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Love and hate in the streets of Hamtramck.
Having Internet issues here at MT. In the meantime here are some links to love and hate for this year’s Blowout, as well as a handful of photos I shot with my crappy camera phone. More later. Full recap in print this Wednesday. –New Grenada aren’t fans of the Blowout. At least their current emoticon…
Blowout X Thursday and Eons special show.
Every Blowout has its discovery moments. Those are the instances when you arrive early for the set of a band you want to see, only to catch a bit of a group you might not have heard of and be blown away. This isn’t exactly what happened with Eons at Knights of Columbus Hall last…
Most illeist B-boy.
On Wednesday, Larry Gabriel’s “Stir it Up” column in MT reminds me of James Brown’s shabby situation: Still unburied more than two months after his death because of family squabbling. Even the hubbub around Anna Nicole Smith has cooled down enough for funeral arrangements. On Thursday, former Detroit poet Geoffrey Jacques is back home from…
Hot Child in the City
So far, and taking so much human mass, booze and toxins into consideration, the one perfectly glimmering moment — the one transcendent and time-stopping flash of Blowout X — was hearing/seeing the new Hard Lessons’ song “See and be Seen” Wednesday night at the Majestic. What. A. Song. What a song. It’s as good a…
Smoke Break: Baranek and Blowout
Our Blowout launch party was a crowded, boozy success. See you tonight in Hamtramck! In the meantime, here’s the first episode of “Smoke Break,” season two, which we filmed in the spacious Garden Bowl men’s room during a break from the launch party hubbub. (No jokes allowed; we had to film it in the bathroom…
Get blown
In the ten sloppy Marches since its inception, the Metro Times Blowout has expanded from two nights, a few bars and a handful of bands to a four-night, multi-venue romp fueled by the fried nerves, fizzing creativity, bursts of cocksure (or misguided) swagger and eager Molson drunks of more than 250 local artists. And the…
Black Snake Moan
Director Craig Brewer’s new film is a torrid Southern gothic so overheated it threatens to melt the screen. Turns out the girl is Rae (Christina Ricci), the local trollop, and after an especially nasty night on the town she’s been chained up by a depressed former bluesman named Lazarus (Samuel .L Jackson), who views her…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "Dear Rob: As an experiment, I’ve been trying to soften myself — to see what it’s like to stand in a room and not always take the lead. It’s had an interesting effect so far: People seem eager to play nice and offer me their good energy. But I don’t know…
Something’s fishy
Want to take a long look into the inner workings of cult filmmaker David Lynch’s mind? Are you sure? It’s not that it’d be too freaky for you — just the opposite, perhaps. Fans of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks will certainly recognize their boy in Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish the filmmaker’s…
The Bridge
If ever a film tested the ethics of documentary filmmaking, The Bridge comes dangerously close to crossing the line of decency. Which isn’t to say Eric Steele’s chronicle of Golden Gate Bridge suicides (“the most popular place to commit suicide”) doesn’t strive for taste and somber contemplation. There’s plenty of poetic footage of the bridge…
The dissolution of Detroit
One of the downsides of installing Shrinking Cities by thematic categories at Cranbrook Art Museum and MOCAD is that the art sometimes seems to suffocate under a blanket of theory. The related exhibition Imprint of Place, curated by Shrinking Cities program coordinator Gregory Tom, provides a welcome opportunity to see work on its own terms…
Goading us
Remember the notorious ’90s? The fascination with serial killers, obscene sex acts and gruesome crime photos? It seems like a million years ago, but the decade that kept blowing smoke in your prissy little face is back with the publication of the early issues of ANSWER Me!, Jim and Debbie Goad’s notorious zine. Starting in…
Full of It
Unless you’re the kind of person who lives for Canadian after-school specials or watches Teen Wolf on an infinite loop, there isn’t a whole lot to recommend in Full of It, a mildly creative but ultimately listless post-pubescent fantasy that’s being unceremoniously dumped into theaters this week. When Pinkston’s 98-pound weakling Sam starts to see…
Punctuation power
It’s been a wild few months for Thunderbirds are Now! in support of Make History, the youthful locals’ third album. Released last October on New York City-based Frenchkis, History was tagged No. 40 on Rolling Stone’s best of 2006 list. (“We don’t even know how that happened,” the band says, sheepish grins intact.) Critic and…
Cold case
Plans push to help with high heating costs.
The Lives of Others
Set during these final years of communist East Germany, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s impressive feature-length debut, “The Lives of Others,” takes place. Constructed as a thriller, this political drama follows Agent Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a Stasi agent whose humanity has been hollowed out by his work. Assigned to bug the apartment of celebrated and politically…
The truth shall out
Black history month ended with a bang this year. The fabulous end-of-February surprise, of course, was the revelation that an ancestor of the Rev. Al Sharpton was once held in slavery by a relative of the late South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond. It’s no surprise that Sharpton’s ancestors were enslaved. That could be said for…
Reform slackage?
Lobby reform bill sets bar low, critics say.
X Boxes
Eons Arun Bali says technology finally caught up. Shit, back when the Berklee College of Music prodigy first met bandmate Justin Bailey at a show at the Pirate House, Ann Arbor’s underground punk rock squatter music venue, “file sharing” meant someone slipping a mix tape into the back pocket of your jeans. These days, Bali…
Murder binge
Dailies whip themselves into a frenzy over Tara Lynn Grant.
Big love
Looks might not be everything, but in Neil LaBute’s lacerating take on love, sex and body image — now making its Michigan debut at Royal Oak’s Stagecrafters second stage — looks are what matters. The play is called Fat Pig. It’s a cynical helping of nastiness from playwright and master of casual cruelty LaBute, though…
Motor City Cribs
Carey Gustafson plays house in Ferndale.
Night and Day
Wednesday • 7 Al Young, Melba Joyce Boyd, Geoffrey Jacques LITERATURE Poet Al Young references the centuries-ago East with a love of music so naturally that you can imagine Li Po dropping wisdom with the Blakey band. The poet-novelist-essayist-memoirist returns home from California (where, by the way, he’s the state’s poet laureate) to share stage…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Well it’s MB109, okay? The Stooges — The Weirdness (Virgin) :: Whaddya mean there’s no "1971"? Al Gore — An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount) :: And you thought science fiction films never won Oscars. Tara Slone — Just Look Pretty and Sing (Orange) :: Her excruciating cover of "Suffragette City" makes Dana Gillespie sound like Diamanda…
File-sharing error
Q: I have a laptop at home. On occasion my best friend-roommate uses it to check her e-mail. On rare occasions her boyfriend uses it to check his e-mail — or so I thought. I have some naughty pics on my computer. They’re not on my desktop, so you can’t accidentally open one. I never…
Letters to the Editor
Shrinkage issues Thank you for publishing Professor Constance C. Bodurow’s essay “We are (or aren’t) alone” (Metro Times, Feb. 14) on the Shrinking Cities exhibition currently on view at both Cranbrook Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. She presents a thoughtful and thought-provoking review of the exhibition, and thankfully does not shy…
Shock values
Un Chant d’Amour Cult Epics It’s not every day that a 25-minute silent semi-porno gay film from the ’50s gets released in a shiny two-disc limited-edition package. Except, that is, when director of said film is French writer Jean Genet. The mainstreaming of porn is a hot topic now, sure, but Un Chant d’Amour (Song…
X Box: Pre-party
Why wait until Friday morning to call in sick? Before the festival begins in earnest on Thursday night in Hamtramck, Metro Times takes over the Majestic Theatre Center on the night of Wednesday, March 7, for the official Blowout X launch party. Blowout wristbands purchased online can be picked up beginning at 8 p.m. at…
Voice of the Beehive
Steve Nawara is on a rant, and you need to listen. “If music doesn’t give you a physical reaction,” he says, “it’s not music at all. If you don’t laugh, cry, shake your ass or pound your fists, you’re simply listening to music for bankers. And bankers trick people by convincing you that the rest…
American Life in Poetry
Those big cherry-flavored wax lips that my friends and I used to buy when I was a boy, well, how could I resist this poem by Cynthia Rylant of Oregon? Wax Lips Todd’s Hardware was dust and a monkey — a real one, on the second floor — and Mrs. Todd there behind the glass…
Blowed out good
Has it been 10 years already? We all know the fable of the Little Festival That Could. It seemed so simple on paper, that first Blowout. They were simpler times, music scene-wise, at least. Times when you could call up your local blossoming rock star or on-the-bubble major-label aspirant and brashly ask them, “Well why…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Home state suds
Brew pub publisher Rex Halfpenny talks Michigan beer.
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Uncovered bridge
So, OK, let’s take the possibility of terrorism seriously for a moment and pretend you are part of the government. Tell me which worries you more: A) There are a lot of young men of Middle Eastern ancestry living in the Detroit area. Some of them talk to friends and family in the old language,…
A killer’s constellation
Spanning more than two decades (1968-1991), the film traces the infamous Zodiac Killer murders and the exhausting investigation that followed. Working from James Vanderbilt’s adaptation of the book by San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), Fincher presents a sprawling, breathlessly meticulous saga of obsession and paranoia. Robert Downey Jr. is Paul…
We’ll get the airwaves
Mick Collins is huge fan. So’s Rodney Bingenheimer — the man who broke countless in-the-fringes bands on L.A. radio spins their shit. Madonna is aware of them. Major and minor labels are thinking of reaching for their thinning wallets to invest. We’ll say it: Siddhartha is the closest thing right now to Motor City rock…
The Italian
Director Andrei Kravchuk and writer Andrei Romanov present an orphan’s tale that reminds us that even when pessimism prevails, there’s room for good. When an Italian couple scopes out a prospective adoptee in a ramshackle orphanage in Russia at first, the adoption seems like it’d be a salvation for 6-year-old Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov). If he…
Hellenic era
Somebody pass the Ritalin. These chicks are nuts. The interview has gone awry. Corey Hart’s on the jukebox and I’ve lost ’em. They’re singing “Sunglasses at Night” at the top of their lungs and everyone’s starting to look. We’re at Jacoby’s, a jam-packed German biergarten in the heart of Detroit, and these five rock chicks…
Wild Hogs
It’s all well and good for Tim Allen to continue describing lazy circles around the rim of Hollywood’s toilet bowl, flushing one bad “family” comedy after another down the shitter, just as long as he doesn’t drag other, better actors down with him. Especially William H. Macy, a warmly respected actor who, aside from a…
Event Horizon.
Blowout X begins tomorrow. And, coincidentally for many of you, so will your four-day hangover. That’s the angle the dudes at Web Vomit take on MT’s annual local music festival, which celebrates its tenth go-round in 2007; they equate the event with pain. But it’s a pain that’s voluntary, because no one on the site…
