ROCKIN’ PNEUMONIA & BOOGIE WOOGIE FLU
The 9th annual Motor City Blues & Boogie Woogie Festival kicks off tomorrow night (October 5th), running through Saturday evening at the Music Hall in the downtown Center for the Performing Arts. Friday night’s festivities are headlined by Koko Taylor & Her Blues Machine, joining the Tommy Castro Band, Ruthie Foster and Ana Popovic. Saturday’s…
LAGER HOUSE FUTURE UNCERTAIN
There’s a lot of speculation going on about the fate of the much-beloved (at least by local music fans) Lager House in Corktown. Motor City Rocks has described the club as “Detroit rock underground’s headquarters,” especially in the years since the closing of the Gold Dollar. The only thing that’s known for sure is that…
States of stage
What does it say when the theater season opens with two plays about police states? That’s what’s happened this fall, with Breathe Art Theatre and the Abreact group allowing ticket holders to draw their own conclusions. From Breathe Art comes the local premiere of The Pillowman, an award-winning 2005 drama by Martin McDonagh. Set in…
Counter culture
Bates Hamburgers 33406 Five Mile Road, Livonia, 734-427-3464, $; This slider stop is a venerable west side institution, with some saying you haven’t lived until you’ve tried one of Bates’ “gut bombs.” The blandishments are few — just the essentials: salt, pepper, mustard and ketchup — but it doesn’t get any more authentic than this.…
The Young Planets/ Time the Teenage Twister
Deastro The Young Planets Our Brother the Megazord Time the Teenage Twister Self-released First, a tale of the tape: 34 jams, 2 monikers, 1 dude, 21 years old. Both Deastro and Our Brother the Megazord are the refined fruits from the fertile mind of one Randolph Chabot, recorded in “basements, closets, stairwells, apartments, fields, coffeehouses,…
Playing the clown
After all the humor, horror, hoaxes and chutzpah artist Jef Bourgeau has served the Detroit art community, you can’t help but want to slam him with a banana cream pie. During the last decade and a half, Bourgeau has fooled the media into printing press releases, biographies, interviews and obituaries for people he’s invented. He’s…
All good eggs
Beverly Hills Grill 31471 Southfield Rd., Beverly Hills, 248-642-2355, $: For Sunday brunch, be prepared to wait at the bar for as long as a mimosa or two. But once you get your seat, you can choose from a half-dozen scrambles, omelets and frittatas, from the humble $8 vegetable scramble (mushrooms, leeks, tomatoes, spinach and…
Plug male part here
The Electric Six has lived through a name change, loss of stateside labels (while enjoying ephemeral U.K. pop-star status), and nearly as many lineup shifts as Chinese Democracy-era Guns ‘N Roses. Somehow, though, they’ve remained Detroit’s premier (and ironic) party band, with more staying power than Andrew WK and — by virtue of attention to…
Fortune-ate comeback
Nathaniel Mayer: A walking instant party.
Tray bien!
American Pie 11557 12 Mile Rd., Warren, 586-578-0156, $; Value and variety come together at this new east side pizza smorgasbord. As each fresh pie is brought out of the oven, a bell rings to alert American Pie guests of the new addition. Whether it’s their signature Mac and Cheese Pizza or the conventional pepperoni,…
Manufactured Landscapes
Director Jennifer Baichwal completed her 2006 documentary before relations soured between Chinese industrialists and the world media, capturing a fleeting moment of history that meshes perfectly with the philosophy of her film’s subject, Edward Burtynsky. The Canadian photographer has made a specialty of revealing the hidden splendor in landscapes manufactured by massive earthworks projects such…
Your leaders at work
Lansing has proved that the system is broken.
Mideast feasts
Al-Ajami 14633 W. Warren, Dearborn, 313-846-9330, $; Al-Ajami is no worse than, but no better than, a slew of other Middle Eastern restaurants, with uneven quality to its cuisine and cleanliness. So what does Al-Ajami do right? It’s less expensive than La Shish. Chef and co-owner Stephan Ajami offers 15 seafood dishes. Also good are…
The Game Plan
At its core, The Game Plan is a hybrid of two Disney staples: the uplifting sports movie and the selfish-man-saved-by-a-wise-child morality tale. What makes all this calculation go down easy are the genuinely winning performances of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as football quarterback Joe “The King” Kingman, who discovers he has an 8-year-old daughter just…
Best fork first
Ah, the pleasures of the table. Few things are more satisfying than casting off our worldly cares and sitting with kith and kin, breaking bread and sharing nourishing food and spirit-raising drink. That’s definitely the attitude that informs our 10,000-word culinary flyby of the metro Detroit dining scene. And, from chili fries to chateaubriand, we’ve…
Sound bets
Baker’s Keyboard Lounge 20510 Livernois Ave., Detroit, 313-345-6300, $$; Baker’s bills itself as “The world’s oldest jazz club,” and, in the club’s 72-year history, almost every jazz musician of national importance has played its bandstand. Baker’s complements the music with some amazing down-home cooking, their catfish being a true showstopper. Live entertainment nightly, with metro…
Pierrot Le Fou
Perhaps the most colorful noir ever made, Pierrot is a loopy romantic fantasy in caper garb, a dashed-off satire of crime-spree pictures that very casually manages to be great. Jean-Pauls Belmondo is Ferdinand, a bourgeois Parisian trapped by family and career who walks out on his life by exiting a dull party. In tow is…
Goin’ to a go go
Sure, it’s a Thursday night, but you’d still expect more people to be here, especially for a free, all-ages show. Tonight’s the grand reopening of the Royal Oak Music Theatre, and the local music onstage throughout the evening has slowly evolved from dreadful to inspired, the latter courtesy of the Singles, a rocking trio fronted…
Class acts
Annam 22053 Michigan Ave., Dearborn, 313-565-8744, $$: Annam promises to provide its customers an unforgettable dining experience of traditional and high-class Vietnamese cuisine. Chef Phong Nguyen, who has a culinary pastry degree, is particularly good at light, traditional Vietnamese dishes. The mood is sort of romantic too. Reservations accepted by phone or fax. No smoking.…
Feast of Love
Multiple story lines are clumsily held together by Morgan Freeman’s deep and soothing narration. Freeman appears too, strolling through several scenes as Harry, a philosophy professor who’s lost his mojo. On an extended hiatus, Harry now prefers to spend his time wandering around Portland, dispensing relationship advice to the lovelorn like a wizened, tweed-jacketed Mary…
What’s in a word
Glen Mannisto writes about art for
Get baked
Atlanta Bread Company 19181 Mack, Detroit, 313-640-8200; $, Lots of sweets and bagels, sandwiches galore, soups, salads, breakfast sandwiches till 10:30 a.m., specialty coffees and smoothies, all at decent or even bargain prices. If you find favorites, they’re worth returning for, but everything seems homogenized; each food is allotted one flavor and one only. Open…
Digging for doubloons
Offbeat without being cute or cloying, California is one of those rare movies that can be undisparagingly described as “quirky.” Its characters and ideas seem to come from a real place — the movie is dedicated to writer-director Mike Cahill’s father — even if the situations are the stuff of pure Hollywood fantasy. Michael Douglas’…
Motor City Cribs
Matt Smith’s Hamtramck home.
Flank right
Big Rock Chop & Brew House 245 S. Eton, Birmingham, 248-647-7774, $$$, Big Rock Chop House oozes northern lodge appeal and there are a variety of rooms in which to dine, including an outdoor patio. Located in Birmingham’s historic train station, it looks like the kind of place where Hemingway would spend a lot of…
In the Shadow of the Moon
A reflection on the ’60s space race and the almost insurmountable setbacks NASA conquered to realize Kennedy’s dream of putting a man on the moon, this fascinating documentary features new interviews with nine of the astronauts who flew on the Apollo missions (not surprisingly, the reclusive Neil Armstrong isn’t one of the them). Their anecdotes…
Ferguson’s conflictions
Contractor pleads self-defense in pistol-whipping case.
Ciao down
Andiamo Italia West 6676 Telegraph, Bloomfield, 248-865-9300, $$: with locations in Warren, Grosse Pointe Woods, St. Clair Shores, Rochester, Royal Oak, Sterling Heights, Dearborn, Detroit and Novi; see andiamoitalia.com: The sunflower yellow and purple color scheme and huge tilted mirrors that allow patrons to glimpse those sitting behind them have given the space a slickly…
Going about it
If your spouse doesn’t know: Yes, you’re cheating.
Caught in Kentucky
The lam is over for William Craig Garrett.
Envious
Camped along the corner of Shelby and Michigan Avenue, there’s a long line five people deep, a streak of crimson against the slick metallic drizzle of night. Girls are pressed against their men, snuggled under suit jackets to avoid the rain. At the line’s front, bouncers of titanic proportions maintain the crowd, while apprehensive doormen…
Thumbs-up
“We feel we’re the most slept-on group in Michigan,” says MC Illtone of the Lyricists. Slept-on? Indeed. And part of the reason, hell, most of the reason is location, location, location. Illtone (Robert Johnson), his partner-in-rhyme Rym-B (Jewan Reed) and DJ Haus Diesel (Craig Herbert) hail from Port Huron, as in the thumb. It’s an…
Split decision
Toledo jury finds photojournalist guilty of “trespassing” while photographing protest.
Art is everywhere
Former Detroiter Greg Holm, a photographer based in New York City, snagged this shot of clouds rolling over our city and an ice cream truck rolling by the Roosevelt Hotel, near Michigan Central Station, on a recent afternoon visiting Detroit. Holm was inspired by the story of his friend, artist Pete Deevakul, who spent time…
In the flesh
Nick Lowe and Ron Sexsmith, The Ark, Ann Arbor, Sept. 25.
Night and Day
Thursday & Tuesday • 4 & 9 Peter Singer and Elie Wiesel SURVIVOR STORIES There’s a Nobel laureate, famed for his writings as a Holocaust survivor. There’s a maverick philosopher, who cites as an influence his experience as a child of parents who escaped the Holocaust. Both speak at Oakland University in the coming days.…
The Beat Reader
With the absurd number of Beatles-related tomes available — Amazon.com lists 23,435 books alone — it’s hard to imagine that there’s anything left to write about the Fabs that could be deemed even remotely “secret.” Don’t tell that to co-author Geoffrey Giuliano; the man has cranked out enough Beatles volumes to choke a herd of…
Head Cheese
Draft picks: Jason Black’s five guilty pleasures .
Letters to the Editor
The Peters principle Re: Jack Lessenberry’s postscript at the end of his Sept. 26 column (“Our sorry state,” Metro Times). Support for Gary Peters is widespread. I take strong issue with Jack Lessenberry’s assumption that support for Gary Peters somehow emerged as a backroom deal. Many women, gays and others outside of the “smoke-filled rooms”…
Beyond chop suey
Start with a steamed vegetable dumpling, move on to the cold smoked duck appetizer, then try the soft-shell crab with garlic sauce or the Chinese eggplant stuffed with minced shrimp. This food isn’t overly Americanized, and adventurous (and stubbornly persistent) American customers can demand a taste of genuine Chinese fare.
Alcatrash!
Delta Farce Lionsgate The most generous thing you can say about a military comedy that stars Larry the Cable Guy and Bill Engwall is that they play to their audience the way Bill Murray did in Stripes. The most damning thing you can say is that when the sleeveless blue-collar audience that this flick is…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Bullets fly and Nugent rides again.
Across the Universe
You don’t have to love the Beatles to hate Across the Universe. The beauty of director Julie Taymor’s latest exercise in cinematic bombast — a deafening blur of Fab Four tunes rerecorded, recontextualized and retarded to fit a sappy, late-’60s romance — is that it can inspire the same stupefied reaction in both a Lennon-phile…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Talking about communication
"In New York," says Matthew Higgs, director and chief curator of the city’s not-for-profit gallery White Columns, "someone who organizes an exhibition can rely on a certain bedrock experience, and, extending from that, a conditioned response." The prolific curator, artist, and writer was in his windowless, record-and-art filled office at the southernmost reaches of Chelsea,…
The Kingdom
What does a well-intentioned director to do when he’s given $80 million and Jamie Foxx for his Middle Eastern action-thriller? It all starts promisingly, with one of the year’s best credit sequences — a condensed 70-year history lesson of U.S.-Saudi relations. From there, the film precipitously falls from geopolitical grace to depict a horrifying terrorist…
Wandering wine country
We were a motley crew, four cyclists on back roads in Ontario farm country. Two of us were experienced riders, the other two on borrowed bikes. Did I mention we were tipsy? Ontario farm country is perfect for grapes. Apparently, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario provide a microclimate that keeps summers from getting too hot…
Go green!
Avalon International Breads 422 W. Willis St., Detroit, 313-832-0008, $: If you like your sandwiches made for you, show up at lunchtime as the focaccia comes out of the oven. It might be topped with organic roasted zucchini, tomatoes, basil and Parmesan. Avalon has branched out from the baguettes and crusty peasant loaves that have…
Trade
Merging sub-Lifetime storytelling with the oh-so-fashionable shaky-cam style of Traffic and Babel, Trade tells the coincidence-laden tale of two kidnapped girls — a single teen mom from Russia (Alijca Bachleda) and a valuable-commodity virgin from Mexico City (Paulina Gaitan) — and the devoted family men who valiantly try to track them down. Though it wants…
