cities + creatives

i've been thinking a lot about that combination (cities + creatives) lately. it helps having urbanism, to kind of ground and perpetuate this thinking. and i find myself doing even more bouncing back and forth. baltimore and detroit. (our first day of class a slide was shown of the demographics of detroit and the surrounding area. it was stark. black and white.)

i sat in on a discussion group this past week with the maryland state arts council (there was free food) and they asked us to reflect on various things... mainly our most pressing concerns and things we would like to see happen in our communities. and i realized that baltimore is doing so many things well. artscape is a three day long celebration of arts, claimed to be america's largest free public arts festival. organizations like art on purpose, the creative alliance, school 33, and baltimore clayworks are popping up all over. and part of that is driven by the mica led community arts movement and graduate students participating in the newly created masters of art in community arts (maca) program. most of our major musuems are free. (baltimore musuem of art, the walters, etc.) the baltimore office of promotion of the arts (bopa for short) has allowed for an increased emphasis on grant giving and public art making. they spearhead programming initiatives like free fall baltimore.

& then i came across this really interesting article from back home (by way of an urban planning website called planetizen.) i love that after the mess kwame kilpatrick has made of detroit, someone can stand up and say that a solution to standing back up as a city might be more abstract, that art has validity beyond just image, that attention to aesthetics can seep into the subconscious of a community and build its confidence.

here's an excerpt from that metro times piece, called "wake up the neighborhood."

"Reading that reminded me that I love Detroit because of all you Ferdinands (cheval) who live here. You view buildings as vessels rather than "developments." You appreciate Detroit not just because of what it used to be or could be, but because the city has a special power and you feel plugged in. That's what you capitalize on. You recognize that far too many of our architects and urban planners — supposedly creative thinkers — are dreaming up lofts and paving over green space. And in the absence of globally minded government leaders, you consider artists visionaries. You literally take matters into your own hands, rebuilding your home or your neighborhood. In the scorched earth, you see potential for life to flourish again."

the picture above is from a guerrilla art effort in detroit. (called "disney demolition") abandoned buildings were suddenly getting coated with this pumpkin orange paint. and the thing is, it didn't take long after they got this face lift that the city finally reacted and demolished them.

fathers day

when i got the word that tiger stadium was finally slated for demolition, i did what anyone with an appreciation for photography and baseball would do. panic. it shouldn't have been that big a deal. they've been threating/planning this for years now. and my dad has already gotten his memorabilia. but seeing as i will be in baltimore for the next few weeks, i won't be around to chain myself to the fence when that wrecking ball comes. (i'll leave that in harwell's hands.)




at the very least, i had to go down one last time and get some pictures. it's a totally different scene down at that ballpark. deserted. (well, obviously.) and really eerie. (jackie and i got sort of lost on the way to death cab last week. and somehow ended up on trumbull. and all of the sudden, there's tiger stadium. just chilling.) i convinced my dad to drive down to detroit, and it turned into this father's day outing. which worked out quite nicely.


happy fathers day, dad!

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....

visual essay: detroit

taken at the museum of contemporary art detroit at the exhibition: "words fail me."

from detroit to baltimore, and back again

this past semester investigating baltimore, i have often been reminded of detroit. there are so many similarities between the two places, but for some reason i only feel such a sense of urgency when i'm in baltimore. maybe i've just been surrounded by detroit my whole life that i need to step away from it for four years to be able to return and truly see it with new eyes. but when i'm traveling home, (wherever that happens to be for three days, five weeks, or a semester) both places stay at the forefront of my mind and i search to connect and reconcile the two.

i've already stumbled across two thing that are making the connection for me.

an entertainment type newspaper my dad saved for me with john waters on the cover holding a "baltimore city jail" sign. crime and john waters, how much more stereotypical can you get? but there was some truth hidden in the article- john waters on detroit: "john waters says he likes detroit because of its connection to his beloved baltimore, where he still lives and sets all of his films. both cities, he says, have suffered from negative publicity and an inferiority complex. 'we've been tough and funny and praised stuff that other people would try to hide,' he says. 'we've made it a style.'"

and a week-long detroit free press project called "driving detroit: it's worse than you think- but better, too." this was an exciting find for two reasons:

one, i've been wanting to do this thing for a few years now, sort of a photographic documentation/mapping of woodward avenue from start to finish. it's one of those ideas that i know is good because it has stuck in the back of my head for so long. i can see it so vividly. a panoramic type bridging together of photographs covering every inch of the street, covered with a long transparent overlay that would begin to get deeper with details and handwritten street names, and something that would come together and be displayed on the walls around a big gallery space. maybe now that i have all this winter break time on my hands i'll actually start doing it. just seeing the tagline for "driving detroit" on the cover of the free press gave me the comfort of knowing someone else is thinking the same thing. that's when it becomes more of a mentality, maybe eventually even a movement.

two, mapping has been a hot topic in baltimore. it's something that was introduced to me my first day of finding baltimore when we made self-maps. something that we are, at a basic level, asking each kid to do when the create something for "a neighborhood called baltimore." it's also the topic of a major exhibition coming to the walters art museum next year, "maps: finding our place in the world," and the community generated project presented in tandem, "maps on purpose," conceived by baltimore's art on purpose. it's also something that i'm finding more and more that i need to do for myself, lay it all out on the table and start connecting the dots.

a sad day at comerica park

tigers loose. 8-5. a not so thrilling game. at least we got a verlander baseball. and some pictures of our favorite vender... shawn.