Rant in D Minor: Detroit Dispatches

I spent a week in Detroit the other night. The connecting flight was via Dusseldorf, which maybe gives some clue as to how Kraftwerk latched onto the Stooges’ motorik for early inspiration. Motor City is steampunk central. Like Manchester, it’s a marginalised industrial megapolis with a glorious musical history: Motown Records, the MC5, Iggy, Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, Madonna, Carl Craig, Kevin Saunderson, Kid Rock, Eminem, the White Stripes.

Despite State-wide foreclosures and an ongoing dysfunctional dependency on an ailing automobile industry, the city fathers and tourist board haven’t yet learned to properly exploit the rock ‘n’ roll museum dollar. In Detroit Metro airport, a glossy Motown-themed store blares modern soul and hip hop, but rumour has it that one of the old Motown studio buildings downtown is now abandoned, leaving its contents vulnerable to burglary and damage.
A few blocks away in the Detroit Institute of Arts, which hosts Picassos, Van Goghs, Warhols and Lichtensteins, the inner court is dominated by Diego Rivera’s majestic murals. Rivera, Frida Kahlo’s husband and Mexico’s foremost surrealist artist, was commissioned to paint an homage to Motor City entitled Detroit Industry in 1932. The DIA got more than they bargained for: those house-high murals depict industrial muscle aplenty, but also war planes, noxious gases, strange symbolist images of babies and seedlings and near Giger-like mechanical monstrosities.
My spirit guide for the week was Norene Cashen, the Detroit Metro Times contributor and poet whose collection The Reverse Is Also True was published by Doorjamb press last November. She describes an arts community depopulated and depleted by the magnetic draw of New York and LA, but there are still plenty of true believers in the Michigan grass roots arts scene. We had a beer with Dan Wickett, founder of the Emerging Writers Network and co-owner of Dzanc Books, and Dwayne Hayes, publisher of Absinthe, a journal dedicated to showcasing new European writing. We dropped by the labyrinthine Book Beat store owned by Carey Loren, a world renowned rock photographer who’s played in Destroy All Monsters alongside Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton. And we paid a visit to Christine Monhollen, publisher of the annual poetry journal Dispatch Detroit. Christine is part Stephen King heroine, part libertarian pioneer woman who sells poetry sculpture online and does her own carpentry – when not tending to her Great Danes Bessie and Newman, the latter a hearing-impaired, pinkish-eyed, part-albino beast the size of a Shetland pony.
What else? Salvation Army stores and antique markets where you can find bargain first-edition Capote and Mailer hardbacks next to working models of William Burroughs’ grandfather’s adding machine, the fabled gizmo that trust-funded the writing of Junky, Queer and Naked Lunch. Or the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Farmington Hills, where ghastly death-camp pyjamas hang on wall displays beside SS leathers. Or Marvin’s Marvellous Mechanical Museum, not so much an antiquated arcade as Noah’s ark for carny contraptions rescued from Coney Island and Brighton Pier: turn of the century dioramas and peep shows, player pianos, coin-operated chambers of horrors, palm-reading machines, distorto mirrors, figurines of amazing two-headed babies, trick pictures that transform turn-of-the-century gents into feral werewolves, the full PT Barnum.
“Hold me tight – callin’ from the Funhouse…”
I’ll be back.