NOT TO DEVALUE THE PUSSY BUT…
The Slap Fight of the Year award goes to rock ’n’ roll’s two biggest pussies, Tommy Lee and Kid Rock. That’s right, Lee and Rock threw down last night at MTV’s ever-dismal Video Music Awards ceremony in Vegas. Too bad the cat fight wasn’t televised (you can watch the MTV clip on the Internet, though)…
JAZZ NOTES
Steve Wood turned in a killer set at the recent Detroit International Jazz Fest, reprising the late ’50s work of Yusef Lateef. Both on the originals by Lateef and Lateef’s colleagues, and on standards (like a haunting “Angel Eyes”), saxophonist Wood and company reminded listeners how exciting Lateef was just then — think of him…
GOODBYE, PAVAROTTI
I’ve never been a very big fan of opera music. In fact, despite the fact that I’m half Italian, I’ve often claimed that opera is the only form of music that I’ve never appreciated. Nevertheless, this is pretty damn cool…so we’ll post it today in honor of one of the all-time greats…in fact, of two…
Speaking of Larry Craig
On public officials getting caught in a public restroom.
Halloween
In Rob Zombie’s world, it’s always 1978. Dudes with hair the texture of greasy mops drive around in Trans Ams stocked with cafeteria-sized coolers of Schlitz. Dirty blonde chicks wear patchwork fur coats with secret pockets in the lining, tailor-made to store their one-hitters and weed stashes. Two out of every three words spoken are…
Night and Day
Thursday-Saturday • 6-8 The Rocky Horror Show Sweet sweet trannie There are reasons aplenty to don fishnets and bustiers in public: Halloween, S&M parties, Casual Friday, comfort … But if you need one more, the Meadow Brook Theatre will present the musical “The Rocky Horror Show” for its third consecutive year. Though the venue’s nestled…
Dead flowers
Writing about heroin is always tricky. The very fact you have something to say risks shrouding substance abuse in glamour and illusion. So anyone who emerges from the ashes of addiction and decides to tell his story is shouldered with a great responsibility: Will it be seen as a cautionary tale, or instead serve as…
30 years of Dallying
Fall fest now spans a generation.
Live at Café Montmartre 1966
Ornette Coleman may have started the free jazz thing, circa 1960, but trumpeter Don Cherry was the Johnny Appleseed of Ornetteology, sharing and extending his boss’s ideas on both sides of the Atlantic. In New York, he worked with such peers as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Steve Lacy. In Europe, he gathered younger, less-known…
Here come cowboys
The original 3:10 to Yuma, released back in 1957, is one of those Westerns that, on a lazy Sunday, you might catch on AMC while flipping channels, get sucked into, and, at the end of it, wonder, “How the hell haven’t I heard of this movie? It should be a classic like High Noon!” You’d…
Orleans to London
Former Detroiter —by way of Temperance, Mich. — McIntosh is now a Las Vegas-based session guitarist of the highest order. His six string excursions are both liberating and inspirational, fueled, to a large extent, by a stellar cast of characters along for the ride. And when a musician has got the support of Ronnie Wood,…
Old red eye
Skin for Sale TLA releasing The average female porn star makes 200 films in three to five years before calling it quits. Judging from Skin for Sale’s conversations with actors, directors and producers of the Barcelona porn industry (the Silicone Valley of Europe), the high burnout rate isn’t because of drugs or scandal but simple,…
Those the Brokes
Just about everything I’ve read about this London group name checks the Mamas & the Papas. Personally, I don’t hear it. They rock a lot harder than those Hall of Famers and no one in the Magic Numbers sings as well as Mama Cass or Denny Doherty, either. Maybe it’s just ’cause they’ve got at…
Real(ist) dolls
“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb.” —Sylvia Plath, from “the Munich Mannequins” For nearly a century, man made a sublime species of woman — buffed wax mannequins modeled after the real thing, modishly attired for the urban scene. Coveted from the far side of department store windows,…
Motor City cribs
Amp Fiddler’s funky Detroit crib.
Phoney art
On a late, sunny, Saturday afternoon several months ago, I was invited to a meeting in Clark Park in southwest Detroit, to witness a “handoff.” This kind of activity was much more common in Clark Park decades ago, better known then as “Crack Park.” It has since been cleaned up, filled with picnicking families, the…
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid The Perry Bible Fellowship – by Nicholas Gurewitch
Keren Ann
Israeli-born, French-raised singer-songwriter Keren Ann learned to play guitar by listening to Joni Mitchell and Serge Gainsbourg albums, and her four records so far have been a pleasant synthesis of these two titan influences. Her self-titled fifth album, however, finds her moving beyond these spheres and achieving an expression of her own true voice. And…
Food stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Don’t mind the maggots
Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan is a crowded string of tired Laundromats, colorful vintage shops, endless bars and dingy tattoo parlors, punctuated by polished Vespas and passers-by toting guitars. Jazz rises from cellar doors at our feet. Ornate metal fire escapes hang from open windows, some brimming with potted ferns. It…
Balls of Fury
Each joke is worse than the last, so dismal and hackneyed that we begin to dread each coming crow like the clicking of a barrel in a game of Russian roulette. The torture never ends, from dumb racist jokes to dumb sight gags to desperate, wheezing attempts to squeeze life out of the dying cow…
Letters to the editor
Power outrage Thank you for the article “Glow Job” (News Hits, Metro Times, Aug. 22), which reveals the nuclear industry support by Rep. Fred Upton. Regional press has been starkly inadequate on the subject of our representatives acting as shills for the industry, and of the NRC (No Regulatory Control) lack of public input into…
The 30 Year Low
No whimper for this Brooklyn alt-country quartet, but a bright fiery crash involving principal songwriters Tim Bracy and Shannon McArdle. Like Linda and Richard Thompson before them, Bracy and McArdle —who married just over two years ago — celebrate their parting and the band’s dissolution after a dozen years, utilizing a white-hot airing of grievances.…
Hatchet
Ben (Joel Moore) and buddies are in New Orleans whooping it up with boobs and booze. But the Girls Gone Wild atmosphere ain’t working for poor Ben; he just split with his girlfriend and the bare-chested chicks remind him that his ex is probably at home screwing her new beau on the couch his parents…
Letter to a student
Words for tomorrow’s ‘educated electorate.’
Beat Konducta Vol. 3-4: In India
Whether on the inside looking out (as Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale are) or on the outside looking in (as Madlib is) contemporary musicians are working with the expansive sonic palette of Indian music in ways that go far beyond the hippie-fied New Age-isms all too often associated with it. Shankar has steadily been moving…
Cutting class
Wayne State considers axing the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies.
The Budos Band II
To those who may claim that the days of great soul labels like Stax and Motown are over, look no further than Daptone, a small, Brooklyn-based outfit that’s produced some of the most compelling music of the 21st Century. The label’s most recent is the second release from the 11-man Budos Band, a record that…
Pressing his case
He made his own case of innocence to the state for the first time in a cramped room last week, speaking for 40 minutes with a woman he saw only on a television monitor. “This is my one chance,” Fredrick Freeman told Michigan Parole Board Chair Barbara Sampson as she typed notes and referenced files.…
Mentor Tormentor
The California that Earlimart’s music evokes isn’t the one with movie stars and palm trees. Frontman Aaron Espinoza may live in seemingly glamorous Los Angeles, but his tunes’ lethargic despondency captures the quiet malaise of suburban sprawl and the wide-open, empty isolation of the state’s less-populated desert regions, where the sun beats down and the…
Head cheese
Tony Sakich of Roseville’s Record Time thinks these are the five worst albums of all time.
The flip to blaxploitation
Shot on 16 mm black-and-white film in a naturalistic style that recalls the Italian neorealists, Killer of Sheep is a fascinating time capsule. Burnett captured a very specific time and place: Watts as a working-class enclave, in the days before drugs, hip hop and gang violence came to define life in this, and other predominantly…
Road bound
It was a typical Thursday lunchtime on a summer’s day in L.A. entertainment business mecca Century City. Things were about to become special, however. As workers from the giant Creative Artists Agency and its neighboring offices began to file out into the large courtyard park behind the building to eat, shop and stroll, they were…
Death Sentence
Kevin Bacon gets to chew all sorts of scenery as devoted family man Nick Hume, a buttoned-down actuary who views life as an exercise in risk management, until his teenage son is senselessly murdered by thugs during a gas station hold-up. It turns out that the killing was part of a gang initiation ritual, an…
A beautiful mess
Brooklyn psych-folk quartet Akron/Family just wanna have fun. They can’t help it if sometimes it seems like the inmates are running the asylum when they play. After all, they get bored easily. “We tend to bring people onstage whenever we can,” says bassist Miles Seaton, explaining the band’s outrageous live antics. “We ended up going…
This Is England
Set in 1983 Yorkshire, plays lower-class schoolboy Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) is picked on at school, alienated from his mother and pining for his father who died in England’s senseless war in the Falklands. Turgoose’s raw energy perfectly captures Shaun’s prepubescent curiosity and impotent rage, and seldom does a child actor shed the artifice, precociousness and…
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
The speed crit peppers platters with praise and potshots.
Gypsy Caravan
Following five Romani bands from four countries during their six week North American tour, the filmmaker bounces from performances to lively offstage interviews (including an illegal bit of fishing in downtown Ann Arbor) to the cities and villages these artists call home, creating an anthropological journey that effectively dispels many of the “gypsy” stereotypes but…
SOME RANDOM IMAGES FROM THE JAZZ FEST
Saxophonists Anthony Holland and Skeeter Shelton, and vibraphonist Mike Gilmore of the Northwoods Imrprovisers, who appeared with Faruq Z. Bey on Saturday. Kenn Cox at the piano, leading Kenn Cox & the Drum on Sunday. Euphonium-man Brad Felt, Steve Wood and Don Mayberry, during Wood’s tribute to Yusef Lateef on Monday. Yusef Lateef backstage on…
Memories of Tomorrow
A film about Alzheimer’s disease, any fears of this movie being a glossy feel-good disease-of-the-week flick quickly vanish. The main character’s decline is depicted honestly and gruelingly. Saintly Emiko gives her husband unwavering support — she’s in her 40s and faces the overwhelming task of having to find a job to support them. It’s a…
