Dead City as Metaphor

I was sitting at a favorite coffee shop and noticed a picture on the wall of the old Detroit Book Depository. It's an image I've been familiar with for a while.

These images of the ruins of Detroit are old favorites of mine, and with the crash of 2008, they became ubiquitous in the media. The Michigan Theater, transformed into a parking garage, the burnt-out shells of humble '20s bungalows and Slavic churches, the caved-in smokestacks of factories that once churned out Plymouths and Packards, the smashed windows of Michigan Central station. We see them whenever Michigan is mentioned on the news in connection with the recession, through a thin gray haze of light snow.

They aren't new images. In "Roger and Me" in 1989, we saw near-identical photos of Flint, some 70 miles to the North. Or we drove through the countless dead zones: Gary, East Saint Louis, Youngstown, vast tracts of the Bronx. They have less of an impact on the national imagination. They are working cities that rose and fell, never having gained the symbolic significance of Detroit.

But Detroit is a more potent symbol. The Arsenal of Democracy, that once-central cog in the American industrial machine, has become a relic. The symbols of the city-- Henry Ford and Al Kaline and the Supremes and the United Auto Workers-- are all likewise symbols of the old America, something with far more bearing on the present politics of nostalgia than the day-to-day life of the city. We rationalize our conception of contemporary economic and social realities around the image and metaphor of Detroit.

But it goes beyond the pictures of the metropolis itself. We have new symbols for Detroit beyond the material space of the city: Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex," the Lions' 0-16 season, Mayor Kilpatrick's texting scandal, Insane Clown Posse, Eminem trudging down 8-Mile with his hoodie up. They are grotesques crawling among the ruins.

Most of us only see the actual decay of Detroit through our television screens and in photos. Or if we travel through the area, it's an ugly patch we drive through on I-94.

In truth, the city has been declining for a long time, having reached a peak population of 1.85 million in the 1950 census, dropping to 1.2 million by 1980, 950,000 by 2000, and 710,000 by 2010-- smaller than placeless Jacksonville, Fort Worth, or Charlotte. Detroit's murder rate peaked in the '70s, and while it has declined since, I suspect that it's because there's no one left to commit crimes against.

I have to wonder how the citizens of older dead cities perceived their slow destruction. Sparta and Ur and Angkor weren't destroyed by single, cataclysmic events, but faded over the course of centuries.

In the age of high-speed media, we have more and more documentation of the collapse of America's manufacturing cities. We see the subtle shifts-- a plant closing here, a riot there. Our artists and journalists are effectively recording the fall of Detroit with a time-lapse camera. We are our own archaeologists.

Archaeology says this. This was once there. Now it is not. At least, not in any form that we immediately recognize. Dig a little among the scrublands, and find pieces of what once was: a piece of twisted metal, a shard of stained glass, a shredded piece of polyester.

To some future generation, Detroit will not be plagued with nostalgia for an old America, but will be a new metaphor. It will be a ruin as exotic as the crumbled temples of Carthage. The ruins will be uncovered and respectfully cordoned off. Instead of a public grain market, there will be a shipping warehouse. In place of a temple to Astarte, the old Tiger Stadium. Schoolchildren will take tours, and, growing bored with the antiquities, skip stones on the surface of the Rouge River until it's time to get back on the bus.

The Aleatoric City

Sitting on a bench in Steinbrueck Park, looking out over the harbor. Tourists are looking at a map of the city that is hopelessly not-to-scale. Downtown is stretched and warped, a funhouse version of itself.

Modern maps are representations of the physical city. A tourist looks at a map of the city (or at a GPS, or at map software), at the grids collapsing into grids. He plots a route using the gray lines of streets, the red bands of freeways that slice the city into chunks.

And then there is the city experienced on a personal and subjective level, based on our landmarks, our routines, the ballet of traveling from point-to-point that composes our day-to-day lives: walking to the bus stop, driving to work, biking to the grocery store, and all of the other little spatial tics that, when accumulated, form our conception of the shape of the city.

And, lastly, most subtly, there is the aleatoric city. Things you cannot control, things left up to chance. Bumping into a friend you haven't seen in months at the market, encountering a little restaurant hidden down a side street, a tangle of warehouses you get lost in trying to find a shortcut. In the aleatoric experience of the city, every street and every corner hums with the potential for fortune and misfortune, synchronic event and diachronic event.

Cardinal directions make sense to me. I've always looked at maps. When I look at the map, when I conceive of the form of the city, the personal and aleatoric experiences of space are subordinate to the lines of boulevards, parks, rivers, and railroad tracks. Minneapolis: a grid curving along the Mississippi River. Seattle: a fractured isthmus decorated with lakes and canals. Get on Google Maps, and there are the shapes of Paris, Tokyo, Fez, Rangoon, Miami.

But then I visit the city and the map fills in, block by block. All of the sudden, the abstract shape is imbued with light. A corner that was once a red square, a gray dot, becomes a flight of crows on a fall evening, an ice cream scoop falling off a cone, three Japanese girls taking a photo on a flawless summer afternoon.

This was how I viewed cities until I came to Bangkok, a city whose cartographies elude reason. The tangle of major roads-- Yaowarat, Ratchadamnoen, Rama IV-- separates out vast swaths of alleys, many too narrow for cars. Without pattern and without shape, my perception of the city cannot be contained in the map and so I throw the map away. Bangkok is made of connections between the Hualamphong Railway Station and favorite noodle shops, black canals and gilded palaces.

The solitary central stupa of Wat Arun, the temple of dawn, looks over the old city, glittering with tiles originally made from the shards of Chinese ceramics dropped by junks as ballast in the Chao Phraya River. Celadon cups are discarded and reborn as tiles. Cracked and faded tiles are taken off, with new ones embedded in their place. The map of the city is analogous to the stupa, constantly taken apart and reconstructed. City and stupa are a massive mah-jongg game, tiles replaced, tactics perpetually revised, individual pieces re-shaped, carrying on into infinity.

In Montana

The passage out of Seattle is sudden.  One minute, you're amid the gas stations and cubist housing estates of Issaquah.  The next, you're up in the misty clefts of Cascades that David Lynch chose as the setting of Twin Peaks.  And then you're out in the country beyond Cle Elum, a flat empty brownness.  Our little Hyundai is a mercury bubble on a strip of highway across a windswept plain.

The radio stations faded out in the mountains, and all the stations in Seattle became superseded by country and ranchera music.  We find a remnant of a previous era, an AM station playing old Brill Building songs with strings and horns.  Someone singing about a rose that grows in Spanish Harlem, dutifully broadcast across the desert for 50 years.

I'd forgotten about highways as escape routes.  About the joy of getting out of town for a while, kicking around gravel parking lots and diners with hand-painted signs.  When your life is defined by cityspace for so long, you forget about the vastness that separates here from there in America.

Glacier National Park is a place so gorgeous that it looks barely real.  Narrow waterfalls cascade down snow-capped mountains, shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight above lakes as translucent and blue as sapphires.  It is almost disconcertingly similar to James Hilton's Shangri-La, to the vision of paradise described in the Qu'ran. The peaks are named Almost-a-Dog, Going-to-the-Sun, whole mythologies captured in simple map references.

We walked along the shore of Saint Mary Lake, along contorted sedimentary cliffs with pale bushes clinging to the sides.

On a sunny day, it's something like Lake Como, a slender body of water lined with bright pink flowers. Squint and you can see characters from Tender Is the Night traipsing along the shore. A pink ribbon flies off a hat in the July wind and is caught by a columbine.

On a gray day, the mountains reveal themselves to be jagged and barren.  The sheer cliffs are barricaded by gray scree slopes, a landscape fit for witches and ghosts.  The heavy log buildings of the park brood, entrenched into the bases of the Lewis Range.

The two images of the lake are holograms of each other. Separated by a perceptual veil of light and color, they occupy the same space, the same contours, facing each other, never touching.

This was our funereal tour.  I wanted to see the glaciers that gave the national park its name before they finally melt.  That last piece of glacier will fall apart 10 or 15 years from now.  It will absorb enough energy from the Sun that it will enter phase change, transform into free-flowing water, and that last little transfixed piece of a previous geological epoch will swiftly dissipate in the waters of the river.

And yet, despite the inevitable demise of a place I was falling in love with, I tried my hardest to put my fatalism behind me.  Here we were, away from our lives and obligations for a few days, drinking screw-top red wine and sunning ourselves on cliffs. We immersed ourselves in a fading summer out on a windy high mountain aerie on the edge of America.

Snapshot Image

I chanced upon the Russian photographer Sergey Chilikov when looking for the photo on the cover of Beirut's "Gulag Orkestar." You can find an archive of his photos here.

I'd forgotten the beauty of simple snapshots like this, photos without the pretense of memory. These are the ordinary people of what was once the Second World. These anonymous vintage snapshots are connections to a world I will never experience, will never see in any form other than a grainy, faded image, names forgotten or maybe even never learned by the photographer.

It is by mere accident that one of these pictures achieved fame. In an interview, Zach Condon said he first saw the cover slipped out of a book in a library in Leipzig. A very personal photo becomes universal, transformed from a memory-machine into an image in the public consciousness.

A photo, taken either for a personal collection or a now-extinct daily newspaper, is uploaded to the Internet, separated from its origins by yet another degree, and disseminated to a largely undiscerning global public.

Because holding a photograph and looking at it on a computer screen are different experiences, even though a photograph is "supposed" to be a crystalline representation of reality. The material photograph is a more direct link to another era, unmediated by a contemporary piece of technology. It's sepia-toned or washed out, and it smells of junk drawers and the dull, metallic smell of silver frames on dusty mantles.

This tells me the photograph is not merely an image, but takes on a life of its own that digital images, unless they're printed out, will never have. Think about all the ancient family photos you've doubtless seen on the shelves of tract homes and McMansions in outlying suburbs of American cities. They're most likely the only things more than 50 years old in a great many homes, a solitary fragment of past existences. We burn our cities to the ground, we build our new houses to last a single generation and yet, amid contemporary suburbia, the individual's line of memory is preserved as a photo, set in a respectable position on a matte-painted particle-board shelf in a white-carpeted den.

Despite the very American and very Protestant environment, it reminds me of those Chinese Confucians who honor their ancestors as a fount of authenticity and truth, even amid the rise and fall of dynasties and the building of 100,000-man factories in Shenzhen. The Confucian attitude seems to be that the truth of a righteous life is beyond material, beyond memory; it exists in an impossibly stable and a priori vacuum. Whatever sound and fury happens in China-- capitalism, Communism, and capitalism again-- that which Confucius called "the way" floats above, immaterial, impassive.

It's been years since I looked through any old snapshots of my own family. It's helpful to consider the photo as a universal subject when you've forgotten the snapshots that are supposed to mean the most to you. When, in some distant future date, I look again on pioneer great-grandfathers and aunts in beehive hairdos, what will I see? What will I feel? What truth will I ascertain? Will I feel a primordial connection to some ancestral imagination? Or will they simply be faded scraps of paper, chemical tracings on thin cardboard moldering in shoeboxes in a house 1500 miles away.

The Enchanted Bluff

Whenever I'm wandering around the Hill and have some time to kill, I tend to stop into Elliott Bay Books, the sort of wonderful, comprehensive local-institution bookstore every city should have, for a bit of browsing.

I hadn't read Willa Cather in ages.  At some point, she appealed to me greatly, along with all the other American regionalists, but as my literary tastes expanded into the wilder, weirder worlds of French surrealism and portent-laden postmodernists and the Japanese avant-garde, she got left behind.  So I picked up her collected stories, and opened up to page 64, her 1909 story "The Enchanted Bluff."

I first read it at a tiny used bookstore back home.  Along with a handful of other businesses constantly on the edge of folding, it occupied a section of the ground floor of the Sheldon-Munn, the town's once-grand railroad hotel now converted into tiny apartments for the elderly and impoverished.

You walked in through a creaky door, and the place was covered in industrial carpeting, with piles of books on the floor, mildewed volumes of long-forgotten onetime bestsellers.  Books by Josephine Winslow Johnson and Gene Stratton Porter and James Gould Cozzens.  Stories of Christian virgins in peril that must have once belonged to the schoolteachers and small town lawyers of Story County, Iowa some 80 years earlier.

I spent frigid winter days combing through musty shelves of dog-eared, yellowed Signet Classics and Modern Library editions filled with faded pencil scrawls written in Iowa State dorm rooms a generation or more ago.  Put together a stack of two-and three-dollar paperbacks, and walk home through the snowdrifts.

Like all teenagers, I was unsure what I wanted out of life, but was quite sure what I wanted wasn't this: high school in a dreary town centered around a land-grant university and ringed by meth labs.  So I read Thomas Pynchon, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg.  In cracked and moth-eaten trade paperbacks, I could envision my world centering around a tiny apartment on a narrow street in Montparnasse, a rough-hewn cabin in the forests of Northern Wisconsin, a life of jumping trains and bumming rides.  Each dusty book represented a hazy, impressionistic dream.

Which brings me back to Cather.  "The Enchanted Bluff" is a lovely, wistful story about a group of boys hanging out for the last time on a sandbar.  The summer is ending, and the narrator is about to leave town, and he tells a story about a place in New Mexico called the Enchanted Bluff.  They all make plans to go there.  They never do.

Memory is shaped by the stories we tell each other, the symbols and phrases that run as motifs through all human interactions and relationships.  The mythic, the ideal level.  The Enchanted Bluff isn't a real place, and it doesn't need to be.  It functions as a symbol that is sustained even as the actual relationship falters.  And as we remember our relations, our images of the actual people we once felt something towards-- whether it was love, friendship, or enmity-- become blurred, impressionistic.  What remains: symbols, narratives, old photos, souvenirs in attic boxes, ghostly images floating on the edge of memory.

In Memory of Modernism

About a month ago, my attention was drawn to a set of photos by the Dutch photographer Jan Kempenaers.  He'd gone around the former Yugoslavia with an old map to track down the monuments commissioned by Josip Broz Tito to commemorate the nation's suffering in the Second World War.  Battlefields, concentration camps, and other sites of national import were memorialized in one of those high-minded Communist projects that are so often forgotten.  The monuments were built as a material reminder of the victory of ordinary people over the fascist armies that marauded Europe.

They're all rendered in this unearthly, brutalist style that, as Foucault says, "heroizes the present."

Some look like the gears of abandoned spaceships:

Others like the skeletons of prehistoric sea monsters:

And others, like my favorite, near the Kosovo town of Mitrovica, seem to be nothing but a profound and monolithic gravity:

Take away the graffiti and restore the concrete, and you can imagine the little socialist automobiles gathered outside, the Yugos and Skodas and Trabants and Dacias.  Neckerchiefed Young Pioneers are gathered around, posing for photos, shielding their eyes from the Sun while they salute.

The Yugoslavs put so much effort into memorializing the defeat of fascism.  And think how quickly after the fall of Communism the peoples of the old Yugoslavia slipped into a new fascism.  Tito combated the ethno-nationalist impulse with a vengeance, recognizing it threatened the unity of the state and by extension his own power.  1989 saw the flowering of Prague and Budapest, but further South it marked the dawn of a decade of religious sectarianism and territorial revanchism.

Religious and ethnic wars slashed the Balkans to ribbons, and modern monuments crumbled in the hills.

When I was off seeing the world, I passed through the little Cambodian town of Kep (during the Indochine days, it was Kep-sur-Mer), some 10,000 people on a rocky shore a few hours out of Phnom Penh.

In the '60s, this was the Cambodian Riviera.  Squint at the old town, and you can almost see it.  Men in white suits strolling along the quay, lacing their Khmer conversation with French.  Lon Nol's cronies must have sipped Scotch at the nightclubs, where Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth sang.

The streets are quiet now.  When the Khmer Rouge marched into Kep in 1975, they torched the modernist seaside villas.  Teenagers in black pajamas, faces covered with red-checked krama scarves, must have gone through these buildings, ripping out velvet curtains and tossing volumes of Victor Hugo and the Reamker into the Gulf.

The black hulks of the old villas loom over the seaside today.  A number of them bear the bold designs of Vann Molyvann, Le Corbusier's Cambodian disciple who imbued fused the International style with design elements from classical Angkorian architecture.

Modernism is annihilated by another modernism.  Two radical approaches are incommensurate: the new architecture of Corbusier and the beyond-Maoism of the Democratic Kampuchea dictat.

Today, the peasants hang their wash on lines strung from the concrete columns.  The Khmers are tough as nails.  Everyone you see over 30 is a genocide survivor.

The government of Hun Sen, the one-eyed former Communist who has run Cambodia in some capacity since 1985, has announced bold plans to sweep away the ruins and restore Kep as the gem of the coast.  Onward marches the new capitalism that dominates East Asia-- the Chinese and Vietnamese and Cambodians have abandoned the anti-Western philippics and embraced the shopping mall.

So much of me still wants to be a modernist, to believe that Schoenberg can save the world, that a liberationist Marxist praxis will lead to a saner, less alienated society.

All I can be convinced of is that anything and everything is temporary and contingent.  We leave traces of our old desires around the landscape.  The old clashes fade into memory.  But in Mitrovica and in Kep, the flowers are still blooming.

Anniversary Issue

Today is a dual anniversary.  First, I've been back in Seattle one year.  In that year, I've become reacquainted with everything I dig about this town: the watery light off the North Pacific, the madrona trees shading the long steps that cascade down Queen Anne Hill, the sunny, dry days that make you feel like you're walking through a Joni Mitchell song, the cold, wet days where you stay inside and drink coffee in your bathrobe.  I've rediscovered the joys of pho on dripping winter evenings, of gin-fueled dance parties in creaking Victorians, of noise shows in dingy bars, of arguing the difference between various Costa Rican coffees, of the hand-painted signs in Ethiopian script on East Cherry Street.

But, in addition to having spent one year back here, that's also one year I haven't been anywhere else.  I have not left Seattle city limits in 365 days, not even to go to a suburb.  I think, sometimes, about hopping on a bus to Shoreline or Tukwila just for the hell of it.  But this seems even more dismal.  My one time leaving the city would be to wind up in some chilly, windswept strip mall on a desolate strip of the Pacific Highway, before turning back.

I pride myself on being a peripatetic bastard.  On having rejected my home and gone to wander the Earth.  I'm slightly worn out and prone to reminisce about Cambodian mountaintops, about the long mosses that hang in the cold weather rainforests, about the steps of Sacré-Coeur on a July evening when Paris looks like an antique stereopticon.

So I have to wonder why it is I've stuck it out here.  I bitch about it a lot.  Everyone does.  Seattleites love to bitch about the rain, about the bad attitude it engenders, about that weird and pathetic desire that Seattle has to be a world city, to be a New York-in-the-Northwest, a Paris-on-the-Puget.

The virtual city threatens to overwhelm the old real.  The digital age has transformed the old town of salmon canneries and creaking viaducts into a shiny chrome post-metropolis.  What I hate about Seattle is exactly this, its icy, venal character.

And what I love most about it is its remnants, the ruins of the old America that poke out through the pacified city.  The half-erased Chinese signs and signs in a vaguely Chinese font-- COLD BEER, CHOW MEIN-- painted in alleys, the red gantry cranes that sway over the harbor, the filthy river that carries the name of a near-extinct tribe in the city named for its chief, the sudden flights of seagulls that swoop down through cobblestone streets filled with fallen sakura blossoms.

To a certain extent, what keeps people in one place is inertia.  Obviously, there are personal connections as well, to work, to family, to friends.  But I think a lot of what keeps people in one place is that they don't know why they would move when there's no suggestion that where they move would be any better for them.  We will be in one place tomorrow because it's where we are today.

Other cities and countries beckon me, and sometimes I imagine my future self there: walking through the streets of Brooklyn on an early fall evening, biking along the seaside in L.A., high atop a Maoist apartment block in Shanghai, staring down the entangled cityscapes of Berlin or San Francisco or Saigon or Seoul.

But Seattle and I have reached something of an understanding.  It's the spot on Earth that I've chosen, at least for now.  And when I walk home late at night, or when I see the sun rising from behind the Cascades, it reveals itself to me, and it's like receiving a valentine.