FAREWELL TO A DETROIT BLUES GREAT
Sorry to report the death Uncle Jessie White, Detroit blues elder statesman, on Tuesday, January 29th at the age of 87. White moved to Detroit in 1950 after spending his youth picking cotton in the fields of Mississippi and playing in Jackson, MS juke joints. During the Detroit riots of 1967, when many blues and…
HIGH STRUNG & DEAD BODIES
Congratulations to local dudes the High Strung, who have their song, “Luck You Got,” featured in the new film, Over Her Dead Body — starring Eva Longoria Parker, Paul Rudd, and Jason Biggs (not to mention one of our personal faves Stephen Root, the voice of “Bill” on TV’s King of the Hill) — which…
DREAM OF LIFE…
A lot of action going on as of late with former Detroiter — well, former St. Clair Shoresian, actually — Ms. Patti Smith. A new documentary on her life and career, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, directed by Steven Sebring, was one of the biggest hits at the recent Sundance Film Festival. Smith also performed…
WHAMMER JAMMER!
From the time the shows were announced, Kid Rock has been promising “special guests” as part of his “Rock ‘N’ Roll Jesus” tour, which hits Joe Louis Arena next week, Friday and Saturday, February 8th and 9th. But the secret is finally out of the bag and at least one of those “special guests” holds…
The Savage seat
Note: All the responses to the letters below were written by Eric Rescorla, a reader who won the right to answer questions in Savage Love in a charity auction. —Dan Savage Q: I’m in a committed, loving relationship with a man I completely trust. We’re very open to each other about our sexual desires and…
Terminal sickness
Diana Lane’s cyber-thriller would be just one torture scene after another, if not for the dull dialogue, thinly sketched characters and incomprehensible computer jargon. The film has Portland-based FBI Cyber Crimes agent (and single mom) Jennifer Marsh (Lane) stumbling across an untraceable Web site where a murderer tortures to death his victims. It’s a second…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Note by Note: The Making of Steinway LI037
Director Ben Niles’ documentary is as deliberate and lovingly handcrafted as the 88 keys of its subject: The Steinway piano. Each Steinway passes through many hands on its way to the sales floor, especially on the factory floor of Steinway’s Queens plant, a holy place staffed with a merry international polyglot of Slavs, Bengalis, Filipinos…
What matters is Detroit
Why the scandal matters, and why Kwame must resign.
Hear her roar …
Following up on the success of 2006’s The Greatest, Chan Marshall delivers another knockout. Sure, Marshall’s a proven song stylist — see 2000’s Covers Record, on which she dramatically reworked songs down to their bare minimum. But she left that album’s sparseness behind on 2006’s The Greatest and went all Memphis. So here, like Greatest, she’s…
Mayor Sellout
Kilpatrick put on a charismatic show but sold us out.
How to Survive a Sneak Attack
Since Wildcatting began playing its ridiculously high positive-intensity shows around town a couple of years ago, punters have demanded this: “Where’s the Wildcatting record?” But this is one smart band. Rather than cave to pressure, Wildcatting waited for its fans to get really hungry for recorded songs. And when that hunger level hit the bursting…
First Stone
Two immediate questions leap to mind while watching the premiere of Eli Stone, the lawyer-cum-prophet dramedy bowing at 10 tomorrow (Jan. 31) on ABC (Channel 7 in Detroit): If George Michael really had even the slightest connection to anything prophetic, wouldn’t he have foreseen the demise of his own career? And why does television —…
The Roundhouse Tapes
Two years ago, Stock-holm’s premier death-prog metal band released Ghost Reveries, an album that could only be described as one of this decade’s most stunning releases in any rock genre, metal or otherwise. Bandleader Mikael Åkerfeldt may continue to consider his music death metal, but don’t let that deter you. This is intelligent and passionate…
Eye-splitting din
Nate Young and Alivia Zivich are not cramped by terms, fields, genres, canons or historical perspectives. The kind of ludicrous hair-splitting over, say, “experimental music” and “sound art,” which originates in caffeinated academic discourse, is immaterial to the heaps of work this couple puts out in all shapes, sounds and sizes. In their world, there’s…
Radio
The question new convertees will obviously ask is: “Does it sound like Exodus?” Well, while you can definitely hear the Marley lineage here, this is more “gangsta Rasta” than anything you’ve heard from the lot of Ky-Mani’s famous half-siblings thus far. In fact, Radio comes at an opportune moment, just as gangsta has really gone…
Letters to the Editor
CREEM rises Bill Holdship’s two-part history of CREEM (“Sour CREEM,” Jan. 16, and “CREEMed,” Jan. 23, Metro Times) is, I think, on the whole, fair and balanced. I started reading CREEM from its inception and subscribed to it up to its demise. It was hugely influential on me as a music critic when I was…
Rambo
Sly Stallone’s second most durable macho man returns in an installment that’s smaller in scope and focus, but way larger in raw carnage, boasting one of the highest onscreen body counts in decades. What old John Rambo has been up to all these years is a mystery, but one look into his numb, droopy sheepdog…
Caught in the crossfire
"If a foreigner who is illegally in the United States breaks their leg and seeks medical care, should the hospital treat them?” Olga Gonzalez says she clearly remembers the debate that question generated in a social studies class during her junior year at University Liggett School. She listened in horror as one of her classmates…
My Unwritten Books
"Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love," wrote George Steiner at the outset of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, his first book. Nearly 50 years after that study’s publication, and nearly a quarter century after the release of A George Steiner Reader, the eminent literary critic and philologist…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 30 Todd Rundgren POST-CARS, PRE-UTOPIAN DREAM SHOW The last time Todd Rundgren came around, it was as the leader of the critically lambasted New Cars project, which is now on hiatus. "We couldn’t get the rights to use the name ‘the Cars,’ and ‘the New Cars’ just confused everybody," Rundgren recently told Billboard.…
The Rape of Europa
This engrossing and thoroughly impressive documentary chronicles the Third Reich’s staggering blow to the cultural treasures of Europe. A fine art collection was seen as paramount to the personal worth of a good Nazi officer, and what art the Nazis weren’t greedily amassing for personal wealth, they were busy blowing up, with much of the…
Motor City Cribs
The Satin Peaches rock out to … Dionne Warwick?
Kernels of truth
As they have done every holiday season for 75 years, the Detroit Popcorn Company just finished churning out thousands of decorative tins full of flavored popcorn. But this past Christmas was the last time they were made in Detroit. The company, founded in 1923 by Samuel Carmas, had its first location in a little shop…
Slip it in
Sex and Breakfast First Look Pictures The only sex problems twentysomethings should be having is either not getting any sex or getting way too much. Yet the two young, attractive unmarried couples in this movie go to a sex counselor because they’re already in a rut. Where’s Dr. Ruth and her cucumbers when you really…
Notes on a scandal
Analysis of the Freep’s scoop offers tantalizing implications.
Hamtown ham
Hamtramck’s always held kind of an almost magical ambience for me. For as long as I can remember, the city’s had a great indescribable vibe to it — down-to-earth, never taking itself too seriously, and all about having fun. Hamtown’s always been a music mecca to my way of thinking, even if only cult heroes…
Liberal gospel
Arms expert and media critic take the pulpit in Ferndale.
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Rat-a-tat drive-bys of top slabs.
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
King me
The Detroit Repertory Theatre, or “the Rep” as it’s often known, is kicking off the first 2008 show by bringing audiences a play that bounces between classic warm American comedy and over-the-top melodrama. The play is Ceremonies in Dark Old Men by Lonne Elder III. It’s Elder’s first play, which first hit the stage in…
So much patience
New book features the art of Detroit’s Receiving Hospital.
Special guests
Generous bidder wins chance to play Savage for a day.
Steak their claim
A good old steakhouse with Chateaubriand, lamb chops and steaks. The dimly lit, low-ceilinged, brick-walled structure can seat 200. At most of Paul’s tables, at least one of the patrons, usually more, are there for the beef dishes that average a reasonable $25. The most popular is the Chateaubriand for two, another tableside extravaganza, that…
Dress me up in your fuzz
Jim and William Reid — two Scottish brothers who have been the Jesus and Mary Chain for more than two decades — wound up a beloved, semipopular adjunct to rock history by ripping off rock history rather shamelessly. Mostly, it was from the tougher-than-leather ’60s garage rock icons or the bouffant-sporting bubblegum girls of the…
Words of Our Own
Where poets from these parts paint word-pictures.
