Update: We just heard that there will be a tribute to Belita held Thursday night at Bert’s Marketplace, 2727 Russell Street, Detroit; 313-567-2030. Just over a year ago we wrote about and shared pictures from a benefit for singer Belita Woods in the wake of her massive heart attack. The Detroit singer’s resume goes...
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“With so many beautiful people, Detroit is bound to last,” Alma Smith sang in one of the many songs she penned, this one an eloquently swinging mash note to her hometown. You can hear her wonderful ivory tickling behind her vocal lines  in the video embedded here, and hopefully, it will inspire others to...
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Unless an Occupy Comics Movement has been stealthily plotting and rears its head at the opening of The Avengers tomorrow, we can write off the effort to bring some justice and remuneration to Jack Kirby just now. Artist Kirby, any major fan’ll tell you, is of artistic import at least on par with Stan...
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Metro Times took seven awards, two of them for first place, plus two honorable mentions in the annual awards competition of the Detroit Chapter Society of Professional Journalists announced Wednesday night. The awards were in the Class A print competition for daily papers of 100,000 circulation or more plus magazines and alternative-style weeklies of...
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As the first Detroit jazz artist to head-up the Detroit International Jazz Festival, Chris Collins unveiled his vision for the festival in the annual preview luncheon, bringing together civic dignitaries (even Detroit Deputy Mayor Kirk Lewis left the City Hall crisis center to deliver a few words), business folks, arts and music community leaders,...
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The recent hoopla over Mike Daisey’s anti-Apple, off-Broadway, one-man show and This American Life’s program-long mea culpa for presenting it as journalism has reanimated the question of veracity in the media. Who gets to make up stuff? Slate takes a stab today at charting degrees of transgression as a function of profession, from fantasy...
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If a fraction of the fans of Elmore Leonard on the page and screen come to see him in the flesh, it’s going to be hard to get a spot this Saturday (March 3) at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art. Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film Jackie Brown — adapted from Leonard’s novel Rum Punch...
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Nearly 30 years before George Lucas produced the story of the Tuskegee Airmen as the feature film Red Tails, award-winning Detroit filmmaker Ted Talbert told the story of World War II’s African-American aerial fighters in a homegrown documentary. Talbert, who landed a spot in the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame for docs like this...
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Multiple choice time: U.S. slavery ended in 1) 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation 2) 1865 with the 13th Amendment 3) 1942 with the first conviction under Circular 3591 of the FDR administration. Wall Street Journal writer Douglas A. Blackmon, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Slavery by Another Name is the basis for tonight’s PBS special of...
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Sad news that we’re losing another one-of-a-kind spot: A.J.’s Café, which is set to close at the end of March, reportedly facing the end of a lease and rising expenses. As fans prepare to say their farewells to the Ferndale spot famed for “Danny Boy” marathons and the like, we thought we’d revisit this...
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