Motor City Journal: 4) The Tour
On my brother David’s annual urban-renewal tour of city center, we confirmed the reported removal of concrete barricades from the GM Ren Center entrance and a new strip park extending to Cobo Hall along the river shore. Apart from Greek Town, the stadium developments, MGM Casino, and Compuware seem forbidding structures, plunked down arbitrarily, wary of their community. A mishmash of poor designs and no doubt trickling development monies has blighted—for the foreseeable future—the parks and traffic circles along lower Woodward Avenue. Detroit is one of few large cities with expensive low-rise townhouses downtown (bulldozed tracts acquired on the cheap?), but planners seem to have omitted essential services.
When services and public transit links are one day in place, magnificent deco structures like the Penobscot Building won’t appear out of place—restored gothic edifices like the Book and the Book Cadillac buildings will put this Gotham back on the map. Then the swinging, closed-fist arm sculpture at the foot of Woodward will again mean business.
posted by Paul at 9:42 AM
Motor City Journal: 3) Interior Space
If the flash of my digital camera slightly distorts interior colors—the light blue living room on Audubon may in reflection now have a lavender cast—outdoors the bare trees, thin snow covering, and monotone sky drain color to a narrow range of gray. During the Great Lake winter color doesn’t distort and the bare forms of things—trees, demarcating fence and hedge lines—stand revealed. Over scraped sidewalks you move deliberately through the cold unaccommodating air between interior spaces: car, work, and home.
At home for Christmas at my brother’s house in Michigan, I pass through warm, wood-paneled rooms and others brightly painted, adorned with seasonal decorations. From the kitchen waft aromas of coffee with buttery glazed fruit strudels early; the hunger-satisfying rich flavors of beef tenderloin or baked ham late. In the indolence of unallocated time—to catch up with family—TVs are ready to divert, a novel basks in a side lamp’s warm glow, and the current puzzle waits patiently for the next fitted piece.
posted by Paul at 4:33 PM
Motor City Journal: 2) At the Movies
Films viewed over Christmas offer little solace—fewer simplified answers—for folks shell-shocked from higher continual levels of unemployment than any experienced since The Great Depression, while our representative government shifts resources relentlessly toward aggressive foreign war.
Scorcese’s final shot of standing Twin Towers culminates
Gangs of New York's internecine bloodbath for a despised turf. Supposedly revenge-driven, the ambitious, flawed screenplay is really about immigrants’ brutal competition to survive at society’s lowest rung. If Day-Lewis’s “nativist” thug is unmatched for ruthless mayhem, look no higher for moral uplift. Colorful broad-brush sketches come to represent elites (Boss Tweed, Politics, Horace Greeley, Media, a Mr. Schermerhorn, Society); in Scorcese’s vision power and wealth only seal hypocritical veneers. DiCaprio’s character Amsterdam, with whom we identify, may still be beautiful but he’s hardly blameless. ("History has to live with what was here…” —Robert Lowell)
posted by Paul at 4:48 PM
