David Byrne has a great, observation- and photo-rich post from Detroit (Don’t Forget the Motor City) that relates back to some of the themes I touched on when I posted about that city’s decline and potential reinvention as an near science-fictional green city. Julien Temple’s Requiem for Detroit (as David points out) provides some context for that.
I’ve been a little too busy to post here recently, but I have been adding to the Shadow Blog, and most recently I seem to be getting captivated by visually arresting posts like David’s, Transversalinflections’ Thoughts and a song (and this piece on artist Monika Cichoń), some wonderful posts from Matthew Flanagan’s Landscape suicide, Next Nature (like this compilation of bizarre oil-death-glam fashion photos), Ron Burnett’s blog, and other things in that vein.
Meanwhile, tonight’s sunset from here looked momentarily like this:
Add to that the last slow chirps of early autumn’s few remaining crickets (their chirping slows down, at a predictable rate, as it cools), and a bat still flittering between the trees (a good sign, since their populations have dropped considerably in the last few years), and there you have it.
holy woa, david byrne! and i hadn’t heard of the requiem doc. yea, the buildings in ruin are quite dramatic and the landscape eerily desolate in many parts, and there’s a tendency to romanticize it, myself definitely included when i come visit back here, but it’s an intense experience, for sure.
i don’t know if you know of Grace Boggs and Detroit Summer, but these peeps have been working hard in the city for years, before when larger media was not interested yet, and they are truly wonderful and cool people doin real exciting things to rebuild community, intergeneration connection, education, and heal the landscape. http://www.boggscenter.org/
greening of the D is sweet, i saw you mentioned them in your other article. yea, there also tons of corridors and collectives of kids, artists, writers, and musicians and other people doin real neat sh** on their own, too.
also, don’t know if you know of these, but two great books to gettin a good feel for understanding the field of racial/economical tensions/forces and their combinations that are structurally embedded into ghetto formation/systematic exclusion of sprawl, etc., in the u.s. and the history of urban activism esp. in Detroit are:
1. Political Economy of the Urban Ghetto. Fusfeld. Bates.
2. Detroit I do Mind Dying. Georgakas. Surkin.
(i think there might be decent excerpts on googlebooks.)
anyway, thanks for this cool post!
I think I had heard of Boggs & D Summer… Thanks for the ref, and also to the two books. I’ve had a real fascination for Detroit for a long time, but haven’t actually spent time there (to speak of) since well before the desolation started setting in. But I guess it’s been a long, slow process. I remember wandering around the train station thinking how like Eastern Europe this felt… (back at least twenty years ago).
It’s always great to hear about the ‘neat sh**’ people are doing there. Thanks for chiming in about it.
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