MONDAY EVENING KUDOS: A BEATLES’ PRAISE, EMMETT ON LENO & MORE….
Congratulations to Detroit area singer-songwriter Angela Predhomme, who recently won finalist placement with her original composition in a major international song contest that featured none other than Paul McCartney as a judge. Other judges for this “Song of the Year” competition included Sting, Rihanna, Faith Hill and George Strait (that’s quite an eclectic assotment). Predhomme’s…
DETROIT-BOLIVIA CONNECTION? LITHIUM COULD BIND US TOGETHER
There’s an interesting article titled “Lithium Dreams” in the March 22 edition of The New Yorker that draws a parallel between Detroit and the slums around the Bolivian city of Potosi. As the article notes, Potosi was once among the world’s largest cities. As the center of a region that produced half of the silver…
Free, again
After the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office dropped its efforts at his retrial in a decade-old murder, Dwayne Provience’s ankle tether came off on Wednesday. “I’m free, mom,” he said moments later as his mother, Vonzella Battle, sobbed in his arms. “You don’t have to worry no more.” Provience’s ankle had been encircled and his movements…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
The Bounty Hunter
Gerard Butler plays Milo, a former cop turned struggling bail bondsman, given the dream job of hauling in his ex-wife, Nicole (Jennifer Aniston), a pushy careerist reporter with a Lois Lane complex. In the midst of their love spat, they’re caught in the gun sights of a drug gang, and proceed to cause massive property…
Toast master
Regan and Thom Bloom opened Toast in Ferndale 10 years ago, and soon began garnering praise for the breakfast dishes that distinguished their restaurant from the pack. A year ago, they took on another, more ambitious project, opening the second Toast in Birmingham, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, continually improving the food, and attracting a…
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
On his first day of junior high, Greg (Zachary Gordon) is warned by his unrelentingly obnoxious older brother Roderick (Devon Bostick) how easy it is to become a social outcast. The next 90 minutes of Jackie and Jeff Filgo’s scattershot screenplay dutifully chronicles how the diminutive tween becomes just that. He’s beaten up by a…
Black noise
Sitting at a wall table in downtown’s Majestic Café, guitarist Rob Smith coolly puffs his Camel, waiting for sound check. Decked in a dark blue tailored two-piece suit and sporting a bush of an Afro — he could’ve stepped straight out of Super Fly — the tall, svelte Smith tugs anxiously at his goatee and…
Formosa Betrayed
Set in the mid-’80s, at the tail end of Taiwan’s White Terror period of martial law, the film’s supposedly inspired by the real-life murders of two pro-independence activists. James Van Der Beek plays an FBI agent sent to the island formerly known as Formosa to observe and assist in the investigation of an assassinated Taiwanese-American…
Fantasy dilemmas
Q: I’m a 23-year-old bi dude seeing a guy who is intelligent, sweet, attractive — the works. We’ve been together for six weeks. The problem is, after our first night together, I lost sexual interest in him. When I do get horny — which is rare at the moment due to work pressures — I…
Repo Men
A jet-black comedy about the high wages of mercenary medicine, the film features Jude Law and Forest Whitaker as a death panel on wheels — a two-man team of collection agents specializing in recovering human organs. In this vaguely near, dystopian future, the insurance industry is even more unscrupulous than today, pushing artificial organ “upgrades”…
Metro Retro
24 years ago in Metro Times: Cal Burnett’s cover story tackles the new wave of syndicated cartoons from some of the best up-and-coming artists, including Bill Griffith, Lynda Barry, Nicole Hollander, P.S. Mueller, Mark Alan Stamaty and the creator of a tiny rabbit "Binky" from Life in Hell, artist Matt Groening. All of these cartoonists…
Out of the park
The minimal and inexpensive menu is a loose blend of Eastern European and Middle Eastern, with an emphasis on ground pork dishes. In fact, more than half of the menu items contain ground pork in some form or another. But for a little more than $4, order chicken, beef or vegetarian shawarma wrapped in a…
Tough talk for city
Things have been pretty testy around Detroit the past couple of years with the political fallout from the Kilpatrick text-messaging scandal, federal investigations into bribery, Detroit Public Schools upheaval, economic recession and all. If it’s up to the folks at Community Development Advocates of Detroit and its 60-plus member organizations, there needs to be a…
44 Inch Chest
A heartsick London gangster, Colin (Winstone), finds out his longtime wife (Joanne Whalley) has been having an affair with a younger man. In a display of loyalty and twisted sympathy, Colin’s best mates abduct the young lothario, toss him in a van and drag him to a safe house, where he’ll be anything but. These…
Hello, darkness
Perhaps no artist gets into the lows and highs of sound quite like Steve Goodman. When we say "low," we’re talking the U.S. military and FBI "psychoacoustic correction" techniques used to root out Panamanian strongman-CIA stooge Manuel Noriega as well as David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, or the pesky anarcho-protesters at the recent…
Pick of the Litter
Was (Not Was) are as legitimately Detroit as Motown, the MC5, the Stooges or George Clinton — all music the Was brothers grew up loving in the nearby suburbs. The group may have started as a bicoastal collaboration between Don Was (aka Fagenson), still living here at the time, and David Was (aka Weiss), who’d…
Victory for all
Tonight … we rose above the weight of our politics. We pushed back on the undue influence of special interests. We didn’t give in to mistrust or cynicism or to fear. Instead, we proved we were still a people capable of doing big things and tackling our biggest challenges. —President Barack Obama, March 21, 2010…
XXXX
It’s a good thing You Say Party! We Say Die! grew up in British Columbia, where the forecast more often than not calls for gray skies and a 90 percent chance of misery. There probably wasn’t much for these hipsters to do on rainy days in the ’80s but to hang out in their parents’…
Food Stuff
Easter, meester — Josephine Creperie & Bistro will be open on Easter Sunday for a brunch buffet. The meal will include such starters (fresh fruit, pasta primavera and more), hot items (roasted Atlantic salmon with shrimp Newburg sauce, country-style potatoes and more), and such sweets as profiteroles with vanilla custard crème and espresso brownies. Takes…
It’s a 1derful Life (Hosted By DJ Rhettmatic)
In the spirit of such previous expatriate successes as J Dilla and HouseShoes, Ann Arbor’s Buff1 has kept one foot at home, despite moving to California a year ago to advance his career. Thankfully, he doesn’t seem to have let the sunny weather and attractive women distract him. With a new album, Crown Royale —…
Basement banishment
Even during the most embattled days of the Coleman Young, Dennis Archer and Kwame Kilpatrick administrations, Detroit’s City Hall reporters remained housed in offices just outside the mayor’s quarters. That era ends with Dave Bing. The City Hall bureau that is still rented and shared by the dailies and a few radio stations is moving…
Teen Dream
Atmosphere was Beach House’s defining characteristic on both their 2006 self-titled debut and 2008’s gorgeous Devotion. On those records, the band paid homage to such dream-pop progenitors as Cocteau Twins by filtering melancholy, gray-day textures through a lo-fi lens. Their compositions were simple, catchy keys-guitar-drum machine odes, soaked in as much reverb as a bedroom…
White lies
The noted multimedia engineer, choreographer and director Lumumba Reynolds had a considerable revelation last August. It struck when he noticed a noticeably dissatisfied-looking woman who’d come to see a production of Passing, the acclaimed play from Detroit-born playwright Dara Frazier-Harper. Inside Marygrove College’s intimate theater, a sizable crowd gathered for the true story of of…
Greenberg
Roger Greenberg is a real piece of work. When a long-suffering friend offers the cozy old chestnut that “Youth is wasted on the young,” Roger snaps, “Life is wasted on people.” He should know; he has spent years tossing his in the waste bin. Freshly out of an extended stay in a New York mental…
Follow the columnist
I get asked the question at least twice a week. Once someone learns I’m the guy who’s written that "Idiot" column (the idiot who’s written that guy’s column?) for Metro Times since 2005, they want to know, "So, what do you watch on TV?" TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly blare headlines like, "10 Shows You…
Terribly Happy
Jakob Cedergren plays Robert, a policemen given a rehab assignment in tiny village, after suffering an emotional meltdown in Copenhagen. At first glance this sleepy hamlet is the prefect tonic for his rattled nerves, but appearances make quick work of fools in pictures like this. Indeed something is rotten in Denmark (forgive me), and soon…
Motor City Cribs
Thunderbirds Are Now! keyboardist Scott Allen’s Big Mess is a band of bros in more ways than one. Everyone in the new, Tom Petty-inspired combo grew up, and continues to live, within a mile of one another in Livonia. And there are three brothers in the band, two are twins. No doubt there’s some long-standing…
Petal pushers
Once Valentine’s Day passed, things got slow again at the flower shop. Life here is marked by flower-driven holidays, and between those busy dates, it gets real quiet. There’s no radio on, not much traffic is heard passing down the street, and people don’t often walk past the front windows anymore. Roy Szymanski has…
Letters to the Editor
For shame! Brett Callwood should be ashamed of himself! In his miserable attempt to be edgy and clever with his back-handed compliments (A glorified bar band? Really? Do bar bands open for Alice Cooper with a huge crowd response, such as they got?) Does this writer know of the history behind McCarty and Bee? They…
Cinefeast!
It’s pretty safe to say that Michigan isn’t exactly wanting for film festivals. In fact, the damn things are popping up like dandelions. Whether it’s Jews, Palestinians, environmentalists or the GBLT community, if you throw a dart at a calendar, you’re bound to hit a week when an ethnic or special interest group is screening…
Young vs. “the Coal Man”
Speaking of Coleman Young, some 36 years after his first State of the City address, his presence still looms — though often distorted into a caricature. Young’s presence was certainly felt last week at a gathering of scholars, city boosters, activists, journalists and others. Organized by New Detroit, it was a response to last October’s…
Night and Day
THURSDAY MARCH 25 Movie Night Alleycat Benefit LOOKING FOR LANCE ARMSTRONG! This two-part benefit for the HUB (recently named Michigan’s first gold-level bicycle-friendly business by the League of American Bicyclists) features an Alleycat race through the nooks and crannies of the Cass Corridor to the Burton Theatre, where a trio of bicycle-themed films will be…
The big push
John Sinclair’s long strange trip is taking another twist Arrested in 1969 for giving two joints to an undercover narc, the poet, writer and political activist paid a heavy price for assuming a high profile in the counterculture of the 1960s. Sentenced to 10 years, he served 29 months in prison — attracting widespread attention…
