Who you gonna call?
If Detroit is the chocolate city, it must be the crummy kind of chocolate. You know, crumbly, oversweetened and, well, it’s just not a box of fancy truffles. At least that’s what it’s like in most Detroit neighborhoods. We’ve all seen those places where there are piles of debris and abandoned, boarded-up, burned-out houses. Junk…
De-press-ing
Taking the press to task for warmongering
Air guitar
Nothing pains a musician more than being separated from his or her instrument at the airport. The hollowness that accompanies watching a guitar case travel away on a conveyor belt is matched only by the anxiety of waiting for it to return — if it returns. While most airlines lightened up their post 9-11 policies…
Local Boy Double Feature
Filmmakers Sam Raimi and Josh Becker grew up around the corner from each other in Oakland County. As boyhood chums — along with Scott Spiegel, Bruce Campbell and a few others — they pursued their teenage obsession, honing their film chops on Super 8 cameras into full-on careers. Here Jim McFarlin talks to Josh Becker,…
Over the top
For the last several years in Windsor and Detroit, the Breathe Art Theatre Project has staged contemporary plays with a social conscience. The theater hardly gets more contemporary than the work of playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. His first play, Fuddy Meers, was a resounding success, earning the young playwright several prestigious awards and being staged at…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Burn, baby, burn
This chubby little kid in madras plaid pants is so excited to hold a real microphone in his sticky little hand that you want to squeeze his cheeks till they pop. “This is breaking, breaking news action!” he says, looking at the camera with all the intensity of a young Edward R. Murrow. “A car…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 One big test of the endurance of any relationship is taking on a joint improvement project. Here Sue Ellen Thompson offers an account of one such trial by fire. Wallpapering My parents argued over wallpaper. Would stripes make the room look larger? He would…
Feeding a yen
This is the type of place where Japanese salarymen go out after work — and there’s a large enough clientele to keep this izakaya (pub) thriving. It serves five Japanese beers, sake and hot sochu. Expect small plates of seafood, noodles, sashimi and more. Most of Hanzo’s food follows the Japanese model of graceful arrangements,…
In The Flesh
Deadstring Brothers Wednesday, April 25 The Intersection, Grand Rapids Fifteen men at a Deadstring gig? (Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.) Thanks to the last-minute cancellation of headliner Will Hoge, the crowd was sparse at Grand Rapids’ Intersection nightclub last week for the kickoff of a Deadstring Brothers’ tour. There were about 25…
Under the covers
Of all the nonsense that shadowed Detroit bands five years ago — all the sightings of Seymour Stein in the back of the Lager House, A&R lunches and big-time dreams — the thing that seems most preposterous these days is how the music was unrelentingly tied to Detroit’s failure as a city. With no shortage…
Democrats in the dugout
Normal human beings may idly wonder why the media is paying so much attention now to who is running for president next year. After all, the election is still a year and a half away. Isn’t there like, any important stuff happening now? Couldn’t we deal with this later? Well, there is indeed lots happening,…
Let in the Light
This Atlanta-based singer-songwriter has garnered favorable comparisons to early PJ Harvey. (Her last album was produced by always-abrasive Steve Albini.) But here Shannon Wright shears off anything that could even be misconstrued as rough, and comes up with a great after-midnight album, where you can hear fingers squeak on the guitar strings and the piano…
Motor City Cribs
Lyman Woodard’s Owosso retreat
Preludes: Rare and Unreleased Recordings
Dramatic forms require that pathos be earned. If you’re an artist delving into sadness, grief and hopelessness, you’ll get a leg up by touching on humor and joy along the way. The complex music of Warren Zevon fulfilled this obligation beautifully. Zevon wrote heart-wrenching songs, just as many that were funny as hell, and quite…
Media Blackout
MB117 salutes the world’s greatest rock critic! Lester Bangs — 1948-1982 (RIP) :: Has it been 25 years already? Elvis Presley – “Hey Jude” (RCA) :: Words can’t even begin to describe the dire depths of this appalling aural indignity. Never has a major recording artist been more embarrassingly out of his league both vocally…
On the Other Side
Singer Tierney Sutton and her band aren’t the first to take a happy song, slow it to dirge time and make us ponder sad words that normally zip by. Sutton and friends may not even be the first to pull that magic trick on Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “Get Happy”; the sleight of tempo…
Weird science
The hours spent staring at toasters, pigeons, gingerbread men, math equations, futuristic gadgets and DNA strands — if you’re up to the challenge — will be some of the strangest of your life. These hours, squinting at the grotesque black and white drawings by Topher Crowder, will be something like playing Where’s Waldo, except Waldo’s…
Tinseltown Sam
When he shuffles into the Four Seasons ballroom, his dark hair neatly parted and a nervous smile on his face, it takes several moments before anyone realizes the man half-heartedly waving his hand from his waist and, with a nasally, quiet voice, offering, “Hi, I’m Sam Raimi. Hi, I’m Sam Raimi,” to his fans is…
Country strife
Irish freedom-fighters Teddy (Padraic Delaney) and Damien (Cillian Murphy) are fighting for Irish independence in the 1920s, in British director Ken Loach’s period drama. The fact that class is an important part of the story means a good deal of political talk — Loach and Laverty productions are loved (and loathed) for their talkiness. But…
Guns ’n poses
The System Within New Look/Urban Works From the moment you hear a white guy say “Wassup, my brotha from anutha mutha?” with all the ease of Don Imus at a NAACP rally, you realize that half the roles in this urban drama went to people who won a “You Could be in a Movie!” contest.…
Night and Day
Friday • 4 Acid Mothers Temple MUSIC Their latest release, Crystal Rainbow Pyramid Under the Stars, features female vocalist Kitagawa Hao — and it’s a sea change. But just because the Japanese psychedelic band Acid Mothers Temple reined it in on its most recent release doesn’t mean they’ve stopped blowing minds. It’s yet another ultra-ambient…
Los Zafiros: Music from the Edge of Time
This documentary chronicles a group who represented the modern sound of a new Cuba in the heady decade after the 1959 revolution. Los Zafiros (The Sapphires) fused Latin and Caribbean music with American doo-wop vocal harmonies, and although they were referred to as the Cuban Platters, they were not imitators. What they created in the…
Stay free
Stand! Don’t you know that you are free? Well, at least in your mind, if you want to be . . . —Sly and the Family Stone, “Stand” Many days, Detroit counterculture legend John Sinclair can be found at the 420 Café in Amsterdam, which he has made his primary home since 2003. He…
What’s wrong with this picture?
Nowadays Josh Becker lives on what he declares to be “the last dirt road in West Bloomfield.” It may not be the last one, but it is all dust, grit and gravel, the back road of Babylon. His is a pastel one-story house, small but airy, and on this particular afternoon very bright. “This is…
Year of the Dog
As the lonely secretary Peggy in the new comedy Year of the Dog, Molly Shannon crosses the line from being one of those pose-for-cheesy-photos-with-your-pet types to one of those crazy-old-ladies-with-a-urine-soaked-floor types. Deceptively innocuous and pleasant, screenwriter Mike White’s directorial debut is one of those drab, unassuming little indie movies that manages to sneak up on…
Skid marks
Rick Miller grew up in a small town and still lives in the sticks, turning that heritage into money as singer-guitarist for Southern Culture on the Skids. These days, you’ll find trucker caps in Beverly Hills boutiques, and merlot drinkers eating pulled pork off picnic tables in Mebane, N.C., near where Miller lives. Even Wal-Mart…
Park places
“The city is doomed,” Henry Ford once said. “We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city.” We took Ford’s advice, drove out of town and ended up who we are, a people defined by parking. The architecture of parking — call it parkitecture — is consequently the most important account we have of…
Into Great Silence
Director Philip Gröeing spent more than six months living with the Carthusian order of monks, who make a quiet corner of the French Alps their home. His efforts have resulted in a practically wordless, nearly three-hour experiment in total monastic immersion. From the time the monks wake to their occasional excursions into the countryside, we’re…
An avatar’s dilemma
Q: I’m a 42-year-old straight guy, married 15 years, no kids. I love my wife, and I have remained faithful. Recently, I opened a Second Life (SL) account, and created an avatar-alter ego for myself. I created an SL account with a female avatar because, although I’m straight and comfortable with my gender and sexuality,…
Letters to the Editor
On bearing arms Jack Lessenberry draws on a 1939 Supreme Court decision to support his opinion that individuals do not have a right to firearms (“Under the gun,” Metro Times, April 25). Apparently, he rejects the right to protect oneself from dictators and common criminals. Strangely, it took 148 years from ratification of the U.S.…
The Invisible
A remake of a 2002 Swedish thriller, this melodrama has Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin), a sensitive rich kid, running afoul of high school bad-girl Annie Newton (Margarita Levieva) and ending up beaten and left for dead in a sewer drain. Caught between life and death, Nick is invisible, unable to interact with those around him.…
LCD’s disco infiltration
James Murphy is the rare musician who improves with age, who gets greater as his grumpiness grows. The dude who spoofed himself in LCD Soundsystem’s quasi-anti-hipster 2002 anthem "Losing My Edge" turns out to be the sum of the amazing glut of influences wryly detailed in that underground club staple. He is Woody Allen’s Zelig…
Kilpatrick on parade
Glossy booklet can’t mention mayor enough.
Fruit of the brine
One man’s passions for pickles pays off
Fighting foreclosures
Detroit’s foreclosure rate soars; activists try to help
