Friday Night in Detroit

Although I occasionally despair for Detroit, it's a city that offers many cultural events to its residents. Last night, we had dinner at a Japanese-Korean restaurant with a mostly young Asian crowd, students from the College for Creative Studies, we then walked across the street and saw a sweet, Italian film Mid-August Lunch with an older crowd-many Italian-Americans among them at the Detroit Film Theater, then walked upstairs and saw a Afro-Cuban concert with a younger crowd of mostly African-Americans.

All of this took place with a block and within three hours. Nice to have this available.

OMAR SOSA

Detroit Institute of Arts

Omar Sosa Afreecanos

April 23 7 & 8:30 p.m.

http://www.dia.org/

Cuban-born Omar Sosa is one of the most versatile jazz artists on the global scene today. He's a composer, arranger, producer, pianist, percussionist, bandleader, ethno-musicologist extraordinaire. He fuses a wide range of world music and electronic elements with his native Afro-Cuban roots to create a fresh and original urban sound. On stage, Sosa is a charismatic figure, inspiring his fellow musicians with his dynamic playing and improvisational approach to the music, full of raw emotional power and humor. Bet he gets the audience to its feet and to join him in singing a chorus or two this week at the always dynamic Friday Night Live! series at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

How was Friday night in your town?

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE THE DETROIT LIONS

The Detroit Lions have not won a NFL Championship since 1957 but that statistic doesn't really begin to tell the story. They have, for instance, lost their last nineteen games, stretching back to 2007. Between 2001 and 2003 there were the only team not to win a single game on the road.

Things looked bright for a few weeks in 2007 when they started the season at 6-2. They won only one additional game, ending the season at 7-9. There are so many more sad stories to tell. A lovely new facility where they continue to stink the place up.

Why do fans still go the games? This is a mystery to me. If they stopped going, the Detroit Lions ownership might be forced to put a good team on the field. I propose that if an owner cannot produce a winning team in 52 years, he should lose the franchise. What do you think? Doesn't Detroit have enough problems without the Lions to drag them down 16 times a year?

Sharon Isbin Plays Rodrigo

A four-star salute to Sharon Isbin, classical guitarist, who we heard play the music of Rodrigo at the DSO last night. We had 12 row center seats as the first part of our $100 buck package for six events. Symphony, play, opera, chamber music, movie, dance. It's called the Detroit Passport to the Arts and what a deal! Detroiters-come on out.

MTM: Detroit Historical Museum

Philip Levine reading. (Born in Detroit in 1928)








The Detroit Historical Museum, established in 1928, is one of America’s oldest and largest museums dedicated to metropolitan history.

Over 80,000 square feet of exhibition space house more than 600 historic artifacts in the heart of Detroit’s Cultural Center district.

You can stroll through more than 300 years of metro Detroit history, including a 19th century street scene known as The Streets of Old Detroit, and an authentic auto assembly line known simply as The Motor City.



Current exhibits include:

Hero or Villain? Metro Detroit's Legacy of Leadership What makes a leader? Are there certain qualities or characteristics that define leadership? Are leaders a product of their time or would they have risen to such status regardless of when they lived? Moreover, why do some think of a particular leader as a “hero” and others as a “villain”?

100 Years Ago Did you ever wonder how large the City of Detroit was 100 years ago? Do you know what song made its debut a century ago and is still sung by millions of people each year?

1920s: Detroit's Building Boom The 1920s is often called Detroit's Golden Age - find out why in this exciting temporary exhibit, which features a look at the skyscrapers, infrastructure and architects who made this decade great.

Detroit's Official Symbols Learn about the City of Detroit's flag and official seal in this great exhibit!

Doorway to Freedom - Detroit and the Underground Railroad Learn about Detroit's important role in the Underground Railroad in this exhibit.

Fabulous 5: Detroit's Entertainment Venues Visitors will learn about five of the region's greatest entertainment venues in this temporary exhibit.

Frontiers to Factories Come see what Detroit was like before the advent of the automobile!

Glancy Trains A crowd favorite for years, The Glancy Trains are from the collection of Alfred R. Glancy Jr. (1908-1973), real estate financier and former co-owner of the Empire State Building in New York City.

Meier's Wonderful Clock An unique item on display and one that visitors frequently take photographs of is Meier’s “Wonderful Clock,” built in Detroit to demonstrate the skill of clockmaker Louis Meier, Sr. It served to advertise his jewelry store located on Gratiot and East Grand Boulevard.

Model T Centennial In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the introduction of Henry Ford’s most successful early car, our Automotive Showplace features a 1911 Model T. Little did Henry Ford know that this “Tin Lizzie” was destined to change the world!

Motor City The Motor City exhibit is one of the Detroit Historical Museum’s most highly visible exhibitions, of interest to school groups, families and auto enthusiasts alike. Opened in December 1995, the goal of this exhibit was to provide a permanent display that would tell the stories of both how cars built metro Detroit and how metro Detroit built cars!

Ralph J. Bunche "Global Impact - Detroit Roots" People from all over can view this exhibit and pay their respects to one of the world’s most honored Check out other My Town Monday posts at Travis Erwins Grand Central Station

Goodbye Freep As We Know It.

Toni Morrison reading.





For a lovely tribute to Michigan writer, Glendon Swarthout, who wrote a classic Christmas story check here.

This has been announced elsewhere but we got the email today.

"In early Spring, the Free Press will change from offering seven days' home delivery to offering three days - Thursday, Friday and Sunday. We now also offer a digital subscription on freep.com so you have the option of seeing the newspaper pages online exactly as they appear in print. And you will still be able to purchase the Free Press any day at stores, newsstands and newspapers racks - that won't change. We will maintain our strong news report, and we will redesign the newspaper to provide an easier-to-use format -- as well as retaining the exclusive reporting and depth that we're known for."

Just as I feel guilty for drifting away from US cars in the last five years, I feel guilty about discontinuing our subscription to the Freep a few months ago. They had discontinued providing their own reviews of books, movies, TV, almost everything. Many of their stories came from AP or other sources. I misunderstood the reason for this. I thought they were making a bad choice, not that they were making their only choice.

But this is what's become clear. If there was no local paper in Detroit, would the misdeeds, make that crimes, of Kwame Kilpatrick have been exposed? Who will serve as a watchdog over local and state politicians if there is no newspaper? Who will chastise sports teams for putting 0-14 teams on the field? Who will cover Detroit weather like it means something? Who will care about and cover the fate of this city if not the newspapers?

What's the status of the newspaper in your town?

My Town Monday: Detroit's Incinerator

It’s been 20 years since the inception of the idea that an incinerator was the answer to Detroit’s trash problems. Landfills that leaked and a shortage of them led to the construction of the nation’s largest incinerator. The City is deciding now what to do about it as the lease runs out today. It sits at the intersection of two of Detroit’s most highly traveled freeways, as if its is something you’d want to see as a tourist.

As you might guess, environmental groups have been on the offensive for the entire 20 years with plenty of statistics about the increase in incidence of cancer and breathing difficulties to back them up. Live east of this structure (as I do) and you’re breathing in toxic air most of the day. To the immediate east, sits the city's poorest neighborhoods. The asthma rate among children there is off the charts. Wayne State University is right there too and the odor some days brings tears to your eyes.

It’s been hugely expensive to pay for this monstrosity, necessary even to import trash to burn to meet the fees. Detroit does little to recycle and has little reason to increase recycling with this structure at its center. That also means that pretty much everything we throw away goes into it… and out of it.

The City decided yesterday they were going to allow the lease to expire. This means they will have to return to landfills and recycling or purchase the facility themselves.

I hate to see historical buildings torn down but this one’s the exception

My Town Monday

My Town Mondays: Tiger Stadium

Sure we have Comerica Park in Detroit now and a new generation will make its memories there. It’s the new look in stadiums: open, friendly, all the bells and whistles. Corporate boxes, designer food, waitresses to take care of you, amusements for the kids, wall-to-wall bathrooms, for the women at least, a scoreboard so elaborate you’d need never look to the field.

But once upon a time, eight years ago, in fact, there was Tiger Stadium. It has sat on the same corner (Michigan and Trumbull) in a section of Detroit called Corktown since 1895. Every seat was close to the field. There were not enough bathrooms, snack bars, good unobstructed seats. You didn’t get the feel of being outside. But it was Tiger Stadium for better or worse. It was our place to watch baseball and its name was the right one, no corporate reminders.

Tiger Stadium has sat empty now for eight years. A hundred plans to reuse it have gone awry: condos, shopping, restaurants, a college stadium, a memorial stadium. None of them happened. Late last year, the city auctioned its innards off— like grandstand seats, the dugout urinal, Al Kaline’s locker and the fence in front of the right-center-field light tower, hit by a Reggie Jackson home run in the 1971 All-Star Game. Last month, the city tentatively awarded a partial demolition contract for the stadium.

People hoping to save it, the Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy, has until June 1 to raise $369,000 to try to save part of Tiger Stadium, even temporarily. The group includes Ernie Harwell, the retired Tigers radio broadcaster.

If that goal is reached, Senator Carl Levin said he will look for greater financing in the 2009 federal budget to preserve the oldest part of the structure around the infield and redevelop the playing field for amateur teams.

Levin, who grew up in the city, would like to see the stadium remain in some incarnation.

Philanthropic groups have discussed contributing money to stave off a full demolition that may begin in weeks. But we’ve heard this sort of rumor for eight years now. And the area the stadium in is in a severe decline, especially with current economic woes, since the stadium moved east. The Tigers organization has not shown a lot of interest in preserving the field. They've moved on with their stadium.

Preserving even a remnant of the structure would add to the costs so the demolition companies have offered to pay the city $300, 000 if the whole thing comes down.

How have old stadiums fared in your neck of the woods? Is any attempt underway to preserve Yankee Stadium?

(Some of the information here comes from a New York Times article)

My Town Monday: A Book Review-The Virgin Suicides

My Town Monday Book Project:

The Virgin Suicides

I don’t exactly live in Detroit. My house is about eight blocks from the city limits and in an upper-middle class suburb. I have mixed feelings about this locale. Good schools, good city services, leafy streets, but a right-wing newspaper, Republican voting, certain limitations in what's available.

Since I work in Detroit and am there for cultural activities, ballgames, restaurants, I count myself a Detroiter. But for the purposes of this assignment from Travis Erwin: reviewing a book written about my community, I chose one written about Grosse Pointe: The Virgin Suicides. Most Grosse Pointers prefer Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides second novel, a more conventional novel despite its subject matter: hermaphroditism.

But I greatly prefer Eugenides first book The Virgin Suicides. Stylistically especially, I find it enthralling. Who else has written a first novel in the collective voice of a group of teenage boys?

The Virgin Suicides is the story of five sisters and the effects of their suicides, one after the other, on their community, and especially on the boys, who narrate the novel. The boys are under the sisters’ spell and watch helplessly as their mother, the community, the church, the school drive the sisters relentlessly toward their deaths. In particular, we see the mother, Mrs. Lisbon, the traditional Catholic mother from that era, as she tightens their leash in an attempt to control her daughters, pushing one after the other off the ledge. It's easy to see the seductiveness of suicide in this novel, how it looks like the only way out. The stakes are not so high for people under twenty, the finality is not apparent yet.

Eugenides attended a private school and experienced an even more privileged Grosse Pointe than most people in the community. But I think he captures the ambiance of a slightly lower echelon very well. But the book's greatest strength is its style. It's poetic. It's heartbreaking.

The Virgin Suicides was made into a movie by Sophia Coppola but filmed in Canada. I like the movie quite a bit but I like the book more.

Check out other book reviews about Home Towns at:http://traviserwin.blogspot.com/

My Town Monday

We think of violence at schools as a recent phenomenon, but this incident occurred 75 years ago in a city an hour outside of Detroit.
In 1926 in Bath, Michigan, Andrew Kehoe unsuccessfully fought a long battle against a tax increase to pay for the towns' new school. He won a position as treasurer of the school board to aid his cause, but the city retained the tax despite his efforts. Kehoe claimed that with the added tax burden he would lose his farm and asked that he be hired to work as the school's custodian. The school board agreed.
Kehoe seemed to be a diligent custodian. He was seen doing electrical work in the building along with his janitorial duties. He seemed particularly willing to take on electrical work, saving the school the cost of an electrician.
On 18 May 1927, just after morning bell at the school, 300 pounds of dynamite wired in the basement exploded. The north wing of the school was entirely demolished in one blast. People four miles away reported hearing the noise. Help had to be got on foot since telephones were scarce. Not until noon was a full scale rescue effort mounted. Kehoe pulled up at that time and spotting the superintendent, Emory E. Huyck, aiding with the rescue, and called him over. As Huyck walked over to the car, Kehoe pulled a rifle from his truck and fired into a bundle of dynamite in his truck. The resulting blast killed Kehoe, Huyck, and 7 others.
Forty-four were dead, 30 of those were children. Another 50 to 90 were wounded. Not a family in the area went untouched by the tragedy. The massacre of Bath Michigan made the front page on 20 May, along side news of Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic flight.But the story went on a bit longer. That day they discovered the Kehoe farm had also been destroyed, his wife slain. Horses in the stables had been hobbled with bailing wire so they couldn't escape. There was a sign hung waiting, which read "Criminals are made, not born."
The Bath School Disaster held the title of the worst bombing incident in the US up until 1995's Oklahoma City bombing, and suffered a small historical revival in the time after the Columbine School incident.FOR LINKS TO OTHER MY TOWN MONDAY BLOGS: http://traviserwin.blogspot.com/

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Kwame on The Wire

I can't help but see parallels between the fictional State Senator Clay David on The Wire and Detroit Mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick. Both know how to manipulate city residents, getting them to believe that a lack of support for their antics, even in the black community, is racism. Getting them to believe, in Kwame's case, that voting for the other African-American running for mayor in 2006 was racist. That he is the authentic African-American.
Of course racism exists and is a serious problem but it seems like it's being used as a shield, as a defense.

Both men know what words to use and their style of delivery comes from the black church and appeals to black voters. They know how to make the audience cry. They can play the victim of a plot to bring them down.

Unfortunately in Kilpatrick's case, the charges are probably real not fictional. He's likely guilty of a number of crimes, but will the Wayne County Prosecutor, Kim Worthy, have the guts to indict him, coming up for reelection. Will the Michigan Supreme Court turn down his appeal to suppress tapes/text-messaging?

Kwame had everything needed to be a good and decent mayor in a hard time, but he craved the perks that came with it--women, parties, expensive cars and vacations. Maybe he was just too young. We should cry, but for Detroit, not him.

Do You Dread Coming Home or is it Me?

Everyone at the terminal looks depressed. We are all going back to a city where the sky is gray, the weather cold, the economy down the drain. No one is reading more than the newspaper in a crowd of 100. Ipods, sure. Vacant stares, galore, Cell phones, you bet. The only happy travelers are the ones where Detroit is an interim stop. The ones moving on to sunny climes.
Do you dread going home? Is where you're going home to always a lesser place than where you've been? Does it seem like you're living in the least interesting place on the globe?
Sorry. My birthday has really bummed me out. Who wants to be 60? Only the ones out there who are 70.