hosting: 12/2010

Erg, de neergang van de Motor City. Maar hoe erg precies?
Over o.m. het racisme bij de opbouw der auto-industrie en de gevolgen daarvan voor deze tijd.
'De betekenis van enkele decennia massaproductie voor de geschiedenis kun je ook overschatten.' Aldus de 95-jarige activiste en auteur Grace Lee Boggs. Wat uitgebreider aan het woord komen ook John Sinclair, beeldend kunstenaar Tyree Guyton en Motown-vedette Martha Reeves. Na haar zangcarrière ging ze de stedelijke politiek in en werd ze verkozen in een openbare functie.
REQUIEM FOR DETROIT?, Julien Temple, BBC Films 2010, 70' ● 16.12.10 - 21 u @'t Blijvertje (In aanwezigheid van John Sinclair)

>Wall Street Journal

EEN VREEMDE OBSESSIE?

'We hebben er al eerder op gewezen,' schreef een dagblad in Michigan, 'hoe men in Engeland een vreemde obsessie heeft met de neergang van Detroit. Dit heeft intussen geresulteerd in een documentaire onder de titel Requiem for Detroit?' De vraagteken die de film meekreeg, wordt er door pers en publiek negen van de tien keer vanaf gedacht en heeft iets van een zwaktebod. De makers: 'A roller coaster story of the city’s automotive industry through the testimony of the people who lived through it. With vivid projections of the city’s heyday on it's now abandoned buildings – and the irrepressible music that continues to come out of Detroit, the documentary charts the rise and fall of the Big Three (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler), and the impact the decline of these giants has had on the city.

Detroit was at the forefront of the 20th Century American Dream. The fourth largest city in the US, it was also one of the wealthiest, housing the country’s earliest shopping malls. America’s first major freeway was built in Detroit to facilitate the increasing number of commuters into the city. A new century has seen the Dream, powered by the Big Three, slide into a nightmare for Detroit. Levels of black inner city poverty, hunger and unemployment have reached critical proportions, in grim contrast to the affluent white suburbs which surround the city.'

Regisseur Julien Temple: 'Detroit was the frontier city in the US, powering the American dream. What I find fascinating is the fact that it is still ahead of the game, becoming the first big US city to virtually fall off the map.'
En de producer:'It was a city at the vanguard of the future the world over, and it's post urban post-industrial chaos serves as a warning to the rest of the world. Despite its ruined landscape there is still hope, as those living within the city’s limits continue to fight for its survival, creating their own solutions such as urban farming and a strong network of young activists.'
'The interviews show people living amongst the deserted auto plants, closed schools and failing infrastructure, as well as those who are based in the consumer utopia of the suburbs.'
>more
>source

MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS

'Shot at the Ford factory in Detroit at 15.6.65 and aired on the television show "It’s What’s Happening, Baby" this performance of Nowhere to Run lasts the two minutes and forty-five seconds it took to put together an entire Mustang.
Ford wouldn’t interrupt manufacturing for the shoot, so the assembly lines at the Rouge plant keep moving as Martha Reeves, Rosalind Ashford, and Betty Kelly jump into and out of cars as they’re being built, surrounded by workers, machinery and hanging parts. Attempting to create a radical new sound, drummer Benny Benjamin and producer Lamont Dozier miked up old, used car chains and banged them down on the beat to make a clanking noise, apparently until their hands bled.'
>Hilary Lloyd in Artforum

HENRY FORD

'After Henry Ford bought a newspaper in 1918, The Dearborn Independent, he published a series of scurrilous attacks on the "International Jew". A mythical figure he blamed for financing war. In 1927 he formally retracted his attacks and sold the paper.
He gave old-fashioned dances at which capitalists, European royalty, and company executives were introduced to the polka, the Sir Roger de Coverley, the mazurka, the Virginia reel, and the quadrille; he established small village factories; he built one-room schools in which vocational training was emphasized; he experimented with soybeans for food and durable goods; he sponsored a weekly radio hour on which quaint essays were read to "plain folks"; he constructed Greenfield Village, a restored rural town; and he built what later was named the Henry Ford Museum and filled it with American artifacts and antiques from the era of his youth when American society was almost wholly agrarian.'
>Fords Sociological Department
>Service Department

THE MODERN WORLD

'Ford enjoyed immense commercial and cultural influence in the early '20s. His claim to have invented the modern world could not be entirely dismissed. Zealously standardising production methods, and controlling every minute of the workers' day helped to make the Ford company a powerful force on the international stage. From his headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, Ford spread his business (and increasingly his personal) values through the United States and beyond.'
>Five-Dollar-a-Day

'Fordlandia is an account of the Ford Motor Company’s effort to create a rubber utopia. The complexity of Henry Ford’s attempt to create a secure source of natural latex in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1920s and '30s. It reveals the often contradictory character of Henry Ford himself. During the period in which the Brazilian project took shape, Ford the man and Ford the company appear to have been a single entity. Greg Grandin combines the subjects, presenting them against the backdrop of changing politics and society in the US and Brazil.'
>The rise and fall of Fords forgotten jungle city

UNREAL ESTATE

'This just might be what the new new economy doctors ordered: a prescription for how to use out-of-the-box ideas to change the oh-so-tired narrative of Detroit as city of decline and distress to one of endless opportunity.

A merry band of Dutch and American urban researchers called the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency see the failure of the free market and the current state of emergency as an the opportunity for a new kind of artistic agency. Decline and decay, they say, also equates to creation and growth. Detroit, in many ways the schoolbook example of the residue city, is often framed as a leftover space. They see a new movement of artists, farmers, activists, musicians and others developing and producing new distinct cultures of their own.'

Detroit Unreal Estate Agency's members 'produce, collect and inventory information on the unreal estate of Detroit: that is, on the remarkable, distinct, characteristic or subjectively significant sites of urban culture. The agency is aimed at new types of urban practices (architecturally, artistically, institutionally, everyday life, etc) that came into existence, creating a new value system in Detroit.

The project is an initiative by architects Andrew Herscher and Mireille Roddier, and Partizan Publik's Christian Ernsten and Joost Janmaat; in collaboration with the Dutch Art Institute and the University of Michigan, funded by the Mondriaan Foundation and Fonds BKVB.'
>Partizan Publik
>Museum of Contemporary Art

JUST A LITTLE BANKSY

'It's just a little graffiti, and yet its existence has caused a firestorm of legal wrangling as to who actually owns the work and the building that once housed it. Seems rather odd, until you take a closer look at who is responsible, where it was created and why it exists in the first place.

The location: of all the derelict buildings filling the city of Detroit, one of the most famous is the former Packard automobile plant. As much as one would like to do something about the the 3,500,000-square-foot facility, nobody seems quite sure who owns the dilapidated building... nor is there any consensus on who should foot the bill for the massive clean-up project.

Naturally, the abandoned Packard plant is a haven for vandalism. Nearly every surface that can be reached is covered in graffiti, some of it rather interesting. And valuable. British-born and highly-secretive street artist Banksy recently descended on the decrepit Packard plant, leaving his mark behind in the form of an image of a young boy holding a can of red paint. Beside the boy are the words I remember when all this was trees.
A simple message, but also a somewhat profound statement when viewed from the ravaged surroundings in which it exists. Or rather, once existed. Shortly after the art appeared, it was literally cut out of the building and transferred to a new site by a group known as the 555 Nonprofit Studio & Gallery.

However, some parties want it put back from where it came, while others believe they are entitled to damages related to its relocation. Why? Banksy's handiwork has a rather high value attached to it. In fact, Angelina Jolie is said to have paid half a million dollars for a few pieces of the UK artist's previous paintings, and this latest piece is said to be valued at over $100,000. But in this instance, there are questions as to who, if anyone, owns the work.'
>cont.

DE STIJL

'Het Centraal Museum heeft een speciale gelimiteerde versie van De Stijl van The White Stripes op vinyl verworven. Er zijn van deze unieke langspeelplaat slechts 500 stuks gedrukt en een platenzaak aan de Oudegracht is het enige verkooppunt in de wereld. Volgens de eigenaar van de winkel is de link De Stijl - Rietveld - Utrecht.

Het museum bezat reeds het oorspronkelijke album uit 2000 en vond dat deze speciale release niet mocht ontbreken in de collectie. Directeur Edwin Jacobs: "Het is bijzonder dat een Amerikaanse band de kunststroming De Stijl op deze manier actueel en jong maakt en het Rietveld Schröderhuis als hoogtepunt van deze kunststroming als inspiratiebron voor hun muziek ziet."

De Stripes zijn een duo afkomstig uit Detroit: zanger/gitarist Jack White en drumster Meg White. Na een titelloos debuut vormde De Stijl hun tweede album.'
>bron

THE 'UNDER-CLASS' DEBATES

'Why the transformation of Detroit and other major Northern cities from magnets of opportunity to reservations for the poor? What was it that turned America's former industrial centers into economic backwaters, abandoned by manufacturers? What explains the high rates of joblessness among the urban poor? Why has discrimination by race persisted in both urban neighborhoods and workplaces? What explains the emergence of persistent, concentrated, racialized poverty in Rust Belt cities? Explanations abound for these questions, particularly in the large literature on the urban "under-class," the most influential body of scholarship to emerge on urban problems in twenty-five years.

The "underclass" debate has moved in three sometimes overlapping directions. The first, and most influential, focuses on the behavior and values of the poor, and the role of federal social programs in fostering a culture of joblessness and dependency in inner cities. A variant, going back to the work of Moynihan and Frazier, emphasizes the role of family structure and unwed pregnancy in perpetuating inequality.

A second offers structural explanations for inequality and urban poverty. Proponents of structural explanations tend to divide among those who point to the effects of economic restructuring and those who emphasize the continuing significance of racial discrimination.'

'A third explanation focuses on politics, emphasizing the marginalization of cities in American social policy, particularly in the aftermath of the urban unrest and racial conflict of the 1960s. The "excesses" of Black Power and the rise of affirmative action fueled white suburbanization and justified a newfound white backlash against the urban poor. Implicit in this analysis is a contrast between the booming postwar years and the troubled post-1960s years, urban heyday versus urban crisis.'

'Liberal politicians won loyalty by promising their constituents that the government would actively protect their economic and social security. White and black Americans took the promise of liberalism seriously and mobilized in the 1940s and 1950s to assert their rights as citizens.'

'But the New Deal state was riddled with ambiguities and contradictions that left room for opposing interpretations of what constituted proper government action. Most threatening to the seeming unity of the New Deal order were unresolved questions of racial identity and racial politics, dilemmas that would become inseparable from the mission of liberalism itself.

Part the story of the African American challenge to liberalism is well known: civil rights groups in the 1950s launched a fierce attack on Jim Crow in the South. But at the same time, the combination of deindustrialization and black population growth upended the racial order of Detroit and other northern cities.'

'Assumptions about racial difference were nourished by a newly assertive whiteness, born of the ardent desire of the "not-yet-white ethnics" (many of them Roman Catholic, second- and third-generation southern and eastern European immigrants) to move into the American mainstream. To be fully American was to be white.'

'Workers who benefited from the systematic exclusion of blacks from white jobs often promoted discriminatory policies in the workplace. White working-class and middle-class homeowners played a crucial role in the racial division of the city. Detroit's neighborhoods became a fiercely contested terrain as the city's black population expanded. Through collective organization to resist black mobility, white homeowners redrew the city's racial boundaries and reinforced patterns of racial inequality.'
>The Origins of Urban Crisis (1996)

DESPERATE

'What, then, accounts for blacks’ move to the suburbs in the last decade? Like whites, blacks have long looked for alternatives to Detroit, with its high crime, poor services and scarce job opportunities. But it was not until the economy of the entire metropolitan area slumped, thanks to the faltering auto industry and the foreclosure crisis, that black buyers finally found whites willing — desperate, in fact — to sell their suburban houses, especially in the working-class and lower-middle-class towns bordering the city.

So far, Detroit’s black suburbanization has followed a well-trodden path. Those blacks heading outward from Detroit aren’t moving to all suburbs equally. Rather, they move into places with older houses, rundown shopping districts and declining tax revenues. Such towns also typically have poorer services and fewer job opportunities than wealthier suburbs — where, despite strong anti-discrimination laws, it is still harder for blacks to find housing.

It’s not clear that this new migration is a positive step, even if it allows blacks to escape the city and its troubles. For whites, suburbs have often been a big step up — but as long as most blacks find themselves in secondhand suburbia, the American dream of security, prosperity and opportunity will remain harder to achieve.'

>A Dream Still Deferred (2011)

AUTO MOTIVE

'Along with 5,000 of my esteemed automotive journalist friends, I have just descended on my hometown of Detroit for the North American International Auto show, where one could hear 5,000 lamentations on what a sad place Motown is or has become, as well as 5,000 metaphorical references correlating the frigid winter weather with the chilly state of the automotive business. And I have to say that all of these people are at least partially right. Things are certainly in a downturn moment here, to say the least.'

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18.12.10

16.12.10

Requiem for Detroit?