CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?
We’ve heard reports of some fireworks backstage during Don Was’ Detroit Super Session show at the Concert of Colors last Sunday evening. First, we heard that the concert promoters were none too happy about Mark Norton of the Ramrods doing his “punk rock” thang on the rented onstage baby grand piano during his song. In…
COLOR US IMPRESSED
Speaking of the Replacements, many youngsters who revere the band today may not know about the group’s strong Michigan connection. For quite a few years in the ‘80s, Ann Arbor was the band’s second home away from their Minneapolis home. Westerberg’s girlfriend and first wife worked at the then-thriving alternative record store, Schoolkids, which is…
INVASION OF THE LITERARY ROCK MAMAS THIS WEEKEND!
Laurie Lindeen — the leader of ‘90s Minneapolis female alt-rock band, Zuzu’s Petals and the wife of former Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg — is about to see her debut book, a memoir titled Petal Pusher, published in paperback on September 16th. In anticipation of the publication, Ms. Lindeen will be in the Detroit area this…
PYSCHEDELIC HORSESHIT!
If you’re going to the X! Fest this Saturday, don’t show up until 9 p.m. The barbecue originally scheduled in the parking lot next to the National Bohemian Home has been canceled. Music will now start at 10 p.m. We saw that Psychedelic Horseshit is scheduled to appear at the fest. Which reminded me: Every…
KUDOS TO D-TOWN JAZZBOS
Tip of the hat to Detroit-based reedman Wendell Harrison. Grants from Chamber Music America announced today include a joint project by the Chamber group and French funders to present Harrison’s music in Paris and Detroit as played by the French clarinet ensemble,e Quatour Issy. The round of grants — in excess of $660,000 — also…
Acting up
You may have seen him in recent television spots for the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, touting the Mitten State as a good place to start a business. Or you may have caught him at a local venue, strumming his acoustic guitar and singing original folk-blues tunes. If not there, then surely you saw one of…
Fish story
Talking with June Cross of John Cross Fisheries.
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY • 23 TIPTON LEA AND THE VICTORIAN ARMY REALLY, REALLY OLD-SCHOOL This Ann Arbor duo asks the question: “If rock music existed 100 years ago, what would it sound like?” The answer involves a piano, percussion and lots of electronic fuzz, as well as grainy black-and-white photos of the band next to large Victorian-era…
Muppets, Music and Magic
During a lightning-fast promo for The Muppet Show, a trustworthy newscaster type informs the potential audience that the new variety program truly has something for everyone, even satisfying discerning eggheads with the “underlying symbolism of everything.” It’s one of the great comic moments collected in Muppets 101, the first program in the Muppets, Music &…
Only skin deep
Girl says she’s ugly; Dan says things will look better.
On the Download
When it comes to jams in “South Detroit” (aka Windsor, Ontario), as Steve Perry so arguably put it, Windsor exists in a weird sort of parallel universe: close enough to Detroit to claim “rock city” props when necessary, but certainly more attuned to the London-Hamilton-Toronto 401 circuit, audience-wise. So while you may not make it…
Motor City Cribs
Custom-bike guru Ron Finch’s Auburn Hills studio.
Tax bumps and rolls
Judging from recent events, you’d think the most pressing issues in the Wayne County treasurer’s race involve controversies that date back 30 or 40 years instead of a crisis that is very much in the present and has no end in sight. For the owners of more than 200,000 pieces of property facing the possibility…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
The X! Factor
Ferndale-based X! Records snuck up on Detroit in 2005, patiently unveiling CD-Rs and 45s from such then-unknown local outfits as the Frustrations, Fontana and the Terrible Twos — bands that trafficked in the same surrounded-by-shambles aesthetic desperation that fueled the greatest punk, garage rock and space music of the past. Over the course of three…
Hard knock life
What the Hard Lessons do as an indie band could be described as fairly revolutionary in the grand scheme of things. To quote Augie Visocchi, the popular Detroit trio’s guitarist and co-vocalist: “We’re old-fashioned. It does seem like a novel idea these days, I guess. We write songs. We record them and put out records.…
Stupak’s stand
Yooper congressman pushes for regulating oil speculators.
City of possibilities
Detroit’s been described in many ways, and here’s a new one:The city has an “atmosphere of departure,” according to Eva Bracke, who owns a gallery in the heart of Berlin’s most popular contemporary art district. She’s not talking about a sense of panic floating in the air, spurring Detroiters to pack their bags. She’s referring…
Black and white TV
Forty years. For those of us unfortunate enough to have lived through it and blessed enough to still be around, at times it can seem like last month. I remember vividly the look of anguish mixed with shock and devastation in my mother’s eyes that April morning, a hollow gaze never seen before nor thereafter.…
Letters to the Editor
Regulating research Jack Lessenberry’s piece on stem cell research (“Stem cell spin,” Metro Times, July 16) was very thoughtful but it overlooked a major consideration in the controversy: Regulation of stem cell research. Lessenberry points out that much stem cell material can come from embryos currently discarded by in-vitro fertilization clinics. However, without regulation there…
A tweak in tough times
Rethinking shortened grace periods in the midst of a mortgage meltdown.
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
You won’t come back from Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #181! Barenaked Ladies’ Steven Page — "I Had a Million Dollars But I Blew it on Blow" (Cocaine Fiend) :: He’s big and he’s fat and he doesn’t even have a brain. Barry Blitt — The New Yorker (July 21, 2008) :: You don’t need a…
Neighborhood treat
This neighborhood restaurant has been quietly turning out respectable meals for a generation or so from a prosaic strip mall on Rochester Road. In a simply decorated, dimly-lit room that seats 120, you can enjoy heavy red-sauced dishes with the pastas averaging around $13 and the other entrées around $18 including soup and salad. Franco’s…
Couch Trip
Lucker: The Necrophagous Synapse Films Who remembers the VHS heyday? That time between the late ’80s and early ’90s when a mom-and-pop video store sat on nearly every corner? They held unseen treasures unlike contemporary showroom-perfect video stores that carry only surplus qualities of mass-appeal flicks. Back in the day, a horror-movie fanatic could easily…
Tell No One
French actor-turned-director Guillaume Canet’s French-language suspenser is taken from a American pop potboiler by crime novelist Harlan Coben. And, oddly enough, that overseas adaptation may very well be the thing that makes the film’s convoluted and overwrought plot work so beautifully. Pediatric resident Alex Beck (François Cluzet) and his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) are the…
Holy shit, Batman!
Picking up shortly after his Batman Begins (that is, early in the caped crusader’s career), Nolan presents Gotham’s dark knight (Christian Bale) as both a source of hope and concern for the city’s denizens. While crime is down in the corrupt metropolis, his actions have inspired less-capable copycat “Batmen” vigilantes to take the law into…
Michigan melancholy
Anyone who has caught Chris Bathgate’s live sets over the last year will most likely have seen him in loop-pedal glory, eschewing full-band interpretations of his work and layering guitar lines and vocal harmonies to fill out the sound. The six tracks that make up this follow-up EP to last year’s full-length, A Cork Tale…
Mamma Mia!
This movie version was made by the creative trio that spawned the wildly popular musical a decade ago in London. Whatever might be lost in the translation from stage to screen, the movie gains in veracity and impact. When single mother Donna (Meryl Streep) helps her 20-year-old daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) prepare for her wedding…
The Last Mistress
Set amid the Parisian aristocracy of 1835, this adaptation of Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel Une Vieille Maîtresse is a stunningly beautiful period film, classically elegant and steeped in literary conventions. Although it contains elements of her previous movies (the manipulative maneuvering of Sex is Comedy and ingrained cruelty of Fat Girl), The Last Mistress is…
Divorce Italian Style
The Sicily of director Pietro Germi’s 1961 black comedy Divorce Italian Style has an impossibly sunny face and a bitter heart of darkness. Baron Ferdinando Cefalù (Marcello Mastroianni) is narrator, protagonist, and embodiment of everything wrong in the society he both mocks and manipulates to his own ends. Known as Fefé to his overbearing family,…
THE ANVIL: CALIFORNIA, HERE HE COMES?
Also releasing a much-anticipated album are the Hard Lessons, one of D-Town’s favorite bands, who’ll be unleashing their ambitious B&G Sides to an adoring public this week, complete with an all-star record release party at the Crofoot Ballroom this Saturday night, July 26th. The band is on the Metro Times‘ cover this week but we…
THE DISPLAYS… & ALBUM RELEASE MANIA!
Congratulations to our young teenaged friends in the Displays, who self-release their debut LP, Ain’t Gonna Put Us Down, this week, complete with a CD release party this Friday, July 25th, at the Garden Bowl. The trio won the Detroit News‘Battle of the Bands competition back in 2007 (less than a year after their formation)…
SUPER SESSION SUPER SHOTS
In case you didn’t make it down to the Concert of Colors this weekend, here are some rare (because the officials were extremely strict about the use of cameras at the event) photos from Don Was’s Super Session show Sunday night, courtesy of our friend, Ms. Rebecca Cook, the CoC’s official photographer. Thanks, Rebecca! John…
