Author: BeatrixKiddo

Mark Binelli recently published the acclaimed book about Detroit, “Detroit City is the Place to Be,” and on Thursday he came to the University of Michigan, his undergrad alma-mater, to promote the book. That morning I was unexpectedly invited (by an old GSI and friend) to have lunch with him and two other students in the Dana Building. I knew Binelli’s name but little else, and so I spent my time between classes reading up on him – Binelli had grown up in a blue-collar suburb in Detroit, and gone on to write for Rolling Stone, later publishing the historical novel “Sacco and Vinzetti Must Die,” a take on the controversial death sentence of two Italian anarchists. His new book explored Detroit as a capitalist ‘dream town’ turned urban failure, using interviews with Detroiters to disambiguate the symbolism and stereotypes associated with the city.

I walked into the Dana Building conference room and introduced myself excitedly to a bald guy with the backpack, who turned out to be not Mark but Ian, an intensely intelligent PhD student in the school for urban planning. Ian and I were early even by non-Michigan time, so PITE staff member Kimberly Smith unloaded the Potbelly catering onto the conference table and briefed us on Binelli’s whirlwind tour of his underground alma-mater, mentioning how heavily she had booked the acclaimed author for classes, radio interviews, lunches and lectures.

When Binelli poked his head in, confirming the room number, his appearance conformed almost exactly to my uninformed expectations of a 30-something Rolling Stone contributor (an imagined melding of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous and the only other employed over 30 year old writer I had ever actually met in my life, who happened to have black hair). He exuded the easy confidence of a writer whose worth has been given a kind of nod of confirmation by spheres of circumstance and reward, at ease, uneager to prove, but quietly engaged in the conversation.
I was nervous about being unprepared, but I asked questions about Binelli’s experiences with Detroit, gave some follow-up and commentary to the other PITE student’s questions, and listened to him and Ian exchange concerns about urban shrinking, suburban plasticization, and the potential for oligarchical control of ailing cities. Binelli also talked about promoting the book in Europe – Europeans are fascinated with the idea of a failed American city, and maybe, he indicated, not without a certain amount of glee.

Later that day during his lecture at the Grad Library, Binelli read from his book with the comforting tone of an NPR editorial commentator – laconic towards the audience, tender towards the subject material – and walked us through a short slide show about the city before responding to questions mediated by Angela Dillard.
Binelli read a segment from the chapter titled “The Fabulous Ruin,” in which he takes a driving tour with a Detroit native named Marsha Curic, and quotes her at length as she muses on the surge of artists and urban explorers. “Some of the people coming here bring a sort of bacchanal spirit – like they’re out on the frontier and they can do anything,” Cusic says at one point, and when Binelli concedes to a ‘degree of arrogance,” she corrects him, calling it white supremacy. For the University of Michigan students in the audience, at least the ones who hadn’t read the book, this segment seemed somewhat revelatory. Recent op-eds in the Daily have highlighted our lack of a presence in Detroit, intertwining our neglect or casual claims to the city with a similarly embarrassing lack of campus diversity. The rhetoric around the new bus line has framed it as a kind of response to the problem, an urge towards participation in the city. But as the University community tries to engage more with Detroit, we continue to wonder what ‘engagement’ really means – It’s certainly not just gawking and exploring, although many of us students don’t even take the time to do that, and it also can’t just be singular participation in once-a-year DP days.

The author appealed to this question as he implied throughout the day that the attitudes of the young, white hipster, can often be insulting on some level to the Detroit community. In Binelli’s book he elaborates on the problem: the issue isn’t the community engagement, it’s the underlying assumptions and attitudes that often accompany such engagement. The common characterization of Detroit by some as a ‘blank canvas’ is insulting; it ignores the people who already live in Detroit in the pursuit of the realization of some metaphoric dystopia or utopia. Binelli explains that many of these symbolic assumptions are based on the rhetoric that became popular after the 2009 financial crisis, when reporters and journalists flocked to Detroit to showcase the decay of the city as a kind of simplified symbol of a complicated, failing economy – the way, he elaborates, that a reporter covering a hurricane has to have the horizontal palm trees and crashing waves in the background, reporters covering the recession needed Detroit as a backdrop. This coverage made Detroit a symbol of American failure, and thus for many the most important symbol of renewal.

During the Q and A, audience members wanted to know how the University of Michigan community – or maybe, an underlying tone implied, white outsiders in general – could engage with Detroit effectively and respectfully.
Binelli didn’t offer any pro-tips about engaging in the right way, but he did give valuable observations and commentary on the dynamics of the engagement that’s already happening. Throughout his book there is a core tension between wanting to fix Detroit’s problems, and wanting to appreciate and preserve the culture that is already there. Binell I concedes that “raising any sort of gentrification fears at this earliest stage of Detroit’s would-be comeback feels like an academic luxury. And yet, when phrases like ‘the most potentially ambitious urban planning initiative in modern history’ are being bandied about…it’s hard not to grimace at the thought of the plasticized, deadening nature of planned communities.” It can actually sound like an academic luxury, but Binelli’s book doesn’t shy away from the city’s almost surreal crime rates – a chapter or so away from this quote Binelli describes a grisly murder and dismemberment that took place in his neighborhood. And he addresses this, saying “If you ask a Detroiter about saving the city, it’s unlikely that she will mention tech start-ups or urban farming. The first thing most Detroiters want to talk about is crime.” But the book also explores how amidst the crime and poverty, there exists a distinct, legitimate culture that deserves to be protected. In the chapter titled “DIY City,” Binelli explores the ‘Do It Yourself’ culture so prevalent in Detroit, where regular citizens “take it upon themselves to tauten the civic slack.” The chapter details the vigilantism of the Detroit 300, the community service provided by illicit dog-catchers, urban farming, and a series of weekly outdoor blues concerts held on a crude stage on St. Aubin. Detroit, Binelli argues, is more complicated than the symbolism that the recession has forced it to assume.

At lunch, Binelli had mentioned the problems that a ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ mentality poses – the idea that anyone with deep pockets can assume make important decisions with little public accountability. He talked about cities that he considered plasticized, such as Dallas or Atlanta, and he and Ian worried about Detroit’s prospect of being subjected to top-down renewal plans by private interests.

Later, reading the section on the blues street performances, I understood how powerful that performance had been to Binelli, and implicitly how powerful the stories, the culture and the will of the people of Detroit were to him as well. The book has been well received by Detroiters, and maybe for that reason – Binelli places enormous importance on disambiguating the symbols and the rhetoric that has been assigned to the city, and focusing on reality.

We learn about slavery in America from the time we are in elementary school, starting with almost cheerful overcoming-adversity adventure stories about the underground railroad, and progressing to the story of the transatlantic slave trade. After an overview of the slave trade, we generally leave off on slavery, focusing on manifest destiny until the Civil War and Reconstruction. If you’re lucky, you might encounter a high school AP US history teacher who emphasizes much more than names, dates and geographical locations, but generally history courses try so hard to get facts across that they deprive those facts of any real substance. So although we know that slavery was ‘evil,’ it’s almost difficult to be viscerally shocked or horrified by it when we’ve known about it since we were little kids. 12 Years a Slave breathes life, and horror, back into slavery.

12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen, tells the true story of Solomon Northup, a free born African American who lived with his family and worked as a concert violinist in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1841, lured by an offer of employment, Northup was tricked, kidnapped and sold into slavery in New Orleans. The rest of the movie tells the story of his suffering under slavery with real historical nuance, brutal intimacy, and stunning cinematography. McQueen’s film probes certain realities of southern slavery that I’ve never seen come to life on a screen before.
In the midst of Northup’s suffering, the director includes several interesting and important pieces of history. In contrast to the mythic southern luxury shown in ‘Gone with the Wind,’ the film illustrated the great variability in economic fortune of the slaveholders, many of whom struggled to turn a profit – owners and overseers consider mortgages and debts, and when a plantation is blighted by cotton worms, Northup is leased to a different owner. The film also explores the unpredictability of slave owners. Northup’s first owner is the benevolent Master Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who expresses sympathy with the mother who is sold away from her children, takes Northup’s engineering ability seriously, and gifts him a violin for a job well done. However, as his fellow slave, (Adepero Oduye, the sobbing, bereft mother from the auction) points out, Ford is still a slave owner, and despite his appearance of kindliness he is still depriving them of their freedom and exploiting their labor. Indeed, when Ford presents Northup with the violin he mentions that he hopes the music will bring both of them happiness ‘over the years.’ Northup is caught off guard by the benevolence, but you can see him absorb the painful implication of life enslavement in the casual remark, even as he caresses the instrument.
Another fact of slavery that the film explores, in heartbreaking detail, is the institutionalized sexual exploitation and abuse of enslaved black women. When Northup assaults an overseer he is sold to a harsher master and known ‘slave-breaker’ named Edwin Epps, who is played as a cruel, crazed alcoholic, by a Southern-accented Michael Fassbender. As Northup suffers under the unpredictable rule of Epps and the whims of his icy wife, he witnesses Epps’s growing sexual fascination with a slave girl named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). Patsey’s case exemplifies that of many slave women –she suffers sexual assault and rape from Epps and physical assault and hatred from Epps’s wife, without recourse, gradually beginning to despair under a regime of abuse that promises to last for the rest of her life. McQueen uses Northup’s story to show how slavery cruelly interrupted a rich life, but Patsey and the other slaves show us a different, more common tragedy – the tragedy of human beings who were born into, and will die in slavery, with no hope of realizing their potential.
McQueen lingers both on the Southern scenery and on the character’s faces – the sun sets on the bayou, trees move in the breeze, Patsey makes dolls from corn husks while a whip cracks in the background, Northup stares into the camera, hopeful and hopeless, for long minutes. Ejiofor brings an incredible dignity to the role, and the performances of the rest of the ensemble are magnified in his often wordless reactions. The strange humans that surround Northup are intelligent, stupid, primitive, cruel, kind, righteous, moral, morally bankrupt – Ejiofor’s performance helps us to keep reacting, to understand that the pain caused by the institution of slavery was real and terrible, undiluted by historical distance from the present..

12 Years a Slave is, as a sum of its parts, one of the most engaging, important, and accurate depictions of American slavery that has ever hit the big screen. But why is it being described as ‘essential viewing?’ Why can’t the past be the past? And why should ordinary Americans, looking for entertainment, spend their money and time watching Solomon Northup’s suffering? Why, to be blunt, is legacy of American slavery so special?

Many people have tried to make the case that it isn’t. Epps points out righteously, slavery is in the bible – “that’s scripture,” he says, after quoting a biblical passage about whipping slaves. We know that slavery existed the world over, including in ancient Rome, in the Slavonic tribes, within African empires, and in Russia in the form of serfdom. But American slavery was different than these other forms of slavery; it was definitively worse, and it was worse largely because it was the first race-based form of slavery in the world. Throughout human history, humans have enslaved other humans due to conquest, debt, or war, but never based solely on physical difference. Race-based slavery is perceived (consciously or unconsciously) as a tragic, but inevitable extension of some kind of human predisposition towards racial hatred, when in reality it was a system intentionally created out of the economic need of a labor shortage. In addition to its created basis in race, American slavery was also distinct from other forms of slavery in that there was no way to work out of slavery, pay debts through labor and become free again. Other American innovations to the institution included inheritability (that a slave’s children would also be slaves for the rest of their lives), the tragic separation of the families (a distinguishing factor from serfdom), and the complete lack of rights – most importantly, the lack of a right to be free from physical violence. With these distinguishing features came the brutality and horror caused by the unlimited power of one human over another.
In Jon Stewart’s recent Daily Show interview with Chiwatel Ejiofor, he meditated on the fact that both Ejiofor and McQueen are Brits – maybe, he mused, it’s too hard, too emotionally wrenching, for Americans to explore our own past. But if we’re ever going the legacy of slavery, and the enduring racial inequality in our country, we need to explore it. 12 Years a Slave is essential viewing, in every sense of the phrase.

This past Thursday night, the Literati bookstore put together a Word of Mouth event. The basement of Literati was a pleasant place to be on a chilly fall night: softly lit, full to the brim of cheerful storytellers and spectators, and stocked with apple cider and a cheese plate (important).The theme of the night was ‘great expectations,’ and the format was randomized: people who wished to tell a story wrote their names on slips of paper and submitted them to an authoritative black hat, from which they were randomly drawn and announced by an animated master of ceremonies. The storytellers seemed to be nervous at first, but the audience generated a reassuring atmosphere of respectful engagement, and laughter or groans greeted stories of unfulfilled or confounded expectations. One performer told us how he was duped out of his money in a bizarre smuggling scheme in India; another engaged us in her high school game of ding-dong ditch gone wrong in the Upper Peninsula (in an adorable UP accent); and yet another explained how he managed to spill coffee on Justin Timberlake. In the warm glow of the dimmed lights, we absorbed these stories as confidence and performance, as entertainment and art.

I recognized a surprising number of people at the event, mostly from my experiences living in the Residential College and cooperative houses, but every story I heard was new to me. I thought about how stories gradually surface over the course of a relationship, about how we generally don’t hear the stories of an acquaintance all at once, but rather gradually, and in proportion to the building of trust and friendship. We’re often nervous to casually give up something so important to us – the turning point of a childhood, the insane coincidence, the hospital stay, the religious experience – because we’re afraid that we’ll fail to capture our audience’s attention, suffering rejection in a change of subject, or because we’re afraid of what comes afterwards: the change in perception, the return in confidence, the intimacy. These stories both require real attention, and carry subsequent baggage.

I love personal story-telling as a performance because it’s both high and low stakes. When we call what often happens casually, between two people, a ‘performance’ we expect both more and less. The story needs to be more interesting, engaging, and Worthy of Our Time when we don’t know the person telling it. But along with these raised expectations, there is no conversation, no expectation of a demonstrated response, no consequential familiarity or relationship-building. It’s less personal, but the one-sidedness of a storytelling performance really frees both the audience and the performer to get lost in a story – to just talk, to just listen.

Thursday night at Literati, a storyteller named Noah explained how disappointed he was by his childhood purchase of ‘sea monkeys,’ the novelty aquarium pets that are in actuality little more than squirming specks but which, he explained ruefully, he had expected to grow up into sentient, playful beings. I’ve heard people complain about their sea monkey experiences before, but as he told his story, Noah did much more than complain about a crappy product. He explained how he had thought of himself as a scientist like Jane Goodall, how he kept a journal of his pets’ nonexistant activities, how he tore off bits of an eraser and threw them in the tank, hoping the unresponsive crustaceans would play with them. As I listened to Noah’s story, I remembered how ridiculous and weird existence could sometimes seem to the serious child with serious expectations, learning about the world’s chaos. As it turns out, almost all stories about ‘great expectations’ sooner or later introduce chaos – even the storyteller whose expectations had been fulfilled by a great night in Ithaca emphasized how crazy, how chaotic it was that his plans had been successful. What are the chances?

The show was over sooner than I wanted it to be, my sister wanted to go home, and I had to do homework. Still I lingered outside, saying friendly goodbyes to familiar faces, thinking about expectations.

Ever since I was little, I’ve been illogically frightened by the idea of space. I remember fixating on the spinning Universal Studios logo that preceded some of my childhood movies and feeling a terrified thrill at seeing what was possibly my first image of earth in space. The incredible smallness of human existence might have been at the core of my dread, but I mostly remember a kind of visual vertigo when I looked at the corners of the screen that the earth graphic didn’t fill. The background was black and studded with stars like the night sky, but unlike the night sky it was possible, deep and dangerous.

Since then I’ve only felt the same kind of visual vertigo when I’ve stood at the foot of great mountains, or looked down from great heights. I believe that the sensation has to do with how certain physical phenomena confrontationally and thoroughly confound perspective. When I first stood in the Court of the Patriarchs in Zion National Park and looked up at the mountains, I saw unachievable altitudes filled with rock, altitudes that in my Michigan hometown were nothing but unpunctuated flat sky above flat ground. When I climbed Half Dome in Yosemite, I saw from impossible altitudes the impossible depths of Yosemite Valley, depths that in my hometown were complacently filled with rock and sediment. Outer space is in many ways the ultimate mountain or valley, the ultimate confounding perspective, that sight that exists so far from any hometown, so lost to any scale.

When a movie takes place in space, often the entity of space itself is ignored in favor of character and action, and space functions as a black backdrop for the same kinds of explosions and fight scenes that might take place on earth. Even when the laws of space are obeyed (air locks, space suits, shuttles), space is a set of rules and not a visual, physical presence. I can’t help but see space movies as a kind of noir genre just because of the loneliness, the coldness and the infinity that space implies, a desolation that often penetrates the story (Moon, Alien, Prometheus, 2001: A Space Odyssey). But although movies have used space to evoke effective moods, no visual conception of space has ever confounded or stunned me quite like that first view of the Universal logo when I was five or six years old – until this October’s release of Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón.

When I saw the trailer for Gravity, now Cuarón’s first world-wide box office hit, I was drawn in by how directly it played to my fears and fascinations with space. Instead of a hodge-podge of scenes set to tense music, for a minute and thirty seconds the trailer showcases a clip of the most climactic scene in the movie – an astronaut, Sandra Bullock, is attached to the large protruding arm of a shuttle, 372 miles above the earth according to text on the screen. Suddenly, the shuttle is hit by debris (from a Russian missile strike on a defunct satellite), and is sent spinning with devastating speed, rotating wildly with the cartoonish physics of a carnival ride. As the shuttle sheds pieces, the arm itself is knocked off of the shuttle and spins end over end, carrying Bullock away from the structure and into space. Amid her rhythmic gasping we hear a voice in her headset urging her to ‘detach’ – she fumbles, then releases herself and goes tumbling away into darkness, the camera perspective inside her helmet confirming both her terror and the truth of her report: ‘I see nothing.’ The trailer ended and I realized that somewhere between Bullock’s amplified gasps, I had stopped breathing.

The scene from the trailer is just as breath-taking in the actual movie, especially as the careful integration of 3-D technology works to place the viewer directly inside of Cuarón’s realization of space. Here, the earth is no pale blue dot. Our blue and white orb is vast but unreliable, as it alternately takes up the entire shot (the two astronauts float in the dizzying grey area of ‘in front of’ and ‘above’) half of the shot, (George Clooney’s Matt Kowalski remarks on the sunrise), and none of the shot (structures disintegrate against blackness, the astronauts struggle towards a distant space station). Cuarón captures the feeling of space using innovative motion-capture techniques, filming the actors in what I’ve only heard described as a giant mechanical cage. However claustrophobic filming must have been for Bullock and Clooney, the results are utterly breath-taking. Cuarón thoroughly transforms the flatly star-studded night sky into exactly that which astounded me conceptually before visual technology could really show it to me– a space with depth, motion, and possibility.

Nervous first time mission specialist Ryan Stone (Bullock) and cocky veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (Clooney), the sole survivors of the first barrage of debris, battle space by separating themselves from it with space suits, oxygen tanks, and damaged shuttles. Explosions are often the cheap currency of action movies, generally used as the cheerful and expected accompaniment to an ass-kicking hero (or heroes, see: the damage to New York City in The Avengers), with no follow up on the devastating damages they might incur. In Gravity this action movie rule is reversed. Every explosion, every destroyed piece of equipment, takes away more life-saving structure and brings the enemy, in the form of nothingness and death, a little closer. Debris hits our heroes at stunningly high speeds and from nauseating depths, once functional machinery disintegrates dizzyingly around the camera, and space itself is ever-moving, deep and dark.

Gravity is worth seeing for its stunning cinematography, but isn’t flawless. Although the actors inject their much-needed movie star charm, the characters are as flat as Cuarón’s space is deep. Kowalski is wisecracking and confident to a weary fault, smooth, simple, and without a personal detail or flaw. In contrast, Stone’s one personal detail, coaxed out by Kowalski, feels trite and almost unnecessary – her young daughter died, and ever since, it’s implied, her life has been in a state of suspension. This plot point is supposed to connect us to Stone’s humanity, to make us understand that she perhaps has been emotionally ‘floating in space’ for a long time, and to lend motivation to her otherwise primitive struggle for survival. But it feels tired, both because the past personal tragedy is a cheap device to introduce depth to a character, and because the script does a weak job connecting the tragedy to Stone’s struggle. As long as we’ve abstracted this far, why can’t fighting to survive be enough? Furthermore, the dialogue is surprisingly bad, especially considering Cuarón’s history of excellent scripts, and the score distracting as it tries to make up for the lack of sound (explosions don’t make noise in space) with pointed, directive swells. But Gravity only seems to fail when it tries to elaborate beyond truly excellent visual storytelling. As much as it has been criticized, its failings are small because what it does well – conceptualizing the movement, perspective and terror of outer space – is a good 85% of the movie.

See it. It’s no Life of Pi, where Ang Lee’s storytelling and visual effects were so beautifully integrated as to be poetic, but neither is it Avatar, where impressive visual effects were discounted heavily by a stale plot and script. It’s innovative, visually stunning, and, regardless of its flaws, unlike anything I’ve seen before.