Ghosts of GM

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

Deep in Suburbia

Can't get much farther away from Civic Park in Flint than Foster City, California. 

Detroit: What Do Twenty-Something Californians Think?

I had a chance to talk with 14 college students in California about Detroit and the Chrysler Super Bowl commercial. We even watched it together. (By the way, it was sunny and 70 outside; not exactly conducive for conjuring the Motor City in February.)

Eleven of the students were from the Golden State, along with one each from Washington, Illinois and Colorado. Only one person had ever been to Michigan. All were in their early twenties. Eight drove foreign cars; six drove American. They were kind enough to participate in a very unscientific survey.

Before watching the commercial, I asked them to write down any thoughts they had about Detroit:

Eminem and 8-Mile.

It's the airport my friends at UM use to get to Ann Arbor.

Literally, I don't think of anything.

A kid I went to middle school was from there.

Motown.

I know it's cold and they make cars, but I don't know much else.

Foggy, dirty, cold, car industry.

Dirty, homeless people, diverse, factories, industrial.

Most dangerous city in the U.S.

Ghetto.

Crime, dirty — never been though.

Did watching the commercial change your opinion of the city?

Makes me realize there is much more there than bad rumors — more history and culture.

It makes it look modern, clean and classy.

No, I've been to Detroit. I liked what I saw. I loved the colorful atmosphere and, to be honest, it confirms a lot of stereotypical Detroit images.

Not really. It seems to depict a hard-working city with a history. Hard and harsh.

Verifies it as a city, but paints a "tougher" image than I imagined.

I don't think it taught me enough about Detroit to judge it.

I never had an opinion but now I think it's a "tough" area.

Tesla Chooses Downey

Cars are still a source of recovery for some towns. Downey, a suburb of Los Angeles, hopes Tesla Motors can help revive its fortunes after the collapse of the aerospace industry.

AP's Daisey Nguyen writes:

This blue-collar suburb on the edge of Los Angeles once helped send men to space. After the collapse of its aerospace industry, its ambitions are now more down-to-earth but still looking toward the future.

The City Council last week unanimously approved an agreement intended to lure Tesla Motors' electric car manufacturing plant to the former site of a NASA plant that helped develop the Apollo program and the space shuttle fleet.

The city hopes that the car factory will bring $21 million in city revenues over 15 years, create about 1,200 jobs and help revitalize its reputation as Southern California's high-tech hub.

"Not only will it bring money to the city, it will establish us as a leader in electric car and green technology production," Mayor Mario Guerra said.

Night Blind

The flora (and concreta) of Chevy in the Hole. (Photo courtesy of Jar With Most.)

There are Flint residents. There are Flint Expatriates. And then there are the rare individuals that are both at the same time.

Jan Worth-Nelson — who blogs as Macy Swain — teaches at UM-Flint during the academic year and lives with her husband in San Pedro, California during the summers and holiday breaks. It gives her an insider's understanding of Flint mixed with the perspective of an outsider. It also means her blog, Night Blind, offers the duality of Flint and Southern California.

It's an intriguing mix that leads to some fascinating posts. Here's one describing a botanical tour of what was once Chevy in the Hole:

"The site is now a giant brownfield. I find it irresistibly ghostly and haunting.

"I took my 'Green Ink' students there on a bike tour a couple of weeks ago. Increasingly, it seems right NOT to drive a car when paying tribute to this fallen behemoth. Pausing to catch our breath on Bluff Street overlooking the acreage, we didn't have much to say as we took in the concretized channel of the river and the silent expanse where some of the fights of the 1936 Sit Down Strike took place and where millions of cars were banged out on noisy and oily assembly lines. Several mallards noodled along in the brown water. A red-winged blackbird sailed by. A remarkable single cottonwood did its leafy hula. It really is a cemetery.

"The brownfields of Chevy in the Hole are not really brown: there are many green things growing in the cracks and edges. I asked our tour guide, Christina Kelly of the Genesee County Land Bank, what they were. "Just weeds," she said.

"My biology professor friend Tracy Wacker, with her usual bracing candor, said 'The definition of a weed is a plant growing where somebody doesn't want it to. Looked at that way, none of the plants at Chevy in the Hole are weeds, because nobody cares if they grow there.'

"This is just the start of what I have to say, but in quick summary, when Tracy and I walked back to Chevy in the Hole yesterday, scrambled around a chain-link fence and poked around in the humid overgrowth on the cracked concrete and the river bank, she called out the names of least 30 different plants: rumex, chicory, bachelor's button, black nightshade, common mullein, curlydock, dogwood, catalpa, coreopsis, lanceleaf plantain, milkweed, dames rocket, buckthorn, bull-thistle, crown vetch. That's about half of them."

The contrast between the Flint and San Pedro posts shows that even though America has become homogenized by chain stores and strip malls, with bland exurbs defining the look and culture of the country, there are still unique regional differences out there.

"Tomorrow is the Korean Bell's big day — one of only two in the year it is rung. Tomorrow the site at the top of the hill overlooking a wide expanse of harbor and ocean will be crowded with well-wishers, celebrants, politicians and ringers wearing white gloves. Today, it was quiet and enveloped in fog. At first I was the only one there -- what delight to be alone here. Then a hawk getting chased by crows. Then these two gulls. Then a long-haired guy with a long-haired dog. Then three gabby Korean men with a bottle of Windex and a red rag, polishing the plaques — for tomorrow, I suppose. It's one of my favorite places in San Pedro."

And sometimes, in a bar like Harold's Place in San Pedro, Flint and SoCal overlap a little.

"A guy sitting next to us didn't say a word to anybody. He poured beer into his glass an inch at a time and fastidiously sipped, savoring every swallow. But he gave the waitress some money to put in the band's tip jar.

"A round little troll about four feet tall wearing a huge straw hat ambled in with a black bag over his shoulder, hawking...straw hats, as it turned out. Nobody bought. An enterprising madame in lycra and a helmet parked her bike out front and tried to sell Debbie some body wash -- also unsuccessful, but still. The pleasantly unexpressive bouncer came and went. We ordered a second round. More people wandered in in teeshirts, baggy shorts and flipflops. Everybody seemed to know who they were.

"'Howdya like the band?' Debbie asked.

"'They're good. I liked the blues,' I said. I was thinking about other dives I've hung out in — The Tonga Club in Nuku'alofa, Hat's Pub and The Torch Bar and Grille on Buckham Alley, both in Flint, and I was thinking how good it felt to be sitting on Pacific Avenue in Pedro with a row of people bent over their drinks, heads nodding just so slightly to the music, which wasn't totally bad."

State of the Unions

Are unions dead? Lawyer, policy analyst and longtime labor activist Nathan Newman doesn't think so.

200,000 union members were added in California alone last year. And this is based on a labor vision that had ten-year horizons for organizing, a level of long-term investment that few American institutions have been willing to make.