Taking Back the Park
Last Friday evening around 5:30 P.M., some 100 protesters gathered at Riverside Park in Detroit underneath the great blue span of the Ambassador Bridge to tear down what Matty Moroun had put up: a 150 foot fence cutting off parts of the park and a section of Jefferson Avenue. Mr. Moroun is the owner of…
Jack on Jack: Lessenberry on the late Kevorkian
After struggling with kidney problems for a number of years, Michigan’s Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian passed away earlier today at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. Aged 83, Kevorkian has always been a polarizing figure and in the past 20 years the on-and-off subject of national attention. The University of Michigan graduate pathologist was ever a…
MT photog Doug Coombe: The (mini) movie
Self-effacing as he is, Doug Coombe didn’t tell us about Turn the Camera Around, a video profile created by Scott Allen (Thunderbirds Are Now!, Big Mess, Arranged Marriage, The Thornbills). It’s recommended viewing not just because he’s shot so much great stuff for MT over the last decade-and-a-half. It’s a look into the life, and…
Elmatic Release Party Footage From Funk Night
Just a handful of days ago, Detroit luminary emcee Elzhi had a release party at Funk Night for his much beloved new album, Elmatic. You should already know about this project because you’ve seen our stellar cover story on the connection between Elzhi and the Will Sessions band who were ingenious enough to recreate Nas’…
New Mayer Hawthorne Double LP Available Now
As of yesterday, some of Ann Arbor’s funkiest former residents, Mayer Hawthorne and his band, the County, released a double vinyl LP that they recorded live last month in Los Angeles. What makes the double LP special is that it was recorded straight to vinyl with no intermediary mixing or studio tinkering before all of…
Ambassador bridge protest: ‘Take back our park’
Leaders of the groups Friends of Riverside Park and Bridge Watch Detroit don’t want to lay all their cards on the table just yet, but they are promising some big excitement will be provided this Friday afternoon (June 3) for the adventurous souls who head on down to the Riverside Park Extension in southwest Detroit…
Letters to the Editor
Equal signs Larry Gabriel’s observations and commentary on contemporary life in the United States and in the D are something I look forward to every week. Larry’s recent comments about Eugene Robinson’s book Disintegration ("The usual suspects," May 25) were especially interesting. I think Robinson’s characterization of the fragmentation of black society into four groups,…
Opening up
Q: My husband and I recently realized that, in order for us to remain happily married, we need to fuck other people. Enter the boyfriend. This 20-year-old hunk has opened the sexual floodgates. He’s gorgeous and athletic and enthusiastic, he gets me off at least twice every time we get together, and tales of our…
Banner year
The family hung the banner again this year, but this time it was different. When Virginia Spencer’s relatives started doing it six years ago, it was to celebrate the noteworthy milestone of the family matriarch’s century on earth. They strung it along the second-floor iron balcony of their east side duplex, announcing to the drivers…
Incendies
Incendies GRADE: B- There’s a fine line between provocative and manipulative, and director Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar nominated Incendies —adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s winning play Incendies ("Scorched" in English) — too often confuses the two. Well-made but far too schematic, it’s the kind of award-bait drama that piles on horrific war-torn tragedy after horrific war-torn tragedy,…
Repress the flesh
$=$5-$10; $$=$10-$25; $$$=$25-$50; $$$$=$50+ Aladdin Sweets & Cafe 11945 Conant St., Hamtramck; 313-891-8050; Last year, this was just a small neighborhood place, lacking cloth doilies and polished steel cutlery, serving food on plastic plates and beverages in polystyrene cups. But what Aladdin lacked in china and stainless steel it more than makes up for in…
Bringin’ it back home
Those who attended the first of many gay-pride marches in Michigan will remember Detroit as the city where it all began. And now, the patrons of the street fair known as Motor City Pride can finally and gratefully reflect on their roots and heritage — but not without some controversy among its organizers. "This is…
Undeathable dreaming
Everett Weathersby is wide-eyed and grinning, but he’s a bit weary. He’s hunched down in a chair in the main room of the Sweet Epiphany, a poetry club on Detroit’s west side that looks more like some crazy beatnik’s basement art gallery. The spindly 26-year-old spoken word poet and visual artist had this place packed…
Will Sessions’ Elmatic
Crammed into the basement of an unassuming bungalow in a suburb just north of Detroit, five members of the eight-piece funk and jazz outfit Will Sessions are plugging in, tapping sticks and tuning strings. They have a long, hot night ahead of them. Not present this evening are Matt Martinez (trombone), Tom Parks (trumpet) and…
Represent
About three years ago, four guys from Detroit were passing a blunt around a Berlin hotel room in ceremonial fashion. Dez Andres (Humberto Hernandez), Phat Kat (Ronnie Cash), HouseShoes (Michael Buchanan) and Elzhi (Jason Powers) — Detroit hip-hop hierarchy — tour regularly abroad. As do Guilty Simpson, Black Milk and anyone else within one-degree of…
The Hangover Part II
The Hangover Part II GRADE: C- Like listlessly thumbing through someone else’s vacation photos, the Hangover Part II implies a good time, without bothering to share the sensation with the rest of us. Made famous by the surprise smash success of the rowdy original, the cast reunites for an expensive romp through Thailand that must’ve…
Broth-erly love
Pho Viet 3854 E. 13 Mile Road, Warren 586-558-8115 Commerce along the thoroughfares of Madison Heights and Warren isn’t pretty. Aging strip malls and asphalt parking lots are the dominant aesthetic. But what these arteries lack in architectural character is made up by a vibrant Southeast Asian community and the abundant restaurants and food markets…
Looking out for Pookie
News Hits has witnessed some odd meetings over the years, but not many have pushed the weird-meter into the red zone the way last Saturday’s gathering of the Detroit Charter Review Commission did. It started with Commissioner Rose Mary C. Robinson refusing to declare herself present when the roll was called, saying that she had…
‘Judging It’
It’s the first of June, or as television critics used to call it, the fall TV season. Back in the Paleozoic Era, when I wrote about this stuff for one of Detroit’s daily papers, one of the scribes I succeeded was a pudgy, pleasant gent named Frank Judge. His reviews were always subtitled "Judging It,"…
Cost of corruption
Detroit has a lot of problems, the biggest of which is that the city doesn’t have nearly enough jobs or money. There’s a lot else wrong too. But the city has one huge problem it badly needs to address, the very mention of which is widely regarded as taboo, especially from a white, middle-aged suburban…
Game changers?
Efforts to get the federal government to downgrade its classification of marijuana from a dangerous narcotic with no medical value and to acknowledge that it has medical uses may be reaching a critical mass. Last week, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) introduced the Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act in Congress. Frank’s legislation would reclassify marijuana…
The First Grader
The First Grader GRADE: B In 2004, when the Kenyan government at long last declared the right to free elementary schooling for all citizens, one of the first students to grab a pencil was Kimani N’Gan’ga Maruge. The only difference between him and his wide-eyed grade school classmates is roughly eight decades of life experience.…
Urgh! A Detroit music war
There’s an impending "music war" set to go down at the Lager House. No shit. And it’ll be featuring 18 of Detroit’s best bands — the High Strung, Satin Peaches, Fawn, Lightning Love, Duende!, and Lettercamp included — the war will be documented as a testament to Detroit’s current indie scene using an idea from…
Food Stuff
Ann Arbor Restaurant Week Our idea of a life of leisure would be to roam the country almost at random, picking the names of cities out of a hat as our next destination. Almost at random we say, because we’d restrict our hat-pulls to cities offering restaurant weeks timed to our otherwise serendipitous wanderings. (We…
Smash it up!
What do you get if you take two people from two well-loved-but-recently defunct Detroit indie rock trios and stick ’em together? A quartet of unapologetic noisy triumph called Destroy This Place perhaps? The newest "project" of John Nelson, Monday Busque (both from New Grenada), Ryan Allen and Sean Sommer (both from Friendly Foes) take the…
