“Death begins in the colon,” reads the sign on the door of the Community Health Hut, on the corner of Wyoming and Eight Mile. A more arresting slogan would be hard to imagine.

Hakim Aleem, 79, who for years has owned the store with his wife Sahirah Muhammad, 77, is all about colons and their health.

“I don’t want to get too graphic about our colon, and many people don’t ever think about it, but that needs cleaning once in a while,” he says. “If you don’t cleanse that colon once in a while, it begins to back up and recycle itself in the body. And of course it begins to poison the body. That’s why you find some animals, their breath is sweeter than humans’ because of that odor that comes from the inside. It becomes fetid.”

To remedy these horrors, the store sells a number of cleansing products that promise to scrape the sludge away, leaving lighter, less stinky innards. “You feel really rejuvenated after that cleansing,” Aleem says.

Clean hindquarters are but a fraction of their focus, however. The Hut carries a wealth of health products, from vitamins and minerals to herbs and herbal teas. It’s also a carry-out restaurant, serving halal/kosher carry-out items like dinners of chicken or fish such as perch, whiting and tilapia, and sides like turnip greens and bottoms, brown rice and red beans, carrot cake, and bean pies, at a relatively low cost. You can buy a cup of carrot juice or a bottle of Ginseng Up and sip it while reading copies of the Muslim Journal newspaper.

The store opened 35 years ago, and apart from a brief shutdown for a few years when one of the owners died, it’s stayed in business at this spot, serving the surrounding community and former residents who make the drive back for its specialties. “We’ve tried to be a friendly store to the neighborhood,” Aleem says. “We’ve been working at it so long. People have respected us and we love that they’ve loved us, because we’ve loved them. We love it. This is our heart.”

The little hut-shaped building, which sports fresh paint and handpainted signs, has undergone considerable changes during its time. “At one time this used to open up to a door right on the corner, but cars would come in,” he says. “There used to be windows here too, but they built that wall up to protect the customers so nobody would get hurt.”

Aleem and his wife recently turned the business over to 43-year-old Wahad Muhammad and his partner, known simply as Brother David. “The wife and I, we’re tired,” Aleem says. “She’s been hanging in here for 35 years. It’s time.”

The new managers plan to open three more Health Huts around the city and expand the offerings to include clothes, toys and a fuller menu. “We’re going to be a complete one-stop,” Muhammad says. Even the sign about colons is coming down (“It was, um, uninviting” he says), in favor of a fresher approach, longer hours and more floor space. “Health is the backbone,” he says. “We just want to be able to bring healthy living, healthy eating and a family atmosphere to the community.”

The Community Health Hut is located at 8942 W. Eight Mile Road, on the corner of Wyoming. Hours are 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday; and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. For more information, call (313) 341-7939.

“Hats off Detroit!” That’s was the Thanksgiving Day parade slogan this year! Excitement expressed through exclamation! In that spirit, a fitting recap! We found a parade viewing spot in front of the bleachers! A security guard then said “get the hell out!” So much for that!

New spot not bad! Pageantry strolling by in fits and starts! Droopy floats sunk by leaked air! Chuck Gaidica broadcasting from everywhere! Trumpets blaring! Hobos glaring! Beads thrown by clowns, raining from the sky! Chills delivered by breezes! Inadequately dressed marchers shivering! Well-connected spectators let into empty skyscrapers by absentee landlords in town on a rare visit! Later: beer, turkey and Lions – don’t mind if I do!

Later still: same old Lions! As bad as ever! Another classic Detroit Thanksgiving!

Some guys are simply cool cats, and 76-year-old Detroiter Kasuku Mafia is one man who’s brimming with throwback hipness.

“Gimme some skin!” he exclaims, extending a hand as he answers the door of his Success Academy of Fine Arts, on Ridgewood near Livernois and Grand River on Detroit’s west side. He’s slim as a reed, with a beard of mini dreadlocks and a smile as warm, smooth and easygoing as his vibe.

The academy is Mafia’s music school, where he teaches almost every instrument and musical style there is. Founded in 1965, it’s located in the upper level of a house he’s lived in since the ’50s. The name reflects Mafia’s relentlessly positive outlook. “Every day is beautiful,” he often says. A sign on the front door reads, “Please leave all negative thoughts outside — you are now entering the Success Complex.” His outgoing answering machine message begins “Hello, beautiful person!”

But he’s not just a music teacher with old-style soul; he was once a musician with Motown Records, playing sax with the Funk Brothers on a number of hit songs and occasionally performing on stage alongside Detroit legends like Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, the Supremes and Stevie Wonder.

It’s his sax growling on “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” and “Get Ready” by the Temptations, “Going to a Go-Go,” by the Miracles and “Don’t Mess with Bill” by the Marvelettes, as well as on a number of smaller label recordings. He’s one of dozens of musicians who played roles in the Motown scene but who are now scattered across the city, living quietly in relative anonymity.

Mafia, born Norris Patterson in 1931 in Detroit, started playing music at 5 years old, got married at 17, had a daughter and became a mailman. After 12 years of marriage, his wife contracted an illness and died. He reacted by immersing himself in music, quitting his postal job and sending his daughter to live with his mother-in-law in Ohio. He never remarried.

He began working seven nights a week playing saxophone at the legendary 20 Grand Lounge on 14th Street at Warren, a hub of the Detroit soul music scene. “It was a beautiful place,” he says. “They had all the Motown acts, all different acts in there. It was on that high of a level. I was in the house band.”

Soon, Berry Gordy had him playing sax for his fast-growing Motown Records label, and 20 Grand owner Ed Wingate hired him for his Golden World Records. Between the two labels, and performances around town, music became his life.

“There was lots of work there at that time,” Mafia says. “There had never been anything here like Motown, so I’m on the ground floor of this, working three days a week, and all the other people in town who were recording stuff were in here trying to get the Motown musicians, so that made my thing even better. Suddenly I’m working day and night, recording at various places and stuff.”

By the early ’70s, Gordy moved Motown to California. “Then it all of a sudden it kind of dried up here,” he says. ‘Some people were trying to create another Motown, they had experienced it and they saw it, and now that Motown left, they were trying to build off the scraps that Motown left them. But nobody’s been able to pull it off yet. It was quite a thing that Berry did with that music.”

Once Motown left, Mafia poured his energy into his Success Academy and played shows with various bands around town.

He adopted an African name, swore off drinking and became a vegetarian. He’s never fully shaken the musician’s lifestyle, however; even as a septuagenarian he’s up every night until 2 a.m. and doesn’t rise before 10 a.m.

Mafia calls himself “the greatest one-man band in the land.” His shows are self-described “flowing extravaganzas” illustrating the evolution of music from the drums of Africa to such American forms as spirituals, gospel, blues, jazz and, finally, hip hop. He’s dubbed himself “The Ninth Wonder of the World,” playing and teaching stand-up bass, electric bass, guitar, sax, flute, harmonica, clarinet, piccolo, violin, cello and piano, even giving vocal lessons. Splitting his time between performances and teaching, Mafia currently gives lessons to a handful of students — and is willing to take on more.

Sharon Estes, whose 15-year-old daughter Candyce takes weekly piano lessons from Mafia, praises his gentle manner. “He’s patient and he takes his time, and I notice, whenever she asks a question, he helps her understand what’s going on so she can take that task on and know what to do with the notes.” Her husband also learned guitar at the academy.

In his signature style, Mafia weaves advice into his sessions. “When the students come in and they sit here, they get what I have to offer,” Mafia says. “They get the best. I talk to them about diet, how to take care of themselves, all of that.”

He still has a fondness for the Motown music he helped create, which endures as a symbol of the city from which it emerged. “The music is very potent and powerful, man,” he says. “It’s good music. I can listen to it day in and day out and still I hear good music. The writers wrote good songs about love, about the weakness or the strength of a man, they covered everything. It was something else.”

The Success Academy of Fine Arts is located at 5114 Ridgeway. For more information, call 313-934-5404.

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times – go look!

In the world of hip hop, calling someone a clown seems like it would be a major dis. But for Detroit artist DeMarcus Hughes, it’s a compliment.

Hughes, 37, a.k.a Smiley the Hip Hop Clown, is a Detroit-based rapper, a G-rated G, an MC whose M.O. is to strip hip hop of its violent themes and sexual content and make it kid-friendly for grade school performances and children’s birthday parties. At the same time, he tries to keep it from being insufferably corny for grown-ups within earshot.

“I’m really tired of cussing,” he says, referring to hip hop. “Everything’s based around sex and violence, disrespecting ladies. It disappoints me because most people that buy the music are young people, and young people don’t look at music or entertainers as entertainment; they look at it like that’s the real world. They try to emulate that. So I wanted to show them that hip hop is for everyone, including children.”

He shares the lower level of a weathered duplex on the city’s northeast side, near State Fair and I-75, with his 11-year-old daughter, Imani. His front door is marked with the words “Smiley the Clown” scrawled in black marker, with an arrow pointing to a doorbell, topped with a smiley face.

He’s a familiar sight around this neighborhood, strolling down the sidewalk in partial whiteface, mismatched sneakers, billowing Afro and puffy, raggedy clothes, or driving the Smiley Mobile, an old, gray Chevy Caprice wagon painted with Tyree Guyton-esque polka dots and topped with a large smiley face painted on the hood.

“Hey Smiley,” says a neighbor standing on the front lawn, in between shouts to a friend living in the duplex’s upper level. Kids pass on bikes and smile and wave. Inside his home, on a desk, is a receipt from a car repair shop — under name and address, the mechanic simply wrote “Smiley.” In this east side neighborhood, everyone knows who that is.

“Outside of being a clown, I’m very low-key. I’m a private person,” Hughes says. “Smiley the Clown is totally the opposite — hyper, energetic, fun, attention-getting, the life of the party.”

Being Smiley is a full-time job of parties and school rallies where he DJs, makes balloon animals, gives motivational speeches and, most importantly, performs his repertoire for the kids, including such songs as “I’m the King,” “On the Block” and “Smiley’s Here,” songs with clean, uncontroversial lyrics prodding kids to exercise, instructing them on new dances, or — in classic hip-hop fashion — brag that he’s the No. 1 clown.

Hughes has also produced his own videos, some filmed right in his front yard, featuring neighborhood kids singing or demonstrating new dances dispensed by Smiley. The charmingly amateurish quality of the videos lends them a sincerity that, in a more polished production, might seem trite or forced.

Hughes grew up on the city’s west side until, at 16, he went to stay with relatives in a small town up north, to escape the inner city. After high school he joined the Navy, served two years, and made his way back to Detroit, getting by on small jobs like lawn-cutting and shoveling snow until he honed his craft as a rapping clown 14 years ago. He earned the nickname “Smiley” in the military for his ever-present grin, a name he formally adopted when he became, in his words, “Detroit’s Hypest Clown.”

He’s not the only wholesome hip-hop clown in town, though. There’s also Kuddles the Hip Hop Clown (36-year-old Dawn Wilson) who bills herself as the Cutest Clown in Motown. “I’m on a mission to restore the innocence of hip hop,” she says. “My songs promote peace, love and harmony.” There’s also Smiley’s girlfriend Candid Bradley, 29, who goes by the name Hyphy the Clown, who also raps on some Smiley tracks. Then there’s E’fee the Clown (Elise Edwards), 55, who sometimes works with Kuddles. She’s a holy clown, spreading the gospel with face paint and funny shoes from her Cass Corridor base at Detroit Unity Temple.

But Hughes isn’t really part of some local collective of hip-hop clowns; in reality he’s just a lone, well-meaning entertainer from the neighborhood, a straight-laced fellow in a foul-mouthed genre, an old-fashioned performer immersed in a modern art form, whose innocent persona sprang up improbably from one of the city’s rougher areas.

“We have too many negative forces out here, and I’m just trying to be a force that’s positive,” says Hughes, who’s turned his back yard into a playground for neighborhood children, with trampolines, a basketball net, a swimming pool and loaner bicycles. “My goal is to bring smiles on everybody’s faces. It brings out so much positive energy that I can do this until I’m 70, like Bozo. Because it’s not a job to me, it’s my life.”

For more information, see smileythehiphopclown.com. and myspace.com/smileytheclown, or call (313) 366-0543.

This article originally appeared in the Metro Times – dig it.

Detroit is a city full of dive bars. Over the years a lot of businesses and people have left, but there are still lots of places to drink here, hundreds of little bars whose customers live in the surrounding blocks and are a reflection of a neighborhood’s composition and character.

Stefan’s Bar, on Springwells near Dix, fits that mold well. It’s a classic blue-collar, rough-edged, family-owned bar, with simple drinks and simpler décor, frequented by everyday folks from the area.

“I made Ugliest Barmaid of the Year award,” said bartender Tim Troyer, 45, a fast talker who came north from Florida 18 years ago and still speaks with a Southern twang. “I’m blind in one eye, deaf in one year and I walk with a cane. When I walk down the street I can walk around this bar ‘cause I got a lazy foot. When I start walking down the street with my cane I look like a spaz case.”

An untreated, minor foot injury became a lifelong disability. “I went to Detroit Receiving; they gave me two mild Vicodins, which were $74, and a prescription for a $500 boot to wear in my shoes. I said ‘the hell with it.’”

The bar’s customers are “pretty much laid back,” he said. “Nighttimes get a little rough,” he added, saying the opposite of what he had just said. “You get loudmouths in here. Every place has a little bit of their knock-down, drag-outs. We get on each other’s nerves once in a while.”

When’s it busiest? Happy hour? During televised sports? “Usually the first of the month, when people get their welfare checks,” he said.

“We got about five or six old people come in, drink coffee in the morning,” he continued. “We got an Indian that’s up every morning like clockwork, he comes in, has a couple ginger brandies, couple Busch beers, goes home, sometimes comes back, then he goes down the street to a different bar. That’s his seat right there.”

“Nobody sits there,” he warned.

An elderly man came in, shuffled slowly to a barstool. “No running in the bar!” Troyer shouted. The man ordered a water with lemon. “He quit drinkin’ eight months ago,” he explained. The man came just to hang out.

Sitting quietly on a stool, watching the Tim Troyer Show, 76-year-old Loraine Mont-Louis was drinking bottled Millers at 2 p.m. She lives down the street in a seniors citizens’ complex, and had heard at another bar that a hobo they both knew got struck by a car and killed. She thought it was someone named Gordy.

“It wasn’t Gordy!” Troyer insisted. She was unconvinced. “You know the little homeless guy that used to stand at I-75 and Springwells holding the sign, little short feller, him and his woman live under a viaduct right off of 75 down that way?” he asked her. “It was him. He was hit coming this way. They had it blocked off all day long. It wasn’t Gordy, though. Why do you listen to these people with their wild-ass stories? Do not listen to stories in a bar!”

Stefan’s small interior is plain but for beer ads on streamers and beer mirrors on the walls. A single pool table lies diagonally across a small room; it’s reserved on Mondays and Tuesdays for the neighborhood pool leagues. There’s plenty of liquor, but beer options can be counted on one hand. During football games, Maria the DJ brings chili. That’s about it for the frills at Stefan’s, where the unpretentiousness matches that of its customers and its lively bartender.

“You don’t want to get too fancy,” Troyer said. “I don’t know, we’re just pretty much Plain Jane.”

Stefan’s Bar is located at 1801 Springwells. Hours are 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. Monday through Saturday; noon-2 a.m. Sunday. For more information, call (313) 841-1833.