Live Review: Pikacyu-Makoto w/Space Band, Deaf Beasts and Mugu Guymen. Saturday, May. 7 at the Old Miami
Saturday was a wild night at the Old Miami. Capping off Scrummage Records’ weekend Cinco de Mayo festivities with a bang, the club booked some of the most frenzied and noisiest bands they could find. Principal among them were the Japanese duo Pikacyu-Makoto, consisting of Pikacyu from the duo Afrirampo and Kawabata Makoto from the…
Live Review: Melvin Davis w/Jeni Lee Richey & the Great Tribulation. Friday, May. 6 at PJ’s Lager House
Legendary soul man Melvin Davis touched down in Detroit at PJ’s Lager House last night. The 69-year-old veteran packed the club and, by the end of the night, had the entire place rocking like the soul clubs of yore. Prepping for his 17-date tour of Europe starting next month, Detroit’s Soul Ambassador and his crack…
In a Better World
In a Better World GRADE: B- "If you hit him, he hits you, and then it never ends," a father tells his son in the ethically ambitious film In a Better World, the latest from director Susanne Bier (Things We Lost in the Fire, After the Wedding). "Not if you hit hard enough the first…
Thor
Thor GRADE: B+ Entertaining, silly and overdesigned, Thor is an exercise in comic-book excess. As a summer blockbuster, it offers enough bang-for-the-buck thrills to overcome its predictable plotline. As the umpteenth superhero flick to hit the screen this year, it’s as boisterous as it is superfluous. As yet another warm-up for next year’s The Avengers…
Something Borrowed
Something Borrowed GRADE: D Kate Hudson in a wedding dress is what Burt Reynolds behind a steering wheel used to be; a dependably breezy fusion of star and theme, almost a genre unto itself. Which is all well and good when you’re making Smokey and the Bandit, but not so hot when you’re making Stroker…
Catch Lady Te on BET’s 106 and Park Today
It was just a few months ago that we were telling you about 21-year-old Detroit emcee Lady Te. The Wayne State University student has all of the swag and rhyme cadence of an experienced music veteran even though she’s still fairly young and mapping out her own trajectory. If there’s one thing that Lady Te…
Wrong to recall?
Thousands of citizens outraged by the Snyder administration’s policies are now talking recall. In fact, a group has been formed that’s making a serious attempt to do just that. Michigan Citizens United got petition language approved last week. They have a website, firericksnyder.org, and are taking donations and mobilizing for action. Their motto is that…
Unfinished business
Q: I was hanging out with a guy who is in a relationship. I told him nothing could happen, and we decided to keep things friendly. A while ago, I made the drunken mistake of climbing into the backseat of a car with him, and things got racy pretty quickly. He asked if I was…
Werner Herzog talks
Shockingly, the famously intense German auteur Werner Herzog is actually a pretty funny guy when you get him on the phone. Traces of his bone-dry wit seep through his famous monotone delivery during a conversation about his latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, an extraordinary documentary driven by Herzog’s vision. The film is a fascinating…
Falling down
The crash came in the middle of the night. Snapped awake by the sound of shattering glass sometime around 3 a.m., Chris Jaszczak’s first sleep-fogged thought was that something had been hurled through a second-floor window in his building at 1515 Broadway in downtown Detroit. He raced down a flight of stairs and hurried outside,…
Keepers of the Flame
It’s Saturday night at Pontiac’s Crofoot ballroom, and people are milling around the dance floor expectantly. The stark modern space is an unusual setting for the anarchic pageant that will follow, but there are hints of the weirdness to come, including masked and costumed attendees and a video projector showing scenes of mostly naked, torch-bearing…
TV on the Radio – Nine Types of Light
TV on the Radio – Nine Types of Light Interscope Few things are harder to put across in rock ‘n’ roll, the music of one-eyed cats peeping in seafood stores, than romance; add a commitment to guttural body music and you have one of the most restless bands of our time, Brooklyn’s TV on the…
Sweet retreats
$=$5-$10; $$=$10-$25; $$$=$25-$50; $$$$=$50+ Ashby’s Sterling Ice Cream Parlor 46540 Van Dyke, Shelby Twp.; 586-991-0106: This old-fashioned ice cream parlor serves 60 flavors of premium, hand-dipped ice cream. No shortcuts here: Ashby’s starts off with the creamiest 14 percent butterfat ice cream mix and adds your favorite ingredients. In addition to ice cream, choose from…
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Cave of Forgotten Dreams GRADE: B Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the most indispensable documentary ever made by a pretentious blowhard, with all apologies to Michael Moore. The blowhard here is Werner Herzog, the legendary German iconoclast whose challenging early masterpieces about the wages of obsession, like Fitzcarraldo, blurred the line between art and artist.…
Erasing terror’s face
Osama bin Laden, the visual icon of terrorism in our fear-driven age, is gone. No one can replace him. Jihadists will doubtless commit new outrages and hatch new conspiracies. But warriors committed to sacrificing their lives for his murderous cause are a wasting resource unless they can draw new recruits into their ranks. And while…
Food Stuff
Muddling through — With the 137th running of the Kentucky Derby coming up, we’d like to bring up a point of cocktail etiquette. On May 7, people who never touched a sprig of mint all year will want mint juleps — and will begin furiously pummeling and mashing this fragile herb into a jelly at…
tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l
tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l 4 ad When was the last time music made you freaked out? When you slide your chair away from your desk — headphones on, hands in the air, — and were compelled to dance? Yeah, like in Beetlejuice, with the lobsters. Doesn’t happen often, eh? The…
Uncommon pleasures
Commonwealth 300 Hamilton Row, Birmingham 248-792-9766 Everyone recognizes something cool when they see it — that jaw-dropping, head-scratching, eyebrow-raising sense of awe that elicits a "Daaaaaaamn." Be ready to experience that sensation upon entering Commonwealth, the most recent and unmistakably hip addition to Birmingham’s dining scene. The obvious consideration put into the decor and atmosphere…
TV sigh
Peter King, the indefatigable pro football reporter for NBC and Sports Illustrated, writes a weekly column for SI during football season called "Things I Think I Think." It’s a wonderful title, and I wish I’d thought of it. But with all the lockout-lawsuit-union decertification nonsense going on in the NFL these days, no one can…
Kinks – Kinks, Kinda Kinks, The Kinks Kontroversy
Kinks – Kinks, Kinda Kinks, The Kinks Kontroversy Sanctuary Backwash None of the schoolboys, stooges and nutjobs from the initial wave of British Invasion bands had a deeper understanding of the black American music being mimicked than Ray Davies; it’s tough to imagine any of the Kinks’ peers so persuasively dismantling Sleepy John Estes’ "Milk…
Spun
FRIGHT FROM THE BINS The Animals on Tour (MGM, 1965) Hard to believe, but there really was a time before the invention of artistic control when rock albums were as casually tossed out as The Animals on Tour was. The brain-busting that must’ve rocked the offices of MGM Records to arrive at this dog-eared artifact…
Doug Halladay’s new beginning
If you know the Detroit jazz scene, you may recognize Doug Halladay as a cat who’s often around it. If you go back far enough, you know him as a trumpeter. But his music takes center stage this week like never before in New Beginnings: A Jazz Benefit to Fight Leukemia. It brings together his…
Happy Campers
When Liz Wittman was playing bass and singing for indie-pop trio the Friendly Foes alongside Ryan Allen, there was much to admire in how their voices blended, and how the raven-haired Wittman handled her instrument and looked demurely cool doing it. There was little to suggest that, without the bass and allowed the freedom of…
Letter of the law
Oakland County continues to be one of the toughest battlefronts around medical marijuana in the state. There seem to be more high-profile cases around the issue there because County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper and County Sheriff Mike Bouchard have decided to take on medical marijuana in a very high-profile manner. But maybe they’re just taking cues…
Burton Theatre closing it’s doors. Long live the Burton!
In a major blow to film lovers and to anyone who believes in the viability of the art scene in Detroit, The Burton Theatre is ceasing operations at it’s Cass Corridor location, effective immediately. Over the last two years the inventive, relentlessly plucky dudes behind the upstart cinema in the old Burton International School had…
