Detroit Stories

Gven Golly's friend Kate had the opening of her show at the new art department space over at Evangelical Brethren College Friday evening, and it was the least I could do to show up. As I confided to a co-worker at the end of another long week, it really was about all I could do. So I dutifully dragged my exhausted left brain across Alumni Creek to Collegeview Road to schmooze and let my right brain look at art.

Am I ever glad I did. Like the sign on the transmission shop across the street from Tiger Stadium at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull: LIMP IN, LEAP OUT! The gallery was a clean, well-lighted space full of vibrant visual stimulation, friendly people, and balm for my weary mind. The whole show was composed of narrative quilts linking the artist's family and friends with mythological characters, and they were beautiful, some of them emotionally touching, like dyed cotton fibers pieced together by human muscle fibers that drew upon memory fibers to penetrate deep cardiac fibers. I felt better.

By the time a bunch of people regrouped at the home of Kate's neighbor for a dinner in her honor, I was well on my way to accomplishing re-entry into the everyday world of social interaction - no mean feat. With a glass of red wine in my hand, I found the next portal in the company of Kate's main men - her son Tedy (Icarus), her husband Jim, and her father Dick (Zeus stirring his drink with a lightning bolt).

For the next couple of hours, the conversation flowed as freely as the wine, with Dick's stories about selling Fords for umpteen years - first in Detroit and then in Pittsburgh - and gambling in Biloxi. Dick likes to play poker and drink Crown Royal, thinks we should pump oil wherever we can find it, in the Artic or in your front yard, and he enjoys the perks of being a regular at the casino, the complimentary hotel room and meals, the quality competition, the occasional big win.

This was when the Tigers were about to play in the World Series, against all odds, so everything Detroit was briefly cool again. We shared our admiration for their old-school manager, their strong young pitching staff, and their few steady veterans. And how can you admire the '06 Tigers without paying tribute to the '84 Tigers, like Trammell and Whitaker, and of course the '68 Tigers, like the aging but peerless Al Kaline, the clutch pitcher Mickey Lolich, the psychotic and lucky and self-destructive 31-game winner Denny McLain.

For the elders, of course, that legacy goes back another generation, so Dick had stories about Charlie Gehringer, George Kell, and Hank Greenburg, who were playing baseball before my time except in legend. By this time, the party had thinned a bit. Tedy and his high school friends had gone to a dance club in the hot rod Lincoln his grandpa Dick gave him for his birthday. Jim and I listened eagerly to the tale of how Lee Iacocca rose like a meteor from selling Ford trucks in New Jersey to master-minding the company's comeback during the '60s by introducing the Mustang, which infuriated Henry Ford, Jr., and then bolting to Chrysler.

There was the night Dick walked into a bar at Nine Mile Road and Telegraph, and the bartender said, "Hey, Dick, don't make a big deal of it, but that's Lee Iacocca sitting over there." Sure enough, tie loose and jacket off, the boss had stopped in for a drink on his way home from work. He lived in Bloomfield Hills, you know, because the Fords all lived in Grosse Pointe.

Welcome to the world's largest dictatorship

Doesn't it make you proud to live in the richest, most powerful authoritarian state in the world? I can only speak for myself, but I'm bursting with patriotic fervor, knowing that the military-industrial complex is working 24/7 to keep me safe from information that might make me question my good fortune.

If you grew up in a Readers Digest environment like I did, where the only news is good news because all the "bad" parts are filtered out, disturbing facts are indeed disturbing because they are unexpected and sometimes suspect. How could this be - what with god on our side and all? So I'm slowly weaning myself of that habit, acquired as a wee sprout, of thinking that all is well in the land of the free and the home of the brave. So pardon me, younger readers who have known this all along, and older readers who never bought that fiction in the first place.

Today's wake-up call comes from MotherJones.com (MoJo Blog 10/27/06) under the headline:

When It Comes to Press Freedom, We're Number 53!

Reporters Sans Frontières recently released its annual ranking of press freedom around the world, and it's not good news for the United States. Our ranking's been steadily dropping since the survey started in 2002, when we were in the index's top 20. Now we're at a dismal 53rd place, down from an undistinguished 44th last year. That puts us in the same league as tiny democracies like Botswana, Croatia, and Tonga. To be sure, we're a long way from the atrocious rankings of Iran, China, Burma, Cuba, and North Korea. But it's nothing to write home about.

The United States' poor showing is largely to blame on the excesses of the war on terror. As RSF explains, "Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of 'national security' to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his 'war on terrorism.'" And then there's the journalists we've got locked up, such as a Sudanese Al-Jazeera cameraman being held in Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein , who's been in U.S. custody in Iraq for 6 months without charge. That's just the official hostility to the press. During the past year, right-wing commentators debated whether the editor of the New York Times should be sent to the gas chamber or the firing squad for revealing a program to track terrorist funds. It's not clear whether this episode figured into RSF's rankings, but it was another sign of why, when it comes to freedom of expression, we've got a long way to Number One.

[Ed. Note: This week's Sports Illustrated carries an excellent column on Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the San Francisco Chronicle reporters who used leaked grand jury testimony to blow the lid off the steriod scandal. They'll be heading to jail soon for failing to reveal their sources, and may still be in the big house when Barry Bonds, documented to have commited several crimes in Fainaru-Wada and Williams' reporting, breaks baseball's all-time home run record.

A detail from the column, which unfortunately is subscription-only: The Chronicle has received 80 subpoenas of reporters over the last 18 months, compared with five over the previous 18. That's the world's strongest democracy, leading by example.]

- Dave Gilson

Gagas for Degas

I learned so much over the weekend:

That it's not pronounced "DAY-gah" but "duh-GAH", because the painter was from an aristocratic family but favored the more modern spelling Degas rather than the traditional deGas.

That he also had family ties in Naples, studied and imitated the Italian Renaissance painters.

That he didn't see himself as an Impressionist or want to be considered one of them, with Manet, Monet, et al, didn't join in the general enthusiasm to get out of the studio to paint outdoors in the plen aire manner.

That he said, when walking past a painting by Monet, that he felt a draft.

That he wasn't crazy about all those dancers, wasn't a particular admirer of most of his women subjects, and was considered something of a misogynist. And when you look at the postures of some of the famous pictures of dancers, they're not all that flattering. And some of them are just a figure in the foreground of a landscape that's much more interesting. So that's what the exhibit was about - the landscapes.

A disclaimer is needed here. I like the museum, and I can get wrapped up in it, but I know nothing really. Other members of my immediate family know much more than the old man, but I do get into it. The rocks, hills, lakes, forest, mountains, and rivers figure prominently. Lots of downward vectors working across the plane of vision.

Gven's favorite was "The Return of the Herd" - animals moving resolutely through the streets of a village - which reminded me of a scene in the great Anthony Quinn movie "La Strada" where nothing much is happening except a huge horse walks past the camera. I especially liked the angular streets of the seaside town of Saint Valery where Degas liked to paint, the planar roofs of the houses at the foot of a hill, the way he left the sea out of the picture.

Then we went to a Greek restaurant in the Short North and ate appetizers, watched people go up and down High Street, listened to the loud laughing people in the back.

"progressive" or what?

I actually got some interesting information today (this post was started way back in in May - jeez it's hard to finish things) from one of the worthy groups that have me on their mailing lists. Ian Mishalove, someone whose title is Online Communications Director of something called Campaign for America's Future, posits four definitions of progressive he has received from readers:

A progressive is someone who cares about the other guy. It's as simple as that!! (Lawrence F. - San Francisco, CA)

A progressive is someone who realizes that she did not get where she is completely on her own. She had help along the way ... and wants to make sure others have the same opportunities, no matter where they started. (Colleen R. - Silver Spring, MD)

A progressive ... believe[s] in liberty balanced with responsibility, economic opportunity balanced with just and open structures, and peace based upon being a global partner not a benevolent empire. (Norman B. - Cambridge, MA)

A progressive is a person who thinks the best is yet to come ... (Craig S. - Fort Collins, CO)

Disclaimer: I do not - DO NOT - mean to suggest that there is no difference, or no meaningful difference, between a 'progressive' and a 'liberal' or a 'radical' or whatever, or that the language used to describe a political ideology is unimportant. On the contrary, in some ways it's all about the language. Politics is talk. If "money is the mother's milk of politics," as the old saying goes, then language is the air. Most of it polluted.

Yet I don't buy the labeling conventions of being a liberal, being a conservative, being a progressive, being a radical, etc. My apologies to those who have patiently heard me harp on this theme before. I'm due for my annual rank on "Them's fightin' words where I come from." I've got issues, obviously, and this plays heavily into one that goes way back with me, at least as far as my very big, very bad graduate-school writing project, which took the onerous title Movement and Discourse in Educational Practice.

One of the arguments in that paper went something like this: a reciprocal relationship exists between the way people use language and the way they use movement. While language is primarily a medium of information and messages, it is also a way of doing things, making things happen. And while movement is primarily a means of gettin' it done and achieving results, it is also a medium of conveying information. Long dissertation short, there is some 'task content' in every verbal message, and there is some 'message content' in every physical task.

My point (and I do have one) is that in politics, the content is heavily loaded on the side of making something happen, leaving about 0.1 percent actual information. So, for example, the inspiring definitions of progressive above have a purpose - to make you want to be like them, to join the movement, and get with the program. If I'm being paid to sell something, of course I want to give it that kind of vibe. To borrow my engineer-manager brother's mantra, You're always selling.

If the salesperson can get you to buy the major premise - such as "Of course I'm a progressive, who the hell isn't?" - he or she is poised to carry out the remainder of their wedge strategy and get you to accept anything they package under the 'Progressive' label. I have run into plenty of well-meaning, nice folks who openly adopt whatever position they believe is the 'liberal' stance, just because they see themselves as a 'liberal', and by simply deduction, whatever other liberals are doing, it logically follows, must be right. Professed 'conservatives' do the same thing. Bill Frist or some other lying blowhard piously declares that conservative Americans want this or that, and people who like the sound of 'conservative' fall into line with the rhetorical call to arms. "Well, yeah, since I see myself as a conservative, I guess I'll let Doctor Bill do my thinking for me."

What was my point again?

Tigers

Where are you from?

My siblings and I had a discussion of that seemingly straightforward but oddly confusing question when we were together for my Mom's birthday two weeks ago. In our family, anyway, it's confusing, since we all grew up in a couple of different times and places, depending on birth order and the vagaries of adolescence and 'upward mobility'.

Anna Banana was almost 16 and in high school when we left LaCrosse, so she really grew up in Minnesota and Wisconsin. After graduating from high school in Michigan, she went to college at Winona (Minnesota) State, where Mom and Dad had met, so that part of the country is where she is from.

Jeanie Beanie was 14, almost grown up and in junior high school, when we moved from LaCrosse to Detroit. She went to college at Northern Illinois and Iowa State, still has ties to Chicago, and still roots for the Huskies and Cyclones.

Jo Jo was barely 13 at the time, a little less established in the social network of LaCrosse and therefore slightly more influenced by the culture of Detroit. She went to Michigan. Go Blue!

Do we see a pattern?

Like most patterns that try to discern meaning in other people's lives based on selected bits of information seen through a narrow lens, this one exists largely in my imagination. But I stand by it, figment or not.

Little Sven was just nine, less formed as an individual with fewer roots in ancestral soil, when transplanted to Garden City, Michigan, outside Detroit. I was 15 when we moved again, this time uptown to Birmingham, so I went to high school in Birmingham, although I was was from Garden City. Am I splitting hairs? After all, we were all from the Detroit area, Michigan, the Midwest, USA, Earth, etc. You can emphasize the sameness or the differences.

My brother Rock, the youngest, was born and raised in Michigan, so there's no doubt where he is from. He was four years old when we moved uptown and went K-12 through Birmingham schools. He went to college in Detroit and married a girl from Birmingham. Solid. Or maybe it just seems simpler from the distance of a few years in age, as my situation might have seemed simpler from the viewpoint of my sisters.

But what I want to talk about is baseball.

How about them Tigers! Has Jim Leyland done a remarkable job of managing a bunch of decent players, mostly no-names (Brandon Inge, et al) plus a couple of stars (Ivan Rodriguez) who are well past their prime? Have their pitchers developed into a strong rotation at just the right time? Are the fans filling Comerica Park with that rustbelt spirit, just as they filled Tiger Stadium in 1984 and 1968, when the team had bona fide stars like Al freaking Kaline - who lived down the street from a guy I knew in Birmingham - and Bill "go ahead and hit me" Freehan - who lived down the street from me? Was Henry Ford a genius? Was Walter Reuther a saint? Could Gordie Howe skate?

All I know for sure is that it does my heart good to see the Tigers kick the Yankees' large-market asses on TV, then move on and do the same thing to the A's. Bring on the Cardinals - just like in '68 with Gibson, Brock, et al - or the Mets, whoever that other league throws out there. They haven't got a chance, because the Tigers are a team of density!*

*with apologies to George McFly

Taiko

It's not every day that one decides to study to new art form. Sometimes it's an unexpected turn of events, and not "Gee, I always wanted to make pottery/poetry/paintings/paper/performance art." This one kind of snuck up on me.

I've been going to drum circles here and there for a year or so and having a great time just improvising. I'm not a "natural" musician, and I've never picked up an instrument quickly the way some people learn to play a guitar, for example, but I can usually keep time and follow a rhythm. I can't tell you what makes a rumba different from a samba or how a Cuban rhythm is different from a Jamaican rhythm. And it's been a long time since I was hanging with the bad boys in the drum section of the Burger Junior High School band - a long time. Color me 'novice'.

So I showed up at the once-a-month drum circles at the percussion store on High Street and had a grand time playing along with some experienced drummers. then, on a lark, I went to a taiko class that Eric "the Fish" Paden teaches at Capital University. I had never heard of taiko, but it sounded exotic and interesting when I saw it listed on an events calendar.

They have a lot of amazing instruments in the little old brick building nextdoor to the music department, and Eric clearly knows his stuff. To my surprise, this Japanese drumming form is all about movement and energy, in many ways resembling taiji, which I took up on another whim many moons ago.

We started with warmup exercises and learned the proper stance, and then we learned to shift our weight and move the arms and sticks in a circular path. So a lot of this is feeling very familiar. We tried to learn the Japanese words that punctuate a piece, and it's all very aural, so the words matter. Some of the beats coincide with steps and big, expansive gestures. In short, it was possible to graft parts of this whole new tree of information onto the rootstock of the existing body of information I brought with me, so even some fairly esoteric things started to make sense.

Ah, but there was a problem. I showed up in the first place at the taiko class only because there was a break between summer and fall sessions of my Monday night taiji classes at the local rec center. The start of fall quarter presented a schedule conflict, an ethical dilemma, and gnashing of teeth. I was committed to the taiji class, under contract, and a sufficient number of people signed up and paid their money to take it. So I would defer my continued taiko.

But wait! One of my new taiji students came to class exhausted from her dialysis earlier in the day and could barely make it through the hour. When I suggested that we change the meeting time from Monday to Tuesday, she and her husband were more than willing. The other students - also a married couple - indicated their willingness, and after a week of adjustment, we are making a successful transition to the new day and time, which is a miracle with most people's busy schedules.

Although I had missed a couple of taiko classes in the meantime, I was delighted to return, and the class welcomed me back. The other, more experienced, students are interesting people, too. A young man and his Japanese-American daughter; an older woman from Israel whose college-age daughter is spending the year in Japan; a mother and her daughter who attends Columbus School for Girls.

Can I keep up with them and learn the taiko form? Time will tell, but I'll be a fish out of water if I don't acquire the habit of practicing. That - and a poor memory, as well as lack of musical talent - is the present challenge.

Mom, apple pie

The Golly clan had a little reunion last weekend to celebrate my mother's eighty-fifth birthday. Helen Shuck Bye Golly is 85 years young. She looked great and seemed to really enjoy being surrounded by her five children, who converged on southern Indiana from five different states.

We all met in New Harmony, Indiana, at the suggestion of my brother Rock Golly, who had been there for a week-long business school orientation a couple of years ago. There is a hotel/conference center with a good restaurant. There are lots of things to see and do in a beautiful little town on the Wabash River with lots of history.

My sisters Jo Jo Golly and Jeanie Beanie Golly Gee shared a guest house with a garden and a couple of sitting rooms where we could all gather. Mom and Dad, Rock, sister Anna Banana Golly Gosh and her husband Fred Gosh stayed at the New Harmony Inn. Gven, Zelda, and I stayed at the Old Rooming House down the street. Nice comfy digs, and cheap.

The town is pretty amazing, full of gardens and public art, and not obnoxiously touristy. Quite a few building are still standing from the original 1814-1824 town center constructed by the breakaway Lutheran Rev. Rapp and his colony of Harmonists. According to the lovely tour guide, they were hard-working German separatists who were preparing for the Lord to return and end it all. So they built a town, and when the Lord didn't end it all, they sold the whole town and moved back to Economy, Pennsylvania, which was closer to markets for their products. She didn't say whether their beliefs changed along with the names of their towns.

Alas, the community didn't last long because, like the Shakers, they didn't believe in propagating their kind. They believed in work. So they built churches, factories, houses, farms, and towns. As the lovely tour guide put it, what else did they have to do?

Lots of structures remain from the next wave of utopian British socialists led by Robert Owen, who bought New Harmony from the Harmonists in 1824. The Workingman's Institute, for example, is still the oldest functioning public library in the state. There is also a theater and opera house, converted from a Community House that was like a coed dormitory for the celibate Harmonists. Owen and his group were scientists and other intellectuals who had big ideas about reforming civilization - or at least a little corner of it. Unfortunately, they didn't have the skills and know-how to make their vision happen, and the experiment essentially ceased.

One of my favorite places is the Roofless Church, built by Philip Johnson in 1960, a remarkable place sitting at the edge of town just off Main Street near the Inn. Inside a low wall are walkways, benches, a grove of trees, a couple of very modern, expressionistic sculptures, a tiny shrine-like installation with little icons, and a six-sided domed gathering place near one end, all overlooking a soybean field. Nextdoor there's a pottery studio and across the street the New Harmony Artists Guild.

Although it rained briefly, the weather was awesome for walking around looking at things and talking with the folks I've known all my life. Apparently we still have things to talk about. We all gathered at the Yellow Tavern on Church Street Friday night for a beer and a sandwich. Okay it was more than one beer, and it wasn't just any sandwich but a pork brain sandwich, and we ended up closing the place, but it was fun and just the right place to get together and catch up.

The next morning we managed to find each other at the Main Cafe for a hearty Hoosier breakfast. Then the men took off walking to explore the town, while the women went from one antique shop to another for an unbelieveably long and no doubt fascinating shopping adventure. We regrouped for a very nice dinner at the Red Geranium and then went to Jo's and Jean's for cake, coffee, and cards.

There were plenty of tales to tell, news to share, and progress reports on all the grandchildren, nieces, nephews, uncles, and aunts. Turns out Zelda was the only one of her generation who could make it, and she was a joy to have around. She's a good sport, and she has more tolerance of some of the crazy family dynamics than I do. The extended birthday party ended with eggs and apple pie for breakfast Sunday morning before the drive back to Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida.