CITYFEST JULY 4TH PHOTOS
Shotgun Wedding (above) Ultimate Ovation Stirling Silver with Audra Kubat and Eddie Baranek Broken Social Scene Ryan Elliott Doop & the Outlaws King Britt Thornetta Davis ALL PHOTOS by Doug Coombe
REARING HIS UGLY HEAD AGAIN…
I guess the really good news about the Phoenix’s “All-Time Best” list (see below) is that Ted Nugent didn’t place as the “Best” from our fair state. Nevertheless, the “Terrible” one is in the local news this weekend, as he prepares to present his 6000th show this Friday, July 4th, at Pine Knob (or DTE…
ARE THE STOOGES REALLY “THE BEST”?
The Boston Phoenix and its Phoenix.com website has just published its inaugural “50 Bands/50 States” list: — a declaration of the “All-Time Best Band, All-Time Best Solo Artist, and Best New Band” from each of the 50 states. Some interesting choices, most of which are sure to result in numerous arguments. For California, to use…
Goose Lake memories
After a few decades of dormancy, the phenomenon of the multi-day rock festival has returned to life in recent years, with Bonnaroo and Coachella becoming annual media events. Michigan is getting into the act with the jam-band friendly Rothbury Festival, which kicks off this Thursday, July 3, at the Double JJ Ranch, not far from…
War, Inc.
Cusack is Hauser, an ex-CIA assassin working freelance for Tamerlane Industries, the first private security firm (think Halliburton meets Blackwater) hired by the U.S. government to simultaneously wage war and organize reconstruction in oil-rich Turaqistan. Hauser’s mission is to whack Turaqi head of state, Omar Sharif (not the actor), because of his plans to construct…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY • 2 JAYNE MANSFIELD DOUBLE FEATURE HERE THEY ARE … Often referred to as the poor man’s Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield had the busty blond bombshell role down to a science. A science that seemed to mainly involve “accidental” exposure of her breasts that kept her (them?) in the public eye long after her…
The Children of Huang Shi
Male model-turned-bland actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays the real-life English adventurer George Hogg, little-known here but revered in China, in a story that plays fast and loose with the facts, since who’s going to quibble? Hogg is an Oxford sophisticate turned green newspaper man, kicking around Shanghai in the late 1930s, when he borrows a…
Word up
What words have changed your life?
Hancock
Smith is Hancock, a reluctant, mysterious, indestructible crime fighter who often does as much property damage as he prevents, a perpetual grump going through the motions of superheroics like a guy who hates his job. In a typically reckless display, he manages to derail a barreling freight train, but fortunately the poor sap he saves…
Beyond innocence
Ken Wyniemko spent nearly a decade behind bars for a Macomb County rape. His most pressing concern was surviving. His second was proving his innocence. He succeeded at both. Wyniemko was released five years ago, exonerated by DNA testing that showed he could not have been the man who broke into a Clinton Township woman’s…
Letters to the Editor
Poster booster In response to Rebecca Mazzei’s article, “Rock posters supreme” (Metro Times, June 25), I thought there was a serious omission of a fantastic and (apparently) overlooked Detroit talent: that of Robert Nixon. (You can see his work online at tinyurl.com/55pfxa). His work has drawn attention from many local bands, and his body of…
Incinerator snuffed?
It’s official: Detroit won’t try to buy the big burner.
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
You might not read Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #178 but he’ll write it just the same! ZZ Top — Animalizer (Warner Bros.) :: Includes the hit single "Squirrel Necklace." (Lester Bangs was one of the great rock writers …) Lydia Lunch — Video Hysterie: 1978-2006 (MVD Visual/Atavistic) :: Although the picture quality improves as the…
Fighting for life
Javan “Sugar” Hill loves a good fight. At 38 years old, the native Detroiter is a retired crime fighter from the Detroit Police Department. He’s now devoting his energy to his biggest battle of all — heading up Detroit’s historic Kronk Boxing Team. It’s the kind of thing nobody does unless they truly love boxing.…
‘How sweet it is …’
I grew up with Motown humming out of the car stereo in my mom’s Charger. It echoed from faint speakers in the local coin laundry as we folded towels together. Sometimes, I’d dance in place by the dryers, soaking in the music’s associations with summertime barbecues and family outings where the Temptations so often played…
It’s a Gas!
The techno-fab event of the summer wasn’t the unveiling of Richie Hawtin’s Cube, best described as puffy promotional hilarity that made a stop at the Minus afterparty during this year’s Movement festival, and more recently made the rounds at Sonar in Barcelona; take a peek at a send-up, courtesy of some anonymous Ubercoolische Brit pranksters…
Contempt
Contempt is both intensely fascinating and frustratingly dull. Godard is clearly not a storyteller. The plot bumps along in fits and starts, and often detours into unconnected exchanges. The characters are more cinematic construction than flesh-and-blood humans — Jack Palance is a cartoonish megalomaniac while Brigitte Bardot is as far from a working-class typist as…
The sexbots are coming
They’re only robots. So would it be cheating?
Desert menu
How is a Chaldean restaurant different from the more familiar Lebanese? Many dishes are the same, but owners Saad and Zeana Attisha add, for example, pickled cabbage, purshee, that’s served to everyone as a starter, plus some tomato-based stews. And their daily specials are Iraqi favorites: burgul (bulgur wheat) on Tuesdays; biryani on Wednesdays (like…
A Beckett scholar in Mexicantown
For local dramatist Shaun Nethercott, the plot of a play — whether involving personal triumph or lost love — isn’t necessarily what live theater is all about. She’s less interested in what happens, per se, than the mechanics of how a play works or the real-life lessons audiences come away with. As co-founder and executive…
Pixar picks a prize
Writer, director and Pixar founding father Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) turns what could have been a predictable tale of robot romance into one of the most evocative, entertaining films of the year, something akin to R2D2 meets “The Little Tramp.” Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter — Earth Class) is the last functioning robot on Earth,…
Count down
Calexico prepares for more “Detroit (manhole) Steam” by Fred Mills Tucson’s Calexico — formed more than a decade ago around the nucleus of guitarist-vocalist Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino while they were still members of Giant Sand — has a new album, Carried to Dust, due in September and featuring a host of guest…
Bab’Aziz (The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul)
The third film in Tunisian-born, Paris-based Nacer Khemir’s desert trilogy, this lyrical folk tale opens in the desert after a sandstorm. Blind and frail Bab’Aziz (Parviz Shahinkho) and his granddaughter Ishtar (Maryam Hamid), are digging out, trying to get a new sense of direction amid the suddenly altered terrain. To placate his worried daughter, Bab’Aziz…
Couch Trip
The Bette Davis Collection 20th Century Fox If Bette Davis were alive today, what would she be doing? No, not scratching madly at the inside of her coffin, but celebrating her 100th birthday (it was actually April 5, but when it comes to marketing, a centennial b-day can last all year). Thus it is that…
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
Rated G for girl, Kit Kittredge is as quick-witted and compassionate as its 10-year-old heroine, played by Abigail Breslin. It’s May of 1934, and Kit is aware that a rising flood called the Great Depression is spreading across the country, but doesn’t feel the impact until her father’s business collapses and Kit and her mother…
Shooting straight
U.S. Supreme Court slouches ever rightward.
Wanted
Rising star James McAvoy is Wesley Gibson, a pathetic cubicle drone who ends up playing human doormat to just about anyone else who crosses his path. All that changes when Fox (Angelina Jolie) marches up to him and announces he’s the son of the world’s greatest assassin, and invites him to join the secret elite…
