City Slang: Danny Brown gets Slate-d
An article published in Slate by Jonah Weiner on the subject of underground rap sees Weiner talk a good, hard look at our boy Danny Brown. In the article, Weiner calls Brown’s XXX the finest underground rap album of the year so far. “A Detroit-based MC, Brown was affiliated for a time with 50 Cent’s…
Indie rockers new- and old- coming through town on school nights
[Up and coming…] Psych-pop trio Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s eponymous debut seems, on its surface, to demonstrate the evoling trend (or coincidence?) that’s seen spats of contemporary bands embracing, if not flaunting, a lo-fi sound, (fuzzed-out reverb and effects-drenched vocals). Where some of these bands catch flack for coming off as contrived, perceivably reaching-for (i.e. manipulating) their…
Tribe closes out Red Bull Academy
The Detroit edition of the traveling Red Bull Academy closed down after six days Saturday night, after workshops featuring Detroit artists from Motown arranger Paul Riser to MC5 axman Wayne Kramer, from Mike Banks and Nick Speed to Jim Diamond. For the closer it was the group Tribe, which fittingly captured much of the range…
City Slang: Alice Cooper hits the Whisky
Detroit’s own Alice Cooper played the Whisky a Go-Go club in LA on September 15 in support of his new Welcome 2 My Nightmare album. This was the first time Coop had hit the stage at the Whisky in 42 years. According to a press release, Rob Zombie introduced Cooper, saying, “I feel like I’ve…
City Slang: Charm Farm bring in the clowns at DIY
The Ferndale DIY Festival, in contrast to something like Arts, Beats & Eats, is a very relaxed, chilled out affair. The focus is 100% on local music and any national bands that play here, like the Electric 6 for example, are home grown. There are vendors – Detroit-centric clothes companies and awesome local artists. Of…
City Slang: Don Was goes back to school
On Monday, September 26, Don Was will be at the University of Michigan in Dearborn for a private classroom lecture and public talk on the campus grounds. According to a statement from Was’ people, “Native Detroiter, co-founder of the band Was (Not Was) and multiple Grammy Award winner Don Was is best known for producing…
DJ Premier Likes Will Sessions
It’s good news to find out that Will Sessions will be officially releasing the instrumentals for Elmatic on September 27th. The eight member funk and jazz outfit worked with Elzhi to painstakingly recreate all of the music from Nas’ Illmatic record. Travis Wright already hipped you to that story a few months ago. Recreating that…
Day Seven and Eight of the Toronto Film Festival
Day 7 – Wednesday Morgan Spurlock’s “Comic-Con: Episode IV – A Fan’s Hope,” turns out to be better than I expected. Far from a snarky smackdown on the geeks and freaks who descend on this San Diego festival every year, Spurlock offers an affectionate look at those who attend. From a young geek who wants…
Higher Ground
Higher Ground B- Like most spiritual quests, Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground finds insight and understanding in its small moments but struggles to offer any real epiphanies. Tackling issues of faith is no easy endeavor, and the actor-director, whatever her shortcomings as a filmmaker, deserves praise for her honest, humane, and richly observed examination of…
Drive
Drive Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Written by Hossein Amini, based on the James Sallis novel. Starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated R. B+ The action flick meets the art house in Nicolas Winding Refn’s ’80s inflected crime drama, a stylishly propulsive…
Homecoming gig for multi-instrumentalist Ralph “Buzzy” Jones
After a long stay on the West Coast, former Detroiter Ralph “Buzzy” Jones moved closer to home a year or so ago to join the faculty at Oberlin in Ohio. But to the best of our reckoning, he’s gotten no closer to the city than a Kerry Town gig with percussionist Adam Rudolph last year. (At…
Check-up time: Is your doctor taking drug company cash?
Is the doctor prescribing you drugs from, say, Pfizer or Eli Lilly, also raking in thousands of dollars — even hundreds of thousands of dollars — from the same companies in consulting and speaking fees? Probably not. But possibly so. And short of asking and hoping for a straight answer, you have no way of…
City Slang: Candy Band put on kiddie music extravaganza
The Candy Band has announced that October 1st will see the first annual Bestest Concert Ever at the Royal Oak Farmer’s Market between 5-8 p.m. Admission will be $5 per person. For that five bucks, there will be four bands, food, drinks, crafts, mini bowling, rock star photos (complete with hair stylists on hand), and…
Passalacqua
I meet Mister for coffee a couple days after he and Blaksmith rocked a 10 o’clock set at Dally in the Alley, warming up the main stage for Will Sessions. “Jessica Hernandez was just in here,” says Mister (known, by day, as Bryan Lackner), “got some coffee to go. By the way, did I tell…
City Slang: “Rock ‘N Roll Again” revisited
Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, for those that aren’t familiar, were an Ann Arbor-based band that formed in ’67 and soon took the Detroit rock ’n’ roll scene, Grande Ballroom and all, by storm thanks to a cool, combination of country, rockabilly and hard rock. The band split in ’76, but front man…
Toronto International Film Festival Diary Day 3: Saturday, Sept. 10
Today started at 7:00am with profoundly good luck at the box office. Sometimes, additional tickets for a screening go on sale that morning, and I was hoping this would be the case for a screening of George Clooney’s The Ides of March and the gala premiere of David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Amazingly, I scored…
Going corporate
Based in Detroit’s Eastern Market, a district half-flourishing with creative spirit and bootstrap entrepreneurship, you’ll find the Hygienic Dress League, a legally registered corporation whose sole product is the promotion of … the Hygienic Dress League. There are three levels of Hygienic employees: Extractors sit on the lowest end of the totem pole, followed by…
Political theater
This is no time for fluff. Even when it comes to weekend theater and a night on the town. Mother Nature’s throwing a fit, we’re on the verge of another recession, campaign season’s upon us and it’s filled with moralizing yahoos and Congress is repugnantly stagnant. But the political climate in 1880s Norway mirrors America…
Round up the prime suspects
What has Rizzoli & Isles done to us? You might as well point a finger at Mad Men too. They’re as much to blame as those two crimefighting BFFs from Boston for the trends engulfing the new fall TV season this month. You see, contrary to popular opinion, TV execs actually do have brains. They…
Onstage with Obama
I was all set to lead a traditional New Orleans brass-band second line for a local union in the Labor Day parade. Then I got a call two days before the holiday asking if I’d like to be onstage with President Barack Obama for his speech in Detroit. I’m always ready to second line at…
True to indie
The rising indie stars of the band Prussia were so proud of their new album, they wanted it to reach as many ears around the world as humanly possible. But that kind of distribution still usually requires a big record label, and seeing as how the music industry’s all topsy-turvy with new distribution schemes, bootleg…
What might have been
You may be reluctant to be dragged back into thinking about Sept. 11, now that we’ve just completed a weekend of wallowing in remembrance of the tragedy that killed nearly 3,000 people. No, nobody breathed a word, so far as I can tell, about the more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians who died as a consequence…
It’s clobberin’ time
It’s impossible to overstate the impact that Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four has had on comic-book fans, writers and artists in the last 50 years. And when it comes to pop culture, 50 years might as well be geological time. So to commemorate the Fantastic Four’s golden anniversary, Dan Merritt, a comics über-fan and owner of…
Letters to the Editor
Double your Dubya Jack Lessenberry has it right ("Lansing’s closet reds," Sept. 6) — almost. The Republicans are Republicans qua Marxist-Leninists: They are functioning in the capacity of Marxist-Leninists, even though that is not, of course, their conscious intent. This has been going on for a long time. Dubya did more to raise consciousness, radicalize…
Food Stuff
Beer, here The Dakota Inn Rathskeller, Detroit’s only authentic German bar, is offering an affordable Oktoberfest alternative for those who can’t shell out air fare to join the millions of beer-lovers converging in Munich for the real McCoy. At the Rathskeller’s fete, expect imported German beer, an "oom-pah" band for spirited sing-alongs, all set against…
Peace out?
In marking the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Wayne State University President Allan D. Gilmour made a stirring pronouncement: "As we pause to remember the past, this solemn anniversary also gives us an opportunity to look to the future. Sept. 11 is a powerful and lasting reminder of the responsibility of men and…
Probing questions
Q: I am a 16-year-old female. I have been in a monogamous relationship with a boy for seven months. My first, his too. A couple of months in, we began to explore masturbating each other and oral sex. He has gone down on me three times, but I have never given him a blow job.…
Rok you up
Are you hip to the Detroit rock scene? From an outsider’s perspective it can amaze, huh? Having said that, the scene’s always been pretty segregated, and you never see too many black faces on local indie or rock show bills, just as it’s rare to see many white kids on local rap shows. But, the…
DIY Street Fair
Ferndale, Detroit’s permissive and "funky" fringe, is so inundated with artists, crafters and musicians; it needs its own quasi-Blowout, essentially to blow off all its creative steam. The DIY Street Fair is three days spent championing the homegrown, taking over two parking lots, one suburban street and one large stage and swarmed with 125 basement…
Let It Grow
I left Amsterdam last week, after the shit hit the fan in Michigan, and the Dutch authorities were striving to match the sheer idiocy of the anti-marijuana crusaders in the United States by forcing 58 licensed cannabis coffeeshops out of business pursuant to a recent dictum that weed can’t be offered for consumption within 350…
Comic pursuit
Comic pursuit Last week, on the same day that leading Republican presidential candidates questioned the science behind climate change, folks at Michigan’s Sierra Club chapter were unveiling a comic book designed to help clue young people in to exactly how serious the problem is. You would think the adults would have been convinced by now.…
Designing Detroit
The Detroit Creative Corridor Center (DC3) has been working hard behind the scenes organizing, qualifying and quantifying Detroit’s robust yet splintered design community. Led by Matt Clayson (who was, before DC3, legal coordinator and promotion manager at the Michigan-based online promotion campaign group ePrize), the DC3 team was instrumental in helping coordinate and produce the…
Fall Arts List
ART EXHIBITS 323 East Gallery and Boutique 323 E. Fourth St., Royal Oak, 866-756-6538 Through 10/5 – Urban Roots. A group exhibition where artists interpret Detroit’s urban farming movement in the present and what this landscape may look like in the future. Inspired by the film Urban Roots. 10/8 – Denial. Street artist from Windsor.…
Local heroics
Zingerman’s Roadhouse 2501 Jackson Rd., Ann Arbor 734-663-3663 Handicap accessible Dinners with sides: $14.50-$38 Sandwiches: $12-$15.50 Chef Alex Young of Zingerman’s Roadhouse is unapologetically meat-crazy — and yet he’s vegetable-crazy too. This summer he served a $45 "Summer Harvest" dinner with vegetables from his own farm, picked just hours before, and then a $45 "Tomato…
No apologies
Nick DiPaolo never backs down. A long-serving vet of the standup comedy wars, the hard-edged and sharply funny Dipaolo grew up in metro Boston, roughly the same time and just a few miles from Jay Leno, Denis Leary and Conan O’Brien. That no-bullshit Beantown upbringing prepared Nick for a life on the road, where he’s…
Dance away
It’s largely thanks to Charm Farm guitarist Steve Zuccaro and drummer Eric Hoegemeyer that I live in metro Detroit today. So, um, you can thank them. While living in London and digging Detroit music from afar, I was sent here by Classic Rock magazine to interview the duo, who were by then in a band…
City Slang: Weekly music review roundup
Remember – if you send it, it will get reviewed. That’s the City Slang promise. It doesn’t matter what genre the music is – as long as it has a Metro Detroit connection, it’ll get in. Preferably, we’d like to concentrate on new releases but, while we’re getting warmed up here, feel free to send…
Big Sean Announces His 30 City Tour
Detroit rapper Big Sean and his G.O.O.D. Music label reps announced yesterday that the 23-year-old MC will be headed out on tour again starting next month. This is a headlining tour of his own and Big Sean will have a lot to prove starting October 2nd when the tour opens up in North Carolina. Hopefully,…
Day Five & Six of the Toronto Film Festival
Despite my plan to post summaries of every film every day I am now beginning to realize that sleep and the need to eat precludes my ability to deliver a daily report. So, I’ve decided to instead mention the highlights of my last four days at the festival. Day 5 – Monday Kicked things off…
