Comics
This Modern World Red Meat Comix
Proactive
Want to get dirty? Urban Farming can help you out. The group, dedicated to creating vegetable gardens on vacant or abandoned lots, is holding three planting events over the weekend. Volunteers can gather this Saturday on the city’s West Side at Collingwood and Cascade streets (between Livernois and Dexter, and Grand River and West Davison…
Weekly Fecal
When Jagged Little Pill was crammed down our throats a decade ago, Alanis Morissette offered some balance to the cock-heavy Billboard chart — a preverbal yin to the alternative nation’s engorged yang. She was chiquita-con-guitar who could yelp about blowing her ex in a theater and still make it seem almost, well, empowering. To commemorate…
Heart of darkness
In a shaky blur of lights and color, the whine of acceleration rises like a cumming lover as I whip my tricked-out Chevy 300C through the roadway clusterfuck beneath Cobo Hall. The splatter of hard rain forms a mist inches above blacktop, and makes for unruly conditions as I hard left onto Randolph from Jefferson,…
Night and Day
Friday • 3 Trevor Watts/ Jamie Harris Trio MUSIC Like more than a few other great sax players, Trevor Watts has a thing about drummers. He came onto the British free jazz scene in the ’60s alongside drummer John Stevens in the now-legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble; he’s played with masses of percussionists in some projects…
Edgeplay: A Film about the Runaways
You’re not going to hear "Queens of Noise" or any other Runaways songs in this rock-doc to make you reconsider these gutsy gals’ place in the grrrl power, punk or pop pantheons. That’s because the usually genial Joan Jett was so violently opposed to this look-see, she prohibited director Victory Tischler-Blue (the former Vicki Blue…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Maybe all you really need right now is a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s quite possible that if you savor a well-made version of that earthy delicacy, the things that are off-kilter in your life will get smooth and fresh again. I’m not kidding, Aries. The adjustment that will help you get…
Come together
Despite never having been afflicted with the disease, Joe Perry considers himself to be a cancer survivor because he’s been touched by the devastating illness through the loss of friends and family, including both of his parents. "Family members are survivors too," Perry says. "We’re all survivors." Perry is the program director of Gilda’s Club…
Pack Me With Your Clothes
Shoe.’s pop is ambitious, which is a gateway to either "glorious" or "garbage." To its credit, Shoe. splits right down the middle here. And the band wears its influences; album opener "Sleepwalker" feels like a four-minute reinterpretation of Radiohead’s entire Amnesiac album — how’s that for ambition? Mostly, though, the songs are primed for musical…
Still shooting
Bill Schwab: The Last Ten Years is a splendid exhibition at the Halsted Gallery in celebration of the new book Gathering Calm (North Light Press, $55) — a collection of black-and-white images from the past decade taken by photographer Bill Schwab. Schwab is a Detroiter, born in 1959, who has worked other places as his…
One for the heart
A strange thing happened to 26-year old bass player and local rock fan Jeff Hardin this year. In a chain of events stemming from an extreme case of pneumonia, the young man almost died. To Hardin’s surprise, he learned that the virus had not attacked his lungs, but his heart, nearly destroying it. It was…
Robot redux
Imagine sitting in the waiting room of a psychiatric help center or a welfare office. The oversized, depressed man in the next seat declaims, "I’m a ma-chine. I feel like a ro-bot, man!" Then he sinks into his chair heavily, with vacant eyes. The determined automaton in John Sladek’s The Complete Roderick is without that…
Battle of the balls
The petanque game is about to start, and Jeffrey Widen of Wyandotte is talking some smack. "Throw it pretty far down there so Joe can’t shoot it. He can’t shoot long distances," Widen says to a petanque newbie about to face Joe Zajac of Rochester, president of the Michigan Petanque (pronounced pay-tonk) Club. "We call…
Mitten state mythologists
The five guys of Ann Arbor’s Great Lakes Myth Society are seated around a table in the Garden Bowl bar, nursing beers. It’s a Tuesday evening and the gents — clad rather anomalously in button-down shirts and brightly colored ties — are relaxed, talkative and gearing up for a gig later that night. It’s no…
Art Bar
Art lover: Move that Fence! In 2003, modern art collectors Frank and Shirley Piku, a retired couple owning more than 200 works of art, bought art by Detroit artist Eric Mesko and installed it in their yard in Sylvan Lake. "Star Spangled Flag" is an American flag painted on a fence. Recently, a jury decided…
Grind it out!
Circa Survive Juturna Equal Vision Record Hardly a year-and-a-half old, this American five-piece has quickly built up a fan base of hardcore kids who want something more than a bunch of screams and fist-pumps to go with their sonic blasts. And for good reason, ’cause Circa Survive manages to satisfy with actual melody, mood and…
Backslash
Take that, FDR — Astute readers of Backslash will recall our coverage of Toby, the poor rabbit who was destined to a fate on the dinner table if his owner didn’t collect enough cash via his Web site, savetoby.com. Some people actually fell for it, and others were just appalled. One blogger decided to steal…
Wraps and wrongs
Some days, some weeks, in 21st-century Detroit, it’s hard to decide which to choose first when it’s again time to hammer the bung into the barrel, drain off the murky water, and start shooting the fish inside … GOD BLESS AMERICA! EVERYTHING PRICED TO MOVE! Bin Laden Captured (See Page 3): All those identical U.S.…
Where the bees are
Back when I wrote here about rare tupelo honey and its unique story and flavor, something happened. I went goofy for bees. Unless you’re part of the sprawl, we don’t live in an especially good environment for beekeeping, but I’m going to give it a shot. Whatever the results, it seems that tending to a…
Feces thesis
Small enough to fit in your pocket and brief enough to be read in an hour, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press) is a serious attempt to arrive at a basic definition of a much overused word. Author Harry G. Frankfurt, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, takes a systematic approach, first determining what the word…
Beating back the meddlers
Q:You wrote this two weeks ago: "Hello, straight people? Most of you seem content to merely rubberneck while gay people have the shit kicked out of us, and while that’s maddening, I suppose it’s understandable. It’s not your fight. But what explains your passivity when your own rights are being attacked?" I think it’s bullshit…
Levity’s rainbow
The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad is a rambling, impressive, endlessly imaginative and often frustrating first novel by Minister Faust, a very talented young writer from Edmonton, Alberta. The back cover lists its genre as "science fiction," but Coyote Kings doesn’t quite fit the tag. It’s closer to magical realism, in Thomas Pynchon’s…
All in favor of praying and packing?
The Michigan Coalition of Responsible Gun Owners, a group that promotes gun safety issues and gun owners’ rights, has been teaming up with state Sen. Alan Cropsey (R-DeWitt) to loosen laws regulating the carrying of concealed weapons in Michigan. Cropsey, who is a coalition member, has been holding meetings at gun clubs across the state…
American Life in Poetry
In eighteen lines — one long sentence — James Doyle evokes two settings: an actual parade and a remembered one. By dissolving time and contrasting the scenes, the poet helps us recognize the power of memory and the subtle ways it can move us. The City’s Oldest Known Survivor of the Great War marches in…
Don’t fall down
Now a much smaller but still-existent union, the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or "Wobblies") was originally a grassroots response to the horrors of capitalism and the racism and elitism of the labor movement. Through black-and-white illustrations, paneled cartoons and expressive portraits of IWW influentials (Big Bill Haywood, Lucy Parsons, Ricardo Flores-Magon), Wobblies!…
Fixing a hole
Ah, Kwame Kilpatrick. Detroit’s youngest mayor is proof positive that hope springs eternal. Despite the fact that Detroit Auditor General Joe Harris has called Kilpatrick’s proposed budget (which Harris estimates has a $300 million hole) the road to receivership; despite the loud scoffing noises from pretty much everyone, everywhere, who’s not a part of the…
Let it flow
A secret hideout is an inconspicuous place where a hero or villain and his cohorts retreat, usually underwater, in a cave or some other uninviting environment. For our purposes, it’s a former Detroit Department of Human Services building, recently purchased by St. Paul’s Cathedral, where Bryant Tillman not so secretly lives and works as an…
Slapstick shtick
The latest animated feature from DreamWorks (the makers of Shrek and the dreadful Shark Tale) is a throwback to the spastic, goofball, gleefully not educational entertainment that used to be the hallmark of any self-respecting Saturday morning lineup. It’s just a silly little movie about a bunch of pampered Central Park Zoo animals who wind…
Balancing act
Speaking of the budget, normally the mayor and his staff write a budget and deliver it to City Council. Council makes amendments, usually to less than 1 percent of the budget, and votes to adopt it. The mayor, normally, vetoes council’s changes, and, unless council can muster the votes for an override, the mayor’s budget…
Dealers don’t take credit cards
Bank robbery remains a popular crime in America and, according FBI officials, there’s no way to stop it Last year’s total of 7,199 bank robberies is slightly behind the national average of 7,404 for the preceding 20 years, according to FBI statistics. Michigan is a hotbed for the crime with 457 robberies in 2004, second…
Don’t Move
This overheated Italian melodrama offers both the pleasures and absurdities of its particular genre: passion exaggerated to operatic proportion, a protagonist who suffers and sins mightily only to be redeemed by love, and an obsessive affair. The film may leave a bad taste in some viewers’ mouths, especially those who can’t get past a rape…
Against genocide
In 1994, Rwanda suffered one of the worst genocides in the 20th century. As many as 800,000 ethnic Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutu militiamen. President Bill Clinton, rattled by the political fallout from Somalia the year before, stood by idly. The rest of the world was quiet. Moreover, say members of a group of local…
Back to life
The 64-year-old man sits at the oak table in the dining room of his daughter’s ranch home in East Lansing and speaks about robbing his first bank. It was a cold winter afternoon in early 1992, and he found himself pacing outside the bank in Southfield. "It was four o’clock on a Friday afternoon and…
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
The film adaptation of Ann Brashares’ 2001 best-selling ode to pants perfection is a blend of tween-friendly fare: fashion, boys, best friends and a little bit of drama. Four friends decide to share a pair of perfect-fitting pants they find in a thrift store just before they are set to split up for the summer.…
Head Cheese
Even within the ’80s underground that birthed them, Camper Van Beethoven was a pop curio. Whether penning a polka-punk tune like "Take the Skinheads Bowling," titling its second album II & III, or rerecording Fleetwood Mac’s entire Tusk album, CVB always brought a no-holds-barred adventurousness to its glorious wank. Singer-guitarist David Lowery moved on to…
In The Flesh
The burn rate on blog collateral has reached ludicrous speeds. Just ask Bloc Party, Annie, M.I.A. — in comment strings and breathless e-mails, anonymous dorks-turned-record execs promote these artists only to hate and kick them to the curb. It’s absurd and offensive, but live music is the equalizer, a brick and mortar challenge that kills…
The Longest Yard
In another attempt to mix laughs with heart, Adam Sandler steps into a role originally played by Burt Reynolds in this remake of the 1974 anti-authoritarian prison-football flick. This seriously schizophrenic version, however, is too obsessed with the bulging torsos of its male cast members to concentrate for a second on any real characters or…
Letters to the Editor
Count online readers too Dear Mr. Lessenberry: I always enjoy reading your column and I agree with everything you say in this week’s column, "One cheer for the Free Press" (Metro Times, May 25). Your take on the newspaper readership in the metro Detroit area, however, is a bit off. The number of print subscriptions…
Media Blackout
Batter up! It’s the fully juiced, human-grown-hormone, steroid-fueled, extra-innings, pitcher’s-got-a-rubber-arm, corked-bat edition of Major League MB35! • Ian Hunter – Rant (True North) :: And speaking of stepping up to the plate in the late innings and blasting one out of the park, "Still Love Rock ’n’ Roll" is Ian’s greatest song about rock ’n’…
Desolation row beauty
A clapboard church sits with its sermons listed on a proud little sign, trying to outdo the tavern next door, the shouting yellow plastic currency exchange, the sedan on fire in the alley. Too bad salvation’s a tough sell. Mary Gauthier finds places like this in her songs and inhabits them with weariness, resignation and…
Take the money and run
Edward Smith became the first entrant into the annals of bank robbery in the United States when he walked off with $245,000 from the City Bank on Wall Street in New York City on March 19, 1831. He was caught, convicted and sentenced to a surprisingly lenient five years in Sing Sing. The subsequent years…
What Memorial Day should mean
They died screaming in agony and in their sleep, in the mud and splattered against the windows of their cockpits. They were impaled on bayonets and tortured to death and slipped and fell in front of their own tanks. Remembering them is what Memorial Day is supposed to be about. Let’s face it, our species…
Rock Hard / Live Nymphomania
Nowadays it’s laughable to even bring up female sexuality in pop. In 1988, however, it was mildly scandalous to hear a chick-rock band singing about needing sex "Six Times a Day" (as Pandoras vocalist Paula Pierce advised, against an arena-worthy backdrop of Van Halenesque riffage, "Once is not enough"). The Pandoras commenced as an L.A.…
