Thoughts from Intern Bill
MT has a great staff of volunteers helping us run Blowout every year. Here are some thoughts from one of our longest running volunteers and Detroit music lover, intern Bill Cheek. —Maria Stella Jewett, Marketing Director You feel it coming. It’s been a year of watching our government screech to a halt, more of our…
Fighter pilot and the monk
Did you hear the one about the fighter pilot and the monk? If that sounds like the beginning of a joke, think again! We just got an announcement for a speaking engagement featuring those unlikely bedfellows. In this case, it’s a talk about staying fearless in a tough economy, featuring ordained monk Michael Roach and…
Bobb report: Detroit schools still in crisis
Within the next few months, the emergency financial manager of Detroit Public Schools said on Wednesday, there will be announcements about new school design, new teaching strategies, more investigations and updates about the troubled district’s finances. “Let’s make no mistake about it. This is a school district in crisis,” Robert Bobb told a crowd of…
Night and Day
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 25 John Legend NEO-SOUL WARRIOR He has released three commercially and critically successful albums, collaborated with high-profile artists such as Kanye West, and earned a truckload of awards, including six Grammys, but R&B crooner John Legend’s most important work may have nothing to do with his music. The 30-year-old with the throwback voice…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Currying favor
Aladdin Sweets & Café 11945 Conant St., Hamtramck; 313-891-8050; $: This is a small, neighborhood place, quite unlike Gandhi just down the street, lacking that restaurant’s cloth doilies and polished steel cutlery. In fact, at Aladdin, you’ll eat on plastic plates and drink from polystyrene cups. But what Aladdin lacks in china and stainless steel…
Cheat Code
The Saboteur EA Xbox 360, PS3 World War II is probably tied with alien invasions as the most overused video game setting. Sure, Normandy can be stormed, and Japan bombed, but only so many times. What often isn’t told, though, is how France got stomped and surrendered to Germany in record time. Liberating France hasn’t…
Luder than hell
The nature of the working relationship between the four members of Luder became apparent when this interview was being arranged. A simple request for a day, time and location was met with a barrage of contrasting e-mails containing all manner of snipes and digs — some amusing and some, frankly, uncomfortable. For many bands, this…
What a town!
It’s not just anywhere that one can start the work day hanging out in the vinyl-cluttered home studio of techno trailblazer Anthony "Shake" Shakir, bump into an electro theorist-practitioner (that would be Brendan M Gillen of Ectomorph, who unexpectedly dropped by), and then end it dancing to rich and variegated house music being spun by…
Bitchin’ kitchen
Dave Graw and Derek Swanson are a couple of solid dudes. Living evidence that age 35 is the new 21 (which is the new 15), they drink beer faster and tell dick jokes better than sports bar swillers, and though these total BFFs are heterosexually hot for each other’s guffaws, they’re also husbands with day…
Cable tangles
The two-year-old lawsuit brought against cable television giant Comcast by a handful of Michigan towns and their community-access television stations ended quietly earlier this year. There was a federal judge’s order dismissing the case after Comcast agreed to the communities’ terms, a cursory joint statement and a couple of community newspaper articles about it. The…
Speaking of the environment …
News Hits was written by Metro Times staff writer Sanra Svoboda. Contact her at 313-202-8015 or
Single-Payer-Minded
No matter how strongly we may feel about the health-care debate — and no matter which side of the debate we’re on — most of us stay safely out of it. Aside from a few boisterous town-hall meetings, we monitor the dealings in Congress from couches, desks, and smartphones, where we can keep tabs on…
Bombs, burns and coloring books
Before getting into the charred thickets of east Detroit, you’ll pass the old train yard. In certain areas you’ll see stray dogs, vagabonds, curious shutterbugs, countless pounds of broken glass and gnarly graffiti art. It’s been that way for decades. For taggers, burners and bombers with a blunt and a backpack full of Krylon, it’s…
Metro Retro
25 years ago in Metro Times: George Corsetti interviews a young (and quite svelte) Michael Moore. Moore had been working as the editor-publisher of the Michigan Voice. Corsetti talks with Moore about the alternative weekly paper switching to color and covering statewide content, all with more subscription-based circulation and meager ad revenue. In 1979, the…
Food Stuff
Go slow — Slow Food Detroit, the local group leading the fight for "slow food," is having a beer dinner at Sherwood Brewing Company. The evening of slow fare and suds will feature plenty of Michigan produce, meat and fish. The fun starts at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 9, at Sherwood Brewing Company 45689 Hayes…
Bottoms up!
Q: I’m writing to you to settle a dispute between my husband and me. We have been married for six years. We’re not terribly adventurous, but we’re not totally vanilla, either. However, there is one issue that is driving me insane: My husband constantly pesters me to have anal sex. We have tried it in…
Hey, Soul Sista
Well, it looks like we still have Sam Riddle to kick around. Somehow, the government case against the political operative (should that be former?) didn’t impress one Angela Woods, the lone black juror hearing the Riddle trial. Since then, Riddle has sneaked off to Birmingham to meet girlfriend, former state representative and bribery defendant Mary…
Desperation programming
After the ratings glory from its Winter Olympics coverage ends next week — beating American Idol head-to-head on Wednesday Feb. 17, something no other network has been able to do for six years — NBC will come schussing out of the gate in March and head straight downhill. The programming geniuses who thought Jay Leno…
Tiger Woods, meet Mao
Back in the late 1960s, China was undergoing the last terrible madness of the Mao era, the so-called "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution." The general idea was that pretty much everything civilization had accomplished needed to be destroyed. Temples were looted. Accomplished persons were disgraced and humiliated; doctors, lawyers, professors were sent to the countryside to…
Motor City Cribs
Architecturally speaking, Palmer Woods might be Detroit’s greatest neighborhood. Tucked in the northwest corner of Woodward and Seven Mile, the neighborhood was built up largely in the 1920s, with grand Tudor and Colonial Revival homes nestled along winding roads. With every house unique — including houses designed by Minoru Yamasaki, Albert Kahn and Frank Lloyd…
Letters to the Editor
Robert’s Rules I’m a Detroit Public School (DPS) educator and a member of the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT), and I read with interest the article, "Schoolhouse divided," (Feb. 17). I attend the DFT meetings and I’ve been asked to act as sergeant-at-arms, which I accept. The meetings have been very chaotic. Steve Conn and…
Fish fry
Scientists, lawyers and the hosting politician had the to-be-expected informative and persuasive presentations at a forum Monday, Feb. 22, about what it would mean for Lake St. Clair and the Great Lakes if Asian carp breach barriers to rivers and canals in Indiana and Illinois and enter Lake Michigan. Get ready to see the carp…
Couch Trip
Staten Island E1 Entertainment This bungled-crime drama marks the directorial debut of Negotiator screenwriter James DeMonaco, and though it received a microscopic theatrical release, it’s better than the majority of 2009 films that opened on hundreds of screens. Surprisingly original characters, ambitious tracking shots and elegant compositions color this portrait of a city and the…
Blood Done Sign My Name
Set in an early ’70s North Carolina town so bucolic you can almost taste the peach cobbler, the film, based on Timothy Tyson’s memoir, very patiently unfurls a yarn about the true-life murder of a young black Vietnam vet, a senseless act of violence that sets long, simmering tensions to full boil. White liberal Methodist…
Requiem for a nuthouse
Haunted by the death of his wife (Michelle Williams), U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) takes a case on isolated Shutter Island, home to the Ashecliffe hospital for the criminally insane. Teamed with his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), he’s in pursuit of an escaped psychopath (Emily Mortimer), but clues suggest the asylum’s top…
Mexican high
Catering mostly to owner Adan Lopez’s fellow immigrants from Jalisco, which gave birth to tacos al pastor, Los Altos’ tacos al pastor are out of this world: filled to the brim with succulent, mellow chunks of pork leg marinated in an adobo mixture. A taco costs $1; $1.50 if you’re silly enough to ask for…
The White Ribbon
Austrian director Michael Haneke’s film is shot in austere, soft-focus black-and-white that recalls the work of Carl Dreyer and invokes its eve of World War I period setting. Haneke trains his chilly gaze on Eichwald, a small, still-feudal village in northern Germany. The village doctor is badly injured after his horse is tripped up by…
Deep listening
The thrill of an anthology of the late Robert Palmer’s work is a far cry from the years-ago thrill of watching for his byline, wondering what he was up to — or out to lunch with — now. When he wrote about something you were already onto, he was likely to take you out into…
Hardy boy
If showbiz is tough at the top, it’s sheer agony at the bottom, a shadow realm explored in this doc, a probing, often maddening slice of gritty vérité. The subject is a tormented dime-store Hercules named Stanley Pleskun, who performs uncanny feats of strength under the stage name “Stanless Steel.” Though he can lift three…
White Lightnin’
The shot-on-video documentary short “Dancing Outlaw” allowed Jesco White, of Boone County, W.Va., to tell his “real people” story of juvenile delinquency, gas huffing and redemption. White’s triumph over adversity came through channeling his energy into the Appalachian folk form of mountain dancing, an art he learned from his father. Now comes the movie “Inspired…
Shameless
TV weatherman Oskar (Jirí Machácek), who one morning wakes up and notices that his wife Zuzana (Simona Babcáková) has a helluva big schnoz. And so he leaves her, in search of … well, it’s not quite clear what Oskar’s looking for. His mid-life leap of faith mostly ends up eroding what little life he had.…
MUSIC & ART BENEFIT FOR FERNCARE THIS WEEKEND…
You can bet the war criminal with the bad ticker is getting quality health care today — but the rest of us aren’t so lucky. People without health insurance often need to rely on free clinics like Ferncare in, duh, Ferndale. There’s a music and art benefit for the facility this weekend at the Phoenx…
TROY GREGORY’S STRANGE DETROIT-CENTRIC FILM
We’re still two-and-a-half weeks out from this but felt it was worth mentioning now so it doesn’t get lost in the upcoming Blowout shuffle. Local jack of all musical trades (and Dirtbombs bassist) Troy Gregory will be presenting World War Love — a film he wrote and directed and has been working on for years…
