Flaming sludge
It’s ugly and alluring in one glance. It’s loud, abrasive and dynamic in one listen. And it all works together well for the doomy, beautifully dreadful High on Fire, and its spokesman and singer-guitarist Matt Pike. As a kid, Pike began his metal journey in true metal fashion — by getting high and listening to…
Meet the new boss …
This record wholeheartedly captures the current essence of the despair UK kids feel approaching dead-end jobs and cheaply living out their excitement through uninhibited dancing, momentary love, getting pissed, starting rows and any other form of temporary escapism available. The stark accompanying artwork only supports this — no band pictures, just dreary, gray-hued urban England…
Dagwood heaven
Delicatessens, like so many other things, once were something they no longer are. Locally, the first of the old-days delis that comes to mind is Samuels Brothers in Eastern Market, a real dive — in a good sense — by today’s standards. Today, in restaurants everywhere, everything is sanitized, including their characters. Polished stainless steel…
Toppin’, shoppin’, signin’ and drivin’
Jizz and pap? Kanye West swept the sweet spots in Village Voice’s 32nd (or 33rd) annual Pazz and Jop critics’ poll for the best recordings of 2005. The survey this year saw 795 ballots — including those from eight Metro Times’ music writers — from the country’s most ace music scribes, who divided points among…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Donuts
This is how a beautiful mind says goodbye. Released on his 32nd birthday, just three days before he died, Dilla’s instrumental solo album Donuts is, without question, a humbling work of genius filled with everything that made the Slum Village co-founder one of the most unpredictable producers of all time. For commercial fans, Donuts is…
McNamara’s finale and other numbers
Normally, when politicians die, other politicians shed lots of phony tears lamenting their loss. There’s been a lot of that this week, with Ed McNamara’s long-expected death. Yet the legendary Wayne County executive will indeed be missed — and has been since he left office three years ago, riddled with cancer. Yes, he was the…
Juan’s world
Through his daily blog Informed Comment, Juan Cole has become “a must-read for those interested in the Middle East,” as the online journal Slate put it. In turn, the University of Michigan professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history has also become a widely sought expert and commentator whose articles have appeared in such…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Fighting the odds
This documentary compassionately analyzes a group of at-risk preteens from the ghettos of Baltimore who are given the chance to spend two years at the Baraka School in Kenya. The program seeks not the highest achievers but the lowest, and as we meet some of the applicants, we begin to realize that just the chance…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Hunter Thompson weighs heavy on this week’s staccato appraisals
Why We Fight
P>Eugene Jarecki’s Sundance-winning Why We Fight, is a cynical polemic on how corporate interests increasingly control government policy. Jarecki presents an impassioned case that a perpetual profit-driven war machine has come to pass. Documentaries, even Michael Moore’s documentaries, ask questions and seek answers. There is, on some level, an attempt at discovery. Jarecki’s film presents…
The Intruder (L’Intrus)
Those requiring instant gratification may want to avoid films by Claire Denis, including this one. The revered French filmmaker has a cinematic language all of her own, and anyone claiming to fully get this movie’s story is lying to look cool. Denis presents The Intruder as a puzzle, and the clues don’t come easy. Piece…
Bombay blockbusters
With a history that spans more than a century and thousands of movies, it’s difficult to recommend just a few examples of Bollywood filmmaking, but, for the uninitiated, here are a few worth seeing: Mughal-e-Azam (1960) Legendary director K. Asif set out to create the biggest, most elaborate Indian romance ever with this epic…
Freedomland
Things open with Brenda Martin’s (Julianne Moore) catatonic stumble into a hospital ER. Her hands are cut and bloodied. Disoriented, she tells the doctors and police that she’s been carjacked and that her 4-year-old son was asleep in the backseat. Because her son was taken near a black housing project, the police lock down the…
Indian takeout
Looking to rent some Bollywood films to view in the privacy of your own home? Here are a few places you can visit (and pick up some Indian culinary treats, too, as many rental locations are inside specialty groceries). A.K. Groceries 51 W. Hancock St., Detroit; 313-832-3033 Bombay Grocers 3022 Packard St., Ann Arbor; 734-971-7707…
Eight Below
If you’re not a dog person, you’ll want to avoid this film like the plague. Director Frank Marshall’s new family-friendly adventure presents so many loving, adoring shots of its eight Antarctic sled dogs, it’s almost nauseating: The adorable purebreds perform acts of impossible bravery; they cock their heads to one side to look curious; they…
Art Bar
Poet, novelist and biographer Robert Morgan was raised in North Carolina. He has written many intriguing poems that teach his readers about Southern folklore. Here’s just one example. Holy Cussing When the most intense revivals swept the mountains just a century ago, participants described the shouts and barks in unknown tongues, the jerks of those…
Date Movie
This is a movie that doesn’t even bother with setups or punchlines, just the long, boring middle parts of jokes. The directors assume that by slapping something – anything – up on the screen – a bad Napoleon Dynamite look-alike, an old lady, a midget – the audience will laugh. Wow, fat people sure are…
Backslash
No sweat — The Internet is full of prefabricated crap to buy — but there are still a few cyber corners of the Web where you can find thoughtful, artistic, handcrafted items that weren’t produced in a sweatshop in the Third World. Such is the mission of etsy.com: providing a forum for people to buy…
French letters
In scholarship, in journalism, in literary nonfiction, to exhume the wisdom of Alexis de Tocqueville is a trope all its own. Usually the 19th century historian is resuscitated to support some broad allegation about an American political tendency. The first outsider to “objectively” assess American democracy in the 1830s and the first to assess our…
Legacy Greatest Hits Reissues
Daryl Hall & John Oates Rock ‘N Soul, Part 1 (reissue with bonus tracks) Epic/Legacy Terence Trent D’Arby Do You Love Me Like You Say: The Very Best of Terence Trent D’Arby Columbia/Legacy Living Colour Everything is Possible: the Best of Living Colour RCA/Legacy The purist argument against greatest hits albums isn’t totally flawed. They’re…
Robots in disguise
For the square, the uninformed and the technophobic, it may never be possible to completely explain the lasting appeal of the Transformers, and the deep emotions they provoke in fans. For a young boy growing up in the go-go ’80s, a decade obsessed with cheerful futurism, few things could spark the imagination like fast cars…
Sweet Harmonie
There’s plenty more to commend Lola’s, the jazzy, comfortably friendly bright spot just inside the Gratiot gateway to Harmonie Park. Contrasting red, blue and bittersweet chocolate walls are enlivened with huge canvasses by local artist Gigi Bolden. The wings are not to be missed; they are meaty and juicy, carrying a thin coating of just…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "The supple willow tree does not contend against the storm." So says the Shaolin monk advising his young pupil in the old TV show, Kung Fu. Let that be your watchword, Aries. There will be other times when your best interests will be served by digging in, steeling your will and…
Can a pill solve the teeny-weenie problem?
Q: Every time I watch ESPN or Spike TV I see these commercials for Enzyte “natural male enhancement.” Does that shit actually work? Not that I’m small or anything, but I’m a divorced, middle-age, chain-smoking, overweight single guy who lives in a trailer park. The only things I’ve got going are a steady job and…
Ohio Players
If you want your heart and soul tested, visit Steubenville, Ohio. That’s where Jeff Daniels has set his newest play Guest Artist, in which two men — a jaded, alcoholic Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and his young apprentice — challenge each other to a duel of wit and will. The time is the present and the…
Head Cheese
Fluoride Program’s Steve Bekkala gives his purity of essence
Rough and ready
On a weekend dominated by celebrity sightings, exclusive engagements and sports mania a few weeks ago, the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit presented the city with that other kind of culture: artistic. While much of downtown was making itself pretty for its one-night stand of super-hype, CAID quietly opened its doors for the exhibition Animate…
Proactive
Waste not — Wondering how to recycle more of your garbage? The Southeast Oakland County Resource Recovery Authority (SOCRRA) is organizing a workshop to explain where and how to recycle household items and demonstrate what can and can’t be recycled (using an actual bag of trash). Free, but registration is required: 6 p.m., Tuesday, Feb.…
Hooray for Bollywood
It’s only the Saturday matinee, but the house is packed, and it seems everyone knows someone, as chatter fills the theater. One couple is warmly greeted by another: “We haven’t seen you since that Christmas party!” Fathers balance toddlers on their laps and make that last phone call, while a small herd of preteen girls…
Sail away
Sensuous images, childhood memories and scuttling creatures come out to play in A Ship in a View, an event by the Japanese troupe Pappa Tarahumara that blends dance, music and theater into a multimedia performance. A large pole represents a ship on a shore; its silk flag flutters in a breeze. Pools of light and…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 22 Master Keys: Tribute to Detroit Jazz MUSIC Here’s one more sign of Detroit jazz’s international rep: Famed English DJ Gilles Peterson included the late Harold McKinney’s long out-of-print cut “Ode to Africa” in the new anthology Gilles Peterson Digs America (Ubiquity/Creative Vibes). Here’s one more sign that such a musician has honor…
Part-time lovers
Eddings and Macomb Commission meet, but it isn’t a love-in
Ready to pop
We’ve all danced around in front of the mirror with tennis rackets for guitars and hairbrushes for microphones. We’ve all, for at least a moment, become do-it-ourselves rock stars. Kelley Stoltz did too. But the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has taken it further. After a youth spent killing time in the Detroit suburbs, Stoltz has…
Screening sculpture
One of the more astute observations about the Detroit Artists Market comes from Michael Hall, former Cranbrook sculptor-in-residence, world-famous artist-collector and diehard Tiki maven: He says it’s always been the one place in the city where a Sunday painter could come, even if only once a year, to have his or her work shown alongside…
Ask the Food Dude
Juicy breasts and cast iron.
Letters to the Editor
Drawing conclusions Jack Lessenberry’s editorial — “Time for a press with a spine” (Metro Times, Feb. 8) — arguing that American newspapers, like their European counterparts, should have the “courage” to print offensive cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad was incredibly obtuse, dangerous and, whether he likes it or not, “Christian,” in that his reaction is…
