APOCALYPTO…
It’s not Detroit-related…but I did watch it on a TV set in Detroit last night, so hopefully that counts. I swear I saw on TV last night that Mel Gibson (with his family) and Britney Spears (both diagnosed as bipolar; that was mentioned on the show) flew to Costa Rica this week for a vacation…
RADIO FREE SINCLAIR
Got an e-mail from Detroit legend John Sinclair the other day. He’s back home in Amsterdam…but he just posted something about his most recent excusion to the D on his “On The Road With John” (entry #9, to be exact) at his JohnSinclair.us site. Being John Sinclair, of course, he mentions both the Ann Arbor…
CLARIFICATION…
Got a nice e-mail from Big Wave Dave over at MotorCityRocks.com stating that he didn’t mean to suggest that there was some sort of conspiracy or purposeful reason for us not tagging this Friday’s Deastro show at the C.A.I.D. It was nice of him to write. I guess it was the word “neglects” that made…
SWEET JESUS, I HATE BILL O’REILLY…
…but this is perhaps the coolest thing to which the insufferable Fox-“News” blowhard’s name has ever been attached. Dig it…
DEASTRO DATE
This week’s lead music feature dude Deastro is actually playing a show in Detroit this week — Friday, May 16th, to be exact — at C.A.I.D. (5141 Rosa Parks Blvd.) as part of one of the Art Fag, Inc. celebrations. Our friends over at MotorCityRocks posted earlier today that we “neglected” to note this on…
STOLLSTEIMER FETED IN L.A.
May is the month that the music performing right organizations BMI and ASCAP host various annual songwriting award banquets in Los Angeles. The dinners are always a blast — and Detroit “garage rock” made a strong showing at the Ascap Film & TV Awards last Tuesday, May 6th at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills…
Open or not?
Reluctance to share isn’t a character flaw.
Detroit loses a great
Without him, Detroit seems a little less worth it. A little less jolting, less hungry; one person less connected to everyone. There is a pall over the arts community, as word has traveled quickly that adored artist and musician Matthew Blake died from a massive heart attack early in the morning on May 10, while…
Motor City Cribs
Dave Shettler’s Mexicantown home.
Howdy, publisher
Detroit’s status as a “Top Ten city” and the Metro Times’ potential for growth attracted Chris Sexson to MT’s Greektown neighborhood. The new publisher — replacing Lisa Rudy, who recently stepped down — will be here full time by mid-June. “I think there’s huge potential in your city and more people are going to see…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Letters to the Editor
Good God I just wanted to say thank you for your article “Hypochrists” (News Hits, April 30), especially for the link to that wonderful Web site on churches and organizations that welcome anyone regardless of race, gender or religion (welcomingresources.org). Living in Ferndale has opened my eyes to the plight of everyone, but especially transgendered…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
From Nugent to Sin City.
Barack and Bobby
Two candidates with much in common, especially the right stuff.
Black Bottom remembered
It was a poor neighborhood, even if some of the residents were wealthy. They lived with crime and overcrowding. But they didn’t give up. For violinist Regina Carter, whose late mother came from Black Bottom, knowing those roots keeps her humble, even as she’s gone on to international acclaim. "You hear that people grew up…
Wall Street’s crime wave
There is a time in the life of every writer when you find yourself fearing that you have become a robo call phone machine — repeating the same message over and over and with diminishing returns. That’s how I felt following eight months of silence after labeling the credit crisis a “subcrime” scandal, lashing out…
Try something else
Adan Lopez is the owner of Lupita’s and Los Altos, two of Detroit’s authentic Mexican restaurants. Where else can you get a plate of tacos served with rice and charro beans for around three bucks? The food is the real deal, not covered with mountains of melted cheese after being deep-fried in way too much…
Unearthing the ‘N-word’
News Hits has questions. Administration hasn’t had answers.
Couch Trip
Shrooms Magnolia Home Entertainment In lieu of the standard helpings of pain, torture and gore found in most horror releases these days, Shrooms eschews the carnage for a breathtaking dose of drug-based psycho terror, with a few talking cows, Victorian demons and wet-brained Irish hillbillies. Brought to you by director Paddy Breathnach (yes, he’s a…
MT reviewer mourned
Elissa Karg: socialist, autoworker, nurse, food writer.
Words of Our Own
War begins — and a poet responds.
A spirit of Detroit
The ghost’s long white beard, cowboy hat and buckskins seemed out of place when Henrietta Malak saw him one night three decades ago at the Two Way Inn, the north Detroit watering hole she and her husband owned. For years she talked about his Western look and wondered what he was doing in her industrial…
Jam Kickin’
Back in the late ’60s, Michigan bands like the Up, SRC and, obviously, the MC5 were providing the soundtrack to a particularly difficult time for U.S. politics — a period which saw the Vietnam War, rebellions in Detroit and other big cities, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.…
Becoming Deastro
Randy “Deastro” Chabot is turning a Hummel figurine upside down, exploring the mechanism that allows the two cherubic porcelain figures huddled under the umbrella to crank out a little tune when you tweak their pedestal. He’s in the basement of his family’s Sterling Heights home, surrounded by a hodgepodge of worn, neon tape-covered mixers, keyboards…
Ode To The Ghetto
Guilty Simpson’s been a Detroit hip-hop anomaly since coming on the scene as a mid-’90s contemporary of Slum Village, J Dilla and the like. While other MCs increased the peace and evolved into Midwestern versions of A Tribe Called Quest, Guilty proudly flew the flag for old-fashioned thug-ism more akin to Mobb Deep; his battle…
Gore-soaked and glamorous
On the new Gore Gore Girls’ Get The Gore album, sultry front-siren Amy Gore sings: “I am a pleasure unit, eating cake and credit cards/ I am a pleasure unit, stealing shoes and cruising bars.” In her own uniquely eloquent way, Gore has managed to summarize the spirit of her band in two lines. Anyone…
Blooddrunk
You’d think it’d be hard for a band to toil at the same sound for 10 years without getting stale and redundant, but Children Of Bodom avoid those pitfalls. And make no mistake about it: Blooddrunk is good metal, that’s for sure — fast, punchy and deathly catchy. But it’s also just a cleverly disguised…
On the Download
Our fair little city’s music scene bristles with a special kind of entrepreneurial spirit, fostering the work of those enterprising enough to give themselves over to it fully. That’s one of the reasons you’ll find dudes and chicks in this city in not one, not two, but often three different working musical outfits. Case in…
Stop and go, Speed Racer!
The Wachowski brothers certainly put the pedal to the metal in Speed Racer, but what’s the use of all that power if you don’t have good handling? This souped-up version of the anime television show is a dizzying swirl of eye-popping color, driven by the need for speed and an anarchic desire to jump the…
Pimpin’ the airwaves
In a corner of WADL-TV/Channel 38 owner Kevin Adell’s cavernous office — more a museum-quality display room of local broadcast history — sits a gleaming orange Vespa motor scooter, obviously vintage. Adell says he outbid Kid Rock for the bike at an auction, and is happy to recount the blow-by-blow details. Suddenly he turns to…
Redbelt
Putting his celebrated theater credentials aside, David Mamet essentially has two Hollywood personas: Mamet the screenwriter and Mamet the filmmaker. And the gulf in quality between the two can be pretty dramatic. Mamet the screenwriter likes to deconstruct well-trodden film genres into his own self-conscious brand of stylized dialogue and narrative sleight-of-hand. No matter what…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Then She Found Me
Does anyone really love Bette Midler? I mean, other than gay men and my Aunt Elaine? In Helen Hunt’s directing debut — an adaptation of Elinor Lipman’s very ’90s novel — Midler provides all the brassy, motor-mouth mugging you’d expect from an actress who perpetually seems on the verge ofbreaking into song. On the surface,…
Night and Day
THURSDAY • 15 THE MARS VOLTA SO 2002? BAH! With a sound hinging on the clusterfuck bizarre (just check out “Aberinkula,” the first track on 2008’s The Bedlam in Goliath), the Mars Volta would be well-placed in some crud-filled art faggy venue — as opposed to the colossal-by-comparison Fillmore. But that’s where they’re playing, so…
What Happens in Vegas
What Happens in Vegas is the cinematic equivalent of a Twinkie: cheap, artificial, bad for you, yet eager to please and weirdly satisfying. This should not be read as an outright endorsement of industrially extruded noxious yellow snack foods, or of lazy, brain-killing formulaic date movies, simply an acknowledgement that both products serve a certain…
Way, way under the radar
Jandek’s Bizarro World blues.
Upscale A2
The eclectic fare, which emphasizes Asia and the Caribbean, is reflected in the appetizers. For example, Thad brilliantly executes a platter of four crispy Chinese pork dumplings atop cilantro, laced with a subtle, tamarind-infused tomato sauce ($9). Although the portion size will disappoint those hoping to share, the tuna tartare, a small mound of yellowfin…
