is the thump silent?
Billboard article with details on Icky Thump, the White Stripes’ forthcoming record. According to the article, the album “runs the gamut from arena rock to blues to a spoken-word prayer to Saint Andrew.” Rollicking Scottish dance structure! JTL
A note from Liz on Alternate Take’s last hours.
Below is reprinted from Liz Copeland’s “Alternate Take” mailing list. Special programming information for AT’s last week is at the bottom.–JTL My dear friends, As many of you know, Alternate Take will end its run on WDET on Friday night/Saturday morning, March 31st. WDET has shifted its programming emphasis to primarily news and information. I…
Pumpin’ through my veins
This week’s night trippers: Tim Hardin Tim Hardin 2 (Lilith reissue) A 1967 (via ’64) masterpiece. Beautiful. You want needle-damaged ache? Or compare this to Dylan at the time. Wait. There’s no comparison. Karen Dalton In My Own Time (Light in the Attic reissue) A 1971 maas -terrr-peeece, chief! You want ache? Sometimes she’s a…
Jason! Eric! Lou!
There are only two groups I’ve ever been a shameless fanboy about, and Sebadoh is one. If you can guess the other, I’ll buy you a new hat. Last night at Magic Stick was the Detroit stop of the big Sebadoh reunion — Lou Barlow, Jason Lowenstein, and Eric Gaffney, together on stage for the…
Nice SASS.
Mike Servito and Nathan Rapport’s SASS party has been migrating lately, but they’re confident it’s finally found a home at Buzz Bar. The venue has this Blahg’s vote; remember, Buzz was the big winner in our latest Best-of issue. Just how many jams from the new LCD Soundsystem record do you think they’ll drop? JTL…
Music on the outs at WDET.
This Freep article lays it all out: with the exception of Ed Love’s weeknight jazz program and a few niche programs on Saturday and Sunday, WDET has more or less completely done away with its music programming. And that means Liz Copeland and “Alternate Take,” her overnight music program, has gotten the ax, too, not…
Final thoughts on SXSW 2008.
As you can read on the print side of things, I spent most of my time at SXSW checking out the rock that’d made its way south from Detroit City. This was the plan, obviously. But from the moment on Wednesday afternoon when I found myself standing in line for credentials in a convention center…
Bank job
Goodbye, Comerica; hello, community banks.
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Hundreds of years ago, the Native American tribe known as the Seneca had a rule of thumb about when to sow corn seed. You had to wait until the weather was warm enough to lie naked in the dirt without discomfort. I believe a similar principle applies to your plans to…
Motor City south
It could’ve been a warm weather retreat for Detroit area gigging musicians. There they were: members of SSM, the Paybacks, the Dead Bodies, the Hard Lessons and Saturday Looks Good to Me — as well as the media types and fans who’d made the trip from Michigan — all crammed into an Austin, Texas, haunt…
Bubble and scrape
In a run that lasted more than seven years, the original lineup of Sebadoh helped define the 1990s indie-rock lo-fi movement. Its records were barely competent sonically but otherwise engaging; filled with beauty, longing, humor, alienation and pain. The band was unpredictable —balanced perpetually between brilliance and disintegration. Now, Sebadoh co-founder Eric Gaffney has returned…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
No, I’m sorry, "MB111" was the correct answer! But as a consolation prize for playing you’ll receive a gift certificate from Spiegel, a Spidel watch band and a copy of our home game! Leeroy Stagger — Depression River (Boompa) :: Stagger Lee serves up another haunting slab of country rock. "The forest is burnin’ from…
Bowdlerize this
Of all of the Ann Arbor Film Festival artifacts that adorn the walls of beloved Dominic’s restaurant in Ann Arbor, perhaps none represents the true essence of the festival better than the nude poster of performance artist Pat Olesko. Olesko, a longtime festival collaborator, is shown gloriously naked, eyes focused on her hands — a…
Motor City Rides
The Thunderbirds crew’s Ford Club Wagon.
Heavy hearts
For that exemplary poet of the modern metropolis Charles Baudelaire, change is bittersweet. In an 1857 ode to his beloved Paris, titled “The Swan,” he writes: “the form of a city, alas/Changes more quickly than the heart of a mortal.” Nostalgia, curated by former Royal Oak gallery owner Barbara Bunting, is about the beating of hearts.…
Letters to the Editor
Those dome lights Dear Jack: I am glad you wrote about Anthony Anthos (“Uncovered bridge,” Metro Times, March 7), who I met once at a Lansing City Council meeting. He had red, white and blue baubles on his hat, if I recall, and addressed the council on his favorite subject: lighting the Capitol Dome with…
Art Bar
One of the ways a poet makes art from his or her experience is through the use of unique, specific and particular detail. This poem by Rick Snyder thrives on such details. It’s not just baseball caps, it’s Tasmanian Devil caps; it’s not just music on the intercom, it’s James Taylor. And Snyder’s poem also…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Sewell’s folly
Q: I was shocked to read your response to Not Giving Up last week. Dan, how could you? For years, you have been our go-to guy for uncommon sexual knowledge. So it made me want to cry when I read your column about Joan Sewell’s book I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low…
Lady libido
I am one of those women who does not exist. I want sex just as much as my boyfriend does. I want it every day, hard and rough. And if he doesn’t want it? Well, that’s what dildos and vibrators were invented for! I’m pretty sure that I jerk off daily more than most men…
State of the gritty
It’s easy to be cynical about grand plans to fix Detroit — especially when you’ve been hearing them for 30 years. Tiger Stadium is still rotting. And there is no new police headquarters in the old Michigan Central train station. And nothing is happening on the piece of riverfront land adjacent to Belle Isle’s MacArthur…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Taste, not waste
Forgotten Harvest brings a bounty to the needy.
Night flights
Apartment Zero Anchor Bay Adrian LeDuc (Colin Firth) is watching his life come apart. He’s a lonely Brit living in Argentina, forced to rent a room from his mentally ill mother due to lackluster ticket sales at his revival movie theater. When the tall, dark and handsome Jack Carney (Hart Bochner) enters his life, the…
Criminal justice
If you have things to worry about like, say, your job and a life, you may not have been paying much attention to the developing Department of Justice scandal. U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently fired eight federal prosecutors, one of whom was from Michigan. Even if you have heard something about this, you may…
Island breezes
The menu showcases seafood, of course, alongside jerk chicken and curried goat. But it’s also the homey side dishes that make Irie worth a trek. To try them, the appetizer sampler platter is positively the way to go. It comes with a mango-coconut-pineapple dipping sauce and well-browned but tender crab cakes, jerk wings, fried plantains,…
Bright Lights, Motor City
With the region in economic straits, and that bastard Old Man Winter steadfastly refusing to release us from his icy grip, a little bit of glamour goes a long way around these parts. What was that line Joan Crawford uttered during the Depression about movie stars and escapism? Whatever. Anyway, it’s Sunday night in Birmingham,…
Fight or flight
Last year, film critic David Denby gushed in the New Yorker about Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond. Set in Sierra Leone during a horrific civil war, the film is a romantic drama about an American journalist and a South African diamond smuggler. Despite a great performance by Djimon Hounsou, African characters, including Hounsou’s, are little more…
Sound decisions
Purchased an iPod and now you’re itching to hear the music how it ought to sound, how it was intended to be heard by the original artist and producer? Are you moved emotionally by a live musical performance and respond to the actual tonality of an instrument (or note) but can’t figure out how to…
The going gets weird
What would happen if Jesus came back and miraculously cured somebody’s chronic heartburn? Would people appreciate the beauty of his miracle, or would they hurl abuse at him for not suitably following up the time when he healed that leper? That’s sort of the problem with even trying to talk about the new Stooges album,…
Night and Day
Thursday • 22 I am Woman! COMMUNITY Helen Reddy’s pro-femme song of the same name made it a fist-pumping anthem for the ERA movement back in the 1970s, but this week, I Am Woman! is a local celebration in song, story, dance and ritual. In honor of Women’s History Month, local singer, drummer and griot…
Star-crossed
The story of a terminally unhappy — but inextricably bound — Turkish couple who live to break up, make up and slowly drive each other insane, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest exercise in minimalist psychodrama is bound to alienate some viewers while it enthralls others. The brooding Isa (Ceylan) and his young girlfriend Bahar (played by…
Soul of Detroit
“The film is so filled with fantasy,” director Bob Shaye says, “that when I got all the actors together, the major note I offered them was that you have to totally believe what’s going on, and you can’t for a minute be coy or arch about the circumstances that you’re experiencing. From time to time…
Fired!
Yeah, she got canned by Woody Allen. OK, so it was after only three days on the job. That’s pretty bad. But is said firing worthy of a cottage industry? Actor-comic Annabelle Gurwitch has parlayed her Allen dismissal into a book, stage shows in New York and Los Angeles, and, now, this documentary film. But…
Power in play
Talk to the experts and this much quickly becomes clear: There is no status quo when it comes to Michigan and electricity. Things are changing, no matter what. Gov. Jennifer Granholm talked about the issue in this year’s state of the state address. The Michigan Legislature will soon debate the merits of at least two…
Puccini for Beginners
Director-screenwriter Maria Maggenti’s tale of neurotic well-heeled New York is a comedy of sexual identity confusion and commitment-phobia. Samantha (Julianne Nicholson) walks out on obscure writer Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser). Allegra, even after nine months with Samantha, declares she’s not ready to commit and is still getting to know her. On the rebound, Allegra finds herself…
Target: Left
Study suggests political bent in government prosecutions.
Premonition
Sandra Bullock’s husband dies — or does he? — and she goes batshit crazy trying to figure it all out. Bullock wakes up one day and her husband’s dead, and the next, it’s all OK. Wash, rinse, repeat. The back-and-forth pinging becomes tiresome and obnoxious by the film’s midpoint. The scene in front of the…
