Remembering Papa Joe Hunter
Keyboardist and Funk Brother Joe Hunter passed away Friday in Detroit. He was 79. Services for Hunter will be held this Saturday, Feb. 10 at the Little Rock Baptist Church, 9000 Woodward Ave., Detroit. Hunter’s family is also asking Hunter’s friends and admirers in the musicial community to come together at Bert’s Marketplace this Friday…
Smoke Break 11: What can Brown do for you?
For the eleventh Smoke Break ever, Smith and I sneak a smoke in the stairwell as we gripe about people who spend a lot of cheese to send us free shit. Yeah, we’re that huge of bastards. Is overnight delivery killing America? Be right back; I have to go check my mail. JTL Watch all…
Motor City Cribs
DJ Sicari Ware finds home in the D.
Marrow to the Bone
Leave it to the Japanese to improve upon an American creation. While Dir En Grey isn’t truly innovative, the group’s brand of extreme metal is a model of musicianship. The production is as crisp as new currency, and the thrash power-riffing throbs like a carotid artery awaiting puncture. Singer Kyo delivers largely unintelligible lyrics that…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Happy Valentine Daze, Aries! On this lover’s holiday, let’s see what we can do to purge some of your old romantic karma. With a cleaner slate, you’ll be freer to create the kind of love you really want in the future. To begin, write a list of the worst sins you’ve…
Shooting pains
After a ceremony last week to honor and remember his teenage son, who was fatally shot last September by four Warren police officers, Pang Blia Xiong rested his head in his hands and tried to answer questions about his family. Yes, his three other children are back in school. Yes, his family is overwhelmed by…
Baby needs to grow up
Q: I’ve been married to my husband for two years and have been with him for four. I’m a little dominant, but beyond that nothing too out-there. My husband, on the other hand, is a diaper-loving, transvestite adult baby. I’ve done everything I can to make him realize that while I’m not into his kink,…
Letters to the Editor
Thanks for the memories Many thanks to Brian J. Bowe for his article titled “Make It Or Break It” (Metro Times, Jan. 24) about the founding of the All Media Guide — and many thanks to Michael Erlewine and staff for their vision and tireless efforts. A music enthusiast myself, I have found the All…
X BOX
Blowout X is official. See for yourself at www.metrotimes.com/blowout, where you can check out the venues and schedules for all four days of excitement tinged with the peculiar aroma of Hamtramck. Go ahead, take a whiff. In the meantime, X Box brings you another artist profile in the run-up to our Blowout issue. —Johnny Loftus…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
MB105 proudly celebrates Black History Month! John Lennon — “Woman is the Nigger of the World” (Apple) :: Just because your wife comes up with a racist feminist phrase in a magazine interview doesn’t mean you have to use it as a song title and release it as a single, do you? John Lennon —…
Not that Canton!
I ate mostly in Sichuan (the current correct spelling for Szechuan) restaurants, although I was in the heart of Cantonese cuisine. I also ate in Hong Kong and tried Hunan and Shanxi restaurants. Here’s how dining out in China differs from dining out at a Chinese restaurant in Detroit or Windsor. You don’t have to…
Painting the stage
Choreographers put novels, poems, even legends on stage, but it is rare to make dances from an artist’s paintings. Jacob Lawrence is an artist who, in his depictions of everyday life, expresses intense emotion and movement. His bright and lively urban scenes are populated by statuesque, exagerrated figures bending and reaching with long limbs made…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Lean and sober
It’s 1 a.m. on a frigid Friday night, and the cigarette smoke in Alvin’s is doing nasty things with the smell of fried chicken and waffles. Soon, the crowd of 50 or so shifts its energy to stage-front as Baatin enters. It almost feels like 2001, except, the three cats appearing with Baatin aren’t T3,…
Norris vs. Kurosawa!
The Chuck Norris American Hero Collection MGM Home Entertainment Years before he became an ironic icon for dipshit Internet jokesters, Chuck Norris was notorious for shooting bazookas at terrorists and crisping evil Vietnamese with flamethrowers, all the while keeping his finely groomed Republican beard in perfect check. Between 1984 and 1988, old Chuck was middle…
Road warriors
Andrew Comrie-Picard is helping his crew top off the tank of his race car, a 2006 Mitsubishi Lancer painted in bold diagonals of red and white and splattered with sponsorship decals. “Canadians are often experts at rallying,” he shouts over his shoulder, and I don’t have time to question his statement because the Alberta-born race…
Mister Nah
If one thing’s for sure, it’s that Nas isn’t holding back. In Hip Hop is Dead, the emcee accuses practically everyone — the moguls who see the music as only a business, the kids who don’t know their Big Daddy Kane lines, and even himself — of systematically killing rap. Yes, it’s a bold statement,…
Music by design
In the imaginary sweepstakes held for best handle bit from a 20th century design school, Eames Era gets trumped by Chicago’s Aluminum Group, who’ve been acknowledging the forward-thinking, yet eminently conventional design aesthetic of Charles and Ray Eames since at least the mid-1990s. AG even took another step, naming their 1998 album Plano after the…
Writer’s Block
The clichés about Scandinavian cleanliness and order apply to much of the music emanating from northern Europe, and Writer’s Block, Peter Bjorn and John’s third album, won’t dispel those perceptions. Further, like many young Nordic musicians, these Swedes romanticize several decades of Anglo-American rock and pop. The result is music that’s both too reverent and…
The state we’re in
Budgetary woes do not begin to describe the depth of the governmental crisis facing Michigan. Leaders have only weeks — at most four months — to solve this crisis or face the rightful wrath of Wall Street, students, retirees and workers and employers thinking about staying in . . . Michigan. — Emergency Financial Advisory…
The Time Has Come
With no context, The Time Has Come is a passable slab of ’60s garage rock. When told that the Alarm Clocks were teen punks from Parma, Ohio, who iced one legendary single back in ’66 and then disappeared for four decades, “The Time Has Come” becomes a testament to breaking the rules. Recorded in Royal…
Night and Day
Wednesday-Friday • 7-9 Oakland Ceramics Artist ART There’s much to applaud about affordable art. And while fine art’s often a luxury for people with disposable income, mediums such as ceramics are available to all. Presented by the Oakland Ceramic Artists — abstracts, busts, sculptures, reliefs, vessels and tiles — will all be available (at shockingly…
Elementary
There’s a genre called “mathcore” that’s more the product of music critics struggling for classification than what the musicians create, but the bands that fall into the category are usually exploring some heady atmosphere in the space between grindcore and hardcore punk. Enter the End. No, the Ontario quintet doesn’t come off like it’s playing…
Damn lies
It turns out Proposal 2 really wasn’t just about ‘protecting’ marriage.
Imagination station
The good folks at Artcite Inc., Detroit Film Center and House of Toast Film and Video Collective have put together four brief days, during which audiences can experience film and video unvarnished by the clumsy hands of capitalism. Starting Wednesday, Feb. 7 and running through Saturday, Feb. 10, galleries and theaters in Windsor present a…
Situation screwed
Granholm shoots straight on state’s straits.
Sweet Land
Director Ali Selim’s Sweet Land is not just another sunshiny ode to the rustic splendor of the plains, but a canny exploration of loneliness, community and the immigrant experience at the root of America’s family tree. The film works well thanks to the outstanding cast, led by Elisabeth Reaser’s luminous performance. She’s a true revelation…
Head Cheese
Detroit’s Hotwalls aren’t interested in broken noses or power chords. Like a crop of notable local groups (the Silent Years and Prime Ministers included), the quartet makes straightforward pop that acknowledges contemporary indie rock but thinks music should mostly be about, you know, having a good time. Appropriately, their new album is full of jangling…
Because I Said So
In this unfunny romantic romp, Keaton, with the fashion sense of Minnie Mouse, is relegated to one of the darkest corners of moviedom — lame romantic comedies in which she can play either an overbearing mother or a sex-starved middle-aged woman. Here, she’s a hollow version of both. As Daphne, Keaton’s a controlling single mom…
The Eames team
Yes, they designed modern furniture. They also designed the machines that made the furniture, the ads marketing the furniture and the films explaining how the furniture was made. Later, they designed their own home constructed entirely of prefab metal parts. It’s all very impressive. But children of the ’70s were awed by the boundless creativity…
The Messengers
Directed by the Pang brothers (Hong Kong twins who gained notice for The Eye) this last gasp at Asian-inspired horror has plenty of gotcha moments and twitchy pale-skinned ghosts crawling across the ceiling, but never rises above the derivative. A family of Chicagoans moves to North Dakota to start a sunflower farm. The sinister old…
Kwame Dawes does Detroit
Last April, I found myself on an airplane en route to the annual Houston IFest, my CD player whirring out Bob Marley songs from the Kaya collection so that I could brush up on my reggae. The theme for the IFest, an annual event similar to the Detroit Arts Festival, was Jamaica, and, quite frankly,…
A Discontinuous Line
Jazz groups reaching for that ecstatic transcendence may not fall into two easily definable camps, but a lot of them fall between two poles. One extreme, let’s arbitrarily call it the right, is the modal-groove-as-mantra approach of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” In the middle is a sort of hyper-energized take on traditional forms — folk…
