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1月25日

Detroit visitor's tips for Seattle Seahawks fans

Hello Seattle, welcome to Detroit. We’re glad to have you.

Great job Seattle Seahawks – unlike the Lions, you’ve managed to shake off a history of losing and (even worse) choking to reach the Super Bowl in impressive fashion. Now you and your fans get to come to my beautiful city. I’ll see you there since I’d vowed to go home as soon as they announced the XL’s host city…

I will have a visitor’s guide for you later, for now here are some tips for Seattlelites based on my 8 years of living here in Seattle and studying its peoples:

1. Detroit weather: no Seattle, it’s not that cold in Detroit – no worse than New York and much less windier than Chicago. And this year Detroit has been warmer than usual, reaching the upper 30’s and low 40’s for highs – that’s only a few degrees cooler than Seattle has been the last 6 weeks or so. It’s been raining every other day in Detroit, so you should feel right at home. Wear your gloves and bring a hat and you will be quite comfortable – there are heated tents downtown just in case you’re cold-natured.

2. Please do not ask for "soda" – it is (correctly) called "pop" in the D. :)

3. Head downtown if you need a latte fix: the whole latte / cappuccino thing is one of those Seattle stereotypes that actually can’t be overplayed. Seatown, you know you are coffee fiends, and unfortunately, Detroit’s view of coffee is that beans + water should not cost more than a few dimes. Starbucks has only a handful of stores in the city, and cafés in general are scarce. There are several in the core downtown Detroit area (there’s a Starbucks at the Buhl building close to the Guardian Building, and the Guardian building also has its own café). You can also journey down Woodward out to Royal Oak if necessary if they run out downtown…

4. Avoid use of the terms "hella" or "hecka": guys, nobody outside the west coast knows what those words mean – I would just avoid them altogether.

5. No jeans in nice restaurants: you’ll find the food to be much less expensive in Detroit than Seattle at the average restaurant. However, if the entrees are anywhere near $20, in the D this would be considered a "fancy" restaurant and this means no jeans. I know – in Seattle you can get away with jeans even at the city’s very best spots (Canlis being the only exception I can think of). Detroit is a place where people take these things a little more seriously, and Detroiters in particular have a thing about "showing off" when they go out to some extent (it’s part of the Detroit style, the gators, etc.). Bring at least one business casual outfit along with a nice jacket in case your jeans and REI jacket don’t cut it.

6. Eat a coney: Coney Island hot dogs with chili and onions are an important staple for some reason. There are Coney Islands everywhere – go in and try one. Oh yeah, if they serve coneys, you can wear jeans. :)

7. Drink some Vernors Ginger Ale: Vernors will put hair on your chest (even if you’d rather not have any). I believe it can also cure the common cold and boost your IQ.

8. The negative stories of Detroit: don’t believe the hype folks. Seattle, you are full of a high percentage of college graduates that come to Seattle to work in newer fields such as software and biotechnology. You’re smart enough to realize that a myth repeated endlessly becomes truth. Yes we have some serious problems, but these are problems that affect and will be solved eventually by the region’s residents. For visitors who will primarily experience the downtown and other visitor-oriented locations, you will see great things and be quite safe, and get a taste of what the city can be like once it has made progress on its problems.

9. The crime: again, it’s no worse than New York or Chicago, and the downtown area where the Super Bowl will be played and all of the festivities will be held is actually very safe. Ignore the rumors and enjoy yourselves…

10. Go to the museums: Seattleites are nerdy enough to think museums are cool (that’s a good thing). Detroit has great museums – peep them.

11. Go to Greektown: all tourists go to Greektown – as a Seattle book nerd, you’ve probably read Middlesex by now, and if you want to go see some of the Greek-ness you read about in the book, go there. The food is quite good…

12. Go to the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History: Seattle is about to have an African-American museum, so visit this one to get an idea of what you’d like to see in your own version.

13. Check out the architecture: Seattle is a new city with nice glass skyscrapers. Very cool. But Detroit has the OG skyscrapers – check out the Guardian Building, the Fisher Building, the Penobscot, the Buhl, the Broderick Tower, the David Stott, and even the new but retro Comerica Tower. You can’t get this back home, so check it out while you can.

14. Dig the soul: despite its prosperity and reputation for quality of life, we all know Seattle gets dinged a lot for, well, not having any "flavor" (you always get this from the Black people that come out to Seattle for work). Seattleites say of their city that it still lacks an identifiable soul. Well, you will find that Detroit has no shortage of "soul" – some would argue that it goes a little too far. Anyway, this is another thing you won’t really find in Seattle, so while you’re in Michigan, take some time to people watch, walk around downtown, listen to the way people talk, and generally take it all in. I would call it a sort of blue-collar, Afro-Gothic industrial flavor that you won’t find anywhere else…

15. Come back in the summer: Seattleites like to stay at home for the summer because those two months of sun make up for all the Pacific Northwest’s previous seasons of drizzle. Detroit has a longer and earlier summer though, so stop through in June or July while Seattle is still chilly. Instead of February’s winter wonderland, Detroit’s summer will bring you leafy trees, grassy parks on the blue-green Detroit River, and excellent musicians and festivals such as the Detroit International Jazz Festival, the African World Festival, and the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. Nice hotels are insanely cheap even downtown, and the warm weather will go great with the food.

Aight, now go root for your Seahawks. As a Lions fan, they have given me some hope. :)

Christmas 2k5

Here are a few shots I never got around to posting from my annual trip back to Detroit for Christmas. I tried out the skating rink at Campus Martius along with mis padres and one of my best friends from college (also a fellow Detroiter) and her family. For the second year in a row I managed not to fall with my non-skating self…

Too bad I didn’t get a chance to try the night skating where the rink changes colors…

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The List 2006

All right, it’s been 2006 for a while now – in case you don’t know, here’s what to look out for this year:

1. Detroit hosts Super Bowl XL on February 5, 2006.

2. Seattle travels to Detroit for an unexpected Super Bowl run.

3. The city of Detroit goes bankrupt after the Super Bowl (probably by March).

4. GM avoids bankruptcy for 2006.

5. The Pistons continue to be the best team in the NBA all the way through the Finals.

6. The wheels continue to fall off of the administration of this U.S. President as more of its conspiracies are uncovered and its foreign policy fails.

7. Seattle breaks ground on its African-American museum, constructed in the footsteps of Detroit’s own such institution.

8. U.S. liberals make some moderate gains in the 2006 elections even as the U.S. electorate continues its rightward shift toward economic and social irrelevance.

9. More nations thumb their nose at the U.S. a la Iran, Iraq’s "insurgents," Venezuela, Bolivia, and Brazil.

10. Apple finally uses standard hardware such as Intel chips to make more affordable PCs and laptops – it’s about time.

11. The world gets an overdue but cool new operating system in Vista.

12. It starts to become normal for DVD’s to release simultaneously with theatrical showings.

13. Video on demand starts to seep into the mainstream.

14. Several game publishers drop out of the PC game business.

15. Something unexpected and bad happens.

16. Something unexpected but good happens.

17. Me and buschick jump the broom.

18. Detroit’s downtown business and residential climate improve even as the city’s schools and services continue their decline and people leave the city.

We’ll see how my predictions hold up throughout the year. I can’t say I would have predicted the 20+ straight days of rain we had at the beginning of the month though… Oh, and I have no idea if the Book-Cadillac renovation will actually start...

12月7日

Virtually Live from the D

These days, if you miss your hometown like I do, live webcams with near real-time views like the Detroit skyline or Campus Martius (both sitting in my links section) can make you feel a little closer to life back at the crib.

If you're sufficiently regular (some would say obsessive) in your visits to the webcams, you can start to see the unexpected variety that exists even in what is essentially the same picture day after day. Weather varies, day flows into night, people come and go; even subtle change drastically alters the character of the same scenes capture by the webcams at different times.

I've created a small album of some of my favorite snapshots from the Detroit skyline (as seen from Windsor) webcam as well as the Campus Martius camera. Yes, I randomly check them at least once a day and when I see what appears to be a memorable view, I capture and save it. This is completley normal. :)

That Windsor view of the city is quite nice -- it has the blend of sky, skyscrapers, and water that make for idealized cityscapes. Clouds seem to make the most difference in the skyline pictures -- some of them are the picture-perfect postcard shots with lots of placid blue sky, while others have large and busy clouds whose assertiveness contrasts with the order of the city as it stands up to their heaviness. Sometimes the city seems welcoming -- at other times grey skies combined with the somewhat gothic nature of the skyscrapers makes it seem ancient and menacing.

Campus Martius seems very "nexus-like" in all the views from its webcam -- I really like the night pictures of the seasonal ice skating rink. This year they've added the ability for the rink to glow with different colors of light (an icy version of Belle Isle's Scott Fountain which also displays colors at night), and I have shots of large crowds of people enjoying themselves on a rainbow rink in the dark. I can't wait to try it out once I get back for Christmas.

One of the Campus Martius shots contains me and Buschick circled in red -- I took that snapshot of us (we appear as little dots) during our September visit there as we enjoyed some tastiness from the non-profit Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream shop inside of the Compuware headquarters. My Internet access to the webcam came from the city's free public wireless access point. The camera isn't quite real-time -- it is delayed by a few minutes, but if you sit there and refresh it, you'll eventually see yourself as a few blurry pixels...

An aside: I'm always looking for unsecured wireless Interet access so I would have found that Campus access point regardless, but I was actually alerted to it by a freeway billboard on the way downtown from the West Side. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick kindly declared that Campus and some other locations (I remember Grand Circus Park) now had wireless Interent access, not just courtesy of the City of Detroit, but thanks to the mayor himself. Perhaps that meant Kwame paid for it out of his own pocket and not the city's money? Of course, it's nice when you can get free pre-election publicity from a public service announcement on a large billboard paid for by city funds.

For now I'll keep hitting F5 in the hopes of seeing something I haven't yet seen on the cameras. Maybe someday when the city's survival problems are behind it those cameras will show the signs of a lively and prosperous town: activity on the riverfront, construction cranes from new structures being added downtown, continuous streams of people instead of emptiness at places like Campus Martius during the day.

Until those happy days arrive, if anyone knows of more webcams inside the Detroit city limits, please comment with the URL's -- it's possible (though still unimaginable to me) that I may get bored of the skyline and Campus views someday...

12月5日

Secrets of Pulitzer Prize-Winning Authors Revealed

As I predicted, Buschick became quite enamored of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, a novel I suggested (i.e. insisted) she read. It's a great book on all the levels of criticism as Buschick raves in her recent lament about running increasingly short on Middlesex's precious unread pages.

I am with Buschick on recommending the book, and not just because much of it is set in Detroit. Mr. Eugenides' portrayal of Detroit at various stages of its 20th century rise and decline makes this one stand out from the usual bestseller or critical book of the moment. Since most people outside of Detroit are unaware of the city's complex, proud history and the untapped potential of its present, I'm pleased to see a talented native of Detroit represent (time for a blog on Detroit notables at some point btw) and tell a story that counters one-sided and overwhelmingly negative reputation of the city in the country at large.

(A quick aside: while offering a refreshingly realistic perspective of the city, it still does not address the most glaring omission of the city's story: the story of the city's now overwhelmingly Black majority. Similar to the media's initial pretense during the hurricane Katrina disaster, people outside of Michigan are often unaware that the city is 80% African-American and that it exerts a huge influence on Black American (and thus American) culture because of this. It's almost like the country is afraid to admit that chocolate cities exist -- that story of Detroit has yet to be publicized in novel form or otherwise...).

Back to Middlesex though. The book also contains good news for aspiring artists who might be intimidated by the apparent effort needed to create a work of notable acclaim. What's great about Middlesex's fiction is that while it is highly imaginative, it is also anchored with a significant amount of "educational" non-fiction content, enough to make a dent in the prevailing mythos of Detroit as a crime-ridden urban wasteland. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that the author grew up in the city. However, a small amount of Detroit-directed Internet research on my part reveals that many details used in Mr. Eugenides' work can be conveniently found at one web site. Great writers of the 21st century, fear not the need for painstaking research on history or obscure professions; the Internet and its searchable archives are the substitute for years of building expert contacts or browsing the stacks and the law libraries.

The Detroit News web site Rearview Mirror contains a collection of entertaining pieces of Detroit history that also show up as details or settings of Middlesex. The site is excellent -- very engaging in terms of casual browsing, and probably quite useful as a factual resource for teaching Detroit / Michigan history. If you haven't yet read Middlesex, please avoid the rest of this blog entry until you've finished the book. Otherwise, here is a quick list of the more obvious ways in which one could take Rearview Mirror's content and transform it into portions of a Detroit masterpiece like Middlesex:

1. Rearview Mirror's piece on "How the Great Depression changed Detroit" contains a picture of an unemployed man in Detroit during the Great Depression carrying a hand-made sign advertising his availability for work. It turns out this exact sign shows up in Middlesex! In the book, there is a chapter entitled "Marriage on Ice" that takes place in 1932 in Detroit during the Depression; the chapter quotes that hand-painted sign verbatim: "WORK-iS-WHAT-I-WANT-AND-NOT-CHARiTY-WHO-WiLL-HELP-ME-GET-A-JOB.-7 YEARS-IN-DETROIT.NO-MONEy.-SENT-AWAY-FURNISH-BEST-OF-REFERENCES." Clearly Mr. Eugenides saw this picture himself and added this real bit of Depression-era Detroit into the story. Its inclusion in the book is very moving as a way of communicating the spirit of the city's people in tough times that seem to have returned in the present; I find this original picture to be even more moving than its usage in the book.

2. That same web page describes a jobs project aimed at easing unemployment in Detroit during the depression that allowed qualified workers to become apple vendors. Five paragraphs after the book quotation mentioned above, the Eugenides writes "What else would my grandmother have seen on the streets of Detroit in 1932? She would have seen men in floppy caps selling apples on corners."

3. On that same web page, the right pane contains a set of links. One of these is a link to "Paradise Valley and Detroit's Black Bottom." These areas were the Black ghettoes of the city during the Depression, and much of the same "Marriage on Ice" chapter mentioned above as well as the following section takes place there. So far, we can imagine Mr. Eugenides hypothetically reading Rearview Mirror and gathering ideas for settings and images for his book.

4. Once more on the same Depression web page: there is a lnk to "How Prohibition made Detroit a bootlegger's dream town" that talks about how the Detroit River was a liquor-trafficking highway between the U.S. and Canada during Prohibition. The chapters previous to "Marriage on Ice" include scenes on the Detroit River where the narrator's grandfather Lefty engages in liquor smuggling. The web site even describes the somewhat unbelievable lengths these smugglers were willing to employ: "Ingenuity carried the day.... In winter, with the ice frozen, anyone from a single skater towing a sled to a loaded caravan of 75 cars could be seen." Smugglers actually drove 1920's automobiles onto the frozen river! Middlesex includes this stranger-than-fiction details -- it is the climactic scene of "Minotaurs" in which Lefty survives a double-cross from his crazed landlord / partner-in-crime Jimmy Zizmo while they are driving a Packard on the frozen Detroit River for a liquor-run. Here is yet another scene that Mr. Eugenides might have decided to enact after reading this page's compact but intriguing description of the desperation and greed of criminals.

5. Back to the Depression page and the right links panel -- this time we look at the link to "Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang," the loose crime syndicate featured in the chapter "Minotaurs" as a threat to Lefty and Zizmo's small-time liquor trafficking operation. Mr. Eugenides employed the Purple Gang as a device to heighten suspense and highlight the insanity of his characters' ways...

There are many other Middlesex story elements that may be contained within Rearview Mirror -- indeed, any publication containing Detroit history (especially the more dramatic aspects of that history) might contain this same information. The key point is that a simple visit to a web page and the links it references can provide enough inspiration for settings, entire scenes, and rich details that you'll be able to progress on several chapters of a future bestseller and award-winner.

To be clear, I'm not in any way making a negative judgment on the way in which the book's content was conceived -- in fact, I'm a fan of Middlesex's factual acccessibility because it demonstrates the legitimacy of using the Internet as a time-saving aid for the bulk of one's research and inspiration. I don't really know that Mr. Eugenides actually used Rearview Mirror for his research, but I submit that had he visited the site, he or some other writer might have been inspired to create a novel with similar scenes, settings, and details.

In the end, the confirmation of the book's historical accuracy makes me appreciate it even more. Since it is fiction the book takes some liberties at filling in the official record's missing information, most notably in its obviously imagined myth of the Nation of Islam's founder and the rather appealing conspiracy theory about the 1967 riots as a true rebellion beyond simple, mindless violence.

But Mr. Eugenides shows writers very clearly that the real world contains ground fertile for imagination. The gaps in the known record of our world are opportunities for the writer skilled in language and storytelling. And with toys like the Internet, today's writers have an incredibly powerful tool to help them uncover and validate those specks of realism that underlie compelling fiction...

11月24日

Respect the D

Just found a great column about the Pistons written by a USC prof and native Detroiter Todd Boyd that talks about the link between the Pistons' style, its image, its economy, and the region's racial climate and history.

Oh, and by the way, the Pistons recovered from their first loss of the season with a very convincing win tonight against a good team.

Back on subject...

I've always found it strange that the incidents of sports violence associated with the city, namely the craziness after the Tigers' 1984 World Series victory and last year's infamous fight at the Palace were blamed on "Detroit." I don't want to go into the us vs. them game, but from a factual standpoint, the people involved in these incidents were most likely not from Detroit itself, but from the smaller cities that collectively make Detroit the focus of any negative images of the region. It's almost like Detroit gets to take the blame for anything bad that happens in southeast Michigan.

Regardless, I think the prof is right that both city and suburbs are becoming a little more of one mind on the issue of the region's image -- all of us are fairly fed up with the unfairness typified by the incident with the Sacramento Kings' pre-game montage of a burned-out city, so it's that much easier for both city and suburb to support the Pistons image of toughness and the fairly accurate belief that no one respects the Pistons. When the team won the 2004 finals, fans and team paraded in downtown Detroit, and you could see both city-dwellers and suburbanites united in their pride in the team and the fact that the team won with defiance.

That sense of defiance is probably even more intense right about now with dinosaur automobile industries and job woes sinking the fortunes of the entire state. Perhaps we can learn something from a sports team -- outsiders' lack of respect for Detroit is a great motivation for us to do whatever is necessary to conquer our problems.

We can re-train for new industries, root out corrupt politicians, end racial politics, sacrifice sure financial security elsewhere for the chance to rescue a region, hustle -- all to expose the falsehood of the naysayers and to demonstrate the city's unique brand of toughness.

And even when we succeed, you know we will still not get any credit. :)

0:07:16 | 添加评论 | 固定链接 | 写入日志 | News and politics

11月20日

Hasenpfeffer -- It's for real (I think)

This is random. For some reason, my mind became fixated on that old Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs convinces a spoiled king who wants to eat Bugs for dinner that the king really doesn't want bunny, he wants hasenpfeffer. I'm sure I haven't seen it since before high school, yet for some reason it's stuck with me even in my advanced age...

I wanted to see if hasepfeffer was a real thing or if Bugs had just made it up, so I guessed that it might be German (how could something with "feffer" in it not be German?) and made up a suitably Teutonic spelling to throw into the search engine -- amazingly, it scored several hits, including a recipe for a rabbit stew, which meant that Bugs was even more clever in his ridicule than I realized when I was all of 8 years old.

I am giving myself a pat on the back for successfully spelling a word I wasn't sure existed in a language of which I have zero knowledge.

But I am a little frightened -- judging from the search results, I'm not the only person whose mind was imprinted with this word at an early age.

Now if I can just find a restaurant that serves hasenpfeffer...

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The Bad Michigan Sports Weekend

These things happen sometimes:

Michigan lost its annual matchup with the red-staters down under. The worst was that we seemed to have solved them and were on the verge of tanking their season, only to let them march down the field at the end of the game for exactly the score they needed to to go ahead and use up the clock.
The Pistons' season-starting unbeaten streak ended at 8 games after we allowed Dallas to win by nearly 40 points. Yes, it was the end of a back-to-back on the road, but shooting a little above 30% and being down by 20 at halftime aren't what you'd expect from a team trying to prove that it's unbeaten streak wasn't just an artifact of being scheduled against 8 mediocre to weak teams.
The Red Wings lost their 4th straight after staring the season 15-2. Now I really do not understand or truly follow hockey, it's just a nice feeling to see their wins pile up. It would have been the small consolation for the Wolverine and Pistons losses.
The Lions lost on Sunday. Of course this was no surprise. Sadly, our opponent (Dallas again) played poorly and we gave them the game by getting a ridiculous number of penalties to keep their woeful offense alive (the Dallas quarterback threw for a mere 110 yards). At least the struggling Lion Joey Harrington played reasonably well in a statistical sense. Outside of a fumble, he had no picks and a decent completion percentage.
I'm no Michigan State fan, but there are a surprisingly large number of such individuals outside East Lansing. They also lost on their way to restoring pride to Penn State's program.

And there we have it -- 2 days of continuous losses by the state's major sports attractions. All right, I didn't look at the Michigan Men's basketball team, it's possible they won a game (the embarrassment from my class's Fab Five scandal has caused me to de-prioritize this sport for the time being).

At least the Tigers didn't lose.

The good thing is that we now have some losses out of our systems. Michigan will go to some WeedEater Bowl or similarly named attraction and vent its frustrations on some hapless lesser-known school. The Pistons will no longer have the pressure of trying to be the NBA's version of the 1972 Dolphins and can get back to beingg focused on the game rather than the streak. I'm sure the Red Wings will recover.

The Lions? The fans will continue to like whichever quarterback was not the last one to lose.

Now I have to say, as much as I'd like to see my teams win (especially when you're living far from home), I'd trade it all for fixes to the city's non-sports related problems.

For now, Go BLUE, Pistons, Wings, and Lions...

17:25:58 | 添加评论 | 固定链接 | 写入日志 | Entertainment

11月12日

Looking for Solutions

I have not yet read Origins of the Urban Crisis, a book that posits that the institutionalization of poverty in Detroit is merely extreme and not unique for U.S. cities.

This interview of the author contains an observation I've noted in other contexts about the role that the U.S. government has had in shaping technology and social trends through "big-government" subsidy programs. The software industry, Internet, westward expansion, and vast development of suburbs are only a few examples of big spending producing a lasting change that is taken for granted as part of contemporary society.

For those of us looking for ways to fix cities like Detroit, the question then is whether such spending is an option for reversing some of the damage done by the population and business exodus from Detroit?

To be clear I believe that Detroit, the region, the state, and its industries own all the accountability for solving our problems, but it's intriguing to consider whether a finite sum of money could help solve seemingly intractable issues that affect not just Detroit but almost all of the nation's most populous cities.

I will need to read further.

Conspiracies of 'Urb and 'Burb

Here's an interesting column on the continued dysfunctionality of urban / suburban relations in southeast Michigan.

For those unfamiliar with metropolitan Detroit and its recent history, here are the two conspiracies that seem to drive the politics, economy, and social interactions of the region:

Suburb Conspiracy: the suburban whites who fled the city and its growing Black population in the late 1960's and early 1970's has been patiently waiting to replace Detroit's Black elected leaders with a puppet who would sell out the Black population and allow them to reclaim the city after somehow expelling all of us Black folks.

Urban Conspiracy: Detroit is filled with a pathologically violent population of low moral character that threatens to destroy the entire metropolitan region unless suburban municipalities isolate themselves by re-creating the region's core economy and institutions in the suburbs without Detroit and create physical, legal, and other barriers to deter Detroiters from entering the "safe" suburbs.

A news flash to both camps that is quite obvious to everyone outside of Michigan: each of these mythologies is the path to destruction for the entire region, both city and suburbs. These ideas are based not on empiricism but are simply superstitions based on mindless fear.

There is a path out of the region's dire future folks, but we have got to make the choice to walk it together.

22:30:34 | 添加评论 | 固定链接 | 写入日志 | News and politics

Perfect Pistons

The 6-0 Pistons did a great job finding a way to win on the second night of a back-to-back after an intense game with Phoenix.

They've earned their Saturday and Sunday off, and I have the whole weekend to enjoy the perfection while it lasts...

11月11日

The Kwame Conspiracy

Defying pre-election surveys, exit polls, and the rational expectation that someone who abuses city funds for nationally embarrassing escapades in Lincoln Navigators is not fit to lead a struggling city of a million people, Kwame preserved his hold on power as Detroit's mayor for four more years.

Was the election result a conspiracy? There is no evidence to support this -- Kwame attributed his come-from-behind victory to the "streets" and Desiree Cooper seems to agree with him in a very bold analysis. Her take on this struck a chord with me for some reason, and not just because I'm one of those bourgeois Negroes in her piece. It is consistent with the mentalities I observed as I grew up on the West Side. As Desiree said, in Detroit, "not all Blacks are Black."

I suppose the election result isn't surprising in a nation that re-elected a president responsible for the falsely justified and horribly executed Iraq invasion.

Enough complaining -- I'll post something constructive shortly. But first, I have to say that during the evening of November 8th's election in Detroit, my mind was spinning theories of conspiracy. In Seattle we'd had our own local elections as well, and I was sadly facing the reality of the overwhelming defeat of Seattle's inept attempt at a citywide monorail. The Black Helicopter would still travel within the confines of a traffic-jam-limited bus. I had some solace in a victory on an anti-smoking intiative and the defeat of a spectacularly bold and ruthless attempt to elminate medical patients' rights.

Still, most of my hopes were pinned on the outcome of the election back home, which the conventional wisdom claimed was solidly in the grasp of the challenger Freman Hendrix who would sweep away our disgraced and ineffective anointed leader and bring us leadership based in realism, transparency, and competent execution, and lacking in self-promotion and indulgence. But at 8pm PST, I was dismayed that none of Detroit's media, despite being three hours later than us, had projected a winner. The polls had closed three hours earlier, yet no one was willing to project a winner?

I scanned WDIV, the Free Press, and several other sites only to find proclamations of a "tight race" with a "narrow lead" for Hendrix. Ominously, the Free Press mentioned that a "glitch" was responsible for a lack of precinct results, fanning the embers of my conspiracy mania. Still, it seemed that Hendrix's victory was inevitable.

Somewhere after midnight in Seattle, I refreshed WDIV and found that Kilpatrick had suddenly siezed a narrow lead. I was concerned, but my sleepy mind's reason held that there was really no way that the final result could contradict all of the exit polls I had seen throughout the evening giving leads to Hendrix. The discrepancy was a temporary artifact of the tabulation process, and assuming our (now ex-) clerk was not engaging in fraud greater than that which had caught the FBI's attention, Hendrix's victory was assured. Time to sleep peacefully and let myself wake to a new day for me in Seattle and a new day for Detroit itself.

This was not to be. The morning brought us back to the reality of the night before -- any chance at the city being run according to the interests of its citizens rather than that of preserving its leaders power had become mere memory.

Here's what's hard to accept:

That Detroiters still think it's just after 1967 and their most urgent problems are caused by suburbanites.

That Detroiters don't see the terrible results they've reaped from their current leader as the city heads toward bankruptcy.

That leaders like Jesse Jackson would make de facto campaign appearances for Kilpatrick after Rosa Parks' funeral.

That a leader like Jesse Jackson happily accepts that jeopardizing the future of a city and a region is worth supporting an anointed member of the Black establishment.

Now, I believe strongly in the city's future. I believe this for a host of reasons. But I think these recent developments greatly increase the chance that the city's recovery will only happen after it is plunged into a most desperate state, one that requires all that can be mustered of the region's history, ingenuity, creativity, suffering, and forbearance. It does not have to be this way.

How many times has history shown us a leader addicted to power who repented of the vice? It's possible, and we have to pray for it of course, but Kwame has shown us nothing to demonstrate that he acts as a servant of the city rather than its entitled reason for existence.

Of course, this shows us that the Black power structure is no different than the non-Black establishment. Power supports power, and power will find a way to use race to manipulate the impoverished heirs of a segregated city into ignoring its abuses the same way it will use religion to blind an entire country to failed wars and hostile domestic economic policies.

So while the count of the ballots may not itself have been tainted by conspiracy, this was an election where conspirators in power, and not the people, made their voices heard.

21:46:40 | 添加评论 | 固定链接 | 写入日志 | News and politics

'Don't Tread on D'

I'm glad the Sacramento Kings apologized for an insulting pre-game video depicting all the negative stereotypes of Detroit as a dead and decayed city right before the Pistons whupped on them in their own arena on opening night.

Of course, I'm even happier the Pistons were the victors (first time in that Arena since 1996). :)

What surprised me is that while media coverage mentioned the injustice done toward the city, the team, and its fans, no one mentioned the embarrassment that any normal Sacramento fan should have felt. Stephen A. Smith denounced the move as something that "insulted a community" on his TV rant-fest "Quite Frankly" the following night, but I haven't heard a discussion of how insulted Sacramento fans must feel that someone in the Kings organization felt that their paying customers would be entertained by unprovoked, classless, tasteless hateration. Is that really what they think of their fans?

Oh, and I was surprised that the Sacramento Bee did not even mention the incident in their two stories published by noon on the day following the game, despite the fact that ESPN, a national news outlet, lead with it in their game recap. It only appeared later in the day...

Anyway, we Detroiters are now used to this -- our image is much worse (and different) than our reality, and even some day when we finally solve the real problems of our home, these stereotypes will linger on.

In the end, what mattered was winning the basketball game itself and keeping the eyes on the prize. The same is true for the city and the region in its struggle for a viable future -- we have to remember that while the disrespect is harmful, the magnitude of damage is meaningless compared to that caused by real problems that are in our power to solve.

We have the power to fix things, as bleak as the image may appear.

After the game, Rasheed Wallace said this about the video and its inability to prevent the Pistons from winning: "Don't tread on 'D'." Tru dat.

20:36:51 | 添加评论 | 固定链接 | 写入日志 | Entertainment

10月27日

Utility Pole Blog on Homelessness

The light pole by my bus stop at Garfield High School on 23rd avenue isn't normally where you'd expect to find a link to someone's blog, but as you can see from the picture, this is indeed what happened to me the other day.

I have no idea how much of it is truth (judge for yourself), but as disturbing as it sounds, it's not unrealistic. Most Americans don't realize that they're one unfortunate incident from homelessness, and in this person's tale, we see a fairly plausible (one-sided) portrait of how society treats the poor and homeless.

A real-life police-state conspriacy story if true... Here's a less dramatic story of a family teetering at the edge of losing everything.

10月26日

Shadow Government in the USA

Surprise -- allegations the President doesn't actually run the show come from a former administration official. This Slate article summarizes the criticisms from a retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson who served with both current President and the sire.

The article's quotes contain delicious use of "cabal," a word of joy to conspiracy theorists. The official's actual speech, delivered at an event for a think tank (how do you get a job at one of those?) can be found here.

That full transcript is an even better read because the speaker actually trots out the quote from that Eisenhower speech dear to every conspiracy-monger -- you know, the one about "the military industrial complex."

Anyway, the claim is that this little cabal, consisting of the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and some other like-minded notables, forced the rest of the government to carry out questionable (actually “stupid”) according to the cabal’s arbitrary master plan. The cabal abused executive branch power to force the federal "bureaucracy" (a term used in the speech without irony -- clearly this is a DC crowd) into carrying out actions it neither understood nor supported. The article singles out the State Department as one of these puppet bureaucracies, and mentions usual suspects like the CIA and FBI.

Sounds like what happens when Dilbert's boss gets to be Vice President. No wonder the administration is trying to pressure The Onion for headlines like "Bush to Appoint Someone to be in Charge of Country."

Interesting read, though of course a side effect is that the Col. has conveniently drummed up some interest in the upcoming book mentioned several times in the transcript.

Separately, I think I'd like to work at a think tank. The host for the speech was the New America Foundation, a group whose web site was touting itself today as "the think tank for Generation Next" (eeew, imagine a baby Wolfowitz). Look out RAND...

11:03:17 | 添加评论 | 固定链接 | 写入日志 | News and politics

10月25日

Rosa Parks Taught Me How to Ride the Bus

Even though Rosa Parks has moved on, we know she will be remembered. I'm proud that she came from Alabama, the same area in which a side of my family originated and still lives. And of course she spent the second half of her life in Detroit, a city that has always been proud to claim her. But even if I were somehow to forget about the course that Black people took through history, there is an even simpler reason I can't forget her-- it's just that I ride the bus every day.

One time buschick asked me why I was insisting on sitting near the front of the bus when I boarded. My answer: "Because of Rosa Parks!"

And besides, without Rosa we wouldn't have a Black girl named buschick. :)

The front wasn't just about being further from the back where all the bad kids that want to be cool will sit (hey, I want to be cool too). I like it because Rosa and another 42,000 Black people went through some thangs for a lot of important reasons, the least of which was to get me a seat as close to the front of the bus as I'd like (which these days isn't the very front -- I'll have to wait until I'm around 65 for that, but it gives me something to look forward to. :) )

So thank you Mrs. Parks -- now I can sit where I please, and each day I do so, I always see that memory of what it took to get me here.

From today's news:

Good-bye Mrs. Parks
Rosa Parks, matriarch of civil rights, dies at 92 - Race in America - MSNBC.com

10月23日

C-O-N-Spiracy

Conspiracy theories are so much fun in part because they tie unrelated events into convoluted streams that collectively take on a mythical life of their own, leading to the most entertaining and ridiculous speculation. As a Black Helicopter, I’m no stranger to conspiracies…

So to motivate myself to stay focused on blogging, and hopefully to provoke arguments if not some thought, I will carelessly declare the following unoriginal and unsophisticated theory of conspiracy:

The government of a certain world superpower is under the influence of a philosophy that elevates to the highest priority the cause of preserving power and its associated structures (well, I suppose this is a fairly common occurrence if you read enough history).

The external threat to this philosophy is foreign military strength and the control of key resources such as energy supplies, both of which limit the ability of those in power to exercise their strength or defend their very existence and fund their wealth-focused coalition of supporters and dependents.

The internal threat is mainly that of democracy, which advances the interests of the disempowered, often at the expense of the power structure.

This philosophy is currently being implemented through a series of foreign military excursions which address the external threat. Additionally, the implementation attacks the internal threat of democracy through a domestic social-class restructuring that decreases the wealth, education, and rationality of the average citizen in order to create a populace that can be manipulated into believing its interests are the same as those of the power structure, despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary.

I also claim that major events of the last four years, and even this year alone, are driven by this philosophy and directly support the theory.

Say it with me now -- C-O-N... Spiracy. :)

Disclaimer: I should make clear that in my academic career I steered away from social sciences in favor of humanities, natural sciences, and mathematics. Any posts with links to philosophers, political science theory, sociology, or other educational links will be most welcome. :)

What had happened was...

This is the Powerpoint of the events since the Black Helicopter went underground at the end of 2004:

1. December 2004: Returned from a Detroit holiday at the end of the year to ring in the new one in Seattle with buschick and the Space Needle’s fireworks.

2. March, April May 2005: Spent way too much time on business trips, but got to finally visit Manhattan as a result and caught up with some NY homies.

3. May 2005: Took my first trip outside of the U.S. / Canada to visit Paris with buschick, with a quick side trip to London. With the French-speaking buschick as my guide, I was able to engage in simple, scripted spoken communication with people in Paris, honoring buschick’s goal of not speaking English. My reasonably strong Spanish and penchant for wild-guessing allowed me to read most of the French signs and newspaper articles… We rode the trains of Paris and even weathered a transit strike.

4. Realized that with the business trips and Paris, I had not been home in Seattle for almost the entirety of a month.

5. June 2005: The Pistons valiantly defended their championship against worthy competition even after giving away a game, but finally relinquished their belts in the 4th quarter of the ultimate game 7.

6. From Seattle I endured a stream of bad news about Detroit’s mayor, the bankruptcies and struggles of large regional employers / entire industries such as Northwest Airlines, Visteon, Delphi (all bankrupt) and Ford and GM (debt downgraded to junk status).

7. July 2005: Watched Detroit handle a successful but boring Major League Baseball All-Star Game in spite of useless commentators who disrespected Ernie Harwell.

8. Became obsessed with Detroit’s art-deco skyscrapers and this weather-cam of the city’s skyline.

9. Went down south to Selma, Alabama, to be part of my family reunion. Despite nearly receiving stitches for my inept attempt at guarding my far more talented cousin in a friendly game of 21, it was hard to leave.

10. August 2005: Watched helplessly as another city with a distinct African-American culture, New Orleans was obliterated in part by a natural disaster but largely by the incompetence and neglect of an incompetent government and a larger society that ignores Black poverty as an accepted state of nature. Folks from the 313, does this sound familiar?

11. September 2005: Went to a conference of African-American employees sponsored by my employer as part of a diversity initiative. The collection of so many talented Black people in one spot was inspiring in a way that no work-related event ever has been for me. Fittingly, a post-conference gathering with some participants at the wonderful restaurant Marjorie yielded the best service and treatment I have ever experienced at any restaurant in the universe.

12. Stole buschick away on a trip to Detroit in September to see its beautiful skyscrapers, catch the Universoul Circus, see my wonderful parents, and “test ride” Detroit’s bus system among other things, and to officially ensure that my eventual return to live in Detroit would be with buschick. :)

13. October 2005: Calmed my fears about Detroit’s future by envisioning a new, uncorrupt city government, a focus beyond downtown-centric initiatives like the upcoming Super Bowl XL toward the city’s schools, and the identification of new industries outside the shrinking automobile industry.

14. Got mad at the Tigers for firing Alan Trammell, a cornerstone of some happy childhood sports memories.

15. Wished I could vote in Detroit’s upcoming mayoral election.

16. Wished the best for one of my best friends in Arizona as she purchased her first home. I know that she will bap it out with booj…

17. Wished buschick well on her new J.O.B.

18. Finally got over blog abandonment guilt and resumed pollution of the blog universe with my brand of Black geekdom / nerdism.

Coming up: ridiculous oversimplifications of current events, my recent Detroit adventures with buschick, a poorly informed visitor’s guide to Detroit for the Super Bowl, how to not own a car in Seattle, and my most ambitious to date, the Virtual Nation State (tm) system for dysfunctional democracies.

Buschick, thank you for your wonderful writing – the Black helicopters are now back in our skies…

BackBlog

It seems buschick’s recent marketing campaign as a featured space (Congratulations buschick!) is shaming me back into action. All along my blog's aims have been purposefully overambitious: to uncover the world’s conspiracies while weaving my own plot to restore the health and influence of the wonderful city of Detroit. These continue to be, at least in my mind, laudable goals worthy of blog resurrection.

For now I'll judge success by the frequency of my posts, but eventually I'd like to accomplish that rarest of feats, the expression of an idea that the world deems slightly "new."

At the moment I have a ridiculous backlog since my last post; world events have passed me by. I will need a few posts to catch up before resuming the mission.

At least I’m finally ready to say that this blog is back…

1:31:15 | 添加评论 | 固定链接 | 写入日志

12月25日

Pistons Victorious

My hometown team the 2004 World Champion Detroit Pistons just won their rematch against the Indiana Pacers on Christmas day. GO PISTONS!!!

I am tired of hearing about the fight at the Palace between these two teams -- it has definitely drained the Pistons emotionally as evidenced by a record hovering around .500, clearly an underperformance. I suspect they're so accustomed to the positive image they earned during the successful 2004 championship campaign that the team was highly demoralized when this incident suggested that all of last season's goodwill was transitory.

I am certainly ashamed of what the fans did at that infamous game, and I have to admit it's a setback for the Detroit area at a time that's extremely sensitive for us as we try to reverse our decades-long population loss.

Anyway, I hope today's peaceful win on Christmas day ends this for both teams and their respective cities. It was a good game between two teams from midwestern cities each enjoying a cold and snowy holiday. This was good fun for all the fans.

Now it is time for us all to move on -- we have bigger problems to solve anyway, like some deadly wars a few continents to the east, and some serious economic and social problems right in the middle of the U.S. of A.

For now, go Pistons...