DETROIT

why won't they tell us

i just checked. these fuckers!

here's the best of the partial lineup, just realeased:

ALEX UNDER –live
CARL CRAIG
CASSY
COBBLESTONE JAZZ –live

letters d-z had nothing interesting, except:

ZIP

this was a person who was playing/was going to play at that weird weird sunday afternoon Berlin club that we went to.

oh what the hell here's the full (still partial) list:

ALEX UNDER –live, ALTON MILLER, BENNY BENASSI, BUZZ GOREE, CARL CRAIG, CASSY, COBBLESTONE JAZZ –live, COOL KIDS –live, DBX –live, DUBFIRE, EGYPTIAN LOVER –live, GIRL TALK –live, GUILLAUME & THE COUTU DUMONTS -live, HALF HAWAII –live, JAMES ZABIELA, JORIS VOORN –live, KONRAD BLACK, MATHIAS KADEN –live, MIKE GRANT, MINX, MOBY -dj set, NEWCLEUS -live, SPEEDY J -live with Scott Pagano VJ, TECH ITCH, TERRENCE PARKER, ZIP

http://www.myspace.com/detroitmusicfest

tiger stadium gets another stay of execution

demf not too exciting this year

i always thought this was a possibility but people are starting to take the plunge
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08barlow.html?_r=2
still wouldn't want to live there though, i don't think

whole thing needs to be here:

Detroit

Sophia Martineck

RECENTLY, at a dinner party, a friend mentioned that he’d never seen so many outsiders moving into town. This struck me as a highly suspect statement. After all, we were talking about Detroit, home of corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, beleaguered General Motors and the 0-16 Lions. Compared with other cities’ buzzing, glittering skylines, ours sits largely abandoned, like some hulking beehive devastated by colony collapse. Who on earth would move here?

Then again, I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the rest of the world.

Two other guests that night, a couple in from Chicago, had also just invested in some Detroit real estate. That weekend Jon and Sara Brumit bought a house for $100.

Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced “opportunities” in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge. Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing?

A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn’t the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. A group of architects and city planners in Amsterdam started a project called the “Detroit Unreal Estate Agency” and, with Mitch’s help, found a property around the corner. The director of a Dutch museum, Van Abbemuseum, has called it “a new way of shaping the urban environment.” He’s particularly intrigued by the luxury of artists having little to no housing costs. Like the unemployed Chinese factory workers flowing en masse back to their villages, artists in today’s economy need somewhere to flee.

But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends.

In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century’s industrial decline. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.

How the birthplace of American auto-driven consumerism turned into a hollowed-out ghost town

oh the first line:

When Detroit mayoral candidate Stanley Christmas was asked about the city's declining murder rate during an all-candidates meeting a couple of months ago, he replied: "I don't mean to be sarcastic; there just isn't anyone left to kill."

http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2009/04/singularity.html
Last week I read in the morning paper about a street here where 60 out of 66 homes were vacant or abandoned on a single block. The reporter called it a "ghost street." Yesterday I found myself in the area. Other than an errant sofa, the street was completely empty, almost peaceful. I took a photo of every house on the north side of one block and then stitched them together.

http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2009/07/feral-houses.html

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/things-i-remember-about-detroit/Content?oid=4132988

http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13778

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/us/23detroit.html?_r=1