‘Jazz has never been popular’
Twenty-three years ago, saxophonist Branford Marsalis released his Columbia Records debut: Scenes in the City. The 46-year-old New Orleans native and the eldest son of the Marsalis jazz family has approached each of his following 23 discs with the same objectives as on the first: to make good music and to be authentic on every…
Handsome Furs
Fans of Dan Boekner’s other band, the comparably cheerier and poppier Wolf Parade, might initially be thrown for a loop by the minimal stark low-fi landscape he constructs here with fiancée Alexei Perry. But Plague Park is no less melodic and a lot more subversive. Employing the same squiggly synths and antiquated drum boxes (and…
In The Flesh
Adult Saturday, May 5 Magic Stick, Detroit The first indicator that Adult.’s performance on a recent Saturday at the Magic Stick might become special came even before Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller stepped onstage. The two Detroiters, who make evil electronic dance music distilled from electro-punk and industrial-klang, were on the floor mixing with…
Lies for the Liars
Yesterday’s tweener punk acts are jumping ship on a sound that has, well, sank. Or, at least, will sometime soon. TRL will move on. My Chemical Romance eyed the conceptual with The Black Parade. Fall Out Boy transformed into this generation’s Blink 182. And Lies for the Liars finds the Used dropping the curtain on…
Media Blackout
It’s ladies’ night at MB119! Kim Barlow — Champ (Jericho Beach Music) :: Kim has a breathtaking gossamer voice that’s entirely offbeat and wholly original, just like her wry wonky songs. Even better, she plays a mean banjo! Julie Doiron — Woke Myself Up (Endearing) :: Fuzz guitar femininity merged with a delightfully double tracked…
Clive talkin’
Clive James’s essay about G.K. Chesterton in his new book reaches a conclusion that any arts lover could live by: “Either in life or in the mind, there can be no such rigid division of the classical and the fashionable. A work of art has to be judged by its interior vitality, not by its…
Smithson’s institute
A floppy-haired kid in an army jacket and tired corduroys is stuck somewhere in the 24th row of an air-conditioned auditorium that smells like soiled socks of 300 teenagers. He’s listening to a mind-numbing art history lecture — only because it fulfills his humanities prerequisite. His tailbone aches and the dry lands of the ancient…
Impending doom
While it doesn’t have the savvy social critique or lo-fi innovations of Danny Boyle’s brilliant 28 Days Later, director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s gut-twisting follow-up is an exercise in pure visceral fear, serving up healthy doses of dread and gore. After a zombie horde crashes a dinner party, Don (Robert Carlyle) escapes, leaving his wife and…
‘Writing while Arab’
When my collection of short stories based on my years as a UAW worker at the former Cadillac plant in Detroit hit the streets in 2004, many readers were amazed to discover on its pages real human beings with real dreams, love affairs and creativity, working in factories. The most common remark people made about…
Delta Farce
Xenophobic, homophobic and humor-phobic, Delta Farce is so screamingly awful it might also create audience phobia of ever dropping nine bucks at the multiplex again. A witless comedy “vehicle” for the talents of Daniel Whitney (aka Larry the Cable Guy), Farce is more like the rusted old pickup on a neighbor’s lawn: a broken down…
Peckinpah dreamin’
Take, say, 1) a deep, dark secret, 2) a Shakespearean quote and 3) a chicken wing. Toss in an exaggerated facial expression, maybe some shoddy camerawork and an incongruent, patchy soundtrack — and voilà! You’re fair game for Detroit’s first Cinemasports, being held this Saturday at the Detroit Film Center (DFC). In what’s frequently called…
Georgia Rule
Chick-flick aficionados beware: This week, a group of cynical, no doubt cigar-chomping, mustache-twirling Hollywood execs are trying to pull one over on you. They’ve gathered together three generations of double-X-chromosome icons — Jane Fonda for the anti-war boomers, Felicity Huffman for the remaining pre-menopausal fans and Lindsay Lohan for the perpetually text-messaging, preteen alcoholic set…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 16 Re-Energize America Town Hall Meeting Issues and Learning We’re warming globally, but the solutions start locally, some activists are emphasizing. Former CIA chief R. James Woolsey and the Michigan Environmental Council’s Lana Pollack are part of a panel exploring global warming and related issues from oil dependency to instability in the Middle…
The Ex
Zach Braff plays Tom Reilly, a career slacker who has just lost yet another job. Desperate to support his wife Sofia (Amanda Peet), who wants to trade lawyering for mommydom, he accepts an offer from his adman father-in-law (Charles Grodin) to trade life in the Big Apple for small town Ohio. Working at a new…
Oral sex and cancer
Q: I’m having a problem. Twice when my girlfriend has given me oral sex, I’ve come in her mouth, and then a little urine came out. She’s understandably mad. The first time it happened was in the morning when I had wood, so I thought it was just me being full of piss, but the…
Boy Culture
Writer-director Q. Allan Brocka’s Boy Culture begins with his lead character, X (Derek Magyar), declaring, “If you’re smart, you’ve guessed I’m a hustler. If you haven’t, here are two clues: I’m gay, and they’ve made a movie about me.” Brocka’s screenplay is littered with similarly clever asides and self-deprecating stabs, but the fact is his…
Motor City Rides
Spinner Juan Atkins rolls like this.
Away from Her
To describe actress Sarah Polley’s debut feature makes it sound like a long-lost Twilight Zone episode. In a snowy, remote corner of Canada, a college professor watches his wife slowly turn into a zombie. One day, she’s putting pots and pans in the freezer; the next, she’s forgotten where she lives. In the rare moments…
One scary guy
I’m not sure that anyone really needs to read a biography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But I must admit that Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas ($26.95, Doubleday, 432 pp.), by Washington Post reporters Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, provides fascinating insights into the character of the man so many of…
Nightly dose
The Murder of Fred Hampton/ American Revolution 2 Facets Most film buffs probably don’t know the name Mike Gray. But the Chicago-based filmmaker is a force, wearing many hats behind and away from the camera. He penned the great China Syndrome, directed Wavelength, produced 13 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and was even…
Fay Grim
But what separates Fay Grim from Hal Hartley’s previous work is that he only seems to be interested in the details of his own labyrinthine plot. It’d be nice to recommend the film to devotees of Posey, who puts a marvelous spin on Hartley’s droll, ironic dialogue. But after two long hours of assassinations, covert…
Fund education — or die
Michigan is in trouble, for reasons that have little to do with the current state budget crisis, though things are worse than at any time since the 1950s. We’re mainly in trouble because the mainstay of our economy for a century — the domestic auto industry — is not what it used to be, and…
Carnivore’s delight
Gratiot Central Market is where the meat is.
Sweating the big stuff
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so they say. How one gets from subjective taste (“I like that painting”) to objective aesthetic judgment (“This is a significant work of art”) has been debated for generations. The new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Stuff: International Contemporary Art from the Collection of…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Saving stereotypes
As Royal Oak prepares for the demolition of several elementary schools, district officials and local historians are preserving one ugly reminder from a racist past: Painted fireplace tiles depicting the Little Black Sambo story, complete with the bulging eyes, very dark skin and exaggerated red lips featured in Jim Crow-era depictions of African-Americans. “Society has…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Letters to the Editor
Stop the war Jack Lessenberry’s column “So maybe I was wrong” (Metro Times, May 9) is welcome. Mr. Lessenberry wonders why Bush and Cheney want to prolong the war in Iraq. One obvious reason for continuing the slaughter is to blame our eventual defeat on the next administration. In this way, proponents of American empire…
Somewhere in time
Fans of time warps and fried food should make a beeline for Scotty Simpson’s. The joint seems not to have aged an hour since its founding in 1950, save for a partial updating of the jukebox maybe 35 years ago. Scotty’s feels like a neighborhood place to the hilt, its small Formica tables host jovial…
In like Intrinzik
If the Rev. Al Sharpton’s promised crackdown on racially charged rap music expands beyond one perfunctory march in a parade, he’ll probably go after juggalos for being white. At any rate, he’d have a hard time trying to pin anything off-color on Intrinzik (aka Will Glass), a Phoenix rapper who from his earliest album steered…
Rufus Wainwrong
Through the wailing timpani, bass trombone and background screaming about “fire and brimstone,” the central question of the opening track of Rufus Wainwright’s fifth album, and first as a producer, is a simple one: “Do I disappoint you?” Oh, Rufus, it’s not that you disappoint so much as you exhaust. All the schmaltzy theatrics —…
Flash forward
The photos were taken on what Ophelia Owens calls the worst day of her life. It shows two of her children, ages 2 and 4, in a hospital emergency room, breathing masks strapped to their faces. The color images may lack the crisp definition and careful framing of a professional, but that doesn’t keep them…
Year Zero
Mr. Reznor described Year Zero as a concept record existing in the not-so-distant (and nihilistic!) future. Maybe he thinks the masses will come around and swallow his industrial din whole in 2022 — that they’ll love him again, like they did in 1994. But, Year Zero collapses under a humdrum repetitiveness before the disc’s first…
Friggin’ in the Riggin’ with the Von Bondies
Marcie jumps, ship sinking faster. Remember the days when the Von Bondies were this wonderful, multi-gendered song machine whose future was laid out like a week of perfect days that stretched across the Atlantic? Yeah, me neither. Anyway, Marcie Bolen — the lovely, fire-haired guitarist who our UK writer once accurately (and fondly) described as…
Jive talkin’
Can’t not mention this little “life-is-fucked-up, kill yourself-or-get-over-it” tidbit: Ann Arbor’s Tally Hall signed to Atlantic Records. And the whole world applauds. Ain’t life grand?
