Speaking of health care, can someone check Obama’s backbone?
In a piece titled “Squandered Opportunity” in The Nation this week, the incomparable William Grieder sums up in a few paragraphs the problem a consensus seeker like Barack Obama faces when trying to deal with the destructive extremists who have come to dominate the Republican Party. You can’t build bridges when the other side’s only…
LOCAL MUSIC TIDBITS
Just catching up on a few items on a Friday afternoon follwing an incredibly busy work week: *Got an e-mail from our friend Zach Curd earlier this week, alerting us to the fact that he’s about to release, on vinyl, a new electronic/dance music collaboration between himself and Keith Thompson from Electric Six and Johnny…
from glitches to riches: $3.75 mil for arts & culture raised yesterday
On Tuesday morning at 10 a.m., the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan opened its virtual doors to the public in order to raise funds for Detroit area arts and culture programs. CFSEM pledged $1 million towards a 50% donation match. Nobody expected what happened next. In the first two hours CFSEM’s website, cfsem.org, had crashed…
Worlds apart
Murray Grandon has a problem. He owns a resale shop that sells high-quality things, but on his parking lot next door there’s a ragtag, outdoor flea market that sells cheap, used tools. They share the dingy corner of Van Dyke and Davison, between the weedy railroad tracks and an old cemetery. The flea market and…
Splish splash
Five-year-old Sosuke (voiced by Frankie Jonas), who lives by the sea with his mom (Tina Fey) and much-absent dad (Matt Damon). One day, he meets an overeager goldfish named Ponyo (Noah Cyrus), who longs so deeply to be with her newfound friend that she transforms into a human. Unfortunately, not only does her magician father…
The corporate co-opt of ‘local’
HSBC, one of the biggest banks on the planet, has taken to calling itself "the world’s local bank." Winn-Dixie, a 500-outlet supermarket chain, recently launched a new ad campaign under the tagline, "Local flavor since 1956." The International Council of Shopping Centers, a global consortium of mall owners and developers, is pouring millions of dollars…
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Eric Bana is Henry, born with truly bizarre genetic disorder dubbed “chrono impairment” which sometimes sees him fade out of time, popping into some other moment in his life, naked and confused, like Bana’s character in The Hulk. The lovely Claire (Rachel McAdams) is the one constant in this fractured existence, and she becomes his…
Blow, Joe!
Reign of Swords: Episode 2 Punch Entertainment iPhone The iPhone is the Wild West of gaming. In the decades of this young industry, gaming has not once been host to such a great and open platform as the iPhone. So, sequel to an early hit for the iPhone, Reign of Swords: Episode II represents the…
Paper Heart
Cutesy and ironically smug, a postcard from the land of twee, this mock mockumentary follows impossibly impish hipster comedian Charlyne Yi, as she crosses the country asking real folk about true love, an emotion she claims to be incapable of. Her more famous pals, including funnymen Demetri Martin and Seth Rogen, call bullshit on the…
Matrimony for three
Q: I just turned 20 and have been out of the closet for a year. A lesbian friend wants to hook me up with her gay friend — let’s call him Kyle — a cute, fit boy who runs track and does theater. The issue is that he’s just 17 and starting his senior year…
Room with a view
It’s a Matter of Taste has not just a terrace but a terrace on a lake. The food is good, but the view of Union Lake, which laps right up against the terrace, can transport you to heaven. As the evening light changes from gold to purple, the swans lift up their ruffled butts to…
Michigan on the rocks
Everybody hates government, right? We bitch, moan and complain about it constantly. Nationally, the right wing is cleverly whipping up the yahoos, getting them to noisily protest against a health care plan that would drastically help this nation and greatly improve most of their lives. Here in Michigan, things have been bad for years and,…
Art brutes
This documentary on the history of rock posters focuses on the renegade artists, many of whom have succeeded without the financial help of big corporations. Detroit looms large in this picture, thanks especially to the presence of Mark Arminski, Detroit’s most recent poster art king, and the great Grande Ballroom rock-art pioneer, Gary Grimshaw, both…
Hush V.2
Four years ago, Hush was on top of the world. He’d been on the season finale of the reality show The Contender. Nate Dogg was singing his hooks and Eminem was appearing in his videos. "Hush is coming …" the song said — and the Detroit rapper born Dan Carlisle was on his way. Or…
Reckoning: Deluxe Edition
It’s always been a bit of a comical irony that R.E.M. hit superstardom during the middle part of their career, signing a reported million-dollar contract with Warner Bros. in the late ’80s, just as they began to lose a lot of their initial thunder. This was a band, after all, that peaked with its first…
More than falafel
Al-Ajami 14633 W. Warren Ave., Dearborn; 313-846-9330; $: Al-Ajami is less expensive than many other contenders, serving a competent menu that even includes 15 seafood dishes. Also good are the lemon chicken, which combines grilled chicken and pilaf with vegetables doused in lemon butter, a terrific chicken rice soup, and a good lentil soup. Servings…
Electric Dirt
Levon Helm is the Southern gentleman drummer and multi-instrumentalist who founded the Band, which surely makes him one of America’s greatest storytellers, bar none. His voice constituted one-third of the vocal beauty of the Band’s songs, all the while, as drummer, providing the thump behind the group’s unique sound. Helm’s also always been the kinda…
Food Stuff
Troy time — Diners take note: This week, you’ll be able to take advantage of the chance to affordably sample 14 notable Troy restaurants — including Charley’s Crab, La Marsa, Loccino Italian Grill & Bar, Ocean Prime, Capital Grille and Tre Monti Restorante. The weeklong promotion includes lunch specials for $15 and dinner specials for…
Mother Nature Sings Her Lullaby
Anybody with even a passing interest in Detroit rock and punk surely must have noticed They Never Sleep looming over the city like an acid-filled cloud for the last 18 months or so, during which time they’ve played every spit ‘n’ sawdust venue in the area with anyone that dares share a bill with these…
Glitter doesn’t lie!
D’Anne: First of all I’d like to say Fucking Awesome Fest is a great name because I love swearing. Laura: And I like things that are awesome. When we arrived on Thursday, things were in full swing with Fidrych rocking out in the bar, Sisters Lucas on the main stage upstairs, and the Juliets getting…
Motor City Cribs
Much like Andrew "Party Hard" W.K., Detroit geeks Johnny Headband mix metal, dance and an unabashed sense of frolic in a highly choreographed and aerobic workout on stage — with no hipster sense of sarcasm or irony about it. And much like Andrew W.K., Johnny Headband leaves a physically drained yet emotionally rejuvenated audience in…
Local or not?
It’s not always easy knowing for certain what’s local and what’s not. Part of it depends on how you want to define the term. In reality, there’s a spectrum of what qualifies as local, with the purest light coming from those companies that are locally owned with local manufacturing facilities. Then there are the corporations…
Letters to the Editor
An Ann Arbor alternative? Re: Jack Lessenberry’s critique of AnnArbor.com ("The newspaper scam," Aug. 5), I wholeheartedly agree with your critique of the new annarbor.com. It’s a steaming pile of crap. While the final few years of the Ann Arbor News were, in my opinion, nothing spectacular, this new online venture is absolutely ridiculous. There…
Bing’s wrong bus stop
We read with interest last week’s news that Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is considering the elimination of city bus service on Sundays and Saturday nights as one way to help reduce a deficit estimated to be about $350 million. That’s it, Bingo — make hitting the poor where it hurts most one of your first…
Bass line
John Clayton is too modest a musician to boast about his considerable accomplishments. The bassist has seven Grammy nods in various categories. In 2007, he won for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying a Vocalist for his work with Queen Latifah. And he’s likewise handled arranging for the likes of Whitney Houston, Nancy Wilson and Diana Krall.…
Couch Trip
Apres Lui IFC Like The Son’s Room and In the Bedroom before it, Gael Morel’s Apres Lui is about parents coping with the loss of a child. But where those two films took approaches of quiet poeticism and raw-nerve realism, respectively, Apres Lui adopts the mechanics of a psychological thriller in its meditation on the…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 19 Emily Wells TEEN BEATS Multi-instrumentalist Emily Wells was inducted into the musical world at an early age. At 4, she took up the violin; by junior high, interest in hip hop had her experimenting with beats, samples and loops; at 17, record labels began sniffing around. But Wells eschewed the idea of…
Blowed ’em up good
This stunning mindbender of a movie attempts to prove that science fiction can handle the heftiest allegorical payloads, even the appalling shame of apartheid. For 28 years, a massive, derelict mothership has hovered over the city, abandoned by its operators but swarming with disorganized and unmotivated drones, now herded into District 9, a sprawling ghetto…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
Jeremy Piven is Don Ready, a sleazeball used-car liquidator, whose team is hired by a failing dealership in Temecula, Calif., to turn their Fourth of July sale into a business-saving success. And, well, that’s pretty much it. The rest is wacky Will Ferrell-style jokes (see his amusing cameo) — that hit and miss in equal…
