Don't Forget the Motor City

I don't know when I got mesmerized by the spectacle of Blade Runner Detroit. It was before the 2007 Shrinking Cities exhibition.
http://www.shrinkingcities.com/detroit0.0.html?&L=1
http://www.shrinkingcities.com/index.php?id=33&L=1

I got sucked in by the Heidelberg Project, perhaps, while working on a project on African-American gardening styles back in the 90s? Yeah.

There was a social justice conference there last month, as world hipsters convened to anoint the Motor City the -- I don't know, the Florence, would you call it? -- center of the world hub of hipness. And social justice too. Last month all the hipsters at KWRK went to the Social Justice Forum and the Allied Media conference in Detroit. My KWRK source spent all her spare time at a blue collar Lesbian bar exploring her roots, and did not tour, as I had hoped, the art scene which has been burgeoning in abandoned inner city Detroit since 1986, I suspect, when Tyree Gurton painted his first dot.

Now comes the NYT on the art scene in the rubble. It is, I suppose, the kiss of death. The Billyburgers are showing up. They're all white. Next up, the rich HGTV gays. Then Packard and Edsel will return. And it will all be so Afro pomo homo. Minus the Afro, I guess.

( Art in the Rubble )

My lifelong battle against cynicism meets a new and most worthy Godzilla of an opponent in the agendas of the Allied Media Conference and the Social Justice Forum. My lizard lids start to droop and my forked tongue to flicker at the very hint of all the cannabis-scented dreadlocks worn by people with straight hair concentrated in one indoor space and the Stokely phenom -- that is, during the revolution scum rises to the top, to proclaim masculine hegemony. The only place for a woman in this movement is on her back? Is what the subtexts of these conferences are, of the struggle to Take Over and Talk Back to the Media. It's part of the subtext at KWRK, that "public access" means the empowerment of barbaric fascist warlords. Free speech!

I'd be more sanguine if the motherfuckers could write spell.

In a not unrelated note, I am authoritatively told that the best-produced show at KWRK is almost single-handedly produced by a Puerto Rican who is the local Goebbels for the Muslim Community. The caudillist meets the caliphate. That's hip. I want to meet him.

Fashion Police: Mother of the Bride

I have to think about this. I think she could have chosen either the ombre, the fuschia, the bertha, or the flowers. All four is nun-unh. And of the four, the ombre is most dubious.

Hillary is an historic presidential candidate, secretary of state, the most reviled First Lady in history, a MacBethian first lady of Arkansas, and a person who named her daughter, the bride, after a Joni Mitchell song.

Now, as mother of the bride, you wish to be very, very festive and yet not compete with the bride, against whose good looks yours will be judged all day: This is what the bride will look like in 40 years.

A tricky situation to negotiate, especially if you are a senior official of state.

Compare and contrast with the Queen's choice for Anne's wedding (not a white tie occasion, perhaps an unfair contrast). It is almost, but not quite, the same self-effacing shade as that worn by the nanny.



As head of state, this is what one wore to the white tie day time wedding of one's little sister:


Of all her ceremonial outfits, including the boddhisattva orange chiffon she wore to lay a wreath, barefoot, at Amritsar, this is the least becoming.

Unlike the Queen Mum, who most scandalously upstaged the bride by wearing white. She treads very close to the scandal line in her costume for Anne's wedding, which is saved only by the fur (!) brown touches.

Still spelunking for a pic of the Quenn Mum's white outfit at M's wedding, so scandalously white there does not appear to be a gankable record of it online.

Richard Price and The Lush Life Tour of the LES

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