Honeymoon in Detroit: A Literary Reading

In honor of our visiting friends, Mika and PR, and their recent nuptuals, we decided to title our most recent summer event "Honeymoon in Detroit." I met the happy couple when we were in the MFA program at the University of Arizona together. These last few years they have been refining their skills at being crazy-good at home renovation, and were more than happy to share their gifts with the house.

I wasn't even sure if I had the energy to plan another event, but as I watched my friends sweat, and as we started to have so much fun exploring the city and as the living room and a stairway got coats of some tastefully chosen colors, I got to thinking... what's one last push of creative energy? All it really takes to throw a successful event are talented people and a trip to Trader Joes. What with my photojournalist/blogging dad around, we figured that even if it was just us at the reading, there'd be enough for an entertaining evening.

Before I'd left Tucson, a fellow of the literary foundation Cave Canem gave me the contact info of a bunch of Detroit poets. Because Detroit is such a magical place, and I really mean this, I'd actually met a few of them already out in the small world. By accident. When I shot out emails, everyone, whether we'd bumped into one another or not, was enthusiastic about attending. Some told a friend or two to come, so we had a healthy crowd. Add to that my sister, my journalism majoring neice, my neighbor Rosie, this awesome photographer Stephen, and an MFA friend who just moved to Ann Arbor for law school, and you've got yourself an event.

There is always a moment before one of these shindigs, usually when I'm on my way to buy wine and cheese, when I think "OK hold it together Aisha. You can do a little chit chat for a couple of hours. Just get yourself a cup of wine and you'll survive." But as soon as these friend-strangers started showing up, I got that happy feeling in my stomach. Before I knew it the evening was in competition with some of the best I've had. Nandi was on the couch telling me about a Connecticut artist's residency to model ours after... Blair had these awesome blue shoes... don't get me started on Darryl's pants. I wanted to marry them all.

Then we started reading. The SHEER QUALITY of the work was... sheer. Oh goodness. Cave Canem doesn't let in anything that looks like average, I'll tell you that. And my old grad school friends blew me away anew. It's always refreshing to hear fresh material from people you thought you had pegged-- even if you'd pegged them as brilliant. This may sound like a love fest, but the reading was called Honeymoon, and I am not exaggerating at all. Not this time.

Blair, a fellow with the African diaspora-themed journal Callaloo (which had the Cave Canem folks jealous if you want to know what prestige looks like) read--nay, shouted!-- from his book of poems on Michael Jackson, Moonwalking. He has a slam history, so the room came alive with that satisfying je ne sais quoi that happens when a slammy delivery meets an academic aesthetic. (If you don't know what I mean don't assume I'm casting aspersions at either genre, really... there's just this beautiful balance...) Nandi read a poem about a woman who died in a Detroit fire that had the whole room going "Unh." Josh read what I must ineptly describe as an ode to his mother's immigration from Peru, that practically got a standing ovation. By the time Erika's car got stolen outside (I wish I were joking), we were all old friends.

When it comes to readings, I've become a real fan of strictly enforced time limits, and my sister Lisa decided to take this task on with gusto. For a lot of long, juicy reasons, I haven't spent a lot of time with my sister until the last few years, and it turns out she is... hilarious doesn't do her justice. Sharp doesn't either. She's like Detroit... you have to see for yourself to understand. Her gentle reminders, impromptu Q and A's, and unsolicited but entirely necessary ending remarks yanked our little gathering into order and laughter and style.

The whole car incident left us all feeling a bit smacked around by the rougher edges of a city we love to romanticize. It forced us to reconsider and perhaps take more deeply to heart some of the more hopeful lines read during the course of the evening about the state of affairs in this city, which teaches residents -- new, old and returning-- every day a new lesson about beauty and strength and loss and community. And humor. Oh! And love. Uh oh... cue the photograph of the young black boy wading through the water off Belle Isle in the shadow of a cityscape...

Romancing Detroit: A Courtship Exhibition (part two)

Our courtship exhibition ended up being a delightful meet-and-greet. Because of the heat, it took place for the most part in the kitchen and on the porch, with courageous dashes up the stairs to check out some gorgeous art.

One room, which we like to call, "the glacier room," contained the work of eight photographers and painters...

The other room, deemed "the woods," contained some handmade "how to" books (which sent my teenaged cousin a-textin and a-blushin... who knew feminism could be so fun!), as well as photographs and an essay about the house where the exhibition was being held (which can be read in an upcoming issue of Michigan Quarterly Review). We also displayed a series of found and re-framed portraits from a Detroit dumpster...

While wandering around in the smothering heat, you could get to know the artists up close and personal. For example, Aisha's cousins! Including Suzanne, whose intricate pencil-drawings and elaborate murals have long decorated the homes of her relatives. Her contribution to the exhibit included a multi-media collaboration with another cousin, Rebecca, who has photographed extensively in Detroit and Italy.

Garrett's photographic documentation of both Detroit and Haiti added to the international breadth of the show. Though not a native Detroiter, he ended up moving to Detroit's Farnsworth Street after living at another artist's residence, the "Million Fishes" collective in San Fransisco.

Also chatting it up in the kitchen was Rachael, en route the Michigan Womyn's Festival. She makes books and other fancy objects out of Austin, in addition to running a design company, Redstart, which provides commercial and residential paint design (and may have inspired our flamboyant painting on the third floor).

If on the sunporch, you might run into the emmy-award winning filmmaker, New York Times freelance photographer and all-around-good guy, Stephen, who is currently working to create a photography institute on Detroit's Riverfront (here he is below, at the site). He was picking the brain of soon-to-be law student Heather, en route to Ann Arbor.

Rosie, a California native and post-card collector, moved to Detroit after taking a photographic road trip through the fifty states. She exhibited a few photographs in addition to the series of post cards she created on her own, fifty in all-- one for each state. She prefers living in Motor City, where "you get the sense that people pay attention," to her former home, New York City, which she describes as "a homing beacon for Type A personalities."

A few people not featured in the exhibit showed up as well. There was Kate, for example, another Farnsworth resident who teaches Detroit kids how to farm. The other Kate in attendance holds a monthly event above a bakery in Mexicantown called "Soup," which is a micro-fundraising initiative. Everybody brings five bucks for soup, and shares an idea they've come up with that relates to the arts. The person with the most popular idea is awarded all of the funds collected that evening.

Jero periodically spends his free time volunteering with a contingent of Detroit DIY/Handmade Detroit ("a loose collective for people who like to make stuff"). After meeting him at the exhibit, we found him at Eastern Market alongside a huge, colorful bus on loan from MIT called the "Fab Lab," which is currently making rounds in Detroit, in the attempt to de-mystify technology. He was helping some kids fiddle with wires that were somehow going to enable a speaker to amplify something (the kids got it much faster than I did).

While the art and learning were educational and all, the evening was most importantly a good time. An old friend made a two-hour treck from her farm to say hello, and three, kindly strangers left with well wishes and requests for more events in the future.

Not to worry!

There will be a literary reading this coming Wednesday... "Honeymoon in Detroit," in honor of our currently visiting friends, who are (to the dismay of all who hear it) ACTually spending their honeymoon in the Motor City. But hey! This place is waaay more romantic than people think.

Romancing Detroit: A Courtship Exhibition (part one)

Our efforts to prepare for the exhibit on Wednesday started out just fine. We had asked a handful of artists to participate with us in an inaugural show, and we were impressed by their enthusiasm. We sketched out a healthy to do list and got to work.

Logan was painting a local creek onto the wall of the stairway that I was sanding...

Radhika was painting a blue Baudelaire onto the door of a closet...

And we all took about forty trips to the Staples copy center within the course of the day to have our buddy Al print stuff for us...

A photographer from the New York Times even dropped by at the last minute, asking if he could add some stuff to the exhibit. Well alright!

It was hot, sure, but we had borrowed a bunch of fans and the fridge was stocked with sparkling water and white wine. Everything was looking great.

And then the electricity went out.

Since this happens a lot at our house, we figured we'd short circuited something. We started running around for awhile, grabbing our local electrician and, for my dad, one of those masks you wear when you're "at work"...

Every time I opened the refrigerator door to look with panic at the cheese in the slowly-warming fridge, someone told me, "CLOSE IT!" And I obeyed.

But it became clear that there wasn't much we could do to change things. This particular outage was not our fault. It was a city-wide thing.

As we celebrated our faultlessness, it slowly dawned on us that the electricity-free environment had brought an air of calm into the house. This feeling-- something between chaos and zen, is a familiar one in a place like Detroit. After all, this summer has been a festival of rupture and healing-- bike accidents, breakups, cross-country moves and graduations... If this city has anything to teach, it's how to live with lots of hope despite a feeling of uncertainty about the future. So, we stopped running around, and waited for our guests as we were.

Painting Spaces

We are in the last minute stages of planning our first exhibition of the summer! It will be a small meet-and-greet featuring the art of some new artist friends, family, and ourselves. We are going a little crazy trying to design the heck out of our new space:

Fashion 313

Extremely Close and Very Uncomfortable

The Story of Two Ladies Taking Fear to Task

Radhika

When Aisha was selling the idea of "Detroit Ho!" six months ago, she had me at the word Detroit. I had been contemplating my post-collegiate future, and was feeling bleak about joining other graduates heading in a mass exodus to those familiar cultural meccas like New York, Boston, D.C., and any European capital. Detroit Ho! was an opportunity to do something different, to make meeting and greeting a new city my first priority, to work with friends and to develop future artistic collaborations. In the following months, when I began to learn more about Motown, I felt privileged to live in a city that has seen such important civil rights activism around housing, workplace discrimination, and city governance. And, I was energized by current stories of community activism, large-scale art projects, and my fellow Seminole residents.

I couldn't have predicted that I would find something to work on as soon as my first day in Detroit, something totally unexpected involving neither art nor activism: fear.

The ground-work was laid before I got to Detroit. My bubbly enthusiasm about coming to stay here caused concern among family and friends, whose perception of Detroit was shaped by the Cops-esque footage of violence often shown on mainstream news channels. The fact of having grown up in an inner-city neighborhood in Boston, where ambiguous noises at night leave you wondering "gun shot or firework?" did nothing to dispel my dad's fear that somehow, Detroit would be a new level of dangerous. It seems even natives of Detroit feel this way: an elderly woman siting next to me on my flight through Atlanta felt that she had to intervene while I was in the midst of gushing about my summer plans, to ask me where I was from. When I told her she said, "You know Detroit isn't Boston, honey."

So perhaps I was predisposed to be scared because of well-meaning, yet fear-mongering individuals. It also didn't help that I have a prediliction to be excruciatingly cautions around unknown men-folk (always reliably half of any population-- except the one where I spent the last three years of college). During my first week in Detroit, my face was consistently twisted into a pretzel of discomfort when I would sally outside alone.

After a run with Aisha on one of my first days out and about in Detroit, this discomfort, which I had unquestioningly accepted as part of city living, came up. She had witnessed my pathetic attempt to wave hello to a man who had greeted us while we were jogging on Jefferson, and afterward subtly staged a friend-tervention. I was introduced to a new and alien concept: being friendly takes practice. It had always been my intention to get to know people in our community, but I unconsciously only seem to rise to the occasion in 'safe' spaces, such as a community garden, bookstore, outdoor jazz festival (already sounds like a post from Stuff White People Like, right?)

So, armed with this knowledge, and excited to end my perpetual cold feet, I jumped into practicing my hellos. In front of the gas station on Jefferson. At the Post Office. By the broccoli at the Indian Village Market. After an initial "hello" there have been some stellar responses: an invitation to a concert at Cafe con Leche, a cool glass of water with ladies from the Congregational Church in Grosse Pointe, "hey baby," a possible new artist collaborator with her mom, and too many returned "hey-how're-you-doings" to count.

So far I haven't had reason to regret my newfound friendliness, although I'm learning to enjoy that there will always be a wide variety of responses. Like when I said hello to someone on the way to Chene park for a Jazz concert, and he said 'Hey Boo boo do you have a light?' Then I got to say, 'Not Boo boo. Lady.' And he got to say 'Excuse me, young lady do you have a light?' Later that day, a visably intoxicated man intercepted a friend and I, physically blocking us as we tried to pass. This experience wasn't particularly enjoyable, but perhaps the opportunity to maneuver out of it was worth the discomfort. My friend kept her cool while I vigorously side-stepped him, repeating, 'Alright, alright.' Extremely close, yes. But as time goes by, more and more comfortable.

Opening up to the possibility of a good interaction is the thing.

Aisha

Of course some things happen regardless of how we walk down the street. A catalytic converter was cut clean off of one of our vehicles, and the tires were stabbed on the other car, both in broad daylight. This despite the nervous watch our across-the-street neighbor keeps on the street-- he sometimes stands with a beer "watching the cars" as an evening past time. A cop-friend tells us with glee about her daily encounters with bullet wounds, standoffs and shoot outs, in what she brags to be the most violent city in the world. It's not so much there is no reason to fear. It's just that there isn't much point.

I am reminded of one stiflingly hot day when we were stopped at a gas station, and a group of teenaged boys walked languidly across the street, shirtless and strong, constituting what on television would be a scene of virile intimidation. The huge, semi-automatic weapon that one of them swung cagily alongside him was made of blue plastic, and the boys were on their way to fill it with water. The threat of danger that statistically has more reason to threaten these guys seems to slide off of their relaxed shoulders while, in a suburban home protected by seven security systems, the idea of danger just rings and rings-- enlivening benign moment after benign moment with the flavor of imagined violence. To what degree, I wonder, does this expectation of catastrophe make you into a target when you might not otherwise have been?

While crime undoubtedly occurs, the scary/sweet image of these boys is much more indicative of our actual experience of danger in this city. Most people you meet are just trying, like you, to get across the street safe, and to keep cool in the heat. Such people within the city limits are, in our experience, much more likely to extend or return a hello to some random stranger with a smile on he face than a passerby in one of the wealthier suburbs we've visited on occasion. In fact, the most overtly aggressive interactions we've had thus far have taken place at a yoga studio in Grosse Pointe. Which has taken a toll on my savasana.

There are most certainly things a young woman should avoid doing in a new city known for drugs, poverty and crime. But encounteing a whole population with the expectation that they are out to hurt you seems to me, at this point, as inaccurate as it is unwise.

Luck to the Duck Who Swims the Pond and Never Lost a Battle

During the week of the US Social Forum, the First Annual Seminole Street Artist's Colony hosted a gaggle of friends to our great delight-- many of them Detroiters coming back to the city for the first time in years. The house turned into a Festival of Interesting every breakfast, every morning. There is no joy like seeing your father sip coffee contemplatively while a rapper snacks on eggs beside him, a midwife muses on the beauty of birth, and a woman's studies professor makes a case in favor of the word "queer" while giving a recent Smith graduate a massage. Yes, we had LOTS of fun.


One needed not attend the forum itself to benefit from the buzz that the thousands of attendees brought to town. Without paying a registration fee or entering a conference room, I was able to see folks camp out on Woodward avenue in a tent city, listen to people discuss the pros and cons of conducting a public panel on anti-Zionist movements, watch a bunch of slam poetry at the bar where Houdini died, and find out how an independent bookseller keeps her shelves so dynamic that her authors engage in complex socio-political discussion by merely sitting alongside one another. I also found out the answer to the infamous riddle: How do you cram a city full of queers into one tiny dive bar?... I can't reveal the answer, but it involved dancing in the street.

One fan favorite event that was affiliated with the USSF was the Mexican Revolution exhibition at the Skillman branch of the Detroit Public Library. This traveling exhibition of photographs by Agustin Casasola opened with a show by a very talented group called Son Solidarios, and was followed by a performance by a band that included the former high school art and music teachers of one in our gang.






When we were at home we relished in the pleasures of our collective little hearth during rain storms, tarot card readings, hash brown cookings, pie feasting, sun porch literary discussions, chilaquiles with ingredients from Mexican town and spooky ghost tours of the third floor. The core group of us got so addicted to having lots of folks around that we now describe our present psychological state as "the empty nest syndrome."

A couple of gals biking across the country came by shortly after our forum-folks left. They are working on a local food blog called The Hungry Bicyclists, which paved the way for us to be, somehow, in a permanent state of potluck. When my dad told my grandmother that some guests had baked us cornbread, she asked him how he came to be such a lucky man.


Opening our house has proven to be a remarkable exercise in allowing ourselves to be the recipients of a lot of goodness. Some have scoffed, but I've deemed the period of Detroit's Social Forum "The Era of the Gifts." It may be cheesy but it's true-- and you know what, sometimes I read Oprah magazine in the grocery store. What of it? We are feeling a lot of gratitude around here these days.

I title this blog post with my Aunt Cora May's favorite toast because I can't think of a better wish for the flock of travelers that descended upon us. Come back!