MORE HAITI BENEFITS SCHEDULED…
Even more Detroit area Haitian benefits have been announced. Keep ’em coming, folks. The Jazz Café at Music Hall will be presenting a music and spoken word benefit show for the cause next Friday night, January 29th, from 7 to 10 p.m. The sole purpose of the event is to raise monetary proceeds and basic…
DETROIT ROCKS FOR HAITI…
Anthony Morrow over at the Majestic complex just wrote to inform us of a benefit show, Detroit Rocks For Haiti, that will take place at the end of this month on Friday, January 29th and Saturday, January 30th at the Magic Stick. More than 20 Detroit bands will come together to raise money for victims…
Shooting starlight
At a loud, dimly-lit bar, Katie Barkel rolls up her sleeve to show me a small tattoo: In signature, the name Elvis. "I find him really fascinating, for being a huge success, and then a huge failure," she says. "He’s a symbol of the American Dream, and how it collapses. Which is something I think…
Youth in Revolt
Saddled with the Dickensian name Nick Twisp, our hero’s a hyper-bright teen, painfully aware of his loser status, but too timid to do much about it. He lives in Oakland, Calif. with his floozy Mom (Jean Smart) and her string of deadbeat boyfriends, until her latest scuzzy beau (Zach Galifianakis in a plum part), pulls…
In so many words
LeRoi Haskins is a man of many words. When he speaks, they come out in elaborate sentences that spin out into tangents and then loop back around again. So many of them swirl in his head they’ve spilled out over the years into dozens of essays and books. "I got four or five books coming…
Popular Songs
Drawing inspiration from the hazy, shimmering magic of the Velvet Underground, Yo La Tengo has been blending the yin and yang of noise and beauty for more than a quarter century. Sometimes they’ll mix these twin impulses on the same album, but mostly they tend to alternate between low-key understated pop and ragged rock roar…
Crazy from the heart
Scott Cooper’s life is changing every second, but you could hardly tell. He’s facing the press at a swank metro Detroit hotel suite and he’s calm, leaning to casual. After years slogging it out as a working actor, he made his directorial feature debut with Crazy Heart, featuring a stunning Jeff Bridges performance as a…
Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel
Some artists captivate us with their unique persona, their distinctive essence — your Bob Dylans, your Madonnas. Others succeed precisely because they don’t forcibly project their own personality into their music, thereby letting us fill the songs with our own hopes and fears. It’s hard to think of someone who has ruled that latter category…
Food Stuff
Bid for kids — Children’s artwork has taken over Inn Season Café until the end of the month. Art from the students at Detroit’s Waldorf School is on silent auction, and proceeds will help fund school programs. Auction concludes Monday, Feb. 1, with refreshments at 7 p.m., all bids final at 8 p.m., at 500…
Mad Mike Monsters Volumes 1-3: A Tribute To Mad Mike Metrovich
As the Beatles and Rolling Stones invaded American shores in the early ’60s, an odd musical scenario was unfolding over the Pittsburgh airwaves. Disc jockeys on low-watt AM stations were blasting a strange combination of mystery music that took the form of undiluted rockabilly, exotic doo-wop, booze-fueled rhythm and blues, wailing and weird guitar and…
Savage for a day
Q: I have a problem. A key part of my problem, I feel, is that I’m a recovering anorexic and I am still struggling a great deal to eat normal and healthy portions of food. A friend and I have recently become "friends with benefits." He lives very far away, so we primarily indulge through…
WR: Mysteries of the Organism
Makavejev’s visit to the Reich Orgonon compound in Maine leads to some small-town moments straight out of Vernon, Florida, like a discussion with the town’s deputy sheriff-cum-barber regarding Reich’s distinctively gravity-defying coiffure. Reich’s son Peter remembers the townspeople’s hostile reaction to his dad, who, the Main Street rumor had it, spearheaded “a secret Jewish organization…
Unstoppable Matty
You have to have a certain amount of grudging admiration for Matty Moroun, sort of like you do for crabgrass or those zombies in the low-budget horror flicks we used to watch as kids, when we should have been running around getting fresh air and exercise. Matty takes a licking; has holes blown through him,…
Big Money Rustlas
Big Money Rustlas may be the year’s best clown-related sci-fi, revenge thriller, hillbilly kung-fu western action comedy, featuring the epic showdown between low-down crime baron Big Baby Chips (Violent J) and the baddest gunslinger in the west, Sheriff Sugar Wolf (Shaggy Two Dope). It’s all a bunch of silly, high-energy nonsense; loud, stupid, crude and…
Going underground
Think you’ve been to every music venue in the Detroit area? Think again. There could actually be a show going on in your neighbor’s basement right now that you don’t even know about. The Wonder Twins recently went underground, to some girl’s house, to check out a couple of bands without a stage to call…
Going native
It was another sign of the times when Mark and Sue Larco closed their upscale Italian chophouse after 19 years on Big Beaver, after being involved in Italian restaurants in our area since the ’50s. However, they quickly reopened last July as the Big Beaver Tavern in the same, spacious, brick-and-stone stand-alone building. Now an…
Letters to the Editor
No on 24 In claiming that 24 is "the finest action series in television history" (Idiot Boxing, Jan. 13), Jim McFarlin appears to have been so swept up in its adrenalin rush that he failed to think about its poor quality, thereby acting more like a fan than a critic. When I watched a full…
Night and Day
THURSDAY-SUNDAY JANUARY 21-24 A Song for Coretta REMAINS OF A LEGACY Playwright and native Detroiter Pearl Cleage’s A Song for Coretta examines the legacy of the Civil Rights era and how it still resonates — or doesn’t — with contemporary African American women. The play brings together a cross-section of women — from a veteran…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Food fight
Fed up with alleged abuses and the restaurant owners’ reported refusal to meet with them in an attempt to address grievances, eight current and former workers at Andiamo in Dearborn have turned to the court and two federal agencies for help. Since November, workers at the eatery have been staging weekly protests involving 50 to…
School time
With hundreds of millions of dollars of federal money available for school improvement in Michigan, educators and school districts should be clamoring for their shares, right? Not necessarily. The state’s application for the "Race to the Top" grants went to Washington, D.C., this week, signed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike…
Artifact in verse
1:30 p.m. We’re headed east on West Grand Boulevard, passing by Hitsville, USA, a living relic of better days. Looking farther down the boulevard, there’s the deserted Lee Plaza apartment building. Not a single pane of glass remains. It looks like a nightly news scene from Kosovo in the ’90s. Together, these two buildings give…
Metro Retro
9 years ago this week in Metro Times: Curt Guyette ventured to the North American International Auto show to see a myriad of "hybrid" vehicles that were going to represent a bridge to a cleaner future. "For years those who hoped for greener automotive future were perpetually waiting for tomorrow. Not anymore." As for getting…
The Book of Eli
The setup is pure Fox News Fantasy, only instead of Christmas, America goes after the Bible, angrily burning every copy in the fiery aftermath of the “Great War.” For those of you with a scorecard, that means six billion copies were remaindered in 30 short years. AK-47s, however, are in abundant supply. Enter Eli (Washington),…
Out of the past
Cliff Bell’s opened in 1935, operating as a supper club until the late ’60s. The space experienced a few different incarnations, one of which ended when a dead body was found in the since-replaced walk-in cooler. Today the name has been revived — and the club along with it. The Detroit landmark has been restored,…
The Spy Next Door
Chan plays “Bob Ho,” a Chinese covert ops ace implausibly on loan to the CIA. Even more implausibly, George Lopez and Billy Ray Cyrus are his best pals in the agency, forming a perfect union of inept line readings. When Ho’s not helping his bozo buds raise the security level to orange, he enjoys kicking…
Winter of his discontent
In 1944 "a very strange screw of events began to turn," Jack Kerouac later reflected about the life-changing paths among rebellious writer friends. That year, Kerouac lived briefly with his first wife, Detroit-born Frankie Edie Parker. While in New York, Edie’s network of friends helped to form the 1940s beat circle. Like many of Kerouac’s…
The Lovely Bones
The heroine is young Susie Salmon, played with ethereal grace and smarts by Saoirse Ronan (Atonement), a bright, gawky but otherwise normal ’70s suburban teen. Her world revolves around her new camera, homework, friends, the mall, and an all-consuming crush on a dashing older boy. All of those things are cruelly stolen from her one…
