High drama in Corktown
I dont know if it’s a combo of lack of sleep along with the relentless crush of constant 4/4 beats amplified at ungodly sound levels, but my house guests are freaking out on themselves. One has lost her ID. The other thinks I hate her. All I want to do now that I have no…
Randomizing and rhapsodizing Saturday at dusk
Francois K (emerging from the smoke) was one of Saturday’s wizards and true stars. Stacks of speakers on the Main Stage. A fan of techno and Belle Isle and a techno disciple preaching the word Jesus is God electronically on E. Jefferson all weren’t bad either for Act One at Movement ’09.
Sunday Funnies
Guess what? More after-parties on tap for tonight. Are they ever. The good news is that you won’t be able to get into some of them, and one is canceled, so it makes the pickings a little less stressful. Pick your poison and keep raving until the end of time (or at least until sometime…
Puff puff, pass….
They’re testing the smoke machine and two of detroit’s finest walk up. One says, “whoo! With all this smoke around….none of it is that wacky tobaccky is it?” I say, “isnt it legal, though?” to which he responds, ” only if you don’t pass, it’s called puff puff pass!”
Sunday funday
At soundcheck prior to my set. The amount of sound down here is scary!
Seems I saw you in a teenage wet dream
The first thing that strikes you while walking up to the Movement Festival, well before you get to Hart Plaza and its four massive sound systems that send throbbing bass signals clear across the river to another country, and high-end ear-splitting curdling howls of agony and ecstasy (at a distance, you’re never quite sure what…
This is hardcore
Jesus Revolution guy: apparent live pa on the street. pic
Saturday’s afterparty hot list
THE OTHER 9 TO 5 Accomplished minimal techno and house out-of-towners from Berlin, Dusseldorf, Chicago and San Francisco include Nikola Baytala, Camea, Daze Maxim, Bruno Pronsato, Tim Xavier and more. Up and running 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. at River’s Edge, 673 Franklin St., Detroit. HOUSE-N-HOME: Berlin’s Panoramabar resident Cassy, sensational on the Main Stage…
Mobile DEMF
MPIII’s Mobile DEMF schedule looks great on my iPhone and computer.
Mothership @ CPOP
Completely and totally out of control!
Yinz Going to Detroit?
Yinz Going to Detroit? Recently in Pittsburgh, I’ve attended a Motown 50th anniversary party, an all P-Funk vinyl party, a dance night “designed to introduce the modern styles of detroit and berlin’s smaller venues to pittsburgh”, and a lock-in party at a recording studio that featured former Minus recording artist Stewart Walker. For the last…
C2 proves you can go home again
Detroit techno legend Carl Craig has been named Creative Director for Movement 2010. Paxahau made the announcement today as the Ferndale-based group prepares for the start of Movement 2009 on Saturday, May 23. The massive riverfront party featuring over 70 acts rolls out at noon tomorrow. Craig was the artistic director for the first two…
Pre-Pre Party Tonight
Special digital dub ambient hypermedia performance at the Detroit Film Theatre with Virgil Moorefield (Swans, Glenn Branca), Merge (Alvin Hill and Colin Zyskowski) and nospectacle. 8 p.m. More info here. Follow @jennpaull on Twitter for live tweeting and Twitpics from DEMF.
LOOKS OFFICIAL! “RAW POWER”-ERA STOOGES TO REUNITE
…or almost. Of course, Ron Asheton, who we lost in January of this year, is sadly not around to take over the bass chores. But as MT hinted at when we published that photo of Sex Pistol Steve Jones meeting Raw Power guitarist and co-writer James Williamson in L.A. on May 8th, there is indeed…
TWEET THIS
Our pals at Popbitch alerted us to this handy little tool that allows you to read someone’s tweets that they think they’ve deleted. Oh, the frolic … http://www.tweleted.com/
McG hearts the Mitten.
A few hundred eager area moviegoers were treated to a nice bonus on Monday night, when an advance screening of Terminator Salvation turned into a meet and greet with the film’s director, the man know as McG. Kalamazoo born and bred Joseph McGinty Nichol has made a splash in Hollywood with his glossy, hyper kinetic…
URGENT! TONIGHT: ROCK DOC IT CAME FROM DETROIT RE-CUT & NEWLY ENHANCED
It Came From Detroit Producer Sara Babila and Director/Editor/Camera Operator James R. Petix shot in front of Cass Corridor’s defunct garage rock venue the Gold Dollar. (Photo: T.R. Wright) There’s a lot a man can do in five years. I mean, you could get through college in five years, you could get married and divorced…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies
Couch Trip
Martyrs Weinstein Company You can’t be in a French-Canadian torture porn flick and not be a chick with a bad haircut. That’s what Haute Tension, Frontière(s), and now Martyrs have proven. Like those previous Midnight Madness entries, Martyrs is trés pretentious and trés boring. In fact, the audience may feel complete empathy for the lead…
Two steps left
Cobo talk has its wonks, but it also has Grace Lee Boggs
Lemon Tree
Salma (Hiam Abbass) is a fortysomething Palestinian widow who literally lives off the fruits of her land — a 50-year-old lemon grove that sits on the border between Israel and the West Bank. Unfortunately, politics come calling when Israel’s new defense minister (Doron Tavory) moves in next door. His men view her grove as a…
Judgment day coming
The Reeds’ efforts to get a new trial may have paid off
American Violet
The freeway to hell gets a fresh coat of asphalt in this sturdy, well-intentioned but ultimately sleepy slice of Southern small town race relations. The film is based on the true story of a series of controversial, racially charged police raids of a Texas housing project, with the 2000 Bush election chaos as backdrop. Among…
Bitter fruit
At the end of March, President Barack Obama gave a speech intended to reassure consumers worried about buying vehicles from a U.S. automaker facing the possibility of bankruptcy. “Let me say this as plainly as I can. If you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car…
Highway to hell
Tom Hanks is back as Harvard professor Robert Langdon, master of arcane religious factoids and the latest in the weird trend of academic nerds as matinee heroes. He’s up against a dastardly plot by the Church’s ancient enemies, a shadowy threat known as the Illuminati, a sect of devoted knowledge-seekers who’ve kidnapped the four leading…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Burn, baby, burn!
The Hard Lessons received a lot of accolades for ambition with their last album, 2008’s, well, ambitious B&G Sides, a four-sided collection of (mostly) previously released singles. But, damn if Arms Forest, the band’s second full-length and first without drummer Christophe Zajak-Denek, isn’t even more ambitious. Or at least it’s a damn sight more eclectic…
More than Dagwoods
Amer’s Deli 312 S. State St., Ann Arbor, 734-761-6000: For 20 years, Amer’s Deli has attracted hungry Ann Arborites with its quality sandwiches and salads. In a coffeehouse atmosphere, you can enjoy their Reuben sandwiches, for which all-kosher corned beef is cooked, sliced and trimmed in-house; the rye bread is direct from an Oak Park-based…
Invaders Must Die
We can deny it as much as we want now, but, for a lot of us back in the ’90s, a group like the Prodigy sounded like music’s future. Knee-deep in our pre-millennium tension, the itchy rave-romp of Music for the Jilted Generation and The Fat of the Land spoke to the snarling uncertainty of…
Supersonic wordplay
Hey, club kiddies, technophiles, pro ravers, gearheads and other electro-fried insiders: this ain’t for you. We know you’ve been techno-babbling about “BPM” and “EBM” in your sleep since at least ’95, when you danced all night to Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva in a field of corn somewhere in southern Ontario. No, baby. This glossary…
Veckatimest
Brooklyn’s dreamy psyche-folk quartet Grizzly Bear broke through with the beautiful Yellow House LP three years ago. That album featured a slew of textures, harmonic layers, space to think and a slick mix-down. Prime songs “Knife,” “Plans,” “Central and Remote” and “Neck on a Spit” have gorgeous drones, sweeps, swells and clamors. It’s a lush,…
Dance the night away
CARL COX FROM: East London SOUNDS LIKE Cox pioneered the use of a third turntable in the late ’80s, which allowed him to layer tracks into a tribal take on house music transcendent enough to levitate dancefloors without resorting to the fluttery trance bollocks of his superstar DJ brethren. Cox is literally the biggest DJ…
Sky & Country
Some of the great sax-drum-bass trios work by having the saxophone throw its weight around — think of the trios that tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins and Albert Ayler recorded. But even when Fly’s Mark Turner is playing his tenor rather than alto or soprano, this collective tends to go the other way; the bass and…
Woof!
On Saturday night, May 16, the Royal Oak Music Theatre was home to a rock ‘n’ roll benefit for the Michigan Humane Society. The Wonder Twins — who have rescue dogs and cats of their own and are staunch advocates of the adoption option — were in the house for the music … and the…
Quick & dirty
You wanted advice? Here it is — good and hard!
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY • 20 AZITA RADICALLY MELODIC As a member of theatrical noise outfits the Scissor Sisters and Bride of No No, Azita Youssefi made a name for herself as a seminal member of Chicago’s famed early ’90s no-wave scene. But her current first-name-only solo artist stint, which began with the LP Enantiodromia in 2003, finds…
Anthropologically speaking …
The tribes drawn to Detroit’s annual orgy of electronica — those looking to get lost in a hypnotic overdose of BPMs (that’s Beats Per Minute, Mom) travel to the Motor City from as far away as, say, rural Iowa, Montreal, the Netherlands, Japan and … oh, I don’t know … Frenchlick, Ind. There’s always a…
Time to honor
Veterans’ park project stalls as city grants parking rights on site
Right time, right place
The vintage apartment building at the corner of Hancock and Second Avenue has many stories to tell. The Renaud, which faces Wayne State University’s Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, is one of an infamous complex of apartments, abandoned buildings and warehouses where — from the socially and politically volatile ’60s into the ’90s — a family…
Motor City Cribs
Brad and Scott Allen’s Livonia basement studio
Meaty matters
Why eating less flesh is good for the environment
Everybody’s a star, baby
Hello cruel world, welcome to the Detroit party. Forget all your troubles, lay down your cares, everything is waiting for you … downtown. Recession? What recession? The global economy is contracting? You don’t say. It’s time again to put your money where it’ll do you the most good: dancing to the music of more than…
Letters to the Editor
Eminem: Role model The most remarkable, refreshing comments in your outstanding cover interview (“The Eminem interview,” May 13) show how many values he shares with this fiftysomething reader. Replies about “I exercise a lot and just eat right,” “guns are just bad news” and “compassion for my mother” are reminders that everyone matures (OK, most…
Meyers, Hall talk big
While Corey Hall and I agree that the new Star Trek movie is the first official summer blockbuster worth seeing, our reactions differed in proportion to our geekdom. As a kid, I dutifully watched Kirk deliver flying kicks and double judo chops to alien adversaries each Saturday evening while eating my Swanson’s TV dinner. I…
COMMUNITY OUTLINED IN CHALK VERY MUCH ALIVE
A few years back, I was the esteemed recipient of a mass e-mail that, unlike the strong majority, I actually forwarded out to a select few. For whatever reason, that’s just usually not my thing. I don’t know, you probably saw it at some point. Do you remember the optical illusion sidewalk chalk guy? His…
