Hard Lessons make mad Euros.
The Hard Lessons do Europe this September, hitting cities like Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne with Motion City Soundtrack – one of the only decent reps of the current pop/punk/emo crop – and crafty viral marketers OK GO. How will the Germans respond to Augie’s Who Came First-era Pete Townshend beard? But more importantly, with these…
Oh there ain’t no rock ‘n’ roll no more
OK, here are a few things blowing my skirt up this week. It’s mostly reissues and old shit. Music: Harry Nilsson – Son of Schmilsson (Sony-Legacy 2006 reissue) Nilsson is too fuckin’ smart here and the record buying public responded in kind — the record didn’t blockbuster like ’71’s Nilsson Schmilsson, though it’s basically the…
Russian Dolls
Living as a writer in Paris, Xavier Rousseau (Romain Duris) struggles to find personal and artistic contentment as he bounces between jobs and women. Unable to get his novel published and suffering from writer’s block, he takes on assignments ghostwriting autobiographies and scripting shlocky made-for-TV romance movies. And though he dallies with a bevy of…
The high cost of being poor
This is one of those things most folks who’ve never had to experience economic hard times can never seem to understand. That’s not to say everyone living a comfortable life should automatically be written off as callous and uncaring toward those less fortunate than themselves, because that simply isn’t true. What I am saying is…
Accepted
For a rude, crude anti-authoritarian comedy, it’s surprisingly smart, and there are a handful of zingers that are destined to be quoted by undergrads for years to come. Better yet, Long and several of his co-stars — including Maria Thayer, Jonah Hill and Lewis Black — have the sort of fine-tuned comic timing that makes…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Willllma! Where is my MB83? Everlovely Lightningheart — Everlovely Lightningheart (Hydra Head) :: A single 40-minute track consisting of a tinny piano-cored music box melody that weaves through myriad underwater caverns before cross-fading into a convergent realm of mysterious melodies and concrete sounds in the haunting tradition of Basil Kirchin and Gavin Bryers. The Cinematics…
Dance, little sister
Densely packing 71 micro-edited tracks, loops and effects into a 78-minute mix, ex-Detroiter Magda (Magdalena Chojnacka) reshapes material by various artists into something all her own. She’s a Dancing Machine, her first full-length release on Windsor’s Minus, takes its cue from label founder Richie Hawtin, whose recent work has helped blur the line between the…
American Life in Poetry
by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 Those of us who have planted trees and shrubs know well that moment when the last spade full of earth is packed around the root ball and patted or stamped into place and we stand back and wish the young plant good fortune. Here the poet Roy Scheele…
Phantasmagore
In 1996, goth metal wildcards Type O Negative released a single called “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend,” and it totally ruled because, like its album October Rust, the song’s sound and premise let the listener in on Negative’s joke. Deadsy has done the same thing since 2002’s Commencement, when Elijah Blue Allman, scion of Greg Allman and…
Blair laid bare
Blair’s unpleasant truth is that he’s 37, unemployed and avoiding therapy one poem at a time. However, this self-described queer-dread-Mohawk-commie fuck and potential porn addict still knows that he needs to be authentic, because that’s when he makes his strongest artistic statements. And he’s feeling particularly authentic about now. After spending the last five years…
Exodus Into Unheard Rhythms
Take the brother of one of most innovative producers in contemporary hip hop, a prolific composer’s repertoire, a bunch of friends, and what do you get? Oh No’s Exodus Into Unheard Rhythms, a 22-track album with beats taken solely from the work of Galt MacDermot (the composer of Hair, among other things) and with emceeing…
Media morons
Last week Iris Ovshinsky tragically died while swimming near her home in Farmington Hills. Not only was she half of perhaps the most important team of scientists in Michigan history, she was half of an incredible love story. If you have a laptop computer, there’s a good chance it’s running on a nickel-metal-hydride battery, and…
Reprieve
The great thing about Ani DiFranco is that she’s never willing to settle down, even if her previous resting place had been a pretty good spot. Although it was her angry acoustic-punk that first brought her to national acclaim, as she’s matured she’s developed her sound in other, more delicate ways. Reprieve, her latest album,…
Dot the eye
You’ve seen it in colors on abandoned buildings around Detroit. It’s the dot, and it’s Tyree Guyton’s artistic signature. So it’s fitting that Guyton is hosting a “Connect the Dots” festival to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his notorious Heidelberg Project on the city’s east side. If you haven’t walked the Heidelberg Project’s streets —…
Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys
In his thoughtful liner notes to Rogue’s Gallery, producer Hal Willner describes the mess of lucky chances, last-minute changes, and serendipitous moments that eventually led to this collection of sea chanteys and other maritime songs as interpreted by contemporary artists. As Willner tells it, whoever was available simply gathered at recording sessions in Seattle, Los…
Pulling coattails
Troubled Waters: Why a state rep is complaining about Kwame.
So This Is Goodbye
The last five years have seen a glut of neo-new-wave bands backing cuddly vocals with laptop electronics: Postal Service, Styrofoam — hell, half the Plug Research and Morr Music labels. There’s a market here, mostly in the form of post-emo kids for whom heart-on-sleeve lyrics wedded to glitchy beats sounds completely natural, like post-millennial virtual…
Backslash
Bolly Wha? — Always been curious about Bollywood? Direct your browser to bollywoodworld.com, which bills itself as “India’s premier Bollywood portal” (don’t worry, the site is in English). You can scroll through galleries of Bollywood’s hunky, busty stars, catch up on gossip, watch trailers for upcoming films and read movie reviews. There’s even a cute…
The Way to San Jose
Never actually having been to San Jose, I’ve always ignorantly assumed no interest in visiting. The name “Silicon Valley” conjures an unsettling image — a grid of sprawling office complexes for people working on lasers and radars and a few too many Office Depots. Lowland lit up like a circuit board. It’s hard to believe…
A little India
Indians in metro Detroit had a tradition in the ’70s. For three days in the summer, a vibrant little India sprang up in the gray concrete expanse of Hart Plaza. The Festival of India was a spectacular event, filled with the rich aroma of Indian cuisine, the eye-popping beauty of sweeping saris and the highly…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "Baksheesh" is a term derived from the Persian term for "gift." Among travelers in the Third World, it has several meanings, among which are these: 1) bribes paid to authorities to get them to stop hassling you; 2) tips given to strangers who insist on being of assistance by, say, opening…
Blah blah blahg
Metro Times Music Blahg Starting a blog is so 2004. Gubernatorial candidates, third-graders, nuns, the weatherman — if you start a blog in 2006, you’re just establishing another blip on a blogosphere radar that’s already overcrowded. So, after deciding to start a blog anyway, and because we wanted it to stand out from the reams…
Does your life suck?
I have no idea how I ended up loitering on the rooftop of a burger stand called Hot Beef Injection. But that’s where I find myself on a Tuesday afternoon with a skater girl named Tripper Tapioca. Behind me, a giant waffle spins slowly on a fixed axis — landmark signage for the local diner.…
Night and Day
Thursday & Saturday • 24 & 26 Paris is Burning FILM This surprisingly intimate look at the 1980s Harlem drag queen scene is the sort of film audiences won’t soon forget. The 1990 documentary Paris is Burning chronicles the story of the predominantly black and Latino contingent of fashion-forward gay New Yorkers who created, among…
Quack up
Gilbert Gottfried lives a double life. By day he’s a popular voice-over actor for commercials and children’s cartoons, by night he’s a hilarious, foul-mouthed comedian. Since 2000 he’s been the voice of the AFLAC duck, he’s spent more than a decade as host of the USA Networks’ Up All Night, and he makes frequent, infamous…
Motor City Cribs
A peek inside Ghostly’s Ann Arbor haunt.
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Catch the buzz
Our food interviewer does a fly-by of Honeybee Market La Colmena.
Of lice and libel
You might say it’s a real head-scratcher: Why would the United States ban the use of a highly toxic pesticide on crops and animals yet allow the same substance to be rubbed into the scalps of children? It’s a question that has no good answer, say the folks at Ann Arbor’s Ecology Center and others.…
Let’s get small
Oxford Inn owner Bob Higgins has opened the Metro Lounge, a completely separate small-plates operation within the venerable Oxford Inn. Experienced chef Mark Platz presides over that part of the Inn’s kitchen devoted exclusively to the Lounge. It’s a dark, spacious barroom with a fireplace, European posters and art deco light fixtures on the walls,…
Head Cheese
Wildcatting is an instrumental local crew right now, the songs on its MySpace bristling with barbed changes and a bottom end suggesting the heavier moments of Mogwai’s Mr. Beast. Here band rep Brandon Moss (remember Bear vs. Shark?) lays out Wildcatting’s monomanias. 5. Voxing: So, when we finally realized Wildcatting was more than a joke,…
Letters to the Editor
A juicy story Curt Guyette’s article “Pulp friction” (Metro Times, Aug. 2) is the most rewarding piece of newspaper reporting (like old-school reporting) that I’ve experienced in metropolitan Detroit in ages, compared to the same old yawn-inducing harping found printed in The Detroit News, Detroit Free Press and The Oakland Press. It was a very…
Hype and hilarity
From the opening helicopter shots of Hawaii that look cut-and-pasted from a travel ad, your expectations are sufficiently lowered, and nothing that follows — not the plane that looks like a cheap model, nor the Predator-style snake-o-vision shots — could possibly detract from the fun. The same goes for the perfunctory plot, which has badass…
Sapphic but selfish
Q: My 34-year-old sister, call her “Carrie,” came out to the family a week ago and is looking for us all to support the decisions she’s making surrounding her coming out. Background: My sister has been somewhat happily married for 14 years and has four children all under the age of 12. She wants to…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
