Play-by-play
Every fall, thousands of music fans, industry folk and music journalists descend on New York City for four days of music, film and symposiums. The occasion is the College Music Journal’s (CMJ) Music Marathon — and for anyone even remotely interested in the goings-on of the modern music scene, it has become something of a…
Night and Day
Thursday • 22 Broadside Press 40th Anniversary with Sonia Sanchez LITERATURE The last few years have seen a surge of interest in Broadside Press, the Detroit-based small press that helped spark an explosion of African-American poetry in the 1960s. There’s been a biography of founder Dudley Randall (Wrestling with the Muse) and an anthology of…
Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert
A Rollins fan who had been following the saxophone colossus for half a century listened to this new release, looked dreamily ahead and sighed, “What a weightlifter.” Rollins followers know that live Rollins releases have been rarities in recent decades, just three in the last 30 years. But this one has the added drama of…
Letters to the Editor
Pro-Bush stories untold Isn’t it funny that none of the top 10 or any other story mentioned was in favor of Bush, the war, etc. (“See no lethal,” Metro Times, Sept. 14)? The fact that you guys are trying to tell us that not all the stories have been shared, yet fail to show us…
Beyond Beans & Cornbread
Suburban soul food restaurant located in West Bloomfield with a moderately priced menu that focuses on chicken and ribs. No trans fat is used. Expect great service.
Unfit to hold any office
Want to help the white racists in Lansing to take control of the city of Detroit, take the power to run the city away from its citizens and send in an out-of-town “economic manager” to run things? Then do everything you can to see that Kwame Kilpatrick is re-elected. I’ll bet you even money that…
Add it up
A high-minded drama with a prestigious cast headed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins, Proof is already being touted as Oscar bait. The hype isn’t necessarily unwarranted; the film is an elegant, intelligent work, even it echoes pieces of other Oscar winners like A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting. Catherine (Paltrow) is the daughter…
This disaster is far from over
Yes, this is one more column about Katrina.By now some of you are probably starting to get tired of hearing about the disaster, although you might not want to admit it out loud for fear of sounding cold and uncaring. After all, when was the last time you lost everything you owned in a flood?…
This Divided State
This Divided State A documentary exploring the uproar that ensued when Utah Valley State College invited Michael Moore to come speak on campus in the weeks before the 2004 Bush-Kerry election. It’s a riveting metaphor for our violently divided country, a documentary filled with fascinating real-life characters displaying all the venom and vehemence illustrated in…
Plan B … we’re still waiting
As receivership looms, Detroit still has no backup plan.
The Fire Within
The Fire Within Louis Malle’s 1963 low-key portrait of a suicidal writer making one last survey of his life while working up the will to make that final leap into the void. A depressed, alcoholic unable to cope with real life, Alain struggles to balance compromise with integrity.. Filmed in moody black and white and…
Head cheese
New Model Army has fought the good fight since 1980, and its frontman, Justin Sullivan, is a passionate dude. NMA’s fist-jacking sloganeering sometimes resembled Hersham Boys-era Sham 69, but they could never be dismissed as shallow riff hooligans. No, they’re steadfast documentarians and defenders of the British proletariat — they did for post-punk what Massive…
School’s out forever
“Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Psalms 126:1” So reads an engraving on East Catholic High School at 7320 St. Anthony Place in Detroit. Well, that very well may be the case here as this, the last Catholic high school on the city’s East Side, is now closed.…
Tell Them Who You Are
Tell Them Who You Are This documentary about acclaimed cinematographer Haskell Wexler is only partly about his turbulent career. Filmed by his son Mark Wexler, the emphasis is more on the relationship between the two, exploring Haskell’s sometimes cold and harsh dealings with Mark, who grew up in the shadow of a famous father, struggling…
Horniness got the better of him
Q: I’m a 21-year-old straight guy with a boring, straight sex life, until a few months ago when something terrifying happened. Back in May, I was contacted by somebody through Match.com. She claimed to be a grad student at my school, had a very attractive photo and we began IMing. She talked about how she…
When the machines rock
T. Raumschmiere is one sick, German electro-punk, hardcore dude. More into the flame-throwing violence of the Stooges than the cool sci-fi intellectualism of Juan Atkins, this gloriously odd techno-anarchist says rock and metal were his first musical loves. “When I started clubbing, I was having fun but I found the music so boring,” says Marco…
Genesis
The follow-up to the 1996 film Microcosmos, which examined the mostly hidden world landscape, revealing a strange and beautiful world of seemingly unearthly abstraction. Genesis is technically similar, exploring the creation of the universe and, subsequently, life on Earth. However, it’s less compelling, perhaps because the topic is so huge and riddled with physical and…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Your adversaries may have a tough time of it in the coming days. I bet their schemes will backfire, their bad hair days will be frequent, their ignorance will be glaringly visible, and the trouble they’ve caused will be punished. How should you react? You’re allowed exactly one hour of gloating.…
CMJ 2005
Every fall, thousands of music fans, industry folk and music journalists descend on New York City for four days of music, film and symposiums. The occasion is the College Music Journal’s (CMJ) Music Marathon — and for anyone even remotely interested in the goings-on of the modern music scene, it has become something of a…
Deeper High
There are numbskull riffs, thud-pocket drumming and (we imagine) nerve-pinching head flips. There are tangled-up-in-blues guitar leads flittering through wah pedals and scads of other Stooges finger-pistols. Shit, even the cowbell on “Turn to Stone” could be turned up. But don’t yawn just yet, chief; this beast of a bong-loading, zit-squishing, porn-watching, beer-gut fueling, stoner-psyche…
Backslash
Dodge this: It’s just what we needed — yet another hipster toy for your cell phone. If, like so many other poor souls, you suffer from a crippling addiction to text messaging, you’ll surely get a kick out of the new-ish service Dodgeball: www.dodgeball.com. It doesn’t have anything to do with flying red rubber kickballs;…
7″ pop shots
Frustrations “Nerves are Fried” b/w “Summer” X! Records What fantastic noisy mess of gangly and eager suburban youth: “Nerves are Fried” is a frenzied punch-up of mad tub-pounding and a descending guitar riff that doesn’t ever stop descending; it only interrupts itself for the occasional off-time note bend or pick slide. The monochromatic lead vocal…
Superbeautifulmonster
Bif Naked’s lyrics strike in the first person. They’re unavoidable, like her tattoos or straightforward sexuality. Problem is, Naked’s music often lacks the same force of identity. She’s adopted numerous styles since her 1995 debut, from swaggering proto-metal and Garbage-style alt rock to mishmashes of balladry and anthemic pop. And while there are some great…
Indie goes big
There’s a scene in Spider-Man 2 where Doctor Octopus is rushed to the hospital to have the creepy mechanical arms grafted to his spine removed. The arms suddenly spring to life and, as captured in a series of frantically wild camera shots, kill everyone in the operating room. For long-time fans of Sam Raimi’s work,…
Media Blackout
They’re at the post so place your bets, ’cause this is the trifecta edition of MB50! • Corb Lund — Hair in My Eyes Like a Highland Steer (Stony Plain) :: Maybe I ain’t been listenin’ carefully, but I ain’t heard an album with yoyo yodelin’ on it since Eno’s ululatin’ “Seven Deadly Finns.” Well,…
13 & God
13 & God is a collaboration between Germany’s long-in-tooth electronic punks Notwist and California’s underground hip-hop heads Themselves. What? Yeah, wrap your mind around that headfuck. Notwist contribute captivating laptop pop while Themselves seep synthesized android-rap into the tracks. The former’s whimsy and the latter’s inventive drum claps mesh together to form something. But problems…
Fighting for life
Carl Demeulenaere is like a nutty secretary from a bad Jerry Lewis movie. At least, that’s how he describes it. As one of four co-chairs of the 10th Annual Art Works for Life auction, a benefit for the Midwest AIDS Prevention Project (MAPP), he’s crazy as anyone in charge of a major event just weeks…
Light waves and their uses
Long filmstrips of ink-speckled acetate hang from racks in a corner of artist Bruce McClure’s Brooklyn loft. Shelves are packed with film reels and cans. McClure, sitting behind a table in the back of the room, prepares to fire up one of four film projectors for a piece entitled “Christmas Tree Stand (parts 1-3).” It’s…
Truckin’ Up To Buffalo
The concert documented on Truckin’ Up to Buffalo took place when this writer was in the midst of an intense bout of high school Deadheadism, so the sounds are familiar and welcome. 1989 was a fantastic year for the Grateful Dead. The band had achieved an unthinkable level of commercial success, and leader Jerry Garcia…
Sewing stories, painting pictures
“I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass. It’s a line that resonates when viewing artist Jeanne Bieri’s mixed-media pieces, paintings and altered found objects. Her solo show at Paint Creek Center for the Arts — one of three for her in metro Detroit within the next month — illuminates the artist’s aptitude…
More than meets the eye
It was a curiously hot and rough morning on Lake St. Clair, with winds out of the northeast creating a good chop on the water. Five of us were fishing over on the Canadian side, in the shallows of the Belle River hump. Other than one huge ugly muskie, we weren’t catching a thing. About…
Asylum
For a film about madness, sex and violence, Asylum is far too serious and sane. Natasha Richardson plays the bored wife of a mental hospital administrator who has a torrid affair with a handsomely murderous inmate. Directed by David Mackenzie, this gothic melodrama abandons the macabre wit and dramatic momentum of Patrick McGrath’s source novel,…
Art Bar
Last Thursday, a conversation with Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick at Detroit’s GR N’Namdi Gallery opened with the announcement of plans for a new art center in the Wayne State University cultural district. The 50,000-square-foot space, featuring 20 to 30 commercial galleries, a small theater and performing arts spaces, will focus on representing African-American arts and artists.…
Fear factor
In Fabric of Fear: Art after 9/11, hosted by Detroit’s Gallery 555, New York artist Chrissy Conant presents an installation featuring a plush wool blanket covering a bed. This blanket has been adorned with the terror alert spectrum in soothing pastels. Above the bed, five Plexiglas panels echo that spectrum. The nightstand is complete with…
The Baxter
This romantic comedy attempts to spoof romantic comedies, specifically, the Baxter: He’s the terminal nice guy in movies who inevitably gets left at the altar when the real hero rushes in at the last moment to sweep the bride away. The jokes are tame, and the film tries just a little too hard, and the…
PAC files financials — but it doesn’t look pretty
Group backing Mayor Kilpatrick doesn’t look good on paper.
Like brothers
Whether a riff or a rhyme, the pattern on a quilt or the padding of a speech, for centuries, repetition is a motif that has defined artistic direction. Why so popular? On some level, we want endurance to define us. On Tuesday at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, a night of words and music…
Lord of War
Nicolas Cage’s effortless charisma and energy shine through in this intoxicating — if not completely convincing — tale of a slick arms trader pulling in cash in the 1980s. With a few less clichés, Lord of War might’ve been a classic, but as it stands, it’s just an enticing near-miss.
Proactive
TALK LATIN If you’d like to bone up on your knowledge about the political situation in Venezuela, Oct. 2 might be a good time to do it. University of Detroit Mercy is hosting “Reform and Revolution in Venezuela: A report and discussion of the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students.” The festival was held…
A show about nothing
For the last several years, sitcoms have been a plateau in heaven for stand-up comedians. You log a few years on the road, start surfacing here and there on basic cable, and before you can say “Norm McDonald,” you have your own show. But a milquetoast half-hour of safe-mode laughter probably isn’t in the cards…
Just Like Heaven
Reese Witherspoon’s latest stock romantic comedy has a cast that might lead you to hope for something more, but in the end, it’s like the acoustic cover version of the Cure song that opens the film: cutesy and irritating.
No count recount
Maureen Taylor’s frustrations boiled over into anger. Monday, inside a cramped meeting room at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers were reviewing and certifying the results of a vote recount from Detroit’s August primary. Taylor, a longtime welfare rights activist who ran for City Council but failed to…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Rock Icons DVD
Sly Stone is stoned. Janis Joplin is thoughtful and insecure. David Bowie is fidgety. Paul Simon is articulate and revealing. George Harrison is modestly humorous. David Crosby is a jackass. And Dick Cavett is often deliberately corny, playing off his own admitted “squareness,” often quick-witted, incredibly patient and genuinely interested in understanding the musicians set…
