STOOGES RIPPED OFF!
Sad to report that the Stooges had most of their stage gear ripped off early this morning outside the Embassy Suites Hotel in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. All the equipment was in a rented 15-foot yellow Penske truck with the U.S. (Michigan) license plate number of AC46493. The band has set up a Website, listing the…
D-TOWN GOES H-WEIRD…
You’ve undoubtedly heard that the famous Drew Barrymore is in town, making her forthcoming Whip It flick about derby girls, which will mark her directorial debut. Well, maybe you didn’t hear; the reasons I knew about this is a) because a location scout called me months ago, asking about clubs in Detroit (I unfortunately forgot…
VOICES OF ROCK RADIO
Shades of Ringo’s All-Star Band Romantics guitarist-vocalist Wally Palmar has teamed up with several other hitmakers of past decades as part of Voices of Rock Radio, something they term “a vocal supergroup.” In addition to Palmar, the band features ex-Survivor singer Jimi Jamison; ex-Ted Nugent Band vocalist Derek St. Holmes; Kevin Chalfant (of the Storm/707)…
DETROIT RED BULL WINNERS
Congratulations to Canadian born producer 14KT, who won first place on the Detroit stop of the Red Bull Big Tune competition at the Majestic Theatre last Thursday night, July 30th. Coming in second was Detroit producer Frank Dukes. Both will now advance to the national championship in New York City this December. “I’ve never won…
A VERY SIRIUS COVER…
Hey, look who’s on the cover of the new SoundCheck Magazine (whatever the heck that is…!):
OSCILLATION…
A year after releasing their debut EP of melodic psych-rock — the cleverly titled Beatles Catting Wildly — the Oscillating Fan Club are releasing their first full-length CD, Feverish Dreams, on August 8th. The band is celebrating the new disc with a record release party at the CAID this Sunday night, August 3rd. Like the…
BLOWOUT 2009!
This just in from the wonderful Ms. Eve Knepp…just so there’s no doubt as to whether it’s happening this year. It is, indeed! For sure. You can take it to the bank… Hello Folks! OK. So it’s hot as blazes out there and I’m writing you about the Blowout. There’s a method to such seasonal…
YOUR CALLS ARE NEEDED!
This Friday morning the First Friday Film Forum is on 101.9 WDET – Detroit Public Radio. Join us, and grill, your host and favorite Metro Times critics! The First Friday Film Forum on Detroit Today Friday August 1st at 11:00am with your host Rob St. Mary and Metro Times critics Jeff Meyers and Corey Hall…
MOVIE MANIA!
For the most part, I like Oliver Stone’s work even if he did get really mad at me one time at a press junket for his movie, The Doors. I asked him about that month’s cover of Esquire Magazine, which featured Jim Morrison on its cover and an article inside about Stone’s new movie, written…
GO, CAT, GO!
The big news at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival, taking place this week from tonight through August 3rd, is the appearance of Michigan native Madonna, who’s showing up this Saturday to screen her new documentary film, I Am Because We Are. We’d be more excited, however, by the fact that our friends the Go…
BULL!
Well, Red Bull will be doing more in Detroit this week than just kicking your ass with too much caffeine and sugar. Tomorrow night (Thursday, July 31st), the national Red Bull Big Tune competition of beat-making producers will be hitting D-Town. Our city marks the fourth stop in a series of eight regional competitions, seeking…
WE LOVE MOVIES
We love movies. We love Detroit. We’re pretty sure you love both of those things too, and so we proudly welcome you to join us here at the B roll, a place where those two great interests can get together and mingle, to safely get their respective chocolate all over their peanut butter so to…
City mission
They were an odd sight. Two clean-cut white kids wearing black pants and white shirts with neckties, wandering through the rubble of a burned-out house in the middle of a littered field on the east side of Detroit. The pair, who go by the names Elder Porter and Elder Sturzenegger, are full-time missionaries sent by…
Meat of the matter
Ask most Americans about what causes global warming, and they’ll point to a coal plant smokestack or a car’s tailpipe. They’re right, of course, but perhaps two other images should be granted similarly iconic status: the front and rear ends of a cow. According to a little-known 2006 United Nations report entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,”…
Pop kisses with a twist
Call it a Pyrrhic victory for Detroit music. Last week finally saw the release of PAS/CAL’s debut album, I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura, on Le Grand Magistery, a label straight out of Bloomfield Hills, no less. And with that, its mastermind, Casimer Pascal — perhaps the best songwriter to come out…
Night and Day
WEDNESDAY • 30 TED PIECHOTA ALBUM COVER RIFFS Ted Piechota, hardworking local barfly and sometime bartender at Seven Brothers Bar in Hamtramck, isn’t particularly well-known as an artist. But the drink-slinger is also a skilled screen-printer, and he now has a solo art show of his prints on wood at (natch) a local bar. The…
Letters to the Editor
Water watchers I’m writing to address an error in Jack Lessenberry’s column (“Shooting straight,” Metro Times, July 2). I’m an environmental law professor at Wayne State University and, in my free time, I’m the Executive Director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, based in Detroit and Ann Arbor. Your column discussed the politics behind…
Tale of 2 Kwames
Performing artists’ confab offers a view of the mayor’s split personality.
Comics
The Boiling Point – by Mikhaela Reid
Couch Trip
Inglorious Bastards Severin By 1977, World War II films were out of vogue. And that year’s Inglorious Bastards is simply a derivative reworking of elements from classic WWII fare such as The Great Escape and Kelly’s Heroes. The film culls most from The Dirty Dozen with its mixed bag of criminals undertaking one final, redemptive…
On the Download
Summer seems never-ending right now. Its omnipresence, intense heatery and related stinkery still offer a vast horizon of both opportunity and ennui. So sometimes one goes crawling to the nearest air-conditioned space with a wireless connection and a yen for some sonic salve. In my surfing this week, I’ve stumbled upon two such tonics that…
Motor City Rides
John “Hentch” Szymanski’s 1997 Ford Club Wagon.
Peculiar porn
Male sub seeks femme dom porn with vampires and werewolves.
Now you see it
In this city of cars, with an economy founded on the production of the disposable, and, lately, an artistic identity founded on the exploitation of detritus, Kenro Izu: Sacred Places, explores the impermanence of the manmade in human history. It makes for an ironic little insight into the really transitory nature of our reality. Descend…
Unsung hero of rock
Way back before Jack White was world famous, he begged another Jack — this one older, wiser and infinitely more musically talented — to sell him a two pick-up, red-and-white Airline guitar. There was something special about this garish fiberglass git-box, says the Memphis, Tennessee-based Jack Yarber — otherwise known as Jack Oblivian — who…
Impeachment lite
Conyers pursues non-impeachment impeachment hearings.
Kleagles for Kwame!
Why Ku Kluxers love Mayor Kilpatrick.
Clearing the air
For the coalition of environmentalists who have been working to both increase Detroit’s recycling efforts and close down the city’s municipal trash incinerator, Friday was a good news/bad news sort of day. We’ll start with the bad news: Despite what the Kilpatrick administration said just one month ago, purchase of the incinerator is still an…
Disaster relief
Are Kwame’s trouble’s affecting Obama in Michigan?
Food Stuff
Full plates for local foodies.
Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout
The joke’s on Jeffrey Morgan’s Media Blackout #182! Various Contributors — The Comics Journal (Fantagraphics Books) :: Issue 291 contains a veritable embarrassment of riches including a 38-page interview with TV Heroes artist Tim Sale; a 30-page evaluation of Hunter S. Thompson artist Ralph Steadman by Gary Groth; an appraisal of writer Steve Gerber —…
Death be not proud
Patti Smith is an iconoclast, proto-punk and poet — but she endures because she’s first and foremost a humanist. How else could an artist quote Burroughs (“Towers open fire!”), create Horses, famously cover “Gloria,” and then offer up “People Have the Power,” first as a pop song and then as a humanistic mantra? It’s this…
Summer breeze
The main reason to visit Portofino is the water, which looks inviting as you gaze at the wooded tip of Grosse Ile, watching the boats slip by. In fine weather, some of them even tie up at Portofino’s dock, which makes sense, considering that the real Portofino is an Italian resort town on the Mediterranean.…
Heavy Meadows
Ah, the quest for the perfect summer soundtrack. For many reasons, music that connects listeners to the thrills, pleasures and anticipation of this season of the year has a lasting effect … and it’s always been so. Albums that come into people’s lives at this perfect seasonal moment are rarely forgotten, forever melded into newly…
The Wackness
Screenwriter-director Jonathan Levine’s film is a ’90s outsider teen flick that’s smart, well-acted, emotionally genuine and boasts a soundtrack that deserves mad props. It’s the summer of 1994 and Rudy Giuliani is about to turn New York City into the biggest mall in America. High school grad Luke (Josh Peck) is raising money for college…
Brideshead Revisited
Handsomely mounted and beautifully shot, Jarrold’s film makes some brave changes to the story but miscasts the role of Lady Marchmain and neuters the protagonist’s homosexual underpinnings in favor of a predictable tale of hetro-romance thwarted. Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) is a middle-class Oxford student and aspiring painter who befriends the aristocratic but mercurial Sebastian…
X’d out
Chris Carter’s inventive, quixotic and darkly sexy 1990s TV classic, with the FBI’s top paranormal hunters Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), gets its second big-screen treatment. Unforunately, the film lands with a thud. Since we last saw our heroes five years ago, skeptical Dr. Scully has taken a gig at a…
Dandy in the Underworld
Ah, the idle rich: Lacking the structure that toil and responsibility confer, they more often than not drift into mindless self-indulgence and total self-destruction. Sebastian Horsley’s life story reads like an exercise in ambitious ambivalence; in Dandy in the Underworld, this Marc Bolan-worshipping scion of Northern Foods chair Nicholas Horsley finds himself involved in horrible,…
Flying high and flailing
Seduced by Suicide’s damnable, synthesized roar and Lester Bangs’ rapturous downtown screeds, they flocked to New York City’s seedier neighborhoods, seemingly by the hundreds: writers, filmmakers, artists, scenesters, punks, students and dropouts. What they’d find was a fertile scene in the midst of urban decay where just about anything seemed possible. In her introduction to…
Step Brothers
Will Ferrell has crafted a monster career playing emotionally stunted, spastic child-men. Here he’s joined by John C. Reily, and both actors play overgrown, petulant teenagers in lumpy adult bodies, and they do it with such a charged, reckless, side-splitting abandon that you’ll almost feel like you’ve never seen a ball-sack sight gag before. Eventually…
Jellyfish
On the evening after her boyfriend moves out of their apartment, taking most of the furniture with him, Batya (Sarah Adler) goes to her job as a waitress at a wedding hall, where her first distracted action is to drop a tray of crudités. Stumbling through her numbing routine seems all too familiar to the…
JAVELINS CD RELEASE PARTY REPORT
The cornucopia of top notch music offerings in the Detroit area this past Saturday night left many fans hand-wringing over what show(s) to attend and whether there was some way to open — even just for one evening — a time portal that would allow users to instantly travel between Hamtramck, Detroit and Pontiac. I…
COMING ALIVE!
If you’re headed to Pine Knob tonight to catch the Peter Frampton show, you may wanna be aware of a few Detroit connections taking place on that mammoth stage. For one thing, Frampton’s current touring drummer is Warren native Dan Wojciechowski, who graduated from high school there in 1984 and has been drumming professionally ever…
