Flames Favorite Music & Things

Aarrgghh. Treasures in this town are so easy to find. Yesterday was the special Noel shopping day and night in what people here lik to call Mid Town, an upcoming part in town that had to do away with its’ old name of Cass Corridor because that reminds too many of the not so beautiful last twenty years. The organizing body for the Noel Day Midtown Detroit’s University Cultural Center put quite some energy in having the market succeed.

And it did. The streets were busting with people. Not so common here, as you’d imagined by now. When I spoke to someone waiting at the take away Chinese later on that eve, he just said: “Wow, to see people on the street. That made me think of years gone by. And you don’t know half how happy it made me seeing our pavements all used for what they are intended for: walking people.” So I suppose the day was a success.

But as you all know that in days of success you happen to have those very special moments. The uber success. While following one of the Detroit’s marching bands performing on the street I passed yet another second hand store on Hancock Street. Now there’s plenty more of second hand shops, be it for clothing, for house materials, or for records. This one looked liked it was for clothing, but they did have some records in there as well. So, logically, I stepped in. Then it turned out they didn’t have a few records, they had a dollar dungeon filled with the best sorted jazz and soul collection I’d seen here.

Owner Jim and employee Lerrol took their time for a little talk. They explained me the shop wasn’t the main income for Jim, however the parttime job has to provide for Lerrol. That the shop wasn’t that known in Detroit itself [whereas the record shops in Hamtramck are heralded all over the local media], but that they do attract visitors all the way down from Japan and Germany and England. The 45’s collection of Northern Soul is well worth that visit apparently. But what struck me most and really took the guys in for me was that they weren’t doing the selling for themselves; profits are all donated to an invisible group in town: the retarded. Once a year Jim told me, they even do organise an outdoor concert where local bands donate their time for a over enthusiastic audience. An audience which also climbs the stage to perform themselves. And so Jim said “We have had blind singers climbing the stage. We have had tough cases shining all over when singing on stage.” Now stories like these are exactly why Detroit is in my heart. It has nothing to do with the upcoming Cork nor Midtowns – it has to do with regular people taking care of eachother. Sharing life. Sharing stories. If only all could be so simple.

And that it is not that simple always is proven in the stories of the Detroit blogger John Carlisle. His book 313 is by far the most insightful book on Detroit bottom up that I have read. No stories on government, no stories on companies, no none of that. John went out to meet some of the special characters living in this town, listening to their stories, and then writing them down in a tender way. It made me laugh a lot as well.

Hipster

One of the words popping up when talkin about the changes in Detroit is hipster. Like mentioned in an earlier post it has something to do with gentrification, it has something to do with outsiders coming in, and it has a lot to do with economical perspectives hipsters apparently do have, whereas others don’t. After diving into the history of the word, it turned out Normain Mailer dubbed the term. Check his classic essay The White Negro here.

But the word has more contemporary connotations as shows this Guardian quote: "It seemed to revolve around the desire to reproduce as rebellion these things that had formerly been part of the mainstream market," says Greif, citing the art-gallery porn by the likes of Richard Kern and the conspicuous consumption of meat while in the company of vegetarians as two examples. "There's this idea that they are the agents of change, the true revolutionaries, where the revolutionary change is to . . . make exclusive the pleasures that had potentially belonged to anyone in the past, to celebrate the upwards redistribution of wealth. Not all hipsters arrive in the big cities flush with cash, but they almost always possess some cultural capital, usually a university degree and refined upbringing. They can use this to prevent themselves from ending up on the bottom of the pile, even if their only means of upward mobility are snarky putdowns and a working knowledge of the Smiths.“ End of quote, since who listens to the Smiths these days?

Now the lines above point towards a definition but as it goes with words, another pops up just round the corner. So it seems. Since the possible definitions and explanations given at a conference, yes you read that right, a conference, on hipsterdom aren’t the most scientific proof. The conversations do however make you smile.

So there is hate against hipsters, which seems to be the ultimately hipster thing. Since who has time to worry about words like these, except for me and the cafe latte soja milk sucking hipsters themselves? Or as somebody remarks in a rather silly video on that big web:"If you like the eighties so much, than just get back, and die of aids."

Now that indeed is not very friendly, so to something a little lightlier: Naturally the name can also be transformed to a title dripping off with heavy drops of self irony. The blog Look at that Hipster even developed their own clothing. Shop here. I guess for me the most upsetting in the discussion on hipsters is the focus on the ever present and everlasting now. As if we don't live our live in a society that has been scarred by the past. So, lack of political, or for that matter historical, knowledge just pisses me off. It could be my prejudice but when i think of hipsters I do not think of kids knowing of bands performing befroe the Smiths...That might have been triggered by the first article I read that mentioned the word hipster, which was published by the loving title “Hipster: the death end to Western civilisation”. The first line of that article just sums it up: We've reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum.

"Resurget Cineribus"

Most likely a lot of people did see the Johnny Knoxville report on the D. Link here, here, and here. But than who did read all comments? Ah…
Here is selection by my hand of some of those.

Lived here all my life. The past few years,_ there has been an influx of hipsters in downtown. Why? Because they just adore taking pictures of the central station for their 'art' classes.

I admire the positivity and the DIY attitude, but I didn't see much job creation. This will sound cynical, but how many of the people featured were actually getting paid? or how many were living on trust funds. What about seniors,_ didn't see many kids, will these people start families in Detroit, send their kids to the local schools? I know this is aimed at a young trendy market but you need more than organic farmers markets and bands to revive a city

I have yet to see a city whose core is constructed of 20-30yr old, single people flourish. Skate parks don't make the city money. Raves put money in the promoter's pockets and sometimes leave havoc - after the event. Most artists don't have healthy incomes. And gardens feed only a few. Detroit needs to attract tech companies with tax breaks, alternative power industries with land deals and bio-engineering firms with the keys to the city.

Wow, can you interview anybody who's not a fucking 20 year old hipster. Why don't you interview the 58 year old people who have lived, worked and STAYED_ in the city for decades! They've been "saving" the city their whole lives, even after they've had their places shot up and been robbed. They're not just trying to create a steller rave scene. (don't get me wrong, the rave scene in detroit is great but it seems trivial).

Detroit Tigers

Some of you might know Detroit is home to a Major League Baseball organisation: the Tigers. The Tigers were founded in 1894 and, contrary to many other teams in Major League baseball, never moved to another town. Wikipedia says this about the club: “The Tigers have won four World Series championships (1935, 1945, 1968 and 1984) and have won the American League pennant 10 times. The team currently plays their home games at Comerica Park in Downtown Detroit. The Tigers constructed Bennett Park at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Trumbull Avenue and began playing there in 1896. In 1912, the team moved into Navin Field, which was built on the same location. It was expanded in 1938 and renamed Briggs Stadium. It was renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961 and the Tigers played there until moving to Comerica Park in 2000.”

And it is on that new stadium i would like to continue. Because to build a new baseball park in a town with so many problems doesn’t seem to be the most logical thing to do. But than, economical necessities more often than not don’t suit the needs of the average Detroiter. As someone mentioned “You don’t get richer not building a new stadium.” And that might be true: building breeds money. Maintaining just costs money. Promptly the Tigers went through some bad years, with the 2003 season being one of the most disastrous baseball seasons played by any team in Major League Baseball history. Quoting wikipedia again: “While the 2003 Tigers rank as the third worst team in major league history based on loss total. The Tigers went 43–119 that season, 47 games behind division-winner Minnesota.” The pitchers of the Tigers were #1, #2, and #3 in the major leagues in losses for 2003—the only time in major league history that one team has had the top three losers.” Things couldn’t get worse.

But now, with the town itself starting to breathe again, so did the baseball club. 2011 saw the Detroit Tigers competing well and making it to the American League series, which is the equivalent of the semifinals, to lose against the Texas Rangers. What pleased the neutral baseball most is they beat the Yankees in the ‘quarter finals’. That, for Europeans, is the equivalent of a Dutch soccer team beating Real Madrid. And not only the Yankees, as a rich club able to sign expensive players, didn’t make it to the final rounds, neither did other rich clubs. Actually other clubs from the ‘rust belt’ performed well this season, inciting Richard Florida to write a pleasant commentary on the “de-industrialized Rustbelt metros”. Read here

Influxes from the outside world

Naturally the situation Detroit is in attracts [media] attention from outside. The former branding of the city as a ruin town, as the living example of the death of the American dream seems to be outdated. So many people here worked so hard to maintain this city, so many people did their best to have some kind of society working, it had to pay off. Whereas Detroit was leading all the wrong lists in many of the USA media, ow the tide is changing. From a town in which one would not even be found death, now the stigma on Detroit is one of 'can do'. From disaster city Detroit turned into 'city of opportunities'. A link to provide you with further insight on that idea:
- Is Detroit the new Brooklyn?

But that idea of course is contested in yet another one [numerous are the publications on this town, and countless the comments they provoke]:
- Detroit: the death of Manhattanism.

Many of the outsiders coming into town at this moment are not wholly trusted by the Detroiters i have been meeting these weeks. As opposed to the white flight from the 50ies, and more recent, now power and money don't leave town, but flow in. That causes Detroiters who stayed here to wonder on the willingness of those people to contribute to non fordist dream of Detroit's future. Are businesses and investment bankers not trying to revive the old system which so deeply hurt this town? Are they here for profits only, rather than for the sake of the community? As some one put it last week: "The new incomers have access to two things most people here don't have: resources and out of town networks. Kids who grew up here during last decades are than again losers - as they don't have these two assets. Who is going to guarantee me the investers will not move somewhere else sometime soon and once again leave us? And in that process having transformed our dream into another nightmare?" Let's see what some of the investers think of that themselves:
- Detroit's fix-it men in their own words

Mexican mural

Walking down the street picturing a mural which clearly was never finished I met a girl. She was as kind to leave the pavement and take a detour on the street allowing me to have an open panorama. When I thanked her she looked surprised and stopped. Nervously sucking her sigaret she greeted back. On my question if she knew if the mural would ever be finished, she looked even more puzzled. “Will you do so?” Me laughing, “No I don’t think so, I just wonder who will do so?” On her second question if I was an artist I had to reply “No, even though some would label me like that during my time here, but no. Are you?” “Naah, never was, never will.” Than we looked at eachother and just laughed. Both of us willing to see the mural finished, both of us feeling strange we would never do so. Both of us sad thinking we wouldn’t see that happen.

Weekend

Weekends in the D offer plenty of opportunities to discover other sides of the town. Friday evening we spent playing 8ball in Temple Bar, meeting up with dj Affection. Some collab in future is at hand.

Saturday night Theatre Bizarre organized a tremendous party in one of the town's iconic buildings, the Masonic Temple. Costumes mandatory. Check their site for more info and see their facebook for uploaded pictures of guests. Five floors filled with music and shows and theatre and burlesque stages and… It was a good night out. The only disturbing fact: our dresses were marked with a Spartan. And Spartans are the sport teams of the Michigan State University, the concurrent of Wayne State University. All evening long people called out to us: "Go green!" And how much I would love the world to go green, I did not expect people to keep confirming that on a Halloween party. It had nothing to do with environmental issues, but all with the color of the sports teams. It took some Arab sheik to explain us why we were being so enthusiastically welcomed. Thanks again Mark.

Than sunday, as you can imagine, some tiredness was my share. Luckily Bart and Luc shared that feeling. An English breakfast with KT and some coffees later we took out to Belle Isle. The lounging island in the Detroit river. We watched a game of slowpitch in the sun. Afterwards we met up with Andrew Herscher [more on him later] in a beautiful pop up beergarten; Tashmoo. As it turned out this was their last sunday at their location at Van Dyke Street, and the lightbulbs, the beanbag tossing, the grilled sausages and the hipsters all made it feel very Berlin.

This town has many sides, and wow, I am going to dive in.

Why one marshmallow is sometimes enough

I am not able to keep up with Jonas' speed and quantity of writing, but I will try and at least write something meaningful in my own, more compact style...
The work continues. I have finished writing my half-hour, three thousand word performance text, and am now busy memorising it (or since we are in the USA, that should be memorizing). This is a very tedious process, although thankfully one that I am quite experienced with now.
Following my experiments last week with the bicycle wheel, I am now building an more advanced camera dolly. So far the results are great - a small test can be seen below.

The piece I am working on focusses on some themes related to the reason for our residency here: growth, decay, progress and success (and to what extent these are subjective concepts), and the idea of “enough” - that is to say, the state of being in which you cease to desire more.
As an example of the sort of accepted wisdom which I am attempting to be critical of can be seen in the following quote:

“In one US experiment, researchers put five-year-olds in a room with a marshmallow. The children were told that if it [sic] could wait 15 minutes without touching it, they would be offered a second marshmallow. Despite the inducement, the vast majority of the children ate it before the time limit was up.“ - www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14412025

The point which intrigues me is: why are they assuming that two marshmallows are better than one? Why is more always better? Can they not see that these children - apart from being impatient (although who would really want to spend 15 minutes in a room staring at a marshmallow?) - were perhaps quite satisfied with only one? How strange it is that adults cannot see this.
This may seem like quite an odd thing to be mentioning in relation to this residency in Detroit - but in fact it completely gets to the heart of what has been preoccupying me the whole time here. The life which people are able to carve out here despite the odds, against the grain of what seems rational with respect to accepted values, is clear evidence of the cracks in the system which chooses to condemn Detroit.

“Detroit has to be deprived of its reality so that everyone else can feel better about theirs.” - Herron, J. - AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History

Or in other words, it is necessary for the city to be written off as a failure so that inhabitants of more traditional, “successful” cities can go on believing that the old system is working. Recent events are beginning to show that this self-deception cannot continue for long.
No-one can deny that, by all normal measures, Detroit is a total failure as a city. There is no getting away from the fact that life is hard for a great many people here, with many practical difficulties. On a functional level, many things which are normally taken for granted as a part of city life simply do not work.
But people stay here - and new people come here - for a reason. Politicians like to use evocative words like “hope” and “opportunity” to explain the mentality of Detroit, but I would say that the reasons are more concrete and down-to-earth than that: the unique atmosphere of Detroit is proof that another life is possible which does not involve a big-name chain store on every corner, ever-increasing house prices, gentrification, superficial image makeovers (although there have been plenty attempts), or a new car (or back home, bakfiets) in front of every house. There are so many initiatives which I have seen here, and in each case I been painfully aware of the countless reasons why it could not happen back home - lack of space, regulation, real-estate prices, the wagging finger of the law. Who is really the success and who is the failure? That is the nagging question which will be, I think, the lasting reminder of my time in this city.

My (THE) problem with community art...and why William Burroughs EAT Superflex any day of the week!!!

Last night our new found friends from Chicago came to visit us in our little house on Farnsworth street in Detroit.

We talked a lot about art,

and again (as it often does here in the midwest) the discussion turned to the virtues (or not) of community art and audience participation. Kevin was talking about an artist colleague of his who did a project where she would install plastic containers at the toilets of friends and collect their left overs to produce manure, which she would then later return in a cup, ready to be used in the nearest flower pot.

We talked about how LONG she would be able to sustain this practice and if that was important or not for the project.

Or if it was maybe enough that the art worked on a more metaphorical, symbolic level.

Apparently this woman was also a great communicator and had managed to get support from powerful people (Patricia Arquette) in high places (Hollywood).

Surely this could be a very useful, green and worthy art project with many possible positive benefits for mankind and the planet as a whole?

And it is usually around this point in the discussions surrounding community art that I fall asleep spiritually and mentally .

And it's not ONLY because I am a mean spirited, jaded cynic, who can't value utilitarianism.

But because it is sOoOOoOoooOOooooo different and alien from my own experience of art and culture.

If I look at my own experience of culture I think about what was important to me, what changed me as a human, and what helped me to develop.

I value and respect Greenpeace, the Red Cross (and the Crescent) or Médecins Sans Frontières

just as much as the next guy. I just don't think it's art, and I don't think that they see it as art either. It would take some truly hardcore relational aesthetics guy or girl to claim that as an art piece.

There were very few utilitarian reasons for me to listen to Sex Pistols or Throbbing Gristle,

or read books by William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski or Jack Kerouac,

or laugh myself silly reading Robert Crumb....au contraire!

There was NOTHING healthy about it.

Which of course was partly the reason why I got into it in the first place.

Does anyone SERIOUSLY believe that people listen to Death Metal or experimental Jazz for any hidden health reasons?

But it DID help me to become a more complex person, it did challenge my beliefs and it did force me to open up to new ways of looking at the world.

And it DID fuck up my mental hard disk and after that I can't process information and ideas in the same way as I did before and I think that's all you can ask of art.

Here in the midwest (as I have written about before) a lot of the little support there is for art, is tied to educational projects.

I have no problem with this, I TOO teach, but I don't call it art!

In the 60's and 70's there were huge debates in Europe and USA.

Usually from a leftist perspective.

Wasn't it time for the artists to FINALLY get off the fence and make themselves useful for the workers and join the revolution?

Every artist and writer joined either the Communist party or the RAF, except Salvador Dali who just wanted to make preeeeeecious GOooOoOOOLD!

"Make yourself useful, go into Bijlmer and help some poor Suriname kids".

Was the mantra (until very recently) from Dutch politicians who felt that maybe they could finally get some economical and social returns from the artist parasites that they had subsidized for much too long.

I am already doing this by the way, but for other more "culturally perverted" (=sound) reasons.

Now the calls come from the cultural right

(or maybe the cultural nihilists would be a more correct description).

Go and entertain Henk and Ingrid in Apeldoorn

(the Suriname kids are of course out of fashion).

I don't mind being useful or utilitarian, but I rather call that teaching, lectures or workshops

to be able to keep my art free, dirty and perverted.

And if you haven't paid attention, most poor, uneducated people ALSO prefers their culture dirty and nasty.

See Baile Funk in Brazil and Gangster Rap in the States, aso...

And they find it condescending when we honkies come up with another well meaning

Do Good-er project in the Bijlmer, Rio or Detroit.

So let's keep REAL culture SICK n NASTY and leave the Do Good-erism to Greenpeace.

And if you absolutely can't restrain yourself and just HAVE TO DO SOME GOOD...

just call it a workshop and you're off the hook....

Peace Out!!!!

Jonas Ohlsson reporting form Detroit thanks to Expodium

Clarifications for Non Dutch/European people...and idiots!

-----------------------------------------------------------

Superflex=Danish art collective who builds water wells in Arica.

William Burroughs=American, anti drug and homo writer.

RAF= Rote Armee Fraktion (German leftist terrorist group from the 70's)

Suriname= Dutch ex. slave colony country, north of Brazil, now independant and free.

Henk & Ingrid=an imaginable ideal couple of "normal Dutch people" in Holland, used by right wing manipulator Gert Wilders in his propaganda against multiculturalism.

Apeldoorn=small town in Holland, representing "white trash country" in this text...

as opposed to...

Bijlmer="The Watts" of Holland, south east suburb ( ex. ? ghetto) of Amsterdam consisting of 100 000 people, 80% black, mostly from Suriname, Aruba, Curacao, Saba (all ex. slave colonies of Holland) and Nigeria and Ghana. Plus some honkies....

Médecins Sans Frontières=Doctors Without Borders.

Who for the last three decennias have fought a global, bloody turf war against NWW=

Nurse With Wound.

More Techno and Race...

So last night we went to see Underground Resistance play for free in Highland park.

They did a very jazzy set under the name Timeline, with a saxophone player and

a slick, flowy guy on keyboards. It was a nice mix of techno and free jazz. After that the

revelation of the night came on, DJ Al Ester. Swinging and dancing like a madman,

he played a very housey set, with singing divas and all, but the way he mixed it, and how

much fun he had with the FX's and taking out the high's, mid's and low's in a super synchronized

set was a true joy! After that the highlight of the night was supposed to be Juan Atkins

"the Godfather of techno" as he was announced, who was part of the legendary "Belleville Three", the other two being Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. But this was a sad, sad affair to have to watch, Juan couldn't mix two tracks

together to save his life, and he dropped records on the floor, had the needle skipping back and forth on a track for bout 20 seconds (which is a loooooooong time if you're DJ ing in front of a extremely knowledgeable crowd (I am not talking about me here...hehehe)).

A couple of times UR's manager Cornelius, who was the MC of the night between the acts had to try to save his ass, by encouraging people AND Juan to get into it again. Juan just looked lost and looked as if he was suffering more than we did. I TOO mix like shit, but at least I do it because I think that is they way it should sound, it is part of my "vision" (or lack of it) and I am really into it while DJing, but with Juan it was just painful. He seemed to be totally somewhere else. He fucked up a reunion of "the Belleville 3" at Awakenings in Amsterdam, by mixing like crap and just not being present. It was extra sad because you could really feel the potential of the music, the track selection was awesome, his own mega hits

as Cybotron "alleys of your mind" and "cosmic cars" and Kraftwerks "numbers" boomed out of the system, and for a moment you felt "wow" this is why I came to Detroit, to be able to hear Juan Atkins pump Kraftwerk into a beautiful summer night at Highland park. But the overwhelming feeling was one of sadness. Well at least Underground Resistance and DJ Al Ester was blockrocking!!! After that we went to the incredibly sleazy temple bar in the most run down part of town, an AMAZING bar! So the night was still perfect in the end.

I was talking with a Dutch artist who now lives in Detroit,

as we were dancing in front of the stage.

We were SOooOoooo surprised to see so few people at the festival.

If you have Underground Resistance, Juan Atkins and DJ Al Ester (trust me he is one for the future) playing for FREE on a warm beautiful summer night in Vondelpark, you would probably be able to get more than 80 people to show up???!!!

Ok..earlier in the evening there were more, and it also had to do with Juan Atkins crappy set, but STILL???!!!.

One of the reasons that she came to Detroit was her love for techno, the same as me.

And it's a story often told, Detroit Techno is HUGE in Europe and Asia but has soooo little support in Detroit itself (or the rest of USA for that matter).

Last weekend I went to a Chicago house picnic festival IN Chicago.

The 21st annual edition of the Chicago House Music picnic and it was PACKED!!!!

Even though you had to pay 10 $ to get in, 1000s of people were grooving and dancing to Frankie Knuckles and the Chosen Few among others.

And what was also very interesting, I was the ONLY white person at this picnic, I am serious!!??

Here...check this video from last years picnic and try to spot any honkies...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQUZqbLX8CQ

I don't know why race, class and music is so interesting to me, but you could make tons of anthropological studies on this subject and it would be very revealing. Rio de Janeiro was another very interesting case, with its Baile Funk, Samba and Bossa Nova, but Brazil is much more racially mixed than Europe and USA.

The Brazilians that we had living with us in Bijlmer last summer in Flatstation were shocked to see the extreme separation between the very black Bijlmer and the very white grachtengordel,

they couldn't believe it!

see for more information...

http://www.fffuck.org/projects/brazilian-air-program-0

http://www.flatstation.nl/agenda

http://www.fatform.com

Anyhow...So Chicago house music has MASSIVE local, black support and Detroit very little local, black support. At the Underground Resistance concert, there was a bunch of De.Bug t-shirts and European football shirts (soccer), which made you suspect that at least part of the audience were European fans who had come a long way to see this spectacle.

So why does Chicago House connect and Detroit techno not?

While in Chicago we also went to see Moodyman, a DJ using the Chicago sound, though originally from Detroit and according to his wikipedia page...

"He is outspoken on the current state of dance music, decrying the lack of black techno and the white domination of the genre."

and...

"An outspoken voice in the normally non-confrontational world of electronic dance music, Moodymann (Kenny Dixon Jr.) is committed to keeping a distinctly black imprint on techno and house."

So for all of us who thought house was..."one nation under a groove" where race, gender, class and sexual orientation would all be absolved into one fruity love juice drink.

Moodyman is again bringing RACE into the mix!

I once read a very interesting little piece about house music in De Appels F.R David publication

where someone wrote a piece about house music debunking the myth of all the love bullshit, saying something like...house was born out of an atmosphere of racism, homophobia, transvestites trying to save enough money to go to Brazil to do sex changes,gay prostitution, drug addictions, and suicides...so this "love dream" surrounding house music needs to be at least more nuanced. If someone knows who wrote this text I am happy to include the name

(I couldn't find it) in this text.

After the Moodyman concert me and Chris had a small after party together with two black transvestites and a white gay guy in their very tiny appartment.

Stumbling out into the bright day light the morning after, I thought we had a very fitting ending to a night out in Chicago, sampling the local house music scene.

But I DO have a little theory as to why Chicago is so succesful and Detroit less so when it comes to hooking up to local (black) support. Chicago house music is much more linked to soul, gospel and R n B. Tons of screaming little divas who sing on top of the house tracks, so the links to other classical black forms of music is very clear. Detroit Techno's VERY obvious flirtations with Kraftwerk (especially) and European (white) electro pop and new romantic music (as they called it in the UK). Takes the music into an another direction, less rooted in classical black music forms.

Detroit techno is much less connected to classical black music styles such as Gospel and Soul. On the other hand it is very much connected to the ideas of "Afrofuturism"that you can find in the works of Sun Ra, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Funkadelic & Parliament, Africa Bambaataa or even Grace Jones.

There is something very sad about the state of music, if we STILL have to discuss race and music, as in...

Can black people sing the opera and country music?

Can white people techno?

Can white people rap and sing reggae?

Just like we whites know what we mean by a whigger (me?!), someone who totally wants to jump into blackness, Detroit techno kids could possibly be seen by the local black population as bounty's

(brown on the outside, white on the inside).

But this is not something I know enough about, but I will research this further here in Detroit.

The problem with this kind of knowledge is that it is often not spoken out loud, it is a gut feeling, and maybe something that you would not say to a white person (if you were black).

But on the other hand these stereotypes DO play a role and to try to totally ignore this debate would do a disservice to the development of music and the ideas surrounding it. In the case of Techno I think that black Detroit Techno stars are TOTALLY accepted in Europe and no one even thinks of race

as an issue in techno, whereas in Detroit I get the feeling that the black population in general thinks that the local techno kids got a bit TOO close to European electronic music, as if they were not proud enough of "their own" musical heritage.

Almost like a sort of betrayal, and of course betrayal is different if you are part of the majority

i.e. whites going black, than if you are a supressed minority, blacks switching to white music.

But to even be able to TALK like this we would have to accept certain musics as "white" and "black" and I think this could be very dangerous. BUT...on the other hand it could ALSO be dangerous to NOT see the history of music and its links to its past. How could you understand reggae or hip hop OUTSIDE a context of racism and the history of the oppression of black people?

I guess it is important to understand where a music comes from and its roots and history, but music is in its essence is universal and it explains why hip hop now works as a great vehicle of expression for oppressed people all over the world, be it Banlieu kids of Arab descent in Paris or Palestinians in Israel.

And I think THIS brings me back to my old argument...Europeans are VERY good at contemporary art for A REASON! Which is also why Indonesians in general are less good at it, but good at other things, such as shadow puppetry for example. And this is NOT meant as a racist statement that Indonesians can never get good at art, or that white people can't rap. Everyone can get good at anything...BUT, you need to live in an environment that stimulates that growth

where you can develop, and compete against the best. That Eminem could get good at rapping growing up in Detroit does not surprise me, or that Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson could get impulses from abroad AND at home and develop a scene that later influenced the rest of the world.

And this is where racism get's confusing when I give lectures. When I for instance say...if you lived in New York in the 80's with the possibility to listen to KRS one and Public Enemy,

and having radio station playing hip hop 24/7 chances are GREATER that you too could become a good rapper, no one has a problem with that.

But If I say that...if you grew up in Europe with the Dokumenta, the Venice bienale, amazing museums where the best of the best are collected and discussed, with newspaper articles on a daily basis discussing art shows, with the best artists, critics, collectors, galleries and so on aso...chances are that you will become a GREATER artist faster in Europe than in Indonesia, who lacks the necessary infrastructure to feed this necessary development...then I often have a problem and people accuse me of racism.

The chances of there being TRULY great contemporary art outside of Europe and USA is smaller, just as there are slim chances of there being fantastic samba bands outside of Brazil, NOT impossible, but less probable.

This is the problem we now get when we debate the globalization of every art biennial, we need THIS many artist from Sudan, THIS many women, this many gays and this many peadophiles and rapists, it just doesn't automatically create quality.

And in general I think this is the most amusing aspect of the Venice biennial for instance, to see the amount of crap art from Uzbekistan or Iran. Would it be possible to assume that democracy is neccessary to create good art? Probably not...Brazil did amazing stuff during the fascist era, China is also doing amazing art. In the case of China you could also add that they have different taboos than in Europe, which creates a interesting grey zone (from OUR perspective) the by now very famous performance "I'm gonna eat a little fetus with a glass of chardonnay" would not be possible in Europe. So so much for freedom in the democratic world hehehehe...

So here the west and the east are complementing each other in the taboo world.

In China the artists can't talk about Tibet and democracy, and in the west we are not allowed to eat fetuses or use dead AIDS women on ice in our installations, but we STILL get by.

But of course, every year the gap is closing, and the best way to increase quality is to let the Sudani artists compete with the best of Europe, just look at football.

And this is also why it is such a good idea to have artists in residencies, to spread the knowledge.

BUT...also infrastructure is necessary, if there are no contemporary art museums in Sudan, or art magazines, or artschools, or critics, or galleries, or biennials, or or or....HOW are they gonna get good? And if there is no critical mass who is interested locally it doesn't HAVE to be a HUGE dilemma. Look at Detroit techno, but it would help!

But on the other hand, what is the problem if not every country in the world are good at contemporary art, I am sure that they are good at other things. If they have drive and fantasy they have to get rid of their energy somehow.

At the Sao Paulo bienial last year there was this HUGE debate of how underexposed the Nigerian artists were, or the Sudanis or the Angolans and I basically said...well maybe you should get GOOD at art first and THEN we can talk!

Of course I know that this is a radical thing to say, but imagine if we would come with quotas for the next reggae sunsplash festival in Kingston!!! You don't have ANY artists from Mongolia, zero reggae artist from Poland and no gay white dancehall stars...what's up????!!!

We would get laughed out of town!!!

So to the all the Nigerian artists of this world I say, you want to participate in the next major biennial in Europe? Then make sure that you create a good art scene where you live, start art schools, galleries, debates, art magazines, radio programs, academies and so on...

create a critical mass, create a scene...Just like they did with Baile Funk music in Rio de Janeiro

or with Kwaito music in South Africa or Kuduro in Angola or Dancehall in Jamaica or Country music in Nashville and so on aso...

Or to quote KRS one "If you can't rock your own neighbourhood...". And of course this will take time and money, but it is not really about money, as we have seen in the examples mentioned above.

Of course it is also unfair to compare art and music, since we can't upload installations, paintings or sculpures and send them as MP3's as of yet.

So music has an ENORMOUS advantage in how fast ideas can spread over the world,

with a decent internet connection you can be on top of all the developments in music ALL over the world. We are not there yet with art. Which is the reason why London, Berlin and New York will REMAIN art centers for the forseeable future. Whereas in music, Rio de Janeiro, Angola and South Africa can EASILY overtake London or New York in musical invention and probably already has.

Of course, developments in the art world is also related to first world power, racism and economy also. Look how hard women had to fight to enter the art world, but they did it and the developments in Europe have been very succesful on that front...

Ok I am blabbering on...I don't really know what I am saying, but that is why I am saying it...

to find OUT what could be the truth...so please feedback me with ideas and critique.

finally I will give you two links to an old Detroit Techno argument...

1. Underground Resistance- AfroGermanic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvyAxHaem24

celebrating the links between Germany, Detroit and Africa...

And as a piss take off that, another Detroitian (DJ Ass ault), who is basically just ripping up that argument with his hit "Nigga Music", which the first time I heard it... I just thought it was a bad/good joke, but if you understand the heated debate about techno music and race here...it is much more subtle and deep than I first thought.

2. DJ Assault-Nigga Music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hax6NGNCEhw

Jonas Ohlsson reporting from Detroit, thanks to Expodium in Utrecht!

Please the goat

Today, we’ve helped KT out a bit at the Catherine Ferguson Academy Farm. It’s a beautiful day, lots of sunshine and refreshingly cold.

We milked a goat… It pleased her while she was eating.

And we fed the chickens, geese and bunnies too. KT says we’re real good farmers, ‘cause we chose, out of our own free will, to clean out the bunny cages. The bunnies were grateful.

Afterwards, we treated ourselves to a fantastic Rhode Island Clam Chowder and a sandwich at Russel’s Deli. KT traded two jars of fresh goat milk for super sandwiches and soup. That’s cool.

Drawing Marathon @ THE YES FARM

Blake and Ben came up with the idea of a drawing marathon and an exhibition at The Yes Farm for this weekend. We have been working putting the place into shape to host the artworks and the guests.

Three rooms were cleaned and freshly painted and a stage in the main hall was set to facilitate the community's School Of Rock.

School Of Rock is a summer program initiated by Tim and the children of the Farnsworth community. Once per week the kids would "squa"t Tim's house, practicing on how to play the drums, form a band and perform on stage.

We took the task of fixing the stage, painting the background black, adding lights and dark curtains.

The School Of Rock will be performed on Saturday during the painting marathon.

On Sunday The Yes Farm throw a raffle where people could buy raffles for 1$, take part in a lottery and if their number would come up they could choose to take home one of the drawings exhibited at the space.

gardening & art summer classes

Kt and a summer class of arts and gardening

"Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another."
wikipedia resource

Earlier on our residency we posted an entrance regarding the demolition of the Ferry Pulbic School.
It has become quite clear that to put down a closed school is far less "complex" than having to pay taxes and preserve it.

Dave on a recent talk claimed that his effort to purchase abandoned buildings fell short since they always come with "demolition estimation costs" and demolition practices benefit the state and a small but well protected industry. The so called "demolition prize".

We tend to perceive education to take its most common form under the roof of a school. Living for two months in Detroit we re-discovered diverse educational platforms which focus on passing out skills, enhance mutualism, raise awareness and responsibility, address locality and possibly build an alternative economy practices .
Spread in various "roofs" and initiated by various organizations and individuals these acts respond to the failure of the state to preserve and advance Detroit's educational system.



Wayne State University and University of Detroit Mercy seem to be the only mega foundations promoting Detroit as an educational mecca. On the other hand Universities are just stations in someone's career and therefore embed within the act of temporarily living and subconsciously the act of leaving.

This summer Kt has been teaching art and farming in three locations around Detroit. We "invited ourselves" to her classes and I managed to attend her last teaching sessions in two of the locations.
We came up with a game of drawing your favorite fruit or vegetable on a paper ribbon, mixing the ribbons and pass them on as "hats" to every one participating. Each kid had to make four questions in order to guess what fruit or vegetable he/she was.
While still difficult to prevent children from looking at their "hats" the game focused on working on the right questions such as:
am i a fruit?
do i grow in our garden?
do i grow above ground?
do i grow on a tree?
am i yellow?
am i round?
etc.



The process of discovering could help them identifying with the object, break it down in forms and shapes, understand the value of the process of growing (gardening) and playfully perform a dialogue of passing out knowledge without the authoritarian overview of the teacher.

Everyone would hold the responsibility of sharing a common set of knowledge (the secret of what is on their friend's hat) and as a unity, by simply answering with a yes or a no could transcend that knowledge to the individual making the questions.

While talking to Joao about our experience, he brought up the term homo ludens introduced by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga.

Huizinga does not mean that “play turns into culture”. Rather, he sets play and culture side by side, talks about their “twin union”, but insists that “play is primary”.

wikipedia resource

Reflective reading on SOUP event or 2nd research on composing social events.

photo by Kate Daughdrill

On Sunday night one hundred twenty people honored with their presence the 7th version of SOUP, increasing participation in relation to the previous event to double.

Invited by Kate and Jessica we worked towards the composition of a social event, evoking interaction and increasing the dialectic process within the already existed format.

photo by Kate Daughdrill

Confronted with the surprising high number of participants we lost our tight line of thoughts but managed to preserve the most precious of our aims - emergence of collective dialogue.

Siting down to listen to the documentation recording, looking back on what worked and what not, working towards the upcoming dinner @ 555 we formulated a critical response following the narrative of the night.

. PING-PONG OF NAMES, FOOD AND ORIGINS

. INTRODUCING THE IDEA OF AGENCY IN RELATION TO COMFORT

. BRINGING PARADIGMS, MOVING FROM THERE (NL) TO HERE (DETROIT)

. INTRODUCING A DIFFERENT VOCABULARY

. FALLING ON A LOOP

. FAILING TO CREATE A SOLID TRANSITION

. COMING BACK TO DETROIT

. REFERRING TO A COMMON AIM

. INTRODUCING INDIVIDUAL PRACTICES

. INTRODUCING SOUP AND ITS SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE.

. OPENING A DISCUSSION ON ART AND SOCIAL INTERACTION

. FALLING ON THE TRAP OF BAD APPROPRIATION OF STATEMENTS

. OPENING SOCIAL INTERACTION TO A BROADER FRAME

. FAILING TO CREATE SOLID TRANSITION

. DEUS EX MACHINA CLOSURE WITH COMMENT FROM THE AUDIENCE

Check the audio documentation on the post below.

audio recording of SOUP event, with timecode for easy listening

a preliminary study on hosting dinners and food for thoughts, and first encounters with engagement art

(or why we are looking for a balance between intervention and integration)

Soup audio documentation by anonymous bystanders

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// timecode :

00:00:00 //waiting for the soup to get cold

00:01:16 //'are we recorded?'

00:02:19 //joao and nicos double checking script for evening, after realizing that the audience number was double than usual

00:04:24 //smoking a cigarette outside mexican bakery, 4330 West Vernor Highway

00:06:06 //'got to give a lil'congo up there man'

00:06:16 //'hey, er.. you wanna crawl under that truck tomorrow?'

00:07:38 //preparing to start

00:08:04 //looking for a frying pan to hit on

00:09:39 //beginning announcement

00:13:15 //one hundred and twenty persons serving soup, salad and desert

00:21:09 //joao meets mark and jake

00:22:20 //'what kind of soup is this?'

00:26:29 //niko joins the conversation with mark and jake

00:29:48 //'the last piece of bread...'

00:30:43 //joao gets niko's bag from under someone's bottom

00:31:25 //'thank you guys for ... '

00:32:29 //nikos and joao look for the right moment to start the show talk dinner

00:32:48 //two unknown persons talk about sitting devices

00:33:21 //joao, miserably, attempts to get audience attention by playing the piano

00:33:36 //dutch eric saves the day by whistling, which joao and nikos dont know how to do

00:33:42 //'hello! its us again.' nikos and joao start the show talk dinner

00:36:17 //the idea of agency - a sketch and a question, third parties and communities

00:40:55 //a (failed) attempt to go high-fi and the uselessness of a microphone

00:41:45 //an everyday life performance of taking care

00:42:47 //re-arrangements of space, inability to use a microphone-part 2 and 'it has been five weeks...' - a series of interrupted acts and thoughts

00:43:38 //urban farming in detroit and over there, when art becomes social intervention and alternatives it creates

00:45:05 //'lets quit the high-tech shite' ... giving up on the microphone and the simple act of talking louder

00:46:38 //'a better future...'

00:48:30 //on staging social events and so-called realities

00:51.33 //quoting 'art in america' and recalling the experience in D, doing and agency

00:54:17 //skype sounds in the back, promising an unexpected appearance

00:54:44 //actually it's not that different at all

00:55:19 //'necessity is the mother of all invention'

00:58:52 //mistranslations, rephrasing ones thoughts, and how to agree on disagreeing

01:03:50 //'entitlement mentality', 'the system has failed us' and 'who's teaching our children?'

01:05:53 //'one last comment and lets go for the soup proposals'