Here’s the deal. Every day here at the Metro Times, our mail delivery includes CDs, books and all sorts of other promotional items. A lot of it we can use and review – local-interest music, DVDs, etc. But we also get a lot of weird and whacky items that just kinda build up. So that’s where this idea came from. Each week (or at least most weeks) I’ll gather up some of the more interesting, freaky and brow-furrowing promo pieces and offer them up here for you. I could be about to show you anything. On that note, feel free to send us anything to Brett Callwood, 1200 Woodward Heights, Ferndale MI 48220.
This week saw us good folks of the Metro Times move offices and our mail hasn’t been forwarded yet. So I had to look back over the year a little to what weirdness I have been sent. The Nicholas Tremulis Orchestra from Chicago sent us a sweet little package that includes a book, and new album For the Baby Doll (52 Recordings). Despite that band name, this isn’t a classical emsemble, nor is it a bunch of jazz cats. These guys play rowdy blues rock, and they do it well. “When I was 8 years old I wanted to be black,” says Tremulis in the book. “To stand with my fist in the air defiant. Fuck this bullshit! Black Power! But I was white, a kid from the suburbs, young, dumb and soon to be full of cum.”
We also received a couple of novelizations - Pacific Rim and Man of Steel. These are perfect if you want to relive the movies through prose, but we’re not really sure what the point is, especially with two movies as reliant on special effects as these two. At least with Man of Steel, the relationship between Jor-El and Zod is given extra depth. Still, don’t bother unless you’re a super-fan. Watch the movies.
Similar but at all the same, we received Joseph Finder’s novel Paranoia, recently made into a movie starring Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman. In this case, the novel came first so read it because it’s awesome. We can’t give too much away, but Finder has a gift for leading his readers down a path that seems comfortable even if we know that we really should be tense, and then throwing a curveball that leaves our nerves in shreds. Paranoia is no different. No spoilers.
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