BREAKING THE SILENCE
Local musician Dennis Liegghio was 14 years old when his father committed suicide. It naturally led to depression, but Liegghio eventually channeled that depression into music and his local band, Student Driver. Suicide is an epidemic in this country, and part of Liegghio’s crusade is to educate the public. To that end, he has compiled…
NEIL: AND THE KIDS UNDERSTAND…
Neil Young at the Fox Theatre Saturday, Nov. 11 How sweet to see a bunch of pubescent kids at a Neil Young show; lots of high school fringe, unruly manes and tender-aged sideburns among the squat greybeards. And there was no shortage of dad-son combos. (Blanket statement of the week: Rock ’n’ roll was played…
Heroes and scoundrels
Voter info grab represents Lansing bipartisanism at its basest.
Summer ’04
Precocious 12-year-old Livia (Svea Lohde) has come to stay with her petulant boyfriend Nils’ (Lucas Kotaranin) family. Mature beyond her years, she meets and then begins sailing with a cheerful hunk named Bill (Robert Seeliger). Unfortunately Bill is easily in his 30s and Nils’s mother, Miriam (Martina Gedeck), becomes deeply suspicious of their “friendship.” One…
Mecca mirth
Be ye not afraid, or hesitant: Apparently it’s all right — encouraged, even — to laugh at funny Muslims on TV situation comedies. Nowhere in North America is that reassurance needed more than metro Detroit, particularly in and around Dearborn, home to the largest concentration of Arab-speaking people outside the Middle East. You see, a…
Cosmic cowboys
"Slow down, there’s only so much you can do," singers Kurt Marschke and Masha of the Deadstring Brothers gently harmonize on this album’s track of the same name. It’s one of the more wistful cuts amid the bluesy rave-ups found on the rest of the album. Yet it’s also still ripe with the Americana and…
STFU!
We had great seats but, alas, we also had the Biggest Bruce Springsteen Fan in the World directly in front of us and he was dead-set on letting everyone in the vicinity know that he was the BBSFITW all night long. He was standing 45 minutes before the show began and remained standing, pumping both…
Hey Venus!
These are some creative sum-bitches! If you haven’t hopped on the Super Furry Animal spacecraft yet, you better get to it! The last Super Furry Animals experience, Love Kraft, was a ship adrift on the slower waves of psychedelic rock. It was beautiful but it also toned down the special effects the band displayed on…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Our speedy music crit digs through the stacks.
Two of Diamonds
Mick Harvey is God’s gift to public radio (or what used to be public radio), turning his listeners on to the great obscure songbook the way Nina Simone or Johnny Cash did with their own covers albums. The difference is that Harvey is content to play second fiddle, as he has done as musical director…
Out of the park
When Erica Chappuis looked over the backyard deck at her empty garage wall two years ago, she saw a blank canvas. So the Grosse Pointe Park artist fastened some recycled doors together, painted two figures dancing on them and hung the artwork in her backyard. Next to it she filled the rest of the garage…
Lights in the Dusk
When watching a movie by the Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismäki, you have to remember to accustom yourself to silences. His movies are so grim, scrappy and loaded with irony, it’s best to just succumb to the emptiness and try to fill in the blanks yourself. You’ll have plenty of voids to contemplate in Lights in…
Legendary Detroit
Have you ever driven down Knock-Knock Street? Been menaced by the White Lady of Tanglewood Drive? Run screaming from the Werewolf of Grosse Pointe? The 18th-century legend of Le Loup Garou, the east side wolfman, doesn’t get much press these days. And it’s hard to find Knock-Knock Street, where a child ghost, victim of a hit-and-run,…
Fete accompli
Randi Rhodes speaks, John Conyers watches, at Peace Action event.
45:33
Alone among dance-music royalty, James Murphy’s greatest attribute is his “normal dude” status. Where his peers dress up like robots or put on airs, Murphy exudes a snarky, slacker-like demeanor. As LCD Soundsystem, his songs draw from punk and pop as much as they do disco and techno, often filled with sly, self-depreciating lyrics about…
For the record
Melvins Smash the State EP Amphetamine Reptile It’s hard to tell if the Melvins are serious here or just taking the piss out of early ’80s hardcore schlock. Accompanied by Tom Hazelmeyer (of Halo of Flies), this blitzkrieg of brutal punk-politik is the same shit Violent Ramp was doing five years ago. Available only at…
Motor City Cribs
Inside Stirling Silver’s carriage house pad.
It takes three
How to approach the “holy grail” of sex.
Letters to the Editor
Blind justice Thanks for your excellent cover story in Metro Times (“Courting controversy,” Nov. 7). I’ve been following the juror issue closely and find that all too many in my community complain about the perceived lack of peers on juries. Yet in reality, until residents step up to the plate, respond to jury summonses and…
‘Tell us your tale’
On four dark-brown boxes sit four poised performers. On the floor to their right sit two additional performers surrounded by small instruments: handheld drums, shakers, jingle bells, harmonicas, kazoos and the like. An engaging “conductor” leads a jittery audience member to a special seat left of the eager cast. This is the beginning of an…
Night and Day
Wednesday-Saturday • 14-24 Walking With Dinosaurs RRRRAAAAAWWWRRRRR Back in the old days, when dinosaurs were but dusty bones in dusty museums, it was hard to visualize the “terrible lizards” that once ruled the earth. There was Godzilla and some stilted animation that was fan-bloody-tastic, but ogling the devoured Japanese did little to teach the kids…
Coens’ Country
If you ran into the Coen brothers at a party, you’d write ’em off as socially awkward weirdos best left alone. Joel, the older Coen bro at 53, is the more talkative of the two. The younger Ethan, 50, speaks as little as possible, but, when he does, he bubbles with an energy that seems…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Wasted talent?
DL Jones isn’t the first name that comes to mind when one thinks of Detroit hip hop. Hell, it’s not even the second or third. But with his new album, Wasted Talent, Jones has a shot at something more than just being another Detroit also-ran. The album is his first — but it’s a pretty…
Crowd-pleasers
I’m a 24-year-old heterosexual male who’s been in a monogamous relationship with a 26-year-old GGG girl for about a year and a half. During this time, we’ve more or less constantly expanded our sexual boundaries, to the point where we were planning on going to a sex club here in Tokyo (we’re both expatriates) in…
Too cool for school
Some guys are simply cool cats, and 76-year-old Detroiter Kasuku Mafia is one man who’s brimming with throwback hipness. “Gimme some skin!” he exclaims, extending a hand as he answers the door of his Success Academy of Fine Arts, on Ridgewood near Livernois and Grand River avenues on Detroit’s west side. He’s slim as a…
Winks & winces
Stranger: Bernie Worrell on Earth MVD The fat, funky bass line that defined the sound of Parliament’s biggest hits such as “Flashlight”? That came from Bernie Worrell. Thing is, Bernie Worrell isn’t a bassist; he’s a keyboard player. As one of the many musicians whose all-pervasive influence lies invisible until it’s made obvious, Worrell has…
Culinary contender
Ex-boxer Al Irish gets into the food fight.
Fusion power
Founded on the principles of elegance, creativity and freshness, Bambu has been serving for just about a year now. Lunchtime sees the largest crowds, drawn by creative panini varieties. For $9, order a Cubano panino filled with such pleasures as shaved prosciutto, honey turkey and avocado. The French Connection is packed with Black Forest ham…
Torch Song
Grace Detroit sashays onto the stage at Cliff Bell’s wearing a flowing green number that sports wings and antennae. The bug-woman costume isn’t her usual wardrobe as hostess and emcee of Torch with a Twist, the cabaret event that takes over the downtown bar once a month. “Torch night” has become a masquerade ball. In…
Lions For Lambs
Lions for Lambs is all lecture. At this point in the Iraq debate, it’s the last thing you want to hear — that is, what you already know — over and over again, for 90 straight minutes. Lions focuses on earnest professor Malley (played by Redford, who also happens to be the movie’s director) lecturing…
Too big to fail?
The fall of Citigroup is a resonant political event — akin to the Republican Party’s failure to win reform of Social Security — only this time the bell tolls for the Democratic Party. The creation of Citigroup as an all-purpose financial supermarket and too-big-to-fail banking marvel was very much the accomplishment of Clinton Democrats. They…
Southland Tales
After earning critical praise and cult-hit status for his clever and hauntingly poignant depiction of human time travel in Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly delivers Southland Tales, a pointlessly convoluted and relentlessly pretentious fever dream. Trimmed by 20 minutes (if you can imagine) after its implosion at the Cannes Film Festival, this byzantine pastiche of post-modern…
Food Stuff
Beer and TV in Detroit, kooky art in Ferndale.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
The sad truth is that for all of its tantalizing elements, the film is essentially a drab little thriller that deserved a quick-and-trashy presentation, with an ample injection of jet-black humor. Instead, it has received a ponderous, would-be Shakespearean makeover from a long-in-the-tooth director and a talented but overindulged cast. What should’ve been an underrated…
