SXSW 2007. It’s getting tight in here.
Sixth St. in Austin was already a clash of sonics and crazy people for South by Southwest’s four nights of live music. It was the event’s main drag all week — the cops shut it down to automobile traffic, so that the only ones driving through were the fuzz themselves or various band members in…
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate Those of us who have hunted morel mushrooms in the early spring have hunted indeed! The morel is among nature’s most elusive species. Here Jane Whitledge of Minnesota captures the morel’s mysterious ways. Morel Mushrooms Softly they come thumbing up from firm ground protruding unharmed.…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Women have their cake
Q: Longtime reader with a vanilla question: What to do about differing libidos? We’re a straight couple together 20-plus years, and we’ve aged well. No weight gain, no radical changes in appearance. We are open and loving, and I am cognizant of her needs and feelings. Yesterday, I read an interview with Joan Sewell, author…
Night and Day
Thursday • 15 Dianne Reeves MUSIC She may be grand in her own right, but the rites of jazz genealogy require we note that Dianne Reeves is the artist of today with the greatest claim to Sarah Vaughan’s crown. Like Vaughan, she can sweep to a high-note crescendo that leaves listeners feeling like they’re being…
Gore Gore Girl
Chances are good that, if you have a mental picture of Lesley Gore, it looks like one of these readily accessible YouTube files. First there’s the frugging Tenafly, N.J., teen smiling for the cameras despite news that Judy and Johnny have hooked up at her birthday party. (And she’ll cry if she wants to.) Then…
Belew in the face
Probably best known as King Crimson’s guitarist, Adrian Belew is also a skilled multi-instrumentalist who has worked with everyone from Frank Zappa and Paul Simon to Trent Reznor, Tori Amos and William Shatner. He also attached midi effects and other synthesized elements to a guitar to create sounds ranging from wild animal calls to soaring…
Mack Avenue: The game
Playing Stephen Schudlich’s “Urban Village” game at Wayne State’s Elaine L. Jacob Gallery calls to mind a first-season skit from Kids in the Hall, where editors William and Wonter, while walking around town, get overzealous and begin bowdlerizing their environment: “How do you feel about that mailbox?” “Hmm, too red.” “Lose it!” “Feelings about…
Just the facts, man
When the 54 Wayne State University students sought public records to test compliance with the state’s Freedom of Information Act, they asked for different documents at different types of public agencies. At police departments, they asked for a copy of the daily log from the day before their visit. At municipal governments they asked for…
Letters to the Editor
No glam in span Re: “Uncovered bridge” (Metro Times, March 7), no offense to Jack Lessenberry, but he should have realized that infrastructure questions, like bridge maintenance and road construction, are “Page 15” material. In-depth stories on such subjects are usually reserved for either the History Channel’s Modern Marvels, featuring industrial feats or engineering disasters,…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Pitts’ stop
Local artist says he was assaulted at Wayne State University eatery.
The Blood Simple Life
A Brush with Death New Light Entertainment Like most replayed soft porn, this bloody tale of pretty girls in peril plays on our simultaneous carnal attraction and intellectual revulsion for plucky protagonists. Here we have five buxom L.A. cheerleaders out for a weekend in the country who can’t help themselves from saying inane things like,…
Fallen Cedar
Noting the passing of a Hamtramck councilman.
Seoul food
With four tables and four booths, this narrow eatery can handle around 30 customers at one time. Although the setting is diner-plain, the Korean cuisine is authentic, making few compromises for the American palate. Garlic is a key ingredient in at least half of the aromatic dishes from Hankuk’s kitchen. More than half of the…
Motor City Rides
Detroit’s High Strung stretch out in their 1992 GMC G3500.
Trash and vaudeville
Jesse Malin’s taste in records, in film, in culture, in the types of women and workaday joes he writes about, in his nods-to — from Robin Hood, Lenny Bruce and Midnight Cowboy’s Joe Buck to Motown, the Stones, the New York Dolls and the Jam — is suitably bittersweet. The allusions became little metaphors for…
Blowout X
What struck me most at this year’s Metro Times Blowout was the number of participating artists who have arrived in our show-going lives fully-formed. Hi Fi Handgrenades were ready for their packed and sweaty Friday night set at Small’s; with melodies like classic Superchunk and the mechanized recoil of Naked Raygun, they sounded incredible for…
Still luscious
It has taken seven years for Jill Cunniff’s solo debut to emerge from the wreckage of her old band, Luscious Jackson, but it’s the most assured and complete album she’s ever released. City Beach feels like an older, wiser counterpart of LJ’s Fever In, Fever Out. It’s full of infectiously danceable pop with an urbane…
Let the sunshine in
All seemed to be going according to the letter of Michigan law when Caitlin Muciek asked for some information from the city of Southgate, her lifelong hometown. She wanted to see a copy of the city manager’s latest performance evaluation. So Muciek prepared a letter requesting the information and offering to pay up to $10…
I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead
From Company Flow to Cannibal Ox to his role as label honcho at Definitive Jux, El-P has had a hand in some of underground rap’s more notable projects in the last 15 years. El Producto shows off his own musical plans, however, on his second solo release, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead. A dark record…
Destroying the Great Lakes
How would you like to invite a bunch of strangers from other countries to come over and go to the bathroom in your bathtub? Sound sick and disgusting? Sure does, and that’s what the governments of the United States and Canada are doing every day with the Great Lakes, the largest source of fresh water…
Learn to Sing Like a Star
Kristin Hersh’s poetic, offbeat imagery and barbed emotions make most of her albums worthwhile, whether solo or going all the way back to Throwing Muses days. But she’s at her best strapped to an electric and fronting a band, where her throaty vocal quiver and raw, idiosyncratic style match the volatility in the music. That’s…
Head Cheese
With all the jostling, good-natured yelling and heroic drinking most Metro Times Blowouts entail, it’s no wonder that each year our “overheard” file overflows with entries. This year’s event was no exception. Here are a few of the best, the context for each blurred to protect the innocent (or guilty). See you next year, hopefully.…
Person Pitch
Animal Collective’s lofty critical esteem and commercial success have surprised the indie rock world, since the quartet’s sound hurtles schizophrenically from feral tribal jams and ebullient Beach Boys-style pop to psychedelic mantras best sung around mysterious campfires. But then Animal Collective’s members split from the mother ship, and things got really strange. Case in point:…
Media Blackout
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout Archive presents the following historical excerpt from a marathon rap session that took place in 1976 at a Trader Vic’s in Toronto. Jeffrey Morgan: I hope you don’t expect me to tell you how great Rock And Roll Heart is, ’cause I haven’t got a copy. Lou Reed: You know…
Cheeseburger
Why wouldn’t you make this essential Brooklyn trio a regular staple of your diet? They’ve got all the daily punk pop requirements you need — meaty riffs, cheesy posturing, seedy lyrics and pickled livers (these boys like to party heartily, as their opening salvo “Let the Good Times Roll” emphatically states). And, like so many…
Cupid comes to Detroit
There are books, and then there are books. There are books that we cram into our back pockets, purses and backpacks, books as mere commodities, conveyers of information — pulp novels, pop how-to books — books that are meant to be pulled out in waiting rooms and in bathrooms, those in-between moments when we are…
Fade the fuzz
It’s like the difference between listening to AM on a tube radio or a solid state. While the latter has all the bells and whistles that are supposedly there to enhance one’s listening experience, tubes just make radio sound better. And maybe it’s an old-school guilty pleasure in a high-tech-crazed world, but when a band…
More than a bumper sticker!
Ancient history gets aggressively physical in 300, where the cornerstones of Western thought and civilization get reduced to bumper-sticker catchphrases and the war for the birth of the modern world looks a lot like a CGI clash between orcs and elves in Middle Earth. Faithfully adapted from Frank Miller’s ferocious graphic novel about the legendary…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Here you come dragging your exhausted but redeemed ass out of the deep dark forest of symbols. The red-eyed monkey demons fall off your back as you straggle toward the light. Your sunken eyes see wonders they were blind to before your ordeal. Your heart rages with a wild angelic love…
Trailer Trawler
Shooter The trailer opens with Mark Wahlberg’s flawed hero enjoying the solitude of his modern-day mountain man existence. Then Danny Glover shows up in an SUV wearing a suit. He takes his glasses off with menace. “You’re a hard man to find,” he says, chewing the first reheated dialogue donut of the trailer. Wahlberg’s steely-eyed…
Gray Matters
To watch writer-director Sue Kramer’s debut, you’d think that Sex in the City — or, for that matter, the Kennedy administration — never happened. Though the movie’s basic premise suggests a wealth of taboo-smashing comic potential — bisexuality, incest, sleeping your way to the top — Kramer tiptoes around these and any other potentially interesting…
Good Advice for Happy Times
Tempus es iocundum Girls, when spring returns don’t despise the young men; rejoice with them. Hear them singing in the choir room. They sound like sturdy delphiniums about to burst into flower. Love’s first promise encourages a girl, but she is held back by her own hesitancy. And the boys keep singing, so full of…
Readers’ rebuttals
Just so I understand, it’s OK to consensually: have sex dressed like a fuzzy animal, wear diapers, act-rape, slurp someone’s santorum, pee all over someone, attach and activate shock devices to genitalia, fist, role play, prod, probe and peg. But you can’t think about someone who is dead when you masturbate? I hope this is…
Karla
Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo were dubbed the “Barbie and Ken” killers, the perfect vision of ’80s Anglo young love. In the film, when we meet Karla (Laura Prepon of That ’70s Show), she’s already served eight years in the clink for kidnapping and raping several girls, and we see, in a series of flashbacks,…
Smith’s got what it takes.
Local musician, nice guy, and rock icon scion Jackson Smith played guitar with a partly reconstituted Van Halen last night during the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony; they performed “Why Can’t This be Love.” Sammy sounds pretty good; rough, but at least he seems to be enjoying himself. I can’t stand the…
