HANDGRENADES EXPLOSION
Got an e-mail yesterday afternoon from HiFi Handgrenades honcho John Speck, informing us of all kinds of cool stuff the band’s up to following their opening slot tour with the Foo Fighters (Dave Grohl himself chose them for the gig) earlier this year. The band is leaving at the end of July for a three-month…
Fading away
Some places are like ghosts, not quite dead, not quite alive, but lingering between the two as faded shadows of their old selves. Paul’s Diner on Michigan Avenue at Cabot Street, less than a mile from the Dearborn border, looks at first glance to have died. It rarely has customers, there’s no listing for it…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Motor City Cribs
The Corktown digs and studio of artist Dennis Michael Jones.
Old German
Haute cuisine grabs headlines, but it’s also the myriad small workaday eateries that help to make a city breathe with gastronomic life. One of these little gems is Jacoby’s German Biergarten, a narrow downtown building on Brush Street and one of the oldest continuously named establishments in Detroit. It’s unlikely that everyone is going to…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
This week they’re ALL sizzling platters here at Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #179! SP1: Night Ranger — Hole in the Sun (VH1 Classic) :: Oddly enough, their first new studio album in 10 years starts out sounding like a Gary Numan album from 1979 — but don’t worry, Kyoto, ’cause it doesn’t take long for…
A Japanese new-rock primer
American journalists often complain that the Japanese tend to take elements of Western culture, most notably music, and give it a quirky, frequently incomprehensible (at least to Western ears) foreign spin. That’s definitely the rap they give to the Japanese rock trio named Boris. But after 16 years of digging up every sound and twisting…
Show-offs
Dan on understanding exhibitionism.
“It’s all happening at the Zoos …”
The Zoos of Berlin are a rare breed of band. They’ve come on like a quiet storm, sneaking their way into the very epicenter of Detroit’s music scene by (gasp!) taking their damn sweet time writing these swelling and artful songs, getting tight as an ensemble, using their energy to create and connect and putting…
Couch Trip
Joy Division The Miriam Collection Control The Miriam Collection You don’t have to worship at the altar of Joy Division to find this documentary a truly absorbing piece of work. Of course, fans of the post-punk Manchester quartet are legion, despite the group’s short lifespan (mainly due to frontman-lyricist Ian Curtis’ self-shortened lifespan; he killed…
Tooth of Crime
Sticky. That’s the new buzzword. A record’s sticky if something elusive yet compelling makes you want to keep revisiting it as you divine new levels and nuances, progressively getting sucked in. Radiohead’s In Rainbows was sticky. In the pre-iPod era, we called ’em “sleepers.” T Bone Burnett’s new studio album is sticky. It’s loosely based…
Fanchon eats crow
In my last enduring image of Fanchon Stinger, she was flat on her back. It was last week and the perky FOX2 Morning co-anchor was tightening her abs on camera with a fitness expert, one of those fluffy, get-bikini-ready-for-summer feature segments that separate morning newscasts from the somber evening reports. Turns out the vision was…
My Winnipeg
Constructed like a personal documentary, My Winnipeg is actually an ornate fantasia shot in hypnotic black-and-white with occasional bursts of color. Maddin (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, The Saddest Music in the World) is at once a surrealist and a humorist, a sly dissector of film history who uses the conventions of silent cinema to…
Transformation
Resilience and transformation are common themes in the Second Annual Detroit Women of Color International Film Festival taking place this weekend at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Documentaries make up the bulk of the schedule, but two powerful narrative films set the tone: Deepa Mehta’s controversial Water (2005) is set in…
The good doctor
A pageant of famous faces parades by Director Alex Gibney’s (Taxi to the Dark Side) camera, each happy to share some wild anecdote or cherished moment. In a move the author probably would have liked, the film makes only a cursory nod to his Louisville childhood and cuts right to the good stuff, beginning with…
Game not over
It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 10 years since the last game was played at Tiger Stadium. It’s even harder to believe that its fate is not yet set in stone. While selective dismantling has begun on the building’s northeast corner, the Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy (OTSC) is still working to save “The…
Tomlin’s rule
Detroit city politics have truly become stranger than fiction.
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY • 9 THE CASUALTIES ROSEY-HUED PUNK ROCK If you’ve ever wanted to time-warp into a different era, say the punk-hardcore scene of ’80s New York City, you haven’t exactly missed your chance. The Casualties are the next best thing to the real thing, a full-on punk rock fist-jack to the glory days, mohawks and…
On the Download
Prussia is a quartet of dudes with a penchant for both sweetly disarming and just as sweetly unnerving indie jams. Their take is an anachronistic one that backbends toward ’60s pop while still sounding very modern, calmly composed … and nervous. Fans of Saturday Looks Good to Me should eat this up. “Supreme Being” is…
Gloomsayers
More bad news about GM’s record low stock price.
High and dry
Politician spearheads state’s fight against little-known hallucinogen.
Third screen’s a charmer
It’s a womb! It’s Plato’s cave! It’s … a movie theater! And, as in the days of yore (i.e. the bygone salad days of the TV and VCR), for the past few years romantics have again been living in fear of the demise of their favorite hideout, the temples with shadowy interior where they can…
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It’s summer, baby
If you spent part of your holiday weekend at a metro Detroit movie theater, you weren’t alone. The Fourth of July is traditionally one of the biggest movie-going holidays of the year, and heading into this all-important weekend, national box office grosses were already up nearly 6 percent from last year, and attendance up 3…
Letters to the Editor
Banning the burn I’d like to thank Metro Times for its attention and diligence regarding coverage of the Detroit incinerator issue. We appreciate what you have done to help keep this up front as one of the most important decisions for the city in years. This is a great day for the city of Detroit.…
Mission of Burma bring it all back home
This summer, Mission of Burma, a band whose original heyday was 1979 to ’83, will play eight shows in the United States — two in their hometown of Boston; two in New York; and one apiece in Philly, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Detroit. Every date, save for Boston, will take place on a weekend. On…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
MOTOR CITY PERFORMANCE ART
Cool Detroit rock art and poster show opening next Wednesday, July 16th, at the Butcher’s Inn in the Eastern Market (1489 Winder; 313-566-0966), featuring work by local legends Mark Arminski, Gary Grimshaw, Carl Lundgren, Leni Sinclair and Thomas Weschler. Opening night will feature music performances by two of our faves, Caroline Striho and John Sinclair…
OUTRAGEOUS CHERRY SHOW TONIGHT
We got this news too late to get it in last week’s issue — appears to be something of a last minute addition — but our friend (and local rock star) Matthew Smith and his band Outrageous Cherry will be playing the Bohemian National House (with Troy Gregory and the Stepsisters) tonight at 9 p.m.…
JACK’S DETROIT
Pretty sure most of you have seen this already, especially everyone who reads the Detroit Free Press (which ran the exclusive on Sunday) or any of the rock blogs. But for the out-of-towners who read this page and may have missed it thus far, here’s Jack White’s ode to the city that Kwame rules. COURAGEOUS…
MICK “ON THE LINE”
Following up on their Here’s the Whirlwind EP, released in January of this year, as well as a slot at last week’s Comerica Cityfest, Mick Bassett and the Marthas will be releasing a new seven-inch vinyl single, “Bird on the Line” b/w “The Keepers,” via Ben Blackwell’s Cass Records label a week from this Friday,…
