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A bit of a miscellaneous post here, more or less trying to catch up on readings and stuff to come back to:

• From the NYTimes Lens blog, “Chop and Crop,” which is a complaint by photographer David Hume Kennerly about how Newsweek reframed/reworked a photo he took of Dick Chenney.  Basically, the original photo was a family picture of the Chenneys where Dick was cutting up a hunk of roast or some other sort of beef.  The re-cropped photo,which appeared in Newsweek and accompanied a quote from Chenney about torture and such, zooms in on Chenney cutting up bloody meat.  An extensive and interesting discussion, too.
• “Is the Internet Melting our Brains?” is an interview in Salon with Dennis Baron about his book, A Better Pencil.  Spoiler alert:  Baron’s answer appears to be “no.”
• Here and here, Henry Jenkins has a long interview with S. Craig Watkins about social media (especially Facebook) and about his book The Young and the Digital. Just skimming through the interview (which is in itself enough of a text to include in a class, especially something like 516 or 444), it seems like Watkins’ analysis is pretty interesting.  Say, speaking of stuff like Facebook:
• The John Seely Brown Symposium at U of M on October 13 is going to feature an open to the public speech and panel presentation with danah boyd as the keynote speaker.  I think I’m going to let my 12:30 class out early and head on over there.

I saw this article on Boing-Boing and on Mark Maynard’s blog: “To urban hunter, next meal is scampering by
Detroit retiree, 69, supplements his income by living off the land” from the Detroit News. A quote:

Beasley, a 69-year-old retired truck driver who modestly refers to himself as the Coon Man, supplements his Social Security check with the sale of raccoon carcasses that go for as much $12 and can serve up to four. The pelts, too, are good for coats and hats and fetch up to $10 a hide.

While economic times are tough across Michigan as its people slog through a difficult and protracted deindustrialization, Beasley remains upbeat.

Where one man sees a vacant lot, Beasley sees a buffet.

“Starvation is cheap,” he says as he prepares an afternoon lunch of barbecue coon and red pop at his west side home.

First off, I’m pretty sure that the last thing that Southeast Michigan and Detroit needs in the paper right now is a story about the resourceful use of raccoons as food. “Come to Detroit for the Final Four; stay for the ‘coon.” Ouch. I think I like Mark’s take on this, for the most part.

Second, this reminds me of a time that must be 15 or more years ago now when Sheri Reynolds brought over a muskrat to a party I was having while living at Charlotte’s house in Richmond, Virginia.

I cannot recall the purpose for the party (though I had many parties at that house), nor can I recall the specific purpose for the muskrat. I do remember though that Sheri bought it at some kind of redneck-ish grocery store. It was in in the frozen food section– no kidding. Anyway, she brought this thing over and cooked up a “muskrat bog” in a big pot: lots of rice, onions, stock seasoning, and, of course, muskrat. Stank up the whole house.

I don’t remember what the muskrat tasted like– I imagine a lot like raccoon might taste. But I do recall someone fishing out the muskrat skull from the bog and propping it up on a bunch of beer cans in the kitchen, or perhaps the dining room table.

I don’t tend to think a lot about Detroit, but I stumbled across a couple blog posts/articles yesterday that made me ponder:

First, there is “The travails of Detroit” from the Financial Times of London– or more accurately, Cory Doctorow’s post on boing-boing about this article. In that post, Doctorow wrote this:

I was at Confusion, a science fiction convention in the Detroit area recently, and I got to thinking that Detroit may be the most science fictional city in the world — if sf is about the way that technology changes society (and vice-versa), then Detroit, the first New World, world-class city built around a high-tech industry that collapsed, is about as science fictional as it gets.

I am assuming– especially based on this Financial Times article– that Doctorow doesn’t mean a “science fictional city” like the “Futureworld” in his beloved Disneyland; I assume he’s talking Mad Max, Blade Runner, etc.

Conversely, on Mark Maynard’s blog, I came across this glass half-full article, “For Sale: The $100 House,” which is about how the collapse of the real estate market in Detroit is presenting itself as an opportunity for artists and other hipster/urban pioneers. Here’s a quote:

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.

The truth is that Detroit has been “suddenly” transforming into a former shell of itself for about 40 years, and the comments on Doctorow’s post on boing-boing point this out. True, the slow decline of Detroit is about the failures of the auto industry, but it is also about race, about the rise of the suburbs, about a general population shift in the U.S. back to the south, etc. Besides, I’ve never quite gotten this dark/sci-fi/noir aesthetic of artsy photos of dilapidated and abandoned buildings of the kind featured in the Financial Times story or on the site“The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.”

The idea of turning a house that costs about the same as a souped-up desktop computer into an inner-city, eco-friendly, artists colony is appealing and even perhaps a little more realistic and unique than the idea of turning it into a dystopian movie set. It is interesting that the kind of forces that originally encouraged migration to the west– cheap land and few rules– are driving them now into the inner-city. Urban pioneers indeed. But it still probably isn’t going to improve the schools, bring a grocery store to town, raise the tax base, reform local government, etc.

In the the almost dozen years I’ve lived in Ypsilanti, I’ve been into Detroit-city about a dozen times tops– well, not counting the Computers and Writing Conference in 2007 at Wayne State, which is the only conference I’ve ever commuted to from my house. Ypsilanti is between Detroit and Ann Arbor and sometimes feels like a bit of a buffer-zone, but I never really think of myself as living in a suburb of Detroit, or even particularly close to Detroit. Granted, downtown Detroit is just 40 or so minutes away by car, but it seems a lot further than that.

Anyway, I don’t think Detroit is a sci-fi prototype and I’m not sure its cheapness alone means it is the next great investment for artists or others. I think it’s a bit of a doughnut hole, meaning the city of Detroit is a whole lot of “nothing” with a lot around it. I’ve been in downtown Detroit before on a Friday or Saturday early evening where it was a complete ghost town, while simultaneously, downtown Ann Arbor is packed with all kinds of folks. All the “good stuff” of Detroit is around it in the suburbs. The hole of Detroit is a blank.

Don’t get me wrong– Detroit-city is not without its many charms (DIA, Commerica Park, Ford Field, WSU, the Fischer Theater, Greektown, etc., etc.), and it’s not like Detroit is that unique. In fact, I would wager to say that most major cities in this country are more like doughnuts than not. Who goes downtown in Cleveland? Baltimore? St. Louis? Even a lot of Chicago? This is what suburbanization has done almost everywhere in this country. Though I will grant you that the nothingness of the hole of Detroit is more pronounced, perhaps because of the pronounced size and general goodness of the doughnut that surrounds this particular hole. There aren’t many urban areas in this country where the towns around that area are as known or more known than the main city itself.

In any event, I’m leery of signaling out Detroit’s state in the face of “high technology,” and I’m rooting for the the artists and other urban pioneers. But I have a feeling that the holeness of Detroit is remaining with us for a while.

I knew we were in for some cold weather today, but I have to say I wasn’t expecting the current conditions: as of 6:30-ish or so AM, it’s -11 with a windchill of -30 (Fahrenheit, of course). I think windchill is kind of bullshit– unless it really is windy– but that is indeed pretty freakin’ cold.

In fact, it’s so cold, schools in the county (including Will’s school, Greenhills) are canceled because of it. That’s a new one for me, a “cold day.” It makes sense for schools that are busing in students because the last thing you want is a third-grader waiting for a bus that is running late turning into a popsicle. But I’m not sure it makes as sense for a place like Greenhills since all students find their own way there, though I have to say that I am happy I don’t have to go out and warm up the car quite this early. And it does create a four-day weekend/break for folks, too.

For father’s day today, Jim K. and I played golf at EMU’s Eagle Crest Golf Course, which is described in this web site as being part of the “Eagle Crest Resort.” Well, if a corporate hotel and a golf course count as a “resort,” then I guess this is what this is.

Anyway, in the midst of my rather terrible play, we encountered a turtle on the fairway of number 15:

Note that this first video (one or two more animal videos are coming) were posted on Flickr, which I haven’t experimented yet with video. The preference for the service is clearly for short videos.

I’m listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition” right now, and they were talking with Debbie Dingle (no, that’s not a made-up name), the wife of John Dingle and a mucky-muck in the Michigan Democratic party, and she just said that the Michigan decision to break the Democratic National Committee rules and have the primary sooner was an act of civil disobedience in protest of a broken system. WTF?! The party bosses in Michigan decide to disenfranchise millions of people because they don’t like the primary system? Even though if they had left things just the way they were, Michigan and Florida would both be hugely relevant right now?!?!

I agree with almost everything Mark is saying right here, and I agree with what I heard Howard Dean saying on the Sunday morning talk shows: changing the rules now is going to give the advantage to one candidate or the other. Senator Carl Levin is apparently talking about/floating a mail ballot system; I’m not sure who would come out on top of that one. And apparently the wisdom out there right now is that neither Michigan nor Florida is going to be enough to put Obama or Clinton over the top anyway.

But what I’d really like to hear someone in a position of power at the Michigan Democratic Party say– I don’t care if it’s Granholm, who is pretty much term-limited and Canadian-ized out of running for anything for the foreseeable future or Mrs. Dingle who isn’t elected to anything anyway– to admit that they screwed up and to apologize. We can argue that the primary system is screwed up and needs to be fixed, though, as a former Iowan, I personally can see the point of a place like Iowa or even New Hampshire going first. But the fact of the matter is these people took a gamble and they lost, and they ought to ‘fess up to that.

It’s not just “super Tuesday,” you know; it’s also Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, etc., etc., and around here, that means it’s time for one of the few foods I think of as being at least kind of unique and/or a “specialty” of the greater Detroit area, the jelly doughnut confection known as the Paczki. (BTW, the other food I associate with metro Detroit is the coney island hot dog and the restaurants that serve them, the diners known as “Coney Islands.” With foods like these, it’s shocking that Detroit has long been considered one of the fattest cities in America, isn’t it?)

I read a nice entry on the local food blog Kitchen Chick, one that even includes audio for the proper pronunciation of the Polish word “Paczki.” Her first recommendation for the best in local/ Ypsi-Arbor Paczki was the restaurant Amadeus, but considering that this was a bit out of the way and it sounded like special ordering was involved, I took the next best option and went to the Copernicus European Deli in downtown Ann Arbor. They get their Paczki in from some bakery in Hamtramck, which is a town completely within the boundaries of Detroit and known for its Polish population.

I went on my Paczki run before going to the gym (no kidding). If nothing else, it was nice to visit the Copernicus Deli, which was connected to a bulk food place and a Brazilian food place on Main street in Ann Arbor, and it was clearly a very local and very Polish-immigrant-run business. At least I think they were speaking Polish. Nice little shops.

The flavors available were plum (aka prune), strawberry, raspberry, cream, and rose. I asked about the rose one first, and the woman explained to me it was a kind of jelly that had a sort of floral taste. So I ordered a couple plum/prune and a couple rose, and I ate one of each on my way to ride the stationary bike and lift weights. So I figure I didn’t gain any weight today, but I sure as heck didn’t lose any either.

The details here are all in the filling. The plum/prune one reminded me of these things my Grandma Krause made once in a while called Kolaches, which is another one of these East European pastries, so I guess that makes sense. The rose one was interesting, kind of like a strawberry or some other smooth and red berry jam with a flowery smell and aftertaste. And I mean that in a good way.

But I have to say, with apologies to Detroit-city purists/loyalists, you can call ‘em what you want, but they are still jelly doughnuts, ones with really good filling, but jelly doughnuts nonetheless. They were sugary and doughy and heavy and– dare I say it?– nothing that special.

Don’t get me wrong– I’ll probably have one next year, and I may very well get mine from the Copernicus Deli again. But it’s not like I’m going to start a calendar count-down to next year’s Paczkis.

Oh PS: Will likes ‘em too.