City Slang: The Verve Pipe bag up the holidays
Mega-selling Lansing alterna-rockers the Verve Pipe will be performing at the Magic Bag in Ferndale on Friday, December 16 at 8 p.m. Cover is $20. The show, the Verve Pipe’s third annual holiday homecoming concert, will be opened by local indie rockers Crashing Cairo. According to the press release, “With sales of three million albums…
City Slang: Detroit Symphony Orchestra brings the joy
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra will perform the annual Home For the Holidays show between Friday, December 16 and Sunday, December 18. Prices start at $19. According to the website, “Leonard Slatkin conducts Detroit’s favorite holiday musical tradition. Share it with family and friends, and thrill to the spectacle of the season. It’s a sparkling holiday…
Recommended recent spins: Surfer Blood; The Bats
Surfer Blood Tarot Classics EP (Kanine) For all the fierce hype that initially greeted Florida’s Surfer Blood, their debut album Astro Coast didn’t receive the attention it deserved, and it’s hard to say what intrigued Warner Bros. about the sweet, emotionally heavy surf-rock revivalists. The foursome can’t escape trials of maturity and the fame hangover…
City Slang: Two proto-punk guitarists are now bobble-heads
Two legendary Detroit guitarists, Wayne Kramer of the MC5 and James Williamson of the Raw Power and current lineup of the Stooges have been immortalized in the form of bobble-head statuettes. The two figures are actually really fucking cool. Both have a little speaker and, with a push of a button, play a riff synonymous…
City Slang: Mike Watt prepares Spielgusher album
Stooges bassist Mike Watt will release the new album by his Spielgusher project on January 12, 2012. Watt likes to keep busy with a variety of oddball endeavors, and Spielgusher is no different. According to the bio, “The story of spielgusher begins at what would be near the end of the minutemen. me and d.…
City Slang: Ozzy drummer goes back to school
Detroit native and drummer for Ozzy Osbourne, Tommy Clufetos, will be coming home to teach a clinic at Adams High School Auditorium on Tuesday, December 13 at 6.30 p.m. Cover is $10. According to a statement, “Tommy Clufetos, drummer for Ozzy Osbourne, will be in town Tuesday, December 13 performing an educational drum clinic at…
Chuck Jackson: Soul man returns to Detroit
Chuck Jackson, the soulful baritone responsible for such early ’60s hits as “I Don’t Want to Cry” and “Any Day Now” is returning to Detroit for the second time this year (he “played” at the Jazz Fest this summer — all of a song or two before he was rained out). This time, at Bert’s…
Mr. Dick goes to Hollywood
Hollywood has a crush on Philip K. Dick. There have been 11 adaptations based on Dick’s fiction so far with no signs of a slowdown. Just this year saw the release of The Adjustment Bureau (based on "The Adjustment Team"), and, if reports are true, adaptations for "The King of the Elves" and Ubik are…
Now read this
1) Ubik — Though no Dick novel stands so far above the others that it can be labeled seminal, Ubik comes closest. The pinnacle of Dick’s "What is Real?" era, Ubik contains the moments of reality-bending weirdness we expect in a tighter package. There are no lapses in plot, as can sometimes happen in a…
$4.1 million question: Why did Detroit incinerator deserve tax credits
What happened over the past half year that suddenly caused the owners of Detroit’s waste-to-energy incinerator to be worthy of $4.1 million in state brownfield tax credits? Back in April, the Detroit City Council voted against allocating the tax credits to the incinerator’s new owner, Detroit Renewable Power, for new equipment and site improvements. On…
City Slang: “Rev Up!!” revisited
Back when I was living in England and obsessing over the Stooges, Iggy Pop, the MC5, Alice Cooper and Bob Seger, I remembering hearing the name Mitch Ryder and that of his Detroit Wheels again and again. By all accounts, he was the golden boy of Detroit rock ’n’ roll, the soulful voice with the…
The K.I.D.S are alright
If there was ever an eternal truth that sits comfortably alongside "everybody dies eventually," it’s that breaking up is hard to do. Sometimes, it’s fucking hard. And if the relationship that no longer exists was in the public eye, as was that of Deleano Acevedo and Marcie Bolen (otherwise known as electro-indie duo Silverghost and…
Got live if you want it!
Just as baseball fans revere athletic lineups like the Tigers of 1984 or the Yankees of 1961, jazz fans can recite short-lived aggregations like the Great Coltrane Quartet, the Ellington Band of 1939-41 and the two great Miles Davis quintets. The first of the Miles units was the 1950s band with John Coltrane. The classic…
Philip K. Dick keeps it (un)real
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem Imagine you’re a regular guy named Joe Chip, a technician and evaluator of psychic-blocking talent. You and your boss, Glen Runciter, assemble a team for an important mission on the moon. You land, there is an explosion,…
Arthur Christmas
Arthur Christmas B Arthur Christmas | B The North Pole as a vast, industrialized bureaucracy is a popular theme at the movies, as seen in Fred Claus, The Polar Express, The Santa Clause and others. Heck, we’ve even seen an Easter variant this year with Hop. Yet Arthur Christmas takes it to extremes, converting Santa’s…
Amsterdam’s Cannabis Cup a tourist draw
Highest greetings from the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, where I’m enjoying the heady ambience of this society where they just don’t care if you want to get high and where a couple thousand American youths are staggering around this week flashing their judge’s badges and sampling the wares of the city’s 250 coffee shops. About…
Food Stuff
Parade rests Going to the Detroit Thanksgiving Day Parade? There are plenty of places along its staging area and route to warm up, chill out or fill up. The Majestic Complex presents a "sumptuous breakfast feast" on the big day, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting the Coalition on Temporary Shelter. That morning’s menu…
Letters to the Editor
Econ 101 Mexican drug cartels are no doubt thrilled with state Attorney General Bill Schuette’s efforts to undermine Michigan’s voter-approved medical marijuana law. As long as there is a demand for marijuana, there will be a supply. This is basic economics. Replacing domestic growers with organized crime groups that also sell cocaine, meth and heroin…
Are Bing and council playing politics over our budget crisis
I’m kind of clueless as to the reason for Mayor Dave Bing’s big speech on the city’s finances last week. Not that our cash-strapped situation isn’t worth addressing. But immediately after the Nov. 16 speech, a City Council member disavowed it, saying the mayor’s suggestions had not gone far enough in addressing the budget shortfall.…
Low dough X-mas
Holiday shopping is such a chore. It’s not even the crowds or the long lines — it’s just the plain monotony of staring at a shelf full of junk and trying to decide if any man ever really needs one more tie. The key, then, is to make shopping more of an activity. To make…
Hugo
Hugo B Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Brian Selznick’s gorgeously illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret is more for film-lovers than filmgoers. That’s less of a compliment than you might think. From its magically executed opening, a dazzling 3-D shot that descends from the heavens, races along the Parisian railways, careens through the hustle…
Holiday Gift Guide
The holidays are here, and we can’t think of a better time to resurrect our inner consumer. (Nor can we think of a better time to sneakily besot ourselves on dollar-store eggnog!) Our handy little gift guide should help you with ideas that’ll appeal to even the most discerning 99 percenter, from anti-DUI breathalyzers to…
Detroit — in books!
National interest in Detroit has never been keener, but this year’s bevy of Detroit books range all over the spectrum, and includes some homegrown talents that are hard to ignore. Chief among them would be Richard Bak. Best known for his fascinating contributions to another local magazine (Hour, if you ask), Bak’s new book, Detroitland…
Can’t go for that
Q: I’m 26, straight and male. I consider myself a socially progressive person, have been a vocal supporter of LGBT issues since high school, and was president of my college Gay-Straight Alliance. Here’s my issue: I fully support the trans community. I have numerous friends in varying states of transition and I’m 100 percent behind…
Melancholia
Melancholia B- When one of the film’s protagonists proclaims, "The earth is evil. No one will grieve for it," you know you’re in for rocky seas. In fact, the first eight minutes of Lars von Trier’s film is a visually ravishing series of apocalyptic postcards. Dead birds fall from the sky like black snow, a…
Rock ‘n’ roll X-Mas
Rock literature aficionados shouldn’t be surprised to find oral histories on the likes of Men Without Hats, and still others devoted to the wit and wisdom of shock-rock "punk" cult hero GG Allin, in our near future. Such a prediction may not be totally fair to Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s I Want My…
Miracle mile
Miracle mile Joseph Campau is the place for bargain-basement gift shopping Is your gift-giving on a shoestring this year? You’re not alone. Luckily, you can penny-pinch your way down Hamtramck’s main drag and still stuff those stockings. Recycled Treasures 12101 Joseph Campau • 313-826-7158 recycledtreasureshamtramck.org At the top of Hamtramck, this little resale…
Riffs & things
Gene Clark Dillard & Clark White Light Roadmaster Sundazed Once guitarist-songwriter Gene Clark quit the Byrds in 1966, leaving behind "Eight Miles High," "I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better" and others (all penned before his 21st birthday), his career was never the same, pop-star wise. Neither were the Byrds, for that matter —…
My Week with Marilyn
My Week with Marilyn Directed by Simon Curtis. Written by Adrian Hodges, based on the diaries of Colin Clark. Starring Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne and Emma Watson. Rated R. Running time: 99 minutes. Rated R. B Playing an icon is often a thankless job, especially when the images of the subject at hand…
Barrio offers upscale Mexican in Birmingham
Barrio 203 Hamilton Row, Birmingham 248-593-6060 Handicap accessible Tacos: $11-$14 for three Barrio in Birmingham? I don’t have to guide you, readers; you can riff on that oxymoronic oddity of a name yourselves. (They at least could have called it Barrio Heights.) Barrio is the Dali Group’s third try in two-and-a-half years at 203 Hamilton,…
Detroit’s death spiral
During the press conference Dave Bing held last Friday to announce that he would be laying off 1,000 city workers in an attempt to keep the city from running out of money next year, News Hits had a question for the Detroit mayor, who readily admitted that the cuts will certainly have a significant, negative…
The Muppets
The Muppets Directed by James Bobin. Written by Segel and Nicholas Stoller. Starring Jason Segel, Amy Adams, Chris Cooper, Rashida Jones, Steve Whitmire and Peter Linz. Running time: 102 minutes. B Muppet mania lives deep inside the heart of Generation X, a universal passion as profound and bottomless as the baby boomers undying affection…
The Decendants
The Descendants B On its surface, The Descendants seems like a typical Alexander Payne project (About Schmidt, Sideways). It’s another road movie about a sad-hearted man who sometimes behaves ridiculously in search for the truth about himself. It has a rambling family of complicated characters whose motivations aren’t easily summed up. And it has…
Tragi-comic
Guest Starring Managing Editor Brian Smith MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus Art Spiegelman $35, 352 pp., plus DVD Pantheon
Chuck Jackson: Soul man returns to Detroit
Chuck Jackson, the soulful baritone responsible for such early ’60s hits as "I Don’t Want to Cry" and "Any Day Now," is returning to Detroit for the second time this year (he "played" at the Jazz Fest this summer — all of a song or two before he was rained out). He’ll perform this Friday…
An Emergency Manager could be what Detroit needs
"Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I don’t want an emergency manager making decisions for my city." —Detroit Mayor Dave Bing "The city of Detroit DOES NOT need an Emergency Manager!!! BING JUST NEEDS TO SHOW SOME DAMN LEADERSHIP…" —City Council President Charles Pugh, via Facebook. What I am about to say…
City Slang: Weekly music review roundup
Remember – if you send it, it will get reviewed. That’s the City Slang promise. It doesn’t matter what genre the music is – as long as it has a Metro Detroit connection, it’ll get in. Preferably, we’d like to concentrate on new releases but, while we’re getting warmed up here, feel free to send…
Muddy Waters and What’s Wrong With The New Chrysler 300 Commerical
The folks at Wieden+Kennedy have done it again. The Portland, OR-based full services advertising firm created yet another strong commercial for the Chrysler 300. They’re the same folks behind the successful Chrysler ad featuring Eminem and can be credited with helping the now surging automaker appear hip and relevant at a time when, only a…
