Motor City Motors premieres tonight @ 10
From the people behind The Deadliest Catch comes a brand-new Discovery Channel show, and it’s set in Detroit. Motor City Motors follows custom-bike builders Dave and James Kaye, the dudes who run Detroit Bros. Custom Cycles in Ferndale, as they take on Jesse James’ old gig and try to build motor revvin’ monsters from the…
Magazine’s X-mas gift for JoAnn Watson
The Nation magazine delivered a present on Christmas Eve to Detroit City Council member JoAnn Watson: It named her one of its 14 MVPs of 2009 among “progressives, liberals and the American left.” Other valued players included Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the California Nurses Association, LGBT activist Cleve Jones…
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Merry Christmas to all our loyal readers. Let’s dance around the Christmas tree, next year, we’ll still (hopefully!) be making rock ‘n’ roll history. (Check out the Roy Wood video below for an explanation and to see that’s not just our ego speaking)… Please click here for a much cooler video of the above song.…
Christmas cheer
Be of good cheer, comrades, whatever ghosts you worship, or don’t worship, at this time of year. True, the economy stinks; we’ve got a pack of fools in Lansing doing their best to ruin our state, and various other horrors too numerous to mention. And yet there is good news most of us are overlooking.…
The Maid
Catalina Saavedra is intense as Raquel, a reserved and clearly exhausted Chilean maid who has traded her own life’s happiness for decades of service to the family that employs her. She’s watched the children grow up, dealt with familial upheavals and ruled over a domestic landscape that was never her own. And those years have…
Murphy’s law
It’s a tragedy that Brittany Murphy’s dead. Maybe not only because she was young and beautiful and had a suitcase pimp of a hubby, but because she was a mighty skilled actress, a fact that’ll likely be overshadowed by her ditzy film personas. See, beyond the Clueless, Just Married and Don’t Say a Word megaplex…
Mobsters, music … and magic
It took a long time for Jersey Boys, the Tony-winning Broadway musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, to finally hit Detroit — four years after its Broadway debut, to be exact, and three years after its first touring company hit the road. Often when a touring production is already this long in the…
Motor City Cribs
You can trace a lot of music straight back to the church. And any good frontman has a little bit of a preacher in him. So how could you go wrong setting up a recording studio in an old church? That’s exactly what BandB vocalist and guitarist Chris Breest has done. Along with partners, local…
We’re all mad here
It’s true, in the world of party and event promotion — from abandoned warehouse to black-tie ballroom — skepticism abounds, and for good reason. Aside from the usual money, cop and safety issues, the hype rarely lives up to the evening’s reality and a lame party is still a lame party, even on drugs. And…
Parent power
The latest national firestorm involving Detroit Public Schools came last week, when a Fox News program host speculated that he’d burn down the district’s buildings if his child had to attend them. With district and city leaders roundly criticizing him, anchor Shepard Smith backed away from his remarks, saying he had spoken "figuratively." It’s another…
Letters to the Editor
Stage directions Re: Brett Callwood’s article on Niagara ("She comes in colors," Dec. 9), the first time I saw Niagara, at the Second Chance in Ann Arbor, she bit me on the top of the head! At a couple of later Detroit shows, at Bookies and the Red Carpet, she came offstage and danced with…
Duh
It is often been said that ignorance of the law is no excuse. But when it’s a judge who is claiming ignorance, well, that’s not just inexcusable, it’s also laughable. Call it negligence in the first degree. We bring this up because of a document from the Judicial Tenure Commission that landed anonymously in our…
Up from the ashes
In a piece recently posted on the Harvard Business Review’s website, Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz, of a Massachusetts consulting firm named Innosight, pointed out that the greenest city on the planet is currently being constructed in an area surrounded by the world’s largest supply of oil: Masdar in the Persian Gulf emirate of…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 23 Turtleneck and Sweater Holiday Extravaganza SEASONAL SARTORIAL CHEER Celebrate Christmas with kitsch at the annual Turtleneck and Sweater Holiday Extravaganza, now in its 10th year of reviving bad fashions of holidays past. The original party was cooked up by a pair of college kids in Kalamazoo, who joined old-school sweaters with ironic…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Branching out
When Christmas comes in a couple days, Tony Woods’ favorite present might be the number on the bottom line of a sales tally. This is the busy season for his small, bare-bones garden center, and if he’s sold enough Christmas trees this month, he can make it through the lean times of winter. If not,…
The return of the ‘Jet Age Geniuses’
A couple of years ago, a lanky mild-mannered Oak Park resident named Dan Miller duded up in an off-white seersucker suit with a cowboy hat and headed downtown around dawn to run in the annual Turkey Trot. A funny thing happened on the way to the finish line: People recognized him and started shouting his…
Ten years after
“Hey, Mom? I love you, Mom — but … I’m in an interview right now. Can I call you back?” Jason Stollsteimer adores this Thai place in downtown Plymouth — Little Bangkok Cuisine on Forest Avenue — where he orders the same meal (pad see ew) at least once a week. The kitchen staff, obviously…
Cajun hideaway
With New Orleans-flavored prints on the wall and a plea to “let the good times roll” in Cajun French above the bar, the atmosphere is laid-back, with dark wood panels, tables and a long, graceful bar, the slender space is cozy under low-hung ceiling fans. All but the most fainthearted of eaters should try the…
Food Stuff
The Day After — If you have family and friends in town and want to show them something different the day after Christmas, consider the Dakota Inn. They’ll be open at 5 p.m. on Dec. 26 for the last sing-along of 2009. It will be a sold-out night, so call for reservations. At 17324 John…
Native tongue
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a paraplegic jarhead sent to the distant moon Pandora to stand in for his dead twin brother. A perfect genetic match, he’s transferred into his scientist sibling’s "avatar," a human-alien hybrid created to win the hearts and minds of the planet’s indigenous natives. You see, Pandora is home to a…
Tableside in Tree Town
See any inaccuracies in our listings? Let us know! Send e-mails to mjackman@metrotimes.com.
Nine
If you thought Rob Marshall’s Chicago was overrated, his latest musical adaptation, Nine, will amplify your feelings of ill will. A wrongheaded mess of a movie musical, it mistakes whip-pan camera angles for choreography, sexy star wattage for acting, and muddled melodrama for storytelling. Yup, this film adaptation of the 1982 Broadway musical is based…
People who died
Michael Jackson was only 50 when he died on June 25. Claude Lévi-Strauss was 100 when he passed on Oct. 30. Jackson was undoubtedly the more famous of the two, a household name all over the planet, and the ludicrous hype of his later career and his tabloid notoriety don’t dim the appeal of the…
My Roaring 20’s
A person’s early 20s are an often frustrating time, full of bewildering possibilities and significantly fewer real opportunities, particularly in this current economy. Cheap Girls, a Lansing trio, capture the emotional tenor of this time like a snapshot, channeling the angst and indecision through chunky two- to three-minute paeans inspired by alt-rock forebears of two…
Cruisin’ for a bruisin’
Q: I’m a woman who wants to be spanked. But I’m overweight and self-conscious. Men who like to spank women like to spank petite women. Sometimes I’ll search kinky personal sites or other online forums and find someone who might want to spank me. But I get scared and I back out. Most recently, I’ve…
Blaxsploitation station
As a parody of that brief golden era of brash blaxsplotation heroes, this year’s Black Dynamite is right on the money, down to its tight, poly pants and broad-flare collars — just a little too on the money, honestly. Michael Jai White plays the title stud, an indestructible soul brother whose kid brother gets gunned…
Best use of youtube in 2009?
Perhaps it is the best sonic youtube collective project of the year. It’s at least the most original. See and hear for yourself. Turn up your speakers.
