Visiting Detroit
Imagining Detroit
spring 2009


Looking up?

I really doubt I agree with country singer John Rich's politics, but his song "Shuttin' Detroit Down" hits a vein. The images are real, the anger is real. The twang is real. And the song is unusually activist for a genre that usually talks about love, swigging beer and bailing hay. Here's the video. Worth it for the images and for the novelty factor:


I spent last week in Detroit. I twittered from a bus full of 7th graders and radical activists planning the 2010 US Social Forum. I argued with locals that corporations could indeed be a force for progress and "good". I met angry poets toughing it out for decades in the streets. I ate at Avalon Bread, which is one of the first "social enterprises" I'd ever read about. I stayed in the third floor of the artist mansion Trumbullplex with an old friend. I sat in a circle with 94 year old activist Grace Lee Boggs and listened to that Chinese-American tell stories to the inner city kids of her 40+ years in the city and why she thinks Detroit is a City of Hope. I tried to retrace my roots to that crumbling, forgotten city....and I discovered that the place is alive.

Detroits plains gardens are blooming. Artists are moving in from all around. Detroit's music is thriving, even 50 years after Motown. And Detroit is so poor and so self-sufficient that it's the first place in the US that's had time to more fully consider what the low-energy, post-growth boom of the afterfuture might look like.

A Detroit New article from March 13 on the appeal of D-town to artists:

"Newcomers see an unusual receptiveness in Detroit as well. 'There are so many interesting things going on here that you couldn't do in New York,' says Barlow, 'both because of cost and crowding, and the fact that everyone's overseeing everything. Whereas in Detroit, it's like, "You're trying to do that? Neat."'"

Here are some of my pics from that journey:











Now I'm back in Beijing, where a different (but no less exciting) future grows. I'm hopefully staying in the same time zone for at least a few months, so I hope if you're passing through, hope that you stop by. We've only got a few years to shuttle ourselves around cheaply on fossil fuels before olfactory-rich dialogue between mortals on different continents (and different cities) probably becomes an afterfuture luxury, and digital (probably not smell-o-vision) is our closest thing to touching the other sides of our planet.

Read also my friend Rob Goodspeed's post on Detroit and the limits of urban decline.

Labels: detroit, development, michigan, photos, sustainable development

Reports from Michigan's Beaver
At the first Fox on a Hill retreat on
Beaver Island, Michigan

You'll find Miss Michigan's nicest big island tucked up in Northeast corner of Lake Michigan between the state's two pleasant peninsulas.

Before this week, I hadn't been to Beaver Island since I was about 12 (1992). As a youngster, I didn't have to say to friends, “No Beaver Island isn't a lesbian resort.”

The Emerald Isle's 60 sparsely populated square miles of people with mostly Irish ancestry have witnessed relative peace as oil, rail and timber industry ventures rolled through. The only notable exception was when James Jesse Strang and his Mormon contingent kicked them out and used a forged letter from Joseph Smith as an excuse to declare Strang sovereign of his island kingdom. King Strang was eventually killed and his followers were kicked off the island by raiding bands of Michiganders. Rumors abound that Strangian Mormons still make pilgrimages to their holy land.

Today, Beaver Island has a larger proportion of electric cars than anywhere else in the state. You get there by ferry from Charlevoix, a place of memories for me: where my then-three-year-old brother survived a swan attack and the main street where I always picture And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street take place.

This year, Fox on a Hill invited me to do a bit of joy seeking, nature communing, strategic dialoging, and music making on the founder's property on the remote southeast side. Earthwork musicians joined. We talked about meefers and plume (two great resources for the gay community—spaces to watch as they develop real, non sex-centric online gay community).

I cleared my lungs out with fresh lake air and native plants. The invasive species Mullen grows all over the island and makes a fine tea or bidi for expelling all that clogs you. I left large chunks of Beijing toxins on the forest floor. Invasive species are trying to tell us things and they're there to help.

My excuse for leaving Beijing for Michigan was to attend my cousin's wedding. A week before I left, I was comfortable with my decision to see the Olympics from afar. Then the air got clean and the cars were gone. I started to fall in. But family—getting tribal—is exactly what I needed. Life is easy with your own people.

Now I crave to go back and take in this Olympic spectacle. My good friend the dragon is throwing one hell of a party. I'll catch the last four days of what Tom Brokaw called "perhaps the most significant event in modern Chinese history" in Beijing (well, that's how I remember the quote from the Today Show). The Chinese are my people too. There's so much work to be done.

Coming up:
The NPR story: Link
Our Beaver Island EP: Link

Labels: fox on a hill, history, michigan