Dearborn

(Visionary industrialist, racist and philanthropist Henry Ford the First. Photo FoMoCo.)

Gentle Readers, I have had my fill of the vile aspersions cast on lovely Detroit, the city of my birth. I was working on the agenda for the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit Tour that I intend to conduct when we are there.

It is a tough line to walk, philosophically. I am filled with righteous indignation at what we have done to ourselves on the triple altars of Capital, Racism and Liberty. Seeing the fruits of the Great Abandonment of the city is, in my mind, a necessary thing. Others find it to be simple schadenfreude, taking perverse delight in the misfortune of those who cannot help themselves.

Screw it. I have my long-form birth certificate, and it proves that I was born at Detroit General Hospital, and so it is my city and partly my story, and I will tell it the way I feel. It is undeniable that the Motor City was in complete eclipse for nearly a half century. There are signs- portents- that the city will be reborn as something else.

Smaller, certainly, with the vast empty spaces offering up all sorts of possibilities for re-invention.

(Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Photo Detroit News.)

There is a lot that needs re-invention, and current Mayor and basketball legend Dave Bing has his hands full. The criminal antics of kleptocrat Kwame Kilpatrick as Mayor were entertaining to readers of the News and the Free Press out in the suburbs. The prickly relations between the Mayor’s office and the media has a legacy that goes back to Coleman Young, for whom White Flight cemented his electoral majority even if it killed the city tax base.

Young was never convicted of a thing, though his lieutenants were, and he left a complex legacy. Kilpatrick was much more clown-like in his apparently shameless conduct, which resulted in convictions on charges of corruption, perjury and obstruction of justice. He wound up in suburban Milan for violating probation.

There is no reason to single out Detroit on that charge. I mean, we have had decades of entertainment from DC mayor-for-life Marion Barry. He is still on the DC Council, being re-elected while serving time. He too accused the Post of racist treatment in the paper’s coverage of his administration.

While the great divide in Detroit is often depicted as one of black and white, there is far more to consider in the urban mosaic, and it may be surprising to you. It certainly is not surprising to red-neck know-nothing Pastor Terry Jones, the idiot who stirred up so much trouble when he burned a copy of the Quran last month.

Pastor Dumbass has announced that he is coming to suburban Dearborn on Good Friday to protest the imposition of Sharia Law at North America’s largest mosque, located conveniently near The Glass House in Dearborn, headquarters of the Ford Motor Company.

(Pierogis in the Socotra kitchen. These are from Emeril’s recipe. Ask me for it. Delicious!)

There are enclaves in Detroit that fought successfully to avoid absorption into the City Borg. Hamtramck and Highland Park might be the two most famous, the former being the home of some tough Polacks who refused to give up their houses, pierogis and kielbasa. At least they hung on for longer than one would think. The Poles are stubborn people, and proud. But even Hamtramck is knocked back on its heels these days.

Dearborn is another enclave, and was once a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ford family. It is not now, and that is why Terry Ford is coming to town. But it is near to my heart. We had our tenth High School reunion there, and at the Dearborn Hyatt Regency I ran into a former classmate who would become my wife. That has nothing to do with Pastor Ford, but I will get to that in a minute.

(Dearborn Hyatt Regency. Photo Hyatt Corp.)

The history of Dearborn is a microcosm of the larger Detroit saga. The close-in enclave south of the big city was settled after the great expansion into the Northwest Territory after the Revolution. The Brits would be back to Detroit in 1812 (don’t get into who won with a Canadian), but farmers were already hacking down trees and planting fields with American energy, unlike their French predecessors who based their presence on the river on trade with the natives.

The newly-arrived settlers cleared them out- it would be worth a dive down the rabbit hole to talk about Chief Pontiac, who once was not an automobile, and “Mad” Anthony Wayne, who was not Detroit’s most prominent University. Maybe we can circle back- the war is an entertaining story.

Dearborn’s name came from a Revolutionary figure named Henry Dearborn, who also served as Secretary of War in the Jefferson Administration. The current configuration of the town dates to the Crash year of 1929, when the neighboring village of Fordson joined with Dearborn to maintain their independence from encroaching Detroit.

Henry Ford bought large parts of the city to construct his estate, Fair Lane, and the original World Headquarters of his company, and the Proving Grounds and the Henry Ford Museum, the Library and all the other stuff that went along with a company that was a global Titan. The commercial heart of Dearborn was the Fairlane Town Center, where Henry Ford’s favorite soybeans and sunflowers are planted to this very day.

The town became home to a series of wonders. One was the Ford Rouge River complex. We took a field trip there from school in Grabbingham to see it; no kidding, the long Lakes boats carriers (think Edmund Fitzgerald) would dump iron ore from the Mesabe Range into the hoppers that carried the red stuff to the blast furnaces, and at the other end of the plant they drove out brand-spanking new Mustangs.

120,000 people worked there. It was awesome. Amazing.

(The Rouge River complex and Rotunda at lower right. Photo FoMoCo.)

Across the street was the Ford Rotunda. Pity you never got to see it. The ultra-modern drum-like structure was a huge attraction to the metropolitan area, becoming the fifth most popular United States tourist destination during the 1950s. In fact, only Niagara Falls, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, The Smithsonian Institution, and the Lincoln Memorial were more popular. Yellowstone, Mount Vernon, the Washington Monument, and the Statue of Liberty all had fewer visitors.

During the period of time the Rotunda was open to the public, a total of 18,019,340 people toured the facility, and I was one of them. The Rotunda saw the introduction of the Lincoln Continental, the Ford Thunderbird, and both the introduction and discontinuance of the Edsel.

The Christmas Fantasy show at the Rotunda was a must-do for Detroiters and suburbanites alike.

It burned in 1962, accidentally, as opposed to all the other burnings that would scourge the great city.

The Nativity scene, for which Ford’s had received a commendation in 1958 from the National Council of Churches for emphasizing the true spirit of Christmas, and which the Council had determined to be the largest display of its kind in the United States, was a total loss.

I don’t want to lean too heavily on the metaphor, since that is a tricky business, but something else was happening in Dearborn, just as it was across the larger metropolitan area. That is what gets us to the matter of that asshole Terry Roberts, and the question of whether he is really going to turn up in Dearborn this Good Friday.

Even as the nation turned away from the public celebration of religious events, there were others who were building on their faith privately.

There are older mosques in Dearborn, but in 1963, the year after the Rotunda and its Nativity Scene burned, ground was broken for The Islamic Center of America.

Dearborn today has the highest percentage of Arab-American citizens in any city of its size in North America- more than 30%. The Mosque is also the largest, and that is why that jerk is coming to Dearborn.

More about that tomorrow.

(The Islamic Center, Dearborn, Michigan. Photo Islamic Center of North America.)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocora.com

It Don’t Mean a Thing….

(Duke Ellington in formal garb around the time he invented a new world. Photo courtesy Ellington Estate.)

Day One back from the Front Range of the Rockies was in the bag. I was eager to have a glass of crisp Willow White and talk about the remarkable things that had occurred that morning. At least I thought it was remarkable, though I did not know for sure. I wanted to hear what the usual suspects thought about it, and see if my pal The Marine had some thoughts about who the next SECDEF was going to be, once Mr. Gates takes his exit this summer. I was whistling as I went.

I am a big fan of The Duke. Well, both of them, in the right moment, if you know what I mean. I liked the old movie version of “True Grit” better than the new one, though after a re-read of the original book by Charles Portis, I imagine the Cohen Brothers casting Jeff Bridges as Marshall Rooster Cogburn is closer to what Mr. Portis was getting at than The Duke did years ago, but, well, you know.

“Fill your hands, you Son of a bitch!” said the way Mr. Wayne said it still resonates in my head after all these years, even if it was bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.

(Lobby Poster for the 1969 film version of True Grit.)

Author Portis cast his tale in an antique language takes a few minutes to get used to, sort of like the Great Weasel-Sphinx of the Fed, Allan Greenspan. And that is precisely why I was channeling the immortal other Duke, Mr. Ellington, as I walked toward Willow whistling “It don’t mean a thing (if it ain’t got that swing). The Duke wrote the music, lyrics by Irving Mills (aka Joe Primrose) when he was doing repeat gigs at the Little Tavern in Chicago. The title was based on the life philosophy of former session-man Bubber Miley, who was then dying of tuberculosis.

(Architect of Swing Bubber Miley.)

Bubber was the master of the plunger mute. His growling, drunken trumpet sound was largely responsible for the Duke’s initial success in the 1920s, but Bubber had his demons and a life-long affair with the bottle and the Duke had to shit-can him two years before the song was written. The upward climb to national prominence for the Duke, a consummate professional, and the eclipse of Miley, a committed drunk, coincided with the disintegration of the financial system.

His spirit was indomitable, even if the flesh was week. You could say that the title inspired the Age of Swing, which coexisted, or had to be invented, to accommodate the ravages of the Great Depression.

I have mentioned before that those bastards at Goldman-Sachs were responsible for that one, too, haven’t I? I had to think about that after the first meeting of the week when the clock radio on my desk told me that it was back to business as usual for the band of thieves who drove us to the brink of bankruptcy.

(John Walsh, Acting Comptroller of the Currency. Official US government photo.)

John Walsh, the Acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, announced the he had reached a negotiated settlement with the gang of 14 banks that handle the vast majority of mortgage paper. In the decree, he said he was imposing “enforcement actions” against the thieves that actually a slap on the wrist.

Rather than do his job and enforce the law, the bank regulators are instead requiring the banks to hire their own “consultant” to review their foreclosure practices and then develop a plan for how to comply with the law. Jesus!

It is mind boggling, like telling muggers to go hire their own judge. What it actually does is impose the doctrine of pre-emption which holds the Federal agreement supreme against the legislative authority of the States, pre-empts a joint effort by the 50 State’s Attorney Generals to actually drag the scumbags into court.

Crap! I was mulling that, and a contract modification, when another thunderbolt was emitted from the little speaker on the radio. The famous rating concern Standard & Poors issued a negative outlook on the value of US Treasury Securities.

“Finally,” I thought. “It is confirmation of what Bill Gross did last month. He took his Pacific Investment Management Company completely out of government-related securities.”

Much later, I could not get The Duke’s tune out of my head. After dodging traffic on Fairfax Drive to Willow, I plunged into the cool darkness and plopped down at my usual stool at the L of the bar between The Marine and Old Jim.

“So what do you think?” I asked. “I mean, is it starting already? The President says the downgrade is a political act, part of the budget battle between the Ryan Budget and his campaign plan.”

“Politics in Washington?” said Jim, snorting into his Budweiser. “Nah. Not here.”

“No, really,” I said, waving to the lovely Elisabeth-with-an-S and John-with-an-H, who was procuring one of Willow’s delicious deserts for his mother, who was matching it with a highball.

The Marine said: “It don’t mean a thing. S&P has only been doing this crap since 1989, and none of the five AAA-rated sovereign nations they have issued concerns about have defaulted. Two of them- including Britain- have bounced back on the assessment to a positive ratings.”
“It is still a one-in-three chance of default,” I said.  “That is huge.”

Jim cleared his throat as two of my associates arrived to flank us all. “It is bullshit.”

“No sovereign nation ever has to default,” agreed Harry, who anchored himself on the window side of Jim. “If they have their own currency, they can just print their way out of it. That was the problem in Greece. They could not print Euros and lost their wiggle room and had to be bailed out by the Central Bank.”

“But doesn’t that mean inflation will accelerate wildly to keep up?”

“It hasn’t worked that way in Japan,” said the statuesque blonde who runs all our business affairs. “They are still in a deflationary spiral after a decade of printing yen.”

“And besides,” said the Marine, “S&P are the idiots who missed the greatest financial collapse in history. Oh, hell, they helped cause it by rating those junk mortgage backed securities as Triple AAA investments. They are just posturing to show how independent they are. Creeps.”

‘Wall Street was down one percent at the close,” I said. “Heard it just as I was leaving the office. The market seems to think that Treasury yields will directly affect rates on consumer loans, particularly mortgages.”

“The cost of issuing new debt will definitely increase,” said Jim with concern, “and that will eventually be reflected in higher Budweiser costs. This is serious.”

“The people at NPR were saying as I left the office that it could mean a 6 to 6.5 percent decline in American stocks over the next three months,” I said grimly. “My 401k just got back to positive performance over the last four years. Fuck.”

“We do have a long-run debt problem, said The Blonde. “This is a tool to increase the pressure on politicians to take action. The forecast is about a crisis in 2013, not tomorrow. We have the time to take on the fat cats. We need to find equitable solution.”

“The 2013 thing is pretty significant,” said The Marine, taking a sip of his martini and glancing at his watch. “It will place this all beyond the next election. And S&P have demonstrated they have their heads up their asses.”

“So the downgrade doesn’t mean a thing?”

“Not at the moment. There is no Republican that has a hope in hell of beating him in a one-to-one showdown. Donald Trump? Sarah Palin? Newt Gingrich? Plastic Romney? Come on. They are a cast of clowns,” I said.

“The President can say he has a Secret Plan to reduce the debt, like Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War.”

“There could be a game changer in the equation,” said Jim. “Suppose a bona-fide national hero shows up.”

“Like who?” I said skeptically.

The Marine smiled. “Suppose General Patreaus isn’t interested in being Director of the CIA? Suppose he sits this immediate flail out, retires and jumps into the race as the Republican answer to spend and tax Obama?”

“Jesus,” I said. “Dave is no Ike.”

“True,” said The Blonde, “but he could be a man on horseback.”

The Marine called down the bar for his check. “He is an ambitious son-of-a-bitch, that is for sure.”

“Yeah,” said Jim. “So it don’t mean a thing. There is a song about that.”

“The Duke did it. If it don’t swing, it don’t matter.”

Jim took a long draw on his Bud. “And when the Treasury gets in a jam, it is going to be because of a panic in the market anyway, when everyone realizes we have hit a tipping point. Not because of those boneheads at S&P.”

I took a sip of Willow White and wondered what that was going to be like. 2013? Damn. We never did figure out who was going to be SECDEF.

(General David Patraeus. Official US Army Photo.)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Cycle Time

Flight Level 34 was OK for most of the flight back to Dulles (IAD), but I have to tell you that everything happening south of that FL sucked, both directionally and altitudinally.

Going up and down to cruising altitude, the Boeing 757 shuddered with the residual effects of the storm system. The front that passed over the Springs had it’s origins in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean where the la Nina cooling event is continuing to generate intense weather. I was lucky that seat 12F was going to be passing through the trough between the fronts.

This one featured flash-floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms interspersed with enormous hail. Twisters killed people in Oklahoma before moving east through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia.

The system hit North Carolina Saturday night as I packed to go home, casting a glance at the Accuweather forecast for IAD. The storm generated a record 92 tornadoes in the state south of Virginia, killing a couple dozen innocents and wounding nearly a hundred.

Travel is not much fun these days, as you well know, since you have been jammed in with fellow citizens, mashed, processed and scanned within an inch of your life. Even when things go well, as they did when the 757 leapt into the air, on time and without undue delay, the residual eddies in the lower altitudes made the big jet shudder with the impact of the swirling air-mass.

The view from 12F was framed by the big blue engine nacelle. I could not tell if it was the Rolls-Royce or Pratt & Whitney engine. The 757 with either as an option. The P&W apparently has, or had, vibration issues that contributed to pylon fatigue. You know the consequences of that, though I have heard a skilled pilot can land the bird with just  on the wing.

I have a little cheat-sheet on what my chances might be. I do not fly Southwest airlines, which has the Boeing 737 as their work-horse, and which has had some minor issues with the roof coming off due to landing and pressurization cycle issues.

Back in 1988, an Aloha Airlines 737 went topless suddenly, sucking flight attendant C.B. Lansing out through the sudden gaping hole in the upper fuselage. I don’t know if I rode on that airplane on our trips around the islands or not. The pilot managed to get the jet back on the deck, but the event made everyone think about fate.

A lesser version of that failure just happened that week to a Southwest 737. It was not as dramatic a failure, thank goodness, but that Boeing model is not the only one with issues. The single-aisle 757 operated by American and United has had its problems, too. Last November, an American Airlines 757 depressurized after a two-foot hole opened over an exit door, forcing the crew and passengers to don those cheesy oxygen masks.

That would be a startling but not necessarily catastrophic event. Still, when the jet that is attached to seat 12F shudders with the pounding of the invisible fists, I tend to think about pressurization cycles and engine vibrations. Not that we can do anything back there, so I read the Economist and a novel about wind-power generation in the great American west.

The whole wind thing sucks, or blows, depending on where you are in the air mass. It is sort of like the fraud of ethanol production, one of those bizarre exercises in social science masquerading as real science. In the interest of progressive technology, we have created an industry that simultaneously removes food from global supply chain and consumes more petroleum in production than it generates when refined.

Ethanol production is almost the perfect government program, generating two completely negative unintended consequences with zero social benefit and one entrenched lobby.
Not quite perfect, though. I read in the pages of the Economist and elsewhere that everything is actually going to be OK through the unintended consequences of those idiots on The Hill. All we have to do is hang tight in the hammering buffet of the immediate future, for a decade, tops.

It won’t take a lot of debate, since it will happen all by itself, and actually accelerate if we do absolutely nothing, which is what Congress is best at anyway.

The Congressional Budget Office maintains a thing called the “Current Law Baseline.” That is what is already on the books. According to the CBO forecast, the Bush-era tax rates will expire in 2012, inflation brings the hated Alternative Minimum Tax to us all. The AMT was passed in 1982, and was billed as only hitting the richest of Americans; do stop me if you have heard this recently.

Since the AMT was not indexed against the Consumer Price Index, as all out boats have risen in a sea of devalued greenbacks, the tax is increasingly biting into middle-class paychecks. Add to this miracle of passive tax increases, under existing law, Medicare payments to doctors are going to be slashed by 20 percent.

With these policies, the deficit drops away in the next 10 years, and stays manageably low for the decades after that. It is sort of like the coming demographic slump in China or Russia that in a few decades will cause them many more problems than the good ‘ole USA will have in the same period.

So really, the question is how to hang on long enough that there will still be something worth saving.

The dueling budget deficit plans are what will possibly get us through the next decade. Well, that is charitable. The Ruthless Ryan plan actually is a plan. The President’s version is one of those campaign things that can’t quite be quantified.

Neither of them work in the long haul. Ryan bills the old and ladles more relief on the rich. The contrary approach by the President- squeezing the wealthy- buys some short-term deficit reduction, and will inevitably have the same effect as the AMT, over time. The campaign version proposed by Mr. Obama, or “Pain Light,” trims an alleged $4 trillion over the decade, almost what the Ryan plan does.

But that $4 trillion is just a fraction of America’s projected long-term debt. The whole point of the Ryan plan is that the real deficit reduction starts at year 10, when his Medicare reforms are phased in.

Under the President’s plan, we soak the rich in the short term, and then just keep going deeper into the red. But of course, he must be counting on getting us to where taxes and Medicare get whacked all by themselves.

The economy goes through cycles like everything else does. That includes jets and the weather. Really, everything is going to be OK. Of course, with jets and the weather you don’t have to go flying. With the economy, we are stuck in our assigned seats with the pilots and the airframe we have got.

At check-in, we forgot to ask about the cycle time, and were not lucky enough to get an exit row.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Rough Country

(Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs. Photo by jemery.)

I spun through the rest of the day in the Springs quite unnerved by the talking Magpie. I mean, how does a normal business trip hinge on things that are quite fantastic, and beyond the realm of the ordinary?

I had a distinct sense of the oddness as I piloted the Mercury Grand Marquis along the flat land below the rough country of the Front Range, thinking about what I thought the talking bird had said. It seemed like he was conservative in orientation, a post-Republican magpie, as it were, as many of my fellow citizens seem to be.

I was nearly overwhelmed by the critters. There were deer wandering across the parkway down from the hotel. A bunny munched grass on the lawn next to the large ornamental pond. Pigeons, of course, but real ducks and two graceful swans- not black- glided majestically across the dark fresh water just ruffled by the persistent breeze.

I commented on the bounty of critters right around the hotel to Tammy, the buxom Texan at the bar who serves up the morning java.

“That’s nothing,” she said. “If you walk the trail over toward the Garden of the Gods you can run into bear and coyotes. Not the little scrawny ones you might see back East. These are big guys, muscular and not afraid of anything.”

I thanked her and left a nice tip, since that was going to be my last vente Starbucks at that Marriott.

I got my ass in gear after a conference call and a radio interview with a public radio station in Arkansas. My blackberry went off as I was passing the Mule Train Barn of the Al Kaly Mystic Shrine jus east of I-25. The Shriners parade for a great cause, crippled kids, and if an odd hobby, certainly good hearted. Definitely better than the scary clown Shriners with the miniature motor-scooters.

I could not tell if there was a full team of forty dark mules in the run-in next to the well-kept barn. Looking further east, the plains stretched back to the land where there were trees and fields. Not here. This is the rough country that runs into the adamant vertical granite that is the spine of the West.

There was a saying the old-time miners had. This rough country was “Hell on women and horses, just right for men and mules.”

(Mule Riders of the Mystic Shrine, Colorado Springs. Photo Al Kaly Shrine.)

The mule was perfect for this place and the work that was done here. I was going to mosey up to Old Colorado City, up the canyon, and maybe beyond to Manitou Springs later. There were mules aplenty there when the silver was coming out of the hills. The mule was the unsung hero of hard work, exploration and settlement of the American West. Durable, placid in manner, bred for the hard tasks of a rough land.

The durable mule is produced by cross-breeding a female horse to a male donkey. The offspring inherits the best characteristics of both parents, a genetic phenomenon called “hybrid vigor.” The mule lives longer, works harder and eats less than its mother; and is faster, more cooperative and smarter than the jack-ass father.

That is a genetic trait we share, apparently, and I wondered what the mules might think. I would imagine they are more of the union orientation, and inclined to support a progressive agenda. I half-thought about pulling off at the Ft. Carson exit to see if the mystical trance could be re-invoked, summoned on demand, but I had been warned about that.

After I confided my little delusion (revelation?) with the wider wired world I got a stern note about channeling the animal spirits. It came from a pal who is a part-time shaman.

The day-job keeps the bills paid, but the spirit world is the passion. Apparently, in the shamanic belief everything is alive and carries with it power and wisdom.  Power animals are an essential component of shamanic practice.  They are the helping spirit that is supposed to conjure and intensifies the power, and the totem is essential for success in any shamanic venture.

Shamans believe that everyone has power animals, sort of like Harry Potter’s owl. These are real animal spirits that reside with each of us, adding to their power and protecting them from illness, acting similarly to a guardian angel.  Each power animal that you have increases your power so that illnesses or negative energy cannot enter your body.  The spirit also lends you the wisdom of its kind.  A hawk spirit will give you hawk wisdom, and lend you some of the attributes of hawk.

The Lynx, for example, is well known for keen eyesight, divination, movement through time and space and is the keeper of all secrets and mysteries.

The Shaman wrote this: “Do not mess with things you do not understand. Do not underestimate the power of the spirit world, and above all, do not insult the animals by attempting to put human words in their snouts or beaks. Tread very carefully here.”

I wrote back and explained that I was not attempting to channel the birds, or anyone else. It was just real, an ordinary event that edged me closer to the reality of Latin Magical Realism. In that reality, more closely based in our ancestral myth than the Marriott usually is, shamanic elements blended to access a deeper understanding of reality.

“Look for more talking animals in the future,” I wrote back, “but with respect. I am not trying to poke fun at the animals. They make more sense than we do.”

In the case of the talking magpie, for example, I assume neither the bird nor I had enough coffee at the moment of the strange interchange. The magical element of the morning was a normal occurrence, the “real” bourgeois morning sliding smoothly along the “fantastic” in the same stream of thought.

Critic Matthew Strecher defined magic realism that crops up, largely in Latin Literature happening as “…what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something ‘too strange to believe.’

Well, we have come a long way from the days when there was anything too strange. It is all around us these days. Maybe we have become inured to the more magical intersections in our lives and instead are living nearly full time in a mass hallucination.

I decided to take a nice long walk on the trails that lead up to the towering mass of Cheyenne Mountain. It would be interesting to talk to a Coyote and see what her take on all this might be.

According to shaman lore, the manifestations of the Coyote incarnate includes the universal premise that all things are sacred, yet nothing is. That only when all masks have fallen will wisdom be revealed. Stealth is triumph, intelligence and cunning abound. Coyote has the ability to place the North Star.

Not to mention the shape-shifting thing. I guess that is where Tony Hillerman got in trouble trying to channel the Navajo Nation. But like Tony, I am just stuck with what I am, and where you sit is usually where you stand.

But more on that if I run into any interesting spirits today in the rough country uphill.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Dawn with Magpies

(Colorado Spring Marriott at dawn. Photo Socotra.)

I put the Kindle aside. I had been reading e-Book version of Black Swan, not the psycho-sexual story of the film with Natalie Portman, but the theory advanced by Nassim Taleb that describes the impact of low-probability but extremely high impact events on societies. I had talked to an extremely intelligent government official the day before, and she had been put on the task of looking at some of the unlikely but really scary things that could go wrong- or right, for that matter.

You know, things like the Internet, or 9/11 or the Japanese Tsunami.

I put the e-reader down and looked around for my smokes. You cannot smoke in the rooms anymore. There is a note that says they will charge you $250 bucks to “Recover” the room if you do. So I go downstairs like a good boy, and was just waiting for Tammy to open up the coffee bar at six and get a jolt of caffeine.

They were kicking the crap out of Andrew Jackson on the streaming audio of National Public Radio. I listened with dull senses just coming awake as the sun edged the rim of the hills to the east.

Apparently someone was taking the 7th President’s insistence on balancing the budget and paying off the national debt as a teaching point in the current mess. The point was that Jackson’s bursting land bubble resulted in a profound and long depression.

The upshot was that somehow the incredible debt that looms over us is “business as usual,” since no subsequent Chief Executive ever seriously contemplated paying off the Treasury IOU’s we sell to interested investors. I gathered that we should take the shortfall in the budget as an appropriate course of action.

Maybe it is, and I am obsessing. But I cannot help think we are being treated as idiots and fools. Where is H. L Menken when we need him?

I shrugged into my moccasins and made preparations to head to the lobby to get a vente coffee and see if I could shrug off the feeling of impending dread. Tammy is a busty young lady from Texas, and is perky enough to make me think that maybe things were OK after all.

I added some half-and-half and three yellows packs of fake sugar and went out front to burn the first couple smokes of the day.

I was not surprised to see that the Magpies were back. They fled the area when the Springs Police and the Secret Service were camped out on the lot when the First Ladies were in residence. The birds are members of the Crow family (Corvidae) and are large birds. Not like the human versions of Raven and Magpie who are in my life. These guys are the real deal, the complete avian package. Glittering black eyes, stark black and white feathers with a hint of iridescence in the long elegant tail.

Interestingly, Magpies are the only non-mammals that are known to recognize themselves in the mirror, which I am not sure we do anymore. We have an image of ourselves that is one thing, and have gained the ability to see that in the mirror when the reality is really quite different.

They are noisy creatures, too, like us. Perhaps all the cacophony is the Magpie equivalent of bad-feather-day mirror shock. To be fair, not all cultures find the Magpie’s vocal habits so offensive. In China, the squawk of a Magpie is a sign of good fortune. And they are certainly having a better feather day than we are.

The birds pecked on scraps of snacks the officers left behind from the surveillance detail. Magpies are omnivorous. They feed mainly on the ground, eating a wide range of food, including such tasty morsels as beetles, seeds, berries, small mammals, small birds and their eggs, nestlings and even reptiles. If I had a beak that functional and large, I might consider taking that up.

I lit a smoke, and inhaled the fumes. It could be the altitude, since I am more accustomed to sea-level activities, or it could have been the time of day, half night and half day, I don’t know. But one of the birds walked up to me on his stilt-like leg. The magpie turned a dark eye to me, cocking his head.

“Morning,” I said. “How are things in bird land?”

I was not particularly surprised when he responded. I have noticed the fabric of reality to be fraying a bit since the bouts of vertigo began.

“Awk,” said he bird. “Better than in yours.”

(Even though Magpies are often seen in large groups, they are solitary nesters, forming large dome-like nests high up in trees. These lofty perches offer them a better perch from which to thrown down insults on the inconsiderate humans like me puffing outside the building.)

“What do you mean?” I asked in surprised. “You mean the budget mess? Things are going to be fine. All the folks back in Washington are getting right on it.”

“You fool,” rasped the magpie. “The budget cannot be balanced by the democratic process. That is because there are three distinct groups, none crazy, and each is acting rationally according to their own best interests.

The first of these is composed of the clients of the welfare state, who vote to obtain as many benefits as they can; the second is the taxpayers, who vote to pay as little as they can; and the last and smallest group is made up of the politicians, who can only get elected by appeasing both groups through deficit spending.”

“So, there is like no good answer without some sort of a Black Swan event that galvanizes everything in a new direction?”

The magpie looked at me with an unswerving gaze. “Of course the dark swan. Sooner or later this house of cards will collapse.  There are no good options.”

I took a sip of Starbucks and looked down at the bird.  “I’m wagering that DC will do enough to kick the can down the street, maybe all the way to 2018 or 2020.  I’d expect the smart guys will trot out Bernanke and some of the IMF folks to bless whatever Potemkin Village construct they’ll be touting as the solution to the crisis.”

The white-and-black bird launched from the pavement and beat the air with his wings. He spoke over his shoulder as he began to gain ground over the blacktop. “Ten years from now at the latest, the world economy will have been so restructured that America will no longer be able to run a game of three-card monte with your greenbacks.”

I watched the bird soar up over the brown dirt of the hill below the Marriott. I decided to make a note when I got back up to the room.

Note to self: “Sell city condo, lay in stock of dry-goods at farm. Actions to be complete NLT 2016. Hope for no more talking magpies or Black Swans.”

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Ninth Floor

(The President and Vice President announce a blitz two-day national tour in support of visits by the First and Second Ladies in support of military families. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images North America.)

It is great to be out of the Beltway. People are nicer. Nothing is quite as crazy as it is back there in the capital; the gulf between us out here is not so deep and implacable.

Accordingly, I was a little startled to find that Washington followed me right out to the Front Range of the Rockies and occupied the entire ninth floor of the Marriott.

The whispers started Wednesday night, at the smoker’s station outside the smoke-free hotel. I saw the K-9 unit was at the hotel, the support truck pulled up almost to the entrance of the towering red-brick building that is an architectural quotation on the Red Rocks formation just to the south of here.

Michele and Jill were supposed to be at Coors Field yesterday to honor military families. It is a little bizarre. The Rockies-versus-Mets game will be shown on the jumbo-tron screens, since the team is out of town and the Rockies are in New York playing the Mets.

Singer Jessica Simpson is set to perform for the fans. It is sort of bizarre, a sort of high-tech version of the Oak Drive In, but nothing really surprises me anymore.

Today the Ladies will visit the National Math and Science Competition at Fountain-Fort Carson High School in Southside Colorado Springs, which is where we should all be staying. The Marriot stands in lonely isolation on the Northside, and is apparently the hotel of choice for the Air Academy boosters, since there are ominous signs in the all the elevator lobbies about making noise after 10:30 at night and getting evicted on the second warning.

I have been quiet as a mouse, and the more so once I realized that there were celebrities in residence with heavily armed escorts.

Their trip is part of a five-city tour to showcase communities and nonprofit organizations that support military families.

It is such complete horseshit that one is tempted to snort in amazement, but it certainly explains why the Vice President nodded off during President Obama’s deficit reduction address yesterday. With Jill on the road, he might have partied a little too hard Tuesday night.

We are on our own blitz national tour to support military families; in this case, our own. We were over on the base, talking to people who are dealing with the war on the border. I won’t say who or why, but the upshot of all this is that there has been a third war in progress for a decade or more on the border with Mexico.

The are just digging up more than a hundred compesenos who were executed and thrown in mass graves there in the unconstrained violence, and that is just business as usual on the border. Mexico is spinning out of control, tourism is being destroyed, and who knows where this is going.

If you consider whatever the hell our military forces have been asked to contribute in the skies over Libya, it is a fourth. We have an incredibly expensive military machine, and that is one of the things that the President wants to cut while his wife and Jill are out here to explain how they are supporting the kids who actually have to fight the wars.

SECDEF Gates already did this, promising the Service Chiefs that if they could make his target reductions in the budget, they would be free to re-invest additional savings to promote efficiencies. I thought that was bullshit at the time, and it turns out I was right, since when the President finally announced that there was a little problem with the budget yesterday, he wacked defense $400 billion more than what Secretary Gates had told Congress was safe or prudent.

Now, hold your horses and don’t start yelling at me.

I think we all realize how serious this is, even if the President seems to have only realized it yesterday. I think we all know that taxes are going to have to go up a little. I suppose I could live with a return to the Clinton-era rates, though what is actually going to happen will doubtless be worse.

There were times in history when the marginal tax rates for we alleged plutocrats was 90%, and the expiration of the Bush tax rates will coincide precisely with my decision to go off the grid and retire.

Oh well. My progressive pal summed it up in a quick note this morning:

“The President is fixed on addressing the problem by looking at both revenue and spending.  The Right always takes the revenue side off the table.  The left may be full of shit on a lot of things, but on these two budget proposals, Paul Ryan’s Tea Party plan wins the bullshit war hands down.

The Congressional Budget Office analyzed the proposal using Ryan’s assumptions and found most savings from spending cuts would go to pay for tax cuts, not to reduce the deficit.  The right has given us more versions of Voodoo economics than Microsoft has given us versions of Windows.  Put the social issues aside.  Maybe we do want to stop taking care of the old and we really do want to reduce their health coverage by 70% (Ryan plan).  Not a country I want to call mine, but we can have that discussion.  In the meantime, we know one thing going forward, there is simply no evidence that decreasing taxes increases revenue. Zero, zip, squat.

And so distilled to its bottom line, Ryan’s plan shreds most of the health care safety net of some little old lady in Pasadena in order to give the benefits of a tax cut to some cigar smoking, Maserati driving, Bank of America douche bag whose “retention bonus” (they had to quit calling them performance bonuses for obvious reasons) was in the millions.”

There is a lot there that I don’t disagree with. I mean, when Barry Bonds is getting more punishment from the Government than Goldman-Sachs, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I got the other view from a more conservative pal who pulled the plug and went off the grid to get ready for what is coming, which he views as something as profound as the Tsunami that smacked Japan. He forwarded the Wall Street Journal analysis of the speech:

“The immediate political goal was to inoculate the White House from criticism that it is not serious about the fiscal crisis, after ignoring its own deficit commission last year and tossing off a $3.73 trillion budget in February that increased spending amid a record deficit of $1.65 trillion. Mr. Obama was chased to George Washington University yesterday because Mr. Ryan and the Republicans outflanked him on fiscal discipline and are now setting the national political agenda.”

You know, this ought to be a discussion about saving America, and both sides are off to the races on their own agendas. I say, a pox on both of their houses.

Smokin’ Joe Biden was tasked by the President to unscrew things. I hope he can stay awake for it.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Late Poem and Pike’s Peak

(The rock and snow poem of Pike’s Peak as Zebulon Pike might have seen it. Photo courtesy Destination 360.)

I have been running on about my once and future city of Detroit, the broad-shouldered steel stamping town of yore, and the destination for the big government convention early next month.

It is hard to concentrate on the state of that once-great place when I am looking out the window at the snow-capped mountains above The Springs in lovely Colorado. The air is crisp, the sun bright, and I can’t focus on The Motor City, so I won’t.

We got a full treatment of the shakes and bumps in United’s flight 995, a somewhat threadbare Boeing 757 that actually had enough legroom to be almost comfortable. The big front was rolling in over the National Capital Region, and it was one of those long days of travel that wound up as a pretty nice day.

Meetings today, and a flurry of communication to the Mother Ship this morning from the sixth floor of the Marriott on the wrong side of town leaves me without much to say. The President is going to talk about the deficit, finally, and maybe the Bowles-Simpson plan will be the template for trying to get out of this mess.

I will reserve judgment until I hear what he has to day, and how the battle-lines are drawn between the White House and Paul Ryan and the Tea Party members of the House Budget Committee.

I will watch with interest, as I imagine all of will with gas at $4 bucks a gallon, inflation running by some measures in double digits. That will wipe out savings, over time, and for all of us counting on fixed incomes from savings and pensions that is a bit of a terrifying prospect. We will just have to see what’s what.

So, with that I am going to punt on The Daily. Our great pal Bonds sent a fabulous poem yesterday. It is by a new poet named Cynthia Zarin. The epigraph at the start is from Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, whose main character is a guiding spirit throughout Zarin’s recounting of her own tale of impossible passion in The Ada Poems, her fourth collection.

Late Poem
” . . . a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern.”
I wish we were Indians and ate foie gras
and drove a gas-guzzler
and never wore seat belts
I’d have a baby, yours, cette fois,
and I’d smoke Parliaments
and we’d drink our way through the winter
in spring the baby would laugh at the moon
who is her father and her mother who is his pool
and we’d walk backwards and forwards
in lizard-skin cowboy boots
and read Gilgamesh and Tintin aloud
I’d wear only leather or feathers
plucked from endangered birds and silk
from exploited silkworms
we’d read The Economist
it would be before and after the internet
I’d send you letters by carrier pigeons
who would only fly from one window
to another in our drafty, gigantic house
with twenty-three uninsulated windows
and the dog would be always be
off his leash and always
find his way home as we will one day
and we’d feed small children
peanut butter and coffee in their milk
and I’d keep my hand glued under your belt
even while driving and cooking
and no one would have our number
except I would have yours where I’ve kept it
carved on the sole of my stiletto
which I would always wear when we walked
in the frozen and dusty wood
and we would keep warm by bickering
and falling into bed perpetually and
entirely unsafely as all the best things are
—your skin and my breath on it.

(New Yorker Cynthia Zarin. She is good. )

Vic

Kick Out the Jams

(Bob Seger at MT. Holly Ski Lodge near Pontiac. Real young.)

Sorry, gentle readers, I am traveling this morning and this is not done with even my usual casual interest to prof-reading.

The success of WABX inspired other Detroit stations WKNR-FM  to adopt the passive-aggressive-progressive-rock approach to the new music. Our pal Lynn was the voice of morning radio in Detroit personality at 94.7 WCSX later, so I defer to her about how it all wound up with the lawyers.

Back then it was easy. The march of the Woodstock summer rolled and reeled across the Midwest. We had the lunatic festival at Goose Lake, featuring some of the same acts.

While not as widely known as Woodstock, the event was just as colorful and had better weather. The most popular images for me seem to have been the flag and the overt drug use. We slept outside in bedrolls, I think, though we may have had a tent. The music of Chicago- I think they had changed their name from CTA after the Transit Authority complained abut infringement- thundered into the clear night sky. “Twenty-Five or Six to Four” never sounded so good and so loud to people so wired.

Someone was shouting they were selling orgasms for fifty cents.

Cheap at twice the price, I thought.

It was cool to see the national and international acts- Rod Stewart and Jethro Tull were my favs from across the pond, and Leslie West’s Mountain was awesome. But goddamn, the Motor City proto-crazies were loud and proud and right there. Look at the lineup of SE Michigan acts:

Bob Seger, The Scott Richard Case (SRC), Brownsville Station, The Stooges and the bottom-of-the-litter, clean-out-the-hall MC5.

(Now an office building, this building used to be a VFW hall in the 1960’s known as The Hideout. Bands that performed at the Hideout included Bob Seger, Ted Nugent & The Amboy Dukes, MC5 and others.)

To most people in the world, Motown means slick bouncy well-packaged soul music. The other Motown sound meant the high-energy adrenaline overdrive of the MC-5, the Stooges and the Amboy Dukes. Bob Seger could rock with the best of them, and Mitch Ryder was a sold blue-collar straight-ahead Devil without a Blue Dress, sine he lifted the material direct from real R&B.

None of us cared, as I recall.

But before any of these bands broke out beyond regional prominence, they had to emerge from the thriving garage-band hotbed of the Detroit suburbs.  The hottest venue in the days before the hippies was a place called The Hideout, which was a rented Harper Woods VFW hall that featured live music aimed at the teen audience. Local promoter Ed “Punch” Andrews’ later branched out with his own record label, Hideout Records.

The Hideout was the place to be, once you had a driver’s license. There you could see the bands that were going to make it out of the teen club and into something big: Bob Seger & the Last Herd, The Fugitives, SRC, Doug Brown & the Omens, the Heavy Metal Kids (featuring future Eagle Glenn Frey, Suzi Quatro & the Pleasure Seekers, and Ted Nugent & the Lourds.

The music was freaking awesome.

You might be surprised to note that Glenn Frey was a Detroiter, albeit from north of Eight Mile. He was a couple years older than our crowd- a true Boomer born in 1948 in Royal Oak. He went to arch-rival Royal Oak Dondero High School, and inspired by the wild 1964 Beatles concert at Olympia Stadium on Grand River, Glenn stopped taking piano and picked up the guitar.

As soon as he had mastered a few chords, Frey put together his first band. That group was The Subterraneans, after Jack Kerouac’s book, and they were a frequent headliner at The Hideout.

Soon after graduating in 1966, Glenn joined the Grabbingham folk-rock band called the Four Of Us, and then, like everyone, got out and moved to the Left Coast to win fame and fortune.

The ones who stayed were Wild Man and Reactionary Revolutionary Ted Nugent, the Nooge, and Smokin’ OP’ss Bob Seger. The latter may be the most famous Detroit Rocker who never left and never compromised where he came from.

Bob was born in Dearborn, to a father who had left Big Band music for the war production industry.  When he was six, the Segers moved to Ann Arbor.

His old man was a shit-heel. He cut out for California to go back to music, and the family was destitute. He big brother had to leave school to work to hold things together, but Bob has able to afford a little AM transistor radio that he would listen to with the ear-plug late at night in the one-room apartment the three could afford.

Listening to CKLW, Bob heard the sweet soul of Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and James Brown.

The Hardest Working Man in Show Business was a huge influence on Seger. His first band was the The Decibels, a 1961 sophomore-year experiment. His next band was The Town Criers. The band worked several nights a week on the Detroit bar circuit and also enjoyed a regular gig backing strippers at clubs like The Primo Showbar, The Rock and Roll Farm, The Suds Factory and The Chances Are were favorites.

“East Side Story” was the first single with his group The Last Heard, and it reached #3 on the Detroit charts. The 1967 single “Heavy Music,” was the one that made me crazy along with a bunch of other kids, and had the potential to break him the hell out of Detroit, but his record company abruptly went out of business.

Take in a show these days- Bob is still on the road more than two hundred days a year. “Heavy Music” is still in his repertoire.

But the center of the Detroit Sex Drug and Rock and Roll scene in my time in late high school and college was the Grande Ballroom, which was run as a sort of greed-driven commune we were all expected to support, sort of like the government today.

What was coming, while I was there, was a showdown between the Grande Ballroom and the hard-edged Eastown Theater.

Gibbs was rooted in Flower Power at the Grande. He had the Fillmore Theatre vision, inspired by San Francisco, if you can imagine that on Detroit’s Grand Boulevard. He attempted to create a similar venue for the new acid music and a resource for local teenagers. Gibb worked closely with Detroit counterculture White Panther icon John Sinclair was a local music broker. John had lived around the corner from us in the Chi Phi house in Ann Arbor. He was immortalized in John Lennon’s tune “Ten for Two,” penned in response to John’s being busted for two marijuana joints and getting a sentence of ten years.

Sinclair helped bring in bands from San Francisco and harder-edged psychedelic rock Detroit bands gathering around the Plum Street community.  The Grande featured acts like Led Zeppelin, Janis, Pink Floyd, The Dead, the original Beck, the Cream and The Who long before they looked like old me. The MC5, Thyme, and The Stooges were the house bands, who ensured you could get your nuts off regardless of who was headlining.

(Interior of the Grande Ballroom today.)

Russ Gibbs did not just feature loud. He made a conscious choice to book avant-garde jazz acts like John Coltrane, and Sun Ra.

Shoot, I understand why I tried to get it. I used to try to understand Miles Davis and never could.

We had our Detroit version of the posters that advertised the acts, which were patterned on Height-Ashbury in the golden days of psychedelic bliss. The art of Gary Grimshaw and Carl Lundgren were happily- no, savagely- anti-establishment.

For Detroiters of a certain age, the Eastown will be remembered for its noisy succession of the Grande Ballroom as the city’s go-to rock venue. While the Grande had captured the flower-power spirit of the ’60s, the Eastown embodied the harder-edged vibe of drug culture.

Think New York Dolls and Lou Reed and men in make-up and big hair. Who palyed there, before the 1930s decaying elegance and plush blue seats? The usual Detroit suspects and touring bands like the J. Geils Band, the James Gang and the Who.

The usual Detroit regional band took up the slack.

The Eastown quickly earned a notorious reputation, targeted by city officials and the news media for overcrowding, hard drug use and vandalism. The venue was shut down by the city in 1971, and “reopened for a brief spell two years later. A 1973 Free Press article described the scene during a concert by Joe Walsh, when the sweet, pungent smell of marijuana, popcorn and sweat mixed with the blaring rock music and shouts.”

That is the last time I saw the place. The music was fantastic in both places, but there was an edge, and entrepreneur Russ Gibbs is still doing whatever it is entrepreneurs to for a living.

Russ Gibb closed the Ballroom as a rock venue in 1972, and I missed the end, since no one was coming anymore. The building has rarely been used since, and I hate to lurch into Ruin Porn, but sort of have to.

As of 2010 it remained inactive and open to redevelopment, which in another Detroit is a call to “bring up the bulldozers.” The good news, from a bulldozer perspective, is that there are not enough of them. As the MC5 used to observe, “Kick out the jams, Mother Fuckers.”

(Grande Ballroom this afternoon, Photo courtesy Albert Duce.)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

MoTown

(A MoTown 45 RPM Record. TM Motown Records or whoever owns the rights now.)

OK, we have done the city, done the region, all is not lost, well, maybe it is. But damn, Detroit was a vibrant place and it just seems like a crying shame that inept government, greed and a staggering level of drug and hyper-violent crime made it impossible for anyone to stay there who had the means to leave.

I mean, think of the legacy on so many levels. Sure, there were the astonishing technical innovations in manufacturing that changed the world and won a war. The social system, based on collective bargaining, that made it possible for a blue collar slob to actually buy the car he built, have a little place on a lake up North, and a decent retirement.

When I was working on the line, figuring out with numbing repetition that I had no interest what-so-ever in staying a Union worker on The Line, I listened to the tunes on the AM/FM radio I brought to the factory.

CKLW, the Big Eight, blasted 50,000 power-watts from the suburbs of Windsor. It was the iconic AM station the boomers grew up with. Pulsing with the beat of MoTown, the Canadian station could ignore the rules of the FCC and power over all in its path.

The Detroit stations- WKNR (“Keener 13!”) copied the format that spread all over- his Top 40 format was known around the country as “Boss Radio.”

“Keener-13” was a leading exponent of the signature MoTown sound in its peak in the mid-1960s, and I have to give a tip of the topper to the music that defines the legacy of the city to most of the rest of the world. It was core to coming of age for all of us, though the music was going to take us on a long strange trip before it was done.

I am going to get to what the white kids in the suburbs did with R&B, creating a gritty Detroit rock & roll sound from a vibrant aggregation of artists that includes Bob Seger, The Stooges and the irredeemably foul MC5. But chronologically, you should know what was coming out of the speakers in that GTO or Camaro, roaring down Woodward toward The Totempole or Mavericks.

(Barry Gordy, in the day.)

MoTown got it’s start with Berry Gordy, who was writing songs for local Detroit acts like the Matadors and the great Jackie Wilson. The latter hit gold with Gordy’s song “Lonely Teardrops,” which makes my toes tap even as I write. Gordy got screwed on the royalties (Welcome to Show Biz, Barry), and it occurred to him that the publishing and pressing of the records was where the money was in the business

(MoTown’s original location at “Hitsville” on West Grand Boulevard. A photography studio located in the back of the house on the left was converted to a recording studio in 1959, and Gordy lived on the second floor. Motown records expanded into several neighboring houses for offices, record production and rehearsal spaces. Photo Furious Freddy.)

In January of 1959, Gordy borrowed $800 from his family and founded Tamia Records. He wanted to use “Tammy,” but the franchise movie/record series with Debbie Reynolds had gotten there first. We used to watch those from the back seat of the Ambassador station wagon at The Oak Drive-in in Royal Oak.

(Oak Drive In sign on Woodward, two blocks from heaven.)

Operating out of his Hitsville complex on West Grand, Gordy engineered his first R&B success with Barret Strong, whose “Money (That’s What I want)” made it to number two on the charts. That song would be covered by dozens of white acts over the next decade, not surprising, since the pulsing base beat and unflinching honesty were dual signatures of the Motor City culture.

Under Gordy’s tutelage, the Matadors turned into the Miracles as Gordy gained confidence in a sound that had cross-over appeal to the top charts.  The lead singer of the group was a charismatic young man who was briefly my neighbor in Palmer Woods: Smokey Robinson.

(Smokey Robinson in his early Miracles days.)

The Miracles’ first R&B hit “Shop Around” peaked at number two on the Billboard charts and #1 one on the R&B. It sold a million copies. Gordy and Smokey were on their way, and the hits kept coming. “Please, Mr. Postman” scored for the Marvellettes. A trio of talented writers, Holland-Dozier-Holland, generated snappy tunes that appealed to an America that wanted to dance and was spending a of of time at the wheel.

I defy anyone to sit down and listen to the greatest MoTown hits of the 1960s to not want to get up and start lip-synching. Gordy had more than a hundred top-ten hits with artists like The Supremes, The Four Tops, the Jackson 5, Mary Wells, Little Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and the immortal Temptations.

The MoTown sound influenced the next wave of music as well. Bob Dylan called my neighbor Smokey “America’s greatest living Poet,” and Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison were both admirers of his sound.

The year I moved back to Detroit was when that was ending, though. Smokey Robinson and The Miracles gave their last concert in DC in 1972, and Smokey went on to a solo career of slow, smooth R&B. He charted his first solo LP “Smokey” that year.

Nothing goes forever, though, and everyone knew there was something going wrong with Detroit that year that good music all by itself could not heal.

Gordy got the hell out of the Motor City himself in 1972, and moved to LA. He continued to operate the label as an independent until 1988, when he sold it to MCA, and God only knows who owns the catalog of music that channeled the Delta through West Grand Boulevard and into our collective souls.

CKLW and Keener 13 were passé by 1972 anyway. On February 1, 1968, a little station with the call letters “WABX” ditched the “play list.” The DJs picked their own tunes and “ABX” became the icon of Freeform Progressive Rock. That is what was playing on my AM/FM clock radio on the line when I was there, not CKLW. ABX boomed and popped with surprise, airing new music no one else was playing.

Try Iron Butterfly, the full-length version of “Light My Fire” by The Doors, Jimi’s snarling, wailing electric guitar. Traffic, Cream, all the bands that represented the nastier side of the anarchic British Invasion.

Sex , Drugs and Rock Roll, anyone?

Oh, man. We will take a trip to the Hideout in Harper Woods tomorrow, where Bob Seger and others got their start. And the Hideout only sets up the titanic struggle between the Eastown and Russ’ Gibbs legendary Grande Ballroom. There, in the old palace, could be seen the most amazing sights a teenager could see.

In the unisex restroom of the Grande Ballroom between sets quite literally anything in the world could be going on. And it was.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

All that Glitters

(Superbowl Night, 2006. Brand new Ford Field looms in the background. Photo Wiki Commons by ifmuth.)

There is good stuff happening in Detroit; there must be. You can see some of it the picture above, from 2006. The downtown was spruced up for Super Bowl XL, when the Steelers cemented themselves as one of the great franchise in NFL history by beating the Seahawks at brand spanking new Ford Field, right downtown.

You can see from the image what the town looked like. Formula One driver Roger Penske worked on making the City glitter for the throngs who came. The new terminals at Detroit Metro Airport, the successor to Willow Run (The tri-graph for Metro is still “DTW”) were nearly ready, and Japanese and Chinese are heard as much as English on the new concourses since the place is an international hub.

The NFL joined in the civic boosterism, promoting this Super Bowl under the slogan “The Road to Forty.” The slogan not only honored the 40-year history of the game, but was a nod to Detroit’s traditional role as the center of the global auto industry. It was the first Superbowl to be played in the city. The only other time the NFL big-boys came to play was at the Pontiac Silverdome, way up in Auburn Hills.

The Lions left the city in 1975, just when I did. The getting was good that year, and antique Tiger Stadium did not have enough butts-in-seats for the voracious appetite of the NFL, and the Ford family, which had lost its way in the auto business and was mired in losing its way on the gridiron as well.

(Tiger Stadium on a game day. The place is gone, carted away in dumptrucks. Built in 1912, it was home to Big League baseball for nearly a century. Volunteers maintain the original diamond, though nothing else remains.)

1975 was a curious year, and intersected with the history of Oakland County, where the richer segment of white Detroit relocated, since it was 1975 when Pink Floyd called a hiatus to the performance of the hypnotic anthem “Dark Side of the Moon.” They did not perform it again, end-to-end, until 1994 in front of a sell-out crowd at the Silverdome in July of 1994.  I was elsewhere then, but later, just before the turn of the millennium, attended a farewell of sorts to my then-father-in-law at the Detroit Athletic club. Ford Field was just rising then, and the rise of the new structure was accompanied by the demolition of the structures around the posh club that once had been the center of social life downtown, along with the Institute of Arts and the Opera House.

(Detroit Athletic Club at night, standing in proud isolation at 221 Madison. Since 1887, this was the club for Detroit’s elite. There is currently an incentive program designed to attract former members to re-join the club.)

The calculated demolition left the club looking like a white marble Chiclet in a gap-tooth grin.

A pal who is still in Grabbingham wrote to applaud my reminder that there is life in the old town still. It is part of the chip on all of our collective Diaspora shoulders about the people who come to gawk at the destruction of the old gal. But my pal had to note that if there is something good happening downtown, the people continue to flee the city.

My pal said it this way: “I have to admit there is something that really fuels the imagination in the near death of a city like Detroit. I drove down a couple weeks ago.  The blight is much more visible now.  I couldn’t tear myself away from looking at it. It was like drinking something you knew you shouldn’t, but getting high from it anyway.”

On the trip, my friend noted that just beyond the spruced up areas of downtown, the vistas become surreal. “Concrete covers every walkable surface.  No trees are visible.  Building materials are processed beyond recognition.  Most of the inhabitants of this new world are strangely obese.  Fast food is abundant. The center traffic lane of five has been taken over by shopping carts, pushed blindly by stoned shoppers.  Its a new kind of blight, and its weird……very weird.”

The problem of the urban food desert- a phenomenon caused by the lack of supermarkets providing relatively wholesome food- is that available nourishment comes from the high-fat diet available from McDonald’s or Church’s Fried Chicken. There are strip malls replacing some of the old commercial areas, but what is available is not what is healthy, and as the city continues to empty out, it is as bizarre as what was Prussia in the wake of the passing of the Red Army.

(Population of Southeastern Michigan. Data compiled and graph courtesy of the Large Lakes and Rivers Forecasting Research Branch, US EPA.)

Numbers don’t lie, though of course they can tell a variety of stories. The chart above demonstrates that Detroit did not die in a vacuum. The city just moved to the suburbs, and the vast infrastructure was recreated in the sprawl of the counties around the old urban areas.

With the population south of Eight Mile falling by half, it is not surprising that one of the great hobbies of those left behind was the annual Halloween arson festival perpetrated on abandoned buildings known as “Devils Night.”

There are some other troubling indicators that have come out of the 2010 Census. The Little City by the Bay Up North has seen the consequences of the downturn in Detroit. Tourism is down, and the Fudgies who come up to wander the summer streets and eat our confections don’t have as much cash to spread around and the demand for vacation properties has declined markedly. I would estimate that our place on the bluff has seen the price come down by as much as half; the grand McMansions at the sprawling Bay Harbor development at the old cement plant on Little Traverse Bay must have experienced the same thing.

It is no time to try to sell anything. Even downstate, the census reveals plush suburbs like my own Grabbingham are experiencing high vacancy rates.  It is no secret to the Realtors that behind the well-maintained facades and manicured lawns no one is home.

(Vacant house Bloomfield Township. The price was slashed to $135,000 from $340,000 after the sellers walked away from the mortgage. Photo Laura Berman.)

Grabbingham has a 9.4% vacancy rate, and regal Bloomfield Hills is over 10%. Those rates are similar to Detroit’s rate a decade ago, when the real flight accelerated, this time not just whites but blacks as well.
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Where are they going? The overall population of the region is relatively stable, so it appears those who are staying are looking more closely at the old near-in suburbs like Ferndale and Royal Oak, where a small post-war home might be had for under a hundred grand.

The people in the property business seem to think it will be an interesting Spring, what with the Bankers getting the green light to resume foreclosures. It is almost tempting to think about relocating to take advantage of something grander than a two-bedroom apartment. But it will be great to visit the old town.

I am looking forward to taking in a Tigers game at Comerica Park, the new facility that replaced the old Tiger Field. It is really fancy, and serves as a magnet to bring people downtown.

But the blight is spreading all over. Remember the Silverdome? It cost the city of Pontiac nearly $57 million bucks in 1973-era money. That would be around $220 million in today’s tired greenbacks, and God knows what tomorrow, if you throw the cost of food and fuel in there, which curiously the government won’t do. Christ, even on base, premium fuel for the Hubrismobile hovered at $3.99 a gallon.

Anyway, after several innovative schemes to utilize the now-derelict stadium fell through, the city felt it had to get out from under the white elephant. They put it up for auction, and a Canadian name Andreas Apostolopoulos read about it in the paper. He put in a sealed bid and won it.

He paid $583,000 for the title to the place with 80,000 seats, 102 luxury sky-boxes and suites and premium 7,384 club seats. That is less than a lot of two bedroom apartments go for in DC, but hey, like they say, “Location, Location, location.”

(Pontiac Silverdome, 2006. Photo Dave Hogg, Royal Oak, MI)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com