Flint Expatriates: Flint Portraits: Erica Firment

Friday, December 28, 2007

Flint Portraits: Erica Firment

If you're not a librarian, a website called Librarian Avengers might not sound wildly appealing, but don't be fooled. Flint's own Erica Firment created the site in 1997 and it's filled with her humor and insight into everything from equality pants to drug screening to rogue sheep. It's so popular The New York Times has taken notice:

With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

Erica now lives in San Francisco, where she's a user experience designer for Second Life, but she makes frequent trips back to Flint, which allows her to weigh in on some on the vital issues affecting the city:

"Friends, we need to have a little talk. Judging from some of your emails, many of you are Woefully Ignorant of one of the most important debates going on the world today. I refer to the fight between Flint-style coneys and Detroit-style coneys. Apparently there is a place claiming to be "Angelo's" located in shiny Ann Arbor (a yuppie Detroit suburb with delusions of grandeur) selling some vile mockery of a coney dog. I'm here to tell you that this is WRONG. Coneys belong to Flint. Flint invented coneys. Specifically, coneys belong to a little place called Angelo's."

1 comment:

AnonymousDecember 30, 2007 at 9:52 AM
On the night that the televised Iraqi reality show "Shock and Awe" began, we needed to get out of the house. I'd sworn not to be taken in by the televised rocket's red glare. (Embedded journalists, indeed.) We went to Angelos for "two with everything", and afterwards, stood on the corner of Franklin and Davison, and cried for the bombed out city we were revisiting, in lieu of crying for the other victims being made in our name. The first presidential candidate that comes to Angelo's and talks to the folks in the hood get my vote.
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Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.

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