Canvassing Erykah Badu
Erykah’s biggest fan?: Demetrius Green. We get a lot of interesting folks dropping by here at the office. And not all of them are the “Monday morning lineup” for personal services ads, homeless dudes crashed out in the doorway, or celebrity impersonators looking for their big break. Some of them are just pleasant enthusiasts of…
Spoked Out: Radio Duo Wants You to Run Me Down
A fellow two-wheeling commuter just sent me a link to WCSX’s webcast of Deminski and Doyle’s banter this morning about bicyclists. http://dd.wcsx.com/?p=4284 Even by corporate-owned morning radio show standards, it’s shockingly stupid, juvenile and just plain ill-informed. D & D’s outrage of the day was bicyclists: those of us who choose to pedal for exercise…
BAATIN MEMORIAL SERVICE ANNOUNCED
Funeral service plans for the late Titus “Baatin” Glover, co-founder of Detroit’s legendary Slum Village, have been announced. There will be a viewing this Monday, August 10th from 1 p.m to 8 p.m. Hip-hop music will be featured at the event. The following day, Tuesday, August 11th, there will be a wake from 12 to…
Insane Clown Posse! Ice Cube! Vanilla Ice! Coolio! Esham & Natas, Gwar, Paradime on one stage. Huh?
No shit. Dozens of glorious has-beens, never-wases and flat-out greats kill at the 10th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos in Cave In Rock, IL. this Thursday through Sunday. Lots of stunner porno ginch, too … and creepy clown-faced chub. Plus freakshow (and superstar) wrastlin’, dirty-girl mud-slingin’ the “Human Cannonball,” ‘copter rides, “Love Train” hay rides,…
“WEIRD AL” DOES JACK WHITE…
Let’s face it: You really haven’t “made it,” pop culturally speaking, until you end up in a “Weird Al” Yankovic parody video. So welcome to the heights of pop culture fame, Jack and Meg…
G.I. Joe: Showing is half the battle
In perhaps the least shocking surprise of the year, Paramount has declined to pre-screen G.I Joe for reviewing press. This, of course, is the international symbol that a movie is not only lame or not good, but likely bad enough to cause severe birth defects for generations to come. G.I Joe has been shown for…
Second coming
Four years ago, the career of Detroit emcee Royce Da 5’9" was immensely different than it is today. No one could have guessed that he’d still be prepping for the release of a long-planned album that’s executive-produced by rap icon DJ Premier. Or that he’d be ghostwriting for the likes of Diddy. Or that he’d…
Couch Trip
Ménage Koch Lorber In Bertrand Blier’s curiously hideous Ménage (1985), sexual orientation is not as set in stone as we may think: Homophobic straight men just need the attention of a brutish, tattooed, bisexual cat burglar, and they’ll be decked in drag in no time. In this awkward, unpleasant domestic farce-cum-melodrama, Gerard Depardieu is the…
The pious beat
And the gods shtupped … Think of the serious dance party as a kind of liberation — a sweaty, primordial vacation from mundane, banal and ordinary life. It could include a temporary end to care and worry, ritual madness, even states of ecstasy and spiritual epiphany. Golly. That description could also be a description of…
Movin’ on up
The Grosse Pointe regulars have been waiting a long time for this day — neighborhood staple Jumps has expanded, spruced up and acquired a liquor license. Jumps was long an oddity — fine dining in a basement, with no booze. Hordes of Grosse Pointers ate there anyway because of the excellence of owner-chef Chad Stewart’s…
Cover me
Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs Under the Covers, Vol. 2 Shout Factory Dwight Twilley Out of the Box Gigatone It’s always curious when someone uses the term "covers band" as though that’s supposed to be a putdown. Maybe if the artist in question does nothing but covers. If not, however, cover versions often say a…
The Merry Gentleman
Michael Keaton directs and stars as Frank Logan, a morose hired gunman who’s lost the will to live, and after a bit of rooftop sniping, hops up on the ledge, ready to leap off. Lucky for him he’s got an angel of mercy on the ground who happens to be looking up, in the form…
Blood, sweat and tears
Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan are the writers and director of The Collector, a low budget attempt to meld two popular film genres: the tense thriller and the blood-spattered horror flick. In it an unsavory jewel thief who needs to score money fast breaks into a house where a serial killer has captured the family…
War pigs
UK writer-director Armando Iannucci (producer of the British sitcom The Thick of It) delivers a deliciously corrosive backstage view of the Iraq War years. Firing off jokes, insults and F-bombs with giddy aplomb, his bitter and twisted film is a whirlwind assault on the Machiavellian double-dealings, egotistical chest-thumping, and the dimwitted scheming of political middle…
Ciao time!
Amici’s Pizza and Living Room 3249 W. 12 Mile Rd., Berkley; 248-544-4100; $$: This isn’t your typical Italian eatery: Pizza crust made with bran, biodegradable dishes soy candles, no smoking, no TV — Amici’s manages both to be virtuous and to pull it off without a hint of self-righteousness. It is a bar, after all,…
Dead or Alive?
Here the “hero” is Arkin (Josh Stewart), a cat burglar who cracks into a plush country house for a precious gem, but instead runs headfirst into a masked mystery man with a penchant for laying elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style traps. More, Arkin faces a midnight deadline and a moral dilemma: Does he steal the goods and…
Deceiving appearances
Q: I met my girlfriend about three months ago on a social-networking website. The pictures made her look attractive and in shape. We texted each other nonstop for the first three months. This past weekend we met, and she didn’t look anything like her pictures. However, we did still have sex twice. I’m about to…
Funny People
As Hollywood’s reigning sovereign of comedy, Apatow has made his Almost Famous, a rambling rumination about making it in showbiz, and how jealousy, loneliness, true love, mortality and other stuff get lost in the mix. Adam Sandler is George Simmons, a thinly veiled version of himself, a middle-aged movie star stuck in a hell of…
The newspaper scam
Last month The Ann Arbor News closed for good. But not to worry, we were told by the publisher, a chipper corporate creature with the improbable name of Laurel Champion. Yes, we were losing a newspaper, and 272 employees would join the vast reserve army of the unemployed. But we were gaining Ann Arbor.com, a…
The Hazards of Love
If thou art one of those gentle folk heard to charge to all and sundry, "Prithee, but doth no one alive maketh the kind of album that one can listen to all in one sitting?" imagine thy surprise when thou finally receivest such an unexpected gift, replete with 17 chamber songs stitched together for continuous…
Stay Sikh
Ocean of Pearls is the feature film debut of writer-director Sarab Neelam, who also happens to be a practicing physician in the Detroit-area with a very full schedule. The film tells a somewhat biographical story of a young Sikh doctor struggling with staying true to his religious traditions in the highly competitive secular world. The…
Ocean of Pearls
Omid Abtahi (24) stars as Amrit Singh, a young Sikh surgeon struggling between the currents of career, personal ambition, family and tradition. He’s been picked to head up a new experimental organ transplant unit in Detroit, but that means breaking free from the comforting bubble of his close-knit suburban Toronto Sikh community, and away from…
Motor City Cribs
In part inspired by their Osborn High School classmate Esham, who started releasing records at age 13, and by mixtapes from New York’s underground — handed to them by DJ Kevo — Thyme and Mudd took to the mics. Consisting of Mudd, Thyme, Proof (who hosted the Shop’s open mics) and J Dilla, 5 Elementz…
Letters to the Editor
Two wheels good Thanks for a great article on Cafe Racers ("Highway stars," July 29). I like their attitude and the execution of their rides. Those groups look as dedicated to their motorcycles as we are to our scooters. We are the Rovers, the "skinny-tie Vespa-scooting Mods" to their "Rockers." We ride all manner of…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 5 The Greencards WORLD CLASS NEWGRASS Two Australians and an Englishman joined forces in Austin to form the Greencards, a trio performing bluegrass and Americana like down-home natives. Over the span of four albums, the Greencards have built upon the traditional bluegrass sound, incorporating everything from Irish lullabies to Latin American rhythms, a…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Finding innocence
When two Ecorse men wrongfully imprisoned for eight years walked out of custody last week, they embraced their waiting family members and a team of volunteer attorneys from the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic who successfully worked to free them and have their charges dismissed. Attorneys and law students, that is. "Don’t call me an…
Animal farm
A rooster’s crow cracks the silence and sends the chickens around him scattering in the yard. The only other sound is the faint whoosh of faraway traffic. All around are fields of trees and tall grass with houses in between, but in the background a casino rises above the landscape, a sign that this isn’t…
Too poor to parent?
Melanie Morgan sits at the kitchen table of a mobile home in Lansing, nervously smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. She’s nervous because she’s talking to a reporter with a photographer snapping pictures as she answers sometimes deeply personal questions about her four-year ordeal with the Michigan Department of Human Services and the Clinton County Prosecutor’s Office,…
Food Stuff
Roll out the barrel — People don’t normally long to return to the economic climate of 1933, but with a one-day deal from Detroit’s Dakota Inn Rathskeller, the Depression never looked greater. For three hours, 11 a.m.-2 p.m., today, Aug. 5, the Dakota will run a lunch special, rolling their prices on Blatz beer back…
Cheat Code
BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Aksys Games Xbox 360, PS3 Anime can be really fucking weird: Stories can get too metaphysical, bad translations can lead to even more nonsensical dialogue, and there’s tentacle rape (which is what it sounds like). It’s obvious that Japan looks at the world a whole lot different than we do over here…
Blonde devotion
If Chris Clark’s original releases on the Motown, V.I.P. and Weed labels were issued with the legend “The Sound of Tomorrow’s Northern Soul” instead of “The Sound of Young America,” and if the price tags accorded to her rare vinyl releases these days were affixed onto shrink wrap and plastic back then, maybe we would’ve…
Helter shelter
This story begins with a large manila envelope found in my mailbox. It shows a vertebrate stemming up from one corner with a cracked skull sitting atop the spine. The cranium’s biting down on a flower losing its petals. With vertigo swirls and such phrases as "trust is careless" and "empathy of vagrants" carefully penned…
Jamie Register: Full force
What do you get when you cross a DJ who loves classic rock like Jimi Hendrix as much as spaced-out jazz with a vocalist mother who loves Motown? Mix well and add a few of the funkiest white boys around, and — if you’re lucky — you get Jamie Register & the Glendales. The Ann…
Funeral suit put to rest
A Milford funeral director didn’t have a valid case against a Vermont consumer advocate and home burial supporter who has publicly criticized him, a federal judge in Detroit has ruled. In granting summary judgment to Lisa Carlson, executive director of the Funeral Ethics Organization, and other defendants, U.S. District Judge Robert Cleland tossed the lawsuit…
