Tour de Troit
If you’ve ever wondered what 2,000 cyclists in the Motor City look like, you could’ve seen it today at the Tour de Troit. Metro Times was there, and if you believe nothing else we publish, believe us when we say it looks damn fine, even considering all the Spandex. About 100 riders pedaled a “metric…
Something exciting: Joan Belgrave at Kerrytown this weekend
Back in June our frequent jazz correspondent Charles L. Latimer wrote about the life and revived career of vocalist Joan Belgrave, who can “belt pop, R&B, classic rock, the blues and jazz,” but whose forte in any genre is delivering love songs in a voice “so soothing and sexy, she could give a pit bull…
Almost Famous: MONA’s Jef Bourgeau Takes a DIP
John Baldessari” 24″ x 36″h dry paint on canvas by Missy Wiggins Opening this Saturday and running thru early-October at the Detroit Industrial Project (DIP) space inside the Russell Industrial Center is Almost Famous: A Shortlist. The exhibition is curated by the man behind the Museum of New Art, Jef Bourgeau, who has compiled the…
QUACK VS. SONICBIDS (AND BY ASSOCIATION, SXSW)
Editor’s note: Please read the update at the end of this post… Got the following e-mail regarding Austin’s South by Southwest music festival from Quack! Media honcho Al McWilliams earlier today. We weren’t aware that there was a SonicBids controversy (sounds like a “pay-to-play” situation?)…but this should definitely stir up some interesting debate and discussion:…
Porno problem
Q: My boyfriend and I have been living together for a year. He knows I am an insecure person when it comes to my body. I’m not overweight, I’ve been told my whole life how good-looking I am, and my boyfriend tells me he loves my body. We have an active and interesting sex life.…
Whiteout
Based on Greg Rucka’s comic-book series, Whiteout wants to be an exciting snowbound whodunit with Beckinsale’s Carrie Stetko, the marshal of a South Pole science base, tracking down an icepick-wielding murderer. Despite a raging winter storm, plenty of claustrophobic locations and a hearty handful of suspects (though it’s not hard to guess who’s pulling the…
Sister city calls
It began last winter as a scribbled idea on a long sheet of paper, one of many thoughts that burst out with others, adding to the list of possibilities. This list was the result of one of many of Broken City Lab’s regular brainstorming sessions for the group’s next big project. These "projects," as they…
9
Set in a spooky post-apocalyptic cityscape, an alternate-reality where distinctly Euro architecture mingles with menacing high-tech robotic horrors, the film’s conceit is that the humans are dead, and the last resistance left against mechanical killers are nine tiny, conscious rag dolls, imbued by their scientist creator with clashing personalities and a vague sense of carrying…
They lie, all the time
You have to feel sorry for Joe Wilson, that nonentity of a congressman from South Carolina who yelled, "You lie!" at the president as he spoke to a joint session of Congress last week. Wilson has had to cope with a lot of trauma in his own life. Not Vietnam; he managed to dodge that…
Discrimination in suburbia
Palestinian single mom Muna (the engaging Nisreen Faour) moves to suburban Illinois with her teenage son Fadi (Melka Muallem) to be with her embittered sister Raghda’s (Hiam Abbass) successful family. Set at the beginning of the Iraq War, it isn’t long before the families are dealing with the anti-Muslim discrimination, even though they aren’t Muslim.…
2739 Edwin
It’s been 17 years since Steve Panton, owner of Hamtramck’s secret headquarters for contemporary art, the 2739 Edwin, made the move to Detroit from his native Nottingham, England. He’s used his time here wisely, taking this unique (as in moving to the Motor City) opportunity — as are other Europeans (see Detroit unReal Estate Agency)…
Beeswax
Set in the funky back alleys of hipster Austin, Texas, the movie lazily follows a set of twins, Jeannie and Lauren (real-life sisters Tilly and Maggie Hatcher), who have the same face but couldn’t be more different. Maggie Hatcher Lauren is an athletic and freewheeling social butterfly, while Jeannie is wheelchair-bound and a studious vintage…
Detroit Fly House
Just about a year ago, on some autumn Sunday afternoon, Micha Adams woke up with the urge to do something she’d never done before: learn how to rock the trapeze. It was the only thing she could talk about on the way to brunch at Royal Oak’s Inn Season Café that day. And that’s where…
Hammer of the gods
Davis Guggenheim won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, and has turned his talents toward another big, potentially unwieldy subject: the lives and work of the three musicians. He takes the Edge back to Mount Temple, the Dublin secondary school where U2 formed, and films Jimmy Page wandering the halls of Headley Grange, the estate…
‘Cuts right into your chest’
After putting global warming at the forefront of American mass consciousness with 2006’s Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, director Davis Guggenheim took an entirely different tack for his follow-up, training his cameras on three iconic rock guitarists — Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s the Edge, and the White Stripes’ Jack White — for the new…
Der Baader Meinhof Complex
For the first half-hour, Baader sets you up to believe that you’ll be following the moral and ethical erosion of middle-class Ulrike Meinhof, as her depression gives way to existential anarchy. But as her sullenness deepens, her already internal character becomes less interesting, so we’re left with the amoral but charismatic Baader and Ensslin, whose…
Abreact Performance Space
Here’s a Detroit story if there ever was one: It’s the tale of a little theater that could, did, got booted, went nomad and, just recently, setup a new home. Founded in 2000, the Abreact Performance Space first existed on the second floor of Bricktown’s Boydell Building, where co-founder Chuck Reynolds and his roomie Thomas…
74-76
To many rock fans, Destroy All Monsters will forever be known as the project that Ronnie Asheton was in after the Stooges. The addition of Asheton certainly dragged the band out of bedroom obscurity and into the public’s imagination. To others, however, it will always be Niagara’s band; the artist-femme fatale was — and is…
The Cave
"If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in caves eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends." —Orson Welles Can we not reside in caves and impress our girlfriends? It’s not so rare when what’s often considered primordial collides with post-modern conceptual art. So it is that Detroit’s…
Slaughterhouse
On some level, regardless of critical reception or sales results, the rap supergroup Slaughterhouse succeeded as soon as their self-titled LP hit stores last month. It seems that every year or so, two or more renowned soloists announce plans for a joint album, only for the material to eventually get shelved — if their busy…
Night and Day
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 17 Japandroids TEENAGE WASTELAND Vancouver’s Japandroids is a two-piece whose self-proclaimed goal is to sound like a five-piece. The result, which can be heard on their debut disc Post-Nothing, is 35 minutes of fuzzed-out guitars, crashing cymbals and shouting duets. Most of the catchy racket expounds on a single theme — youth simultaneously…
Lorna’s Silence
Globalization seems to be a preoccupation with European filmmakers these days, and after Olivier Assayas’ quietly meditative Summer Hours and Fatih Akin’s profoundly moving The Edge of Heaven comes Belgian auteurs Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s ethical thriller Lorna’s Silence. The Dardennes, masters of neorealism and film-fest faves for their gritty minimalism, rigorously craft a tale…
By the time he got to Woodstock
A couple weeks ago as Woodstock 40th anniversary-inspired nostalgia kicked into high gear, we asked local musician Muruga Booker to share some of his memories of playing there with singer Tim Hardin. Booker gave us a more elaborate slice ’o memoir than we expected, and it took a little longer than we expected too. But…
David and Goliath on Bishop Street
Two guys with a truck got Belva Davis into her three-bedroom bungalow on Bishop Street in Detroit’s East English Village back in 2003. On Saturday, 125 or so folks — neighbors, anti-foreclosure activists, politicians and others — gathered outside her house in an effort to keep her there. Davis’ neighbors talked about what brought them…
The writing on the wall
Their paintings get seen by more people than do the works of most artists in the city. The exhibitions of their art are shown in every part of town, and often last for years. Yet they’re virtually unknown. "You’ll sometimes see my work in the middle of, say, Puritan and Livernois, where you say, ‘Wow,…
The Burton Theatre
It’s really OK if you’ve never heard of the Burton Theatre. It doesn’t technically exist. Yet. You can find it in old Chinatown. What? You weren’t aware Detroit had a Chinatown? Don’t feel bad, there are only remnants left, for which we have to thank Cass Corridor preservationist and landowner Joel Landy for saving. Landy,…
News of the weird
"I’m not in a normal band." So says Chad Thompson, Johnny Headband’s singer-keyboardist, delivering what surely could be considered one of the local musical understatements of the year. But even though this is surely a band that loves to use theatrics — with members often donning outlandish outfits that are more like disguises while swaggering,…
Dome sweet dome
Using his authority as Pontiac’s emergency financial manager, Fred Leeb is selling the Silverdome his way: an auction with no minimum bids to be completed by the end of this year. "We have to sell it now," says Leeb, appointed in March by Gov. Jennifer Granholm because of years of unresolved budget problems in the…
The love shack
The building’s exterior is beset by a gaggle of tattooed twentysomethings in cutoffs, holding beers and sticky rollers. They’re helping Andrew Beer paint the outside of his place a phosphoric shade called "green energy." All concerned have a shared vision for Detroit’s Woodbridge community, the channel for which is this old carriage house Beer purchased…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Food Stuff
Grape deal — It’s been a tough decade for the Merlot grape. Though Merlot acreage mushroomed tenfold in the 1990s, not all that land was suitable, and the wine’s popularity waned. (That movie Sideways didn’t help either.) But don’t give up on Merlots. Or so say the wine-lovers at Vinology, who are hosting a tasting…
Letters to the Editor
We’re not No. 1 I’ve noticed in a lot of letters to the editors recently in several papers where writers state that the U.S. health care system is the best in the world (see "Yahoo, you," Letters to the Editor, Sept. 9). Not so. That singular honor goes to the French. France has been noted…
Read It Out Loud!
If you’re old enough to remember the Poni-Tails’ 1958 hit, "Born Too Late," then you were born too early to have been in the tank for the KISS Army. There’s no place for KISStory among snobs with firsthand recollections of the Beatles — another band with four distinct personalities, a band that never made a…
Celebrating tofu
"Do you like tofu?" is a rarely used interrogative. Tofu is so broadly disdained; you may as well ask someone if they’d like to smell your fart. It has been tagged with myriad guilt-by-association disses, from being a weird, if innocuous, hippie food, to an epithet denoting godless New York Times-reading liberals, and even, as…
Secrets of the city
The battered abandonment, the veritable concrete jungles and the wrecked streets give Detroit its ghostly and troubled tone. It also makes the once glorious metropolis one of the world’s most enigmatic modern cities. It’s true. Blunt and simple: People dig Detroit, but nobody’s rushing to move here. It’s a wonder to outsiders — from Bloomfield…
Bully beef
You can’t walk in without thinking “time warp,” what with the diner chairs with their sparkly blue, red and gold seats, the counter with its low stools and the motherly and well-informed waitresses who really do seem to care. Fifteen-year veteran waitress Linda Holmes presides over an eclectic crowd that might include an elderly blond…
