FAREWELL TO A DETROIT BLUES GREAT
Detroit blues singer Odessa Harris (aka Dessie Williams) died from complications of emphysema this past Saturday, Aug. 18th. She was 71. Born in West Helena, Arkansas, Harris began, like so many blues vocalists, singing in the choir at a local Baptist church. At the age of 14, she landed a spot singing with James “Peck”…
RETURN OF THE VON BONDIES
It’s official. Although there were numerous rumors that the band had been dropped from their major label deal and even that they were now defunct, the Von Bondies – albeit an almost completely new lineup of the Von Bondies – will return in early 2008 with a brand-new album for Sire Records entitled Love, Hate…
UNCLE KRACKER BUSTED ON SEX CHARGE
Kid Rock ‘s former DJ and pop-rock-country star in his own right Uncle Kracker (real name: Matthew Shafer) was arrested early Friday morning (4:45 a.m., to be exact) in Raleigh, N.C., on charges of second-degree sexual offense. The 33-year-old Mount Clemens native was being held on $5 million bail after being arrested at his Embassy Hills hotel following…
CHICKENHAWKS VS. DOVES
What is this fat fuck laughing about? Now that that total waste of human flesh (and one of the most notorious closeted men in America) Karl Rove is leaving the Bush Administration (indictment free, I might add), what is the first thing this dickhead is doing when he leaves his position? No, he’s not going…
BRUCE!!!
Magic, Bruce Springsteen’s new studio recording and his first with the E Street Band in five years, is set for release by Columbia Records on October 2, 2007. Produced and mixed by Brendan O’Brien, the album features eleven new Springsteen songs and was recorded at Southern Tracks Recording Studio in Atlanta, Ga. Magic Song Titles:…
A DETROIT ARTISTIC TREASURE
Speaking of Charlie Auringer, as Lester was in the item below, another guy who used to work in the CREEM art department for Charlie has an art show opening up in Detroit this coming Thursday, August 23rd. Gary Grimshaw is not just a Detroit legend but one of the national legends of psychedelic music posters…
IT WAS 30 YEARS AGO TODAY…
“But I guarantee you one thing: We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.” — Lester Bangs, August 1977 I’m really not here to criticize other pundits in town but Terry Lawson’s article on Elvis in Sunday’s Free Press kinda bugged me. He wrote that he didn’t pay much attention…
ROUGHING IT…
A bunch of area indie-folk types are throwing a groovy “Farmhouse Fest” camping musical event this Saturday, August 18th, at 5830 Johnstown Rd., outside of Ann Arbor. (Hmmm…Johnstown…camping…who’s bringing the Kool-Aid? Wait a minute. That was Jonestown…never mind…) Canada, Or, the Whale, Frontier Ruckus and Matt Jones are just a few of the artists scheduled…
WAS (NOT IS)
Hey, check out what Detroit boy Don Was is doing at his Wasmopolitan Calvacade of Recorded Music website, which is part of the My Damn Channel website group. The latter’s kinda cool on its own. We’ve heard talk that the former Don Fagenson may be returning to the Motor City to work, at least part time,…
KOO KOO FOR COCOA PUFFS
It looks like Eminem pal 50 Cent may be going a bit off — how you say? — the deep end. Fitty has issued a statement that if Kanye West’s new album, which hits the streets September 11th, the same day as 50 Cent’s new album, sells more copies than his does the first week…
The beat goes on
King Sundiata Keita, the beloved forerunner of Detroit’s African drum and dance community, must have decided to leave some of his spirit behind when he passed away two years ago. The reasoning behind this theory is that his son, Prince Sewande Keita, has emerged as a wicked percussionist on his own at a very young…
Dreaming, Kashmir
From Folding a River Marick Press $14.95, 51 pp. i. There are words on your tongue I have considered embracing, a landscape of water and stone. Yesterday, I dreamed of you in another language and felt the vertigo of Kashmir, a singular gesture of not finding my footing upon the edge of this page. As…
Live at Cafe Monmartre 1966
Ornette Coleman may have started the free jazz thing circa 1960, but trumpeter Don Cherry was the Johnny Appleseed of Ornetteology, sharing and extending his Coleman’s ideas on both sides of Atlantic. In New York, he worked with such peers as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Steve Lacy. In Europe, he gathered younger, less-known players…
Zen and now
It probably goes without saying, but Buddhist monks look wildly out of place in a metal scrap yard. And, upon entering one, you can only imagine how the barely contained chaos of one of these places must feel for ordained monk Hilary Moga (her Buddhist name is Myung Ju Sunim) and monk-in-training Luke Niewiadomski (Sosan),…
Excerpt from Riding the Hubcap
From Voices of the Lost and Found Wayne State University Press $18.95, 177 pp. Through the window I watch Michigan corn bleed into Ohio wheat, and pungent tobacco become flat miles of soy before we hit the rice fields of Mississippi. By the time we reach Biloxi I think Mason will drive until our threadbare…
Phantom Limb
Total, uncompromising destruction seems to be Pig Destroyer’s aim. On Phantom Limb, the band defiantly succeeds in making its particular brand of noise a step above the legions of other bland noise bands out there. So, what makes Pig Destroyer so much better than your average grindcore band? Well, for one thing, they have guitarist…
The man who has them nailed
Al Gore’s book tells it like it is.
Poem in Two Parts After Michael Palmer – for George Tysh
From In the Company of Words Past Tents Press $12, 114 pp. And I arrived there with open eyes glued to the light, too real, fading and rising all aglow, staking speechless claims about useless principles in full view of other watchers whose stripped smiles and lazy eyes brought shame and starched pleasures She stepped…
Small plate club
The 17 full-size entrées are quite reasonably priced at $11 to $19, but the main attraction here are the 40-odd small plates which, even more reasonably priced, average around $6. A hot appetizer combo platter — bruschetta, oysters Rockefeller, oysters Ozzies (brandy, mushrooms, shrimp and Asiago), roasted peppers and teriyaki stix — is available for…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 15 The Wiggles LUNCHBOX & UNDIE BRIGADE How does one enter the fray of upper-echelon kiddie entertainment? As in Death to Smoochy, is the competition brutal, cutthroat, dog-eat-Big Red Dog? Australian quartet the Wiggles began in the ’80s as the Cockroaches, but mellowed their sound ever so slightly, moving from pubs to preschools…
Excerpt from “Cowboy Pile”
From The Women Were Leaving the Men Wayne State University Press $18.95, 230 pp. 0ut on the ranges, out West, you get cowboy piles. Mounds of human cowboys. A cowboy lies on the ground (for no reason, it seems), and then somebody lies across him, and then a third guy piles on. Then one after…
The 11th Hour
Narrated in a dire monotone by Leonardo DiCaprio, and laden with montages of calamity from hurricanes, deforestation and factory farming, the film uses information as a bludgeon, until the viewer is forced to seek diversion. The problem is not with the film’s premise, that humans are wrecking havoc on the biosphere, but the alarmist tone…
Corn hole
As Michigan rushes ahead to build new plants that will turn corn into fuel for our cars, trucks and SUVs, an unusual assortment of opponents is trying to douse what critics call a “frenzy” for this alternative to gasoline. It’s a national trend, and Michigan is part of it. As the Detroit News recently reported,…
Excerpt from Wildness Lies in Wait
Atomic Quill Press $17.95 The doctor pulled away with graceful haste. The Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant sat next to an abandoned gas station adjacent to an overgrown lot strewn with garbage and high weeds. Somewhere in that thicket might have been a suite of mangled furniture styled into the skyclad redoubt of a homeless dealer…
Stardust
In adapting Neil Gaiman’s lovely graphic novel, British director Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) hoped to deliver a fable filled with epic romance, understated comedy and emotional thrills. Unfortunately his inventive but chaotic translation has merely replaced Gaiman’s delicate and whimsical wordplay with episodic and cluttered storytelling. A throwback to kinder, gentler genre efforts like Willow,…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Excerpt from The Welsh Girl
Houghton Mifflin $24 hardcover, 352 pp. The Pub on D-Day. Esther yearns to be British tonight of all nights. She’s proud of her Welshness, of course, in the same half-conscious way she’s shyly proud of her looks, but she’s impatient with all the Nationalist talk. Some part of her knows that nationalism is part and…
Rush Hour 3
If the first two films were guilty pleasures, this one is all-guilty. If nothing else, the sheer comic desperation here will entertain, in the spaces between fight scenes. The plot? As if you care. It involves an assassination attempt, a car chase, the triad, a car chase, explosions and a bald showgirl. It also involves…
American Life in Poetry
A poem about survival.
Motor City Cribs
How Danny Kroha and Tia Fletcher roll.
Mother’s milk
Something about Stanley Kubrick’s midnight-black adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel, for all its calculated shocks and grown-up controversies, speaks to the undeveloped mind in the way only a movie about a sociopathic, undeveloped mind can. From the staccato blasts of primary colors in the opening credits, to the sped-up, Looney Tunes orgy scene to the…
Big job for a small house
Dennis Teichman is the man behind the pages at Past Tents Press, a small press publisher whose mission, from day one, has been to "support and publish writers who live, work or have a history of involvement in Detroit’s cultural communities." Since 1985, Past Tents has brought out books by many of Detroit’s best known…
Freeman fallout
Small town police chief tells us to stay away.
Ac-cent-tchuating the positive
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Common is starting to think about his own legacy. He’s 15 years and seven albums into his career; is still grieving the death of former roommate J Dilla; and is cognizant of the omnipresent argument that “hip hop is dead.” And so his desire here to both honor his…
Listening to Jazz
From Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged Marick Press $14.95, 99 pp. It isn’t always such a cool nude as me who stands there like my father or an older man with his chest all graying hair, eyes bulging from high blood pressure, who nods to the mirror, the veins in my neck with…
Lame-o Leno
TV funnyman misjudges us by our cover.
Healing the Divide: A Concert for Peace & Reconciliation
My vote for the weirdest live album of all time? It’s gotta be this benefit album for Healing the Divide, a nonprofit foundation founded by Richard Gere, the proceeds of which will go to providing health insurance for Tibetan nuns and monks in exile. After Gere’s brief intro, His Holiness the Dalai Lama comes on,…
Descriptive clauses
BILL HARRIS Was there a particular turning point when you really committed yourself to writing? After I realized that my career as a visual artist wasn’t going to happen. How would you describe your writing to those who aren’t familiar with it? Concerned with the issues of being a human being — primarily from an…
Blueprint of the Ruins
From The Seed Thieves Marick Press $14.95, 104 pp. Here’s the front door approximately. Here’s the threshold, the opening to a room of charred walls. Before us now, half-razed beams, the intricate architecture of rubble. In our hands, this map of a place once here, recovered from ash. What will we make of this light…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Quick rock crit keeps it in key.
Interview
The love-hate dynamic of press vs. celebrity gets taken to bizarre extremes in Interview, affectionately adapted and directed by the brilliant Steve Buscemi, who also stars as a morose, intently serious journalist with the silly name Pierre Peders. Banished for undisclosed sins by his editors from his prized political beat, Pierre is forced into a…
Seasonal surfing
Far removed from its once-shabby reputation as the very definition of Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland,” summer TV has become a petri dish of creativity in recent years. It’s a prime-time test track: New series emerge in limited editions for a few laps around the fans, and if they can maintain an impressive speed they often…
Excerpt from the beginning of “Lift”
From Giraffes Atomic Quill Press $15.95, 126 pp. The first of the blue carded boys took off down the dirt runway on the east side of the Park. One of the boys had built an enormous kite, box-shaped with light woods and sheets of cloth dyed in psychedelic colors. The boy slipped inside a pouch…
From bizarre to burlesque
Movie nights and Torch with a Twist at Theatre Bizarre.
Back to the old house
We enter Russell Thorburn’s recent poetry collection Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged through the cover’s glossy image of a weather worn farmhouse floating in a sea of tall grass. To enter the space of Thorburn’s meditative collection is to inhabit such a solemn place. Strolling through these poems, we walk wooden floors that…
Steely resolve
Josh Trust bleeds black and gold: New to Detroit and to Metro Times, the paper’s new advertising director still carries season tickets for his hometown Pittsburgh Steelers. But an offhanded slight towards the less-than-stellar Lions doesn’t mean he’s not “thrilled” about his move from Toledo. “I love the metro vibe here,” Trust says. “You really…
Excerpt from the beginning of Be Mine
Harcourt $23 hardcover, 320 pp. I stepped out the door this morning to a scarf of blood in the snowy driveway. Like a bad omen, or a threat, or a gruesome valentine—a tire track, and the flattened fur of a small brown rabbit. The florist must have run it over, delivering the roses—running late already…
Letters to the Editor
Railroad tracks Re: Your two-part series on the conviction of Fredrick Freeman (“Reasonable doubt,” Metro Times, Aug. 1-8), it doesn’t suprise me. In this country you’re “guilty until proven innocent” instead of the other way around (which we were taught in school) — and god help you if you can’t afford O.J. Simpson’s legal “dream…
Winning work
The Dropped Hand, Terry Blackhawk’s third book of poems, has all of the elegance and attention to sound and form a reader would expect, but the pressure to communicate is more intense than ever. The book is organized into four sections, which could be entitled four views of loss. Elegies, or poems commemorating loss are…
Food stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Excerpt from Ashes on the Water
From a novel in progress… set on Caledonia Plantation, Alabama 1854 Cretia’s Gal, unmindful of the quiet in the house, & without her realizing it, her hands, weighted by the echoing music in her head, lowered them selves & made contact with the pianoforte keys. Her fingers were still for a moment, as still as…
Now’s the time
A ripe moment to push for single-payer health care.
Men without women
Just because you can’t get a girlfriend doesn’t mean you’re gay, it only means you’re pathetic.
Excerpt from first act of post trauma stress machine unit # three
[actors stand before audience gesturing and speaking unintelligently wearing a t shirt that says enlightenment] black installation of the outlaw [machine unit # 3 stands before malcom X and marie laveau] unit; what is this rags tossed in the mind . what is the ultitmate knower and truth/ peppercorns and whiskey malcom; there is nothing…
Get lost (here or elsewhere)
—–Original Message—– From: kelli b kavanaugh Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2007 10:39 AM To: rmazzei@metrotimes.com Subject: you gotta love… a kick from someone on the way out the door http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070808/METRO/708080371 On 8/8/07, Rebecca Mazzei <rmazzei@metrotimes.com> wrote: Thanks for the heads up. I’m going to start packing my bags. Where are you moving to? On 8/8/07,…
In the queue
Cashback Magnolia Possibly the nadir of that post-Trainspotting, British pseudo-hipness category, Cashback feels like a kinetically stylized memoir but with none of the distinction. We’re supposed to feel sorry for Ben Willis (Sean Biggerstaff, a porno actor’s pseudonym if there ever was one), an amateur artist who’s just been dumped by his girlfriend and is…
Pheasant Under Glass, Cignus ustus cantat
From Carmina Detroit Adastra Press $15, 31 pp. More than any young thug I ruled the vacant lots. Seven sweet brown hens and our chicks attended me. Now I am presented trimmed in my own feathers. I cannot fly, but I can see a glitter of knives, the hunger of teeth. I cannot think; the…
Take it slow
Slow Food Detroit founder Melinda Curtis arrives at Clawson’s Black Lotus Brewing Company early for tonight’s event. The pub is cool, comfortable and smoke-free, the wood and walls dark, the bar made of stone. Polished copper tabletops are surrounded by high windows. The bistro setting seems apt for the group, a Detroit chapter of the…
Get lit
OK, so here’s how it works, at least according to the passionately ranting Tim Dugdale, founder and publisher of Atomic Quill Press, who’s spitting into his receiver on the other end of the line: “There are more writers and fewer readers, and MFA creative writing programs are building a certain kind of writer telling a…
The Stone on the Island
From The Dropped Hand Marick Press $14.95, 84 pp. In the middle of Lake Erie is an island, and in the middle of the island is a stone. Mornings, as air moves with the warming of the water, a cabin on the eastern shore receives the sun. Curtains sway in the new day’s breeze beside…
From bars to pars
How Alice Cooper went off the sauce and hit the links.
