DETROIT BAND NAME OF THE WEEK…
Or Plymouth band name, to be exact… The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre And they’re playying this weekend — Saturday, March 29th, again to be exact — at the New Way Bar in Ferndale.
THE WAY HE AM…
In case anybody still cares, Eminem will be publishing his memoirs on October 16th, which his publisher has described as “every bit as raw and uncensored as the man himself.” Titled Eminem: The Way I Am, the book will be published by Orion Publishing and feature previously unseen photographs, journal notes, hand-drawn art, lyric sketches…
ALL THINGS JAZZ
On the horizon for lovers of jazz with twist is the The Third Annual Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music at Bohemian National Home, happening May 30-31. Performers include the Matthew Shipp Trio (hard to pigeonhole or describe, but he sometimes evokes the pianist evokes the volcanic energy of Cecil Taylor bounded by a sort…
IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN…
The nominees for this year’s Detroit Music Awards have been announced. The awards ceremony will be held Friday, April 25th at the Fillmore. Go here for more info. (And please don’t lobby me to vote for you; I haven’t received a ballot nor am I expecting one…) Here’s a full list of the nominees: OUTSTANDING…
Dishonor roll
Corporate accountability campaign shows Michigan’s lows.
The Counterfeiters
Stefan Ruzowitzky’s slick thriller is a “Holocaust” film in name only. Based on a true story but undeniably gussied up for the screen, The Counterfeiters charts the survival tactics of Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a Jewish criminal-turned-concentration camp inmate, whose counterfeiting talents spare him the gas chambers. As a character study, the film plays…
It’s about the music, man
A musician’s life is mostly more affliction than avocation. Perhaps there should be a 12-step program. Like the priesthood or reality TV, musicians sacrifice much of their lives for a paltry fiscal payoff, if any at all. It definitely requires a peculiar mentality. That’s the best explanation for what drives American Mars, the smart Motor…
Diving for dollars
From the local to federal levels, officials who tend to the vital Lake St. Clair watershed say they’re making progress. They’re restoring natural habitat, installing an innovative monitoring system, developing a management plan. But they’re also worried about the future, about water levels, about the threat of invasive species. They’re particularly worried about where they’ll…
Couch Trip
Excellent Cadavers First Run Features Earlier this year, a tiny convenience store opened in Palermo, Italy. This wouldn’t be noteworthy under nearly any circumstance if not for the fact Punto Pizzofree is openly proclaiming that it neither intends to pay protection cash to the Mafia, nor sell goods from vendors who pay for protection. And…
Down in front
As most major film festivals have evolved into movable feasts of paparazzi, partygoers and goodie bags so swag-laden they could be declared on one’s taxes, the Ann Arbor Film Festival has remained stubbornly committed to the notion of art for art’s sake. The back cover of this year’s festival guide sports a timeline that proudly…
Brother act
Catching a cuckold’s canard.
Night and Day
Thursday • 27 Freedom Fried AGIT-POP In the beautiful downtown district of Harmonie Park, it looks like some new agitprop artist has set up shop. The subversive images of young, hot French artist Alexis Peskine can be seen through the sheet glass windows of G.R. N’Namdi gallery, temporarily housed on Randolph Street. Peskine, currently based…
The more things change …
For a good stretch of the 1990s — let’s estimate 1993 to 1998 — the techno times, they were-a-changin’. Bored with overwrought, hard-charging productions presented with increasingly banal theatricality (think Chemical Brothers, Propellerheads, Moby and Prodigy — oh, God, must we?), breeders of stripped-down dissent began to emerge. In Berlin, it was the Basic Channel/Burial…
Letters to the Editor
Hillary’s dirty tricks Jack Lessenberry’s comparison of Hillary Rodham Clinton to Richard Milhous Nixon (“Hillary Rodham Nixon,” Metro Times, March 12) totally made my day. If only Helen Gahagan Douglas was still alive to chortle! She dubbed Nixon “Tricky Dick” in 1952. Back then, the whispering was about if a candidate was a Commie or…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Our cultural critic is faster than a speeding bullet.
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Our future — maybe
The promise of Barack Obama’s big speech.
Coming out strong
Your column about coming out was insightful, funny, and very moving. You tackled hard questions and provided some of the best answers I’ve ever heard to them. My only qualm is with your reply to Christian Parents Angrily Chastise, whose Christian parents were making his life hell after they discovered he was gay: "Your only…
The perils of Brenda Goodman
A flagrant theatricality unites the two series of paintings in Brenda Goodman’s new show at Paul Kotula Projects in Ferndale. Together they suggest that the celebrated Cass Corridor artist — who retains a cult-like following here despite having lived in New York since 1976 — has fled the studio to join the circus, or to…
Moving in
In warm weather, a large, covered outdoor dining area allows outside dining. The bar serves beer, wine, juice and smoothies. For the harder stuff, examine the small but diverse wine selection and three Michigan craft brews. Salads and veggie-intensive appetizers fill a good portion of the menu. There are even a few unique pita pizzas.…
Fire on stage
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Germaine Acogny have a couple of things in common: their African heritage and their successes as renowned choreographers for reputable dance companies. Add one more credit to that which they share: Recently they’ve been shaking up the dance scene with “Les Écailles de la Mémoire” (“The Scales of Memory”), a…
Snow Angels
We’ve all heard this downer story before: A small town, seemingly nice guy loses control of his marriage, becomes estranged from his wife, grows increasingly angry (and religious) and ends committing a murder-suicide. This could be a gripping drama, but, executed as it is, you have to wonder what in the world would attract a…
Stop motion
On the phone from Queens, N.Y., animator and artist Martha Colburn sounds flustered about her upcoming trip to MOCAD. She’s preoccupied with shooting another film, this one standing high up on an animation stand she built out of two-by-fours. It’s so big she has to get up on a ladder to line up shots, and…
Teenage wasteland
It’s tempting to say Paranoid Park flirts with self-indulgent and pretentiously artful irrelevance, but that’d be a disservice to the poignant sense of guilt and alienation he so brilliantly captures in this tale of a numbed-to-the-world teen who may have caused the grisly death of a rail yard security guard. Adapting Blake Nelson’s novel into…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Steal a Pencil for Me
There are illicit love affairs and then there’s Jack and Ina. Michèle Ohayon’s Steal a Pencil for Me kicks things off with the now-elderly Jack quipping, “I’m a very special holocaust survivor. I was in the camps with my wife and my girlfriend; and believe me, it wasn’t easy.” The comment pretty much sets the…
Hope for Detroit
Why we need truth and reconciliation.
Hot Water Music
The career trajectories of Charles Bukowski and the Black Crowes are pretty damn similar. Here’s how: Bukowski was already famous when he finally learned how to write, how not to lift from chroniclers of losers like David Goodis; by 1982’s Ham on Rye and the next year’s Hot Water Music, crusty Buk was downright engaging,…
From Warhol to war
Harmonie Park is this sweet little slice of Detroit. Sheltered from major thoroughfares, the downtown neighborhood’s got storefronts, sidewalks and streets scaled for humans. With a pleasant park and historic buildings, it could be a haven for arts and culture. And yet over the years, restaurants, galleries, clubs and cafés have come and gone. There’s…
Red of Tooth and Claw
Indiana’s Murder By Death has long drawn from the darker side of the human experience, toying with ideas of death and vengeance and regret while playing dusty, imposing music that only helps to accentuate the inherent lawlessness of lead singer Adam Turla’s voice, the group’s most memorable asset. Their 2006 album, In Bocca al Lupo,…
Oh, the irony!
Jerry Springer’s favorite Jerry Springer show is … America’s Got Talent, the wacky NBC amateur-hour contest from the mind of American Idol mad genius Simon Cowell, on which Springer serves as emcee-slash-zookeeper. “I’ll be the first to say our show is just stupid,” Springer freely admits, sitting in a closet-sized dressing room at Wayne State…
Live 1969
So are Simon & Garfunkel — or at least Paul Simon — suddenly “hip” again? It seems that Vampire Weekend’s similarity to at least one of the short guy’s classics gets mentioned in nearly every other story on that current buzz band (though I’m not sure I hear it). On the other hand, the recent…
Worthy and unworthy
Praise for the prosecutor.
Drillbit Taylor
The idea of a screenplay co-written by Seth Rogen that focuses on three hapless high school kids may promise Superbad-style laughs, but dredging up the same three teenage archetypes that inhabited Superbad, the boys in this movie are trying to get revenge on two relentless bullies. They hire Drillbit Taylor (Owen Wilson), who’s supposed to…
For the lakes’ sake
Sen. Stabenow asks feds to step up on environmental programs.
Shutter
This remake of a Thai horror flick is the story of newlyweds Ben and Jane Shaw (Joshua Jackson and Rachael Taylor), who move to Japan for Ben’s new photography job, but on their honeymoon accidentally hit a woman (Megumi Okina) with their car. She subsequently appears in many of Ben’s photos and proceeds to haunt…
