In the upper room
Nestled back on the second floor of a gallery/coffee house complex in the burgeoning cultural center of downtown New Pontiac, this cozy, live-music venue offers top-notch national and local acts, predominantly in the alterna-twang and adult alternative veins. It’s also an excellent listening room, with round club-style tables and great acoustics.
Spit flying folk fun
Any genre goes here, as long as it’s acoustic. You might hear bluegrass, klezmer, flamenco, and a few folksingers, all in one week. The intimate semi-circular seating arrangement ensures that even those in the back row can see and hear the spit flying onstage.
Coming up
The Shelter hosts a lineup of national and local touring bands that are not quite popular enough to play upstairs in St. Andrew’s Hall. The venue provides an invaluable opportunity to check out fledgling alt-rock bands before they hit the ‘big time.’ An added bonus is the pool table, where bands have been known to…
St. Andrew’s Hall
The venerable Detroit institution known as St. Andrew’s Hall, has played host to just about every conceivable punk, hard-core, new wave, no wave, alternative and anything in between band that’s come down the new music pike since 1980. With a capacity of 1,000, and a balcony ringing the upstairs leve, there’s an opportunity to see…
“Just a little bit…”
Rhino’s latest retrospective of 20th Century women in American pop is a wild musical success … but it presents a rather mixed political message
Help and hype
When Gov. John Engler’s Project Zero expanded to include all of Oakland and Wayne counties this month, state and local welfare officials applauded. "Project Zero helps take this welfare reform a step forward," Margarete Gravina, a section chief in Michigan’s Department of Career Development, said at a kickoff ceremony for the program at a Detroit…
Beasts and beauties
The Old Miami Bar is a musty horror-nest, where jungle leeches and parrots and mosquitoes float belly-up in the whiskey; where the ghosts of the dead swoop from the rafters to flutter like bats above the heads of the near-dead. It’s a house of memories dedicated to Vietnam vets that lends itself to raw rock…
Adult.
Adult. is savvy music for electro grown-ups who still like to kid. But seriously, the husband-and-wife duo of Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus lay down analog electronic funk that swerves into tones of new wave, dadaist lyrical playfulness and a post-post-modern grab bag of modern sounds and beats. With Adult., comparisons to Kraftwerk are…
Renaissance sound fiend
DJ-producer Andrea Parker keeps one ear to the ground and one foot in dance music’s past….
Raw redemption
One woman’s tale of the civil rights struggle pulls no punches about the path that led her there….
Shop till you pop
David Fincher’s new film proclaims, “Are we not men? We are consumers!”…
Crazy contraceptives
"Old school" (Pong, foot-shaped gas pedals and sparkly blue eye shadow) is in. "New school" (hand-held electronic pets, Mendhi body painting and that neon lighting people put underneath their cars) is out. And if the newfound popularity of the History of Contraception Museum is any indication, "old-school" contraceptives — such as the Multiload Mark II…
Their morals and ours
Never let it be said that there is no difference between the two parties. Last week, the Republicans scored a significant political victory making some form of eventual nuclear catastrophe, if not war, very much more likely. Led by Mississippi’s U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, one of the shrewder, more malevolently ruthless ferrets in Washington, the…
Celestial selling
Against my better judgment, I’ve been watching the television news and reading the daily papers. Also against my better judgment, I’ve been sharing bits of the information I glean with the Lizard of Fun, who cringes with each mention of Hillary Clinton, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters. "That’s it," declares the Lizard. "I’m sick…
Getting pumped and snug
PUMP PEOPLE The soul-reverberating lounge-swing-blues of Bonne Temps Roulle lures me periodically to the Town Pump on Thursday nights, where I am sometimes so enraptured that I throw caution to the wind and can be seen cutting the proverbial rug (no cameras, please). Guinness in hand, I’m set for a night of musical and atmospheric…
Indian commission’s demise
Native Americans from across Michigan rallied in Lansing last week in an unsuccessful attempt to halt Gov. John Engler’s elimination of the state’s Indian Affairs Commission. An executive order signed by Engler abolished the 34-year-old commission Monday, Oct. 18, transferring its responsibilities to the Department of Civil Rights. The commission investigated problems common to the…
Candidates say, “Humbug!”
Tired of trying to convince public officials to save Humbug Marsh, environmental activists are taking the issue to downriver voters — in more ways than one. Three members of Friends of the Detroit River are vying for seats on the Gibraltar City Council. A fourth member of the environmental group is challenging Trenton’s incumbent mayor.…
Reform school lessons
Class was in session last Friday. The subject was public school reform and the future of the Detroit district. The grades aren’t in. Wayne State University’s State Policy Center sponsored the conference on the experiences of the handful of cities around the country where school takeovers have taken place. Held at the David Adamany Undergraduate…
High-wired act
Outrageous Cherry (Deb Agolli, Chad Gilchrist, Larry Ray and the locally omnipresent Matthew Smith) are now on their fourth record in six years, getting an incredible amount of power and distance from musical forms – Stones, Yardbirds, Velvets – that date back to the Johnson administration. But don’t be fooled by the wolf-of-a-rock-band in ’60s-garage-sheep’s-clothing;…
Futurific!
A new millennium will soon be blowing its digital noisemaker, so it’s time for a few high-tech predictions. And why not? Besides, most media outlets are so blindsided by the Y2K question mark that they can’t see past the Christmas season anyway. (Buck up, kiddies; life will go on after New Year’s Day). Here’s the…
Pitch’d
SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM The stage is set with two full drum kits, an electric organ, a bass, some turntables and a mike next to a floor-to-ceiling rack of gear that must be command central. A gentleman dressed in a floor-length trench coat and wrap-around sunglasses is talking about jazz and space and voodoo with the…
Food stuff
Y2COOKING Are you prepared for the dreaded Y2K bug? Some people are worried that necessities such as electricity, gas and water could shut down at the start of the new year because of a computer malfunction. If so, we’ll probably survive. But we can’t survive without food. Even basic foodstuffs may be hard to come…
After Life
Say you die and it turns out there actually is an afterlife, and when you arrive there you find yourself entering a rather grubby looking social services building of some sort, staffed by unfailingly polite but distinctly mortal-looking employees. And say that during an initial interview with one of these solicitous counselors, you’re told that…
Hip-hop cash crop
Ordinarily I’m pretty much immune to the dubious charms of advertising. I have a remote control and know how to use it. But ever so often, you hit upon an ad so dreadful that, as much as you want to look away, you can’t. Just like when "Band on the Run" comes on the radio.…
The Minus Man
The most interesting thing about director Hampton Fancher’s film The Minus Man is the title. But the interest is fleeting, as is the strangeness of its main character, Vann Siegert (Owen Wilson), the all-American nice-guy psycho who drifts in and out of small towns and sleepy suburbs “subtracting” more-or-less deserving members of the community. The…
The Omega Code
I’ve been had. I settled into my seat at the Star Gratiot theater for what I thought was a suspense flick based on the infamous Bible Code. Dr. Gillen Lane (Casper Van Dein) is a motivational speaker haunted by mystical vision — read: Tony Robbins with a sharper jaw line and eyes that could infiltrate…
The Straight Story
“This is a true story” — that’s what always gets to us, doesn’t it? That little announcement attached to something as hopelessly artificial as a film, which dangles before us the promise of realism and familiarity. “This is a true story.” In other words, the formidable notion that there are men and women out there…
Higher vibration
Every now and then, artists outdo themselves. They go to places, creatively, that are too distant, too universal to be bound by what they normally do. It’s as if they string together previous moments in their career like railroad tracks and illustrate how they have traveled, inched closer and culminated in an album that sounds…
Whispered treasures
This is the second CD in the Rykodisc Voices series that bears Jack Kerouac’s name. The first, Kicks Joy Darkness, a 1997 tribute featuring Matt Dillon, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the late Allen Ginsberg, the late Mark Sandman and Jim Carroll, was a celebration of the genuine article found on this CD. Jack Kerouac Reads On the…
No casanova
This is what demented minds do. They create things incessantly. They don’t test their theories. In fact, they don’t have theories. The scientific cycle of the demented mind goes like this: idea, data, experiment. No analysis or theory. There is no need, because the demented mind is not trying to feed you anything positive or…
