THE BIGGEST & BESTEST BLOWOUT YET!
Hey, just in case you missed it at the top of the Home page, this is to inform you that our annual groovy big Motor City Blowout music festival is now officially slated to take place Wednesday through Saturday, March 5th through 8th. For those unfamiliar with the event (what, you live in a cave…
‘A BASSIST LIKE NO OTHER…”
He was “a bassist like no other I have ever seen or heard in my life,” his longtime friend and musical partner Bill Meyer said in an e-mail that bounced through the Detroit jazz community and beyond Thursday morning. Bassist Hubie Crawford had been found dead at his Westside home Wednesday evening after he failed…
Werewolves of Warren
Deep inside a creepy laboratory, a deranged doctor conducts bizarre experiments on a disembodied head, as a werewolf and his ghoulish companion look on, cackling in the shadows. What’s really odd is that this weird science isn’t happening in some spooky Transylvanian castle. Nah, it’s right here on an industrial stretch of Van Dyke, just…
Proof of Youth
The Go! Team really doesn’t sound like any other one band on the map right now. Imagine a world where the Jackson 5 gets a raw makeover, your high school cheerleaders have street-cred, and Public Enemy doesn’t need samples. Over the past couple of years, the band has backed its buzz-worthy debut by playing tight…
All’s well …
Romulus residents win long fight against hazardous waste wells.
Grand Ledge
The first thing to understand about Grand Ledge is that its reputation as a farm town and bedroom community for Lansing was shattered this past summer by a brutal fight for promotional YouTube video of the year. The contest, sponsored by Ikea (hardly a poster child for independent small business), led Grand Ledge officials into…
Peer pressure
Wayne County juries short on minorities.
Bella
José (Eduardo Verástegui), a chef in the Mexican restaurant is taciturn and nose-to-the-grindstone reliable, until he suddenly walks out during the lunch rush to pursue Nina (Tammy Blanchard), a waitress just fired for tardiness. Looking like refugees from an off-Broadway play, they wander the streets and quickly bond. They leave the city and visit the…
Correction
The right time to see Randi Rhodes.
Means to an end
The film concern’s the British synth act Joy Division and its agonized frontman, Ian Curtis. Turning his sunken, blank eyes, distant monotone and spastic performance style into assets rather than debits, the epileptic Curtis rose to prominence a few short years before hanging himself, at age 23, inspiring legions of gloomy mourners. And it’s a…
Night and Day
Wednesday • 31 Zoo Boo MERRY NOT SCARY So the basic idea behind Halloween candy glut is to get it all for free, but it’s hard to swing that once one’s past puberty. The trick-or-treatin’ 38-year-old might well have to deal with red-cheeked humiliation, slammed doors and questions like, “Really? What are you, 80 years…
Lake of Fire
It’s a near impossibility to make a calm, focused documentary about a subject that inflames passions as much as abortion, but director Tony Kaye has almost achieved that goal with Lake of Fire. Few issues epitomize the sharp divisions in American society more, yet Kaye eschews righteous indignation and opts for a cool, methodical approach,…
Building a Rep
In his smart blue-checked shirt and everyday chinos, Bruce Millan doesn’t fit the part of an original ’50s beatnik. There’s no stereotypical shaggy hair, finger-snapping or conversation peppered with hep phrases like “dig it” and “cool, man.” “I never looked the part,” Millan says. Maybe not, but he’s sure played it. Fifty years ago, he…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Acts of state
In August 2006, Michigan State University students Annie Moss and Erik Adams had a simple idea: to start a blog to celebrate the local music they both loved. He was writing music reviews for MSU’s student paper, The State News; she was taking photographs at shows. So, pooling their creative output and putting it online…
(De)Mythologizing Bats
There are more than 1,100 bat species on Earth; one of every five mammal species is a bat. A bat can eat more than 1,000 mosquitoes a night, with moths and beetles for dessert. Next time you drink a margarita, thank the bats — they pollinate the agave plant that is made into tequila. Bats…
Gone batty
Dark, swooping, mammals that fly, mouths open, teeth bared, through evening skies, after hanging upside down by the thousands in caves all day, capture the imagination. Dracula, Batman, Silverwing. Bright, stinging eyes and menacing, fangy grins, oversized ears with thin veins pulsing, hearing every sound, tracking every movement, waiting for the right moment to swoop…
Kith and kidneys
There are times when I suspect you give an outrageous response to a reader so you can get a free column out of the angry responses. Regarding your response to Auntie Mame about the femmy 5-year-old nephew, I think calling his father’s reaction emotional abuse is completely over the top. Restrictive and unfair? You better…
Head Cheese
Alice Cooper gives his five fave fright flicks.
No rump roast here
No heads turn when Mike Gravel walks into Detroit’s Traffic Jam restaurant, no ripple of whispers spreading through the dining room that someone important has arrived to take a seat among the usual patrons. That’s the way things go when you’re running for president but have polling numbers that hover in the 1 percent range.…
Sex with my ex
Why? Because Mr. Right is nice, funny — and a bore in bed.
The answer, my friend, is …
Really, who doesn’t have a favorite pedestrian bridge? Mary Beth Carolan doesn’t own a car, so she rides her yellow Schwinn with a flowered banana seat across them all the time. But she prefers one particular bridge. “We have all talked about it,” she says, “the way it spirals up and down and has two round…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Our speedy music crit makes tracks through the stacks.
The big dogs
Hippo’s serves a crowded Chicago-style hot dog: a steamed, all-beef, natural-casing wiener slid into a poppy seed bun and topped with mustard, onion, outrageously green sweet pickle relish, a dill pickle spear, tomato slices, sport peppers and a dash of celery salt. But Chicago-style isn’t the only dog in the house. There are loads of…
Our driven future
The incredible shrinking auto industry.
Lars and the Real Girl
Don’t let the fact this is about a slutty lump of inanimate silicone turn you off: Lars and the Real Girl is the sex doll movie for people who don’t like sex doll movies. The movie lives or dies on Gosling’s performance as Lars, but he has a way of making even his showiest work…
Food Stuff
Pizza ’n’ beer, a lunch buffet and great steaks.
My Kid Could Paint That
Ostensibly, Amir Bar-Lev’s subject, 4-year-old painter and media darling Marla Olmstead, rose to prominence as a painter by freely expressing her creative impulses unencumbered by expectation or the corruption of the marketplace. Marla’s ascent was rapid, and her fall precipitous. As the media juggernaut was at full-steam ahead, the Olmsteads were profiled on 60 Minutes…
Synapse glimpses
Singapore Sling Greycat Films/Greece 1990 Not rated, 112 minutes. Two beautiful women, covered in little more than flimsy negligees, are digging a hole in the middle of the night as a driving rainstorm rages around them, their wet bodies covered in mud. Can you say “erotic”? Yes, but this opening scene from the mesmerizing soft-porn-horror…
Dan in Real Life
Safe, warm and reassuringly middlebrow where his previous work was ironic, sardonic and righteously raunchy, the movie is further evidence of the softening of Steve Carrell. As the lovelorn widower Dan, Carrell scrunches up his shoulders, molds his doughy face into a pallid perma-frown and, for the most part, manages to suppress his considerable gift…
Letters to the Editor
Our readers mourn Delray, pick a bone.
Sonic dread
When frontman Thom Yorke shocked Radiohead’s fans last year by quietly releasing The Eraser, his first solo album, he took great pains to insist that the future of the band was not in jeopardy. Now that the group’s new record, In Rainbows, has arrived — and the hype of that record’s being released directly through…
Iraq inkblot
It is odd that a seemingly straightforward piece of legislation could be a sort of political Rorschach test, with different people seeing in it very different things. But that’s exactly the case with a new bill introduced by U.S. Rep. John Dingell. The long-serving Democrat from Dearborn has authored legislation setting a timetable to get…
Modern Mayhem
ARE Weapons is a band from New York’s Lower East Side that spent its first incarnation channeling ’70s synth-punkers Suicide in much the same way the Strokes channeled Television. Trouble was, early A-dubs found them wearing their New York pedigree so heavily on their sleeves that they couldn’t reach around their influences. With Modern Mayhem,…
R.I.P.
In other tragic news, our condolences to the family of Dan Denton, keyboardist in the local band Crashing Cairo, who passed away earlier this month. He is survived by his wife and two children. Said Robert Wax(aka just wax), leader of Crashing Cairo: “Dan exuded all that was great about the Detroit music scene, played…
HARD ROCKERS SHOW HEART BY “ROCKIN’ FOR VINNIE”
You may have read the tragic story of 12-year-old Vinnie Ocelnik, who died in a car crash on September 29th near his home in Warren. The youngster’s mother, Beth Ocelnik, is a well-known and much-respected long-time booking agent in the hard rock/metal community via her CB Entertainment. Next Saturday, Nov. 3rd, that community is coming…
