industry in the late ’70s there was a Johnny Sings the Hits…
Rising star
Astro Coffee 2124 Michigan Ave, Detroit 313-638-2989 astrocoffeedetroit.blogspot.com Handicap accessible Prices: $3-$6 per item Despite its obvious specialty, categorizing Astro Coffee as a coffee shop would be a grave disservice. Coffee shops in southeast Michigan are generally caffeination stations. Places with stale pastries or dry muffins. Vulgar franchised institutions with ad-sponsored WiFi connections where…
Ty Segall – Goodbye Bread (Drag City)
It’s sublime and woozy, soaked in reverb and bristling with tinny guitars that can purr furiously over beats so tipsy it’s like a soundtrack to a Sunday morning hangover. Here, Ty Segall has drifted from his initial tendencies for punchy grit and snot-blotted blues-punk into dirge-y psychedelia and melodic but garbled folk. The effect can…
State of emergency
As our colleague Jack Lessenberry accurately predicted moths ago, the move to recall Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is going nowhere. That is now official. However, the effort to overturn one of the key laws our nerd-in-chief pushed through the Legislature is going even better than expected. Greg Bowens, spokesman for the coalition seeking to place…
City Slang: Weekly music review roundup
Remember – if you send it, it will get reviewed. That’s the City Slang promise. It doesn’t matter what genre the music is – as long as it has a Metro Detroit connection, it’ll get in. Preferably, we’d like to concentrate on new releases but, while we’re getting warmed up here, feel free to send…
