MITTENFEST IV SCHEDULED FOR NEW YEAR’S WEEKEND
Our expatriate Michigan friend Brandon Zwagerman, who makes his home in New York these days, is presenting his fourth annual Mittenfest at Ypsilanti’s Elbow Room in late December. This year, it actually starts the afternoon of New Year’s Eve — and then runs through Monday, January 4th. That’s 40 bands in four days, for those…
GOOBER & THE PEAS REUNION…!
December 26th, at St. Andrew’s Hall… (Drummer “Doc” Gillis will probably not appear, though. Seems he left Detroit some time ago and no one is really certain of his whereabouts…)
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION: MT ON SATELLITE RADIO THIS WEEKEND
Just got word from show producer and local publicist extraordinaire Kim Silarski that this weekend’s Motor City Hayride, Don Was’ weekly satellite radio program on Little Steven’s “outlaw” radio network, will feature an interview with MT’s music editor Bill Holdship (um, that would be me, shamelessly writing in the third person today). Also featured on…
Yet another bridge suit
Add “exit ramps” to the list of issues being litigated by the Detroit International Bridge Co. and its leader, Manuel “Matty” Moroun. The Warren-based company filed suit this week in the Michigan Court of Claims against the Michigan Department of Transportation, claiming the state is delaying opening ramps from Interstates 75 and 96 to the…
Cass class
The two men sitting side by side couldn’t be more different. One is a dignified former college professor who quit his university job so he could teach people how to read. The other is an animated ex-con fresh out of jail who visits the teacher every day just to be in his presence, as if…
Time for Thanksgiving
This has been a painful, bruising year for our entire state. Unemployment has soared past what the leading economists predicted. The state has slashed spending for schools, scholarships and cities. And when it comes to tough times, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost jobs this year, and lots more are…
Muchas gracias!
With two turkeys dominating our thoughts tomorrow — the one on our dinner table and the other playing the Packers at Ford Field — it’s time for your idiot box watcher to perform his annual holiday rite of celebrating those things for which he is truly thankful. I give thanks for: • My health, because…
Motor City Rides
Ty Stone has been a Detroit star-in-waiting for nearly three years. With Kid Rock’s help, Stone landed a contract with Atlantic Records. Since then he’s recorded enough songs to put out a box set, and he supported Kid Rock on his arena Rock N Roll Jesus tour. As you read this, someone at Atlantic is…
Detroit gets booked
For a city that’s shrinking, Detroit sure gets a lot of play on the bookshelves. From appealing photographic books to auto histories to poetry anthologies, there’s plenty of paper to stuff a stocking with this year. Take Up the Rouge! (Wayne State, $34.95), for instance. Former Freep journo and active Detroit blogger Joel Thurtell tells…
New trials and their tribulations
In the course of doing her job — reporting and photographing the scene of a fatal accident involving Michigan state police a year ago — Diane Bukowski got arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced earlier this year. A jury found her guilty of resisting arrest and obstructing a police officer. Now a judge has given the…
Hanging around the scene
The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue 1957-1965 by Sam Stephenson Alfred A. Knopf, $40, 270 pp. Sounds like a novel plot, doesn’t it? In the late ’50s, a world-famous (and drug-addicted) photographer retreats to a Manhattan building at the artsy intersection of high-life and low-life, a…
Tribulations, and maybe a trial
The Detroit man freed from prison earlier this month after a judge threw out his 2001 murder conviction, Dwayne Provience, got a little more freedom this week. But a new trial remains possible, the prosecutor maintains. And the drama surrounding his case isn’t over. For example, attorneys say the Detroit police can’t find files related…
‘I began writing in mystery’
For Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and poet Philip Levine, the small details of everyday life have always been newsworthy. From the awkward stumble of coming of age in a blue-collar town to the dirt-under-your-fingernails reality of factory labor, he’s paying attention to lackluster circumstances and spinning them into gold. Levine was born in Detroit in 1928.…
2009 Metro Times Gift Guide
Greetings, faithful readers, and welcome to our consumerist manual to International Western Commerce Season! … Er, better, our guide of handpicked holiday giftables for those folks you love and those you pretend to love (and if you yourself are among the latter, please watch for our upcoming self-esteem issue). It’s another on-the-cheap season, to be…
Easy Riders
Eleven inches of Christmas Don Wand’s Candy Cane pleasure wand is pretty enough to hang on your Christmas tree! But you might want to keep it tucked away in your nightstand drawer come X-mas, lest grandma mistake it for the real thing (um, candy, that is). The 11-inch-long, break-resistant glass toy is about an…
Viva la revolution!
When you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired — that is, when folks in high places don’t want you and me to enjoy ourselves — well, shit, Detroit dance music people, it’s time to get off your asses and start thinking about a little revolution! That’s exactly what Aaron-Carl did. But he went…
Slip ’em a disc
The Doors Live in New York: The Felt Forum Concerts Rhino The Doors were always more popular in New York City than they were anywhere else; the liner notes in the accompanying booklet to this box set attribute it to the more intellectual nature of Manhattanites. Whatever the case, after selling out huge venues in…
Cheat code
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Infinity Ward Xbox 360, PS3, PC There once was a time when you knew who your enemy was. The good guys wore white; the bad guys wore black and usually sported sweet handlebar mustaches. In wartime, telling who fought for what army was as easy as uniform color. Alas,…
A little bent
Q: I am a 29-year-old single straight man. Over the past year, I have become very close friends with a gay man close to my age. We have a blast hanging out, and I value our friendship. Four months ago, he told me that he had developed romantic feelings for me and said he needed…
Swingin’ X-mas party
Look, buying video games is hard enough when you’re buying for yourself, but to compound the fact, it’s practically impossible to purchase one for someone else. With myriad choices out there, just finding the right game is daunting. So here are a few suggestions so that you don’t get the forced old Christmas fib of…
Food Stuff
Home, sweet, home — What does it say when a Michigan restaurant weathers 25 years, several recessions and actually grows to three locations? It says you’re talking not of a restaurant but of an institution: Sweet Lorraine’s. It has been a quarter of a century since chef Lorraine Platman and her husband, Gary Sussman, opened…
New moon falling
Mopey but precocious Bella (Kristen Stewart) is caught in a love triangle. On one side is the vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson), her alabaster emo lover who frets over her safety and the integrity of her soul. On the other is Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), her childhood friend who has blossomed into a tortured hunk. You…
Literary largesse
Real Life & Liars by Kristina Riggle Avon A-HarperCollins, $13.99, pp. 327 Playing off the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina — "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — Grand Rapids-based Kristina Riggle sweeps readers into a family drama in her debut novel, Real Life & Liars.…
The Blind Side
Sandra Bullock is sensational as Leanne Tuohy, a spitfire Memphis matriarch who runs her well-heeled family with queen grace and drill-sergeant precision. But Tuohy’s a benevolent ruler; when she discovers one of her kid’s junior high classmates is homeless, she takes him in, ignoring the country club gossips. The taciturn boy looks more like a…
Sonic supreme
Marvin Gaye What’s Going On (Gold CD/SACD Hybrid) Let’s Get it On (Gold CD/SACD Hybrid) Tamla/Mobile Fidelity The absolute last sonic word on the two best Marvin Gaye albums comes packaged in lovely cardboard mini-LP sleeves, each open-gate, including all original art and credits. The disc itself arrives in a felt protector-holder. Mobile Fidelity Sound…
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
In an award-worthy performance, Mo’Nique plays mom, a foul, hateful creature who calls her daughter a “worthless fat bitch” whose only value is as a monthly government check. Continually abused at home, Precious can’t begin to fathom her schoolwork; she daydreams about having a handsome “light-skinned boyfriend” who’ll buy her fancy things and treat her…
Money’s no object
The bubbly Consider a gift you might be lucky enough to share a week later: the perfect bottle of (real French) Champagne. Dan McCarthy, of Cost Plus Wines in Eastern Market, recommends Krug Grande Cuvee. At about $120 a bottle, it’s not as pricey as other notable French spirits. But McCarthy says it’s better than…
More than takeout
Midtown’s Shangri-La has a quirky interior, extremely attentive servers, and excellent dim sum, those small plates that are something like Chinese tapas. Most dim-sum are $2.95 to $3.50, and most offer a bite or so for at least three diners. Teeny pancakes laden with garlic and chives, crisp dumplings, lilliputian spare ribs in a sweet…
Rockin’ reads
Full disclosure: Two of the books I’m enthusiastically endorsing this year — Harvey Kubernik’s Canyon of Dreams: The Magic & Music of Laurel Canyon (Sterling, $29.95) and Robert Hilburn’s Cornflakes With John Lennon & Other Tales from a Rock ‘N’ Roll Life (Rodale, $24.99) — were written by friends of mine. I hung out with…
No country for anyone
It probably seems odd to praise a film that, in the end, exhausts its audience. And John Hillcoat’s faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is just that: two hours of bleak tension that anyone would be hard-pressed to call entertaining. The apocalypse has come. We don’t know why or how; we just know that…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 25 The Jesus Lizard DO YOU THINK YOU’D LIKE THAT? The Jesus Lizard formed in ’87, helping usher in a new era where screwed-up malcontents of an underground rock scene battled against the glossy image of the pop star. The Chicago-via Austin quartet made grating, abrasive and glorious noise rock with frontman David…
It’s in the 313, baby
It’s been a belt-tightening kind of year, but, despite the economic turmoil, the indie biz in metro Detroit is still kicking. New stores are opening — many within the supposed retail desert of Detroit itself — and old ones are hanging on with white-knuckled determination. And organizations and individuals are taking action to ensure that…
Fantastic Mr. Fox
George Clooney enthusiastically leaps in as the arrogant Mr. Fox, who gave up his days of livestock thievery to placate his wife (voiced by Meryl Streep) and raise a family. Now a newspaper writer, he has a stable home life, neurotic son (voiced by Jason Schwartzman) and a deep longing to be true to his…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Letters to the Editor
Open letter to retailers You want me back? Stop charging high interest rates. I’m tired of being charged 18 percent interest even though I always pay my bill on time. I also don’t understand why you raised my interest rate even though I pay my bill on time and always pay more than the minimum…
Ninja Assassin
This film’s plot concerns a pair of bland Interpol dolts dedicated to tracking down and stopping these elusive Ninja clans, who serve as an elite murder cabal, offing anyone for the low fee of 100 pounds of gold. The cops get a major assist from charismatic renegade ninja Raizo (played sleekly by a J-pop singer…
Drinksgiving!
Arbor Brewing Company Pub & Eatery 114 E. Washington St., Ann Arbor; 734-213-1393: More than a beer-geek hangout, Arbor typifies everything you hope to find in a pub: a nice selection of well-prepared food that transcends pub grub, good local music, and — oh, yes — beer, most of it brewed on-premises. It varies season…
Pickup lines
When it comes to curbside recycling in Detroit, city officials and activists looking to boost participation in a pilot program are hoping children can help lead the way to a greener future. It’s help that is definitely needed. In place since July 1, Detroit’s pilot program offers curbside recycling to about 30,000 households in select…
35 Shots of Rum
Lionel is heartsick widower, quietly toiling as a Parisian train conductor, silently watching the world stream past him. We see many POV shots of subway cars charging forward, but, like Lionel’s own life, the film runs at a more deliberate pace. He lives with Josephine, his pretty, university-student daughter, in a drab high-rise somewhere in…
JESSE REJOINS PEACHES & OTHER LOCAL TIDBITS
Original founding member Jesse Shepherd-Bates (JSB Squad, Mick Bassett & the Marthas) has rejoined the Satin Peaches. As the band’s Aaron Nelson told MT: “We’re now back to our original lineup and can’t wait to get things rolling. Deep down, I think we all knew this would be happening someday. We’re going in the studio…
