A different kind of uprising

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Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry" murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts

It was like a new bird was born out of the burnt ashes of the phoenix Sunday.

If you don't live in the U.S. you might not know about the big hype over TV ads they run during the Super Bowl, the playoff football game between the two conferences of the National Football League. Advertisements cost $3 million per thirty seconds of air time. People like me who don't care about American football watch between touchdowns when the ads come on, for the entertainment, and to see if they spent their money well. For the most part, they're a whole lotta money spent on silly. In fact, the ads were so mediocre Sunday that Don started flipping to other channels during ads. Poor Madison Avenue.

But apparently in the third quarter an ad aired that hadn't hit the Internet ahead of time like many ads had done. It was two minutes long, unprecedented for Super Bowl ads, and cost $9 million to produce and air. (Sounds like maybe they got a bargain.) After the Packers beat the Stealers, the buzz started, and the ad was aired by 2,000 news organizations, including the NBC evening news that we watched Monday night. I immediately loaded it on YouTube and watched. It had 1.5 million views by then after the first 24 hours. At the moment of this post it has 4,740,910 views. The ad was made for the new Chrysler 200 automobile, starring Eminem, but more than being a car ad, it is an ad for Detroit. It's called "Imported from Detroit." Be among the millions and watch the ad here or at the bottom of this post. Chrysler is being criticized for taking the $15 billion bailout from us taxpayers, still being in debt, and then spending so much money on this ad. But as one of the "shareholders" of this loan (which won't be paid back, since they filed bankruptcy), I think the ad might be a good investment. The Chrysler 200 web site traffic has increased 1600%.

Of my 54 years, some of which I lived in Chicago, Oregon, California, and Istanbul, 43 years have been  in Michigan, with Detroit down the road. Two years we lived a couple of miles from the General Motors proving grounds. I grew up when the population shifted from the city of Detroit to the suburbs, becoming one of the wealthiest metropolitan areas of the country, sadly and ironically, as the city of Detroit began collapsing in on itself. The peacock strutted as the phoenix burned. Simultaneously there was the excitement of Motown Records, making black musical artists like Stevie Wonder (from Lansing, where I was born) international stars. After the Twelfth Street race riot of 1967, we felt the heart of Detroit turn sour, as white flight, political corruption, a disappearing tax base, and the decline of the American-made automobile turned a once gilded city into a sepulchre. There was little to be proud of, it seemed, and we felt the shame as the whole world thought of Detroit as the armpit city of the U.S.

Slowly a few have started to invest in Detroit. I've been skeptical, wondering how those with money to invest would want to do so in a still failing city. While our daughter Lesley attended art school in the heart of Detroit's cultural center, the city buses stopped running at night. The workers in the city who had no cars of their own couldn't even get to a night job! Automobile plants closed one by one as imported cars like Toyota and Honda became more and more popular. Unemployment rose, until Michigan's economy was one of the worst in the country. In high school when Lesley went to punk rock concerts at venues in Detroit, I worried about her in Detroit at night, even with friends. In the last few years, when I've wanted to go photograph interesting neighborhood art projects there, Don hasn't wanted me to go alone, even in the daytime. It's just how we think of Detroit.

So when the Super Bowl ad titled "Imported from Detroit" played, a miracle happened. I could feel the city down the road rising up from its nearly burnt out forging fires. You can watch the two minute ad for yourself, and maybe you'll feel something of its power too. As my friend at work said, whose husband was a Detroit cop for twenty years (such terrible tales he tells!), "he was speechless, and I cried." What is so moving to me about this little film-ad is how it gets inside the very aspects of Detroit that we had thought were its weaknesses, and convinces me they are its strengths! The laboring class, abandoned buildings, keeping on with toughness, even when everyone says you're burned up and out.

This little ad has inspired me to turn my attention to Detroit and share things with you. In the ad you can see shots of Diego Rivera's 1932-33 Detroit Industry murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts (top photo of this post). I'll write about that eleven month project soon, the only Rivera murals in the U.S., and what he thought of as his most important work. This is across the street from a beautiful art deco hotel where he lived while he painted the fresco in the gorgeous atrium court of the DIA and his wife Frieda Kahlo visited, and where our Lesley lived while she went to art school a block away. I felt such pride as I watched the Chrysler ad, about just these murals alone. I want my friends to know something good about Detroit. But I promise I will show you some of the "sepulchre" along with the "gilt."

As long as I live in Michigan, I want to pay attention to this city, as it keeps rising and filling its dead, abandoned spaces again with life. Maybe it will be safe one day for me to take my future grandchildren to walk its streets any time, just as we will in Chicago and New York City.

Detroit skyline on the Detroit River, viewed from Windsor, Ontario, Canada
taken the year we went to the North American Auto Show in 2007


The Chrysler ad "Imported from Detroit":

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S is for

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S is for


               soft      
  sapphire
snow     
  shadow 
     slide
        slow
       sinuous
 saxophone
     surrender           

Other S words to describe you, your day, jazz, or just anything you love?

Miles Davis & John Coltrane ~ Kind of Blue

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Quick winter project: re-covering work as play

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."   ~ Carl Jung

"Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder."

~ Mason Cooley

I love this chair that I adopted and then neglected. Now I'm gonna play with it.

I bought it fifteen years ago at a garage sale of a prominent businessman for $20. It is hand-carved, and although it is not meant for comfortable sitting, I like how it looks. It could be pretty old, I haven't had an appraiser look at it. I found fabric at Calico Corners to re-cover the seat, since I didn't particularly care for the colors and pattern of the one it had. The distressed-look linen I bought conjures Louisa May Alcott or Jane Austen. Drool. For years the chair has served a fine purpose as a "bookshelf" in the bedroom, with the fabric I bought lying on the seat under the books, well protected. A chair that you don't sit on much, because it might be more for decor than function, is called an occasional chair. This one could be called a never chair.

When we rearranged the living room recently and took out the bulky dining table we almost never used, I remembered the bookshelf occasional chair. Transporting it from a dark corner of the bedroom to the warm light of the occasional room, minus the books, renewed my interest in re-covering the chair.

This was a fast, easy project (about an hour). Quite silly that it took me fifteen years to get to this and enjoy the chair. Note to self: Play with the things you love now, don't put it off.

I took the ribbon trim off the edge of the seat, exposing the staples. I didn't need to take the fabric off; I just put the new fabric right on top.

I made a muslin pattern first, then cut the linen following it. While I cut the muslin I was thinking about the muslin dresses Jane and Elizabeth Bennet wore in Pride & Prejudice. Wouldn't I have loved to be one of the Bennet sisters . . . one of the elder sisters. I also thought about the younger sisters remaking hats with new trims. I felt connected with all those Bennet girls -- re-using, recycling, remaking.

Don helped me with the staple gun, stapling the new fabric onto the wood base, because I lack wrist strength (carpal tunnel). Then I re-attached the trim with a glue gun.

Here sits the occasional chair in the corner with a Paris pen & ink, 200-year-old poetry books from my dad's collection, and a few things I inherited from Grandma Olive, herself a very good re-user and re-maker -- a re-creator): Cupid lamp, lyre table, tea box, oriental carpet, and Navajo rug.

This has been a nice Sunday activity, and it gave me something to blog about. (I know, I always have such a hard time coming up with something, don't I? Pshaw!)

And as Mr. Darcy said to Miss Elizabeth Bennet:

"Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."

A great many things from the past give me pleasure!

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Stormy

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Snow clogs the air, ominously and thrillingly. It neutralizes time and blows into mind the Big Blizzard of ‘67 when I was smaller by a drift or two.

You were already a windswept woman in 1967, my raven sister, fruited in a peach twinset and slim wool pants, accentuating your hourglass. By the fire you styled my adolescent hair like Twiggy’s. You, a lover of storms. I could feel your excitement in the comb and clicking scissors as the skies emptied themselves, like feathers falling from seam-ripped pillows around the black oak trees outside our windows. My head was safe in your hands. You took such care with me.

You were wild. Like a restless, exotic bird, kept indoors. Not angry, though once in a while you cried out -– your energy misunderstood, sometimes dark, as complex and giving as thunderhead clouds -- sky-filling, gleaming, powerful and beautiful. But we of the minister’s clan must be quiet, controlled, stable. You were a little dangerous and unpredictable, with an immense, soft, roiling heart. Romantic, impassioned, with boundless vigor for design and fun that had to be somehow channeled through the church: Youth Group parties, bridal showers, champagneless-danceless weddings!

On that day in ‘67 it was as if you required a storm in your flesh, its turbulence a counterweight to restore and calm what bled in you like a red sky. You needed it. You greeted it, unafraid. When Mom said we were out of milk, it was your chance! You escaped the house-pocketed air for a staple from the grocery store, miles away, on foot. We barely understood, and you were gone! -- slogging with booted piston feet in knee-deep drifts, black hair flying like a crow leaning into the wind and stinging seeds of snow. You needed the storm’s blinding fury to temper and protect your wildness.

How could I know if you’d return? So many hours the blizzard howled on. I distracted myself with games of Sorry, Scrabble, Chinese Checkers. Lunch. Lying face first on the bamboo toboggan skimming down the hill between scores of oaks on the way to the iced lake. More games and staring into orange fireplace flames. On the snow fell. The light changed, the sky grew gray around black tree branches that bordered the deep, empty driveway.

Before nightfall, your stomping feet at the back door! Your crimson face as saturated as a morning sky -- Warning! The raven woman is back, and her black hair is shining blue! She carries milk in her brown paper bag -- triumphant! I wanted to dance a wild dance, like birds among the oak branches, the sky dumping confetti all around!

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A focus on blue

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If you focus on one thing among the many, a deeper connection ensues. It’s like a research paper. You lug an underarm tower of books from the library to scour the one thing. You become consumed by blue whales, for instance (not literally, one hopes) and along the way you learn about plankton.

And the blue in the ocean.

I visited the cathedral at Chartres, like a ship in a field. Its thousand-year-old windows sang wet and saturated songs of blue. An ancient melody of a clear conscience. Guilt-free. How did they get the blue up there high in the holy arches so close to Heaven? And how did the man-dominated church manage to commission this freedom, clarity and hope from the makers of that glass? What contract with the sun to illumine the labyrinth -- so cold, so hard and mysterious, crawled by hopeful, prayerful knees?

Blue became a thesis. French blue.

And so the research project that was really just a recognition, an attention-paying, a consciousness, tucked itself into the soft heart’s cortex.

Two years later and it’s the Van Gogh gallery at the Orsay. You know how it goes. You are being attentive to the Degas ballet bronze. The train station converted to a creamy dreamy galley-dome. The special exhibit of smoke rising like alive ribbons. The wall-size clock window framing the distant Sacré-Cœur on the Montmartre butte (embraced by a blue sky), a white counter-point to the Orsay’s arc. You are beyond emotion already, in a state of above, of afloat. You walk into the room of Van Goghs, which is just a white cube with two doorways like so many museum rooms. White sand. Or wheat. And there is the water of blue that has lapped itself in your psyche like an unstoppable tide that comes back over and over to your shore.

Paintings on the white walls: the mid-afternoon silky blue sky above siesta sleepers against a haystack; an indigo dome asterisked with stars that declares: I exist; calm sky-blue walls of a bedroom neatly stocked with a blonde wood bed, dresser and chair. Everything else recedes -- all colors, all paints, all frames, even stars -- and only blue steps forward, like waves. Where do you turn when you reunite with blue?

Only around and around.

Tears.

Guilt, or bitterness, runs out to another room where a color like Delacroix red turns it into desire.

How does color tell our hearts what to feel?

If you pay attention to one thing on your way through the many, your heart will connect. (This can be beautifully pleasant, and also painfully difficult, depending on the point of focus.)

Hand-stitched wool crewel blue peacocks on my Indian bag.

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Quiet, dear soul

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Quiet,
dear soul,

spiraling

through a palace

of angels --
their thundering,
bidding heartbeats,
their lightning glances
and their blinding,
stair-stepping
feathery flames.

Come out

to the empty field
in the cool morning
and listen
to nothing,
no voice,
no song,
no sound

and almost no
wind

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Poem: What survives

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Photo 'lead type' from jm3 at flickr
via Creative Commons license

Our children, and subsequent children, will know little about the printing press, movable type, and typesetting, except from history books and very cool art departments where book printing continues as an art form. My Uncle Jimmie had his own printing press and these tiny letters and symbols of different fonts. He had a nice little private printing business and printed our wedding invitations thirty-three years ago. I got to thinking about the loss of this painstaking "black art" sometime late afternoon yesterday, when I looked out the deck window and noticed that all the birds were gone. There had been hundreds of them on top of the bird seed on the ground all day. It got me thinking about . . .

What survives

Not a one is left
on the basin of ground

under the spruce tree
where sunflower seeds cover
snow

like black letters
on a white page

And evening draws down
its fade --

sky, rooftops and ground
the same shade of white-gray

The bamboo leaves
are still

and graceful,
like vintage wallpaper

A hundred birds
scavenged
all the day,

tirelessly
picking up and
rearranging black seeds

like typesetters preparing
the evening paper

for hours,
in a rush,

furiously, against
a cold night

as if their livelihood depended on it
as if a deadline approached

And where are they now
gone from this silent basin

Perched on the bars
of pine trees

inside a thick atmosphere
of huddling?

Their black claw feet
tapping each other,

knocking snow
from the boughs

their gullets
transforming seeds

into words
inside them

like

y e s t e r d a y

and
t o m o r r o w

and
n o w

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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