we went there to feel alive

spending time on my laptop today, i started to organize all of the websites i've bookmarked this past year, putting them into their respective categories (design, art, blogs, baltimore, museums, etc.)

i came across a link to something called sweet juniper, and couldn't remember what it was. i clicked on it, and from what i could gleam at first, it is some sort of a blog. it appears to be a stay at home dad discussing diapers and the necessity of low expectations. i scroll down to find this relevant post about the validity of "blogging" to begin with. (something i am agreeing with now that the school year is done and i am finding fewer things of worth to write about...)

and that post leads me to a link discussing a recent discovery of his: the abandoned detroit public schools book depository. and i am in awe. he writes first about growing up and going into abandoned buildings "back in the day." how he puts it, "the town had died, but we went there to feel alive."

i think it is hard not to feel something (whatever that something is...) when looking at these. i find the whole thing enthralling. below are some snippets of text that had particular resonance with me, but i urge you to flip through the pictures and read the blog entries and comments on your own, too. find the meaning for yourself. let the links take you where they may...


"books that once sat in boxes on shelves are now strewn about the floor in post-apocalyptic confusion. perhaps the missing shelves were made of some metal worth hauling to the scrapyard for a few dollars that could be traded for crack. who knows, maybe some kids just got bored one day and wanted to make a big mess. there is no longer any organization in this warehouse. there are no longer any supplies here that appear 'usable' in the sense they would have been in 1990. here, chaos will reign until it all is destroyed"

"the photos, it seems, spoke for themselves: to some they said black people couldn't be trusted to govern themselves, to others that the taxes we pay for education are inevitably wasted, and that our system public education itself is a failure. and here I just thought they were beautiful."

"all that's left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential. it is almost impossible not to see all this and make some connection between the needless waste of all these educational supplies and the needless loss of so many lives in this city to poverty and violence, though the reality of why these supplies were never used is unclear."

"what seems clear is that sometimes a system simply breaks down and fails."

"were the warehouse to be destroyed, like any other of the hundreds or even thousands that are torn down in detroit every year, its bricks, its crushed concrete, rebar, and its contents would be hauled away in garbage trucks to be dumped in a landfill somewhere, covered up by more trash, and lost to us, forever. instead, because this is detroit, it just sits there. it is left unsecured, open to scrappers, looters, crackheads, graffiti artists, suburban taggers, vandals, prostitutes, and local bloggers."


under one of the pictures, he included this quote as a caption:

"but instead of the old gods, [it] is a greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the olympian forces. it’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason... individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. in this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of american empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak."
david simon, talking about his show, the wire.

hmmm. back to baltimore. i'm taking that as a sign that i finally need to figure out how to see some of that show....