City Slang: Arts, Beats & Eats on Monday
I of City Slang decided to cycle to Arts, Beats & Eats from my Berkley home today, due to the fact that it didn’t look like rain, yet the sun wasn’t killer hot. This raised an interesting question. While we don’t condone graffiti in public places at all, who scrawled “Iggy Pop” in big orange…
City Slang: Arts, Beats & Eats on Sunday
Day 3 of Arts, Beats & Eats and the weather was a little more manageable today. Not crazy hot, but not the high winds of yesterday either. It was a short festival day for me, but not without some memorable moments. After checking out the impressive old school rock stylings of Crooked Joint, who throw…
City Slang: Arts, Beats & Eats on Saturday
When I arrived at Arts, Beats & Eats on Saturday afternoon, the sun was beating down and, as Jason Stollsteimer’s Hounds Below took to the Soaring Eagle stage, the organizers’, biggest problem would have been how to stop thousands of people getting sunstroke. The Hounds didn’t have any such issues to think about, and they…
City Slang: Detroit Music Veterans Play Teacher
A Red Bull-sponsored Music Academy tour will hit Detroit for a week from September 12-17 for a series of workshops in Detroit. A statement on the event website says, “From Motown to garage rock and techno, Detroit is the birthplace of some of the most seminal records of all time; records which stand for whole…
Breaking News: Luis Croquer Moving On – MOCAD Begins Search For New Director
Luis Croquer, photo by Dave Lewinski for Hour Detroit We’ve just received this news from the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s PR Coordinator Carlie Dennis: Following a three-year term as Director and Chief Curator at MOCAD, the highly successful Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Luis Croquer will…
City Slang: The Hounds Below prepare for Arts, Beats & Eats
This weekend, Jason Stollsteimer’s Hounds Below will perform at the Arts, Beats & Eats festival in Royal Oak. The former Von Bondies man is naturally excited to be bringing his still-fresh group to a hometown festival crowd. City Slang spoke to Stollsteimer, and he said this: How did you meet the current members of the…
The Future
The Future C+ Lyrical, elliptical and frightfully twee, The Future is a movie my grandfather would have absolutely hated. Fortunately, gramps was an engineer, not a film critic — though Miranda July’s curious, willfully quirky new picture is a serious challenge for even someone with a more sophisticated cinema palate. Quixotic multimedia artist July earned…
City Slang: “Reach Out” revisited
Maybe I am the only person that needs to revisit, or even to visit, Reach Out. It does, after all, feature some of the Four Tops’ biggest hits, not least the monster “Reach Out I’ll Be There”. But it’s the covers and lesser known songs that hold the most interest for me. First of all,…
Arse lickers! Jack White does Insane Clown Posse and, um, the essence of some dead dude named Mozart.
It’s pretty obvious that Jack White is a master of celebrity. Hell, even old Alice Cooper’s got nothin’ on him there. And what better platform to sustain said celeb status than on the one erected by our very own Insane Clown Posse on the backs of a million dedicated and well-mannered Juggalos? See, White brought the…
Triumph and despair
Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe by Kate Buford Knopf, 496 pp., $35, hardcover Few remember, but the name Jim Thorpe was once synonymous with athletic prowess. The all-star played football and baseball, won Olympic gold medals in 1912 and was, in many ways, the first sports superstar. A Native…
It’s natural, bay-bee
I was reading a Whitney Balliett omnibus one night (Collected Works: A Jazz Journal) when on Page 138 I ran into my old and much-missed friend J.C. Heard in 1940 drumming with Teddy Wilson’s band, swinging "an exemplary mid-tempo blue" behind Lena Horne in the film short Boogie Woogie Dream. I wondered where else James…
A commons idea
A commons idea for the Cass Corridor The Cass Community Commons flies in the face of convention on a couple of counts. For one, the newly created enterprise in the First Unitarian-Universalist Church’s three-building complex at Cass and Forest embraces the name and sensibility of the old Cass Corridor just as the rebranding of the…
Flavor to go
Fou d’Amour 15110 Kercheval Ave., Grosse Pointe Park 313-823-8425 Handicap accessible Dinners: $11.50 Sandwiches: $6.50-$6.95 Scones: $1-$2 Somewhere between the thriftiness-but-toil of eating in and the expense-but-ease of eating out lies carryout. More and more, it won’t surprise you to know, people are opting for the latter. According to a survey by the scary-sounding…
Letters to the Editor
Bring back the WPA I’m writing to tell you that I totally loved Jack Lessenberry’s opinion piece on socialism ("Long live socialism," Aug. 23). I have been a socialist since birth and I even voted for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt the last time he ran. The WPA saved our country and we need it again.…
Food Stuff
Organics, organized Door to Door Organics, a home delivery service of locally grown produce based in Livonia, has been appealing to locavores this summer, delivering throughout metro Detroit, Ann Arbor, Flint and Lansing. They’ve recently developed a special Web tool to aid online shoppers. The "Door to Door Organics Kitchen" allows customers to "shop by…
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Square Enix Xbox 360, PS 3, Windows DX:HR is, quite arguably, the best FPS to drop this year. It offers seemingly endless replay ability and a real story. In the near future, "human augmentations" have become all the rage. Folks (like you and me) have achieved near-superhuman status by enhancing their bodies with various augmentations.…
The Jazzman cometh
Whether or not you’re a jazz aficionado, there are some names that’ll almost certainly be familiar to you (unless you absolutely hate music), such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. These are cats who stretched the boundaries of jazz, sort of like how Bob Marley did with reggae or Bob Dylan did with…
Is this ‘high-level crime’?
Bringing the War Home: Last week, Michigan moved into the spotlight in the War on Drugs when the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act (MMMA) does not permit patients to sell marijuana to each other, and that marijuana dispensaries may be shut down as a "public nuisance." Meanwhile, Detroit police…
Time to rally
The Michigan Court of Appeals last week delivered an opinion that rocked the state’s medical marijuana community. In a 3-0 ruling, the court decreed that patient-to-patient sales are illegal. Period. That decision, for the time being at least, effectively annihilates the foundation used by many of the estimated 300 to 400 businesses that have been…
Soaring sounds
A festival as big and broad as the Detroit International Jazz Festival can seem intimidating and off-putting. That’s especially true when the term jazz covers more terrain than ever, yet gets less media than at many times past — and in a festival that has, over the years, expanded beyond the confines of jazz. With…
Lansing’s closet Reds
When I was very young, I thought for a while I might become an entomologist, that is, someone who studies insects for a living. Unfortunately, I did not have the math skills for the hard sciences, and so I ended up getting paid to watch politicians instead. There are certain drawbacks to this. Few of…
Honesty first
I’m in a bad place. I have been in a monogamous marriage for 19 years and have two kids. At least I think we’re still monogamous. My husband is an avid reader of your column and loves to bring up the idea that it is perfectly normal to have outside sexual relationships with other people…
Burning issues
It just so happened that soon after fire broke out and triggered an evacuation at the Marathon Petroleum Co. refinery in southwest Detroit last week, a handful of national environmental justice advocates and Environmental Protection Agency administrators were nearby. They were in town for an environmental justice conference, but had ducked out of a few…
It’s natural, bay-bee
I was reading a Whitney Balliett omnibus one night (Collected Works: A Jazz Journal) when on Page 138 I ran into my old and much-missed friend J.C. Heard in 1940 drumming with Teddy Wilson’s band, swinging "an exemplary mid-tempo blue" behind Lena Horne in the film short Boogie Woogie Dream. I wondered where else James…
The Debt
The Debt B- Once controversial, hunting Nazi war criminals is basically a settled issue from a historical and moral perspective, and so The Debt is forced to twist itself into uncomfortable shapes to squeeze out some dramatic tension. The film jumps timelines between 1997 and 1965, when a trio of photogenic Mossad agents are tasked…
No joke?
Birmingham-born comedian-musician J. Chris Newberg has blown through his 15 minutes of international stardom, at least for the moment. He was voted off America’s Got Talent this month after receiving a second-chance, "wild card" reprieve from judge and fellow cockeyed comic Howie Mandel. Ultimately, he lost out to a troupe of crazed acrobats who skip…
Loaded
Its summer’s end and school’s still out, which can only mean it’s time to freak on three non-jazz fests this weekend — Panic in Hamtramck, Hamtramck Labor Day Festival and Arts, Beats & Eats. Here we chose, with few exceptions, the killer local bands playing this weekend that you need to see. Arts, Beats…
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…
