BELLY DANCIN’ PROG-METAL GOES NATIONAL!
Congratulations to Dendura, the Grand Rapids-based, female-fronted, Egyptian-inspired, progressive metal band (with belly dancers!) for recently scoring an indie label deal with the Austin-based KillZone Records. The group is reportedly discussing going into the studio “with a national producer who’s worked with some very big bands,” according to their publicist. The group — which plays…
WHAT A JOKE!
Well, the nominees have been announced … and it’s the biggest joke yet from this “institution” that supposedly has something to do with the notion of “rock ‘n’ roll” (or “Rock and Roll,” as they call it, using the spectacularly less hip “and” between the “rock” and the “roll” — let’s face it, even an ampersand would be…
True lies
How to spot a cock-and-bull story.
Night and Day
Thursday • 27 Nash the Slash WRAPPED WITH ATTENTION Undergrounder Nash the Slash is a Canadian prog-alt-classical-punk singularity. Reputed to be the artistic alter ego of 59-year-old Jeff Plewman, the multi-instrumentalist has performed with a face covered in bandages since 1979. Though he’s mostly known for aggressively sawing the violin with preprogrammed accompaniment, he recently…
Detroit vinyl roundup
Fontana I Feel Like a Jerk EP X! Records Sloppy, inept punk rock that’s heavy on squealing guitar swaths which cut through the modesty a la the Voidoids. “(Having a) Fun Time” resurrects the audio verité of the Germs, while “You’re Obscene” does the punk-by-numbers jig before spilling into a slow, sing-along-tempting breakdown. Nice! The…
Perfect pops
Britain’s Pipettes land at the Magic Stick.
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
A writer slaps Morgan upside the head over Wattstax crack.
On the run
Eight years ago, William Craig Garrett thought he had a rare second chance in the Michigan courts. Then-Wayne County Circuit Judge Sean Cox had ordered a new trial for the Hazel Park native convicted in the 1995 armed robbery of an elderly woman in her Plymouth Township home. Just four years into a 15- to…
Food Stuff
Harvest road trips and a bellini brunch.
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Life in the desert
Study suggests lack of fresh food shortens Detroiters’ lives.
Feast your ears
Gaining entrée with opera theatre head David DiChiera.
Rocking the celluloid casbah
If you’re looking for proof of just how big the Toronto International Film Festival has become, you could count the paparazzi that line the red carpets, preventing you from getting even a glimpse of just one of Angelina’s back tattoos. Or you could tally the millions of dollars paid for the unrepresented indie films picked…
No jacket required
Despite its simple furnishings, casual dress policy and reasonable pricing, J. Baldwin’s fare is decidedly uptown. Entrées include six chicken options (ranging from Southern-fried to a low-carb almond-crusted variant in tomato-basil over zucchini linguini), several steaks (with Kobe flatiron an attractive option), a good number of sea-food items and several daily catches, jambalaya and, for…
In celebration
Two summers ago, when I was interviewing then up-and-coming Ghostly International/Spectral DJ Ryan Elliot for a feature story, the conversation veered toward the difference between real time and something we called “techno time.” “You have to keep staying on your game to keep the edge,” Elliot said. Sure, that statement seemed obvious and universal. But…
The Hunting Party
Coming off the critical success of his debut, The Matador, filmmaker Richard Shepard steps into the difficult-to-master arena of political satire with The Hunting Party and comes up short. The shaggy-dog mishmash of cynical black comedy, male-bonding road trip, political commentary and cautionary tale, concerns Simon Hunt (a jaunty Richard Gere), a washed-up TV war…
Mothership lips
“I wanted to speak of not just my experience, but everybody’s experience,” Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne says the night before his band’s show at Denver’s Red Rock Amphitheatre. “That’s really the hardest thing that artists do. Because when you’re young, you want nothing more than to think, ‘I’m utterly unique and there’s no one…
Sidney White
Amanda Bynes stars as a salt-of-the-earth high-school grad who enters college with dreams of joining her late mother’s sorority, which is now overrun by a totalitarian witch and her cabal of elitist buxom blondes. So she bands together the nerd fraternity to take down the Greek establishment while converting her frat-boy love interest.
Bang on the eye
The Graduate 40th anniversary collection MGM The Graduate was utterly of its time in 1967, but it was especially ahead of it in terms of its modernism. The underrated Mike Nichols brought visionary style to the movie, taking chances most directors wouldn’t today. Take that poetic associative montage after Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin and Anne Bancroft’s…
Eastern Promises
When a 14-year-old prostitute dies while delivering her baby, London midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) vows to track down her family. Her only clue is the dead girl’s diary, written in Russian, and a business card for a posh Russian social club left inside. So, as Anna’s elderly uncle sets about translating the journal, she meets…
Getting smashed
Is this what the Internet has come to?
Our sorry state
Lansing row lays Michigan low.
In the Valley of Elah
Writer-director Paul Haggis (Crash) employs a cool, minimalist style — without bombast or heated rhetoric — to create a devastating portrait of the casualties of war on the home front (based on the 2003 death of Specialist Richard Davis). What makes In the Valley of Elah so effective is its straightforward directness, embodied in the…
Well worn
To be young, stylish and Muslim.
American Life in Poetry
A poet in the park mulls dining choices.
Good Luck Chuck
The current kings of the gross-out romantic comedy (that’s Judd Apatow and crew) have nothing to fear from Good Luck Chuck. Neither do former kingpins the Farrelly brothers — though director Mark Helfrich’s debut film here tries to mimic There’s Something About Mary. Good Luck Chuck has a great central premise, but suffers from a…
Onward, secular soldiers
An amazing thing has been happening here in God’s own country: For the first time in living memory, religious skepticism is hot. In the past two years a whole slew of atheistic polemicists — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — have been on or near the bestseller list, speaking to packed houses,…
Letters to the Editor
Heartened by art I spent some most pleasurable evenings last weekend attending art shows in downtown Detroit. The arts community is hale, hearty and vital, as far as I am concerned! Thanks so very much for publishing the Arts Issue — we need the print media now more than ever to discuss and report on…
Tolstoy’s children
A stunning example of all-out, go-for-broke creative risk-taking on a massive scale, this audacious adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace redefines the epic film. Writer, director and star Sergei Bondarchuk transformed one of Russia’s most revered texts into one of the most expensive movies ever made, and he did it in the former Soviet…
Censored!
For 31 years, Project Censored has been compiling a list of the major stories that the nation’s news media have ignored, misreported or poorly covered. The Oxford American Dictionary defines censorship as “the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts,” which Project Censored Director Peter Phillips says is also a fine…
Down on the corner
With its overgrown weeds, bushes and trees, the corner of St. Aubin and Frederick in Detroit could be rural Mississippi. Particularly on a Sunday evening when raw blues and billowing barbeque smoke from the grills of John’s Carpet House fills the air. “Do y’all have a bass player with you?” asks Pete “Big Time Operator”…
Day Night Day Night
What does it take to strap a backpack full of explosives to your body and become a human bomb? Reducing the question to an exercise in abstraction, Russian-born filmmaker Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night tries to provide a context-free answer but is undone by postmodernist affectation and art school minimalism. Set over the course…
50 Cent vs. Kanye West vs. Kenny Chesney
The press is responsible for making up its share of bogus celebrity feuds — Beatles vs. Stones, Sammy Davis Jr. vs. Sandy Duncan, Fall Out Boy vs. Get Up Kids — but this phony three-way smackdown was just handed to us on a silver platter, an indication of just how desperate even platinum artists with…
The War is on
America is smack-dab in the middle of The War, both literally and televisionally. However, in this age when our brave young men and women are dying overseas every day for a cause both ill-defined and seemingly without resolution, it’s almost inspiring to immerse oneself in a time when America was compelled to engage in “a…
‘Little Red Book of Business’
The China that James McGregor describes in One Billion Customers isn’t the China of Associated Press photographs, bustling street scenes briefly broadcast on television news programs, undergraduate Eastern philosophy courses, Nixon-era Doonesbury chicanery or fortune-cookie koans. Nor is it the intensely mystical and deeply personal China Susan Sontag fetishized in her ’70s essay, “Project for…
Back in the Detroit groove
“Although we’re jazz lovers who love live music in clubs and concert halls, we got tired of having to hear what’s essentially an intimate art form in a cavernous space. Or worse yet, in a smoky club with drunks and loud talkers who distracted from the music.” So says Andrew Rothman, who, along with his…
Motor City Rides
A hearse with wings and a jet booster.
Head Cheese
The Melvins’ King Buzzo’s top five last meal requests.
First strike
A cub reporter crosses the line.
FOOS FRIENDLY
Detroit’s own HiFi Handgrenades — not yet a year old, without a record deal (and originally designed solely as a side project for John Speck, formerly of the politically-correct named Fags) — were just tapped by Dave Grohl himself to join the Foo Fighters on the first leg of their upcoming tour. The Handgrenades were…
NAUGHTY BUT
The porn website fleshbot, which subtitles itself “Pure Filth” (God, I’m so pleased to be the one to tastefully bring porn to the Metro Times’ music blog!), has presented a theory on the supposed “Meg White sex tape” that’s all over the Internet. The site has suggested that the person in question could possibly be porn…
