Fables of the Great Lakes Reconstruction Society
Ace Metro Times photographer, Motor City Rides/Cribs coordinator, and official Ann Arbor correspondent for the Music Blahg Doug Coombe writes to tell us that Great Lakes Myth Society has entered Big Sky studio to commence work on their new album. The new record will also be their first for Quack!, Al McWilliams’ fine operation out…
Suburban scrawl
On a sunny day in Northville, two women sit in a coffee shop flipping through an album of wedding cakes. Down the street, a movie theater advertises Alice in Wonderland on the marquee. A middle-aged man cruises Main Street in a red convertible. A block over, on a storefront window, someone has written a heartbroken…
The Protector
This follow-up to Tony Jaa’s breakout performance in the 2003 low-budget martial arts movie Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior will leave the amplified echo of bones crunching ringing in your ears long after its painfully disjointed plot has faded from your memory. Jaa’s form of combat is called Muay Thai, but you may need a few…
Backslash
Comma comma chameleon —How, many times; have you had to — decipher a poorly. Written sentence just, like this? Are you overcome by uncontrollable rage when confronted with a dangling participle? Does steam billow from your ears when your eyes stumble across fragmented sentences? Do you just fucking hate people who don’t know how to…
12″ Pop Shots
As a project, Odd Clouds showcases the wildly firing synapses of Chris Pottinger and Jamie Easter. Best known as a scum punk with a penchant for audacious stage antics with the Piranhas (Easter) and for making gear-grinding hardcore noise under the moniker Cotton Museum (Pottinger), this effort sounds nothing like either man’s previous work. Underneath…
What September 11 really meant
You’ve been sold a vast amount of nonsense about what the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 really meant. That is to say, why they happened, what caused them, how we should have reacted, and what really changed. Like most empires in decline, we increasingly love anniversaries. This was the fifth, and unless you’ve been in…
Art Bar
American Life in Poetry by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 I’d guess we’ve all had dreams like the one portrayed in this wistful poem by Tennessee poet Jeff Daniel Marion. And I’d guess that, like me, you too have tried to nod off again just to capture a few more moments from the past.…
Play the fool
On a small stage, empty except for some stark white drapes and a table, a sullen man in pasty-white clown makeup sits quietly drinking and smoking. On the floor in front of him are three black-clad artists hovering above overhead projectors, furiously scribbling. Eventually, the sullen man disappears behind the curtain and reappears in full…
Motor City Cribs
Dan Mulholland’s natty Nash.
Polyamorous problems
Q: I’m a divorced man and have been dating a married woman in an open/poly relationship for six months. Her husband has been occupied with his new girlfriend. As a result, his wife has been spending a lot more time with me. She’s feeling (understandably) abandoned by her husband, and I’m picking up that slack.…
Letters to the Editor
Backward newspapering Jack Lessenberry’s column on declining newspaper quality (“Rags and ruin,” Metro Times, Aug. 30) hit the bull’s-eye. As editor and publisher of The Oakland Press for a quarter-century, and the person who hired the three veteran editors who were shown the door rudely the other day, I shake my head in wonderment. Most…
Comedy climber
In nearly two decades of furious Hollywood social climbing, Jamie Kennedy has had his share of peaks and valleys; he earned two Golden Raspberry nominations for 2005’s stink-bomb flick Son of the Mask, and he also had the somewhat dubious distinction of having the top-selling hip-hop album in Canada. But none of this could have…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Transformer
Stephanie Angeline Loveless is knees-first on the center of her made bed, grinning coyly, comfortable in around-the-house lacey boxers and a purple baby-girl T. She removes from a wrinkled paper bag a gadget that looks like a prison built for a gerbil — curved and straight hard plastic bars join at a clamp, which is…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): According to the theory known as Ducharme’s Precept, "Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment." I bet you’ll soon be living proof of that, Aries. An offer or invitation will come your way in a maddeningly inconvenient way. You’ll be tempted to invoke excuses about why you cannot possibly take…
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Judgment day
Judge Mathis began its eighth season in syndication this week, and before you read what I’m about to suggest and pound out your response on your computer keyboard with homocidal wrath, let me get all my legal disclaimers out of the way: I know Greg Mathis. I like Greg Mathis. Before he hit the daytime…
Dope & doper
Too many writers waste ink trying to pigeonhole Detroit hip hop, sticking albums with unnecessary labels like “underground,” or “conscious” or “street” without considering how pointless these classifications can be. West side emcees Blackreign and Ohkang largely avoid those arbitrary brackets on their full-length debut. The 20 songs on Greatest Hits range all over the…
Head Cheese
Mates of State delivered their monomanias via BlackBerry, which is a Head Cheese first. But vocalist Kori Gardner’s Top 5 “things that should be brought back” — in keeping with the title of the duo’s fourth album and first for Barsuk, Bring it Back — is as thoughtful and mildly, sweetly poignant as the keyboard-driven…
Return to Cookie Mountain
TV on the Radio, here on their major-label debut, write terrifically infectious vocal hooks. Tunde Adebimpe’s falsetto on the opening “I Was a Lover” is raw and vulnerable; leaning against the whirring string sample provided by David Sitek, it comes over both dreamy and intense. The wordless vocal refrain that opens “Province” promises an anthem,…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Oh. Well, would you believe MB86? The Philosopher Kings — Castles (Sony BMG) :: This is the album of the year! The Brought Low — Right on Time (Small Stone) :: Dual guitar stereo high jinks in the sonic service of some hooch-swillin’ Southern-fried blues rock. Cult of Sue Todd — Kelsey Grammer Loves Us…
Gravity Won’t Get You High
Gravity Won’t Get You High, the Grates’ debut, just might get your rocks off in church. Throughout, the Aussie trio channels messy punk rhythms and sunshiny harmonies for their own sort of revivalist garage rock debauchery. And where the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O delivers her shtick in a convincing growl and purr, Grates vocalist…
Middle-age riot
If you have ever heard a concert by Rhys Chatham, you know it can be terribly, brutally loud. Not the kind of loud that an amplifier alone can make, but the kind a scientist of noise can make. A guy who knows what combination of tones and volume will produce the most overtone intervals and…
Ben is Back
Ben Affleck has long needed a resurrection: not a big-buck spectacle but a low-key supporting role that made good use of his good looks and corny, earnest demeanor. He’s found that in Hollywoodland. Playing George Reeves, TV’s original Superman, Affleck gets to show off his chops by trying on the accent and gait of a…
Don’t sleep
It’s one of those late August afternoons when it’s still hot enough to barbecue, but clear and crisp in a way that guarantees autumn’s inevitable arrival. A kiwi-colored Caprice Classic crawls along Belle Isle’s Fountain Drive, the yellows, blues and reds of the ice cream trucks it passes reflecting in its chromed rims, and every…
Army of Shadows
In 1969, celebrated French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville released this bleak World War II epic that follows a small group of men involved in the French Resistance. At the time, it received a tepid response in his home country and never reached these shores. Now, 37 years later, the carefully restored film has finally come stateside,…
News you lose
JonBenet. Baby Cruise. Martha Stewart and Brangelina. The mainstream media’s fascination with these kinds of unimportant stories isn’t anything new. Professor Carl Jensen, a disenchanted journalist who entered advertising only to walk away in greater disgust and become a sociologist, says the media’s preoccupation with “junk food news” inspired him to found a media research…
Conversations with Other Women
The screen is split, and so is the verdict, on this banter-heavy encounter between two unnamed characters. Taking place during and after a wedding reception, our lady and gent, played by Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart, occupy separate frames of the screen for most of the movie. When they come together, the other side…
Night and Day
Thursday • 14 Little Steven’s Underground Garage Festival MUSIC Actor, E-Street dude, radio DJ and silk head-scarf enthusiast Steven Van Zandt’s affinity for garage music makes him an honorary Detroiter. It’s no surprise that many of his favorite young bands come from the Motor City itself. As part of Van Zandt’s traveling showcase — Little…
Another Gay Movie
From its title, you might expect this to be a spoof that takes aim at the done-to-death genre of incessantly happy queer romantic comedies, the kind that indie studios seem to churn out monthly. But writer-director Todd Stephens has his bar set much lower than your average gay date flick. This film wants nothing less…
Where art thou, Motor City Music Conference?
Alright everyone, grab your head shots, demo tapes, CDRs, and promo packs, because the 2nd Annual Motor City Music Conference is here! Oh, wait. According to its Web site, MC2 2.0 is scheduled for Sept. 13-19. But there’s no further information about locations, venues, panels, showcasing artists, etc., so it seems to me anyway that…
