THE STRAIGHT TRUTH ABOUT THE GO
OR “A THANKSGIVING TURKEY STORY”…. I’ve lived in cities in various parts of this country, as well as parts of Europe, but for some reason, after 17-plus months back in the D, it unfortunately strikes me that this kind of “controversy” would only be “controversial” in a place like Detroit (and certainly only on the…
REMEMBERING SEAN FITZGERALD
We were sorry to hear of the death earlier this week of local musician Sean Fitzgerald, who was killed in an automobile accident and who our good friend Eve Doster Knepp described as “a beloved local singer/songwriter and the host of a million open mic nights.” There will be a tribute to Sean at PJ’s…
LESS JAM
Bert’s Marketplace, which kick-started the jazz jam scene in Detroit nearly a decade ago, is pulling back from two nights to one. Bill Meyer, who’s been the pianist throughout the sessions, sent us an e-mail Tuesday (Nov. 25), saying that an improved economy might help bring Wednesday’s back. We don’t have to put on our…
Detroit bound
This year, we’ve seen a profusion of books that relate to our region, rolling off the presses everywhere from national trade publishers to university presses to even local individuals. So whatever the bookworms in your life are interested in, there’s a volume related to Detroit, the state or the region that’ll fill their stockings. For…
Twilight
Bella (Kristen Stewart) is smitten with the magnetic, aloof Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), not realizing this smart, solitary heroine realizes that her beloved bad boy is actually a vampire. Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg makes the rainy small town of Forks, Wash., into a viable community instead of just a misty backdrop. Director Catherine Hardwick incorporates action…
Books abound
Few spaces satisfy as wide a spectrum of curiosities and passions as a bookstore. Bird watchers, crime trainspotters, and art obsessives are rarely in the same building on a Saturday afternoon — except when they are scouring the aisles looking for that perfect book on exactly what animates them. Whether you are merely a bibliophile…
Rock and read
There have been reports for a long time now that young people no longer read books. So maybe it’s because rock is now often music for middle-aged and old folks — but whatever the case, publishers keep publishing rock books, and as long as they do, we’ll keep spotlighting them in this annual roundup of…
Four Christmases
From their home base of San Francisco, where an inconvenient fog has spoiled their plans for a flight to Fiji, Brad (Vince Vaughn) and Kate (Reese Witherspoon) hit the road in their Land Rover for four Christmases in one day, driven by guilt and obligation. The desert ranch house where Brad’s macho father Howard (Robert…
Makin’ it under the tree
PRESERVING THE LOVE Every holiday season, self-described “aging hippie” Mary Davis gives out batches of gifts — literally. In her case, it’s batches of homemade jams and preserves. Davis first started making jams about 30 years ago, when her neighbor’s crabapple tree produced a bumper crop of the small, tart fruits. In order to make…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Spinout
Will you please rise and turn in your hymn book to Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #197! Robert Christgau — Christgau’s Consumer Guide (MSN) :: He’s the Leonard Maltin of music! James King — Gardens in the Sky: The Bluegrass Gospel of James King (Rounder) :: Like heroin or Ernie Kovacs, religious bluegrass music is an…
Synecdoche, New York
As far as ambitious, poetic and brilliant failures go, Kaufman’s directorial debut is singular in its attempt to double down on the meta-narrative. A theatrical director in Schenectady, N.Y., hypochondriac Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is obsessed with decay. Whether it’s his opening pronouncement (“I think I’m dying”), his fading marriage or his faltering career,…
Agony of the feet
Q: I AM A 28-YEAR-OLD woman who has been with my boyfriend for two years. I would call it a stable, fulfilling and kinky relationship. I consider myself GGG, and every time my boyfriend has brought up a kink or variation, I’ve been willing to try it. Some things became a permanent part of our…
Ceramic vistas
Back in art school in the 1960s, John Glick didn’t consider himself a great painter. It was only when he became a world-renowned potter and began painting with ceramic glazes that he recognized his talent for creating beautiful abstract visions with color and a brush. “I was a C+ student as a painter,” he says.…
Transporter 3
Jason Statham is former British SAS badass-turned-topflight underground courier Frank Martin. He’s kicking back at his French villa with his fishing bud (Francois Bereland) when an unannounced visitor literally crashes his pad, driving right through the expensive stonework. Soon Frank’s forcibly enlisted in a trans-Europe caper involving the mob, government kickbacks, toxic waste and a…
Motor City Cribs
SinTex’s crib, where he keeps the notebooks
The turkey dance
It’s a grimy life. You spend way too much time in beer- and liquor-stained rooms, inhale plumes of smoke, get jostled and bumped by intoxicated geeks and freaks, expose your sensitive eardrums to some of the planet’s most intense sustained sonic vibrations. Yes, it can get ugly down there in the dark among the mongoloids…
Brace for impact
These are doubtless the most uncertain times we have faced in the state since we started forecasting the Michigan economy [in 1972] … the hard times are here to stay for a while —George Fulton, economics professor, University of Michigan. Worse and worse. That’s the outlook for Michigan’s economy, with virtually every bit of new…
Homemade for the holidays
We were sitting around the conference room table a couple weeks ago, talking about this year’s gift guide and what it means to give gifts in hard times. It might mean thinking more before parting with a dollar, for sure, and we’ve got our thoughts and suggestions on scads of ways you might do that.…
Rags to riches
Holiday shopping can be something of a Sisyphean struggle — there’s always one more person to buy for, one more store to run to, one last search to complete a gift. So as you run the interminable holiday gantlet this year, keep in mind that where you shop is as important as what you buy.…
Choice gifts
A MERCY by Toni Morrison Knopf $23.95, 167 pp. Toni Morrison, the last American author to have won the Nobel Prize in literature, has once again spun a tale of profound insight into the human psyche. In her latest historical narrative A Mercy, Morrison explores the fine line between compassion and cruelty, freedom and entrapment,…
(Not so) silent night
You want a simple gift to make a plain ol’ house a jazz home? Three words: Kind of Blue. It’s under-the-conversation music and music to dig into, background and foreground, perfect for a candlelit dinner with company and for when you’re alone; it’s musical furniture and an aesthetic high. Its original five selections have become…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY • 26 PJ’S LAGER HOUSE THANKSGIVING EVE BASH SOUSED SOUNDS On the biggest party night of the year, there’s not a bar, club, pub or tavern in sight that ain’t vying (dying?) for your pre-Thanksgiving cash and patronage (your post-party puke notwithstanding). There are options to satisfy pretty much any fancy, but local music…
Handy qualities
DIY is back, as evidenced by the growing popularity of brick-and-mortar boutiques and handmade shopping sites like etsy.com. Original clothing, jewelry crafted from found objects and vintage parts, blown glass ornaments, and handmade soaps are just a few options for shoppers who want to make the switch from commercial to community, and those who are…
Eastern comfort
Wasabi’s bibimbab is best served in a dolsot, a heated stone bowl. Chef Seonghun Kim tops a big pile of white rice with little piles of julienned beef and vegetables, mostly cold, and a fried egg. Squeeze on the gochujang, a chili-based hot sauce, and mix it all together. It’s huge and infinitely satisfying on…
Warming trend
Angel’s Cafe 214 W. Nine Mile Rd., Ferndale, 248-541-0888, $: Part art gallery, part restaurant, Angel’s Café has a prime location in downtown Ferndale and the feel of an intimate European café. The chef will happily accommodate vegetarians’ (and vegans’) special needs. Atlanta Bread Company 19181 Mack, Detroit, 313-640-8200, $: The Atlanta Bread Company offers…
Autumn chills
It makes perfect sense that Frontier Ruckus’ debut LP would be released during the waning days of autumn. More so than any other group in the current Ann Arbor folk scene, this band’s music evokes ruddy cheeks, frosty breath “smoke” and the encroaching darkness of post-Daylight Savings Time in the Midwest. What’s remarkable about this…
Letters to the Editor
Talking turkey Every one of us has the “presidential power” — to pardon a turkey on Thanksgiving. Here are some reasons to skip the turkey this Thanksgiving: • You are what you eat. Who wants to be a Butterball? • You won’t spend a sleepless night wondering how the turkey lived and died. • Your…
Here’s the Whirlwind EP
Mick Bassett sounds a lot like Bob Dylan. Let’s get that out of the way right up front. But Bassett doesn’t sound like Dylan in 1966, or 1975, certainly not 1980, and probably not 2008 either. Mick Bassett sounds like some sort of über-Bob, a condensed and compacted amalgamation of all of the various Dylans…
A green light
The stock market continues to nosedive. Major financial institutions have crumpled and retirement funds are evaporating. There’s no end in sight to the foreclosure pandemic that hit southeast Michigan before most other areas. The Big Three automakers are frantically trying to fend off collapse. With millions of manufacturing jobs lost already, the immediate future holds…
Condensed Milk
Gus Van Sant’s unabashed Hollywood-style biopic of Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), chronicles the last San Francisco gay activist’s last eight years. In 1978, Milk became the first openly gay politician to be elected to public office in California. The film lays out Harvey’s political awakening, as he evolves from casual business owner to righteous citizen…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Bolt
A canine TV action star, Bolt (a vocally spry John Travolta) lives in a studio-created reality that has lead him to believe he’s truly a canine superhero, vigilantly protecting his owner, Penny (Miley Cyrus), from the evil Dr. Calico (Malcolm McDowell). The poor pup’s so fooled by the world he lives in, so committed to…
Gift Guide 2008
Homemade for the holidays by Metro Times staff Staff reminiscences of Christmases past Handy qualities by Norene Cashen From soap to Spandex, Detroiters are making it Rags to riches by Megan O’Neil Sick of hearing ‘buy local’? Too bad. Makin’ it under the tree by Michael Jackman Locals spread holiday cheer by making sweet jams…
Australia
Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrman’s attempt at an Outback Gone With the Wind or Casablanca can’t decide whether it’s a rousing romantic Western or a brazenly manipulative World War II love story, so it inelegantly jams the two together. Nicole Kidman is Lady Sarah Ashley, an uptight English woman in Australia to search for her uncommunicative…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
A Christmas Tale
The Vuillard family’s crisis comes at Christmas, when the matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) receives dire news: Diagnosed with the same rare strain of leukemia that killed her eldest son, Junon now looks to her children for a bone marrow donor, aware that the treatment offers potentially lethal side effects. This familiar plotline — a family…
Couch Trip
On the Rumba River First Run Features It’s rare for a documentary centered in central Africa to be uplifting, but the story in On the Rumba River is so positive it’s joyful. While director Jacques Sarasin doesn’t shy away from the political, social and economic turmoil that defines the past and present state of the…
The Grocer’s Son
A box-office sensation in France, Eric Guirado’s modest and patient portrait of a sullen and selfish young city slicker who learns to care for others after heading to the countryside follows a fairly predictable route but benefits from small grace notes and an understated charm. Still, given The Grocer’s Son’s incredible success, one has to…
