IF IT SOUNDS LIKE A DUCK…
Our friends over at Quack!Media (who manage and have released discs by Tally Hall, the Hard Lessons, Great Lakes Myth Society, among other projects) have joined forces with the Livonia-based record label Suburban Sprawl Music (home of Javelins, the Pop Project, Child Bite, the Word Play, the Recital and El Boxeo). The label will exist…
SSM’S BLOW FOR EVOLUTION
When the new lineup of the Von Bondies takes the stage at Ann Arbor’s Blind Pig next Wednesday night, January 9th, for Jason Stollsteimer’s first area show in four years, they’ll be hitting that stage following a set by SSM (Szymanski, Shettler, Morris), who will be opening for the headliners during the January tour. The…
Hot and topical
Detroit classics retooled for today.
Cinema festivus 2007
MICHAEL HASTINGS Movie of the Year: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly How is it that Julian Schnabel — purveyor of broken-plate paintings, unfashionable sarongs and a bad Basquiat biopic — ended up becoming one of the most talented, intuitive American directors working today? With Diving Bell, he and screenwriter Ronald Harwood managed to avoid…
Doobie-doobie-do
Mitt gets caught with pants on fire Trying to establish his civil rights bona fides, presidential candidate and native son Mitt Romney talked about how he “saw” his father George, the one-time governor of Michigan, march with Martin Luther King Jr. At various times over the years, Romney has placed his dad with King in…
Artist of the year
There’s an installation at the entryway to the new Cranbrook exhibition. Through an oculus-shaped window, an old black-and-white film clip plays, showing a hand printing with architectural precision the name Eero Saarinen. Then, with confidence and flair, the name is signed again, very quickly, backward. Saarinen supposedly could do this with both right and left…
That was the year that was
Way back in 1977, Lester Bangs declared that “solipsism was king,” that it held all the cards at the moment. One can only wonder what ol’ Lester would’ve thought of 2007, wherein music seemed to be more of a solipsistic venture than ever. Once upon a time, there was the local music store where people…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
System failure
How Lansing earned its slaps this year.
Bullet points
He really is “Terrible,” part one “Terrible” Ted Nugent may not exactly be a local rocker these days due to his move to Waco, Texas, four years ago. But the gun-toting dude — forever known as the Motor City Madman — got 2007 off to an appropriate neocon start when he appeared as the entertainment…
Motor City Cribs
Artist Jim Stella’s Bloomfield Hills studio.
Under suspicion
Panties in a bunch over moral implications.
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Our musical motormouth gives us a Scenic drive-by.
Jam pack
Pittsburgh art collective Paper Rad comes to town.
Letters to the Editor
Save the cells I read with interest Jack Lessenberry’s article, “Stemming the tide” (Metro Times, Dec. 26, 2007). I have agonized over the “Embryonic Stem Cell Research” issue for a long time, but, the more I think about it, the more I believe that I would rather die than destroy an embryo to save my…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 2 Tim Gralewski POP, HIT, REPEAT A bit of old Warhol goes a long way. Thanks to his genre-defining work of decades back, you see oodles of repetitious postmodern facsimile in today’s artists market. Artist Tim Gralewski will present a series of serigraphs, or silkscreen prints, that draw influence from the top of…
Slashed fiction
BEST Come Early Morning Ashley Judd makes good for all those horrible women-in-peril flicks she’s done with her smart and perceptive performance in this film directed by Joey Lauren Adams. Maxed Out This doc about America’s credit card obsession will have you thinking twice about charging future DVD rentals. The Abandoned Director Nacho Cerdà international…
Charlie Wilson’s War
Once upon a time, before Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, Afghanistan was the frontline for the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cold War. Only no one knew about it. This is partially because of liberal Texas Congressman, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks). An unrepentant boozer and lady’s man, Wilson was also smart, popular and remarkably adept at foreign affairs.…
Balls-out bravado
Fictional hard-living music icon Dewey Cox is played with balls-out bravado by John C. Reilly, in this epic life story that’s a mash-up of biographic details cribbed from Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and just about every other hard-partying, self-destructive musical genius of the last half century. The flick…
Plates of plenty
A visit to the free-standing castle-like edifice east of Crooks on Big Beaver Road offers some answers. One of 41 in a national chain, this upscale family restaurant is designed to look and feel like a venerable neighborhood institution, just as the original, which opened in Chicago in 1991, was designed to appear as if…
