Men of Gold Rush Alaska Climax Deep Inside Glory Hole

Detroit '67

Sorry to Tarek to push his excellent post lower, but I really wanted to post this song before I forgot. To me, this really touches on a lot that we've talked about with regard to Detroit. It's by a Canadian singer-songwriter, Sam Roberts (interestingly, of Afrikaaner extraction). There's mostly footage of the riot of 1967, which looks like a warzone, and the remainder is scenes of the singer in the bar Jacoby's (where I drank underaged a couple times as a college freshman) in Bricktown, Detroit getting soused.

The best part is the bridge:

So many years, so many lives
these are the streets where they collide
from Jimmy Hoffa to Cadillac
some look ahead, I'm going back

Video.

Comparison of uprisings with American situation - "America is a nonentity."

I thought this was a really interesting analysis of what's happening in many countries now. Qaddafi, unfortunately, has chosen to attack his people.

Worth saving

"It would be tedious to mention all the different men who have spent the whole of their life over chess or ball or the practice of baking their bodies in the sun. They are not unoccupied whose pleasures are made a busy occupation. For instance, no one will have any doubt that those are laborious triflers who spend their time on useless literary problems, of whom even among the Romans there is now a great number. It was once a foible confined to the Greeks to inquire into what number of rowers Ulysses had, whether the Iliad or the Odyssey was written first, whether moreover they belong to the same author, and various other matters of this stamp, which, if you keep them to yourself, in no way pleasure your secret soul, and, if you publish them, make you seem more of a bore than a scholar. But now this vain passion for learning useless things has assailed the Romans also. In the last few days I heard someone telling who was the first Roman general to do this or that; Duilius was the first who won a naval battle, Curius Dentatus was the first who had elephants led in his triumph.

[...]

...does it serve any useful purpose to know that Pompey was the first to exhibit the slaughter of eighteen elephants in the Circus, pitting criminals against them in a mimic battle? He, a leader of the state and one who, according to report, was conspicuous among the leaders of old for the kindness of his heart, thought it a notable kind of spectacle to kill human beings after a new fashion. Do they fight to the death? That is not enough! Are they torn to pieces? That is not enough! Let them be crushed by animals of monstrous bulk! Better would it be that these things pass into oblivion lest hereafter some all-powerful man should learn them and be jealous of an act that was nowise human. O, what blindness does great prosperity cast upon our minds!" (source)

Someone on a list-serv was using this to justify an argument that "Just because data can be saved does not mean that it is transformed into 'information' or that it should be saved." Librarians and archivists often seem to debate the validity of saving things like Twitter tweets and Facebook photos of drunken college students. Are these part of the cultural record, and thus worth saving? Or "better would it be that these things pass into oblivion"?

Personally I think if we can save it, we should. One's generations trash is the next generations treasure, right? The problem now is that there's just so much data to be saved, inevitably the people doing the saving are going to have to make judgment calls about what is archived/preserved. Hence the argument that Facebook photos should get bumped to the bottom of the list.

Swim Club at Work

It's happening in Michigan too...

Speaking of Wisconsin, this blogger takes a look at recent House and Senate Bills in Michigan that are potentially worse for public employees than those in Wisconsin.  There are also a few documents I could put here, but I'm not sure blogger will let me do that.

Zine Drama

I've had my head stuck in zine purgatory for like the last three months trying to bang out this book chapter on zines in libraries as a means of "bringing arts into libraries and making libraries vibrant cultural community centers." Today I found this amusing/interesting dust up between an academic and zinesters. Teal Triggs, a graphic design scholar and zine researcher, just published a book called Fanzines that's in the New York Times Sunday Book Review this week.

Unfortunately, Triggs wasn't as diligent as she ought to have been in obtaining permissions to include many of the zine scans and online zine screen captures, contacting many zinesters only after the book had gone to print. She's allegedly loose with facts, too. Offended zinesters have created this centralized complaint repository.

Wisconsin public sector workers' strike (with students)

Given our earlier enjoyment of Nicole's post about Midwestern issues of class, this is kind of an interesting demonstration, going on in Wisconsin. The Republicans in that state are trying to take away workers' right to unionize.

Marquette & Egypt

Ian already posted a bit about this, but the president was in Marquette last week.  Tickets for the event were extremely hard to come by, and despite my best efforts, I was not able to obtain one.  I did stand around in the cold for 45 minutes so that I could catch an extremely quick glimpse of the presidential motorcade, and I was rewarded with the sight of POTUS waving his hand through tinted bulletproof glass.  It was fun watching our little TV station's second-by-second coverage of Air Force One landing at the airport and later seeing clips of his speech on the national cable news networks.  He picked a bitterly cold day to come here, but he found time to buy Sasha and Malia some candy from the old-timey chocolatier downtown (see above photo) and eat a BLT.  (Initial reports were that he had ordered a vegetarian sandwich, but this was corrected in time for the late local news.)  The purpose of his coming here was NMU's fancy wimax wireless internet, which allows anyone within a roughly 30 access to the university's wireless network, provided they have an NMU laptop.  The administration is pushing this kind of community-wide wireless access across the nation, especially in more rural areas such as the UP.  The idea is to increase broadband access to everyone, and he drew inspiring parallels to rural electrification projects of the FDR era.

That's all well and good, but this trip became an interesting little footnote to history due to the Mubarek situation.  On the flight from DC to Marquette, the president was informed that Mubarek reportedly would be stepping down that day (this past Thursday).  This hadn't been confirmed, but during the speech he made remarks to the effect that we were witnessing history in the making.  Well, the joke was on him!  Later that day, Mubarek of course said that he wouldn't be stepping down, and only agreed to devolve powers to the vice president, which clearly isn't what all those protesters had in mind after weeks of action.  Obama found this out on the flight back to DC, and it wasn't until the next day that the regime finally fell.  So maybe he'll actually remember Marquette to some extent, which I'm sure isn't the case for a lot of little podunk towns he constantly visits, if for no other reason than the interesting briefings he had on the way there and back.

And speaking of Egypt, is anyone else as concerned about the current state of affairs as I am?  The military is currently the sole holder of formal political power, and from what I understand the uniformed leadership is going to draw up constitutional amendments themselves, then submit them to the people for approval.  This seems shady to me - why can't leaders of the revolution participate in this process?  Might the military not be tempted to carefully word such amendments in a way that reserves certain powers for themselves?  I never trust the armed forces of any country to act as a responsible caretaker government, and I'm not ready to make an exception here.

The whole timetable set forth by the military, as pointed out by the Times, is extremely brisk, which seems promising in that the country can start making steps toward democratic government quickly, but also means that new political parties are not going to have a lot of time to organize themselves and campaign for new offices.  This again presents an opportunity for the military leadership, who are probably the only widely recognized political figures who can claim to have some experience governing Egypt, to either run for office themselves or push for candidates who are friendly to their interests.  I don't know - this all seems like it could go shittily.

The protesters are saying they will meet again every Friday on Tahrir Square to express their opinions and remind the leadership that they're still there.  That's great, but I think there's a real danger that people are going to become somewhat complacent now that they have achieved their primary goal, the ouster of Mubarek.  They've got to get back to their lives, and I imagine many are only going to be able to keep up the public protests for so long, especially as the message becomes more nuanced and the opportunity for disagreement between various factions of the revolution arises as we get into the nitty gritty details of setting up a democratic government.  "Get out, Mubarek" was a simple message that everyone could get behind.  "Make sure X provision is included in the new constitution" isn't quite as compelling.

But I'm being a pessimist.  I just hope that people do not settle for some lesser form of military rule just because it's better than life under the Mubarek regime - there's a real opportunity to create a model government here, not just for the Arab world, but for those living under repressive dictatorships throughout the world.  Hopefully that's what we'll see.

New Hampshire Drive-In

Belated Valentine's Day Song

Drunken nights

Brian and I get drunk a lot and one night we left on some recording equipment we had lying around. I was amazed at what comes out of us when we're intoxicated. Brian gets pretty homophobic.

Audio.

Zola Jesus - I Can't Stand

Happy Valentine's Day!

Huck Finn: Robot Edition

Live coverage of Egypt and Obama's speech from Marquette

http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish?feature=ticker

New movie filmed in Ann Arbor

This movie was filmed in Ann Arbor and guess who's in it? Watch the preview and you'll see.



For those of you who don't know what he looks like, it's Ralph Williams, the English professor.

Chopin's "Raindrop Prelude"

I have been listening to a lot of Chopin lately. At work, I need something to keep me alive.

Anyways, I wanted to share this with you guys. It's his piano prelude no. 15, the "Raindrop Prelude." According to Wikipedia, when he was living on Majorca with George Sand and two of her children (not from him and they weren't married at the time), they went out and a monsoon touched down immediately after. Chopin wrote this during the monsoon, reporting to George Sand that he thought they were dead and then imagined himself dead during it.

So, it's something to get you out of the office mindset.

Another from Vystotsky

People seemed to like it last time when I posted one of his songs with subtitles:

There's Yer Breakfast

"Ask fer me on Wabash 'n Harrison," he began inviting everyone late one night, his tongue still sounding burdened to Sparrow. "I'm the guy wit' the right connections. Ask fer me on the hotel corner, I wheel the GI Joe cab there. Gracie brings me sandriches but I got no damned matches. Pokey'd gimme some but I don't want to wake him up. He let me make a phone call fer free when I told him I was crashed but the morning guy is no good, he wants a buck or no phone. I showed that marked-down lushworker, I thrun his moldy baloney on the floor. 'There's yer breakfast,' I told him straight."

Winnebago Man

I think I might have posted this aready, but here it goes again.



It's like my dad trying to make a commercial.

Defending Detroitophilia, or, Why This Commercial Got Me

I can understand, for Detroiters, why it's annoying to hear people who have never lived in Detroit talk about your city. You or your family lived something unique, saw the decline, felt something more intensely than anyone else. It's annoying to hear someone wax poetic about a subject that you don’t find poetic. It’s annoying to have to listen to an outsider discover something you already knew.

But to get upset about it, the impulse to take it away from the other person, it’s a little bit like a teenager getting angry when someone else mentions his favorite band. “That is mine, you can’t feel what I feel about it.” But what if other people can?

I’m not an expert on Detroit; I’m not as well-read about the history as many people here, and I frankly never cared to analyze the phenomenon of universal love of the D until now. This is just how things seem to me.

Accusations that come immediately to mind: out of touch suburban yuppies, racial tension, white guilt, romanticization of the working class, romanticization of the past, nostalgia for something that probably never existed.

But we’re still left with a lot of people from outside the city who feel a connection to Detroit, and people from Metro Detroit who wear that fact like a badge. The non-native’s fascination isn’t invalid or disallowed just because the he didn’t have a first- or secondhand experience with Motown, the riots, working in an auto factory that no longer exists, or whatever else is meant to legitimize a person before they can talk about Detroit.

Underdog
The most obvious reason for the phenomenon I can come up with is our (us humans’) love for the underdog. I think that’s pretty self-explanatory in relation to Detroit. You can’t help but root for the comeback of a city that has been kicked when it’s down…for decades. Because people sometimes think of themselves as underdogs, they empathize. We want to see Detroit succeed, and we wallow in its failures.

Nostalgia
A friend recently pointed out that the warm feeling of nostalgia is really a sad feeling, because it’s about loss.
My elders—parents, grandparents, friends’ parents—tell stories of a different Detroit, a different Benton Harbor (my area’s microcosm of Detroit), a different Michigan. A time when prosperity existed. Yes, they have probably romanticized the past, but there has been a factual, measurable loss in burned out, declining or dead industrial cities.
Detroit is only the most famous of the afflicted; there are many other cities with smaller versions of the same problems all around the state, and country. For many of us, Detroit is a better-documented representation of another sad city with a sad story that we know very well.

To Be American
Detroit’s story, that it is in the Midwest, a working-class city, represents American values. I think it’s a shame that I feel weird typing the phrase “American values,” that one political party has co-opted and vilified for others the concept of what it means to be and to feel American.
Detroit represents a patriotism that even today’s cynical liberal can ascribe to. It’s a city of Working Class Hero concepts: hard work, humility, unpretentiousness, self sacrifice, grit, fight. I can't emphasize enough this idea of the working class.
I have no ethnic community; no storied heritage has been passed down to me, and I have no cultural identity other than growing up poor in small town Michigan, USA. That’s my identity, and though there are smaller towns and poorer people than mine, it resonates with me when I see it. Misery loves company. When you suffer, it's natural to reach out and see if your experience is shared.
Because Michigan was economically challenged for a decade before the rest of the country was (and Detroit for decades before that) I think our population resents the fact that our misery was relatively unnoticed until everyone else felt it too. There is so much feeling sorry for ourselves right now on a national level, but I think the spirit of Michigan and her people has been more of a fight through it, shoulder it, get over it kind of mentality, rather than our national (or is it just the east coast?) wallow-and-complain mentality. And isn’t that more admirable? Isn’t that how we’d rather imagine ourselves when we're kicked down? As martyrs instead of whiners? I think that’s how people see Detroit.

Mortality
Finally, those ubiquitous photos of dilapidation, of once-great landmarks abandoned and mansions crumbling to the ground…do I even need to say this? It’s the palpable, physical, animal revelation of mortality; Detroit's decay is our decay. Humanity's decay. The fragility of our own individual mortality. We struggle against a steady tide. Can we prevail? How long can it last? Once fallen, is there redemption?

Happy Birthday Ronald Reagan!

Everyone is remembering Reagan! Share your memories of "America's own Gipper!"

Let's Go Pack!

I've waited since 1998 for the Packers to return to the Super Bowl.  I was turned into a Packer backer at a very young age by my uncles, and although football is certainly not my favorite sport, I can't help but care more about the Packers than I do any other sports franchise.  Growing up in the UP, Green Bay was the closest thing to a nearby big city.  My trips there were relatively rare and usually there was some special reason for taking the 3 hour drive - big swim meet, shopping excursion (they have a Gap!), or, most special of all, a Packer game.

My uncle gets tickets to four games a year, and in the days before he got married, I frequently went with him to those games.  It's pretty awesome to see the insane obsession of this overgrown small town with this team, an anachronism left over from the early days of the NFL when employees from the meatpacking plant would play football on around the upper Midwest to make some extra scratch.  Green Bay is absolutely dependent on this team for its whole identity, and its citizens have a devotion to their team that I haven't seen any other community even come close to.

Northern Wisconsin is culturally very similar to the UP, and there is a divide among the Yoopers about who to support, the Pack or the Lions.  I find this interesting because it reflects on the nature of the UP as an area lying within the political boundaries of Michigan, but at the same being geographically and culturally distinct from the rest of the state.  Like a lot of Yoopers, I had spent little to no time in Detroit (I never went to the city until I was in college), but had spent a lot of time in the Green Bay area, and I never really felt any reason to identify with the Lions.

The Packers also have a bizarre business model, operating as a non-profit corporation.  This doesn't really make any sense, but I find it refreshing to root for a team that doesn't serve to enrich some old white guy.  The Packers have no owner, and although there are a bunch of people getting rich off of the team, I like pretending that they are some grand socialist experiment owned by the people, defying the odds and defeating the forces of capitalism.

Anyway, the game is coming up, and I'm quite excited.  A good chunk of the NYC Swim Club community is together in Brooklyn (including me, in town for a job interview) to watch them, and it seems like everyone is more or less on the same page:

GO PACK.

My prediction:  Packers 34, Steelers 30.

Pool. Vail basement.

Me and Justin and this song. I want a rematch one day.

The work-study student I supervise just held up one of these envelope sealers:

And asked me (really serious)... "Hey Carlie-- Do we have any more of the liquid for this?"

This is Good

I ran into this blog today while at work and bored. I recommend it. Old newspaper pieces and advertisements mostly

Older Than Me

Pittsburgh is goin to da Superbowl

Hey we haven't talked about this on the blog yet have we!? Who are you rooting for? There's a cafe called the Cup and Chaucer in the library where I work, and they're having a "black and gold" party with appropriately colored cookies, bagels, and normally colored hot dogs etc. But the most ridiculous part is that when I got off the bus this morning I noticed 2 things:
1. the newspaper boxes are gone in case there's riots again, but the bus shelter that got smashed 2 years ago is still there
2. this sign is in the lobby of my workplace, to advertise the party:


I wonder who in administration approved that!!! This is going to be an interesting day. I'm wearing black and gold attire so that I can get free food, but secretly...

I WANT GREEN BAY TO WIN

They're the better team and there are too many unlikeable characters making the Steelers look bad this year. Though I would like to see the insane t-shirts that will be for sale if we win.

Michigan Party (December 2010)

Here are some videos from the kitchen dance party.

The White Stripes Split

Say it ain't so!

1989 French music video

I found this by sniffing through the streaming radio stations in the international category on iTunes. it was on some Frenchy station. And then I found another station called "Dali'n Love" that bills itself as offering "The whole international repertoire of DALIDA, interspersed with her biggest hits from the 50s to 80s, but also with some interviews and ....".

!!!

Midwest Vacation (October 2010)

Finally got around to sorting photos from my trip to Chicago and Michigan this Fall. FB album here, videos (mostly of my weekend in MI) below.



Clever decorations outside The Second City:



The Meatmen formed in early-80s Lansing environs; frontman Tesco Vee also co-founded punk zine Touch & Go and was involved in the label until relocating to D.C.:



Steve Miller of Lansing hardcore band The Fix joined them for a song:



My sister and I had lunch with my godfather:



There was an awesome line-up of local music at Mac's Bar; I went to high school with the guy on the left -- they've recently switched their guitars to synths:



Fields of Industry also played; here's one of their noisier moments:



My favorite song from the new album:



...and a great cover of The 13th Floor Elevators:



Had brunch the next day at The Kellogg Center; here are some cute Jack O' Lanterns:



Chicha and Mr. Darcy were excited to see us: