Dennis Coffey to be Honored at Detroit Music Awards+DJ House Shoes Podcast
This year at the Detroit Music Awards, legendary Detroit guitarist Dennis Coffey will be receiving a Distinguished Achievement Award. The timing is fitting with all of the energy surrounding his new album coming out next month. The popular award ceremony takes place at the Fillmore Detroit on April 16. Coffey is scheduled to play a…
Rare photos: Beatles in Detroit for the last time
National Public Radio’s online The Picture Show regularly has great eye-candy for fans of photography, in particular, and all things visual. Today, the blog clues us in on The Lost Beatles Photographs: The Bob Bonis Archive, 1964-1966 by Larry Marion. Seems Bonis was a Fab Four tour manager who snapped pics like crazy. But not…
Looking for Jesus in Detroit
We had a chance to talk with MacArthur genius grant-winning photojournalist Camilo Jose Vergara yesterday. An inquisitive churchgoer and intrepid photographer, Vergara has been shooting urban settings for more than 25 years. He’s long been obsessed with recording inner-city religious rituals in America. Interrogating pastors and interviewing worshippers, he’s fond of joking that he goes…
Sucker Punch
Sucker Punch GRADE: D Spastic, bombastic, and incoherent, Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch is a baroque, highly polished chunk of pop culture vomit. A nonsensical mash-up of Shutter Island, The Lord of the Rings, I, Robot and Kill Bill, it doesn’t even have the decency to have fun with its cartoonish obsessions, instead delivering a somber,…
Former Justice Department lawyer’s case dismissed
Nearly eight years ago, the nation’s media were focused on a federal courtroom where the first post-Sept. 11 terror trial was prosecuted by an aggressive, hard-driving prosecutor named Richard Convertino. It seems like the litigation in the wake of that trial will never end A federal judge today in Washington, D.C., dismissed a whistleblower lawsuit…
They said they can
It should have been called a commitment ceremony. Hosted at southwest Detroit’s Greater Apostolic Faith Temple Church by a coalition of Detroit advocacy groups, some of Detroit’s leaders responded to requests to address education, youth violence, abandoned and dangerous buildings near schools and harassment of racial minorities and immigrants. The audience, numbering several hundred, chanted…
Detroit at SXSW photo recap, Wednesday, 3/16/11
It’s no mystery why there’s always a big Detroit contingent at SXSW – we want to get the fuck out of cold Michigan and eat some BBQ. I hit town with Chris Bathgate and band just in time to catch Danny Brown and his hype man Dope Head tearing it up/celebrating Danny’s 30th birthday in…
Bootsy Collins on Jimmy Fallon tonight. Hear the new single …
Badass Parliament and Funkadelic bassist Bootsy Collins sits in tonight with The Roots on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Note that his new album Tha Funk Capital of the World’ lands April 26. You can listen its killer lead-off single “Don’t Take My Funk” here. The album features fellow George Clinton and Bernie Worrell, along…
Matty Do-Right?
Here’s a sentence you won’t see often in News Hits: Kudos to the Detroit International Bridge Co. Yeah, that’s right. Manuel "Matty" Moroun’s much-vilified company, which owns the Ambassador Bridge, has done something praiseworthy. In what was billed as a David vs. Goliath battle between the billionaire bridge company owner and the owners of a…
Green for green buildings
When Jen and Randy Lewarchik purchased the apartment building six years ago, they knew the 90-year-old structure needed some work. Its intricate tile flooring, aged wood fixtures and leaky roof had been neglected for decades. The couple was taking inventory of the basement when they found the sign: "This building will be open in May…
Love and falafel
Harmonie Garden 4704 Third St., Detroit 313-638-2345 My computer contains a review of Harmonie Garden going back to when Desiree Cooper was editor of the Metro Times — and that was Harmonie Garden III. Owner Taher Jaber has opened and closed five iterations of his Middle Eastern restaurant in five locations. What makes him think…
Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre GRADE: A- Is there any old chestnut as hearty as Jane Eyre? Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 proto-feminist page-turner has been reprinted enough to paper the earth’s surface a dozen times over — and committed to film so often that it has faded into cultural wallpaper. Everyone’s had a crack at it, from George C.…
Not the next Diana Lewis
Vocalist Kimmie Horne can operate in many musical situations. For starters, there’s Horne the consummate show-woman with her 10-piece ensemble, performing the music of pop bigwigs such as Tina Turner and Michael Jackson. Then there’s Horne impersonating — or as she calls it channeling — the spirits of great jazz singers of long ago, the…
Kill the Irishman
Kill the Irishman GRADE: C+ Probably the most surprising thing about Jonathan Hensleigh’s Kill the Irishman is that it features a supporting cast of scenery-chewing actors — Val Kilmer, Vincent D’Onofrio, Christopher Walken — who don’t chew the scenery. Normally, this would be seen as a virtue, an indication that Hensleigh has a firm hand…
Service, please
Q: Three months ago, my sociopathic girlfriend dumped me because I was going into the military. Afterward, I found out she was cheating on me with a married man. The one great thing about her was that she opened me up. At 22, I’d been in only a few other relationships. The sex with her…
Daydream believer
A man walks into the Turkey Grill on Woodward Avenue in Detroit on a cold afternoon. He’s old, with gray whiskers and a black cap. It’s obvious most of his time is spent on the street. He quickly finds his first target. "Can you help me out with something to eat?" he says to a…
Beyond THC
Gersh Avery has a thing for hemp. He’s not one of the folks trying to get industrial hemp legalized so we can enjoy the economic benefits of producing and selling the hundreds of items that can be made from the fibrous substance. They want to create clothing, biofuels, skin creams and more from the hemp…
Just face it
From the beautiful to the beehived to the woefully deprived, Detroit photographers are out on the street, cameras in hand, capturing what becomes a mosaic of Motor City faces that appear — along with an abundance of architectural and landscape photography — on the Metro Times Flickr stream Motor City Seen, on our website. For…
Steamy whether
It was supposed to be a public hearing about state brownfield tax credits, and whether the new owners of Detroit’s waste-to-energy facility deserved to receive them. Instead, the meeting held last week turned into a contentious, emotionally charged debate about whether the facility itself is desirable. That dispute has been hashed out often over the…
The anti-inertia
Think of the view of Earth from space. In South America’s peninsular tail, there’s a brown spot, an earthen blemish on the face of our globe. It is Chile’s Atacama Desert, a place where the rain never falls. There, among the abandoned silver and nitrate mining camps, hollow-eyed women search for the remains of their…
Cheat Code
MLB 2K11 2K Sports Baseball titles sure have evolved. MLB 2K11 followed suit with what a lot of stick-action sports games are doing — utilizing the dual analog sticks as your arms and such. But never fear, there are plenty of neat-o features here, such as the pitch cam, in which you’re able to review…
Letters to the Editor
Labor not beaten yet I’m a Detroit Federation of Teachers Union member, and I read with interest Larry Gabriel’s article, "Game-changers ahead" (March 16), and I must say, "We unions have just begun to fight." The assault on unions officially began when the late President Ronald Reagan, in one of his first acts as president,…
Screwing the future
Phil DiMaria isn’t exactly Gov. Rick Snyder’s biggest fan. "Shared sacrifice? He isn’t going to share in any sacrifice with this budget," DiMaria snorts. "Cutting taxes on business the way he wants to is just going to make him richer." DiMaria, who lives in Eastpointe, has had two careers, neither of which has made him…
Justin for president!
The Wonder Twins bravely risk contracting Bieber-fever by going to see Justin Bieber: Never Say Never — a 3-D, full immersion, in-your-face, inside look at the rise of Justin from Internet phenomenon to a teen superstar who drives little girls quite literally insane. Laura: I think it’s best for me to admit to the world…
Food Stuff
Radio returns — Detroit radio was never so hot. Cliff Bell’s sold out of tickets for the one-night-only performance of WTYN Detroit Radio. The "radio play" promised guests a genuine supper theater, with a limited dinner menu and selections of Valentine Vodka cocktails. Given this enthusiastic response, they have added an encore performance for Monday,…
Mo’ Movement headliners and dubby Detroit debuts
The news in round two of Paxahau’s announcements of its 2011 festival schedule includes the live debut of Carl Craig’s 69 — that’s six-nine, by the way, not sixty nine, a project launched 20 years ago and one of the first to break up the beats of Detroit techno’s heretofore silky 4/4 productions — and…
