MEG SEX TAPE “A FAKE”?
Well, it certainly looks like her … but the White Stripes’ publicist is claiming that the woman featured in the “Meg White sex tape” unleashed on the Internet this weekend is not actually Meg at all. In a statement, Chloe Walsh said: “Some people have a very twisted sense of humor and this prank is…
MEG PULLS “A PARIS”?
A lot of the Internet, especially some of the music chatrooms, is buzzing this morning over the sex tape that suddenly appeared this weekend that supposedly shows White Stripes drummer Meg White engaged in full coital activity. While nobody can verify that the person of interest in the video is indeed Ms. White, there has…
AND THOSE CARDS & LETTERS KEEP COMING…
Four more “Terrible” Ted e-mails that we didn’t post below: Bill — You are obviously biased in your opinion of Ted Nugent. You claim to like hunting but are upset by it? I think you shouldn’t drink the bong water. It’s bad for you. Drop the joint and pick up a bow and go out…
BETTER TO BURN OUT…
It turns out that the one-year anniversary extravaganza hosted by the Michigan-centric rock website Just Haircuts and Jackets this past Saturday night (Sept. 22) at Ypsilanti’s Elbow Room, previewed here several weeks ago, also served as a swansong for the much-beloved music blog. “I have decided to put Just Haircuts and Jackets to rest,” the site’s cofounder…
“TERRIBLE” TED MAIL
These are some of the e-mails — both progressive and even more progressive — that I got in response to last week’s review of Ted Nugent’s new Love Grenade CD: Bill, Your review of Ted Nugents Love Grenade is ridiculous. It seems as if you have something against Ted, and if you do, then you…
FAREWELL TO JAKE
We were saddened to hear of the death of Shakey Jake, a fixture on the Ann Arbor street scene for well over three decades. If you spent any time at all in the city, you were likely to see the eccentric figure, dressed in his trademark oversized sunglasses, floppy hat, white shoes and three-piece suit,…
DRIPPING HONEY
John Sayles has long been one of America’s greatest film directors and screenwriters – we’ve believed this ever since he made the wonderful Baby, It’s You in the early ‘80s – and his latest, Honeydripper, which debuts this week at the Toronto Film Festival, has a small Detroit connection via one of its cast members.…
NOIZE BOYZ…
The second Curare Festival — the brain child of Metro Times’ own freelance writer Mike Ross — will be held at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit on Saturday, Sept. 29th. Described as “a music festival for the sonically adventurous,” last spring’s debut event presented a cross-section of Detroit’s underground, noise, and psychedelic music scenes. …
ROCKIN’ RIFF
Congratulations to Doug Podell and the folks at Detroit’s own 101 WRIF, which just won the National Association of Broadcasters “HD Radio Multicast” award for its “Riff 2” multicast channel. The other award went to KBCO in Denver. The two were the first stations to ever receive the awards, which will be presented by NAB…
On being born
Hamtramck’s CaFE 1923 is deliberately designed to look like a place that belongs in Paris, San Francisco or, you know, Ferndale or something. The corner grocery (built in 1923, hence the name) has been given its cosmopolitan makeover to become a fashionable coffee joint, from a backroom library to the pumpkin-colored walls and silver ceiling.…
Move over, Nirvana
Seattle got its rep as a music city because of grunge. No surprise. In the 13 years since the genre flamed out in the worst way imaginable, the city of a half-million has coasted on it. At Pike Place market, sleazy vendors peddle Nirvana T-shirts just like they would Statue of Liberty snow globes in…
Blink fast
The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down First Look A night in the life of L.A. club-kids, hipsters and hangers-on gets an almost anthropological breakdown in The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down. Writer/director Paul Sapiano undoubtedly lived the life he vividly skewers here. His L.A. at night is an interracial melting pot…
Night and Day
Wednesday-Saturday • 19-22 ZigiDeeBooM Hip Hop Fest GOTS THE GOODS The nonprofit, big-ideal crew over at Project A.R.T. is up to good. “Detroit’s only hip-hop arts organization” is run by students, and they’re throwing the third anniversary ZigiDeeBooM Hip Hop Fest. In it, Detroit artists can submit and perform a rap song, as long as…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Bite the Big Apple
“This is the first time I’ve been drunk all summer,” a coy female voice murmurs. “What’s wrong with being drunk?” someone retorts glibly. “Are you Middle Eastern?” she responds. “No.” Deep sigh. “Then you wouldn’t understand.” I overhear this exchange at Crave Lounge, during the sixth of seven club-style blowouts dubbed “Crave the Sunset,” which…
Life in the factory
The massive structures standing at the intersection of I-75 and East Grand Boulevard are impressive brick and glass monuments to Detroit’s bygone industrial glory days. Designed by Albert Kahn, Russell Industrial Center (RIC) was once the site of automobile and airplane manufacturing. Although its days as the hub of industrial production may be long past,…
Writing on the wall
…Our song is a slam a screen door sneaking out late tappin on your window when were on the phone and you talk real slow cause its late and your mama don’t know Our song is the way you laugh…. —Anamarie & Shannique These words were taken from a mural gracing one of the…
American Life in Poetry
A poet gazes at a run-down border town.
Call for entries
Detroit may have a lot of problems, but one thing’s for certain: We have no shortage of artists. But, if you’re a collector, finding an artist whose work is for you can be a problem. Perhaps, if you could shop in the privacy of your own home, those walls in your abode wouldn’t be so…
Way out there
An alien art show touches down at Corktown Tavern.
Enter here for design
As I walked up to Design 99, the newly opened “retail space for design and architecture” on Joseph Campau in Hamtramck, I was reminded that this stretch of mainstreetscape is one of the most authentic, diverse and well-used in metro Detroit. And that is exactly why founder Gina Reichert chose the location. When I met…
Corridor city slicker
The slickest city slicker might find the southern half of Detroit’s Cass corridor, where sagebrush blows through barren streets and folks hustle to survive, scary as the lawless old Wild West. Robert Ray does not. The proprietor of Cowboy Trader Gallery has relocated from complacent Birmingham to a large Victorian house that little resembles a…
Under his cap
He keeps his swimming secret, silly though it seems.
In The Flesh
Björk at the Fox and Steve Wonder at Meadow Brook.
Motor City Cribs
The Wolf Eyes guys’ Ann Arbor spaces.
C’mon in!
Joe Vicari answers about Andiamo.
Plan 313 from Outer Space
The soundtrack: The jarring warbles and screams of lo-fi electronica and noise music. the scene: A silvery, futuristic command-and-control center in the heart of Detroit, from which three multi-tasking, otherworldly brainiacs beam their strange sounds and visions into the minds of unsuspecting humans. Their master plan: To transform the very city itself, to re-imagine it…
New plays, new stages
Every week in this already notable season, theatergoers can see different small or independent shows, often by local playwrights, sometimes in newly opened theaters. And all this before the Detroit Repertory Theatre even embarks upon its landmark 50th season. Notable offerings include: • Performance Network is midway through a run of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean…
The heartbeat of the city
Our art scene exists, regardless of what you may have heard or read. For proof, here’s your annual arts issue. Beyond our usual, extensive list of this season’s exhibits and performances, we set out to profile some new spaces, schemes and collaborations. Before we knew it, there was a list of more start-ups than we…
Space savers
The corner of Hubbard and Porter streets hums with activity. Work vehicles have packed the ground out in front of the Whitdell apartment building into hard earth. Slabs of dumped concrete and mounds of sand adorn the ground outside, and a duo of portable johns graces the attractive courtyard, while tarps billow and flap above…
What’s in a name?
In high school, Jessica Williams used to tease a kid named Itchy for living in a “clown house.” That’s all she really remembers about the infamous Heidelberg Project from those days. Five years later, a lot has changed. The first in her family to graduate college, Williams earned degrees from University of Michigan in art…
Head Cheese
Turbonegro’s Euroboy weighs in on Detroit rock.
Boys to men
Call it returning to the scene of the crime. Or fighting with foam bats. Originally a punk band that could barely play, the Beastie Boys followed up 2004’s sample-heavy rap “comeback,” To the 5 Boroughs, with an all-instrumental album, The Mix-Up. It picks up where 1996’s odds & sods instrumental collection, The In Sound From…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #137 beats your year! SIZZLING PLATTER OF THE WEEK: Zeitkratzer — Metal Machine Music: Live (Asphodel) :: Right from the very beginning, when it first came out in 1975, decades before the advent of such caffeine-laced drugs as Jolt Cola and Tylenol Ultra, I habitually used Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music…
Kwame’s failure
The people have spoken, but what does it mean?
Letters to the Editor
Resents state taxes After reading Jack Lessenberry’s column “Bishop’s block” (Metro Times, Sept. 12), I wanted to offer my 2 cents. The piece has some valid points and some interesting information, but I must wholeheartedly disagree with you on raising the income tax level in Michigan. Our economy is the worst in the nation. Detroit…
This old house
In the early ’80s, during a time of hopeless economic and social malaise, a bunch of Detroit poets, artists and anarchists read a clandestine, utopian tract on economics called “bolo’bolo.” Written by a Swiss-German with the pseudonym of “p.m.” (post-Marxist?), it was an inspired description of an economic alternative to the failed European left-wingers of…
Teaching the terrain
Midtown Detroit, lately, is a surprisingly bustling landscape. With hip, new modernist lofts overlooking Woodward Avenue, a new museum of contemporary art and a Starbucks, people glide in and out of buildings and cruise the streets on a Saturday afternoon. And all that action is just a few blocks up from even more activity, where…
Dance in Detroit? Say what?
Surreal. From a primordial darkness, fluorescent, skeletal figures stalk forward. Glowing green, they take the shape of snakes, of sea creatures and of dinosaurs, dancing across a blacked-out stage. It’s just engineering, not a mishap with a hallucinogen: Flexible electroluminescent wires are sculpted and attached to dancers clothed in black. Through jetés and rond de…
Food stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Family style
Despite a few jarring notes, this is the real deal — house-made pasta, fresh sauces, traditional dishes at reasonable prices; you can imagine somebody’s mama in the kitchen. The menu is much too long to do justice to — there are calzone, panini and pizza as well as 53 entrées, including veal, stuffed pastas and…
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Florida hot sauce mogul Billy Mitchell is exactly the kind of guy you’re dying to see knocked down a peg. Featured as the ultimate video game champion in a 1982 issue of LIFE magazine, for 20-plus years his score at Donkey Kong (and Donkey Kong Jr.) went unchallenged and — in the world of video…
Mr. Woodcock
Billy Bob Thornton plays, again, a mean man who says extremely nasty things to children. It’s a time-honored formula that flops here, because Thornton’s Mr. Woodcock is merely a petty little sadist in zip-up sweats. John Farley (Seann William Scott) is a former Woodcock “victim” who overcame his childhood demons to become a successful self-help…
The Hottest State
When aspiring actor William (Mark Webber) meets aspiring singer Sarah (Catalina Sandino Moreno) in a New York City bar, he quickly finds himself caught up in a nervous dance of delirious infatuation and awkward advances. Every moment of William and Sarah’s budding romance is dizzy with possibility but sober with uncertainty. When intimacy turns into…
Manda Bala
A student of famed documentarian Errol Morris, New York-based Jason Kohn adopts his mentor’s excitable visual style and convoluted storytelling to splashy but confusing effect. Bouncing from one subject to the next and back again, it takes nearly half the film for Kohn’s jumbled puzzle pieces to present a meaningful picture. It’s an ambitious attempt…
Feast on this
Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s rigorous, astringent documentary about factory farming shows you the industry of modern food production in a way that will make you rethink what’s on your plate. Making its case viscerally, with images unadorned by explanation or context, the film’s lack of narration can be jarring, as we are whisked from open…
Vitus
For the hyperaware 6-year-old Vitus von Holzen (Fabrizio Borsani), it isn’t hard to see the moment he changed from a beloved and indulged precocious boy to a child prodigy whose future must be managed. It happened the night his formerly bohemian parents were celebrating their upward mobility with a party at their newly-furnished modest apartment,…
The Brave One
Someday Jodie Foster will reward us by taking a role that’s worthy of her immense talent. But until then we’ll make do with yet another of her noble efforts to make enlightening mainstream studio productions. The Brave One has the pedigree, budget and buzz-worthy patina of quality to ensure trophy talk, but it lacks a…
