detroit rock city

Today I find myself in Detroit Michigan, getting ready to show my films at Wayne State University. It is pretty amazing that I made it here- for the past week I have been in a severe mental fog and have barely been able keep my shoe-laces tied, let alone get myself anywhere on time and be half-way presentable. It is my annual post PDX Fest brain melt; I think that I have become pretty good at dealing with stress and keeping things together when I have to, but the minute my brain can relax, it really shuts down. I’ll apologize now to anyone who has noticed me zoning out midway through a conversation in the past few days. It’s not that I am bored, it’s just that my brain is on vacation.
But while I was able to get myself to the airport in time to get on the airplane that got me to Detroit, I am sad to realize that I forgot the little cable that connects my camera to my computer. I think that Detroit might be the most photogenic city in America, and I had big plans of ‘blogging the shit’ out of my trip to Detroit, complete with photo analysis. This is my second time in Detroit, I was here a couple years ago for the Media City film festival. Pretty much the only traveling I do these days is on these ‘work’ trips when some school or festival or museum invites me to come and do my little song and dance. This is pretty much how I make a living; I go somewhere and show my films and talk about them, and if it’s a school I’ll usually do some sort of filmmaking workshop or student critiques or something. They always pay me much more than I deserve to get paid, and I suppose the big secret is that I would gladly do it for free if I could (but then again I guess that would mean I’d have to have a regular day job which would then prohibit me from taking off time for traveling so much- one of those ‘vicious cycle’ scenarios).
But anyways, back to Detroit. Detroit is a crazy, messed up place that I find fascinating and beautiful. Less than a century ago, Detroit was competing with New York to become America’s grandest, most important city, but now it is an urban wasteland. There are so many beautiful, significant old buildings here that are shuttered up it makes my head spin. It’s like passing through the living ruins of an ancient mecca, where the decay is in process. It’s hard to tell if the powers that be are waiting for the right time to renovate the buildings, or if they are waiting for nature to take it’s course and naturally do away with them. Detroit is a lot like one of those ghost towns I described in a post last week, but on a much grander scale.
It would be very difficult to sum up the issues and conflicts that face Detroit with real accuracy, but the one thing that seems clear is that Detroit is a good example of what happens when a community puts too much faith in a single entity- in this case, the auto industry. Detroit was already a thriving city before Ford and General Motors came along, but in the 1920’s, Detroit saw a boom unlike any American city has ever seen. Those corporations became so powerful that they could just completely have their way with this city, and when the time came to pull out, they let this city crumble. The thing that gets me angry is that this is not exactly a poor city. One look at GM’s “Renaissance Center” or a drive through some of the outlying suburbs is a clear indication that there is plenty of money floating around here. But instead of taking care of the community that made all this growth possible in the first place, those with wealth have retreated behind walls and have fortified themselves away from the actual city. The economic and racial issues in this town are as blatantly terrible as anywhere I have ever seen, and one has to wonder if this city has deteriorated beyond the point of possible resurrection. The problems here are deep, and far more complicated than I could ever grasp.
But I am excited to do some ‘urban spelunking’ tomorrow, and maybe i’ll even be able to wrangle the right kind of cable to download the pictures I take. Urban Spelunking is huge in this town, so much that I think the city should consider legalizing it and marketing it as a tourist attraction. Maybe they could hire me or Bill Brown or Jem Cohen to make the television commercials: “Come to Detroit to explore the millions of acres of abandoned factories, sky scrappers, warehouses, and famous train stations!” The commercial could have a bunch of attractive young people with flashlights strapped to their heads and wearing safety boots, repelling down one of the elevator shafts at some abandoned Ford manufacturing plant, or maybe looking out at the view of the downtown skyline from the top of the abandoned train station. We could shoot it all in Super 8 Kodachrome. It would be hot.