Text Bowl 2007.
Below is an assembled transcript of the text messages I sent and received during the Super Bowl last night. You can fill in the blanks. JTL Dude. Ready? –Bxxxx 6:15pm 2/4/07 URLACHER. –JTL Sent 6:16pm 2/4/07 Motherfucker. –Bxxxx 6:28pm 2/4/07 Prince does Foo. –JTL Sent 8:17pm 2/4/07 Grohl just shat himself. –Gxxx 8:18pm 2/4/07 Weird,…
Smoke Break 10: The Drive
In this episode of Smoke Break, Smith and I rock a few Styx and Foreigner resets as we try to figure out why anyone would ever call a variety hits format station like Doug FM and tell it how fucking great it is. As I say in the segment, if you’re one of those people…
Blowout no Travolta.
Blowout X is live. Get your tickets now for the tenth anniversary run of our annual music binge weekend. Plenty of highlights this year, from old faves to who the fuck? new bands that your lamer friends will only get around to loving in 2008. And we’re challenging you, too: the lineups reflect all the…
Night and Day
Thursday • 1 Le Feu Follet FILM Louis Malle directed this existentialist picture about an alcoholic writer, Alain Leroy, who grapples with the complexities of life as a suicidal and tortured dandy. Based on the novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, this story is a haunting emotional portrait of a man whose sad existence is…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Art Bar
Bright eyes The DIA just got big bucks to show hot stuff this year. The institution just heard word they’re included as one of a handful of organizations across the Midwest to receive a $50,000 award from the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation. The money supports the museum’s upcoming installation by Ethiopian-born visual artist Julie Mehretu, a…
Continental comfort
Offering classic Italian fare in elegant surroundings, Mezzaluna is blessed with highly professional, liveried servers who lend an unintimidating air of continental sophistication rarely found in restaurants in such an accessible price niche. While examining the four-page menu, one can nibble on warm, cheese-infused focaccia and crusty Italian farm bread. The mains on the menu…
Tales from two fronts
Last week I talked to U.S. Rep. John Conyers, the Detroit Democrat who is now the powerful head of the House Judiciary Committee. That’s the place where you get the ball rolling if you are going to impeach a president. So, I wanted to know, what’s the scoop? Two years ago, Conyers told me he…
Girlishly yours
Last summer, Lily Allen and her saucy lips took over the UK airwaves with “Smile,” a reggae sun-splash of Jackie Mittoo samples, slick mixing and Allen’s flirty vocals. Sugary and sweet in song, but a bit gnarlier in the press, the 21-year-old Allen became all the rage in a bitstream instant, leaving the blogger elite…
Turn up the heat
The narrator of Blues Rhythm is a grizzled and nostalgic piano player, a character who’s a little bit of Marcus Belgrave, a little bit of the late Harold McKinney and a bunch of jazz cats that Lisa McCall, the revue’s creator, has known over the years, from Detroit to New York and back. But the…
Wincing the Night Away
With its generic structure and nondescript melody, “Phantom Limb” initially seems like a poor choice for the lead single from the Shins’ hugely anticipated third album. But then the counter-melody pops in at the 2:24 mark, and the simple, soothing and deceptively familiar “oh-oooohh-ooh” gives “Phantom” a lift. Curious how a failing set of verses…
Rock Star Supernova vs. Cradle of Filth
“We’re back again to fondle you while slitting your throat.” Whether you love, hate or couldn’t possibly care less about Cradle of Filth, congratulate the veteran English metal band for recognizing the entertainment value in top-shelf wordsmithing. They’re so metal (or at least such showmen) they weave scary thrills right into sentences. And speaking of…
Casually Smashed to Pieces
While Six Parts Seven has toned down the Eno-ing post-rock mannerisms for its most structured set in years, the stalwart-looking Viking on the cover of the Kent, Ohio, band’s fifth album definitely means business. Call it a metaphor, call it what you want — the collective of six and sometimes seven members has battled the…
X BOX
In our second installment of X Box, we look at a few more artists performing at this year’s event, and also the central dynamic of Blowout’s 10th year — letting the lineups reflect the diversity and disparate styles in local music. Here are a few more quick hits leading up to our official Blowout preview…
Say it loud
“I am where I am because of the bridges that I crossed. Sojourner Truth was a bridge. Harriet Tubman was a bridge. Ida B. Wells was a bridge. Madame C. J. Walker was a bridge. Fannie Lou Hamer was a bridge.” —Oprah Winfrey In honor of Black History Month, we’ve compiled a selection of events…
The reservoir runs dry
If you feel like shelling out 10 bucks to see yet another director exhume the corpse of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” drag it out onto a blood-soaked, gold lamé stretcher and hit it with a pair of rusty defibrillator paddles again and again and again until all that’s left in the theater is a burnt…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
How do you do, ladies and gentlemen. This is Bob “Media Blackout” Hope coming to you live from the big room upstairs. I’m filling in for Jeffrey Morgan, who’s away this week in Da Nang Trong province listening to some of the latest rice-paddy platters. You know what “Da Nang Trong” means, don’t you? That’s…
Motor City Cribs
Mr. Largebeat’s Ann Arbor home hosts a working railroad.
Venus
Lust, not love, saves the day in Venus. The lust of a very old, very washed-up actor named Maurice for a very young woman. The geezer is played by Peter O’Toole, who, at 75, still emits a singularly beguiling brand of iconic leer. Maurice (O’Toole) in his youth was an also-ran in the early-1960s British…
Lowbrow / highbrow
The Marine 20th Century Fox Whatever happened to the American action flick? You know — big beefy dudes with little peckers fighting outrageous villains in an orgy of violence that could fill even the nearest teste with jizz? Thankfully, the WWE have spurt forth a wallop of an actioner with The Marine, starring one of…
Battle cry
Chris Killion sits at his computer, staring at phantoms. The 27-year-old Iraqi war vet from Dearborn Heights has just endured another bad night, catching only about 45 minutes of sleep. After more than two years, tossing and turning in a fruitless search for some position that eases the searing pain has become routine. His body…
Catch and Release
Manic-depressives need romantic comedies too, and for them there’s Catch and Release, one of the weirdest, mopiest date movies to come down the pike in a long time. Set against postcard-perfect views of Boulder, Colo., the film chronicles the stop-and-start grieving process of Gray (Jennifer Garner), a young woman whose imminent wedding is preempted by…
Building community
Artists have gallery openings, poets have in-store readings and musicians have concerts. Be it in the back of a bar or inside an arena with stadium seating, most creative people have some way of interacting with their audience. But architects, who are working in arguably the most people-oriented of all art forms, have few opportunities…
Raising shackles
State says female inmates can’t sue over sexual abuse.
Blood and Chocolate
The coolest thing about werewolf movies, and the secret to horror lover’s decades-long infatuation with them, is the transformation scene; that absolutely essential cinematic money shot when man becomes beast. However, in this willfully dull snooze-fest, man becomes lame lycanthrope by imitating Baryshnikov — pirouetting through the air, morphing into flashes of light and hitting…
Light ’em up
Perhaps no writer waxed as eloquent about meditative smoking as the polemical novelist Ayn Rand. In her mammoth work Atlas Shrugged, she wrote, “I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the…
Who’s sorry now?
Canadian government apologizes to innocent trapped in terror snare.
Knife in the Water
Once upon a time, Roman Polanski was considered the most promising director of his time. Though Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and Repulsion are true cinematic classics, 1962’s Knife in the Water first landed the Polish filmmaker in the spotlight. An economically crafted and remarkably unnerving psychodrama, Polanski masterfully wrung suspense from a tale confined to three…
Be my guest
I regard this column, gentle readers, as a sacred calling and I would never intentionally do anything that would cause you to question my judgment. Sound judgment, after all, is the professional advice columnist’s most precious commodity. Nevertheless, I have — once again — stupidly auctioned off the right to give advice in this space.…
Column, march left!
Soldiers sign on to bring U.S. troops home.
Beat shaman
When David “Disco D” Shayman took his life in New York last week, his death shocked and saddened his thousands of fans, friends and colleagues. And those who remembered the Ann Arbor kid — the one who went from DJ’ing ghettotech at raves to making beats for 50 Cent — are hit particularly hard. Shayman…
Letters to the Editor
Look about you Thank you so much for Jack Lessenberry’s article on the sulfite mining in Upper Michigan (“Ready to swim in sulfuric acid?” Metro Times, Jan. 17). This is a hugely important issue to those of us who love our Upper Peninsula. They have fought national and multinational corporations’ indiscriminate extraction of natural resources…
Visions of visions
You can’t help but be charmed by Beth, just as you also can’t help but be charmed by her creator, 42-year-old Annette Gilson. Seated inches from Gilson (she in a brown leather chair, I on a small couch beside) at a Caribou Coffee, I somehow feel as if her exuberance is catching — as if…
Natural-law school
When Mary Smith met Graydon Smales at his apartment near Wayne State University in the 1960s, it was virtually love at first sight. A Roseville native, Smith worked as a Macomb county switchboard operator in Mount Clemens. Smales studied speech and psychology at Wayne State, working in the general post office on Fort Street near…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): I have one little whisper of warning and one big blast of encouragement for you. First, the warning: Don’t be like the ancient Roman emperor Caligula, who declared war on Neptune, god of the sea, and commanded his troops to hurl their spears into the water. Now here’s the encouragement: If…
Feeding and breeding
Q: I was browsing the Planned Parenthood Web site and something totally surprised me. In their birth control (BC) section, they quote the percentage of women who get pregnant during the first year of using a particular method. The interesting part: The breastfeeding method (mothers who are full-time breastfeeding, haven’t had a period, less than…
The big cheese
For the cheese-weary, R. Hirt’s Ed Nemetz has the cure.
American Life in Poetry
Grief can endure a long, long time. A deep loss is very reluctant to let us set it aside, to push it into a corner of memory. Here the Arkansas poet, Andrea Hollander Budy, gives us a look at one family’s adjustment to a death. For Weeks After the Funeral The house felt like…
We can dance if we want to
Christina Hill, distressed by interpretive features incorporated into recent Detroit Institute of Arts special exhibitions, suggests that this reflects the DIA’s “rather low opinion of Detroiters … [who] have been judged as dum-dums who can’t engage with art, and must be lured into the DIA on some pretext unrelated to art.” (“Lowering the Barre,” Metro…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
No place to turn.
The De’Sean Jones Quartet’s performance Jan. 19 at Baker’s got our jazz scribe Charles L. Latimer thinking about the promise and pitfalls of being a young jazz cat in 2007.–JTL Two years ago, saxophonist De’ Sean Jones was a promising prospect in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Civic Jazz Orchestra program. When you listened to the…
