Art Bar
Gardeners who’ve fought Creeping Charlie and other unwanted plants may sympathize with James McKean from Iowa as he takes on bindweed, a cousin to the two varieties of morning glory that appear in the poem. It’s an endless struggle, and, in the end, of course, the bindweed wins. Bindweed There is little I can do…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Mutant scribe
In progress versions of “Sum Total of What I Know About Chaos and Us.” Whether it’s playing that Beatles record backward or finding the figure of Abe Lincoln on a french fry, our culture has an absurd desire to invest deep meaning in ordinary objects. We do that with words too. We manipulate and distort…
Keeping up with the Steins
In this film, Jeremy Piven plays Adam Fiedler, a slick-talking shyster with anger management issues, a virtual reprise of his role as Ari Gold on HBO’s hit Entourage. On the tube, Piven is a comedic pit bull in a business suit, undercutting his viciousness with charm and occasional bouts of hugging, and he’s playing almost…
Head Cheese
Live, Chicago’s Russian Circles are getting a reputation as being a hard act to follow. The instrumental trio’s math rock has its highs and lows; quiet noodling turns into bursts of metallic thunder, only to simmer and slow down into a controlled burn. Just off a tour with Minus the Bear, Russian Circles are now…
Terminal suburbanism
“Don’t schedule a show anywhere near your wife’s due date,” Prime Ministers guitarist Brandon Malik says. His band has forgotten that before, but that’s nothing new. “Having spouses, children and day jobs makes rehearsing a scheduling nightmare,” he says. Still, band practice is solace, and when the songs are this good, it’s worth putting up…
Returning to the scene of the crime
It’s like a bad sequel to a movie nobody liked the first time around. The United States is fighting an unpopular foreign war, the president seems to have a less-than-monogamous relationship with the truth, and at least one member of the MC5 worries that his phone might be tapped. At one point during a recent…
Everything All the Time
Band of Horses hugs the line between modern, jangly indie and more traditional roots rock. They aren’t the first to try this — fellow Sub-Poppers the Shins as well as My Morning Jacket are fellow travelers. But the songwriting is straightforward if not original, and Ben Bridwell’s bright, booming voice cuts through the airy production…
Night and Day
Thursday • 8 Davin & Dion ART They ain’t foolin’ nobody — local rockers Davin Brainard and Dion Fisher make art as pretentious it comes. Their clouds and mermaids and frogs and aliens and ice cream cones and bumblebees are all fluff and silliness, like “pop-corn” art. But lest you take them not-so-seriously, consider that…
Modern Problems
An album of boy-girl coos and combustible pop produced by Steve Albini? Is it the Pixies? Well, on “Meat is Murder Mobile” it could be. But even though Royal Oak’s New Grenada has that anxious thing down pat on Modern Problems, and recorded the album with the famously cantankerous Albini, they seem to want more…
Legends reborn
The setting is the tarnished glitter of Fremont Street in old Las Vegas. Dozens of young women mill in front of the Celebrity Theatre, their pin-curled hair bedecked in feathers, their sequined gowns winking under the neon lights that dance along the street. Among the tattooed neo-pinups and whiskey-swilling hipsters stand two septuagenarian African-American women…
Cute little devil
After Hollywood mangled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, botched the Exorcist prequel and turned the Amityville Horror into a homicidal Abercrombie and Fitch ad, do we really need their take on The Omen? If director John Moore’s slick, enjoyably tasteless and surprisingly competent new version is any indication, the wave of awful horror remakes might…
What are we for?
Stop and consider this, regardless of your politics: We are currently involved in a war in Iraq in which nearly as many Americans have died as perished on Sept. 11. Far, far more Iraqis have died. What did any of them die for? And what do we hope to get out of this war? Whether…
District B13
Hollywood once knew how to make flashy action films that relied on brute strength and minimal special effects. Now, it seems, the tough-guys-with-chips-on-their-shoulders genre seems to be the province of Europe and Asia, where they still churn out leaping, kicking, punching heroes faster than audiences can consume them. Case in point: The slick new sci-fi…
Vintage vixen
In the couple of decades since the triumphantly villainous film Heathers, the machinations of teenage girls — specifically, princesses with raging hormones and lousy parents — have become a cliché. But back in 1894, when Oscar Wilde wrote the one-act play Salome, it was not commonly accepted that 16-year-olds could be nearly evil. In 1905,…
Twelve and Holding
It’s not quite 13, but Twelve and Holding is another indie flick that digs into muck of preadolescence looking for the darkest bits. Director Michael Cuesta brings us a less-endearing Stand by Me, stripped of nostalgia and a cute sound track, a coming-of-age story that replaces fond remembrances with snide humor and gloomy conclusions. The…
Legislation imitation
“Buzz” Thomas gives new meaning to “double bill.”
The Lost City
Girls with pin-curled hair and twirling dresses mix with men in white dinner jackets, black ties and slicked hair; ice clinks and sweat beads on freshly poured cocktails as an orchestra’s horns blare. Havana nights in the 1950s, through Andy Garcia’s lens, look and sound like heaven. The Lost City, however, is not so divine…
Driving fears
Will new licenses be used to target illegal immigrants?
The Break-Up
You can tell that the creators of the new “anti-romantic comedy” The Break-Up thought they were mining comic gold. In scene after scene, talented actors like Vince Vaughn, Vincent D’Onofrio and John Michael Higgins are allowed the kinds of indulgent close-ups, long takes and pregnant pauses you can only get from hours of shit-shooting improvisations.…
Minute No. 15
Freddie’s dead: Our writer begged us, no, pleaded with us. He even played “I’m Telling You Now” into the telephone for us. That did it. Freddie Garrity’s passing earlier this month in a Welsh hospital at the age of 69 might’ve been a blip on the pop culture radar, but we’re here to change that…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Is the planet running out of oil? Some experts say yes, others say no. But the whole discussion may become irrelevant in light of the existence of oil shale. It’s a rock that, when heated, releases the abundant oil hidden within it. Though expensive to access, two trillion barrels of the…
Summertime and the music’s easy
Beyond such headlining acts as Richard Thompson, Solomon Burke, Bettye Lavette, and the Roy Hargrove Quintet, the 20th annual Detroit Festival of the Arts blows up like polychrome batik. Flamenco dancers, French emcees, ambling folk singers, Caribbean guitar players, blues guitar stingers and Ethiopian reggae singers — if there’s a stiltwalker playing Motown covers on…
Sub mission
Somewhere just beyond the sonar, beneath the murky sonic dirge of the latest disingenuous post-post-punk (s)hit band, the Submarine Races lay in wait — jams damned and ready to lay waste to any poseurs who think a good haircut trumps a good song. Guitarist-vocalist Ian Adams, bassist Steve Denekas and drummer Paul John Higgins are…
Letters to the Editor
Greens add it up Re: “Needed: A Third Party” by Jack Lessenberry (Metro Times, May 31): Here we go again with another blame-it-on-Ralph-Nader comment. Why do people still insist on blaming him for the failures of the Democrats? If you examine the data you will find that Democrats are to blame, not Nader. It’s very…
Frigid, furry & forlorn
Q: I decided, at 12 years old, that pregnancy was not something I wanted to worry about, and now, at the ripe age of 26, I’m still a virgin. I exchanged oral favors with my boyfriends, none of whom lasted more than three months. Approximately half said they wanted more, and the other half were…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Art upstart
It was the late ’70s when graphic artist Gary Panter made his initial foray into the world of design. He started off as an illustrator for punk mags Slash and Raw, and, over the years, he achieved an industry reputation as “the king of punk art.” But despite the fabulously underground beginnings, Panter is probably…
‘A fun, demented girl’
Marquita Lister is a young soprano. She refuses to say how young (early 30s is a good guess), yet she has already made herself recognizable to Michigan Opera Theatre audiences — as Aida in 1997 and as the murderous, passionate Tosca in an incandescent performance in 2000. She’s also taken on one of opera’s greatest…
Changing to win?
Chances are you haven’t heard of Silver Capital, a small, now-defunct Chicago-based company that used to manufacture mirrors, frames and glass-cutting boards. Silver Capital’s workers were mostly Mexican immigrants, working for substandard wages and zero benefits — no health care, no pensions, no sick days. They suffered severe injuries (fingers chopped off, limbs gouged) and…
Record times
We’ve heard lots of reaction to Brian Smith’s “Last of the independents” (MT, May 10), which traced the sad decline of record stores in Detroit and across the nation. The rise of big box stores and Amazon for CD sales, the rise of downloads, which make the CD irrelevant … those are just some of…
