Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
MB90: I guess you could say it was my favorite column! 5ive — Versus (Tortuga) :: Alan Swann says: “Stone, this very heavy medieval instrumental thud-rock sounds just like the second coming of Kyuss. Mucho recommendo!” The Velvet Underground — “Sister Ray” (Verve) :: One of these things … Mad Violet — Caravan (Passenger Sounds)…
Slappers
If the recent seductive glares of Alison Goldfrapp and Annie had you at hello, then the hypnotic beats of vocalist-producer Dani Siciliano will bring you to your knees. Matthew Herbert’s partner in crime (she’s the electronic music maverick’s wife and muse) offers her own bag of tricks on her second solo effort, the ever-so-sexy Slappers.…
Motor City Cribs
Legendary session guitarist Dennis Coffey has probably spent more time playing in Detroit studios and clubs than you’ve spent sleeping. During his heyday in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Dennis would play as many as 18 sessions a week and do a few live gigs on top of that. His tripped-out wah-wah guitar on…
Ben Kweller
If Ben Kweller was a member of “Our Gang,” Follies 2006 would be the best one yet. And that’s without monkeys in bustles or prepubescent hula girls. After all, Kweller’s floppy-haired look has been a selling point since he was a kid himself. But though his latest album has all the endearing cadence and chemistry…
Backslash
Haunted Web — So, Halloween mania has officially begun — the season of witches, pumpkins and that nasty-ass candy corn has become the second-most-commercialized holidays, right after Baby Jesus and that fat guy in the red suit. Looking to make the most out of your Halloween experiences this month? Log on to haunteddetroit.com for a…
Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain
Somehow, the quiet presence of singer-songwriter Mark Linkous is never really forgotten. The painfully introverted troubadour remains one of those guys, an understated romantic and genius in that Jim O’Rourke or Daniel Johnston kind of way. For longtime Sparklehorse fans, the five-year break between the melancholia of 2001’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Dreamt for…
Art Bar
One of poetry’s traditional public services is the presentation of elegies in honor of the dead. Here James McKean remembers a colorful friend and neighbor. Elegy for an Old Boxer From my window I watch the roots of a willow push your house crooked, women rummage through boxes, your sons cart away the TV, its…
Back in crime
Matt Damon is Colin Sullivan, a Massachusetts state trooper who’s been groomed since childhood to infiltrate the Boston Police Department by his father figure, mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Quickly rising through the ranks, Colin provides Costello with vital information, while manipulating the system for his own success. But his police unit has planted…
Talking two ways
The bridge baron spins his span plans.
The Fallen Idol
Carol Reed’s dark, atmospheric drama examines the complexities of adult life from the point of view of a young, privileged boy, Phillipe (Bobby Henrey), the son of a foreign ambassador in London. Phillipe is deeply attached to his butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson), who is having an affair with a young embassy employee, Julie (Michèle Morgan).…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): According to the Midwest Book Review, David Foster Wallace’s 1,088-page book Infinite Jest is "perhaps the most innovative novel in the English language since James Joyce’s Ulysses." The Review of Contemporary Fiction calls it a vast comic epic. On the other hand, critic Dan Schneider (cosmoetica.com) believes Infinite Jest "might be…
Dick’s head
Devos satirist runs a heady Web site.
The Face of Another
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s freaky-cool 1966 sci-fi parable is the story of a disfigured man who agrees to a have a radical, dangerous facial transplant. It’s like an episode of The Twilight Zone as directed by Salvador Dali. If Hollywood made it, this would have been a fairly routine thriller; in Teshigahara’s hands, it becomes a surreal,…
Bet on Black to Showhalter
Michael Ian Black may just be the perfect new millennium celebrity, famous for everything and nothing at once. A staggeringly prolific entertainer and a near ubiquitous presence on television, Black nimbly zips from project to project like a kid with ADD. He’s been a network series regular (NBC’s Ed), a pitchman for Sierra Mist and…
Punching in
Detroit labor activists take aim at parts plants.
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
Director Zhang Yimou is determined to thwart expectations and avoid the pigeonhole. In this curiously sentimental film, Japanese great Ken Takakura plays Gou-ichi Takata, a widower who has exiled himself to the isolation of a remote fishing village. When his estranged son is diagnosed with liver cancer, he travels to see him but is rebuffed.…
What’s the point of a new museum in Detroit?
A year ago, when word got out about seemingly legitimate plans for a new contemporary art institution in Detroit, the buzz was big in the creative community. Many were skeptical from the first word — people here are skeptical about “new” anything. But in the ensuing months, the e-mails arrived, followed up by press releases.…
Letters to the Editor
Gag work Re: “You don’t know Dick” (Metro Times, Oct. 4), I got about this far into your article before getting sleepy and woke myself up with a laugh: “Using donations from private foundations they control, as well as personal contributions and money kicked in from their companies, these people have been funding conservative think…
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Former punk rocker Dito Montiel’s directing debut is so thick with gritty urban realism you can almost smell the desperation. It’s also so full of such dead-end stereotypes and familiar beautiful losers that you’d think it was assembled from pieces of other movies, if it wasn’t based on Montiel’s own popular memoir. The cast is…
Letting light in
“It’s been a long time since Detroit has made any statement in architecture,” says Andrew Zago, who splits his time between here and in Manhattan, where he directs City College of New York’s architecture master’s program. And he thinks a renovation, no matter what scale, is also a statement about what the city should be.…
Got Dem hopes
It’s voters like Mark Knowles who give Democratic congressional candidate Nancy Skinner hope. The 42-year-old chemical plant logistics manager lives in Farmington, which makes him part of the district that’s sent U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-Bloomfield Township) to Washington in every election since 1992. But when Knowles met Skinner at the Harvest Moon Festival in…
Renaissance
Like a beautifully wrapped gift box with nothing inside, Renaissance is a big letdown. French director Christian Volckman breaks new ground with his hyper-stylized black-and-white animation, employing motion-capture technology to render striking images. But his barely coherent sci-fi noir storyline — scripted by five writers, no less — is slow-moving and unoriginal, lifting the plots…
Shock treatment
Chemist Matt Mio has a laboratory that would do Dr. Frankenstein justice. Shiny beakers and test tubes crowd the countertops, and there’s even a miniature Yoda watching over the place (Dr. Frankenstein never had the force on his side — perhaps that’s why things didn’t work out). An avid Star Wars fan, Mio has a…
Mark Foley & me
You know how after each Bush-administration scandal — male prostitutes running amok in the White House, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S.," domestic spying — you sit there thinking, "Shit, if Clinton had done that he’d be impeached!" I felt something similar this week listening to Republicans attempt to excuse or minimize the Mark…
Employee of the Month
Blank-eyed, scruffy and perpetually juvenile comedian Dane Cook is Zack, a directionless slacker who has been happily drifting for a decade since his Internet start-up bit the dust. He’s a stock boy a cavernous discount store. With his bland looks and low-wattage charisma, Cook holds the picture together with all the conviction of a donut…
Star shooter
Annie Leibovitz is the dean of celebrity portraiture in America, enshrined as a fixture at some of the nation’s biggest magazines for nearly four decades. She got her start at Rolling Stone, where she worked from 1970 to 1983, and, as many know, took the last photographs of John Lennon just hours before his murder.…
Graham ascendant
Just like a Greek goddess in one of her renowned dances, defying the gods, legs splayed, torso close to the ground, Martha Graham’s spirit has transcended time. The modern dancer and choreographer lives on in legend, still celebrating on the stage with the current incarnation of the Martha Graham Dance Company. But like the paths…
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
If you’re making a new, utterly unnecessary prequel to the already unnecessary 2003 remake, you want your body count high and your laughs low, something director Jonathan Liebesman just doesn’t understand. The first hour is deathly dull, focusing more on the antics of Leatherface’s adoptive redneck dad, Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey), than anything else. The…
Close to the edge
Besides four days of avant-garde, experimental and otherwise fringe musical performances from local, national and international artists, this year’s Edgefest in Ann Arbor will also feature … a parade? At first it seems strange, a come-one-come-all, baton-twirling parade to celebrate a festival that has always reveled in music that purposely exists far outside the mainstream.…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Our future, with Dick & Jen
Normally I am not an enormous fan of what we call “debates” between candidates for high office. For one thing, they aren’t debates, but sort of joint press conferences where the best one-liner usually wins. Twenty-two years ago, Walter Mondale (if you’ve never heard of him, that’s OK) was debating Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who supposedly…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Problems, big and small
Q: I am a 20-year-old woman going to school in New York. Recently I admitted to myself that I am either a lesbian or a strongly female-oriented bisexual, and ended my first-ever relationship with a boyfriend. With the boyfriend gone and my social anxiety being dealt with in counseling, I am craving another woman’s company.…
Ladies’ room
An old-fashioned tea room, awash in florals, where one can sip, knees together, and enjoy a ladies’ afternoon out. The sunny room, a teacup’s throw from the People Mover yet tranquil as a garden, is intended as a haven from the tensions of everyday life. An array of teas, many of them organic, are offered,…
Bye-Bye Bowery
With the closure of its endearingly tacky Bowery digs imminent, for the past month New York City’s legendary music club CBGB has been throwing itself a sendoff worthy of its 30-plus year history. That’s a lot of beers drunk, glass broken, noses split and toilet bowls missed. But you can bet that, if the rumors…
Biochemical jism!
As bits of audio, The Information doesn’t always add up. It’s Beck’s usual rummage sale of claptrap hip hop, hazy folk psychedelia and dollar-store electronics, smoothed with the balm of careerism. But he’s still a smart guy, and manages to echo some real cultural comment inside those same old shells. “Cellphone’s Dead” is sharply funky.…
Head Cheese
Regina Spektor’s beguiling piano songcraft has been making hearts in the underground swoon for a few years. But with the (slightly) grander sound and (certainly) bigger budget of the new Begin to Hope, she makes questioning the motives of love and life over winsome parlor melodies the perfect autumn soundtrack. You know that montage set…
The Town and the City
It seems that we’ve been at Los Lobos’ window so long now, clinging to fleeting glimpses of the genius that dominated records like Will the Wolf Survive and Kiko and established the East L.A. quintet as not only the voice of Chicano rock, but also pioneers of a singular brand of American roots music. With…
Make it up as you go.
Metro Times jazz scribe Charles Latimer checks in with this review of the Trio X gig at Bohemian National Home last Saturday night. Because Trio X is a free jazz band, I sort of expected a live set from the New York City-based group to be a bunch of self-indulgent horseplay. But they proved my…
Break my own heart.
I don’t know what prompted it, but this morning on the way out of my house I grabbed Whiskeytown’s Stranger’s Almanac off the shelf, a record I hadn’t listened to or even thought about much since 1998 or so. Maybe it’s the weather outside, as every day wilts closer to autumn and the crinkly burnt-sienna…
