Roast of the town
How a Detroit trio got up in Michigan Avenue’s grill.
Into the streets
In Detroit, thousands protest immigration legislation.
World on a string
On a frigid mid-February Friday night at Chicago hipster bar Schuba’s, the Deadstring Brothers are cranking through a sweaty set in celebration of the release of their sophomore album Starving Winter Report. Near the set’s end, frontman Kurt Marschke boozily boasts from the stage: “We’re just playing some tired old motherfucking music.” It’s part self-effacing…
Letters to the Editor
Ain’t it the truth I want to thank Jack Lessenberry for an excellent article (“The economy: Things fall apart,” Metro Times, March 8). The global zeitgeist of 21st century seems to be neo-Leninism. Their motto is: “From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.” —Bill Harrison, Grosse Pointe Farms We’re…
Night & Day
Wednesday • 29 Minimal Maximum ART It’s composed of recent works, but the new exhibit at Ann Arbor’s Gallery Project, Minimal Maximum, is heavily influenced by the minimalism movement of the 1960s. It re-examines minimalism as it applies to today’s globalized society. The featured artists, unlike the original artists of the movement, have maximized the…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
The brothers behind the stats
Late last year, I spent about an hour one Saturday evening visiting a group of young men at Mound Correctional Facility in Detroit who had invited me to meet with them. They had read some of my columns, and they had begun an in-house (OK, in-prison) newsletter with the purpose of helping one another cope…
Sublime swagger
At its worst, the term “performance poetry” reeks of bad coffee and equally gritty verse. Too many performance poets write sentimentally overcharged abstractions about jazz, anarchy and the agonies of being culturally maligned, and unfortunately the sight of gesticulating hands can too easily seduce the listener into believing that the work is actually pretty good,…
Mortal combat
A dreadful disquiet stirs in society right now. And yet by the looks of the art world, many don’t care. Perhaps the problems have overwhelmed us or we’ve grown accustomed to unrest. Maybe we’re feeling so removed, we have finally reached a point where we are beside ourselves. If you consider this country’s leading people…
Back track
Sitting in the darkened den of his Westland ranch house, shuttling through slides from a collection that numbers more than 40,000, Richard Andrews stops the projector on a shot from a bygone era. Andrews is a rail fanatic. At 80 years old, the retired AAA employee has photographed rail lines all over the world. He’s…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Our $2 billion prison blues
Even as auto jobs have been falling away faster than tiles off the space shuttle, there has been a booming growth profession in Michigan: convict. Here’s an arresting fact for you: There are nearly four times as many people behind bars in Michigan prisons as there were in 1982. Today’s total prison census fluctuates, but…
The global pillage
Showing us the cruel domino effect of free trade, Darwin’s Nightmare gradually piles one example of human misery atop another, revealing a complex chain of exploitation and despair. Local factory managers and government officials exploit the locals — desperate from famine and poverty — with slave wages. Young women turn to prostitution, servicing the transient…
Joshua’s sax life
Joshua Redman never planned for a career in music. No, the Grammy-nominated saxophonist became an accomplished jazz musician while pursuing his lawyerly dreams. Then his music success happened nearly overnight. It began for the Harvard grad in 1991, just before he enrolled at Yale Law School. He was doing some soul-searching in New York City…
C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
What if the South won the Civil War? Writer-director Kevin Willmott milks this hypothetical — to a hilarious, cringe-inducing degree — in his new mockumentary. As the title implies, Willmott mines two centuries’ worth of material, both real and fabricated, to produce a not-so-preposterous alternate universe. In the so-called C.S., the first man on the…
Broad appeal
You could say that Lisa Lampanelli has a mouth like a sailor, though there has likely never been a sailor on the seven seas as funny, rude or delightfully obscene. In fact, most sailors would get a motherly mouth-swabbing for the stuff she spouts on stage. A self-described insult comedian, Lampanelli has been toiling away…
The Inside Man
This is one instance where Lee’s incessant button-pushing actually works to the advantage of the material. By working within a clearly defined genre and freeing himself from the constraints of his own overly ambitious, scattershot scripts, Lee is able to doodle in the margins with his ideas on race, class and power. In another director’s…
Momentum shift
The spotlights in downtown Detroit had just been turned off. It was three days past the big Super Bowl XL weekend and Roger Penske, the host committee chairman, addressed a genuinely impassioned crowd of executives at a packed Marriott luncheon. He told his business peers that he was devoted to “continuing the momentum” of Detroit’s…
Touch the Sound
Director-cinematographer-editor Riedelsheimer’s biographical documentary follows deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie on a globe-hopping sound journey. It’s a travelogue of sorts that traces the Grammy-winning Scottish musician’s exploration of different kinds of percussive music and recording her work. Glennie’s been mostly deaf since her adolescence, but the film is not just about challenging the audience’s notion of…
Art Bar
What a marvelous gift is the imagination, and each of us gets one at birth, free of charge and ready to start up, get on and ride away. Can there be anything quite so homely and ordinary as a steam radiator? And yet, here, Connie Wanek, of Duluth, Minn., nudges one into play. Radiator Mittens…
Balls in Pocket
Nick Lowe, the redoubtable pop kingpin who produced the Pretenders’ debut single, “Stop Your Sobbing,” once remarked that the first time he heard Chrissie Hynde it reminded him of a wistful Woolworth’s counter girl, serenading herself with no one else around. Utterly sweet, pure, heartbreaking and real. No fool Nick; his ears did not lie,…
Backslash
Google is the giant among online search engines — this we all know. But it just keeps getting cooler and cooler; check out possibly one of the greatest “educational” time-wasters ever created on the Web: Google Earth (earth.google.com). Actually, you’ve probably already downloaded the 3D program by now, so take a look at some of…
Sony/Legacy reissues
In 1973, after four go-nowhere Atlantic albums (including the essential self-titled debut and the great Brain Capers), Mott the Hoople found success with its smart and witty drink-along hubbub in David Bowie, who resurrected the band’s career producing the glitter bootprint All The Young Dudes. The record revealed Mott’s advancing cultural and musical blueprint, one…
Heron takes top perch
As the resident office sage, W. Kim Heron has been the glue that’s held together Metro Times often-shifting editorial department for the past nine years. He now takes over as editor of Detroit’s largest alt-weekly. (Former editor Ric Bohy resigned earlier this month.) Originally from Amherstburg, Ontario, Heron came to Detroit at 11, attending Cass…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): It would be a great time to launch several new ventures all at once, even if it means abandoning an old project you’ve been working on for months. APRIL FOOL! Don’t you dare do what I just suggested. The future won’t thrive unless you lavish the past with the gift of…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
You need cooling! MB64 ain’t fooling! Led Zeppelin — Led Zeppelin XI: Live at Carnegie Hall (Atlantic) :: They all laughed when Bun E. Carlos sat in for John Bonham during this one-off reunion. Well, they’re not laughing now. Black Oak Sabbath – Paranoid Mutha (Atco) :: I wish. Frank Sinatra & David Lee Roth…
Off-color
Are you as surprised as I am to see that Ice Cube is one of the prime movers behind the much-talked-about, race-baiting new series Black.White.? Yep, that’s his name in the executive producer credits, and his voice rapping the theme song, “Race Card.” Mr. Straight-Outta-Compton, formerly of N.W.A. (which doesn’t stand for Nice With Affection)…
Head Cheese
After three years and nearly 50 underground CDRs, Royal Oak-based noise troopers Red China have finally produced their first official album, Imprecision…Impregnio… Impossumal! Threshing together the trio’s heroes (Melvins, Eno, Melt Banana) with a heavy helping of their own skewed humor, Impregnio makes you feel all weird in your gut, then makes you love the…
Use ’em or lose ’em
Q: I am a 17-year-old straight girl with a boy problem — and as such I am fairly sure it won’t be terribly interesting to read, and will thus avoid publication, but I figured it would be worth a try. I’ve known this boy for three years. A year ago, he asked me out but…
Tiger tale
City says Tiger Stadium has struck out, but others cry foul.
