You’ll not feel the drowning.
In 2005, when Danger Mouse and MF Doom made that record with backups from the Adult Swim crowd, it was a nice little bump in the pop culture continuum, like when you’re in the woods and the root systems from trees all around you tie themselves into knots and bust through the soil. Of course…
Smoke Break, vol. 4
It’s the fourth volume of Smoke Break, live from the mud and the blood and the grease traps. Smith and I travel the hoary high waters of deserved and undeserved criticism, both local and national. The central issue? Everybody’s right in the 21st century, which means no one’s wrong. Paranoia strikes deep, motherfuckers. JTL Watch…
Iraq: close and personal
When I arrived in Amman, Jordan, last summer, the Israeli incursion into Lebanon had been going on for two weeks. Relatives of mine had fled Beirut a few days before my arrival, and we all stayed together at my uncle’s house. At night my cousins and I would stay up late, smoking and sharing stories…
Night and Day
Thursday • 14 International Holiday Marketplace and Fashion Show SHOPPING/MUSIC Holiday shopping gets the global treatment this week at the Arab American National Museum. Featuring an indoor bazaar full of fashion and crafts from around the world, the International Holiday Marketplace and Fashion Show is an easy way to buy loved ones rare and beautiful…
Black market ruse
Strip away the fat budget, graphic violence and flashy editing and Blood Diamond might’ve been made in the 1930’s, with its attractive cast on a dangerous Safari chasing a MacGuffin — in this case, a beautiful, golf ball-sized pink stone — through the jungle. All that’s missing are the pith helmets, as the old Dark…
On a carousel
The average length of the school day in American high schools is seven hours, or about 6 hours and 57 minutes longer than the duration of the buzz OK Go generated this year with its YouTubed video for “Here it Goes Again.” (That’s the one with the synchronized treadmill heroics. If you haven’t seen it,…
Apocalypto
Much has been written of Mel Gibson’s religion and violence fixations but few can decide whether the actor-filmmaker is a sadist or a masochist. The long list of films in which Mel has been tortured — including his own Braveheart — suggests the latter. But his biblical snuff film, The Passion of the Christ, decidedly…
Letters to the Editor
See yah, Sarah! I was born and raised in Detroit. After getting laid off from the City of Detroit, I moved to Los Angeles in 1980 and returned to Detroit in 2004. My first response to Sarah Klein’s “Go west, young gal” (Metro Times, Dec. 6) was “don’t let the door hit you in the…
The Holiday
London journalist Iris (Kate Winslet) starts sniffing gas after being strung along for the umpteenth time by her boss, Jasper (Rufus Sewell). Meanwhile, Los Angeles movie editor Amanda (Cameron Diaz) throws her cheating boyfriend out on his ear. Their respective Christmases are going to be miserable, so Iris and Amanda trade places through a house-swap…
Motor City Rides
Pas/Cal drummer pedals like a girl.
Unaccompanied Minors
Only kids would consider getting snowed in at a major airport "fun," and they are, of course, the intended audience for this surprisingly limp farce. Adults will just have to suffer in silence. Unaccompanied Minors is a loud, antic but only intermittently amusing romp about a group of kids movie stereotypes running amok in the…
Juvenile injustice
The Wayne County judge presiding over the murder trial of Damion Todd wanted to send a message. The year was 1986, and the problem of violence among Detroit teens had reached panic-inducing proportions. That year alone 365 kids 16 and younger were shot; 43 of them died. Melody Rucker was one of them. Just 16,…
A bakery and more
Downtown Ferndale’s offerings became even more complete Sept. 30 with the opening of Strawberry Moon Bakery. Owner and baker Jonathan Glab is a rare phenomenon in America: He didn’t grow up on Wonder Bread. The regular family visit to the bakery is his fondest childhood memory. Today, using organic flour from Owosso, he and a…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Hello, I’m Jeffrey Morgan, founder of the influential international humanitarian aid organization Rock Critics Without Borders. When I created RCWB at the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll back on May 20, 1954, one of my primary goals was to spread the literal word of rock music around the world through the expert applied use of…
Royal thrush
Since making her debut with 2004’s Milk-Eyed Mender, Joanna Newsom has truly become indie rock’s crown princess. Her fringed parchment folk evokes the spirit of a young Kate Bush but also captures the childlike mystery of CocoRosie, and her exquisite lyrics read like Renaissance literature, or at least the daydreams of a graduate student. Self-indulgent?…
Leak freak
Has publication of a memo rattled Detroit Police?
Play Themes from the Dark Pink Circus
Detroit-based X! Records often adds proud little phrases to descriptions of its releases. “Includes photocopied and stapled sleeve,” or “Each copy has its own individual message written on the CD.” With limited pressings, there’s leeway for DIY. But homespun, person-to-person touches like this are also key to the music X! puts out. Heroes & Villains…
Protection racket
Deconstructing 6 minutes of Steve Wilson’s career.
Pop Ambient 2007
Since the premiere 2001 edition, Kompakt’s Pop Ambient compilations have been one of the few things that make the holiday season bearable. With comforting reliability, these collections immerse you in the bracingly cool warmth of analog (and digital) bubble baths. The tracks gathered are always dreamy descendents of Brian Eno’s beat-less sonic meditations, and usually…
Art Bar
Artbar American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser Loss can defeat us or serve as the impetus for positive change. Here, Sue Ellen Thompson of Connecticut shows us how to mourn inevitable changes, then go on to see the possibilities of new chapters in our lives. No Children, No Pets I bring the cat’s body…
We Want You — to include us at school
Opponents of military want equal time.
Rhythms Del Mundo
Alternative and modern rock faves reinterpreted with and by the Buena Vista Social Club sounds like God’s gift to public radio, back of course when public radio played music. But these iPod classics reinvented as Afro-Cuban two-steps are more often than not revelations too. Ibrahim Ferrer and his Social Club pals pull Coldplay’s “Clocks” off…
The Cat’s Back
The Artist Formerly Known as Cat Stevens has gotten a raw deal over the last few decades. On 1970s albums such as Catch Bull at Four and Buddha and the Chocolate Box, he came off as an honest spiritual seeker, an open and kind individual who was trying to connect to his higher purpose while…
Reel time
Pink dress, pink dress, a couple of taxidermied animals, and one concrete-blond Anne Heche looking bored, bummed and dead: That’s what, near as I can tell, can be made out of this 60-second remake of Psycho on speed. If you shift your eyes even just for a second away from artist Douglas Gordon’s new and…
3.5MB Pop Shots
When Eminem is really on his game, his raps spin out at a hundred hard angles, like Tetris on its most crazed level. It’s chaos, you think; it’s too fast. He’ll be subdued. But he nails every rhyme, and shades every rhyme inside those rhymes, so that by the end of the track you’ve realized…
Head Cheese
When west side emcees Blackreign and Ohkang dropped Greatest Hits earlier this year, it was an ambitious move in both name and tone. The LP was all over the stylistic map. But with the new Oriental EP, the duo prove that their style is exactly that — ambitious. The loping “Ying” features the exotic plink…
Neverland raunch
Lost Girls Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie Top Shelf; $75 On the surface, this three-volume, hardcover, slipcased graphic novel is an elaborate Tijuana bible that casts grown-up versions of Wonderland’s Alice, Dorothy of Oz and Wendy from Peter Pan as fuck buddies. Of course, Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) could never write a simple stroke…
Merely a flesh wound
The Black Knight must have salamander-like regenerative abilities or newfangled prosthetic limbs. Because after being hacked to bits on screen, he’s crossing scimitars again with Arthur, King of the Britons, in Monty Python’s Spamalot. For this waggish musical version of the cult classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Eric Idle — you’ll recall: Brit…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Listen! I will be honest with you. I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but rough new prizes.” Walt Whitman wrote that in his poem “Song of the Open Road,” and now I’m saying it to you. If you expect the events of 2007 to bring you old smooth prizes,…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Michigan’s Time to Get Real
His announcement itself didn’t get much attention, and almost nobody realized the full implications of it. But U.S. Sen. Carl Levin may have done the state of Michigan an enormous favor, possibly by accident. Last week Levin, soon-to-be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, announced he is going to run for re-election two years…
21st century box
Graying hippies and boomers still reeling over Jim Morrison’s death, and kids who’re just mourning lost Lizard King mythology now, can salve their aches because the Doors are, um, back … in a way. And this writer is no fan of rewritten musical history, particularly when it involves the remixing of actual multi-track master tapes…
Showstopper
One time I spotted Audra Kubat in a crowded concert hall, dancing seductively with, what on earth else, but her own shadow. She had rather consciously sought out the spotlight meant for a movie and stood directly in front of it so her silhouette was projected huge — like a real stunning amazon — against…
DVD eye
Dark Harvest 3: Scarecrow Lionsgate Home DVD “For 60 years it has waited for the taste of blood …” … of a group of kids staying at the family cabin? Sure, why not? When an old witch puts a curse on you and your ancestors, you should expect consistency. Bringing a new low to low-budget,…
What’s up doc, can we rock?
For every Fiona Apple, Ginuwine, and Shakira on its roster, there’s a Cheyenne Kimball and any number of flunkies from Rock Star: Supernova; there’s also Peter Gallagher. But it would probably still be pretty cool to say you had a record deal with Epic, so if you’re in a band, maybe you should check out…
