A man walked upon it

Everyone was talking about the moon. A man had walked upon it, but I hardly noticed.

     — Patti Smith, Just Kids

And the year 2000 won't change anyone here
As each fabled promise flies so fast
You'll swear it was never there

      — Morrissey, Reader Meet Author

Flint Writers Unite: An Afternoon with Author Connor Coyne in San Francisco

Despite my less-than-stellar organizational skills these days and my two-year-old daughter Larkin's idiosyncratic napping schedule, the book party for Connor Coyne's compelling Urbantasm: The Dying City actually happened on Saturday. 

It started at 3pm, at which time I was wandering the aisles of the Mission Safeway buying beer, forgetting that any trip to that Safeway — once labeled "the worst Safeway on planet Earth" by an internet wag — involves a 20-minute wait in line. So no booze, no host at start time. But Connor was there, entertaining the early guests with tales of Coneys and what happens late night at the corner of Dort and Lippincott. 

Then my brilliant plan to push the shopping cart filled with beer, ice, and paper plates across the street to the party was thwarted by the security thingy on the wheel to stop people like me from walking off with the carts. Connor was called and he had to enlist a few guests to come and ferry the supplies over. Never let it be said I don't know how to show people a good time.

In the end, it was a great chance to connect Flintoids, Flint Expats, and San Franciscans who have grown to know Vehicle City because I never stop talking about it. And a reminder that Flint, despite its problems, is a place that people love and have not forgotten. And a chance to celebrate Connor Coyne's great writing.

Books by Connor Coyne, which were sold. Quickly. And efficiently.

Ruth, my friend and neighbor, with Dennis Brownfield's old license plate, which tells a big part of Flint's history in just six characters.

Chuck Siegel, formerly of Eldorado Drive in Flint and the man behind Charles Chocolates in San Francisco, with Shabana Siegel. (That's me in the Flint Lumber Company apron.)

Michael G, featured prominently in Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City, mocks a remnant of one of the worst jobs I ever had.

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