WHAT A MORON!
Don’t know if you saw this or not, but the Monkey Boy (aka The Leader of the “Free” World) was in Nashville the other day to “speak” (if you can call what comes out of his mouth “speaking”)… According to The Tennessean newspaper: Bush was speaking in Nashville last week. It appears that he doesn’t…
SPEAKING OF WHICH…
Hey, I passed my Metro Times drug test… np: “The No No Song,” Ringo Starr BTW: This dude was a full-blown heroin addict when this video was shot. Think he could have cut it on American Idol?
CRAZY BITCH
I’m sure you’ve all read by now that Lindsay Lohan has been busted for DUI and possession of cocaine in L.A., only days after appearing in court on another DUI charge and having the judge order one of those ankle bracelets that supposedly can sense if someone is using or not. I believe this was…
ART LOVER
Detroit is losing one of its native sons this week, as Art Lyzak and his lovely wife Christine leave the Motor City for the beautiful confines of San Francisco, where Christine has taken a job with a major advertising firm. “Dammit!” Art exclaimed on his first voicemail message to me, “can’t we live in the…
HELLO, IT’S ME
OK, so I’ve arrived. Back in the Motor City. You can check out my introductory column at the Metro Times web site, proper, to learn more about me. But for practical purposes, these are probably the two most important graphs… just in case you don’t want to take the time to read the whole damn…
Opposable Thumbs
Storming the beaches with two World War II shooters.
Army of Darkness
If you’re feeling nostalgic for Raimi’s glorious cheeseball period, then see Army of Darkness. Campy, brilliantly paced and boasting every hokey low budget effect known to man, Army Of Darkness is an exuberantly kitschy comic book gagfest. The plot follows S-Mart housewares salesman Ash (Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 star Bruce Campbell) as he’s…
Sicko’s reel change
Where does entertainment end and activism begin? When asked in relation to the documentary Sicko, those two threads are so entwined the question can’t be answered. Before director Michael Moore shot a single frame of Sicko, activist groups he’d reached out to were supplying him with the stories of people who’d fallen victim to this…
Space invaders
Pranksters, subvertisers, copyright daredevils, Naomi Klein, Gilles Deleuze — anti-corporate agitators of all stripes are united in Christine Harold’s OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture (University of Minnesota Press, $24.95, hardcover, 232 pp.). Harold, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, is overly ensconced in the world of academia, and she poisons her…
Night and Day
Wednesday-Saturday • 25-28 Michigan ’50S Festival FUN FOR ALL Rocky and the Rollers: Either they’re a family friendly, doo-woppin’ ’50s tribute band, or they’re the masters of irony, the uncontestable conquerors of anti-cool. Yeah, no such luck. They’re the former, and performing at the 20th annual Michigan ’50s Festival with such trailblazers as the Teen…
White Devil
Phil Roth of Bay City pop-garage trio the Esperantos gives his freak flag plenty of room to fly in drums-bass duo the Fascists. The first impression of this debut LP: It’s nervous, skittering post-punk England circa ’79 until Roth lets loose his array of vocal whoops, cackles and woo-hoos. By then it’s apparent that the…
Letters to the Editor
Riot remembered My wife Kelly gave birth to a beautiful baby girl on April 1. Audrey is our first child and I often wonder what the world she will grow up in will be like and how it differs from the world I grew up in. Today I wondered what it will be like for…
Just squeeze ’em
How campaign cash avoids public disclosure.
Clap hands
Date from hell ends with command performance.
Impeachment pie
Activists try to hold Conyers’ feet to the fire.
Brothers’ keepers
In 2005, actor Zach Braff won a Best Compilation Soundtrack Grammy for the soundtrack to his directorial debut, Garden State — a soundtrack that included a soulful ballad titled “Blue Eyes” by an obscure, unsigned artist named Cary Brothers. The singer-songwriter turned out to be Braff’s college bud. But even though he was one of…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Bonus points for reading Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #129! The Stooges – “L.A. Blues” (Elektra) :: Song title of the century! Chuck Berry – “You Never Can Tell” (Chess) :: Bonus points for actually singing: “They had a teenage weddin’ and the old folks whooshed ’em well.” Parkas – Put Your Head in the Lion’s…
Gas-powered vehicle
Thunderpants Genius Products To gauge how far the Weinstein brothers’ star has fallen, look no further than 2002’s Thunderpants, a noxious direct-to-DVD “family film” that the men who made Miramax decided to distribute. Thunderpants’ four-years-later release seems arbitrary, except that it was the acting debut of Rupert Grint, who is currently appearing in multiplexes everywhere…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Run, cable, run
Holly Hunter is an Academy Award-winning actress, not the least bit unattractive, and she still packs enough big-star name recognition to headline anyone’s ensemble cast. So why is it you can’t remember three things she’s done in this century? (The Incredibles doesn’t count; you only heard her as the voice of ElastiGirl.) Can’t be lack…
Beyond borders
On the winter 2007 cover of Bidoun, a muscle-bound Uncle Sam rolls up his sleeves and proclaims “IRAN … You’re Next!” The image, altered from a 1940s piece of anti-Japanese propaganda, raises questions about who “our enemy” is. Editor-in-chief Lisa Farjam, an Iranian who grew up living in the United States and Dubai, founded the…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Steak holder
Curtis Nordeen sells more than sizzle.
Death of a hero
Why Rabbi Sherwin Wine was one worth remembering.
Sublime paperwork
One of the more seductive propositions made by visual art is that what we see in a gallery or museum has the power to change how we experience the all-too-visible, everyday world. Not only do habits of seeing die hard, they tend to make us oblivious. Then along comes an artist to get down inside…
Dressy D
Motor City Fashion Week hits the catwalks.
Silver balls
“Couples get in first!” a voice bellows from the front of the line. I squint in the garish glow of Boogie Fever’s neon sign and survey my options for an expedited entrance. I see women squeezed into floral capri pants like sausage, some dude bewigged in a curly mullet, and an Asian couple with backpacks…
Elicit response
The Portrait by Zilka Joseph Inspired by Hippolyte-Jean Flandrin’s 1846 painting "Madame Louis Antoinette Cambourg," at the Detroit Institute of Arts. 1. Madame You make me wear velvet darker than horses, drape a blue shawl with gold flowers over the arm of this brown satin chair where I sit bare necked, bare shouldered. Still I…
Brand Upon the Brain!
As a viable, relevant art form, silent films began to lose their mojo in the late 1920s with the advent of talkies, but nobody seems to have mentioned this to Guy Maddin. Re-creating the look and antiquated feel of the silents, Maddin’s hallucinatory plot finds the filmmaker returning by rowboat after decades away to Black…
Motor City Cribs
Myth man’s best girl lands a plane in their back yard.
Talk to Me
Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene was one of the unlikeliest media stars to arise from the boiling social cauldron of the late ’60s. A convict, a hustler and an all-around charmer, Greene got his start as a prison DJ, and after a parole for talking a fellow inmate off the water tower, he sweet-talked his way…
A prodigal son returns
“Face it, Bill. You’re getting old.” Those words appeared on the Metro Times letters page 20 years ago in reference to an article on CREEM magazine for which I’d been interviewed. Of course, in many ways, ageism has always been the most hilarious and probably least harmful of all the “isms.” One won’t wake up…
David and Layla
David (David Moscow), the host of local cable show, Sex and Happiness, becomes smitten with the mysterious and exotic Layla (Shiva Rose), a Kurdish Muslim refugee whose visa has expired. Unfulfilled in his relationship with a high-strung girlfriend (Callie Thorne), he desperately pursues Layla, despite the hysteria it causes in his Jewish family and the…
Continental divide
From coast to coast with Turf Talk and Prodigy.
Spray job
Hairspray is, for the most part, effortless fun, buoyed along by a hugely talented ensemble cast, fantastic dance numbers and the best atomic-age production design since director Todd Haynes’ meticulously retro melodrama Far From Heaven. Travolta notwithstanding, there’s no reason it should’ve worked this well. The movie — and the musical upon which it’s based…
It walks, it talks, it crawls like a reptile
Seems Von Bondie head Jason Stollsteimer is alive. We got a press release from a Warner Brothers flack informing us of an upcoming Stollsteimer show that’s “a bunch of his close friends, aka: Jason and The Hounds Below.” This piece of PR pulp says the show is a warm up “in lieu of the new…
