When most people hear about the D, they immediately refer to Eminem. No wonder: Eminem is probably the most popular emcee on the planet and he’s from Detroit. However- to the real conoisseur- Eminem is only the visible part of the bubbly, murderous, grimy, Detroit scene iceberg. D12’s deepest, more consistent work has to be sought in their solo and underground work as well.

I’ve been a fan of Eminem’s music first-before I started focusing on local Detroit artists around 2003. The Detroit hip hop scene is composed of a panel of various artists with different styles. But all of then do have ( let alone the few untalented clowns from the suburbs pretending to rap): they do carry the city’s dirty, rough, grimy imprint. The 313 is the heart of Detroit’s hip hop music. A lot of artists have contributed to the scene. Some of them, like Esham ( the godfather of acid rap) , Slum Village, 5 ELA, Trick Trick and Da Goon Sqwad, D12’s Proof ( just to name a few) have pioneered it.

Most Detroit artists take much pride in the way they word lyrics and the city is well known for its battle scene that came to life thanks to hip hop dedicated people like Maurice Malone. Much underrated, but nevertheless incredibly talented Royce da 5.9 and Obie Trice are among Detroits’ most creative lyricists.

Are you curious to know more Detroit artists? I’d strongly advice you to check the local mixtapes and CDs, then. There are a lot of hidden jewels like I-Mac’s Ruthless Aggression mixtape, Uncle ILL’s Ya All Know CD, Hush’s Roses and Razorblades CD, Proof’s From Death in collaboration with Da Goon Sqwad…in addition, you can also check my archive regarding the Detroit scene at the Eminem blog:)

A lot of talented Detroit artists have collaborated with Proof-yet their names barely emerge in magazines and newspapers, despite their obvious talent.

Journalist 103 is one of them. He appears in Proof’s “Broken” song and he’s a remarkable emcee. I had the chance to review him several times. Another brilliant emcee too many people forget to put in the spotlight is Dogmatic- Kevin Bailey aka Dogmatic carries the true spirit of the Detroit ghetto. You could barely talk about Detroit hip hop without putting his name on your tongue- which will make his Sicknotes label come to surface too. Sicknotes is an example of Detroits’ amazing creativity. Malaki The Most Hi has some good Proof collaborations at his active plus some inventive tracks of his own. His mouth truly spits fire. How come only a few people name the Sleeper Cell artist when they mention the Detroit scene?

Let’s talk about Swifty Mc Vay: ever checked his Grenade Pins and Forest Fyres mixtapes? Have you checked his collaborations with Raw Collection in which his sister (Reddbone) is an active part of the team? Have you ever heard about Miz Korona, the Laila Ali of rap?

You probably think you know Bizarre? Have a look at his amazing collaborations with Detroit’s most outstanding DJ Odell Perry aka DJ P Dog.

What is so cool about Detroit hip hop is that it is tailored to many tastes. Whether you like the warmth of Latino accents brought to you by DJ Rick and Dirty Politics or the sharp, rough Streetlordz sounds, for instance. The Detroit scene is indeed multi cultural. Emcees come from different backgrounds and each of them brings a different sounds and styles in the hip hop community.

Pure rap geniuses like Mc Lazarus ( whose parents emigrated from Pakistan to Detroit) will impress many listeners with his verbal mastery. Merciless Amir’s rhymes are intentionally enhanced with a subtle oriental touch, in which Detroit meets Lebanon.

Sound the alarm, like Guilty Simpson and Black Milk said it in 2006: Detroit hip hop has some amazing talent. Many of them deserve to have their names written in capital letters.
Not those who are running their big mouths on public places or on the internet. Not the biggest Cd peddlers either. Only the hard working, the heartfelt, hip hop dedicated emcees really deserve it.

But to get more recognition from the world, Detroit artists will need to consolide their unity: this is and will remain my point of view.

 Deshaun Holton aka Big Proof carried a dream: he aimed at reuniting the most Detroit artists possible in their differences and make them work together.

Detroit, you can make it happen!

Copyright© by Isabelle Esling
All Rights Reserved

There’s been a lot of talk about Michigan’s tax break on filmmakers moving production to the state of Michigan, what features added incentives to film in Detroit in particular. It’s been a big hit with major productions increasing from only three last year to over 60 features so far this year including “Butterfly Effect: Revelation”, a sequel, Drew Barrymore’s “Whip It!”, and Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino”. The LA Times is calling us a film Mecca, the Hollywood on the Huron. We’re not just talking about Michael Moore or Eminem anymore.

As Governor Granholm says: “We’re stealing (projects) out of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Mexico, Louisiana, New York, Toronto.” Granholm said the new tax program has the potential to create thousands of jobs, not just through temporary movie projects, but through permanent film and digital media facilities. With the recent strengthening of the dollar against the Canadian dollar we are that much more competitive with locations like Toronto and Vancouver.

I know there are opponents as well as supporters of this legislation.

Check out an incentive video that was made for filming in Michigan:

And more.

Hundreds of films have been made in the state of Michigan, more than I could list. But here’s the list I have found of movies made in Michigan. michigan.gov also has a list but it’s kind of hard to read.

But besides the major film studios what about Michigan’s budding film scene. Michigan has more film festivals than I can recall, from Detroit, Ann Arbor, and other Metro Detroit communities to film communities on the West Coast in Grand Rapids, Saugatuck, and Traverse City. Let’s not forget the Detroit/Windsor International Film Festival, one of its kind. Tuesday, November 11, at 7:30 p.m. the Mitten Movie Project presents Zombie Night, a night of independent zombie films, at the Main Art Theater in downtown Royal Oak.

And then there are the films themselves. Detroit filmmakers have been busy making films from the sci-fi movies of Mike Madigan (Laughcry, Cadence, The Candle, Demeter: Surrender, Demeter, Caught) to the horror flicks of Tommy Brunswick (Little Red Devil, Mr. Jingles, The Remake, and more) and Dan Falzone’s The Tower, which recently screened at the Thriller Chiller Film Festival at the Wealthy Theatre in Grand Rapids.

‘”Demeter” and “Demeter: Surrender” is a short film series centered around the character from the hit Detroit sci-fi series “Inzer0″ from Thought Collide Productions. Set in the same post-apocolyptic world as the series, the short allows the viewer a peek into the life of Demeter - a character described on the show as tough, brilliant and completely psychotic. However, perception is everything - nothing is ever as it seems.’

Thought Collide Productions is the same group that brought us “The Passenger”.

Are you interested in getting into the motion picture industry in Michigan? The Motion Picture Institute of Michigan offers “aspiring filmmakers a training ground where they can develop their craft, access professional tools of the trade and determine a logical career path all within a cost effective and supportive environment”. Although it’s in Troy it’s also the most “cost-effective one year film program in the country”.

Within the United States violent crime isn’t something particularly unique to the city of Detroit but around the developed world it is a problem that particularly affects our country. Europe, Japan and other modern Asian countries, and even our neighbor to the north, Canada, don’t have the level of violent crime that we do — clearly strict gun control laws need these countries more, and not less, safe. Part of the reason is that those countries don’t have the level of gun ownership that we do. And in our country victims of gun-related violence are shot and killed by guns owned illegally anyways. These victims are caught by surprise, often not even the intended target, and even if those victims own guns and happen to have the weapon on their person they wouldn’t ever have a chance to use them.

Part of the problem is the ease of availability. Back when cigarettes were two dollars per pack any high school student could afford to buy cigarettes. Now they might think twice about starting this habit. And guess what, the number of young people who smoke has gone down. But any high school student who wants to buy a gun can afford to buy one if they can find someone to sell them one. This is easy because there are so many used guns swirling around the underground market in the United States and this number keeps increasing because it’s still relatively easy and cheap for Americans to legally buy guns which then disappear into the black market. The other piece you need when shooting a gun is the bullet. Remember that Chris Rock skit about bullet control? He jokes that bullets should cost of $5,000 apiece. If the bullets were that expensive there would no longer be innocent bystanders. And a guy about to shoot another guy would think twice about wasting $5,000.
I think that made a lot of people think. Bullets are cheap right now, pennies, just like cigarettes used to be. But is it a constitutional right to be able to fire away as many as you want? Or is it something that citizens should only need to do when they have to in which case how much would you be willing to spend on the bullet that will save your life?

So that got me thinking further about bullet control. First of all, bullets shouldn’t be cheap. Bullets as a whole have a pretty high cost to society which is divided among each bullet meaning that bullets right now are cheaper than their true cost. So if bullets are going to be taxed they need to be tracked. So what if we are able to track each box of bullets to the person who bought them. What if each bullet found in a gun violence victim could be tracked to the person who bought the bullets. This could certainly help police in solving gun violence crimes. It would still be possible to buy bullets on the black market but they would be much more expensive than legal bullets. (How many people buy black-market cigarettes?) Maybe high enough to make criminals think twice. It would also allow law enforcement to shut down the vendors who are supplying the most criminals.
I did a little googling and it turns out that my idea wasn’t actually new. There have been proposals for laws where guns would have to be made to imprint a serial number on the casing of bullets as they were fired. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help if the police don’t know who owns a gun, if someone scratches the imprinting mechanism from the gun, or if the shell casing is picked up by the shooter.

But is it possible to have the serial number in the shell, unique to the box it came from, independent of the gun firing it, and as it would be stuck in the victim it would be harder for the perpetrator to retrieve.

No idea is to promote the use of tasers for self-defense. Tasers are usually nonlethal (every once in awhile people die) so they’re not very useful for committing murder but they’re much safer when used accidentally. They are easy to carry around. Maybe they are the right alternative for self protection.

Between Michigan’s two largest metropolitan areas, Detroit and Grand Rapids, there has traditionally been some animosity from the smaller West Coast of Michigan towards the east and probably not enough attention paid from Metro Detroit towards the west. So Bridging 96, a collaboration between Crain’s Detroit Business and Grand Rapids Business Journal is a good idea whose time has come. The collaboration was kicked off with an exchange between the two cities’s business communities with a bus carrying 35 Grand Rapids business people to Detroit to see what’s going on in downtown Detroit.

Bridging 96 is a website and a newsletter and they even have a an Discussion Forum“>online forum which at this time is underactive to say the least. The kickoff event according to Mary Kramer’s blog:

Afterwards members of the Detroit community went to Grand Rapids. No doubt they took I-96, the Michigan-only “interstate” Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Detroit. Grand Rapids and Detroit are often at odds in Lansing but hopefully improved communication like this among the business community will allow the state of Michigan to finally solve some of its economic problems.

As the nation faces recession and with economic conditions poignantly difficult in Southeast Michigan what’s going on in Grand Rapids? At the time as downtown Detroit has been experiencing a revival so has downtown Grand Rapids. Further comparing the two cities, downtown Grand Rapids and the whole city of Grand Rapids didn’t quite experience the shock and decline of Detroit. The population of the city has been basically stable near 200,000 for years and the city’s nonwhite population is a much smaller proportion. East Grand Rapids is still called East Grand Rapids. The greater Grand Rapids area has a population of around 1.3 million and the economic makeup has been shifting from furniture and manufacturing to medical research.

Many of these new jobs in the medical sciences are in the so-called “Medical Mile” which is according to Wikipedia: “Grand Rapids Medical Mile is approximately a mile of medical-related development in the Hillside District of downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan bordering both sides of Michigan Street. It has also been referred to as Grand Rapids Medical Corridor, Michigan Street Medical Corridor, Health Hill, Medical Hill, and Pill Hill, among other names.” Although the district is mostly employees, patients, or students, the new construction includes mixed-use buildings.

There’s been nearly $2 billion in construction and renovation in downtown Grand Rapids in recent years. This includes the River House, Michigan’s tallest residential high-rise at 34 stories, new hotels like the elite luxury brand JW Marriott, a new art museum, convention center, and more. Around 2000 residences have been added to downtown Grand Rapids. The revitalization has extended into new identities for neighborhoods like Heartaside, Southtown, the Wealthy District, and more.

Grand Rapids’s skyline has been transformed and let’s more is that the city is doing it while being green. Grand Rapids is a national leader in LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, more certified buildings per capita than any other city in the country and fourth in total number, more than cities like San Francisco and Austin and even our nation’s capital.

And then there are the zombies. Last night’s Grand Rapids broke the world record for the largest zombie walk with 3370 zombies walking around the streets of downtown Grand Rapids from Rosa Parks Circle. The event was organized by Rob Bliss who has organized other events in Grand Rapids in the past.

Did Metro Detroit get a new addition to its public transportation system without us noticing? It appears we did get a new form of regional transit. No, no trains yet, but a new shuttle bus that transports citizens from some of Metro Detroit’s nightlife districts, downtown Detroit, Royal Oak, and Ferndale.

I called it public transportation but it’s actually a private, nongovernmental group which organized it. It’s called The Night Move and it’s only as publicly subsidized as the most subsidized form of transportation in our country, our roads and road traffic system. We are already paying too much for it, we might as well get a little more use out of it, right? But let’s not let the fact that a private group is running this that public transportation shouldn’t be subsidized because without subsidies roads wouldn’t exist.

This new shuttle has some differences between Metro Detroit’s main transit systems, DDOT and SMART. (Why there are so many separate public transit systems in Metro Detroit is another topic even though this group increases the number by one.) The fair for The Night Move is $12 which is more than the regular fares for DDOT and SMART although understandable for shuttle fares especially considering the price for parking, say $10, which doesn’t include the true cost of having lots of parking lots. And as the name might suggest it runs at night, normally Friday and Saturday evenings from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. which may leave some after hours partiers stranded. You book a ticket online, print it out, and it’s good for all night.

So now those who choose to live in Detroit, Royal Oak, or Ferndale have slightly more incentive to drive less or even not at all. It really increases the amount of area where those people can go at night. Hopefully the service takes off and they expand to other areas of the region with lots of residents living in a pedestrian environment with an active nightlife such as Hamtramck and especially Ann Arbor.

Actually, I had a similar idea before and I’m really glad that somebody has implemented it. I might have included Ann Arbor from the beginning because it has a huge residential population in a pedestrian friendly environment many of whom don’t own cars and it has a very active nightlife that would attract those living in Metro Detroit proper even more if they didn’t have to drive. Ypsilanti also has a large population of students, some nightlife downtown, and even though residents within Washtenaw County can get around any hour of the night guaranteed by AATA they might like to get out to Detroit or Oakland County.

Anyways, you can book The Night Move online. Shuttles leave Royal Oak every hour on the hour, Greektown in Detroit every hour on the half hour, and stop in Ferndale in between. And due to a relationship with the Detroit People Mover you can ride it for free if you ask for token from the bus driver. Oh, and if you need more motivation you will be saving the environment in many ways by taking this new shuttle. Not only are you cars from the road, the buses that you would ride on actually run on biodiesel.

Michigan in Pictures right now has the links to some amazing weather formations in Michigan, a tornado over Black Lake 15 miles southeast of Cheboygan and a waterspout from Oval Beach in Saugatuck. Waterspouts are those funnels over bodies of water that are sometimes tornadoes and sometimes not. In Michigan tornado is often occur in the summer and late spring but can also occur in the fall. I’m no meteorologist but if you want to talk about Michigan weather and maybe some storm chasing then maybe you should get in contact with these guys.

Dtownie readers! Do you want to participate in writing about Detroit? Everyone is welcome to contribute to this blog but lately I’ve been getting a lot of sign-ups that are spammers. So if you are for real then after signing up please leave a comment here with a short introduction so I know that you’re real about Detroit!

The Westin Book Cadillac Hotel (and Residences) has reopened after a nearly $200 million reconstruction to feature 453 hotel rooms and 64 condos which have already started to close sales. The Book-Cadillac is also a place to eat with exciting additions like the Spa 19 24 Grille with a spa run by the owner of Todd’s Room of Birmingham, the Boulevard Room in the Westin Hotel, the Motor Bar serving breakfast and lunch, and Roast, run by celebrity chef Michael Symon’s steakhouse for dinner. Michael Symon is an Iron Chef. There is also a Starbucks.

Even if you can’t celebrate the opening of the hotel by staying a night there you can still get in on the fun next Friday, October 24, with a Detroit block party in front of the hotel on Washington Blvd. It’s free and lasts from 8:30 till 10:30 p.m. and features music from Ryan Elliott, Paxahau’s Chuck Flask, Killer Flamingos, and Trick Trick. There’s also a breakdancing show, featured artists, and free giveaways and T-shirts.

It’s all Access Detroit next Friday night at Washington and Michigan Avenue in downtown Detroit.

From Freep.com: Last week Leslie Horn, president of the Power of Green Housing in Detroit pitched a plan to develop a 17-unit condominium project near Woodbridge. City Councilwoman Barbara-Rose Collins stood against it.

As they said on their blog: “In the end even though we had challenges we have been invited to return next Wednesday after meeting with CPC (City’s Planning Commission) who had concerns about the “aesthetics” of our condo project– so we immediately met with CPC and fully believe we have come up with great solutions that will make everybody happy without losing the integrity of our “urban look” and affordability.”

Perhaps the Councilwoman just isn’t aware of the recent trend in using shipping containers as building blocks. The idea is still cutting-edge while not being absolutely brand-new or untested. Go to Europe and other locations and you’ll see shipping containers being used as offices. Go to Southern California and you’ll find the first official two-story shipping container home designed by Peter Demaria. This condominium project would not only provide new multiunit, medium density housing stock that the city desperately needs it would also focus attention on Detroit’s Green movement.

Buildings constructed from shipping containers may look strange but I think anyone would find any such proposed designs more attractive than a lot of existing dilapidated housing including what currently exists on the proposed building site. And the shipping container, left over from shipping imports to this country and underused because we don’t have the products to send back out, can be bought for $900. These containers are constructed in such a way that they can be stacked (nine high, I hear). There are high-rise hotels being built from these things.
There are plans by PFNC (“Por Fin Nuestra Casa”) to build complete homes made of these for $10,000. Then there are plans by South Carolina’s SG Block to manufacture homes and factories which can be done more cheaply than building them on-site for between $150 and $400 per square foot. So think about where in this country we need cheap housing, where we might want to innovate in shipping container housing.

Check out the group’s blog for updates: Power of Green Housing in Detroit and check out weburbanist for more innovative shipping container building designs.

In other housing news, September’s residential home sales were up 57% over the same month in 2007. Sales were up in every region of Metro Detroit with the largest gain in Detroit itself.

Sporting News names Detroit second-best sports city

How bad of a sportstown is Detroit?