Flint Artifacts: Weaver's Bar Matchbook

Before you drink, be sure to obey the safety patrol.

Flint Artifacts: Raincheck Lounge Hawks Hockey Club Figurine

A Shoulder Clod Kind of Town

Ah, Flint. Good to know that — despite all the changes — it's still a place where Ruebens, shoulder clod, and brisket are considered light luncheon fare.

Roberto Acosta at MLive reports on the ownership change and menu updates at Blackstone's on Saginaw Street in downtown.

The restaurant will soon feature two menus -- daytime and nighttime -- each offering different items such as a classic Neapolitan-style pizza cooked in 170 seconds on a wood-fired oven. 

"It's light. It's not the heavier variety like some of the other places," said Hester. "It's something that you can come down at lunch and you're not going to overeat." 

The daytime menu will include sandwiches including the Big Sicilian from the Starlite menu, Reubens, hamburgers with a combination of shoulder clod and brisket meats ground in-house, and salads.

Lordstown, Meet Flint

Does this sound familiar?

The Associated Press reports:

"General Motors will cut up to 14,000 workers in North America and put five plants up for possible closure as it abandons many of its car models and restructures to focus more on autonomous and electric vehicles, the automaker announced Monday. 

"The reductions could amount to as much as 8 percent of GM's global workforce of 180,000 employees.""The restructuring reflects changing North American auto markets as manufacturers continue to shift away from cars toward SUVs and trucks. In October, almost 65 percent of new vehicles sold in the U.S. were trucks or SUVs. That figure was about 50 percent cars just five years ago. 

"GM is shedding cars largely because it doesn't make money on them, Citi analyst Itay Michaeli wrote in a note to investors."

And...

"Trump, who has made bringing back auto jobs a big part of his appeal to Ohio and other Great Lakes states that are crucial to his re-election, also said he was being tough on General Motors CEO Mary Barra. 

"At a rally near GM's Lordstown, Ohio, plant last summer, Trump told people not to sell their homes because the jobs are 'all coming back.'"

Slumming Became a Mania

"In the 1920s, 'slumming' became a mania, as urban elites sought out the exotic, the 'real,' wherever they could find it. They packed into the speakeasies that filled the cities after the imposition of Prohibition, where they could rub shoulders with Italian, Irish, or Jewish gangsters. They filled theaters to see ethnic entertainers such as Ragtime Jimmy Durante, late of Coney Island, or the anarchic Marx Brothers. And in the most startling turn of all, they discovered Negroes living in their midst. 

"In the early 1920s, sophisticates scrambled to grab a share of the black life that the southern migration was bringing into cities. White producers mounted all-black musicals. White couples fumbled with the Charleston. And white patrons poured into Chicago's South Side jazz joints and Harlem nightclubs. If they were lucky, they squeezed into the Vendome, where Louis Armstrong held the floor, or Edmond's Cellar, where Ethel Waters sang the blues. The frenzy was shot through with condescension. White slummers thought black life exciting because it was "primitive" and vital. Visiting the ghetto's haunts became the era's way to snub mainstream society, to be in the avant-garde. 'Jazz, the blues, negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously,' novelist Carl Van Vechten wrote H.L. Mencken in the summer of 1924. 'Doubtless, I shall discard them too in time.'"

Spambot Poetry: Pretty Element of Content

The comment section of Flint Expatriates is truly a mixed bag. For all the meaningful connections I've made with Flintoids over the years, I've also had to deal with racists, weirdos, and sickos who think Detroit actually knows how make a real Coney.

Then there are the spambots clogging the comment section and forcing me to spend hours of my life deleting them. But I eventually discovered that many were quite beautiful, if not poetic, with their tortured syntax, goofed up conjugation, and lines that would feel at home in a Patti Smith cover of Nirvana.

Here's the latest batch, with my comments below each ode.

Pretty element of content.

I just stumbled upon your weblog and in accession capital to assert

that I get actually enjoyed account

your weblog posts.

Anyway,

I will be subscribing to your feeds

or even I achievement you get admission to consistently rapidly.

— Teddy Bear

Thank you, Teddy Bear. I am having bumper stickers made as we speak declaring "Pretty Element of Content!" I hope they will bring solace to other drivers in these troubled times.

This is my very first time i go to here.

I discovered a great number of entertaining stuff in your blog site, particularly its discussion. From your tons of feedback in your articles,

I guess I am not the only one possessing each of the satisfaction here!

Preserve up the great operate.

— drukarka 3d

Actually, drukarka 3d, judging from the sales of my book, you may indeed be "the only one possessing each of the satisfaction here!"

I haven’t any word to appreciate this post.

Really i am impressed from this post

the person who create this post it was a great human.

— Anonymous

Thanks for the kind words. I'd like to think, in my moments of unbridled hubris, that I am a great human. But your use of the past tense does cause me some concern.

Nice blog and absolutely outstanding.

You can do something much better but i still say this perfect.

Keep trying for the best.

— Indianapolis Junk Yard

Junk yard, why do you torment me? You say it's perfect, but then tell me I can do much better. This kind of Zen crap may work in Indy, but not in Flint.

Time Travel Is a Discretionary Art

Downtown Flint, Michigan in the 1950s (Photo by Mary Fisher)

"I find these days that a wistful form of time travel has become a persistent political theme, both on the right and on the left. On November 10 The New York Times reported that nearly seven in ten Republicans prefer America as it was in the 1950s, a nostalgia of course entirely unavailable to a person like me, for in that period I could not vote, marry my husband, have my children, work in the university I work in, or live in my neighborhood. Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others. Meanwhile some on the left have time travel fancies of their own, imagining that the same rigid ideological principles once applied to the matters of workers’ rights, welfare, and trade can be applied unchanged to a globalized world of fluid capital."

— Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books, 2016

Ghosts of Flint: Corvair Monza in Anacortes, Washington

Feeling Blue in Flint and San Francisco

The more things change, the more they stay the same, at least when it comes to politics.

My old Flint precinct in Civic Park is decidedly blue, just like my current precinct in San Francisco's Bernal Heights, according to this great New York Times "extremely detailed map of the 2016 election."

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young

Now Available for Pre-Order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones in Great Britain, and Indigo.

Praise for Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young

"One can read Teardown and go 'My, my, my! What a horrid town! Thank God I don't live there!' Oh, but you do. Just as the 'Roger & Me Flint' of the 1980s was the precursor to a wave of downsizing that eventually hit every American community, Gordon Young's Flint of 2013, as so profoundly depicted in this book, is your latest warning of what's in store for you — all of you, no matter where you live — in the next decade. The only difference between your town and Flint is that the Grim Reaper just likes to visit us first. It's all here in Teardown, a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once great American city."
— Michael Moore 

"There must be a thousand good reasons to flee Flint. I can't assume there are many reasons to return. Gordon Young's Teardown supplies a few of these answers. A humorous, heartfelt and often haunting tale of a town not many could love. Fortunately for us, a few still do."

— Ben Hamper, author of Rivethead: Tales From the Assembly Line

“Teardown is the tragic and somehow hilarious tale of one man's attempt to return to his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Gordon Young is a Flintoid at heart, and his candid observations about both the shrinking city and his own economic woes read heartbreakingly true.”

— Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

“Armed with an aluminum baseball bat and a truth-seeking pen, Gordon Young returns to the post-industrial wasteland of his hometown — Vehicle City, aka Flint, Michigan — in search of a derelict house to buy and restore. At least that's his cover story. Young's true mission is to reclaim his past in order to make sense of his present. If you're bewitched by the place where you grew up, you'll find comfort and a sense of home in the pages of Teardown.

— Jack Shafer, Reuters columnist and a former Michigander

“Like so many other Flintites, I visit my hometown with a mix of sadness, repugnance, and anger. Flint is too easy to criticize, but I look back in gratitude for the values Flint instilled and the bonds I made that remain with me to this day. You can take the boy out of Flint, but you can’t take Flint out of the boy.”

— Howard Bragman, author of Where’s My Fifteen Minutes?

“Teardown is a funny and ultimately heartbreaking memoir. The travails of house hunting are skillfully interwoven with Gordon Young’s attempt to reconcile life in his adopted city of San Francisco with his allegiance to Flint, Michigan, the troubled city of his childhood. The result is an all too contemporary American story of loyalty, loss, and finding your way home.”

— Tom Pohrt, artist and author of Careless Rambles by John Clare, Having a Wonderful Time, and Coyote Goes Walking.

For more information, including excerpts, photos, and events, visit www.teardownbook.com.

Flint, Michigan would be hard hit by G.O.P. Medicaid work requirements

Flint, prepared to get screwed, as usual. This time it's Medicaid.

Alice Ollstein of TPM reports:

In the GOP-controlled states of Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio, waiver proposals would subject hundreds of thousands of Medicaid enrollees to work requirements, threatening to cut off their health insurance if they can’t meet an hours-per-week threshold. 

Those waivers include exemptions for the counties with the highest unemployment, which tend to be majority-white, GOP-leaning, and rural. But many low-income people of color who live in high-unemployment urban centers would not qualify, because the wealthier suburbs surrounding those cities pull the overall county unemployment rate below the threshold. 

In Michigan, the GOP-controlled legislature is trying to pass a bill to make the 700,000 people enrolled in the state’s Medicaid expansion either work at least 29 hours per week or lose their benefits for a year. According to the state’s own numbers, 105,000 people could lose their insurance, but that burden will not be shared equally across the state. 

A Washington Post analysis found that while African Americans make up about 23 percent of Medicaid enrollees in Michigan, they would make up just 1.2 percent of the people eligible for an exemption. Meanwhile, 57 percent of Michigan Medicaid enrollees are white, but white residents would make up 85 percent of the population eligible for an exemption.

Places to Park by the Factories and Buildings

I see the shapes
I remember from maps
I see the shoreline
I see the whitecaps
A baseball diamond, nice weather down there
I see the school and the houses where the kids are
Places to park by the factories and buildings
Restaurants and bars for later in the evening

Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas
And I have learned how these things work together
I see the parkway that passes through them all
And I have learned how to look at these things, and I say

[Chorus]
I wouldn't live there if you paid me
I wouldn't live like that, no siree!
I wouldn't do the things the way those people do
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to

I guess it's healthy, I guess the air is clean
I guess those people have fun with their neighbors and friends
Look at that kitchen and all of that food
Look at them eat it, I guess it tastes real good

They grow it in those farmlands
Then they bring it to the storeThey put it in the car trunk
Then they bring it back home
And I say

[Chorus]
I wouldn't live there if you paid me
I wouldn't live like that, no siree!
I wouldn't do the things the way those people do
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to!

I'm tired of looking out the windows of the airplane
I'm tired of traveling, I want to be somewhere
It's not even worth talking
About those people down there

Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo goo goo, ga ga ga ga!

Happy Birthday Tiger Stadium

"April 20, 1912 —the day should be trumpeted. There should be balloons and bunting. A celebration. A cake. There is none of that. Just silence. They would prefer we forget.

"It opened in the era of ragtime music and black Model T's. Airplanes were still aeroplanes. Mary Pickford was becoming a star, and Jim Thorpe soon would be. The First World War had yet to begin and women wouldn't get the right to vote for eight years. It was a time when fans wore sports coats and dress hats and paid to stand in the outfield, separated from the players not by a home-run fence but by a rope that defined the playing area."

           — Tom Stanton, The Final Season

Deindustrialization, Decline, and Opioids

Andrew Sullivan, writing in New York Magazine, on "the emptiness" and opioids:

"If industrialization caused an opium epidemic, deindustrialization is no small part of what’s fueling our opioid surge. It’s telling that the drug has not taken off as intensely among all Americans — especially not among the engaged, multiethnic, urban-dwelling, financially successful inhabitants of the coasts. The poppy has instead found a home in those places left behind — towns and small cities that owed their success to a particular industry, whose civic life was built around a factory or a mine. Unlike in Europe, where cities and towns existed long before industrialization, much of America’s heartland has no remaining preindustrial history, given the destruction of Native American societies. The gutting of that industrial backbone — especially as globalization intensified in a country where market forces are least restrained — has been not just an economic fact but a cultural, even spiritual devastation. The pain was exacerbated by the Great Recession and has barely receded in the years since. And to meet that pain, America’s uniquely market-driven health-care system was more than ready."

And...

"Market capitalism and revolutionary technology in the past couple of decades have transformed our economic and cultural reality, most intensely for those without college degrees. The dignity that many working-class men retained by providing for their families through physical labor has been greatly reduced by automation. Stable family life has collapsed, and the number of children without two parents in the home has risen among the white working and middle classes. The internet has ravaged local retail stores, flattening the uniqueness of many communities. Smartphones have eviscerated those moments of oxytocin-friendly actual human interaction. Meaning — once effortlessly provided by a more unified and often religious culture shared, at least nominally, by others — is harder to find, and the proportion of Americans who identify as “nones,” with no religious affiliation, has risen to record levels. Even as we near peak employment and record-high median household income, a sense of permanent economic insecurity and spiritual emptiness has become widespread. Some of that emptiness was once assuaged by a constantly rising standard of living, generation to generation. But that has now evaporated for most Americans."

The Streets of San Francisco: Welcome to the Future

Flint Photos: Doomed Space

"A rich silence, heavy with secrets and untold stories, hangs in the air of each doomed space, and the banal residue of everyday life seems to cling to the blank walls like mold"
— Holly Myers, LA Weekly, 2001

Flint Photos: Illinois Avenue