VON BONDIES FINALLY FIND A HOME
The Von Bondies have finally found a home for their Love, Hate, and Then There’s You album, originally recorded for Sire but lost in the ether when the band asked to break their contract with that Warner Bros.-based label. It was announced this morning that the band has signed with Majordomo Records, a division of…
THE WONDER TWINS TAKE ON THE FRIENDLY FOES…
This past Friday night, our own Wonder Twins — D’Anne and Laura Witkowski –attended the Friendly Foes’ CD release gala at the Berkley Front. There was cake. There were cupcakes. There were streamers. There were paper lanterns hanging from a ceiling badly in need of a good dusting. In other words, it was a rock…
LOUDER THAN LOVE: THE GRANDE ON FILM!
Wow! This looks fucking cool! What Detroiter wouldn’t be excited about a trailer that features Dick Wagner and the Frost’s “Rock ‘N’ Roll Music” as its theme song? Hopefully, unlike The MC5: A True Testimonial, this will actually get a commercial release. New documentary by director-writer Tony D’Annunzio. Have no other details regarding release date,…
HAVING A WILD WEEKEND
In case you haven’t heard — and you’d probaby have to be a hermit with no access to the media or the Internets to have not heard — the big gig news tonight is the Friendly Foes’ CD release party for their new Born Radical album, being thrown at the Berkley Front in, duh, Berkley.…
FREEDOM HILL AMPHITHEATER WILL CONTINUE
Macomb county may have recently voted to eliminate its administrative staff at Freedom Hill County Park — but according to Joe Bellanca, programming manager at Freedom Hill Amphitheater, that venue is not closed as a result of that decision and will continue to operate as it has since 1999 via Hillside Productions. The latter has…
Election detection
Democratic Party suit aims to balk alleged GOP vote challenges
Recovery
From the beginning of his career, folk singer Loudon Wainwright III has been looking back. On his 1970 debut, he penned "School Days," a nostalgic song reminiscing about his days as a young stud. The joke at the time was that Wainwright wasn’t even 25 yet. It’s a joke that’s stayed with him: Indeed, the…
Welcome to my nightmare
Dario Argento’s the Italian maestro of horror, period. His cult status grew because he eschews conventional narratives in favor of stories that feel like personal nightmares, a perspective that has made him a force in horror films for more than three decades. His films are unabashedly artistic, filtered through candy-colored lighting and elaborate death sequences.…
Up and coming
Local speakers to address Palestine, labor and ‘ageism’
I Served the King of England
Any attempt to infuse World War II-era atrocities with an ironic sense of whimsy is a risky gambit. Filled with affecting grace notes and gentle gags, this episodic tale of a young man’s dreams to become a hotel magnate is frustratingly superficial, unable to reconcile its past- and present-time storylines to deliver a message worth…
Pooch out
August was a bad month for pit bulls. First, Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin quipped that she and other hockey moms were pit bulls with lipstick, painting the pooches — at least in the case of their similarity to the veep candidate — in an extremely bad light. Then the breed was banned in Grosse…
Tax fact and fiction
It wouldn’t be an election year without candidates promising tax cuts, right?But who gets them, how much they are, what’s the likelihood they can ever be made and what they say about each candidates’ priorities are the bigger questions. “Tax and fiscal policy will loom large in the next president’s domestic policy agenda,” says a…
Towelhead
There’s a difference between provocative and profound, and writer-director Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under) seems to confuse the two. Towelhead, as its in-your-face title implies, sets out to shock the audience with its sexually frank and purposefully dark coming-of-age story. Presenting a scornful view of American suburbia, Ball’s graceless and contrived exercise in…
Keeping up
When libidos don’t match, here’s how to compromise
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
On the Download
Amid all the (relative, mind you) hubbub over maestro Troy Gregory’s departure from the anarchic institution that is the Dirtbombs was the explanatory note that he’s taking a leave to concentrate on other projects. When you’re the bassman in a headlining, working, touring, commercially gregarious outfit like the Dirtbombs, that can happen. So just what…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Round four!
Third acts have always been a problem for former House of Pain frontman Everlast. But this third time around might end that streak.After leaving House of Pain, Erik “Everlast” Schrody staged a massive “comeback” on 1998’s Whitey Ford Sings the Blues. The double-platinum album (which included his huge “What It’s Like” hit) gestated between a…
Ken Cockrel column excerpts
No Honeymoon in Detroit by Kenneth V. Cockrel Jr. Sept. 1, 1993 In my job, my colleagues and I spend a lot of time fundraising and writing grant proposals. Not an easy task, as anyone familiar with this process knows. But once you actually get the money you’re asking for, what’s even more difficult is…
Rainbow’s end
It’s a good day for an ark. As Tropical Storm Hanna turns umbrellas inside out and wreaks havoc on carefully coiffed hair in midtown Manhattan, Detroit clothing designer Katerina Bocci and her crew calmly prepare for her runway show. It’s Saturday night at New York City’s industry-huge Fashion Week. There’s house music, international stars and…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Glamout
Yoo hoo! It’s Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #190! SIZZLING PLATTER OF THE WEEK: Jobriath — Creatures of the Street (Collectors’ Choice) :: "Jobriath believes he’s a rock star, but that’s an allegation adequately milked and turned over to the listening public for final jurisdiction." And with that final withering pronouncement in November 1974, CREEM Magazine…
Love is not the enemy
Coming back to the city where you grew up is a profound kind of return. It’s a reunion with part of yourself. There are memories, family and all the shapes and textures of experience — good or bad — that made their impressions on you and helped you dream of what you could be. And,…
Dan too hard?
I think you were hard on the lady whose first response was "What?!?" when her date suggested testicular sex. As things go, "What?!?" is a pretty tame response that might also have meant: What are you talking about! I am surprised and confused! I’m saying it’s pretty difficult, in a clutch situation, to have the…
Free market fall
On bailing out bad banks with our money
Couch Trip
Woman Times Seven Lionsgate At best mildly amusing and at worst intolerable, 1967’s Woman Times Seven is one of the weakest examples of Vittorio De Sica’s erratic late career. It’s a neat concept — seven short films with Shirley MacLaine playing seven women living in adulterous relationships, alongside brief appearances by Peter Sellers, Michael Caine,…
Special K
Ken Cockrel’s heroic alter ego takes on Detroit’s underworld
Igor
The premise is solid enough. In the blighted land of Malaria, where the sun never shines, evil scientists fuel the economy by blackmailing the rest of the world with monstrous inventions. Each year, the kingdom holds an Evil Science Fair, where the threat of the year is chosen. When his cruel but incompetent master (John…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY • 24 WORLD/INFERNO FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY CIRCUS PUNK? WTF!? Brooklyn’s World/Inferno Friendship Society has become something of an outlandish institution in contemporary punk rock. (Wait. Isn’t that an oxymoron?) And so much so, in fact, that they’ve been dubbed with their very own subgenre: circus punk. Sound hackneyed? It isn’t. See, the World/Inferno is something…
Ghost Town
Ghost Town looks like a pretty obvious stinker with a goofy, hackneyed premise straight out of the 1940s, but it’s really a shiny little gem, a sharply funny and very modern spin on timeworn supernatural comedies. As misanthropic dentist Bertram Pincus, the brilliant Ricky Gervais is allowed to exercise his singular gift for petty churlishness,…
Separating rap from truth
The relationship between hip hop and politics can be just as polarizing as the music sometimes is. For artists like Public Enemy — with songs such as “Fight the Power,” which helped shed light on largely ignored problems in the black community — hip-hop and politics mixed like water and Kool-Aid. But when artists like…
Lakeview Terrace
Writer-director Neil Labute made his name with scabrous satires of sexual politics, wherein men and women not only can’t be friends, but are sworn enemies. Here he turns his venom towards race relations, though the poison goes down slightly easier thanks to the standard-thriller coating it’s given. Samuel L. Jackson dominates the action as Abel…
More than Muppets
You think of PBS: musty antiques, kiddie shows, Tavis Smiley, an exposé on sperm whales, doo-wop groups on parade and every five years or so, a Ken Burns doc. And the pledge drives. Oh, the pledge drives. It was useful for anybody who wanted to view every nanosecond of the recent political conventions but, on…
Hearty fare
Though the menu bills the place as “European,” Allegro is patronized mostly by people from the former Soviet Union, though the staff is more than hospitable to the occasional interloper. On the menu are herring and potatoes, blini with caviar, pilimeni (veal dumplings), smoked fish, sturgeon, and lamb, chicken or pork shashlik (marinated and on…
Motor City Cribs
Ted Miller of the Pizazz shows off his Grosse Pointe Park digs
Helter Skelter
Mention Roman Polanski in mixed company and you’re just as likely to hear “child rapist” as you are “Oscar-winning director.” As with all things, the facts of the case are a bit more complicated than most realize. And it’s to Marina Zenovich’s considerable credit that her documentary approaches Polanski’s story as something other than a…
Letters to the Editor
Out-there art Rebecca Mazzei’s Sept. 17 cover story “Wake up the neighborhood” is a perfect example of why she has been such a valued commentator on arts and culture in Detroit over the past few years. Mazzei’s article combines sharp critical thinking with solid reporting, brought to bear on a topic that is both timely…
Morality as allegory
There are a few organizations as mysterious as the Freemasons. Members are sworn to secrecy and work hard to stay out of the spotlight. The last time Freemasonry made an attention-drawing misstep was in 2004, when an inductee was shot in the face and killed by an elder Mason during an initiation ritual gone wrong.…
Cockrel the columnist
What the interim mayor then thought about politics, hip-hop and crime
Across the Crystal Sea
Danilo Perez is a wunderkind among today’s jazz pianists. He doesn’t play freeform, but he’s nimble in just about any form, whether swinging hard and fragmenting a theme by Monk or bouncing on a folk melody from his native Panama. Moreover, his dazzling reflexes and facility for stretching out have made him in an equal…
CONFIRMED: NO FEST OF ARTS IN ’09
The Detroit Festival of the Arts is definitely cancelled for 2009, but it will be back the following year in “one form or another.” That’s the word from Sue Mosey, president of Midtown’s University Cultural Center Association, who spoke to Metro Times on Tuesday. Last spring marked the 22nd festival that UCCA had put on…
