Letters to the Editor
Taking aim After reading your opinion concerning guns at Arts, Beats & Eats ("Arts, Beats & Ammo," Aug. 25), I had to respond. First, you feel it’s "terrible" that citizens have the right to keep a handgun for their own defense. Studies show that 800,000 to 2.5 million crimes are prevented because the potential victim…
Unfriendly places
A reader recently contacted MT and suggested we check out the Facebook page of a guy named John Truscott. People who pay attention to politics will recall that Truscott was the wunderkind mouthpiece for John Engler during his reign as our governor. As the profile on the website of his public relations firm, the John…
Purple heartache
When last we checked on Royal Oak resident Tom Mahany, he was recovering from a nearly month-long hunger strike he’d conducted in Washington, D.C., in an attempt to draw attention to the problems faced by soldiers being subjected to repeated deployments in war zones, known as "stop loss." ("Fast times in Washington, D.C.," Dec. 16,…
All Along the Watchtower
The great Detroit music, the stuff that has put this city atop of the rubble, has always found the perfect balance between grit and hope, the broken glass and the banana pudding, the melody and the noise. Look at Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program. This Ypsilanti-based two-piece absolutely adores the fuzz (both musically and facially) in…
Metro Retro
18 years ago in Metro Times: Even after the Cold War has ended, Star Wars, properly known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), is still going strong. President Ronald Reagan proposed the orbital nuclear defense grid nearly 10 years earlier, and the Pentagon has been funding it since, despite the protests of opponents, including an…
Night and Day
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 9 Susurrus THE BOTANY OF DRAMA Susurrus strips away the traditional trappings of theater — actors, sets, even the very stage itself — to provide an unorthodox theater experience, both sensually intimate and baldly exposed. Audience members, armed with a map and an audio headset, amble through the Matthaei Botanical Gardens listening to…
Meat and drink
The menu is mostly meats, as generally demanded by the traveling businessman on account — St. Louis ribs, flatiron steak, filet mignon, lamb sirloin, beef brisket, a burger on a pretzel roll, steak tartare, house-made kielbasa — but also includes mussels, salt cod croquettes and calamari, a cheese board, and a few fish and pasta…
Uncle Jerrold and the schwa
"If you say to any thinking person, ‘Let us form a society for the invention of new and subtler words’, he will first of all object that it is the idea of a crank, and then probably say that our present words, properly handled, will meet all difficulties. … [T]his argument, like most of the…
The American
George Clooney plays Jack, a very bad man. How bad? Well, he shoots his innocent and unsuspecting girlfriend in the head in order to preserve his anonymity (don’t worry, I’m not giving away a key plot point). Bad as Jack is, life has become a wearying exercise in paranoia, violence and personal detachment. Not a…
Oakland’s bounty!
Andiamo Bloomfield Township 6676 Telegraph Rd., Bloomfield Twp.; 248-865-9360: The sunflower-yellow-and-purple color scheme and huge tilted mirrors that allow patrons to glimpse those sitting behind them have given the space a slickly contemporary look. The food is in contrast: it’s the solid Italian fare of old master Aldo Ottaviani interpreted by a crew of young…
Separation anxiety
Drew Barrymore plays Erin, a clever 31-year-old graduate student and intern at a New York newspaper. She meets Garrett (Long), an indie record-company employee freshly dumped by his girlfriend, and they bond over shared interests in 1980s music and vintage arcade video games. Their budding romance is propelled with some help from a montage of…
Digital dogs
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days Square Enix Xbox 360 (Review Copy) PS3, PC Hollywood would have you believe that everyone in the world is impossibly beautiful. Hell, you’ve heard the term "TV ugly" haven’t you? If not, it goes like this: People who are supposed to be unattractive in-story, are still pretty hot by…
Zodiac
When the Electric 6 released their debut album, Fire, in 2003, the singles "Danger! High Voltage" and "Gay Bar" gave Dick Valentine and co. international hits that would allow the band to tour the world. It looked very much like the band formerly known as the Wild Bunch would follow the White Stripes out of…
Drunk & dopey
Q: A few nights ago, I got drunk and knocked on my roommate’s door and confessed my attraction to him while he was lying in bed in nothing more than his Skivvies. (It was dark and I stayed at the door, so I didn’t know that until after the fact.) And then I asked him…
Junky Star
There’s a timeless quality to Ryan Bingham’s best songs that drops them in the middle of the 1940s, 1970s or 2000s. It’s one of the reasons he won an Oscar this year for "The Weary Kind," his plaintive theme from Crazy Heart. He’s also a sharp songwriter. On his third album — on which he…
Out in the open
There she is, Dina Bankole, a petite, black woman vocalist with her seemingly oversized Gibson Flying V ("Sweet Louise" if you must know the guitar’s name), with her "twin" brother, Tim Thomas, on the drums, creating music steeped in everything from ’90s alternative radio to the subtle, sullen plucks of Nick Drake or Leonard Cohen.…
Interpol
By this point, there’s not much to distinguish one Interpol album from another. Since their 2002 debut, Turn on the Bright Lights, the dapper New Yorkers have combined ’80s post-punk reservation with modern indie-rock disconnection. Their fourth album — self-titled, so it’s supposed to herald some big changes after 2007’s major-label bomb, Our Love to…
Public consumption
The Detroit Institute of Art celebrates its 125th birthday this season with projects and exhibitions, including DIA: Inside/Out, outdoor installations of reproductions from their permanent collection. But will metro Detroiters be taken aback by the 40 clones placed — quite conspicuously in some instances — in parks and downtowns? Larry Baranski hopes so. He’s the…
False Priest
False Priest’s cover art is a grotesque mess, which sorta sums up Of Montreal’s music. The revolving collective’s tenth album comes down from the alter-ego orgies of 2008’s Skeletal Lamping, with lots of hate ("Go away/ You’re a bad thing/ Useless thing") and incoherence ("I can’t cope with such an abstract blackmail domination spasm") from…
The numbers game
So how many people does Detroit really have? The U.S. Census bureau counted us all on April 1, except for the millions they had to spend time and money hunting down afterward. We’ll learn how many people each state has around Christmas. But it will be next April before we get detailed population data for…
Borders on absurd
One of the funnier things about Machete, the new action flick from Robert Rodriguez, is envisioning how much it will fluster anyone supporting border walls and Arizona SB 1070-style immigration laws. The film’s subject, an uprising of Mexican-American immigrants spurred by corruption on both sides of the border, practically begs conservatives and the even-further-right to…
Obama’s Iraq problems
Let’s get the good news out of the way first. In President Obama’s Iraq speech last week, he said that the U.S. combat role in Iraq has ended and that Iraqis have "responsibility for the security of their own country." He said that "all US troops will leave by the end of next year." And he…
Countdown to fall
With Wednesday’s premieres of Hellcats at 9 p.m. on the CW and Terriers at 10 p.m. on FX, the 2010 fall TV season is officially off and running. Last week I was interviewed on a Raleigh, N.C., radio station for my post-Emmy Awards observations when the host (you may remember Detroit’s own Joe Wade Formicola)…
Food Stuff
Tasty trailer — You may have seen it around Corktown — or glimpsed it at the U.S. Social Forum. Or perhaps you just heard about it from a friend. But that vintage silver Airstream trailer that serves food is a delicious reality. It’s called the Pink FlaminGO!, and it’s the brainchild of an entrepreneurial Corktown…
