Bridge babble on TV
Just caught on the Web Heather Catallo’s story from Friday for WXYZ/Channel 7 about the Ambassador Bridge Co. and its heavy-handed efforts to build a second span. This is, admittedly, a tough story for TV news because it contains so many threads. But Catallo and crew did a good job covering different aspects of the…
THE TRASH BRATS IN …TOO MUCH TOO LATE
Or, you can put your arms around a memory … Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers made a cottage industry of rent party (“reunion”) gigs at Max’s Kansas City, those events that happened long after the band had officially fizzled. Many, many Heartbreakers fans were grateful for such, even if Johnny was often tumblin’ from of…
THE ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME SUCKS. AGAIN…
Oh, yeah. And I’ve said it before, but fuck the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Here are the nominations (note: not the inductees, the nominations) KISS, LL Cool J, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Genesis, Jimmy Cliff, the Hollies, Laura Nyro, Donna Summer, Darlene Love, ABBA, the Chantels and the Stooges. I’m totally down…
LOCAL VENUE NOTES
*Kudos to the Royal Oak Music Theatre, which becomes a smoke-free venue for all shows, beginning this Saturday, September 26th. The new policy begins the night of a charity event from which all proceeds will go towards the American Cancer Society. Hopefully more places will follow suit. Many people think it’s their constitutional right to…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 23 Death Note ANIME AL FRESCO Originally a Japanese manga series with a serious cult following, Death Note went on to become a successful live-action and then anime show. The tortuous storyline centers on Light Yagami, a bookish college student who discovers a magical tome that can cause the death of anybody whose…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Food Stuff
Wine is fine — Respected winemaker Nicola Biscardo will be in D’Amato’s this week to show off the wines in his portfolio. And the staff of the Royal Oak eatery has assembled a dinner to complement his selections. It all happens Sept. 24 at 222-224 S. Sherman Dr., Royal Oak; 248-584-7400; reservations required; $65 plus…
Motor City Cribs
Will Sessions is one of Detroit’s best new bands. Since its debut last Halloween, it has recorded with Slum Village and neo-soul phenom Mayer Hawthorne, and re-created hip-hop tracks and live samples as a roots-inspired big band with Black Milk, Phat Kat and Guilty Simpson. If you like your hip hop with a side of…
Council conspiracy?
My telephone answering machine was blinking like a Christmas tree with some 12 messages when I got home from a walk Friday afternoon. I was pretty surprised since I’d only been out for an hour. I pushed the play button. "Where you at, man?" I heard the voice of conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Mulenga Harangua. "We…
The great deceivers
There was once a major league baseball player named Rube Waddell, who may well have been the best pitcher there ever was. He set major league records for shutouts, strikeouts, you name it. Unfortunately, he had one little problem. He was easily distracted. As in, attention-deficit disorder to the max. He more than once left…
Mike Birbiglia
Around this time last year, I was headed up to Michigan wine country with an iPod full of This American Life episodes. No, I wasn’t driving a faux-wood-paneled station wagon sipping Earl Grey, but I might as well have been. Have a laugh. Anyway, if you have yet to tune into TAL (Sundays at 11…
Gracious Paul Grosz
Among Detroit’s one-of-a-kind restaurants are a few housed in old homes. One of them is Cuisine, which occupies a 1920s home in Detroit’s New Center, near the pre-theater dining crowd that favors it. The man behind the restaurant is chef and owner Paul Grosz. Grosz has a serious fine-dining pedigree. He started young in the…
Fall TV, come on
Well, what did we expect The Jay Leno Show was going to look like? Despite NBC’s monumental hype and the months-long buzz suggesting fresh and different prime-time entertainment, last week’s debut of Leno at Ten-o was startlingly identical to The Tonight Show from which he was unseated so the network could keep Conan O’Brien. (This…
Death becomes them
The history of rock ‘n’ roll is littered with dozens of such stories — great bands discovered years after their initial obscurity has faded into almost nothingness. As Lester Bangs wrote of the Count Five in what many fans consider his defining piece: Some people are recognized in their own time, and some aren’t. Or…
Beyond the Kid’s Zone
You can find fun about any night at Nine Mile Road and Woodward Avenue. But for three days in mid-September, at least for the past two years, that intersection has turned into a street fair, complete with local music, local beer, and local arts and crafts. The Wonder Twins were on hand for the second…
Courts and sparks
Like a besieged army, Manuel "Matty" Moroun and his Detroit International Bridge Co. are fighting legal battles on multiple fronts in their high-stakes effort to build a second span adjacent to the privately owned Ambassador Bridge. Moroun, an octogenarian billionaire and transportation mogul, has long seemed invincible. Certainly his political clout is formidable. As this…
Letters to the Editor
Killer KISS covers Dude! I would like to thank Serene Dominic for finally allowing me to read my way through the fabled Kiss Alive! Album ("Read it out loud!" Sept. 16). I would have gone to see the show that it was "recorded at," but my pet rock needed a lot of TLC. The back…
Evidence lost and found
Call it the case of the reappearing evidence. About nine years ago, the Innocence Project at Cooley Law School started looking for remaining evidence in the 1986 rape of a 9-year-old Detroit girl. Students and faculty at the Lansing school were representing Karl Vinson, the man convicted in the attack who had always maintained his…
Park art
The city of Grosse Pointe Park is appealing a Wayne County Circuit Court ruling that the suburb’s sign ordinance is unconstitutional. Laurent Chappuis was prosecuted under the ordinance after his wife, Erica Chappuis, erected her paintings in their yard. The city ticketed him, saying he needed a permit because art, under the city code, is…
You call that sex?
Q: You are known far and wide as an arbiter of all aspects of sex and especially definitions of sex, so we are hoping that you can give your definitive opinion on an interesting conundrum. My wife and I were recently regaling each other with anecdotes from our past, and she easily had the most…
Co-ops to the rescue?
Has your job been shipped of to foreign shores or your workplace been sold to faraway profiteers with a bottom-line-only mentality? The Detroit Community-Based Business Week presents an alternative vision of cooperative economic development as we struggle to recover from recession and battered local industries. "Detroit is going through a major paradigm shift of what…
Single-minded about single-payer
They’re calling it a "Care-a-van" — a cadre of medical doctors who piled into a motor home and pulled out of Oregon’s Willamette Valley on Sept. 8, to rally support across the country for a single-payer health care system. And the doctors — aided by the likes of Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 national campaign organizer —…
Couch Trip
In a Dream Indiepix Documentaries about eccentric artists tend to write themselves, only foundering when the documentarian doesn’t have the best access to, or rapport with, his subject. Being the subject’s son, Jeremiah Zagar has no problems in this revealing film about his father, Philadelphia mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar. Isaiah’s public works are themselves worth…
Cheat Code
Muramasa: The Demon Blade Vanilla Ware Wii According to Japanese legend, Muramasa Sengo was a peerless swordsmith and a violent, ill-balanced man who bordered on madness — a trait passed on to the blades he forged. It was said the sword must draw blood before it can be resheathed, even if the user injures himself…
Green space
Situated at the corner of Main and Third, their newly remodeled building boasts rooftop solar panels, cork flooring, a bar top constructed of reclaimed wood, rain barrels for irrigating their onsite greenhouse and a bio-digester. But all these nifty, earth-friendly measures don’t mean a hill of organic beans without tasty food. No worries there. The…
Jennifer’s Body
Diablo Cody’s neo-feminist scream matches a demonic teen hottie with a satanic indie band by casting Megan Fox has a devil of a time in Jennifer’s Body, twirling her raven tresses, arching her back and quivering her pouty lips seductively. Her dead-eyed glare is so perfect for the role of a demonic teen queen it’s…
Love Happens
In this dire rom-com, saved by camera-ready Jennifer Anniston and Aaron Eckhart, Eckhart plays a motivational speaker who has lost his motivation, secretly moping over his dead wife, while selling others on a sunny-side-up program of grief recovery. He’s throwing a weeklong seminar in rainy Seattle, urging clients to walk on hot coals, while he…
The Informant!
Based on Kurt Eichenwald’s nonfiction bestseller, the film follows Mark Whitacre (Damon), a toupeed Ned Flanders-like VP at Archer-Daniels-Midland who, during a minor investigation with the FBI, spills the beans on his company’s participation in a global price-fixing conspiracy. Mark is quickly recruited to wear a wire and turn whistleblower, a role he comes to…
Wait for Me
Moby spoke recently about the 10th anniversary of his breakthrough album, Play, but fans excited to hear behind-the-scenes stories about epochal tracks like "South Side" or "Porcelain" were greeted with a shrug by the man who brought them into being. "They’re all OK," he allowed, but they weren’t his favorites. "The only songs I really…
The real basterds
Based on the true stories of Danish resistance heroes Bent Faurschou-Hviid and Jorgen Haagen Schmith, Madsen’s gripping noir is filled with familiar wartime tropes: lonely resistance fighters, clandestine meetings and double-crossing agents. But even more than a satisfying historical thriller, Flame and Citron presents its conflicted idealists as psychologically complex men who feel their humanity…
Fan obsessive
In Big Fan, Paul Aufiero (Oswalt) is the most devoted of secular zealots, a schlubby mid-30s superfan who lives with his nagging mom, and spends his workdays in a cramped Staten Island tollbooth scribbling the intricate rants he phones in nightly to the Sports Dawg radio show. A total zero in the real world, on-air…
Postmod modern
Well, it sounds like the guy must have grown up with or around one helluva record collection. And it’s nice to see someone put history to such ambitious use in these modern times. But first things first: Mayer Hawthorne is probably the biggest grassroots buzz to hit the music mainstream since Nirvana’s Nevermind and Beck’s…
Council by districts makes ballot
The Michigan Court of Appeals today overturned last week’s Wayne County Circuit Court ruling and ordered that the question of whether to elect the majority of the Detroit city council by district be put to voters. “The citizens of the city of Detroit are entitled to have the proposal placed on the ballot,” the order…
Sixth Grade through MFA: Meet the Taubman Center for Design Education
This morning, under a threatening sky, The College for Creative Studies (CCS) celebrated the grand opening of its A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education, an integrated educational community of sorts whose main focus is on art and design. The Taubman Center will extend from middle school through graduate school and beyond into the professional…
