Friday, December 11, 2015

Colorless Smoke



"As he gazed at the four names on the screen, and considered the memories those names brought back, he felt the past silently mingling with the present, as a time that should have been long gone hovered in the air around him. Like odorless, colorless smoke leaking into the room through a small crack in the door."

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Flint Artifacts: G.M.I. Sweatshirt




Flint Artifacts: Northern Vs. Central 1962 High School Football Program




Tuesday, October 27, 2015

International Students Find the American Dream — in Flint


In the summer of 2009, I met a group of Kettering and UM-Flint students from India playing cricket at Mama Calvo Field near Whittier and Central. It got me thinking about just who is coming to Flint during an era when many residents are leaving.

My recent story in the New York Times chronicles the international students from more than 40 countries who are coming to Flint in record numbers. Here's how it begins:
A few months after Abhishek Y. Utekar left Mumbai, India, to start an M.B.A. program at the University of Michigan campus in Flint, his landlord gave him a driving tour of his new home. Dennis Brownfield watched out for his tenants, and he wanted Mr. Utekar to understand the dynamics of a city often defined by deindustrialization and decay. His car provided the first lesson. It was a Honda Civic with a license plate that read “GM LEFT,” a commentary on the 70,000 automotive jobs that have disappeared over the years in this birthplace of General Motors.
They rolled to a stop in the empty parking lot between the main library and Central High School, an imposing brick building shuttered because of falling enrollment and budget cuts. “Now make sure you’ve got your seatbelt on because I’m going to show you an American custom,” Mr. Brownfield said. He shifted into reverse, cranked the steering wheel hard to the right, gunned the engine and popped the clutch. The result was a dizzying, deftly executed series of backward 360s. For a final flourish, Mr. Brownfield yanked the emergency brake to abruptly change directions.
“That’s called a doughnut,” he said when they had skidded to a stop. 
“It’s how we have fun in Michigan.” 
Rattled but impressed, Mr. Utekar realized: This was going to be a lot different than India.
Read the rest of the story here.


Friday, October 23, 2015

Flint Artifacts: Ski Haus Skis






Thursday, October 15, 2015

Ways of Going Home


"I watch the cars, I count the cars. It's overwhelming to think that in the backseats children are sleeping, and that every one of those children will remember, someday, the old car they rode in years before, with their parents."

Ways of Going Home, Alejandro Zambra

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Flint Artifacts: McDonald Dairy Crate




Flint Postcards: Bird's-eye View of Flint




Sunday, September 13, 2015

Nothing Works, Everyone Labors: An Interview with Poet Lacluster by Sarah Carson


Nothing Works, Everyone Labors: An Interview with poet Lacluster

By Sarah Carson

Flint Performance poet Lacluster’s debut full-length collection Nothing Works, Everyone Labors is an unsympathetic portrait of what it means to live in Flint, Michigan in the 21st century.

Published by NIC Publishing, an imprint Lacluster started himself to represent Rust Belt voices, the book is as honest as it is pleading. He writes of arson, desolation and love all with an eye toward what could be: “Sometimes / you have to sacrifice/ a house full of dreams/to find your real home even / if that means, / setting up camp on a / patch of new grass/ and re-imagining.”

I sat down with him at noon on a Sunday over Irish Breakfast shots at The Torch. As downtown church bells rang around us, we discussed the collection, what it meant to him to write it and what he thinks is next for the city he loves.

So what’s the name Lacluster about? Where did the name come from and why the choice to use a pseudonym?

A lot of people know my real name, so I’ve created this alter ego to separate myself from that – which a lot of poets, rappers, etc. do.

Although these poems are based around real issues, I use a pseudonym to separate myself as a real person from the persona who’s narrating the collection.
Lacluster relates to how people from Flint are viewed through the eyes of outsiders. If there is any association, it is typically negative — violence, no jobs, funky water, poverty. And young people live up to those negative stereotypes as underachievers partially to cope but also to carve out an identity.

What does Lacluster have in common with the real life author of these poems?

I would say that I have a sort of schizophrenic writing personality. You know, it’s me, and it’s not. What’s nice about having a kind of a pseudonym is that first and foremost people can’t judge you by your name. They have to read the book.

Let’s talk about the title. Where does Nothing Works, Everyone Labors come from and what does it mean in terms of what you want to communicate with this collection?

The title is a phrase from the poem “Most Dangerous Fame.” Part of living in Flint is constantly dealing with the disappointments and lack of opportunity. Either you settle for less, hustle harder and create those opportunities yourself, or you choose to move away. It speaks to the larger struggle to achieve a sense of progress in life while everything around you crumbles faster than you can repair it.

When you talk about “everything crumbling around you,” are you talking about Flint? Or are you talking about something more personal?

I think it’s scalable. I think the experience of living in this city — you have to just deal with the fact that every single day something horrible is going to be in the news. Everything we try to do in this town to move us forward always takes us two steps back.
Some people have this mentality that things are coming back: GM’s coming back. This town’s coming back. It’s going to be this big city, but any progress is actually a step backwards. Either it’s done lazily or it’s done incompetently.

It’s a constant flow of BS, you know?

So why write a book about that?

Why write a book about any time and place? To share it. To get it out there.  To show people that this is not just happening in Detroit, but that it’s something that could also come into their backyards.

We have problems that should be national news, but I don’t think they’re ever taken seriously because we live in the shadow of Detroit.

Fuck Detroit. Come to Flint. We have the same kind of problems, and we need the same solutions.

But the book doesn’t necessarily tell people come to Flint. Or do you think it does? What are you trying to do?

I’m just trying to paint a picture of what I feel as a citizen is how you experience daily life. I’m a huge booster for Flint. I always have been. But you can’t walk up and down the East Side or the North Side and say how pretty it is. It ain’t pretty.

The reality is, it's really challenging to live and do well here. And most people move away because there are other cities that have opportunities for advancement – including Detroit.

People come into Flint and see there’s nothing going on. But what is going on may be beyond their looking glass. So let’s take a peek at what really exists, at what I’d see if I was taking the bus all day.

I’m painting a place. I’m trying to say on a personal level, the city feels like this, and my own struggles feel like this, and they’re interrelated.

Why do you choose to write about Flint? What does it do for you? What do you hope people will take away from reading/hearing your work?

I write about Flint as a kind of exorcism because it can be a heavy burden to live here.

As an artist I want to bear some kind of witness even if my perspective is skewed. I hope people find something unexpected in this book or at least something that is true to its time and place.


Nothing Works, Everyone Labors can be purchased on Amazon


Saturday, September 12, 2015

St. Mary's School, R.I.P.



The planned demolition of St. Mary's on Franklin Avenue in Flint has been delayed, but the home of the wildcats will disappear soon, another lost monument to Flint during happier times. 

Sarah Schuch of MLive wrote: "The three-story, 12-classroom school now sits vacant. The gym and locker rooms aren't like they were a decade ago. Cerca Boxing has been using the space. And the inside is deteriorating.

"Alumni wrote messages on the chalkboards during a fundraiser in May. Many messages include 'RIP' and fond memories."




Here's a collection of photos related to St. Mary's that have appeared on Flint Expatriates over the years. Thanks to Kelly O' Connor for the Jet League basketball photos.
























Saturday, August 15, 2015

Flint (via Ann Arbor) Artifacts: Schoolkids' Records, 1985




Monday, August 3, 2015

Flint Artifacts: IMA Hockey Puck




Flint Artifacts: Durant Dort Carriage




Flint Artifacts: Jimmy Manutes' Suburban Cocktail Bar Matchbook




Flint Artifacts: Superior Pontiac Cadillac Matchbook




Sunday, July 19, 2015

Ghosts of GM


"Vintage" Chevy pickup and jet ski at the Russian River near Guerneville, California.


Monday, June 29, 2015

The Scent of Flint


Now what would this "Flint Scented Candle" from Crate & Barrel actually smell like? Perhaps the interior of a Buick Electra 225 with undertones of Berston Field House and the old St. Mary's locker room, along with a slight hint of melting snow?

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis by Andrew Highsmith


Historian Andrew Highsmith’s indepth look at the intersection of race, housing, education, and politics in Flint is a must-read for anyone hoping to truly understand the past, present, and future of the Vehicle City, and, by extension, other post-industrial cities around the country. It’s really a portrait of America. It explores the decisions — often made during the boom years — that brought Flint to its present state. And it reveals that even when the city was viewed as a industrial success story, racial politics ensured that many were systematically excluded from the prosperity. Highsmith’s work profoundly changed my understanding of Flint and the forces that animate it. In an era when quick hits and shallow reporting have come to define a great deal of what is written about complicated issues, Demolition Means Progress captures the complexity of cities like Flint. I highly recommend it.

Pre-order Demolition Means Progress here.


Saturday, June 13, 2015

Exile and Banishment

"It was the banishment from youth into age. For youth is our biological and physiological homeland. There, we know our way. And even if in our nostalgic memories the sun shines where it was actually dark, still we are familiar with the pitfalls and perils of youth. We know how to live in that homeland with good and bad — how to master it, anyway, better than we know how to navigate the foreign country of age into which we are expelled."
— Frederic Morton

Thursday, April 2, 2015

An Absence of Unicorns by Megan Crane

When I tell people that I voluntarily chose to move to Flint, I am usually greeted with looks ranging from confused to appalled. Flint, Michigan, a rough-shod blue-collar town gracelessly eroding at its seams, crumbling into its eponymous river as more and more people flee. The town has been described by author Ben Hamper as “greaseball Mecca” and by noted journalist Gordon Young as a “city that continually challenged the national media to come up with new and creative ways to describe just how horrible things were.” Flint has a well-deserved reputation for toughness, and Michael Moore’s documentary Roger & Me depicted the gritty reality of post-GM Flint accurately, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek. It is one of the most violent and crime-ridden towns in the United States. It is also roughly two hundred miles south of my hometown. However, despite growing up in rural northern Michigan, Flint has been a part of my life for as far back as my memory reaches. In an indirect manner, it has helped to shape my adult personality, and that leaves me owing it a spiritual debt, as we all owe the things that create us.


My father was part of the Flint diaspora of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. He left the city with the hopes that he could find peace and a quiet life up north, and that his offspring would be spared the dangers of a childhood like his, shielding us from the crime, pollution, and general decline of his hometown. Interestingly, Flint still remained nearly a day-to-day topic of conversation in our home. Lee Iacocca and Roger Smith were names I recognized and could identify by face by age five. Michael Moore was someone to be mocked as being “not-from-Flint,” a fact which irritated my father for some unknown reason, as was Moore’s removal from my great-aunt’s bookstore at the hands of my grandfather, who did not approve of the filmmaker’s use of profanity in the presence of ladies.

We made frequent trips south to visit my grandparents and uncle, who remained residents of Genesee County. I would compare Cross Village, Michigan, population 200, where I spent my childhood, to Flint, with rather unfavorable results. Flint had large libraries, museums, a mall, a planetarium, and so many, many things to do. Cross Village, on the other hand, boasted a post office, a tiny general store/gas station, a bar that we were strictly forbidden to enter, and a one-room schoolhouse that educated children in kindergarten through sixth grade until it closed shortly after I entered third grade in 1990. Sturgeon Bay, one of the upper reaches of Lake Michigan, was directly across the street from our front yard, but I had little appreciation of this fact as a child, focusing more on the injustice of the lack of pizza delivery and door-to-door mail service. I felt cheated by the lack of other children to play with and would plead with my parents to move south. My father would attempt to deflect my efforts with what were meant to be cautionary stories of narrow escapes from shadowy-faced hooligans or tragedies that would have never occurred in a suburban setting. However, I was a precocious child, an early reader with a sense of adventure who preferred the reality of Unsolved Mysteries and Reader’s Digest to the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys, and I developed the ghost of resentment against my parents for depriving me of what I saw as my birthright to eat at Halo Burger and shop at the Genesee Valley Mall.

As I slouched my way through my teen years and into my early twenties, I developed into something of a gypsy, managing to live in several of the small scattered towns north of the forty-fifth parallel without staying more than three or four months in each. Eventually, I settled in Petoskey for a few years, continuing to work as a cook as I had done throughout high school, and always dreaming of escape from what I viewed as a restricted small-town existence. After all, small towns limit opportunities, and the tradition of going off to the city to make a name for one’s self is time-honored for a reason. I still harbored thoughts of Flint in the back of my head, often getting on realtor.com to look at housing costs, searching Flint’s craigslist for cooking jobs, and reading a wonderful blog for former Flint residents, FlintExpats.com. However, while most of the blog’s followers read it for its trips down memory lane and to keep abreast with new developments in their old hometown, I used it rather more as one would use a Spanish dictionary while vacationing in Mexico. Finally, I began to piece together a bigger and more accurate view of Flint than the one garnered from family stories and childhood visits, seeing the city without the rose-colored glasses of childhood fantasy. Flint was dangerous. Flint was dirty. However, it still had colleges and museums, still had history oozing through every pockmark left by an abandoned house, seeping through the wizened and blackened stumps of the burnouts. It invaded my life — most of my friends in Petoskey were either originally from Flint or had ties through their parents to the benighted city. Flint still called to me.

In 2011, I moved 1,800 miles south of Flint to Austin, Texas, searching for year-round employment as a chef. I found a job easily and climbed the ladder rather quickly, ascending from lower-rung prep cook to sous chef, or second-in-charge of the kitchen, in less than two months. Things were going rather well throughout 2012, and I had just been offered the chance to run my own restaurant, an offer I was getting ready to formally accept when my mother suffered a massive heart attack. Six weeks later, I had sold everything I owned that did not fit into two messenger bags and a carry-on suitcase and was on the Amtrak from Austin to Chicago. Two days after leaving Austin, I installed myself at the Super 8 Motel on Miller Road and began looking for a job and a place to live in Flint. I have been living in Genesee County ever since.

My gypsy ways had left me familiar with the adjustment period following every move. Transitioning to a new city means new slang, new eateries, new traditions and routines and habits. My prior familiarity with Flint did not make the transition easier, though. Rather, I felt as though my dad was always walking a couple steps behind me. At the public library, I could almost see the shape of my father, age fifteen, slouched over a notebook and scribbling away. As time passed, I began to see certain traits inherent in my father’s personality explained by the daily reality of living in a factory town like Flint. I began to notice the way that hometowns shape people’s personalities. I am a small-town girl in my heart. I believe in helping the neighbors out and in always trying to believe that people operate with the best of intentions. My sister and I refer to this as “keeping our unicorns,” a sort of stretched metaphor meant to represent the naiveté necessary to believe that the crushed syringe on the ground at the bus stop was dropped by a frazzled diabetic, or that the elderly couple missing for a week simply ran off to Vegas to renew their vows. I like my unicorn; I have grown quite fond of it and have managed to hold onto it for over thirty-two years. Many of my friends “back home” still have theirs too: when your neighbors were once your parents’ neighbors, when your mailman is the fourth cousin of your first grade teacher, and when the cashier greets you by name not because you are a regular, but because you were friends with his older sister in middle school, it is fairly effortless to maintain some level of faith in humankind.

My unicorn, however, has always kept close company with a healthy dose of cynicism. This might sound contradictory, however, my native intelligence led to some rather ferocious bullying when I was a child, which then led to the anxiety issues I still suffer from. After moving to Flint, I began to notice a profound absence of unicorns. People were cynical. People were harsh. So many people felt trapped by the city and dreamed of escape. Meanwhile, Flint kept suffering. The people who fled were the people with education, with fighting spirit and a desire for change, the people still capable of dreaming of better things. It seemed to me that this was one of the roots of Flint’s troubles — all of the people who could help turn the city around and make it better had left or were preparing to do so.

Did I have a right to feel this way? I, too, had fled my hometown, even going so far as to relocate across the country. My travels had shown me, clearly, that where one grows up shapes the person one becomes. In much the way a parent shapes their child’s character, for better or worse, the place where childhood shades into adulthood also dictates several basic parts of personality, such as cynicism, political leanings, slang and its delivery, and often, even choice of career. Had I not grown up in Emmet County, it is impossible to say what I would be like today. My rural upbringing left me with a healthy concern for the environment that focuses more on conservation rather than repair, a love of tree climbing and kayaking and swimming, and a love of animals, especially strays. Since my overall “up North” vibe was one of the things that initially attracted my fiancé to me (he is also an up north boy), I cannot say with any certainty that my marriage in July 2015 would be taking place.

I was starting to feel somewhat guilty for leaving Petoskey and Cross Village until it struck me: those towns were not dying. Cross Village was not the town of my youth. Real estate developers had discovered it in the mid-1990’s and proceeded to blanket it with soulless mansions that saw their inhabitants for three weeks per year. Cross Village, as far as I was concerned, had reincarnated. Petoskey is and has almost always been a resort town, dependent on tourists for the bulk of its economy. It holds a location nearly in the center of the three surrounding ski resorts and has a wildly popular casino and a small but quaint downtown. The residents are well-accustomed to the sudden influx of people in the summer months, and for the first month of “ski season,” and many working-class families augment their household income in the off-season by hunting, fishing, raking leaves and shoveling snow, and other odd jobs. Petoskey would survive without me and others of my kind, dreamers with a passion for a good fight and the smarts to recognize that the road ahead would not be easy.

My curiosity satisfied on that account, I turned to Flint. I had chosen to move here from Austin, rather than back to Petoskey, where my parents now live. On the surface, I rationalized my decision by claiming that it was far easier for me to find a job and affordable housing in Flint, rather than go back to the layoffs and crazy in-season insanity of the tourist towns up north. After all, it was better to be only four hours south rather than a seven hour flight plus a two hour drive away. Now, however, I removed myself from that equation and realized that, in fact, my primary motivation underneath my adult-sounding claims of economic stability was a five-year-old girl in pigtails looking up from her Encyclopedia Britannica and saying “We can finally move to Flint?”

Did I owe Flint a debt, being one generation removed from the right to call it my hometown? Had it truly exerted enough influence over me from two hundred miles away that I could claim any part of it? People who left Flint for greener pastures were referred to as Flint expatriates; what would the term be for someone like me, a gypsy returning to settle in the land of her father? Had Flint born any responsibility for shaping me as a person?

As I stated earlier, I carry a healthy dose of cynicism nestled next to my unicorn. Some blame for that can be laid for the ferocious bullying I endured for four years, which led to a sort of nervous breakdown and a school transfer the next fall. However, a large portion of it I picked up attempting to emulate my father, and his was learned naturally on the streets of south Flint. I felt that my father’s toughness — and to me as a child, my father was the toughest man in the universe — would make me stronger than my tormentors, and indeed, I was disciplined a few times for losing my temper and fighting.

I believe that attempting to model myself after my father lent far more “Flint” to my personality than what I would have naturally inherited, based on examination of the differences between my siblings and myself, and taking our differing basic personalities into account. There are some common threads that mark us as having a somewhat-different upbringing than many of our schoolmates, such as our dark and slightly warped sense of humor, and our political leanings, which are far too liberal for ultra-conservative Emmet County.
All of this intense self-examination had tired me out. I stood and brushed the seat of my Goodwill jeans off and decided to make a run to Angelo’s for a couple coney dogs. It hit me, then: maybe the bits of Flint in me were enough to count. I grew up craving coneys and Halo Burger as equally as I did Mackinaw Island fudge and fry bread. Flint and Petoskey and Cross Village had struck an even balance in me, my hometowns and the home of my father and my father’s family. Both had come together to shape me into the woman I am now. I am fairly fond of myself as a person, for the most part, a geek bearing battle scars from intensive physical labor, the girl who will fight a person for hurting an animal while crying for the animal the entire time. This dichotomy showed me, finally, that yes, I did owe Flint in the same way I owed the towns of my youth. It had already been established that Cross Village was beyond recognition and that Petoskey had never needed me. That left Flint.

I needed my homemade mythos of Flint as a child. It represented all the large dreams of a city that my child’s brain could create. It gave me a focus point while I struggled through the long days of school, watching over my back for my tormentors, getting in fights on the playground, that there was a place out there where I would be able to get through one day unnoticed, with no one calling me a freak. As I grew older and started to make my way in the world as a chef, my vision of Flint shifted to that of a place that would not scorn my working-class upbringing, where the economy was troubled but there were still opportunities available, where everyone got a chance if they were just willing to work for it. 

Sitting on my sofa, tonight, in the living room of my little house in Atherton Park, I see that my vision remains largely unchanged, merely more concrete.
Flint helped shape me as a person on a number of different levels. Most importantly, it gave me a touchpoint. This crumbling town was a beacon of hope for me as a teenager, and it is difficult to let go of the illusions cherished at that age. As an adult, Flint represented myself to me, in a way. Battered and torn down by the establishment, it struggles and has been struggling for years to come back from the ashes of the burnouts and the devastation left in GM’s wake, finally attempting to recreate itself as a college town. I spent years struggling to overcome crippling low self-esteem and horrible attacks of free-floating anxiety after being ostracized and hurt, finally recreating myself as a loud, brash, cocky chef. It has only been over the last eighteen months that I have been able to let my original geeky book-obsessed self out of hiding. Flint has a reputation for being hard, dirty, crime-ridden and poverty-stricken, yet underneath that reputation lies good people, amazing cultural sites, and a wealth of experiences and history one would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. People who grow up in Flint are resilient. They are survivors, able to roll with whatever life throws at them, for the most part. They share a sense of community and nostalgia that keeps them coming back for visits, keeps them busy on their computers googling “Safetyville” and “Hamady sack” and “coney dog Flint-style” when they get homesick. In towns with a large population of Flint expatriates, they tend to find each other almost as though drawn to one another. They share almost a unique love-hate relationship with the city of their birth. None of these characteristics would be present in these people to this degree had they not grown up here. Flint has shaped them — and to a lesser extent, me — in ways no other city could manage.

We — each of us who walk and breathe and eat — owe our parents a spiritual debt for spawning us, raising us, teaching us who we should — or should not — be. In much the same way, where we come from shapes who we are. I am a second-generation Flintoid, a northern Michigan girl raised by an expatriate with the Flint worldview, a Flint repatriate. I came home because of my mother, because I owe it to her to be close while she recovers. I choose to live in Flint for the same reason, because I owe it to aid it in its resurrection. As I was able to rebuild myself into a stronger, better person, albeit one with visible scars from my past, so too can my adopted home rise again, rebuild, secure in its new status as a college town and wiser for its years of struggle. It just needs our help.


Saturday, February 21, 2015

Flint Artifacts: Buick-themed Beer Glass




What would happen if Michelangelo Antonioni made a movie about a Buick Electra 225?




Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Flint Photos: Mayor Floyd McCree


Flint Mayor Floyd McCree featured in a July 1967 Ebony Magazine feature.


Thursday, January 29, 2015

Detroit Today WDET 101.9: Is Flint a College Town?

Journalist Gordon Young on WDET 101.9 Detroit Today program discussing Flint's efforts to rebrand itself as a college town in 2009.




Detroit Today WDET 101.9: Who Wants to Run Flint?

Journalist Gordon Young on WDET 101.9 Detroit Today program discussing the 2009 Flint mayor's race.




Detroit Today WDET 101.9: Reviving Carriage Town in Flint

Journalist Gordon Young on WDET 101.9 Detroit Today program discussing the revival of the Carriage Town neighborhood in 2009.



Friday, January 16, 2015

Gary Custer, R.I.P.

Gary Custer, founder and editor of East Village Magazine, died yesterday. Flint has lost one of its finest.

Jan Worth-Nelson writes: "We are putting together a 'tribute page' remembering Gary Custer for the Feb. 14 East Village Magazine — our first without him. We're hoping to use this page not just to help us honor and remember Gary, but also to raise a bit of money toward the future sustenance of the magazine. For each person who donates $25 or more to East Village Magazine, we will list your name and (if you wish) up to 20 words of remembrance. If this is something you would like to do, please send your tax-deductible check, made out to East Village Magazine, along with your words of remembrance, to EVM, 720 E. Second Street, Flint MI 48503. Please write "Tribute Page" on the envelope and on your check memo line. We need to receive your donation by Feb. 1 at the latest."


Sunday, January 4, 2015

The Horror