No matter how much you think you hate Detroit

you love Detroit. We all fucking love Detroit. It's like that convenience lay you start to have feelings for. And you resent her because she isn't the beautiful, perfect woman you had always hoped to be with, but very few things are as comforting as seeing her at the end of the day. What made me think about this? It's been on my mind on every goddamn drive down, but today especially I picked up "Up from the streets: Detroit Art from the Duffy Warehouse Collection" The art in the collection isn't my flavor at all, but I began to read the interviews with the artists and I was floored. It was a mirror of the Detroit that I've been lucky enough to get a glimpse of through crazy, stupid, unemployed, wonderfully giving, struggling, drunk, hillarious people I've met in the city...musicians, waitresses, poets, chronically unemployed apartment hoppers, ex-suburbanites, get-rich-quick schemers, visual artists, fathers... Back to the interview: Here is a bit from Nancy Mitchnick.


"I see it all so clearly, but it seems so impossible to write about. Michael Luchs in his large oversized army jacket...green with too many pockets. Greggy Murphy wrapped in a kind of trench coat with some sort of fur collar. Sour passionate existence...everyone's insane importance to one another...The freedom of it. No one ever called to make a date, we just appeared in each other's lives in some inevitable way like the swelling of the ocean...Forward, overlapping, but no going back. Usually, everyone would meet at a bar...I don't know how we knew which one to go to...Sometimes Gordie Newton would walk through the alley when I lived on Prentis Street...Sometimes he would wander up to the door and check to see if I was cooking something."

It's hard to cut pieces of the interviews and get the right gist, and this is from a book published by Wayne for their exhibition of the Duffy Warehouse Collection so it isn't readily available, but if anyone is interested in reading it knock me on the chin when you see me.
-i.