Homers lose one
Because of my total ineptitude at anything athletic, it still gets a laugh out of people when I tell them that my first job in journalism was covering high school sports for a small daily paper. It was at that paper that I first heard the term “homer,” which my editor used to describe a…
Fired up on the gun beat
As Slate’s Jack Shafer noted last month, everybody is doing the “Barack Obama election=surge in gun sales” story. AP, Globe and Mail, Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star and Anchorage Daily News were on his partial list. Detroit’s own Freep followed on Nov. 23, 10 days after Shafer’s piece, with Korie Wilkins’ “Election spurs gun sale…
Tesco Vee: On DVD
Punk legend and Meatman mainman Tesco Vee has had a busy year. Not only has the East Lansing native assembled a new Meatmen lineup, taking it on tour starting with this year’s South by Southwest. He’s also busy making good on his promises to release a slew of his hilarious back-catalog stuff this year. In…
MC5 FLICK CLEARED FOR RELEASE? PLUS, A NEW DETROIT RAP DOCUMENTARY
Good news for those anxiously awaiting the release of the great MC5 documentary, A True Testimonial (although we don’t know how many there are at this point…since the film was mailed to journalists as a review DVD several years ago, right before MC5 member Wayne Kramer and his wife/manager Margaret Saadi filed suit against the…
MOTOWN STILL OUR TOWN & OTHER LOCAL TIDBITS
Just playing catch up on a few things we’ve missed… The video for the new Raconteurs single, a reworking of “Old Enough” which features 13-time Grammy winner Ricky Skaggs, debuted yesterday on music.yahoo.com. Directed by noted photographer and videographer Autumn de Wilde, the video was taped during the recording session for the re-worked version of…
REFLECTING ON “THE LIST”
Now, that two weeks have passed since we published that music “powerbrokers” list, we’ve had time to digest some of the comments and criticisms that have come our way. The thing to keep in mind is that it was just a list — a list compiled by a few people who are certainly fallible and…
Make like a tree
Man gets wood over lumber; lit class discusses
On the Download
So I’m doing the rounds, trying to find the Most Important Content the Internet has to offer, you know, checking the traps and whatnot, and I head to Mountains & Rainbows’ MySpace (myspace.com/mountainsandrainbows) for a dose of a little psych pick-me-up. And the boys don’t disappoint. They’re kind enough to have posted a new song…
Motor City Crashes
Hotshot emcee Danny Brown finds inspiration and repose
What price Milk?
On Nov. 7, 1978, Californians voted overwhelming against an absurd right-wing religious extremist-supported bill that would have banned gays from teaching in public schools and would have removed known homosexuals and their supporters from public office posts. Proposition 6, as it was called, might have succeeded if not for the efforts of San Francisco city…
Letters to the Editor
Attach those strings I’m writing in response to Jack Lessenberry’s “Crisis and corruption.” As a former Southfield resident, I would like to second his view that strict regulation must be a condition of any possible auto bailout. Without federal assistance, it is likely that one or two of the Big Three will indeed collapse in…
No small beer
Craft beers are brewed in small quantities by independent producers who use traditional European methods. At Bastone, the Belgian restaurant and brewpub in Royal Oak, brewmaster Rockne Van Meter carries on this sacred tradition. Since 2005 his ales and lagers, all brewed on-site, have won more than 30 awards. METRO TIMES: How long has craft…
Bah & humbug
Do those toys contain harmful substances?
Brothers in arms
“Does anybody here have a problem with taking a life?” asks 69-year-old General Laney, owner of Laney’s Guns and Supplies on Detroit’s east side. “If you’re not capable of taking a life then you’re not in the right place,” he warns, “’cause you might have to take a life. You have no choice because the…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Close-up
Whether he’s filming Scottish junkies (Trainspotting) or the zombie apocalypse (28 Days Later), Danny Boyle is an unabashed stylist. His films overflow with arresting images, and no two are alike. Slumdog Millionaire, his latest, is a crowd-pleasing multilingual kaleidoscope of genres that offers both gritty thrills and heartfelt romance. It also revolves around an impoverished…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Modern communication
The greeting comes from within the house: “Come on in!” New Grenada’s frontman John Nelson welcomes a visitor, who enters to find the singer eating a bowl of cereal with a plastic spoon, a box of rice milk sitting on the table beside him. Nelson says that bandmate Dave Melkonian, New Grenada’s longtime drummer, has…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Bailout
‘Tis the season to read Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #198! John Lennon — "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" (Apple) :: Hippie. Various Artists — We Wish You a Metal Xmas and a Headbanging New Year (Armoury) :: I may be just an old softie at heart, but even I can only take so much of…
Blue dot days
One of the main themes of A Bronx Tale, Chazz Palminteri’s brilliant one-man play now holding at the Fisher Theatre, is that one of life’s greatest sins is wasting the talent you’ve been given. If that’s true, let’s hope Chazz’s touring schedule has kept him from watching much TV in ’08. In terms of pure…
Upscale bistro
Brian Polcyn’s stylish bistro, situated on the unlikely east side of Woodward Avenue, is on the ground floor of a new multi-use, especially “green,” three-story building created by prize-winning architect Victor Saroki. The handsome, long, narrow room, with huge windows and a bustling open kitchen, seats only 65 at its white-clothed tables and lively bar.…
Hope lives here
As the bad times hit the country at large, Detroit must look within for the answers
Bolly high
Danny Boyle’s gritty, multilingual fairytale is an intoxicating brew of exotic locales, harrowing thrills, affecting romance and social consciousness. Dickensian in spirit but structured like The Usual Suspects, Slumdog chronicles the incredible twists of fate that lead uneducated street rat Jamal (Dev Patel) from the garbage-strewn alleys of Mumbai to the set of India’s Who…
Serious comedy
Need a chuckle? As the state, the region and the nation tiptoe ’round the rim of a deep financial abyss, a merry band of rebels in downtown Ferndale is staring down the darkness and thumbing their noses at it. The spanking new Go Comedy! Improv Theater is a full-time professional comedy venue that offers original…
Blowin’ minds
When the clone Defects nailed their artistic conclusion in ’04, Detroit’s rock ‘n’ roll scenesters waited to see what the band’s extraordinary frontman Tim Vulgar (aka Tim Lampinen, although the name depends on the mood you catch him in) would do next. When the first self-titled Human Eye record appeared soon afterward, it was with…
Getting to work
A bailout is needed, but a new New Deal would be better
National Ghost
What is a ghost but a spirit or a vestige of what once was? In the case of National Ghost, however, it also refers to something that’s still alive. The Detroit jam group combines “ghosts” from various veteran local bands to create something that’s vital and new. This eponymous debut scales new heights with a…
Old Patterns
After making waves with his local band Rescue earlier this decade, frontman-turned-solo artist Alan Scheurman releases his new record, Old Patterns, as a free download this week. What would otherwise be fairly straightforward folk tracks are given far-out treatment, thanks to production from His Name Is Alive mad scientist Warren Defever at Detroit’s UFO Factory.…
Night and Day
THURSDAY • 4 A YEMENI COMMUNITY OPENING RECEPTION REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN ONES Social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin is best known for his photos of people that he referred to as “the forgotten ones” — Appalachian coal miners, steel workers, laborers and, in the 30 photographs of this exhibit, a group of Yemeni immigrants in Lackawanna,…
Beauty in Trouble
Several years after the 2002 flood that devastated Prague, Marcela (Ana Geislerova) and her family are still sorting through the rubble. With no insurance, their ramshackle house is in disrepair and full of mold, while her mechanic husband Jarda (Roman Luknar) has turned the adjacent garage into a chop shop for stolen cars. Fed up…
Merry XXXmas
Johnny Wadd VCX Nothing brightens a face on Christmas morn like the gift of classic porn, and Johnny Wadd is about as classic as you can get. The golden age ’70s Wadd stars the man himself, John C. Holmes, and the almost comically enormous penis he was attached to. Of course, Holmes, his pioneering adult…
Bush’s war, our refugees
Classmates Even Yaaqoub and Maryam Bkla know they’re safe at Sterling Heights High School. That wasn’t the case in their native Baghdad. Classes were canceled for Even when bombings were too close — he remembers hearing the explosions while in class. Maryam says everyone in Iraq knows someone who’s been injured or killed in the violence…
Sound & glory
In the back of music clubs, there often lurks a testy, unpredictable beast who only rises at night. In various music scenes, this “animal” is called the sound engineer or just “sound guy.” Indeed, Detroit sports a crew of these technicians who populate our favorite holes and halls with all the cuts and scrapes from…
