RUNWAY A LA VINTAGE
by Sara Axelrod Shopping sprees may not be an option right now — that’s just time and money we don’t have. Still, we’ll subject ourselves to a buying Bazaar to peek at the latest trends and essential pieces for fall. We melted at the hot Fall 2009 runway. Jean Paul Gaultier’s modern interpretation of a…
LOCAL MUSIC TIDBITS
*The Los Angeles rock community is all in a tizzy about the show Jack White’s new band, the Dead Weather, played at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip Wednesday night, June 17th, similar to the “surprise” show they did last Friday here at the Magic Bag. It wasn’t the show itself that had everyone super-excited…
Incinerator decision: Still up in the air
This was supposed to be decision day regarding Detroit’s municipal waste incinerator. Instead, the situation is more confusing than ever. It didn’t help that John Prymack, manager of the Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Authority, denied writing a letter to the City Council informing them that today’s meeting would determine whether the city would continue sending…
Movement ’09: revisited, recycled
The numbers keep going up for Paxahau and its three days of electronic love on the Detroit riverfront. In a press statement released this week, the Ferndale-based promotions group said that 83,322 people visited Hart Plaza during the three-day Memorial Day Weekend for Movement, the annual electronic music festival that featured nearly 100 performances on…
HONORING STEWART; STEWART HONORING OTHERS
We’ve been a little lax here regarding recent news about our old friend Stewart Francke, who’s not only one of this region’s better-known and dedicated musicians but used to be a regular columnist right here at Metro Times back in the day. But it’s been quite an eventful year for the blue-eyed soul singer-songwriter thus…
Folks on the street: Tiger Stadium, low-budget summer
We armed an intern with a tape recorder and set him loose on downtown Detroit the other day with two questions: 1) What do people think about the loss of Tiger Stadium? 2) What is the tight economy doing to summer plans. Here’s some of what he heard. Steve, 24, marketing and public relations Metro…
DAM GARDENS!
Can you picture one of those immaculately unkempt gardens you see illustrated in children’s books, the ones wrought with twisted branches and serpentine vines? They remind me of the minds of some artists I know — beautiful, dense and tangled. Navigating their headspace requires interpreting their art — but at least they give us a…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Sweet ride
The current attattraction at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn is Rock Stars’ Cars & Guitars 2 — the perfect museum exhibit for fans of both music and motors, featuring as it does more than 20 cars and 50 guitars from musicians spread all across the rock spectrum. And it features the world’s coolest John…
Night and Day
THURSDAY JUNE 18 The Neal Medlyn Experience Live! HE’LL BE YOUR NAUGHTY GIRL Imagine a skinny white dude wearing glittery spandex and shaking his ass a la Beyoncé and you’ve got the crux of the Neal Medlyn Experience Live! A re-creation of the curvy diva’s 2007 concert DVD, The Beyoncé Experience Live!, Medlyn accurately re-enacts…
Nice dreams
Bob Jo’s 4071 Fort St., Wyandotte; 734-282-6818: A fixture on Fort Street for 50 years, this Downriver roadside stand specializes in custard and yogurt, and patrons aren’t fussy. Most people seem to like their "twist cones," the familiar combination soft-serve treat. You can get a medium twist for $2.01. Bob Jo’s has vanilla and chocolate…
Bash and pop
Brandon Malik and Todd Wicks, one half of Detroit power-pop quartet the Prime Ministers, gather at a Chinese restaurant in Ferndale to talk up their new album, Compromiser. Malik politely asks the waitress for a bowl of streamed broccoli, unconsciously miming a bowl with his hands. "We don’t have bowl," she responds. "You have to…
Mixed-up priorities
Miriam Braunstein was one of the funniest, sassiest and most brilliant students I’ve ever taught at Wayne State University. Actually, she could have gone to Brown, or probably any Ivy League school. Delightfully irreverent, she was always happy to lampoon the too-politically-correct on either the left or the right. Soon after she began a class…
The stadium’s last gasp
As this is the Summer Guide issue of Metro Times, I cast my eye toward the warmer months and speculate. Things have already heated up this season, with urban camping, certainly a thrill in this water winter wonderland of ours. You’ve probably seen pictures of the tent city at Grand Circus Park, where the People’s…
Over easy
While interviewing Dave Eggers a quote my wife told me pops into my head, "An artist is entitled to whatever meaning you give his work." As I prod at themes in Away We Go, the film he and his wife Vendela Vida wrote together, it’s clear Eggers is a little uncomfortable with my intellectualizing the…
Robert Bobb’s state of emergency
In Washington, D.C., where he was city administrator and deputy mayor, Robert Bobb had a view of the White House on his morning walk to work and Capitol Hill on his way home. Now he has an office in the Fisher Building across the street from the former General Motors Corp. headquarters and drives through…
Summer sugar
Saturdays and Sundays, June 19-Aug. 23 Historic Baseball Games at Greenfield Village Buy us some peanuts and Cracker Jack, we don’t care if we never get back … ’cause we don’t have to work on the weekends and hopefully you don’t either! Oh, you do? Well, hey, at least you’re workin’! For those with true…
The handmade’s tale
It’s been six years since the first Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago’s hipster haven, Wicker Park. The DIY-spirited fest of artful handmade wares was the big bang of urban craft revivalism. Tiny crafting planets were quickly born in cities around the United States: Brooklyn, Portland and Austin grew in step with Chicago’s scene, but it…
Love Hurts
Q: I’m going to say up front that I know I am a complete and total asshole. I have been with my current boyfriend for about three years and we are living together. About a year ago, our relationship started to go bad when I found out I was pregnant and ended up having an…
Motor City Cribs
Back in 2002, Motor City emcee and producer Ohkang ran into a whole lot of trouble getting the carburetor in his classic 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Brougham fixed. He went to seven different mechanics and nobody could fix it. That’s when his musical co-conspirator Blackreign recommended his neighbor down the street — Lafayette Watson. Working…
Tents and tense times
News Hits spent a little time with the residents of the roughly 20-tent city that’s popped up in Detroit’s Grand Circus Park to protest the economic summit at the RenCen, where bankrupt General Motors has its world headquarters. After morning speeches and discussions, more than 100 people marched down Woodward to where the titans of…
In Memoriam
A once-dazzling and hilariously brilliant career was cut short this year, a victim of advanced, chronic lethargy and an incurable case of apathy. Eddie Murphy’s film career rose meteorically in the early 1980s, when the gifted performer parlayed an electrifying stint on Saturday Night Live into a string of critical favorites and box-office smashes. Hugely…
Comic
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Right place, weird time
A place can have definite or indefinite boundaries. Places, in my mind, have always been marked by very definite barriers. It’s a product of growing up with a younger brother who is handicapped. Some time, very early on, I unconsciously made the decision to join him on his journey, and began processing my experiences in…
Life-altaring TV
America, you are cordially invited to witness the wedding of Miss Jaénelle Burnette and Mr. Nykolas Jones of Detroit at 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 23, 2009, at the Belle Isle Conservatory. RSVP not required. Gifts are optional, since the actual marriage took place 10 months ago. But what a receiving line that will be! "You…
Race (out of) the toilet
Summertime’s teeth are showing and you’re flat broke. So the season will force your thoughts southward: You see yourself in crummy DTE lawn seats watching Loverboy and Flock of Seagulls, or cornered at someone’s backyard barbecue where ape-draped probationers show you why they aren’t allowed to go anywhere near beer, or attempting to sleep in…
Try the windshield theater
In these days of volatile gas prices and failing car companies, you’d think drive-in theaters would be out-of-date, obsolete, a thing of the past. After all, they hark back to a time when every American saw it as as a God-given right to drive an oversized Oldsmobile onto blacktop for everything from buying a burger…
Meditate on flutter-bys
As you read this, caterpillars on farms in El Salvador and Costa Rica are doing the 16-legged hang, bingeing and worrying about the future. Yesterday, you were an egg. Today, you’re a munching machine, chomping down leaf after leaf, packing on the centigrams. Tomorrow, you’re a pupa — and is that all there is to…
Rent summer fun by the hour
Where to go to get away for a while? Venture off to the cottage "Up North"? Look for a place with continental breakfast and a pool? Do the cruise thing or pile into RVs in search of something monumental? Isn’t there always some far-off music fest worth considering? But maybe you don’t have the money…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Stupe-out
I don’t care what the neighbors say, I’m gonna read Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #220 each and every day! Broadway Calls — Good Views, Bad News (Side One Dummy) :: You know I’ve had my share. Well, my woman left home for a brown-eyed man who plays in a generic teenage angst rock band that…
Letters to the Editor
Try reading the article next time Re: "Taking a toll" (June 10), turning someone into a Simpsons character doesn’t make them evil. Maybe the real story is that trying to do business in Detroit is very difficult, especially with three layers of government bureaucracy to overcome. You blame Mr. Moroun for the loss in business…
Rolling on the Riverwalk
It’s an ambitious project, transforming downtown Detroit’s gritty, industrial riverfront into, well, something nice. But that is, indeed, happening along the Riverwalk that eventually will run the five miles from Ambassador Bridge to Belle Isle, providing a paved, safe, lit, marked route for walking, biking, skating, lunching, boat watching and fishing. It’s also a prime…
And the gods made love …
First, a brief history for those out of the loop: Deastro (pronounced DES-tro) is the cheerful, new-wave-2.0 project of young Randy Chabot, one of Detroit’s most prolific recording artists. Releasing music (usually gratis) at a staggering rate, and under a handful of monikers, Chabot’s synth-and-sample live performances have become a sensation around here in the…
Taking cold comfort
Birdwatchers and butterfly hunters know the score: When the weather warms up, all sorts of striking creatures start returning. Again we can savor the thrill of colorful fauna in its natural habitat, teaching us something and leaving us a story to tell. But we can’t all afford to load up the car and drive out…
Bridge buster
Are you going to believe those lying eyes of yours, or are you going to trust Manuel "Matty" Moroun and his minions at the Detroit International Bridge Co.? That’s the question in the wake of a stunning letter the U.S. Coast Guard sent the company Monday, informing it that the permitting process for the new…
Enjoy your staycation
We were getting ready to head out and report from sundry locations as we have for the last couple of MT Summer Guides when it occurred to someone to check our sundry trips budget. That’s when we realized that we wouldn’t be tripping this summer. Not that our MT travels have been extravagant — Flint,…
Watercolor Ghost Town
Anyone remember Ether Aura? Between 2004 and ’07, that band, formed by local music vet Tony Hamera and angel-voiced singer Kate Hinote, were self-described as the "premier dreampop outfit in Detroit." (A quick glance at Wikipedia says dreampop "originated in Britain in the mid-1980s, when bands like the Cocteau Twins, etc., began fusing post-punk and…
That summer feeling
Aside from Christmas, no other time of the year has had more great songs associated with it than summer. In fact, no other season has become sort of a musical genre of its own, as in, "Wow! Now that’s a summer song!" Doesn’t even have to specifically be about the summer months. For instance, for…
Food Stuff
Take a sample — This summer, Hiller’s markets will hold weekly in-store samplings showing shoppers how to get the most for their money. The mini-chain’s executive chef, Peter Julian, will host the events, dubbed Hiller’s Homemade Saturday Samplings, at noon, 1 and 2 p.m. at three locations over the course of six weeks. The next…
Don’t imagine
Here, Eddie Murphy is Evan, an ambitious investment broker who’s got no time for his cute little moppet of a daughter Olivia (Yara Shahidi), until the imaginary friends under her security blanket begin to offer up amazingly accurate stock tips. This is just the edge he needs to finally beat out his competition inside the…
Couch Trip
In Love We Trust Film Movement You’d be hard-pressed to find a Dostoyevskian epic with as much nuance as the quietly shattering In Love We Trust, the latest from Chinese auteur Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle). A long-divorced couple, Mei Zhu and Xiao Lu learn that their 5-year-old daughter suffers from terminal blood cancer. She needs…
East side story
Located in the prosaic Gar-Pointe strip mall, Luciano’s, which seats 200, is opulently decorated with elaborately carved pillars and arches, an artificial palm tree, and white-clothed tables and elevated booths in the main room and two private curtained booths in the bar. These surroundings, the Italian pop music that blares through the speakers, the liveried…
Underground classic
Tony Scott’s whipping, zooming, totally unnecessary remake brings a spastic ADD approach to what is, at its heart, an over-the-radio radio showdown between John Travolta’s frothing villain and Denzel Washington’s decent but ethically compromised MTA desk jockey. You see, Travolta seizes a subway car and demands $10 million from the city of New York. Washington…
