IssUE 2 | AW 2011
ÂŁ8 / $12 UsD An antidote to lazy journalism
DETROIT
Jeffrey Eugenides Alex Winston Ben Gordon & Charlie Villanueva David Robert Mitchell Megan Abbott
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The first issue of Boat Magazine took us to Sarajevo, Bosnia where the media piled in for the 1984 Olympics and then again in the 90s to cover the siege. They left and never returned leaving a vacuum of information out there about the city. This issue of Boat Magazine found us in Detroit, Michigan where the exact opposite has happened. The auto industry collapse and the housing crisis hit Detroit hard. In the last decade 25% of its population has left leaving about 60,000 houses standing empty. These houses are hotbeds for crime, vandalism, and arson, all of which cause the surrounding property values to plummet and the local schools to decline and eventually close which in turn causes more residents to leave the city... It’s a horrible cycle, one that has attracted the media in droves. The thing is, they’re only telling part of the story. There’s a plethora of articles and news programs out there about Detroit’s decline usually accompanied by photos of the ‘modern ruins’ that are sprinkled around the city. It’s hard to see it as anything other than lazy journalism; spew some devastating stats and put a huge photo of a burnt out building on the front page for people to gawk at. But that’s not all there is, it just takes a bit more digging. So we packed up the studio once again, rented a house and made this magazine in an attempt to tell the rest of the story. Back in 1931 the New York Times was turning 80 and to celebrate they asked some of the movers and shakers to write an article about what the next 80 years (1931-2011) would be like. Henry Ford was one of those chosen and he wrote an article titled “The Promise of the Future Makes the Present Seem Drab.” After our time in Detroit compiling this magazine, we couldn’t agree more.
- Erin Spens
Editor, Erin Spens Creative Director, Davey Spens Art Directon & Design, Luke Tonge
ISSN 2046-9721
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Printed by Cambrian Printers.
Published bianually by Boat Studio Ltd, 27 Tileyard Studios, Tileyard Road, London, N7 9AH A special thanks to: Toby Barlow at Team Detroit, Steve Watson at Stack Magazines, Erin Rose at Positive Detroit, Steve Cole at Creators Trust, and our clients at Boat Studio without whom this wouldn’t have been possible.
D e t r o i t headline typeface by Alex Sheldon for Match & Kerosene. Gotham Rounded typeface by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. For contributions, advertising, and stockist enquiries, please contact davey@allaboardtheboat.com
@boatmagazine
4-7. AGAIN ST R U I N - P O R N J EFFRE Y E UGE N IDE S
8 -9 . 1 38 SQ U A R E M I L E S GILE S P RIC E
1 0-1 3. KA L E T OW N HOW IE K A HN
1 4-2 3. ADVENTU R E S I N D I R T Y D E T R O I T LIZ & Max HA A RA L A HA M ILTON
2 4-2 9 . JU ST KI D S ALEX W IN S TON & j e s s ic a he rn a n de z
30 - 3 1 . 1 0 DETROIT IN TE N L P s
32 -35. TH INGS W E L E F T I N T H E F I R E BEN BL A C K W E L L
3 6- 41 . W E TH INK YO UR C I T Y L O O KS L I KE A M A L L JAMES GRIFFIOE N
42 -49 . T H E SU B U R B S JAME S N A Y L OR
50- 53. TH E M Y TH O F T H E A M E R I C A N SL E E P OV E R DEBS PATE RS ON
54-59 . S E E I T T H R O U G H LUKE TON GE & J ON ATHA N C HE RRY
6 0- 61 . STa r t ER IN S P E N S
6 2 -6 5. DENNIS M A N N I O N i s a l l f i r e d u p DAVE Y S P E N S
6 6 -7 7. T H E L O C KO U T J OHN BA L S OM
78 -7 9 . W E A R E O U R C A R S J OE P OS CH & AM A N DA JA N E J ON E S
8 0-9 1 . M ANY PAR T S M A KE M O T O R C I T Y GILE S P RIC E
9 2 -9 7. O U R EY ES C O U L D N ’ T ST O P O P E N I N G MEGAN A BBOTT
Photograph by Adam Jacobs Illustration by Seif Alhasani
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In 1960, when I was born, Detroit was the fifth largest city in the United States, the population standing at a healthy 1,677,144. In addition to being the center of the automobile industry, Detroit wasn’t far removed from its pivotal role in World War II, when it was known as the “Arsenal of Democracy” due to the production on its re-tooled assembly lines not of Buicks, Fords and Cadillacs, but tanks and B-52s. Detroit had a semi-great art museum, boasted the world’s tallest department store (Hudson’s), and possessed a reasonably sized downtown filled with the self-important bustle of commerce. Our family lived in Indian Village, a stately neighborhood on the East Side not far from the humble streets where my parents had grown up. Sometime when I was two or three, there was a shooting in the alley behind our house, or on the next block over, or ten blocks away – close enough, at any rate, to scare my parents into joining the exodus, known as “white flight,” out of Detroit and into the adjoining suburbs. A few years later, in the summer of 1967, the Detroit riots erupted, and after that the movement of whites from the city, perceptible beforehand, became a flood. The results were predictable. A lowering of the tax base. A plunge in real estate values that further accelerated the depopulation as homeowners sold their houses in response to the collapsing market. Jobs disappeared, poverty increased, and, with it, crime and blight. Slowly, the city began to be hollowed out. Homes were abandoned. Stores closed. Great buildings like the Grand Trunk railroad station were reduced in operations and finally shuttered. Everywhere you looked, something familiar had disappeared, either torched or demolished. “The Arsenal of Democracy” became “The Murder Capital.” I was just a kid, and it all seemed natural enough. I didn’t know that this wasn’t happening everywhere else. And though the city’s slow degradation often depressed me, coloring my sense of the world in a hue of melancholy, 4\5 1\2
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I didn’t stop to ask the reasons behind it. Moreover, even as an adult, these reasons get more complicated the more I learn about them. For instance, I always accepted the common wisdom that it was the riots that made the automotive companies leave the city, taking jobs with them; but, in fact, Henry Ford had begun to move his operations out of the city decades earlier. The riots were a response to this abandonment of the city rather than its cause. Detroit’s racial tensions go back a long way, too, essentially to the 1920s when African Americans from the South began to migrate northward in large numbers. With its large African-American population, Detroit had more members of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA (United Negro Improvement Association) than anywhere else in the country. W.D. Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam, appeared in Detroit in the 1930s, adopting many of Garvey’s attitudes and recruiting methods. Earl Little, the father of Malcolm X, was a Garveyite, and brought his family to Lansing, Michigan in the 30s, leading to Malcolm’s brief (and, according to Manning Marabel’s biography, slightly embellished) life of crime, when he was known as “Detroit Red.” In short, the reasons for Detroit’s ongoing difficulties are racial, economic and political, and much too complex to discuss in detail here. This is the background, however, of the city I still call home. As teenagers, my friends and I began venturing downtown at night. Our parents forbid this, and so we didn’t tell them where we were going. After 6 p.m. downtown Detroit was nearly empty in those days. It felt safe for the simple reason that so few people were on the streets. As we tooled around in our parents’ cars, we discovered amazing places. Our favorite was the Michigan Theater, a former opera house that had been converted into a parking garage. Carrying sixpacks of beer, we hopped the fence and went inside to stare up at the ceiling of the garage, which had been left intact, the ornate balconies and gilded plasterwork, though falling away in chunks, still arching over the cars parked below. Sometimes we stationed ourselves outside the Cadillac plant – soon to be closed – at midnight, to watch the autoworkers come streaming out the doors as the shifts changed. Or we ventured into the Michigan Central railroad building as far as we dared, its twelve stories empty, the stairwells coated six inches thick in pigeon waste. We didn’t know anyone else would be interested in these dire locales. The staggering nature of their disrepair filled us with a sick delight. We felt special to have discovered them, less suburban somehow, and in our callowness we believed that we were somehow dignifying these ruins with our presence, as though drinking a six-pack in an opera house converted into a parking garage was an act of solidarity with the city, as if we were the custodians of the ruins, the only ones who understood.
Years later, the artists began showing up. In the 90s, Stan Douglas took photographs of many of the places my friends and I had hung out in fifteen years earlier. Others who knew nothing about Detroit began to come to the city, smitten with the beauty of its ugliness. I know what these people felt because I had felt that way too, even though, as a native son, I should have known better. Sometime in the last five years, however, the ruin-porn got to be too much. Filmmakers and photographers from far afield, such as the French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, descended on Detroit to make coffee table books, speaking all the while of the city’s destruction in abstract or poetic terms, and acting as though they were bringing us the news about ourselves. The reason I agreed to contribute these brief thoughts about Detroit for Boat Magazine has to do with the correctness of the editors’ attitude. This issue of Boat Magazine seeks to take a stand against ruin porn. It is everything a ghoulish filmmaker wouldn’t understand. Because I, too, have committed the sin of aestheticizing Detroit’s demise, I’m well aware of the seduction of this posture and, therefore, all the more eager to condemn it now. That’s what this issue of Boat Magazine is about. To see the city of Detroit as it is, today, a beaten-up, beaten-down place of incalculable difficulties, but a place where a half million people still live. What has happened to the industrial cities of the American Midwest is a travesty. St. Louis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Toledo, Flint, Gary. It’s a big country, and if one place craps out on you, you leave it behind and find somewhere new. But not everyone gets to leave. Not everyone wants to leave. And so, if you visit the Rust Belt now, you come face to face with a central breakdown in American capitalism. No country that calls itself great can allow such a vast swath of its territory to be written off as has been the case here. Detroit has died as a great American city. And yet it’s still there. Every time I visit, I meet wonderfully resilient people and have a tremendous time. The racial tensions, though by no means gone, have begun to dissipate. It’s not great, but it’s a lot better than when I was a kid. Not everything gets worse. So here’s a little look at the Detroit that is. In my novel, “Middlesex,” I mention that the settlement of Detroit burned down in 1805. In response, the city father’s installed a Latin phrase on the city flag: Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus. “We hope for better times. May it rise from the ashes.” I don’t know if I believe it anymore. But it still applies. It’s still what any true Detroiter feels, though we’re the last people who’d ever try to sell you a little easy poetry.
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Photographs by Giles Price 8 1\2 /9
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P h o t o g r a p h b y L I Z A N D M A X H A A R A L A H A M I LT O N
10/11
Detroit, vast, at 138 square miles, larger than Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco combined, has become a reductive term. Save Detroit. Fix Detroit. Detroit’s Coming Back. All that language is way more complicated than it sounds and once you really know what “Detroit” means, those rallying cries — too small, wrong words — stop making much sense (address Detroit, plan Detroit would be better). Like any city’s name, Detroit’s is an umbrella. Nationally, perhaps internationally, people hear it and think, down deep, of an underdog, of some bygone way to do work, of the way we all experience decline and hope for resurgence. It’s also connected, subconsciously, I think, to America’s collective sense of freedom: Detroit made the cars; the cars set us free. People tune into the city’s story, especially now, because they themselves want some of that horsepower and mobility back.
Casinos are bad neighbors: they want to keep you inside forever, neglecting the world, which does absolutely nothing for a city that needs to exist in a far more open and physically unified way.
Locally, Detroit means something else.
Some people think kale — hearty, cruciferous, it’s dinosaur skin thick enough for a Detroit winter — is an answer if not the answer. Related skepticism comes easily. Economically, who knows whether urban farming can provide a viable boost. And of what size? Will these be small operations, spearheaded by neighborhood groups? Or, mid-sized fields, backed by local businesses? Or, will a spectacular Orwellian mistake be made, bringing in Big Agra, turning over the city to Cargill, to Archer Daniels Midland? Socially (and racially), turning up the dirt for gain could also be a problem.
It’s physical, not figurative — a collection of neighborhoods with real and dire needs (blown-out street lamps, Godot-like buses, dozens of unmaintained and functionally “closed” parks,a city budget bitterly battled over like a divorce settlement in an oldmoneyed family whose fortune has not held). It’s an East Side and a West Side. A long riverfront with manufacturing and the ghosts of manufacturing. There’s Osborn, Kettering, and Brightmoor. Indian Village, East English Village, and Boston-Edison. Southwest, Brush Park, and North End. Have you heard of these neighborhoods? Any of them? This is actually Detroit; the real sum total; the individual neighborhoods and every one of their needs. And there’s dozens more. And there’s Downtown, too, which, of course, everybody has heard of — and everybody has seen from the sky (during nationally televised sporting events where the home teams, without fail, are made the specious stand-ins for the city’s truer grit) and from the ground (in a recent wave of Midwesternly operatic Chrysler commercials). Downtown is where some people work and hardly anybody lives, but where lots of people come to gamble in three newish casinos that set the wrong tone, planning-wise, for any place looking to rebuild. For the most part, there is nothing around them. They are isolated from one another. Walking between them is ill-advised. They do nothing for public space and why would they?
Open space, like the gaps between those casinos, is rapidly becoming Detroit’s hallmark. Population decline, a foreclosure mega-crisis, and a long history of deindustrialization dating back over half a century has left behind the kind of mass-vacancy that’s either an epidemic or one of the best ever opportunities for re-evaluating urban thought. There are festering houses, so many thousands of them, plus empty factories, empty schools, empty storefronts, empty office towers, at least one big empty hospital, and an epically empty train station. Entire blocks are devoid of population and human life (there are animals).
“You try getting a black city to go to work on some white man’s farm,” one elderly Detroiter told me, not too long ago. But then, there are the believers, whose convictions — ahistorical, apolitical, and so wide-eyed, like their lids are pried by calipers — run deep. Proof: another resident— a much younger one, not connected in body to the‘68 riots or the Great Migration — told this magazine’s editor, “Detroit needs a signature food, and in my mind it’s Kale. I hope one day this city is Kaletown, not Motown.” What’s most interesting for me to think about is not the demographic particularities of who would want to work on a farm in Detroit beyond twenty-something males with Fauxhemian facial hair and women who look like flannel was invented — by God — especially for them, or whether or not the city needs a signature food (in Detroit, congenitally so meaty, kale will never be it). It’s not about the economics either or even the food supply issues. 10/11
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Rather, I’m wondering how to bring new ideology to the city. I’m wondering more about how farms and greenways can speak to the city’s spatial issues: how people use space, how they feel about it, how they engage with it. Kale could very well be a tremendous planning tool, an organizing principle, and a therapeutic correction. Any other number of crops could, too — with the exception of Jerusalem artichoke (too polarizing for an already polarized place). And here’s where I bring out my own calipers. The temptation, being a Detroiter (even an expatriated one) of a certain age, is simply too great. The whole city, all that Detroit, all those neighborhoods, could certainly benefit from greater connection. All that vacant property collectively represents a chance to string parcels of land together for unified purposes. Let’s say every neighborhood had its own small, working farm — one crop to start. Empty land is reclaimed in a positive way. A community can accomplish something on its own, without having to call city help lines repeatedly, asking for the bus to come and the lights to go back on and for somebody to mow the three-foot high grass in the park. A feeling of self-determination emerges and, also, pride. Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors, in many a good year and even some bad, gave the city the means to puff out its chest. This had less to do with the cars, I think, than it did with the notion that Detroiters were joined by a single, progressive pursuit. The city had an unwavering emotional identity until it did not. I’m not saying kale can replace the cars — one has an engine, the other is a vegetable — but there is something powerful about the idea of a common pursuit rising in a city, not to mention something profound about watching actual growth in a place where there was none. “A city!” wrote an enthused Le Corbusier, in The City of To-Morrow and its Planning, “It is the grip of man upon nature. It is a human operation directed against nature, a human organism both for protection and for work. It is a creation.” If Eminem rapped about this now, maybe in this coming year’s Super Bowl ad, it would be Detroit’s gospel. Man versus nature. City as creation. But even in a world without Marshall Mathers Goes Urbanizm On Your Ass, these words, from 1929, seem too site
and time specific to ignore. How, in Detroit, going forward, will man control the tall grass, the unwieldy trees, and the preponderance of earth? How, going forward, will Detroit grasp its inner nature, too? The kale fix would not be about pirating land and dropping seeds. There would have to be plans, decisions, and financing. Small steps, each feeling like a risk. Some of the wide-eyed would have to emerge as leaders. Their comprehensive vision for the city’s tomorrow might look like this: Farms and gardens springing up everywhere. In Brightmoor. In Osborn. In Southwest. In between those casinos (to be fair, one of them has actually committed to a million dollar greenhouse project in an adjacent, empty lot). On the roof of City Hall, like in Chicago. Symbolically, that does mean something. And there would be vertical farms, too, in those empty office towers Downtown, in the Central train station that must stop being glamorized as a ruin. If it works, Detroit comes back outside. Neighborhoods are again understood as part of the whole. Empty space develops value, internally then externally. Le Corbusier covered this almost a century ago, theorizing that for every residence a garden plot should be built. “There would be a farmer,” he wrote, “in charge of every 100 such plots and intensive cultivation would be employed. The farmer undertakes all the heavy work. The inhabitant comes back from his factory or office, and with the renewed strength given him by his games [the great architect advocated for daily exercise here, too], sets to work on his garden. His plot cultivated in a standardized and scientific way, feeds him for the greater part of the year. There are storehouses on the borders of each group of plots in which he can store his produce for the winter. Orchards lie between the houses and the cultivated ground.” In Detroit, it’s the opposite—for every absence, a garden plot should be built. But the benefits remain the same. A more robust street scene develops and a conversation is born. It’s the dialogue you have with your neighbors when you truly understand their work. Dirt beneath the fingernails, not motor oil. Nobody would ever have to call it Kaletown.
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P h o t o g r a p h s b y B R I A N K E L LY
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We have always thought that the best way to get to know a city is by its food. A lot can be found out about the culture of a city by the way its inhabitants consume and Detroit is no different. Our Detroit story is not just about food itself, but rather the people who produce it and care about how it contributes to the city. Sure, Detroit isn’t known for its Michelin class restaurants, but we had heard about Slow’s BBQ and the urban farming movement and before we even touched down we got the sense that it was a city of independent people and companies doing interesting things. Our journey starts out at a little place in Ferndale called AJ’s Music Café. We’d heard that the owner A. J. O’Neil had the best coffee in Detroit, so decided to head down there. AJ’s is not just known for its coffee, but it also holds the world record for the longest concert in the world, lasting 360 hours and involving local bands. The café is split in two with the restaurant one side and the other a little stage, where the longest concert took place. This is typical of Detroit, independent businesses setting out to serve coffee and then out of the blue deciding it might a good idea to try and have the longest gig in the world. AJ’s Music Cafe - www.ajsmusiccafe.com
ADVENTURES IN DIRTY DETROIT
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Rafino Valentine moved back to his home town Detroit and like so many, is intent upon bringing industry back to the city. His idea for a local vodka distillery came from a Dirty Martini he downed over eight years ago when he was working on Wall Street. Rafino couldn’t understand why vodka was seemingly always imported, someone in the US must be able produce a world-class vodka. After spending several years working in other distilleries and studying the traditional processes of production, Rafino started Valinetine Vodka. As he showed us around, Rafino explained that the whole concept of being a Detroit-based company starts with the building itself. The doors to the distillery are stripped back to the original doors of the former pool table factory that now houses the distillery and bar. The bricks and wood in the bar are salvaged from old buildings that were being demolished in Detroit, Rafino gave a few bottles of vodka to the foremen in exchange for the bricks and timbers. Rafino clearly loves ‘old’. He uses traditional techniques and makes a single batch at a time, tasting and smelling the vodka throughout each step to produce a spirit that competes and often beats the big brands that most of us know. Bottled by hand, 99% of the material used in the process is locally sourced. Rafino starts by trying to source ingredients from Detroit, then Michigan, then Illinois and finally from the rest of the US, but so far the furthest he has had to go is Illinois. While enjoying a Dirty Detroit (Valentine’s bar’s signature version of the Dirty Martini), we told the bar-man Nick about our morning spent driving miles and looking unsuccessfully for one of the local food vans that we had heard about – Jacques Tacos, only to discover that he usually parks up right round the corner! Valentine Vodka - www.valetinevodka.com
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Starting-over is a common tale nowadays in Detroit. We had heard that there was a Detroit-based company making mead, (an ancient alcoholic beverage that is produced by fermenting a solution of honey and water). B. Nektar Meadery was founded in 2006 by Brad and Kerri Dahlhofer and their friend Paul Zimmerman. The three had been avid home-brewers but it wasn’t until Kerri and Brad were laid off that they decided to set up a meadery and start producing and selling their own mead. The day we visited them at their distillery on an industrial park, they were bottling their new concoctions ready to be tasted for the first time by the general public and sent off to ten states around the country. But not every enterprise in Detroit has positive stories to tell, Detroit resident Kristyn had got hold of an old Airstream trailer and was trying to serve healthy street food to the residents of Detroit. We tried to track the truck down, so drove to the last address that we had heard it was parked at. We ended up on the outskirts of downtown in an area of boarded-up buildings and open green spaces. We drove past a building with a Airstream trailer outside and pulled up to have a closer look. Kristyn explained that her business, Pink FlaminGO!, was off the road at the moment. Kristyn still goes out with the truck although it’s not supposed to be serving food. She has been fighting against paying extra taxes for permits to park up and serve food downtown and dealing with the realities of a local government hampering small businesses. We spent a few hours with Kristyn and her friend Malik talking about Detroit, and listening to their solutions for the city.
B. Nektar Meadery - www.bnektar.com Find Pink FlaminGO! on Facebook
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We heard more about two food vendors in Detroit than any other. Before we even landed, people had been telling us about the infamous Coney Dogs war that has been raging since the early 20th Century. This is a rivalry fought over the Coney dog, a hot dog topped with beef chilli based on the legendary Nathan’s hotdogs found in Coney Island, NY. In downtown Detroit, the two restaurants sit side by side, American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island, both serving their interpretations and claiming supremacy. Legend has it, a family feud created the two rival eateries and portraits of family members hang proudly in each place. Residents in the city take sides, but we sampled the delights of both. American Coney was the bigger of the two, decked out in a patriotic red, white and blue, patrolled by an owner who introduced himself as “Dan the Hotdog Man”. Conversation was flowing until Dan discovered we didn’t love Tony Blair quite as much as he did. We walked around the block a few times before sneaking in next door to Lafayette Coney. The service left a lot to be desired, it was definitely a less polished experience, but in the end their dogs came up trumps.
American Coney Island - www.americanconeyisland.com Find Lafayette Coney Island on Facebook
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Everybody we met in Detroit told us we had to visit Eastern Market. Eastern Market is a huge farmers market surrounded by meat wholesalers and restaurants. We headed down there on a Saturday morning to find a bustling area filled with vegetable stalls, and thousands of people from all over Detroit and the surrounding states shopping for produce for home or business. The must-haves are the ribs from Berts, but we were as taken by the market across the freeway with its walls painted in murals of meat, fish and cheese which are sold inside. Food is a great introduction to any city. We met so many extraordinary people through the plates, bowls and glasses of this town. They have given us a good taste of what Detroit has to offer. But we leave with an unsatisfied feeling in our stomachs as if we have only just had the appetiser. The rich food landscape of this city is evolving so rapidly, we’ll have to come back in a few years for the main. Eastern Market - www.detroiteasternmarket.com
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Photography by Liz and Max Haarala Hamilton
“New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: find a new city.” – Patti Smith, who lived in Detroit with her late-husband, a member of MC5, for over a decade.
Erin Spens talks to Alex Winston and Jessica Hernandez about music and community in Detroit.
Historically Detroit has a knack for turning out musicians and records that inspire entire eras of music. Every few years this city changes the game, from Diana Ross, The Temptations, and Marvin Gaye at Motown to J Dilla, Eminem and Kid Rock. There were Unrelated Segments and MC5 holding up Detroit’s garage rock, The White Stripes impact on alternative music all the way to Carl Craig and the massive Detroit electronic movement. This place has something special. I met up with singer-songwriters / Detroit it girls, Alex Winston and Jessica Hernandez to find out if it’s something in the water.
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JESSICA HERNANDEZ Patti Smith’s suggestion to young artists is to forget New York City and move to Detroit. Why? Well, obviously it’s cheap. So many of my friends work a part time job a couple days a week to pay the bills and then spend the rest of their time on their art. But there’s a thing about Detroit that’s really special – the people here support their artists. I haven’t been doing music for that long – I played my first show in 2009, and already I’m working as a full-time musician. If someone here wants me to play an event or a gig, they pay. They don’t think just because I’m a small local musician that I’ll do it for free. They take their artists seriously here and that keeps a lot of us going. Why do you think Detroit births such influential and game-changing music? I just think it’s a place that inspires original stuff. It’s kind of a melting pot of different influences and sounds which I know has really inspired me personally. Yeah I just think there’s something about Detroit, it’s amazing when you think about who has come out of here. It’s really varied and I think that’s kind of how Detroit is. What about Detroit have you incorporated into your music? Well everyone knows everyone in the music scene in Detroit. It’s a great community. I have a lot of different people play with me (the Deltas). I think mostly we all just have a lot of fun. I run a venue space called The Bakery Loft which is above my parents’ Mexican bakery. We have gigs there all the time with lots of different artists, I love that about music here in Detroit – everyone is involved and I think that’s a big part of my music. [Jessica invited us to meet some of her friends at The Bakery Loft. See overleaf.] Tell me about the Bakery Loft. Well, my dad opened Armando’s Mexican Restaurant in Mexicantown. My mom was a waitress and they fell in love! So a few years later they started the bakery across the street from the restaurant. I first worked at the bakery when I was in third grade. My mom taught me how to decorate cakes so I’ve done a lot of that. The space upstairs from the bakery I didn’t really notice until I’d moved back home after a stint of living in Chicago and Kansas City. I saw it with new eyes and realized it would be an amazing space for gigs and events. We do some shows there, we’ve got dance classes there and a thing called Detroit Soup. What is Detroit Soup? Detroit Soup is a monthly dinner we do to help fund projects in Detroit. People pay $5 at the door and all the money goes into a pot. We feed everyone soup, bread and pie which is all donated. A handful of people get up and pitch their project ideas and at the end of the night everyone votes on who should get the pot of money. We’ve had awesome stories, my favorite is Veronika Scott who designed a jacket for homeless people that harnesses their heat during the day and is turned into a sleeping bag at night. Carhartt is helping her with the production side of things. She’s amazing! You mentioned that you’d had a stint living in Chicago and Kansas City. What brought you back to Detroit? I think in other cities there’s more of a leisure culture where if you’ve got some spare time you go to the bar or just hang out with friends, you know? But in Detroit people are really motivated to do stuff. In Detroit if you’ve got free time I think there are more people who spend it on projects or art or just doing things around the city. We’re not big on leisure here, I think people here are do-ers and that’s how I am so it just works. Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas’ album Weird Looking Women in Too Many Clothes is out now.
ALEX WINSTON Patti Smith’s suggestion to young artists is to forget New York City and move to Detroit but you’ve just done the opposite, why? Yeah, I just had an opportunity present itself that I couldn’t turn down. What you can do in two weeks in New York City takes two years to do in Detroit, but I’m a little tortured by it. I love Detroit and I kind of feel like a traitor. I know what she’s saying, though. Detroit is an amazing place to make music. And there’s space, tons of space, for everything to breathe. Why do you think Detroit births such influential and game-changing music? Good music comes out of there because it’s real. Motown was made of people who really wanted to do it. They worked so hard – there’s an amazing work ethic in Detroit. People work their asses off and I think it really shows. I don’t really know if people are born with the talent they have, I guess some people are, but I think mostly it comes down to how hard you work at it and the musicians that have come out of Detroit all work really hard. What about Detroit have you incorporated into your music? Not many national shows come through Detroit. I’d see three to four shows a week living there, but it would be my friends’ bands and by the end of the night everyone would be on stage singing – a real community thing. That has played a part in the fact that I have eight people on stage with me – it’s comforting and fun. I also go to the Motown Museum every time I go home. I love Motown. It was The Supremes that inspired me to have my backup singers. I call them my Sister Wives. You’ve been compared to just about every female musician out there. What do you think about that? I know, it’s weird, it’s like if she’s got brown hair and she sings people think we’re similar. I guess it’s a good thing because I don’t have them all saying I’m exactly like one other musician but at the same time I like to think that what I’m doing is different from other people out there. People need their comparisons, though, so I just go with it. What do you enjoy most about your job? Performing. Hands down. I love touring and I love to put on a good show. I love the energy of the crowd. I did this show in a small town in Missouri where families came out and it was a big event for them. They really got into it because they don’t have a lot of big shows going through there. I loved performing for them. I also loved the Underage Festival in the UK because they were too young to know that you aren’t supposed to act excited if you want to be cool so the energy was really great. I love it when people just let loose and have fun. What is your new single, Velvet Elvis about? It’s about people with objectum sexuality, where they fall in love and have feelings for objects. I saw this crazy documentary about a woman who fell in love with the Eiffel Tower, well, she fell in love with a lot of things, and I was so fascinated by it. Then I bought a velvet Elvis painting from a thrift shop and I thought, “You know someone could totally fall in love with this.” And I wrote a song about it. I’ve noticed your songs aren’t about the ‘normal’ stuff like breaking up and falling in love. Yeah I’m really inspired by American idiosyncrasies and from watching documentaries. I watch a lot of documentaries. A lot of this album is about con men - different types of con men, people who think they know it all but are actually pretty demented. But I do consider Velvet Elvis a love song! Do you have any plans to go back to Detroit? Well, I’m signed to Island Records in the UK so I’m playing a lot around there and staying based out of New York City. But I’m going home to visit Detroit soon. I can’t wait to get back there! Alex’s new album King Con is out March 2012. 1\2 26/27
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Jessica Hernandez
Bryan Lackner Passalacqua
Brent Smith Passalacqua
Benjamin Sturley Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas
Virgil Jackson Singer/ Song Writer/ Producer
Polo 50/50
Nick Cicchetti Body Holographic
Alyssa Borrelli Body Holographic
Knowledge 50/50
Jazz 50/50
Sarena Ridey Body Holographic
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Selected for Boat Magazine by UHF Record Store, 512 S Washington Avenue, Royal Oak, Mi Art Direction and Photography by James Naylor
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1. Mitch Rider and the Detroit Wheels - Breakout / 1966 (New Voice) 2. Alice Cooper - Love it to Death / 1971 (RCA) 3. Stevie Wonder - Greatest Hits / (Tamla) 1968 4. Bob Seger - Live Bullet / 1976 (Capitol) 5. Four Tops - Reach Out / 1967 (Motown) 6. The Supremes - A’ GO GO / 1966 (Motown) 7. The White Stripes - Blood Cells / 2001 (V2/ Third Man) 8. Aretha - Hey now hey (The other side of the sky) / 1973 (Atlantic) 9. Martha and the Vandellas - Greatest Hits / 1966 (Tamla) 10. The Temptations - 25th Anniversary / 1986 (Motown) 30/31 1\2
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By Ben Blackwell P h o t o g r a p h y b y J a m e s N a y l o r a n d f r o m t h e B l a c k w e l l Fa m i ly A r c h i v e
THINGS WE LEFT IN THE FIRE I was in Sweden on December 13th 2008 when I got the phone call that my mom’s house caught on fire. While I barely ever spent the night there, it was essentially where I lived, holding all my possessions and acting as the de facto headquarters of my label Cass Records. It would be just short of a week before I was back home in the states to actually survey the scene. After dark on a cold December night, she opened the newly-added padlock, took a deep breath, looked at me and asked “Are you ready?” What I didn’t anticipate from the burned-out shell of the house I’d grown up in was how messy it would be. I expected stuff to be burned, the acrid smell of the stale smoke and the general despair of the entire situation… but it’s easy to forget that fire fighters tear up walls and bust holes in ceilings to control the conflagration. What results is an ungodly amount of stained dry wall, soggy insulation and every other sort of disemboweled housing material all over the place. The combination of the flames from a candle left burning and the water sprayed to douse them destroyed all of my books, leaving literature littered all through the front room where I used to lay on my belly with feet flush up against the heating vent watching the 7am airing of SportsCenter before heading off for school.
In hindsight, I don’t really miss the books and feel almost ashamed that I’d convinced my mom to go through rubble and compose a list of all the ones I’d lost. I’ve been very happy to discover that replacing my books has been far cheaper than replacing my records could ever be. The awkward part of cleaning out a burned house is the uncertainty. It was immediately clear what stuff I wanted and needed to get out of there…records, musical equipment, all of my clothes. It was also self-evident what was garbage…all my books, the television with a melted plastic casing, all of the dishes except for my favourite ramen bowl (that was thankfully submerged in water in the sink during the ordeal). But things like artwork I’d trash-picked, participation trophies from grade school…all the stuff that one accumulates in life is confusingly difficult to deal with. You don’t have the luxury of a proper “moving” like other folks do when they leave a residence. You are evacuating. When given the opportunity to return to the scene of the crime, you feel like shrugging your shoulders, “I got out already…do I really need any of this?” I did crap like glued a Chet Lemon Starting Line-Up action figure to the front door, put a glow-in-the-dark skeleton (used in an 8th grade science project) in my old bedroom window 32/33
The building itself was not a complete loss. It did however suffer $90,000 worth of structural damage…mainly confined to the walls of the front room where the fire was and smoke damage everywhere else on the ground floor. The way insurance operates is they give you $70,000 to cover the structure and the balance of $20k if you actually decide to renovate.
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My mom had no interest in renovation. When a 1989 Pontiac with a Blue Book value of no more than $500 was stolen from the driveway earlier that year she’d already pledged that she was done with Detroit. Having spent all 50+ years of her life in the city, she’d felt that she’d done her time. The fire merely hastened her exit and to some extent made it easier, as she was renting a cute little house in the bedroom community of Berkley by late January.
and nailed a bass drum with “The Rolling Stones” written on the head to the roof. The whole situation was surreal to me so I did my best to have the structure echo my feelings. On top of that was the frustration of the scum of the city breaking into the house and going through what was inside. A small, faux-historic childhood bank safe was pried open and freed of the $2 bill and bicentennial drummer boy quarters it contained. The next-door neighbours saw some guys walking out of the back door with an armful of busted drum cymbals and unusable hardware. Thankfully it seemed scrappers never got in there, but the fact that some absolutely soulless idiot defecated in the middle of the living room was the ultimate low. Never mind having to clean it up, I was just disappointed in all the times as a kid when I sprinted to the bathroom at the first sign of a television commercial break only to come back having missed a joke on “Full House” or some other such pallid sitcom. If anyone should’ve gotten to do that in the living room it should’ve been me. Or maybe my brother. Approximately three months after the fire, I moved to Nashville to take my dream job of overseeing vinyl record production at Third Man Records. My mom was left with the task of the affairs of the house.
The peculiar thing about the check from the insurance company for $70k was that it was made out to my mom AND the bank who held the mortgage. She couldn’t do anything with that check without them. And in 2009, trying to deal with a mortgage company in regards to property in Detroit was the last thing you wanted to do. Every person she talked to told her something different, contradicting and unaware of what folks all working for the same company were telling my mom at any given time. The charade went on for so long that the check actually expired and she was sent another one by the ever-patient (and extremely easy to deal with) folks at Farmer’s Insurance. The other thing to know about the house is that she owed $100,000 on it and if the residence were in proper, liveable condition (as it was before the fire) its estimated market value would be $50,000. It’s pretty clearly stupid to spend $90,000 fixing a house that’s only worth half that, just to spend another 20 years paying off that $100k. So over two years after the fire, my mom had negotiated with folks at the mortgage company to take all of the $70,000 and just consider the deal done. She’d be taxed on the $30k she never paid back and was fine with it. While the bank would be out $30k, in giving her the house they’d have their books clear of a place that was worth half the money it’d take to fix. She was fine with the responsibility of the house from that point, whether to sell it, bulldoze , whatever.
Once the mortgage folks received the check and deposited it, they told my mother that they’d changed their mind and that they were keeping the money and not giving her the house. To be fair, she stopped paying her mortgage once she’d stopped living in the house so it was technically a foreclosure. But I doubt any of the other thousands of foreclosures in Detroit at that time had a homeowner immediately willing to pay 70% of the total amount owed. There was an unsuccessful foreclosure auction of the house in May of 2011. Just before that, my mom and I essentially broke into the house for what I imagined would be my last time. I pulled some old speakers out of a cabinet in the basement, a box of multiple copies of the White Stripes’ first cover appearance on the Metro Times and a handful of other inconsequential random things. I told mom I was fine if I never went back into the house.
What was even more frustrating was that being in the middle of saving up to buy a house in Nashville made that amount seem so insignificant. I could’ve bought it instantly. I wanted to buy it instantly. If I was 21-years-old I probably would’ve. But I’m old enough to know about property tax (in Detroit, exorbitant) and can’t imagine that I personally want to be responsible for a burned out building in the city. It’s embarrassing. My mom’s words on the whole foreclosure ordeal are short but to the point “It could’ve been so simple.”
While researching for this article, the folks from Boat sent photos of the house as it stands as of October 2011. The front door has been replaced with an out-of-place stained wood with oval-shaped glass centre. Friends in the neighbourhood were under the impression that someone was living there. A quick search of real But I think there are probably still some baseball estate records show it sold for over $7000 in cards and back issues of Sports Illustrated in July of 2011. the attic. I know I left hundreds of copies of the Int’l Shades cd I’d released in the basement. While the twinge of discomfort I feel is only The cement walkway leading from the driveway slightly belied by the fact that someone, to the house still has the impressions of my feet somehow sees promise in the building, the way from when I was four months old. The kitchen we got to that point is nothing but absolutely door frame still displays the heights of me and disgusting. For a city that has lost over a million my siblings as we grew over the years. people in the past few decades, too many folks’ memories of Detroit are tied-up in empty lots A friend of a friend has taken on mom’s case in or burned-out buildings. There were five people terms of pursuing legal action. Mom was ready living in that house in the year 2000. They’ve to just walk away, to essentially let the bank all left the city now. It seems that my family’s steal the house out from under her, but I urged memories (both good and bad) will be encased her to pursue it, to not let those ogres just take in that house forever. I just wish it all didn’t end the place away from her. on such a sour note. My stomach felt instantly nauseous when I opened an email from my mom that showed the house listed on a local Detroit real estate website for the paltry sum of $5000.
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I admit I have fantasized about taking all of the journalists who give the world its impression of Detroit to the metro area’s most luxurious shopping mall. All the hackneyed articles about professional sports teams lifting our weary spirits and hand-wringing over a moribund automobile industry might be challenged by the sight of what takes place inside The Somerset Collection in suburban Troy, Michigan, where the shops include luxury department stores like Nieman Markus and Saks Fifth Avenue as well as exclusive regional storefronts for Gucci, Tiffany & Co., Burberry, and Louis Vuitton. It turns out there is still a lot of money in the Detroit metro area. And at the Somerset Collection, people are spending it. With 1.443-million-square-feet of retail space (and averaging over $600 in annual sales per square foot) the Somerset Collection touts itself as one of the nation’s most profitable shopping malls. It all began in 1969 with a single floor of shops, but today the Somerset Collection has grown to occupy two massive multistory buildings connected by a 700-foot moving sidewalk in an enclosed bridge over Big Beaver Road (a quintessential Metro Detroit thoroughfare, where bicycling and pedestrian activity are not only non-existent, but appear to be actively discouraged). On a recent visit, I accidentally followed a brand new Ferrari 458 Italia right up to the valet. Yes: in addition to 7,000 self-parking spots, this shopping mall outside the Motor City features a popular valet parking service. It costs $5. The Somerset Collection’s bleak exterior hints at little of the splendor inside. One can imagine what an alien race landing in Troy might think of such an edifice: a factory, perhaps. A fortress.
Or even a prison. The enclosed shopping mall, like the airport, is a distinctly 20th-century architectural achievement. They aren’t much to look at from the outside, windowless and surrounded by acres of parking. Certain elements of interior mall design are universal, and inside they are almost always equal parts appealing and disorienting. In the central atrium of The Somerset Collection’s north building, the divergent wings of the shopping center meet in a soaring, three-story open space topped by nearly an acre of glass skylights. According to the promotional literature, this “North Grand Court” is “resplendent, with polished marble, fine woodwork, soaring atria, [and] captivating fountains.” One of the highlights of the North Grand Court are the two Finnish-made Sorvikivi Oy Floating Stone fountains: massive granite globes that weigh more than two tons and “float” on a thin film of shooting water. They look like something that would take Carmela Soprano’s breath away. The escalators leading from floor to floor are designed to prevent quick movement in either direction, forcing the visitor to wander around the vast shop-lined atrium to get to the next set of moving steps. On one visit, I noticed a long line of people at a railing near the central part of the atrium and it was a moment before I realized they were waiting to be photographed with the vast expanse of the shopping mall behind them. This group was mostly Middle Easterners, joking with each other in Arabic and smiling in turn for raised smart phones and pocket cameras. The diversity of shoppers at the Somerset Collection is particularly noteworthy, but at times it seems like a disproportionate number of shoppers are from the region’s significant South Asian and Middle Eastern communities. These shoppers are often well-dressed and clutching designer
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handbags along with their bulging shopping bags, and it’s clear that despite whatever problems with the auto industry and the current unemployment rate in metro Detroit, there are still people who have come here and managed to find their version of the American dream. In the few times I have been to The Somerset Collection, I can’t spend a lot of time inside before I’m overcome with dread. I know that there is not a single thing in any of the stores that I actually need or even want, but I grow fearful that if I spend too much time there the desire will return like a demon exorcised long ago. Somerset shoppers are notorious for dressing up in suits or elegant dresses (with heels) for their shopping experience, and within a few minutes of entering the mall I start to feel shabby and underdressed. If I make the mistake of entering some store that sells clothing, I become hyper aware of my sartorial shortcomings. I suppress the urge to stick my face into neatly-folded sweaters just to remember what new clothes smell like, and I tell myself that it’s just the smell of tears from Honduran widows working till their fingers bleed. The models in the ubiquitous in-store advertisements taunt me with their lovely, knowing eyes. Even the headless mannequins stick their noses up at me. Everything smells so nice, and I start to imagine cartoon stink lines coming off my body. I have spent lots of time in some of the roughest neighborhoods of Detroit, but I never get as panicked as I do in the menswear department at Saks in the Somerset Collection. Of course, I wasn’t always this way. I used to love the mall. I grew up during the 1980s (the height of American mall culture) two hours west of Detroit in Kalamazoo, Michigan. My hometown’s official nickname was “the Mall City,” which I always assumed came from the five indoor shopping malls that flanked the city in all directions. Instead, the nickname dates back to when Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen---the indisputable pioneer of the American shopping mall---came to Kalamazoo to design America’s first urban outdoor pedestrian shopping mall. Built in the hope of stemming the effects of suburbanization, the downtown Kalamazoo mall was completed in 1959, just a few years after Gruen designed his first suburban shopping center: the famed Northland Mall just outside Detroit that had been heralded by numerous publications (including The Wall Street Journal, Time, Life, and Newsweek) as the future of shopping in post-war America. Today, the pedestrianfriendly downtown Kalamazoo Mall has been torn up to allow automobile traffic, and while the Somerset Collection thrives near Detroit, Gruen’s Northland Mall languishes like the downtown from which so many of its original
businesses fled. Detroit-area real estate developer A. Alfred Taubman made billions developing upscale shopping centers around the country, putting venerable downtown institutions and lower performing malls out of business. For every success story like the Somerset Collection there seem to be a half dozen sprawling buildings filled with more fading memories than shoppers. When I was a young child, Victor Gruen’s downtown Kalamazoo mall felt empty and sad, kept on life support by the stubbornness of a few businesses too proud to move to one of the new indoor malls built just outside the city limits. Maple Hill Mall was built in 1971, right across the street from West Main Mall (built just two years earlier), both faithful to Gruen’s original vision of the American shopping mall as an environment in which “shoppers will be so bedazzled by a store’s surroundings that they will be drawn — unconsciously, continually — to shop.” I spent much of my childhood in those two malls, shuffling from store to store with my parents in the exercise of consumption that had become our default form of leisure. I loved everything about “the mall,” from the modern sculptures and fountains to the fake music piped in from unseen speakers and the smell of the hot pretzel shop. I spent countless Friday nights with my grandparents who lived near the newest and grandest mall in town (The Crossroads, built in 1980). The fact that my grandparents had no money never stopped us from going. My grandfather would spend the entire time talking to any strangers who made the mistake of sitting next to him at the foot of the escalators by the Kay-Bee Toys. My grandfather died when I was fifteen, but that is how I will always picture him: sitting under potted silk ficus plants, looking to meet anyone who wasn’t averse to arguing with an old stranger. I spent so much time in malls that there is unavoidable nostalgia. For all its faults, the indoor shopping mall was an ingenious means of providing both the freedom and the boundaries necessary to tame the American teenager. The mall provided entertainment and the whiff of consumption without requiring too much out of pocket; you could waste an entire afternoon and spend only a few dollars at the arcade or the food court. Unlike today’s unsightly big box stores and strip malls that have processed the shopping experience down to its purest, most methodical form, the shopping mall actually encouraged loitering. My friends and I would drive across town to “the good mall” just for a chance to wander around and gawk at girls who went to other high schools. In time we got jobs in order to buy the things the mall taught us we needed, or we grew up and went to college and learned
Photography opposite by Nicole Muster
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that the mall wasn’t so great after all, that it was more like a cage than any of us ever realized. Still, I feel a sense of sadness thinking about the day those malls began emptying until nothing remained but darkened stores with abandoned fixtures lingering behind locked steel grates. Whatever nostalgia I feel can be explained by one fundamental difference between those malls and the ones that have survived: the last few decades have seen such large-scale homogenization of the American (and even global) retail landscape that there is almost nothing different about shopping at the Maine Mall in Portland, Maine than shopping at the Pioneer Place Mall in Portland Oregon (both, in fact, are owned by Chicago-based General Growth Properties, which runs 169 regional shopping malls in forty-three states). General Growth Properties also owns the last mall standing in my hometown, where national and global chains long ago replaced all the regional department stores and local businesses. At one time that mall had a variety of locallyowned oddball stores and weird experimental concepts; Ned Flanders’ “Leftorium” on television’s The Simpsons (a mall store that carries products designed only for left handers) isn’t that far off from the shops I remember. Those shopping malls were like petri dishes of local entrepreneurship. Today every mall is pretty much the same. There is one store that is truly unique to the Somerset Collection. Opened only for the 2010 holiday season, the Detroit Shoppe was supposed to be a nostalgic look at the once-vibrant city that more than a million suburbanites abandoned, as well as a purveyor of Detroit-themed products like t-shirts, soda, pistachios, and potato chips still made in the city. Funded by a litany of corporate sponsors (including Lincoln, Bank of America, and U.S Trust), the shop was deemed so successful in its initial run that is has become a permanent fixture at Somerset. The store even organizes monthly “tours” for suburbanites to see the city of Detroit from the safety of a luxury, climatecontrolled motor coach. There is no Detroit Shoppe in the city of Detroit, however. To shop there you have to drive sixteen miles up I-75. Despite my complaining about journalists who visit Detroit, it is undeniable that this place feels like no other city in America. As with
all the abandonment, the lack of street-level commerce is almost impossible to ignore. You cannot come here and window shop along some tree-lined boulevard in a cute gentrified neighborhood. Most stores operating in Detroit long ago found it necessary to replace their windows with concrete blocks. Those businesses that remain in most neighborhoods seem fit to serve only the barest needs of a community, from Chaldean-run grocery and liquor stores to dubious fast food restaurants, barber shops, and wig stores. There is no department store downtown. Along the block of Woodward Avenue that once earned the name “Merchant’s Row” there is a fenced-in city block of concrete where the flagship Hudson’s Department Store once stood. At 2.2 million square feet (a full fifty-percent more than the entire Somerset Collection) it was the largest building in the world to be imploded when it was demolished in 1998. The 439-foot building was once the tallest department store in the world and the second largest department store in America after Macy’s in New York. Today dozens of monolithic footings rise from the concrete at the site, intended to act as the foundation for a new building that no one has ever stepped forward to build. This empty, inaccessible plaza has served for ten years as a striking reminder of what this city has lost and might never regain. The fall of Hudson’s flagship store followed the flight of shoppers to the suburbs, where a new Hudson’s Department Store anchored Victor Gruen’s Northland Mall in Southfield along with a dozen other malls. The storefronts along Merchant’s Row in downtown Detroit have been mostly empty for decades, though in the summer of 2011 the local press fawned over a splashy new tenant touting a hefty $500,000 investment on Merchant’s Row. The Forbes Company (owners of the Somerset Collection) announced it was coming downtown with a pop-up boutique called the “Somerset City Lofts,” offering wares from a number of Somerset Collection merchants. It was announced that the boutique would only be open one weekend a month during July, August, and September. I rode my bike there on its last weekend and found a red carpet fashion show with a Prince impersonator entertaining a crowd of befuddled customers. Most of the people I talked to about it didn’t even know what they’d do with a $1500 Coach bag, but they were happy to discuss the return of retail to downtown Detroit. Organizers called the three weekends a success, making it pretty clear that the intent of the shop was something other than profitability. At a cost of more than $160 million per weekend, that would have been a lot of $1500 handbags. The small, independent retail businesses that have been successful in the city of Detroit are more than just PR stunts. Those that survive and even thrive in Detroit’s most viable
neighborhoods (like Midtown) are almost all either old-school places full of inimitable character that were simply never pushed out by the big chains, or cool little shops owned by young, visionary entrepreneurs. In a retail climate where the streetscapes of even our greatest cities are pocked with the same homogenous collection of chain stores pushing small businesses to the point of extinction, Detroit presents a unique opportunity for small retailers and business owners with grit and good ideas. There may not be much shopping to be done in Detroit itself, but what we do have is vastly more interesting than anything you find at the mall. Journalists love to point out that the city of Detroit has no big box stores and an obvious lack of interest from national chain retailers. I wish they’d stop writing about that as though it were a bad thing. In contemporary America, where the restaurants and retailers at every highway interchange are interchangeable,Detroit distinguishes itself by having none of it. For years now New York City has looked more and more like a luxury playground for shoe-obsessed women hoping to live out some absurd Sex and The City fantasy. The names along the Magnificent Mile in Chicago today read like the store directory of a suburban shopping mall. While Detroit’s streets and its shops may be mostly empty, at least Detroit doesn’t look like everywhere else. As Detroit artist Vaughn Taormina recently put it, “If you think Detroit is a shit hole, fair enough. But we think your city feels like the mall.” I moved here five years ago from San Francisco, where I was a corporate litigator at a large national law firm. I worked long hours for huge paychecks and spent money on things I didn’t need to justify just how hard I was working. San Francisco felt like one big mall, and when I wasn’t working, shopping was my preferred form of leisure. When my daughter was born, I realized I would soon need to choose between my career (with the lifestyle it provided) and spending time with her. I chose her. I quit my job and we moved to downtown Detroit. I haven’t practiced law or earned a regular paycheck since leaving San Francisco, but this seemingly reckless act was a promise to my children: I may not be able to buy you as many things now, but you will know your father. Detroit is a place where even a former corporate lawyer can escape his sins and reboot his life. I threw my tailored Italian suits in the back of the closet to remind me how much I spent to justify how much I worked, and how much I worked just to keep spending. Part of our decision to move to Detroit was because we didn’t want to raise our children some place that felt like the mall. We found a home where we can have amazing adventures that don’t involve buying anything: we go for hikes in abandoned zoos, hunt for pheasants on the
urban prairie, and ice skate down overgrown, forgotten canals. I recently built a miniature covered wagon that our energetic dog pulls around town with both kids inside. We started growing our own food. My wife knits and makes many of our kids’ clothes. A good number of our friends and acquaintances share in this creative, DIY spirit. In a city where consuming simply isn’t much of an option, there is often little choice but to create for yourself. Detroit has certainly seen a significant influx of refugees from overcrowded, expensive American cities searching for the space they need to do what they want. And Detroit has plenty of space, whether it’s physical space to keep a workshop or a studio or a garden, or start a business, or just the emotional distance from the prying judgment of anyone who would keep you from doing whatever it is you want to do. There are people in Detroit who’ve found the space to build everything from a colossal fire-breathing dragon in an old factory to an elaborate circus sideshow across a half dozen abandoned houses to an organic farming operation on acres of vacant land that nobody seemed to own or care about. Detroit, for all its faults, may be poised for a different sort of comeback than anyone imagines. Just as it was at the turn of the 20th century, Detroit has once again become a city of innovators and tinkerers. As we become more and more aware of the importance of supporting local enterprise, the more it becomes clear that the globalization model used by big-box and chain retailers is unsustainable for our cities’ long-term futures. Sweatshop-manufactured goods shipped from the developing world and trucked thousands of miles to be sold for razor-thin profit margins may seem great on the surface, but we still haven’t learned their true cost. Detroit may be where the assembly line was born and where large-scale production of goods blossomed, and because of this our city has seen as well as any other the true cost of industrialization. Post-industrial Detroit, the anti-mall, may, in the end, offer the freedom of a new American dream for those who seek it: freedom from the unhappiness of living beyond one’s means, away from the pressure of conspicuous consumption, with the satisfaction of discovering that most of us still have it in us to grow or make much of what we need, and that we might need less than once thought in order to be truly happy.
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Debs PAterson meets david ROBERT MITCHELL. PHOTOGRAPHY BY COREY VAUGHaN. Neither David Robert Mitchell nor I are where we belong when we meet on a bright but blustery day in LA. He’s on the other side of the country, and I’m on the other side of the world, geographically if not professionally, both are a long way from home. We say hi and then wander around the alleyways and parking lots of Culver City, looking with our photographer for scenes that look somehow poetic. There’s a beaten up yellow and black striped motor that most times would be great, but not today. After debate, an abandoned couch is rejected for health reasons and we settle on walls and stairwells before retiring to Ford’s Filling Station to chat. Even posing for portraits leads straight into the Detroit dilemma. Expectation and cliché, bouncing reflections off the rusted surface of its infamous decay, this seems to be the role the Motor City is now invited to play, and one David is keen to avoid. His debut feature The Myth of the American Sleepover is testament to that. The movie follows the adventures and explorations of an ensemble of teenage unknowns as they wander through the suburbs and eponymous sleepovers of the last night of summer. It is gorgeously shot and beautifully performed, sitting tonally somewhere between Richard Linklater and Larry Clarke, an assured vision of suburbia which holds up to its distinction as the only American-directed film in the Cannes Critic’s Week selection last year. Financed with favours and a self-funded song, crewed by film school friends and shot at breakneck speed, the movie betrays none of its humble origins. The freewheeling narrative is a lyrical ballad of teenage exploration, teetering on the brink between innocence and experience. 1\2 50/51
Towards the end of the movie there are resolutions where the city is more plainly felt, an abandoned industrial building transformed into a ‘make-out maze’ and some scenes from a city parade, but mostly the movie feels resoundingly deliberate about its generality, rather than familiar to representations of the city.
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The movie introduces some stunning performances - the running girl, lovestruck boy and punkishly innocent dancer all spring to mind. Working with unknowns, and casting out of local schools and clubs, David talks about the fun he and first-time producer Adele Romanski had figuring out which potential cast would be believable friends with who, who would go to which parties and hunt after which kisses. Casting is a mad genetic science at the best of times, and has all of the curious alchemy of reproduction. You pick your ingredients, hopefully create conducive conditions, and then see what happens as it goes. Several of the kids radiate an energy, grace and confidence that far outstrips their on-camera experience, which is especially impressive as the movie wasn’t organically improvised. David says they really didn’t deviate from the script at all - there wasn’t time. He says there are maybe one or two lines that didn’t make it to the final cut. ‘But essentially we did a little rehearsing before shooting and that was it. Enough to say to them - be comfortable, know your lines, then just show up and enjoy it’. I ask him about the shoot and David tells me they hired an unfurnished house where the crew slept on air mattresss, and must have looked more like a drugden than production. But he speaks warmly about the support of the community. We discuss their locations, which for the most part feel surprisingly anonymous. In the stereotypes of suburban streets, lake parties and pool gatherings, the Myth’s sense of place is much more in the air and on the skin than specific.
David talks about this ambivalence being central to his intention in the storytelling, he says there has been some criticism that there is a harshness missing from the film (it is more Linklater than Clark, certainly) but he doesn’t agree. In his childhood he was aware of the beautiful mansions of Grosse Point and the half-abandoned homes elsewhere, but he grew up in between, in a box house and family who worked in the automobile industry, aware of both extremes, belonging to neither. This liminality is the true poetry of the film. The kids in the movie are not wealthy or poor, there is a mix of races and ambition and ‘society’, they are wandering the night, alone together, pursuing their youth and aware of adulthood’s impending demise. I ask him how much of the film is autobiography and he says not much, although at the hometown premiere, his high school friends were laughing as they recognised partial names and histories recycled and played out. Although he wrote the script in LA, David says every bit of it was about the Detroit of his childhood. A testament to the world he remembered and its place in things now. But he doesn’t think of the movie as a documentary either of Detroit or of what it is to be an American teenager. For David, it’s about the mythologising of experience, the rituals that are handed down, a tribute to what we imagine before we know. He muses on the sense that the myths of his film are both reacting to and reinventing fantasy and expectation, saying that growing up in Michigan felt very separate from
the world of the movies, so he was excited to be able to portray the neighborhoods, the city and suburbs as he experienced them. A view he doesn’t see too often. I ask why the Detroit he knows is not the Detroit that gets represented, and he replies: ‘People say that the recession is a depression in Michigan, and when I go back every time it’s surprising and sad to see more businesses gone, more things I remember from growing up. It’s rough in a lot of ways, and there are a lot of parts of the suburbs and the city that are really tough, no one would deny that. But to focus on that, and to have that be the only thing about the city that people would focus on, I don’t like that. I don’t think it’s how it is, or that’s what people in the city want to be seen for. I understand the idea of finding beauty in decay, I understand that, but I hate for it to be the only thing that people are finding beautiful about Michigan, about Detroit. A photograph can describe a moment, and I can appreciate the beauty of it, but it’s not what life is like there in real time. It’s not the only thing to see’. There’s a resonance between these thoughts about the city and the adolescence of his characters in the movie. The real-time view vs the snapshot of experience and objectivity. Notably, there are no adults in the movie,
no parents or teachers, the generation of characters is self-contained. Within the teenagers are older siblings, the jaded and the ingenues, but the sphere of adolescence is never broken. Rules and expectation are both known and a mystery: societal, teenage, legal, moral, all implied, but the task the characters face, and seem to understand fully, is that what they do with this received wisdom and themselves, will be up to them. They will accept or remake their mythologies. They may grow up too quick and trade their last days of innocence for a bowl of soup; they will learn to be loved or learn to be lost, but these decisions will be their own, whether in acquiescence or rebellion, even as they fade out of sight into the city parade. These teenagers are aware of their impending demise, right in the middle of their youth, some rushing, some cautious, cynical, trusting, patient and headlong, all a little uncertain in the sense that these received traditions may not be the best ones to follow. And in a sense perhaps that’s what feels prescient about the film, from a city which has become a cautionary tale about national decline, this is a film, onscreen and off, which acknowledges that our myths are there to be engaged with and challenged, by the poets and adventurers who will. 52/53 1\2
Photograph by Jonathan Cherry
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See It Through by Edgar Albert Guest (1881, Birmingham, England - 1959, Detroit, Michigan) when you’re up against a trouble, meet it squarely, face to face; lift your chin and set your shoulders, plant your feet and take a brace. when it’s vain to try to dodge it, do the best that you can do; you may fail, but you may conquer, see it through!
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black may be the clouds about you and your future may seem grim, but don’t let your nerve desert you; keep yourself in fighting trim. if the worst is bound to happen, spite of all that you can do, running from it will not save you, see it through! even hope may seem but futile, when with troubles you’re beset, but remember you are facing just what other men have met. you may fail, but fall still fighting; don’t give up, whate’er you do; eyes front, head high to the finish. see it through!
Edgar Albert Guest was an English-born American poet who wrote some 11,000 poems. His first work was published in 1898 in the Detroit Free Press. Dubbed the ‘People’s Poet’ he holds the honour of being made Michigan’s only poet laureate.
Photographer Jonathan Cherry, also born in Birmingham, England but over a century later, spent time in Detroit capturing the spirit of the people in still and moving form. You can see his film ‘See It Through’ on the Boat Magazine website.
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Words Erin Spens
Photographs Jonathan Cherry
It’s hard to drive around Detroit and not dream about what you’d do with all the gorgeous empty buildings if you had the chance. There’s something about the unused space in Detroit that gets you thinking of starting something, that thing you’ve always wanted to do but never had the guts to. One of the photographers we worked with pointed out a retail space she’s always dreamt of turning into a restaurant with her dad. Even the house we stayed in while making the magazine was the vision of a woman who didn’t want to sell in the real estate slump and so uses her love of interiors and hospitality to rent it out short-term. Now she’s got a little business. It’s contagious in Detroit; a little bug that says your idea might just work here.
‘Young man, that’s the thing; you have it. Keep at it. Electric cars must keep near to power stations. The storage battery is too heavy. Steam cars won’t do, either, for they require a boiler and fire. Your car is self-contained—carries its own power plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke and no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it.’
The rich heritage of Detroit can almost always be traced back to an entrepreneur and most people will draw a line straight to Henry Ford. He was born the son of a farmer just outside of Detroit. His dream was to turn the automobile into something the average American could obtain, not just a plaything for the wealthy. Ford went to work for Thomas Edison’s company which later became Detroit Edison. While there, he used his spare time to build a gas car which he planned to mass-produce. Ford described his car to his hero, Edison, who listened intently. He encouraged Ford that he’d found the key:
Ford later wrote that the encouragement from ‘the greatest inventive genius in the world’ meant everything to him, “And this at a time when all the electrical engineers took it as an established fact that there could be nothing new and worthwhile that did not run by electricity. It was to be the universal power.” He went on to develop the Model T, the first gas car offered at a price that the average American could afford, and they bought them, lots of them. His commitment to the masses, the 99%, got the country moving. Detroiters are innovators, doers. They’ve always got a project on the go, not in hopes that it’ll make them famous or because they want to change the world, but simply because they can’t sit still. It’s the spirit he left behind, the whole point of Henry Ford’s life, to get people moving. And Detroiters are, no matter what the media says, moving.
Insull, Samuel. The Memoirs of Samuel Insull. Polo, Ill: Transportation Trails, 1934, 1992, pp. 142–43.
Here we profile six female entrepreneurs in Detroit.
Margarita Barry is the founder of I am Young Detroit, a website that tells news and stories of local professionals and artists under the age of 40. She has also started 71 POP, a retail space that features different local artists. www.iamyoungdetroit.com and 71 POP is at 71 Garfield, Detroit.
Jeanette Pierce is dedicated to educating people about the history, culture, and livability of Detroit. She started Inside Detroit, an agency that operates tours around the city. Her goal is to inspire people to live, work, and play in Detroit and ultimately add to its economic recovery. www.insidedetroit.org
Torya Blanchard is a former French teacher who cashed in her 401(k) and opened up Good Girls Go to Paris, a creperie that now has two locations: 15 East Kirby, Detroit and 14929-14931 Charlevoix, Grosse Pointe Park.
Fotoula Lambros is a Detroit-based fashion designer dedicated to sustainable Americanmade materials and products. She is currently working on developing a garment district in downtown Detroit and using old automotive technology to manufacture clothing. www.fotoulalambrosdesign.com
Claire Nelson moved to Detroit in 2002 and five years later opened the shop Bureau of Urban Living. The shop is now called ‘Nest’ and is run by siblings Andy and Emily Linn, the area has sprouted other small, local businesses inspired no doubt by Claire. Nest is located at 460 West Canfield, Detroit.
Suzanne Vier is the founder of Simply Suzanne granola that is sold in over 100 stores including Whole Foods and Meijer. She is also the co-founder of Tashmoo Biergarten an outdoor European-style beer garden with local cuisine and beer in a vacant lot in West Village on Sundays during Autumn. www.simplysuzanne.com and www.tashmoodetroit.com
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Photography by James Naylor
Davey Spens
DENNIS DENNIS DENNIS DENNIS MANNION MANNION MANNION MANNION IS ALL IS ALL IS ALL IS ALL FIRED UP FIRED UP FIRED UP FIRED UP meets THE
new president
of the
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Dennis Mannion can do something I can’t – smile for the camera. In every photograph he is perfectly composed; hair neatly parted, the sort of wide, Hollywood smile of motivational speakers and Mormons. When we met, Mannion had only been in his position a few weeks, he moved from Los Angeles, where he had been at the Dodgers. As we waited in the lobby of The Palace, a vast brick and glass stadium in a wealthy suburb, I wondered whether after three weeks in Detroit there’d still be a smile on his face. “This place is misunderstood,” said Mannion, leaning back in his padded leather chair, “my father moved here in 1985. He said his years in Detroit were the best of his life.” I couldn’t help but think that this was a line he’d tried on his wife and five children when he told them the plan to trade their Californian dream for the Rust-belt. His family hasn’t followed yet. Mannion has been holed up in a hotel, living out of suitcases. But that’s the price of doing what he loves. Mannion has sport in the blood. “It is an enormous force in Detroit. You go into restaurants and bars and it’s on every television. I tell people here that and they say, ‘but there’s always sports on the television in restaurants and bars,’ and I say ‘Go to LA!’” There is definitely something different about how Detroit approaches sport. The three weeks we spent here coincided with the best run of form the Tigers (baseball), Lions (football) and Red Wings (ice hockey) had collectively enjoyed in recent memory. The Tigers reached Postseason and the Lions took their unbeaten streak to five games at Ford Field in the first televised Monday Night Football fixture in Detroit since 2001. The city was buzzing, and not just on game days. Nightly, the band-wagon rolled downtown, and fans piled in from the suburbs in thousands just to join the party. “It’s a very interesting time,” said Mannion, “because clearly one team can raise the tide for all the others. Sport in this town becomes
infectious. You can feel a profound positive effect on everyone else. I would never root against the other teams in the town.” Where I come from this idea would be laughable. London has no fewer than thirteen professional football clubs with five in the Premiership alone. There, sport is far from a uniting force, it draws criss-crossing battle-lines across neighbourhoods, the game is built upon rivalry. The pervading cynicism of fan forums, press and sports talk radio phone-ins stifles any hiccup of optimism. Where I come from people grumble about where they live, they moan about the weather, the traffic, the Olympics, the cost of living. “This town is clearly geared towards winning,” said Mannion, “You’ve got to go through excruciatingly tough times before you start to understand how important it is to get on offence as opposed to playing defence. More and more people are starting to understand that negative energy is detrimental to growth. I never understood why anybody would harp upon the negatives!” I received my first lesson in the contagion of positive energy, the previous day at Comerica Park when the Tigers entertained the Yankees. We rose for the national anthem and fortythousand people placed a star-spangled palm across their chest. We only do that in England on really special occasions. Then something even more affecting happened from the unlikeliest of places. “What does a city that’s been to hell and back know about luxury?” The two-minute television advertisement for the Chrysler 200, commonly referred to as ‘The Superbowl commercial’ has entered the Detroit hymnal as a city anthem. As it played immediately after, some kind of electricity crackled around the stadium. The boy next to me grew two inches taller and the guys behind, decibels louder, as if Eminem was delivering Pacino’s ‘Inches’ speech from Any Given Sunday. Not the usual response to a car ad. The players entered the park to a primal roar.
In the sporting highs of the three weeks we spent in the city, you’d be forgiven for forgetting the fourth professional sports team in Detroit. As the good times enveloped downtown, The Pistons looked enviously on from the sidelines. October is meant to be their preseason, but as players and team owners clashed over revenue share and salary caps, what resulted was the Lockout – an indefinite postponement of the league that started on July 1st and at time of print is still unresolved. During the Lockout, no team can trade, sign or even contact players. There’s talk of a mass player exodus overseas, though only a few have yet made the move. If Mannion was worried, he didn’t show it. He’s convinced The Pistons will play their own part in Detroit’s sporting renaissance. Neither has Mannion let the inertia of the protracted contract disputes distract him. He took me to a table covered in maps and Powerpoint slides, documenting his strategies to expand the team’s footprint in the state. Our conversation took a turn as he talked for fifteen minutes about moving away from demographic-based marketing to interest-based marketing, about adopting an itunes way of thinking. He got excited about how they can develop the media and experiential side of the business, talking enthusiastically over the resources they had, the 8600-odd parking spots that could host the world’s biggest three on three tournament or weekend warrior competition, appealing to different audiences. Mannion’s plans were undoubtedly impressive, but at the mention of ‘segmentation’ and ‘customer-interest-mapping’ I felt my British cynicism returning. The calm corner office of Mannion’s seemed a world way from the raw energy of Comerica Park and the jubilant chaos of Lions fans tailgating at Eastern market at five in the morning. But then, it is a world away. The Palace of Auburn Hills is in Auburn Hills, not Detroit. It’s 35 miles from the grit of Downtown in the shiny corporate world of suburban Detroit. The ‘magic in the air’ is still in the air up here, but it’s a magic that wears an open shirt and Gucci loafers.
Detroit today as a city is a conversation between the suburbs and the urban core. It’s a difficult conversation, loaded with baggage. Like tectonic plates rubbing against each other, what bubbles up from beneath is a volatile thing. It’s why Detroit is unpredictable, it’s also why there is always a feeling that something is about to happen. Lots of people are looking for an answer to the city’s current situation. I can’t imagine an answer will come that doesn’t involve Metro Detroit as a whole. It won’t just happen downtown with a flotilla of micro initiatives from twenty and thirty-somethings with nothing to lose, nor will it simply ride a tide of good vibes from a tailgating party in Eastern market, it will just as likely be brought about by the forward-thinking of the bean counters, marketers and business leaders in the suburbs. A town geared towards winning doesn’t root against the other teams in town. One program on the Mannion’s drawing board, Come Together, is an idea to offer every municipality, county and city in Michigan the opportunity to bring a hundred people to a basketball game, courtesy of The Pistons. The thought is to have thirty to fifty towns represented in the stadium each game, and to identify and celebrate the communities they come from. It’s part of Mannion’s desire to see people come together. Maybe that is sport’s greatest gift to humanity. Mannion wandered over to the window. “We’ve got a long way to go,” he said. He pointed at the trash cans dotted around the lots. “These trash cans are in teal. They should be royal blue.” Then he turned back to me. And smiled.
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THE LOCKOUT JOHN BALSOM The hard work ethic still applies, even in the Lockout. We spent an afternoon with Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva of the Detroit Pistons at Ben’s home court.
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ILLUSTRATION BY AMANDA JANE JONES The notion that Detroiters are a people obsessed with the automobile is as far-reaching as it is accurate. While there are car buffs around the world, in Detroit it goes beyond hobby and becomes something existential. Detroit is a car town, and Detroiters are car people. In Detroit, it is impossible to escape car culture. The near-total lack of reasonable mass transit means cars are ubiquitous. The automotive industry is the area’s major employer, so if you aren’t connected to it then someone you know is. It is our history, and it is the local news. It drives the economy and it is the philanthropic backbone of the area. The auto industry ties people together and makes Detroit – a large city by anyone’s standard – seem more like a tight-knit small town. So as a Detroiter, you pay attention to cars. And more than a few Detroiters grow to love them. The appeal is broad, because for almost as long as cars have been around there’s been a car for every budget. The well-off may collect classic cars, or drive a car that costs as much as a three-bedroom house. Working class folks may spend time customizing an otherwise standard-issue vehicle. Even in some of the poorer areas you can see the love, in rims that cost as much as the car they’re on, or in a refurbished 70’s ride. Metro Detroit is home to the Woodward Dream Cruise, a massive annual gathering of over a million people who come to watch classic and customized cars cruise a sixteen-mile strip of the region’s main thoroughfare. The event caters to every faction of car culture imaginable: those nostalgic for the cars of Detroit’s heyday, automotive design junkies, tinkerers who love souped-up hotrods, and those who are simply voyeuristic. It is the largest one-day automotive event in the world.
To an outsider, this preoccupation could appear a bit pitiable. Technology, information and finance – they move our world today, not wheels. Are we Detroiters just fixated on the totems of our manufacturing heritage? With manufacturing in the United States in a decades-long decline, couldn’t this be interpreted as willfully ignoring the change that’s coming? Perhaps, but not necessarily. In Europe there are many cities with traditions of craftsmanship and a specialty industry: Murano and its glass, for example. Solingen and its knives. Paris and its fashion. In the United States no city but Detroit is known for creating tangible objects that not only serve a purpose, but that connect to the primal urge to possess something. In a world where you can’t even own music anymore, cars are still coveted as much for what they do as what they say about the person who owns them. Detroit doesn’t just make objects, it makes objects of desire. Manufacturing in the United States has always been about mass-production. Even the industries such as garment manufacturing or glassware production never reached the design heights that the automobile has reached, and Detroiters are rightfully proud of that fact. It is what makes us unique in this country, and if we’re a little more attached to our automobiles because of it then I think that’s understandable. There are changes underway in the automobile industry, there are no doubts about that. At the same time there can be no doubt that Detroiters’ love for their cars will remain undimmed. Cars may not define us forever, but for the time being, in some way, cars are Detroiters, and Detroiters are their cars.
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ASSISTED BY Ruth Synowiec, Nicole Muster & Marvin Shaouni
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Zoraida Pallen - Ford Quality Control Assessor Portrait taken outside Ford Rouge Assembly Plant, Dearbom
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Anthony Brancaleone - Publisher & Editor of The Metropolitan d’Etroit Portrait taken outside Comerica Park
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Ruth Synowiec - Photographer Portrait taken by intersection of John C Lodge FWY and Grand River Ave
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Kef Parker - Artist Portrait taken at Peckard Plant
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Rachel Legg - Owner of Rachels Place Portrait taken downtown on Bagley Street
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Tenley Lark - Chef Portrait taken in Grosse Pointe
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She always wanted to go and there was no stopping her once she got it in her head. Her voice was like a pressure in the car, Joni’s mother’s Buick, its spongy burgundy seats and the smell forever of L’Air du Temps. Joni was game for it and I guess we all were. We liked Keri, admired her soft and dangerous ways. So lovely with her slippery brown hair lashed with bright highlights (all summer spent at the pool squeezing lemons into her scalp), so lovely with her darted skirts, ironed jeans, slick Goody barrettes. She was Harper Woods but, you see, she didn’t look it, so we let her slide, we let her hang with us, even let her lead us sometimes, times like this. Her mother put every dime of her Hutzel Hospital nurse’s salary into her daughter’s clothes, kept Keri looking Grosse Pointe and Keri could pass, pass well enough to snare with her pearl-pink nails a prime cut: a lacrosse-playing Grosse Pointe South boy, Kirk Deegan, hair as blonde as an Easter chick and crisp shirts with narrow sherbert-colored stripes and slick loafers, ankles bare with the fuzz of downy boy hair. Play her cards right, she could ride him anywhere she wanted to go …
None of us, not even anyone we knew, was supposed to cross Alter Road, even get near Alter Road, it was like dropping off the face of the earth. Worse. The things that happened when you slipped across that burning strip of asphalt, the girl a few years older than us— someone’s cousin, you didn’t know her—who crossed over, ended all the way over on Connor, they found her three days later in a field, gangbanged into a coma at some crackhouse and dumped for dead—no, no, it was three weeks later and someone saw her taking the pipe and turning tricks in Cass Corridor. No, no, it was worse, far worse… and then it’d go to whispers, awful whispering, what could be worse, you wondered, and you could always wonder something even worse. But there Keri would be, nestled in the backseat, glossy lips shining in the dark car, fists on the back of the passenger seat, spurring us on, Let’s go, let’s go. C’mon. What’s here, there’s nothing here. Let’s go. How many nights after all could be spent sloshing spoons in peanut buttercup sundaes at Friendly’s, watching boys play hockey at
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Community Ice, driving around trying to find parties, any parties, where new boys would be, boys we’d never met. Our boys, they all wore their letter jackets and all had the same slant part in their hair, straight across the forehead, sharp as ice, and the same conversation and the same five words, and there you are, beer can tilting into your mouth, begging for the chance to not talk, to let the full-mouthed rush of music flood out all the talk and let the beer do its work so this boy in front of you might seem everything he wasn’t and more—how many nights of that, I ask you? So when Keri said, Let’s go, maybe we let ourselves unsnide our tones, let our tilted-neck looks loosen a bit, unroll our eyes, curl into her quiet urging and go, go, go. When he was around, Joni’s brother would buy us the beer, the wine coolers and she’d hide them in the hedgerow underneath her bedroom window until we needed them. But he was at Hillsdale most of the time, trying to get credits enough to graduate and start working at Prudential for his dad. So there was Bronco’s, right off the Outer Drive exit and you could buy anything you wanted there, long as you were willing to drop twelve dollars for a four pack of big-mouth Mickey’s, or two tall 40s of Old-Style, the tang of it lingering in your mouth all night. Bronco’s, it was a kick, the street so empty and the fluorescent burst of its sign rising like a beacon, a shooting star as you came up the long slope on I-94. Sometimes it made your heart beat, stomach wiggle, vibrate, flip, like when the manager—a big-bellied white guy with a greasy lower lip—made Keri go in the back with him, behind the twitchy curtain. But he only wanted to run his fingers, studded with fat gold, over her chest and backside, and what did any of us care? It was worth the extra bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill he dropped in our paper bag. Hell, you always pay a price, don’t you?
Detroit. Detroit. Say it. Hard in your mouth like a shard of glass. Glittering between your teeth and who could tell you it wasn’t terrifying and beautiful all at once?
How different is it, Keri reminded us from the dark of the backseat, from letting the Blue Devils football starters under your bra so you’d get into the seniors’ party on Lakeshore where the parents had laid out for six cases of champagne before heading to Aruba for the weekend? How different from that? Very different, we said, but we knew it wasn’t. Bronco’s was just how it started. Next, it was leaving a party on Windmill Pointe, hotted up on beer and cigarettes and feeling our legs bristling tight in our jeans and Keri saying, Let’s
go that way, yes, that way and before we knew it, we’d tripped the fence. Goddamn, Alter Road a memory. We pitched over the shortest curl of a bridge, over a sludgy canal not twelve feet across, and there we were. But it wasn’t like over by Bronco’s. It was just as deserted, but it didn’t look like a scarred patch of city at all. The smell of the water and trailers backed up onto the canal, abandoned trailers, one after another, rutted through with shimmering rust, quivering under streetlamps, narrow streets filled with rotting boats teetering on wheels, mobile homes with windows broken out, streets so narrow it was like being on the track of a funhouse ride and then, suddenly, all the tightness giving way to big, empty expanses of forlorn, overgrown fields, like some kind of prairie. Never saw anything like it, who of us did. And our breath going fast in the car because we’d found something we’d never seen before. And it was like our eyes couldn’t stop opening. We’d let the gas pedal surge, vibrate, take us past sixty, seventy on the side streets, take the corners hard, let the tires skid, what did we care? There was no one here. There was no one on the streets. All you could see was shivering piles of trash, one-eyed cats darting. There was no one left. I tell you, it was ours. And Keri kept us going, her voice, soft and lulling, the Grosse Pointe drawl, bored-sounding even when excited: turn left, turn left, Joni, there, Joni, there. And we’d find ourselves further in, deeper, down the river, the slick brew of the canals long past now, and trembling houses cooing to us as the wind gasped through their swelling crevices, their glassless windows, their dark glory. That’s the thing Keri showed us. She showed us that. It’s beautiful, she whispered. None of the rest of us would ever have dared to say it aloud. And eventually, we saw people. First, a man alone, singing softly about a lady in a gold dress. Then, a woman, middle-aged, clapping her hands at her dog, calling him toward her, the dog limping toward her, howling, wistful. But mostly small fits of young men standing around, tossing cigarette embers glowing into the street. At first, Joni’d pick up speed whenever she saw them, chattering high-pitched and breathless, about how they’d try to jack her mother’s car and take it to a chop shop and in twenty minutes her mother’s burgundy Buick Regal would be stripped to a metal skeleton. But then there’d be Keri: Come on, Joni. Let’s see what they’re doing. Let’s see. And then we’d be long past Alter, past Chalmers
even, into that hissing whisper that was, to us, Detroit. Detroit. Say it. Hard in your mouth like a shard of glass. Glittering between your teeth and who could tell you it wasn’t terrifying and beautiful all at once? His voice was low and rippled and his skin was dark as black velvet, with a blue glow under the street lamp and he was talking to his friends from the sidewalk and we could almost hear them but not quite. And there was Keri, her hands curled around the edges of the top of the car door, window down, that long spray of hair tumbling out the window as she craned to get a better look, to hear, to get meaning. “You lost, honey,” is what he said and it was like something stretched tight for a thousand miles suddenly letting loose, releasing, releasing. “Yes,” was all she managed to whisper back before Joni had dropped her foot down on the gas hard and we all charged away, our hearts hammering… and Keri still saying, yes, yes, yes … You have to understand we didn’t know anything. We didn’t know anything at all about conditions, history, the meanings of things. We didn’t know anything. We were seeing castles in ruin like out of some dark fairy tale, but with an edge of wantonness, like all the best fairy tales. Keri, Monday AM, cheek pressed on the inside of my locker door, swinging it, rocking it, says, Let’s go back. Let’s go back. I should’ve seen it coming because who wanted to keep doing the same thing, which was fun at first, but where could it go, in the end? You couldn’t get out of the car. It was for kicks and you did it until the kicks stopped. This time, it worked like this: Joni started dating a De La Salle boy and he had a car anyway and her evenings were now for him and I was starting up tennis, and there were new parties and Keri, we saw her less and less, a long-haired flitter in the corner of our eye. She was there in the Homecoming Court, smiling brightly, waving at everyone and standing ramrod straight, face perfect and still. Face so frozen for all the flashing cameras, for all the cheering faces, for all of us, for everybody. It was her last of everything that year. Later, at the dance, willowing around Kirk Deegan, that bright wedge of hair, the blackwatch plaid vest and tie, that slit-eyed cool, he who never let another boy come near, even touch her shoulder, even move close. What boy ever kept me so tight at hand? What boy, I ask you. He loved her that much, everyone said it. He loved her that much. Sidling up to me in study hall, Keri’s voice slipping into my ear. How was the party, she’s asking, Was Stacey mad I didn’t go?
I just smiled because of course Stacey was mad, because Keri was supposed to bring Kirk because if Kirk came, so would Matt Tomlin and she was angling for Matt Tomlin, was so ready for him she could barely stand it. Where’d you guys go, I asked. And she gave me a flicker of a smile and she didn’t say anything. I said, Did you and Kirk… But she shook her head fast. I didn’t see him. It wasn’t that. And she told me Kirk was too wasted to go anywhere, showing off some fancy Scotch of his father’s and then drinking three inches of it, passing out on the leather armchair like some old guy. So she took his Audi and went for a drive and before she knew it she was long past Alter Road, long past everything. Even the Jefferson plant, the Waterworks. She said she drove all over the city in his car and ended up getting lost down by some abandoned railroad. She was crazy to do it and I told her so and she nodded like she agreed, but I could tell she didn’t agree at all. You could feel her rippling in her own pleasure over it. Like she was someone special who got to do things no one else did. I met some people, she said. They invited me to a party at this big old house downtown. You could see the big Chrysler plant. That was all you could see. The house had turrets like a castle in a fairy tale. I remember I wanted to go to the top and stand in the turret like a lost princess and look out on the river, waving a long handkerchief like I was waiting for a lover to come back from the sea. I think it was the most I ever heard her talk and it didn’t make any more sense than Trig class to me. It was empty, she said. The floors were part broken through. My foot slid between the boards and this boy had to lift me out. They were playing music and speakers were all over the house, one set up on an old banister thick as a tree trunk and everyone dancing and beer and Wild Irish Rose, wine red as bloodshot eyes and smoking, getting high and the whole place alive and I danced, one of them danced with me, so dark and with a diamond in his ear. He said he’d take me to Fox Creek, near the trailers, and we’d shoot old gas tanks and he sang in my ear and I could feel it through my whole body, like in lab when Mr. Muskaluk ran that current through me in front of the whole class, like that, like that. I could do anything, no one cared. I could do anything and no one stopped me. “What did you do, Keri,” I asked, my voice sounded funny to me, fast and gasping. “What did you do?” Anything, she whispered, voice breathless and dirty. Anything. 94/95 1\2
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Did I have time for that, for that kind of trashiness? Don’t you see, Joni said, she’s Harper Woods. She may look Grosse Pointe, but deep down, she’s five blocks from the freeway. It all comes back. You can fight it, but it comes back. So we dropped her. And it was just as well because lots of things were happening, with boys’ hockey starting and everyone’s parents taking trips to Florida, meaning more parties, and there was the thing with the sophomore girl and the senior boy and the police. Other stuff happened too—I’d dropped out of tennis and then dropped back in—and there was the boy with the long, adamappled neck of a star basketball player, which is what he was, and he took me to parties and to parents’ beds in upstairs rooms at parties and slid his tongue fast into my dry mouth, his hands fumbling everywhere, and his car, it smelled like him, Polo and new sneakers and Stroh’s. But then before I knew it, it was gone. He was gone, yeah, but the feeling that went with it too. Just like that. Please, please can you drop me somewhere, Keri said and we were in the school parking lot and her eyes rung wide and fingers gripped the top of the car door. I said okay, though I’d barely seen her for months. To Kirk’s? I asked. She said no and shook her head, gaze drifting off to the far end of the parking lot. Farther than that. Farther than that. And, somehow, I said yes. So she was next to me and the sky was orange, then red as the sun dropped behind the Yacht Club, its gleaming white bell tower soaring — when I was a kid I thought it was Disneyland — I was going to take her. I felt somehow I had to. Where are we going, I kept saying, but she’d just chew her gum and look out the window, fingers touching, breath smoking the glass. You can drop me here, she said, finally. We were at the foot of Windmill Pointe, just a few blocks from Alter Road. You just want me to leave you here? I asked, looking around, seeing not a soul. Yes, she said and waved as she began walking toward the water, toward the glittering lighthouse. Wait, Keri, I said, opening my door so she could hear me. Where are you going? And she half turned and maybe she smiled, maybe she even said something, but the wind took it away. “Her cousin’s letting her drive her sad-ass Nova, you should see it,” Joni was telling me, about Keri. “I saw her in it. Do you think she’s taking
it there? Next thing you know, we’ll be driving down Jefferson to go see the Red Wings game and we’ll spot her rolling with some black guys.” I said I didn’t think Keri went downtown anymore. I didn’t want Joni to know. It was something between us. And, truth told, if she’d asked me, I’d’ve driven Keri all the way. But she didn’t ask me, did she? It was in the aching frost of February and I was coming out of a party on Beaconsfield and I saw her drive by in the blue Nova. I saw which way she was headed and maybe my head was a little clogged from the beers, but I couldn’t help it and, in seconds, I was in my dad’s car and headed toward Alter Road. She was long gone, but I kept driving, thinking maybe I’d see the car again, especially once I hit the ghostly pitch over the bridge at Alter and Korte Street. Sure enough, I heard a squeal of tires. The only sound at all, other than the occasional sludge of water against the creaking docks over the canal, were those tires. I thought it had to be her and I stopped my car, rolled down my windows, couldn’t hear anything so figured she stopped. Slowly, I edged past the side streets and ended up back at that shell of a trailer court, those aluminum and wood carcasses, like plundered ships washed to shore. And that was when I thought I saw her, darting around the bowed trees, darting along like some kind of wood nymph in a magic forest and yet it was this. I could admit, if I let myself, there was a beauty in it, if you squinted, tilted your head. If you could squeeze out ideas of the kind of beauty you can rest in your palm, fasten around your neck, a slip of cashmere, one fine pearl, a beauty everyone could understand and feel safe with. This was not that kind of beauty. And maybe it felt realer to me, for a second. I parked my car and got out, the wind running in off the lake and charging at me, but I went anyway. Beer foaming my head, I just kept going. I was going to see. I was going to see it for myself. Wading through the golden rod, studded with scrap metal, with shredded firecrackers, flossy crimps of insulation foam, there I was. The trailers all edged in rust like frills peaking from under a dress but as you got closer, it wasn’t so dainty and there was a feel in the air of a hard current of something else. A kind of nastiness and dirtiness and badness, sweaty, gun-oil, mattress spring coil throbbing, stains spreading. My eyes skating over the abandoned trailers and thinking of the things happening behind the bulging screens, the pitted aluminum. The sky so black and the vague sound of music and the feeling of teetering into something and then it getting inside you, feeding off you, making you its own.
There was a laugh then and it struck me hard right through the swirling muzz in my head, but it was warm, rippling, and it broke up some of the nastiness for me, but not enough. Coming from one of the trailers, a faded red one with a rolling top, like a curling tongue. There was something glowing inside and there was music A thud-thud, bass tickling me, promising things, and I walked closer, I just did. I walked closer, that tickling laugh kept rolling itself out, felt like long fingers uncoiling just shy of me, just shy of my body, hot and itchy under my coat, aching for the cold wind ripping off the water and instead this runny canal, a ditch swelling. And then there it was. Soft, high, sweet, Keri’s own laugh. Like when we watched a funny movie or danced in our bedrooms, singing, singing until we thought our lungs would burst. But then turning, turning like a dial, the laugh got lower, throatier and I could feel it prickling under my skin, then sinking through me, down my legs, straight into the ground. Reaching under my feet. And in my head, I could see her face and she’s lying on a stripped mattress, hair spread out beneath, a windmill, and she’s laughing, her head tilting back, neck arching and who knew what was happening to draw that throaty laugh from her, pump that bursting flush into her cheeks, face, god, Keri, god, all kinds of dark hands on her, she at the center of some gruesome white-girl gangbang. All those hands touching her white white-girl skin. These are the things I thought, I won’t claim otherwise. I was standing ten seconds, a minute, who knew, when suddenly a hinge struck. That’s when I realized the sounds weren’t coming from inside the trailer but from behind it. Back to the mangled sheet metal, I sidled around until I saw everything, beginning with the sparking bonfire that made the whole trailer glow. Hiding behind the tinsely branches of a halffallen tree, I watched and I saw everything or figured I did. There were two black guys and a white guy and a tall black girl in a forest-green jacket. From the gold print struck in it, I saw it was Keri’s letter jacket from volleyball, and the girl was climbing on the picnic table, the picnic table Keri was dancing on. They were dancing to the music from a radio nested in a split tree trunk and one of the black guys, Keri was saying something to him as she danced and he was laughing and watching her
and I could tell he was the one she was with, you could see it in his eyes and hers, it was vibrating between them. She was there in the Homecoming Court, smiling brightly, waving at everyone and standing ramrod straight, face perfect and still. And the black girl joined Keri and the girl had a can of beer, they all did. The boys were shouting and rocking the table, and I could smell the pot and a lot was going on like at any party and it seemed like maybe more. But I was watching Keri and Keri’s face, it was glowing from the bonfire and it was a crazy orange flaring up her cheeks and she was wearing her long cashmere muffler from Jacobson’s coiled around her neck, flapping tight in the wind. She was dancing and the fire lit her hair and I could see her face and it was like I’d never seen it before and never would again because things made sense even if they didn’t because Keri, well, she was fathoms deep and, fifteen minutes from how, I would be driving along Kercheval, driving to my family’s three-bedroom colonial and tucking myself in and hoping the boy would call and thinking about the next party and here was Keri, and she was fathoms deep and I was … I couldn’t have known, watching her there, watching her dancing and looking like that, feeling that way, that she would be gone by finals, by junior prom, even. I never said a word about what I saw, not even to warn her. But even if I had tried to warn her, to hold her back, it wouldn’t have mattered because I would’ve told her to watch out for the wrong things, the wrong places. Because I couldn’t have known, watching her there, that two weeks later she’d be driving a drunken Kirk Deegan home late after a postgame party, driving him in his Audi and coming into the Deegan garage too close to the wall and shearing off the side view mirror. I couldn’t have known Kirk Deegan would get so mad and push her so hard against the garage wall, her head hitting that pipe and then turning and hitting the edge of the shovel hanging and what must have been a sickening crack and her falling and her dying and her dying there on the floor of his garage. Her dying on the floor of his garage and him too dumbstruck to call the police, an ambulance, his parents, anyone, for a half hour while she was there, hair spread on the cement floor like a windmill and then gone forever. I couldn’t have known that. But one way or another I did. “Our Eyes Couldn’t Stop Opening” originally appeared in Detroit Noir (Akashic Books, 2007), edited by E. J. Olsen and John Hocking.
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WRITERS Megan Abbott is the Edgar award-winning author of the novels The End of Everything, Queenpin, The Song Is You, Die a Little and Bury Me Deep. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Believer and L.A. Noire. Her new novel, Dare Me, will be published in 2012. Born and raised in Detroit, Ben Blackwell lives in Nashville with his wife Malissa. He agreed to contribute to Boat after hearing Jeffrey Eugenides was also contributing. Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993 and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003 Eugenides won the Pulitzer prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG 2002) which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, the international IMPAC Dublin literary award and France’s Prix Medicis. At the age of 29, James Griffioen walked away from a promising legal career and moved his family to downtown Detroit, where he no longer practices law but instead spends his days caring for his two children and taking photographs. He publishes a blog about his family’s life in Detroit called Sweet Juniper (www.sweetjuniper.com). Called one of the “Most Creative People We Know,” by O, the Oprah Magazine, his photos and writings have appeared in Harper’s, Vice, Time, Fortune and many other publications. Edgar Albert Guest was a prolific Englishborn American poet, popular in the first half of the 20th century and became known as the People’s Poet. During his life he wrote over 11,000 poems.
Howie Kahn is from Detroit, lives in Brooklyn, and has written for GQ, The New York Times, and other publications. Debs Paterson was born in Taiwan, educated in southern India and northern England, and has lived, worked and travelled all over Asia, Africa, America and Europe. A literature graduate and ex-sportscaster, her feature directing debut Africa United - a comic African road movie about Rwandan kids - released internationally to critical acclaim. Joe Posch was born in Detroit, and raised on the east side and in Grosse Pointe. Joe started Mezzanine, a store that specializes in classic modern and contemporary furniture, lighting, and accessories. Mezzanine converted to an online-only store in late 2009, at which time Joe introduced Hugh, the first “pop-up” store in Southeastern Michigan. It enjoyed a very successful six-month run, and then “popped up” again in December 2010 for the holidays. Davey Spens is a creative who runs Boat Studio with his wife Erin. In 2007 he was named one of Marketing Week’s Rising Stars, and resigned two months later. Some say he couldn’t take the pressure. He was Costa Coffee’s Writer-in-Residence, has ghost-written a memoir for a TV Vet and is still tinkering around with a novel. Erin Spens is an American writer, editor, and creative. She co-founded Boat Studio with her husband Davey, a small creative studio based in the heart of London. She writes for other magazines, works for lots of cool brands, and spends an unhealthy amount of time dreaming about travel.
DESIGNERS Luke Tonge is a graphic designer currently living and working in Birmingham, UK. As part of the influential FormFiftyFive.com his voice in the design industry continues to grow. A lover of ice-cream floats, all things typographic, and Bill & Ted – he wears shorts all year round. Boat Magazine is just one of his many creative outlets. Google him for more info. Christopher Vickers is a well-rounded graphic designer and creative thinker, who after recently graduating from the University for the Creative Arts has been working in a number of studios in London. www.christophervickers.co.uk
Alex Sheldon is a graphic designer living in Detroit, MI. He creates design, fonts, and illustration under the moniker Match & Kerosene. Alex has had the pleasure to work with the kind folks at Warner Brothers, Sony, Motown/Universal, and Columbia. www.matchandkerosene.com
PHOTOGRAPHERS John Balsom graduated with a BA in Graphic Design from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London, before transferring to photography. Initially assisting Julian Broad, Balsom has been working as a photographer for eight years; contributing editorial shoots to magazines such as Numéro Homme, GQ Style and Japan Vogue as well as commercial work for Thomas Burberry, Top Man, McQueen and Adidas. Balsom also has a keen interest in sports and has created a substantial body of sports imagery that includes work for 10 Men, GQ Style, Nike and Adidas. Jonathan Cherry spent his younger years wearing speedos but now is fascinated with shorts. Since graduating from University College Falmouth he continues to work on both personal and commissioned projects. In 2009 he founded MULL IT OVER - a series of webbased interviews with innovative contemporary photographers. www.jonathancherry.net Liz and Max Haarala Hamilton are a married photography duo based in London who collaborate on commercial portrait, food and editorial photography and fine art projects. Their work has been featured in numerous publications both in the UK and abroad and have worked for a range of clients including The Observer Magazine, Observer Food Monthly, HUCK Magazine, Mondadori Electa, and Conran Octopus. Adam Jacobs Born in London. Studied in Australia. Lived in the States. Now 26. Photographed Mandela, Clinton, Tutu and Jagger. Shot everything from World Cup Finals to abandoned factories and remote glaciers. Avid traveller. Still exploring, always learning.
Brian Kelly is a Grand Rapids, Michigan based editorial and advertising photographer specializing in environmental portraiture. His passion for Detroit and its people was the catalyst for his ongoing Detroit Portraits project. www.briankellyphoto.net Nicole Muster is a Detroit native & fashion photographer. James Naylor is a photographer living and working in London. Amongst other things, he enjoys Christmas, button down shirts and the story his Dad tells about the boiler that blew up and killed a cat. Giles Price is a photographer based in London. Well known for portrait based work, his personal projects also include exploration of landscape and social documentary in and around urban environments. Price’s work has appeared in numerous publications including the Telegraph Magazine, Guardian Weekend Magazine and Independent On Sunday Magazine. Corey Vaughan is a photographer located south of Los Angeles. His images are earnest and direct. He has been featured in various international blogs and digital galleries, and is beginning to venture into printed publications. He loves cheeseburgers, tall trees, tear-jerk movies, and friendship. You can find him plotting ways to make a living travelling and taking pictures. www.coreyvaughan.com
ILLUSTRATORS Andrew Davis is a Detroit based artist/ illustrator who wears many hats. An Events Coordinator at CAVE Gallery, Co-Founder of SMPLFD, Screen Printer, Curator and Friend. When he’s not busy print making, designing on illustrator or booking and promoting music shows, he’s usually hanging out at Chiipss Skate Shop, eating a sandwich at Mudgies or just watching a movie. Amanda Jane Jones is a freelance graphic designer and letterpress artist. She currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband and 600lb Vandercook proof press. You can view her work at www.amandajanejones.com
Seif Alhasani was born in Iraq, grew up in Sweden and studied illustration in London. He loves working with his hands and will take every opportunity to screen print posters, build paper models and paint murals. Whatever the medium, he always aims to create conceptually driven work that is highly visual with a playful twist.
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