Pump don’t work ’cause vandals took the handles.
The production design for the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards rendered New York City’s Radio City Music Hall as a gilded and enormous VIP room, complete with burnished handrails, lacquered black walkways, top shelf lighting systems, and elegant carpet remnants stolen from Versailles or somewhere. It looked like Jay-Z’s veranda crossed with The Cell. But…
Todd Snider eats Bush!
Dig this vid that pimps a song from Todd Snider’s latest, The Devil You Know. The song uses an inarticulate aging frat dude as a device to spin an hilarious and on-target Bush yarn. All hail the chief and the power and beauty of the three-minute pop tune! Click this: “You Got Away With It…
Shiny boots of leather.
As she told us, Linda Ronstadt’s the only mama that’ll walk the line. Her 1969 gender-opposite remake of the Waylon Jennings classic scooted along with an unbuttoned shirt and upturned lip, and easily beat out the Lee Hazelwood/Ann-Margret version of that same year, mostly because the Linda of the Hand Sown Home Grown era had…
SSM drunk dials; No Meier in Mayer
These chatterbox chestnuts just arrived from “Motor City Cribs & Rides” helmsman Doug Coombe: SSM has a new EP coming out, but we don’t know the title. What’s more, crispy Detroit organist Lyman Woodard appears on one song. The band found Woodard by simply looking him up in the phone directory. Woodard, you’ll note, might…
When does the law think you’re man enough?
Q: There was a piece in The New York Times last weekend about the debate in the queer community — particularly in the lesbian community — over gender reassignment surgery. Lots of formerly butch lesbians now identify as “transmen.” The strangest revelation was that after one member of a lesbian couple became a man, they…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Beware the savage jaw of MB84! Leon Russell — Leon Live (Shelter) :: Most creative album title ever! Ray Davies & The Shelter People — The Kinks of Leon (Cola) :: Geddit? Ambulance Ltd — New English EP (TVT) :: Their last record sucked cockney but this new one shows an impressive maturity that’s derivative…
Rags and ruin
Last week, in my gentle and understated way, I beat up on our newspapers, primarily the Detroit Free Press, for the increasingly poor job it does covering important news in this area. I used as examples the sudden death of internationally renowned scientist Iris Ovshinsky, which the Free Press treated as a water safety story,…
Second Round’s on Me
Second Round’s on Me, like Detroit, has its highs and lows. It makes perfect sense at times, and struggles to find its way at others. But when it’s right, it’s stellar. The first two tracks sneak up, mostly because of Eminem’s brooding production style. Synth bass and snapping kick drums drone under “Wake Up” and…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The Weekly World News suggests that we celebrate a new holiday this week, National Hate Day. For 24 hours, it would be socially acceptable to drain off the rancid opinions, bitter spleen and sickening ideas we’ve been hoarding. While every sign of the zodiac can profit from this massive purge of…
How I learned to second line
When it’s really going on, people are dancing out of their heads, maybe even out of their bodies. The bass drum rumbles like thunder on the mountain; snare drums snap your hips into twitching spasms; the horns, twisting around each other like a nest of serpents, call out to the heavens, calling all you children…
What were once vices are now habits
Michael McDonald’s market value has fluctuated mightily during his 40-year migration from the sock hops of St. Louis to the “snow”-capped hills of Hollywood. But little can be written about McDonald without mentioning the silken bellow that defined an era when men were men (albeit often in women’s blouses), resplendent patches of knotty body hair…
Night and Day
Thursday • 31 Respect Sextet MUSIC Mainstream jazz, trad jazz, fusion jazz, big band jazz, Django jazz, there’s lots to choose from in downtown Detroit this weekend. But the omissions shout volumes, and if you want to hear music that echoes Ornette Coleman or the Chicago radicals of the ’60s or the European free jazz…
Inbox outtakes
This occasional column features demented doggerel we get from our readers, one envelope at a time. Send comments, limericks and haikus to [email protected]
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Bang Bush
State houses can spur impeachment proceedings?
Letters to the Editor
Fishwrap blues Re: Jack Lessenberry’s “Media morons” (Metro Times, Aug. 23), I’ve been unhappy with the Gannett sale since the beginning. But what to do? Sure, I get the online New York Times and Washington Post and a few other cities’ offerings. But there’s nothing like a handheld newspaper and an easy chair for pure…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Confuzed Disco
Based in Bologna, where radicals, artists, glam rockers, and hippies all coexisted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Italian Records was the first label in the country to release music by such weirdo smartbombs as Tuxedomoon, DNA, Lydia Lunch and Throbbing Gristle. More importantly, it was as an incubator for a crazy new dance…
Horny dilemma
You think you’ve got problems? Let me be the first to tell you that your problems are minor compared to the problems of Gordon Lish. “Gordon Lish” is the narrator of the recently reissued Gordon Lish novel Zimzum, first published in 1993. Gordon Lish the novelist wants it to be known that the problems of…
Idlewild
Rumors of an OutKast breakup have been circulating for years, about as long as the duo’s plans for a movie plus sound track have been around. They still managed to release two records though, 2000’s Stankonia and the 2003 “double-solo” Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and in late 2005, it looked like things were finally set to…
Sleight of hand
Visually sumptuous but emotionally barren, this period romantic thriller never quite dazzles but does entertain with a few predictable parlor tricks. Edward Norton plays Eisenheim, a self-made magician whose childhood romance with young duchess Sophie (Jessica Biel) is rekindled when the two meet during his performance in Vienna. Unfortunately, Sophie is betrothed to the decadent…
Lassie
This latest UK-made Lassie sidesteps most of the camp of earlier versions, some of which stretched the fable amazingly thin. Director and screenwriter Charles Sturridge has assembled a “serious” cast of British heavyweight actors — including Samantha Morton, John Lynch and Peter O’Toole. Lassie is living with the Carracloughs, a coal-mining family who’ve fallen on…
Radio rocks
In the beer-soaked rock joints of Sydney and Melbourne’s hippest record stores — or even out past the bloodwood and desert oak — ask an Aussie who Radio Birdman is and they’ll look at you cockeyed. Not because they’ve never heard of the band, it’s because he can’t believe you haven’t. After all, from 1974…
Invincible
Invincible is cut from the same cloth as two other recent Disney hits, “The Rookie” and “Miracle,” and it follows their formula to a T. Set in a grungy Philadelphia neighborhood in the mid-’70s, the film takes more than a few liberties as it tells the true story of Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg), a jocky…
How to Eat Fried Worms
The 1972 book by Thomas Rockwell is an evergreen favorite of kiddie lit, prized as much for its message as the gross-out-factor. The screen version varies in details, but sticks to the main plot: once-popular fifth-grader Billy (Luke Benward) is struggling to fit into a new school in a new town. He’s soon faced with…
Motor City Rides
Danny Methric’s Detroit rock chariot.
Beerfest
Imagine a two-hour home movie made by your idiotic drunken college buddies, full of in-jokes and childish humor. Now, slap on a minor plot, replace buddies with the boys of the Broken Lizard comedy troupe, and you have Beerfest. This is Broken Lizard’s fourth feature, after they became minor cult idols with the stoner-fueled success…
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 Of taking long walks it has been said that a person can walk off anything. Here David Mason hikes a mountain in his home state, Colorado, and steps away from an undisclosed personal loss into another state, one of healing. In the Mushroom Summer…
Backslash
Virginity RULZ!! — Dude! Viriginity, is like, so cool! For “proof” check out virginityrules.com, and prepare for an irritating onslaught of wiggling, zooming, noisy Macromedia Flash content (apparently teens who don’t have dial-up are just going to have to pop their cherries). The site is run by the East Texas Abstinence Program (E.T.A.P. — insert…
Rag on the mag
A couple of months ago, word spread fast around Detroit that supermodel Kate Moss was in town with renowned photographer Bruce Weber to shoot a layout for W magazine, an outrageously oversized glossy that looks as slick as an expensive fake tan. The duo showed up all over the city — at the Heidelberg Project…
High notes
There are all flavors of jazz at the 27th Annual Detroit Jazz Festival, and that’s not even a pun on the Food Network Village, a new attraction that will apparently include pastry chefs building “outrageous jazz-themed cakes.” Dizzy’s cheeks rendered in devil’s food? Kind of Blue … Frosting? But seriously, the talent, tradition, tributes and…
A regal return for the sounds of New Orleans
As the 2005 Detroit International Jazz Festival began, fresh images of Hurricane Katrina victims fleeing their homes in search of safety were in our minds. We’d witnessed wind-lashed ropes of rain devastating the Gulf Coast, floodwaters washing through the streets of New Orleans. We saw suddenly homeless Americans trudging past abandoned cars on highways, and…
Alone again or?
Several months before the formation of the Clientele in 1997, frontman Alasdair MacLean was working his self-described “Kafka-esque desk job” at Bloomsbury Publishing in London when a manuscript of the first Harry Potter novel arrived. “We’d have these editorial meetings and talk about different books, and it was my job to read a lot of…
Year of rhythm
Paxahau’s Jason Huvaere is looking back at the year behind him. Then he shifts to the organization’s plans for the future, which already has 2008 in its sights. Reclining on a couch in his Ferndale office, he begins to weave together a story of an amazing string of hits that have put Paxahau over the…
Autocratic architecture
Flip through even just a few channels on cable television and you’ll soon come upon home decorating experts dispensing advice, archly sizing up people’s style and offering tart summaries of their subject’s misdeeds. These scenes, where cowed homemakers are mercilessly mocked, have become common enough to become cliché. But what if those aesthetic buttinskis were…
Tips for TIFF
By now, just about any gathering in front of a screen constitutes a film festival; everyone and their grandmother has been to one. Maybe you once went to a 24-hour marathon of random horror flicks that was dubbed a “festival.” And Utah now has something called the ROADance Film Festival — a couple of guys…
