Dishonor roll
Knollenberg, McCotter and Miller won’t break with prez.
One Year
The Zombies broke up as “Time of the Season” began its eternal reign on radio and singer Colin Blunstone took a job at an insurance company. The lure of the cubicle versus the recording studio eventually tipped in favor of his recording this 1971 solo album. With the members of Argent backing him on three…
TV acceptable?
As mainstream media spills oceans of ink fretting and blathering about the “YouTube revolution” and the “democratization of entertainment,” one question remains: What’s it all mean? Sure, watching tiny clips of “lonely girls,” Star Wars dorks and lip-synching teens is a good way to kill cubicle hours, but man can’t live on skateboarder face plants…
Green cut
The guv will get back to that environmental justice issue … later.
Motor City Cribs
Denaun Porter: Working with everyone from Busta Rhymes to Burt Bacharach.
Media mutters
Chomsky, Herman, Goodman and more at Windsor confab.
Night and Day
Thursday • 10 StoryCorps Griot COMMUNITY Here’s a fabulous opportunity to preserve some personal history. As part of a one-year initiative to gather the life stories of African-American families across the country, StoryCorps Griot will be in the D to collect personal tales of “endurance, resilience, achievement and hope.” The interview consists of a 40-minute…
So maybe I was wrong
I have been steadfastly against trying to impeach George W. Bush, even though he is clearly the worst president in the modern history of America. These were my main reasons for feeling that way: 1) Politically, I saw impeachment as absolutely impossible to bring off. 2) As bad as Bush is, I don’t want to…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
In the Mood
It’s a Monday evening at Beans & Bytes Café in downtown Detroit. The place is full of Internet surfers and cappuccino slurpers, just like any other night. Moody is hunched over, elbow on table and chin on fist, listening quietly as his manager Kasha Story and label head G-Raw discuss his future with the same…
Walk of fame
The Tribeca Film Festival launched a few months after Sept. 11, 2001 with the express goal of drawing New Yorkers to a downtown area devastated by the attacks on the nearby World Trade Center. What began as a rallying cry for a beleaguered neighborhood has grown exponentially into New York City’s largest — and most…
She’s the boss
Joss Stone is a 20-year-old from Devon in southeast England with Julia Stiles’ lithe body, a saucy billow of long hair, a penchant for vaguely Janis Joplin hippie fashions, and an angelic, soaring voice that sounds like she grew up in a Southern Baptist gospel choir. Amy Winehouse is a 23-year-old north Londoner flaunting Dita…
Little screeners
WKRP In Cincinnati — The Complete First Season Fox Home Entertainment In the pilot of the much toasted ’70s sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, the underdog radio station draws protesters when they change format and become a rock ‘n’ roll station. Senior citizens picket the lobby and one old biddy even loses her cat, which —…
Media Blackout
“Hey Media Sellout! Why didnt u mention Wrestlemana in yor last two columns? What ahhepoend did the WWE take u off there payroll??? Who cares what u think about the Diodes whoever they are ROFL!!!! or did they pay u more to write about them insetad u crook??” That dippy epistle is just a small…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): I’m a big fan of facing your problems head-on and dealing forthrightly with your pain. But what if that approach isn’t always best? Renowned psychologist Richard Lazarus said he wanted to "challenge the view that psychological health demands full realism." He believed that some sick people get healthy faster by refusing…
Gets hard for language
The Gods of Poetry Superior Spirit, Elevated tone’s a must. It fits! Oh, how I long to write Oh, And NOT illicit eye-rolls. How I’d relish a T.S. sassy-horse, A deliciously lofty Wasteland. The Occasional Some remnants remain. This afternoon, a blue shirt and black-striped tie wear a young, well-scrubbed Italian. His lunch partner…
Purloined panties
Q: I was recently seeing an alpha-male type — Ivy League grad, big executive, loud laugh, etc. He found me on a Web site, one thing led to another, and he was showing me pictures of him in his ex-girlfriend’s panties! We went out for the first of many coffee dates and it ended with…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Dear Heartbreaker
“They’re kinda girly,” says Metro Times’ arts editor, as she hands me a slim pack of stationery and a hardcover journal, both decorated with art by pop master Glenn Barr. He’s “Detroit’s own,” the stationery’s publisher reminds us, as if we never heard of the guy. Across the top of each sheet, dewy-eyed hipster chicks…
A pleasing ratio
More formal than its immediate predecessor, Caffe Milano, Pi flaunts heavy linen tablecloths, elegant oversized white china in a variety of interesting shapes, dramatic white ceiling-to-floor curtains separating the lively tapas bar from the two main dining areas and a professional wait staff smartly attired in black. Averaging around $9, the seven starters may be…
Monster full-color double-truck
Fantagraphics’ new bestiary of imaginary creatures is beautifully illustrated and handsomely produced, a credit to any art lover’s library. But for all its coffee table pretentions, Beasts! ($28.95, 200 pp.) will feel strangely familiar to nerds of a certain age. It is, after all, just an elaborate update of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster…
Web of plots
The first Spider-Man movie was good, the second was great, this one … well, it sure is big. Clocking in at 2 hours, 20 minutes, Spider-Man 3 embraces the “more is more” philosophy, proving that a little bit of everything ends up giving you not enough of anything. (You’d think that Sam Raimi would have…
Art Bar
I’ve talked a lot in this column about poetry as celebration, about the way in which a poem can make an ordinary experience seem quite special. Here’s the celebration of a moment on a campus somewhere, anywhere. The poet is Juliana Gray, who lives in New York. I especially like the little comic surprise with…
Lucky You
High-stakes poker players are one ugly-ass bunch. They’re either gaunt, pasty and pear-shaped, like they’ve managed to shape-shift themselves into the form of a vinyl La-Z-Boy recliner, or they’re lanky, shiny, sleazy dudes with pockmarked, orange skin. Whether they’ve seen too many or too few UV rays, chances are they’ll be draped in some loose,…
Photo op
In Carrie Williams’ first semester teaching photography at Royal Oak’s Oakland Community College, her oldest student was 74. Back then, she was a young-looking 23. Williams recalls the elderly gent’s surprise: “He looked at me like, ‘What! — you’re the instructor?” The fellow had a point. Williams’ career moves at a quick clip. A College…
The TV Set
Each year the major TV networks commission dozens of “pilots,” shooting complete test episodes of prospective series, most of which will never see light of day. Here, director Jake Kasdan smartly chronicles the agony and ecstasy of pilot season, and the often painful process of forcing art through the machinery of commerce.
Letters to the Editor
Don’t take our guns What is all of this “we” stuff Lessenberry writes about in his recent column, “Under the gun” (Metro Times, April 25)? I certainly have not asked for murder. Our gun laws work as well as possible to keep nuts and criminals away from guns and still protect the individual right to…
Pajama party!
Between the major-label ink, malcontent hipsters, and a gang of rock scribes thirsting to sip her bathwater, it seemed like Leslie Feist’s third proper solo release was destined to suffocate under impossible expectations. In turn, she did what any singer-songwriter tiptoeing on the edge of mainstream appeal might — called up a few pals and…
Soldiers of fortune
Training Iraqi soldiers in SWAT procedures didn’t seem like mercenary work to Greg, who took a yearlong leave of absence from a Midwestern police department to spend a year in Baghdad as a contract employee with a private military corporation. Sequestered at a guarded training camp near the airport, he and a team that grew…
The Abattoir Blues Tour DVD/CD
Nick Cave said in an interview once that he’d take cheap fabric to the best tailors to get his suits made to look “like a businessman whose ambitions were beyond his abilities.” The analogy could be applied to his music with the Bad Seeds over the last decade or so, when, ever since an unhappy…
Blackwater: One Man’s private army
Imagine FedEx with guns and ammo.
Dial T for This
After several albums mining the intersection of alt-country rawk and late ’80s indie crunch, this Austin act takes a bit of a left turn reminiscent of the Old ’97s dive into power pop on Satellite Rides. Gone are the ragged guitars and the thundering drums, in favor of piano-fueled pop and bright hooky strumming that…
