Dream Log: Detroit and Sweden

 In my dream last night, it was the year 2020, I was my real age, my Mom was still alive and COVID didn't exist. Mom was driving, I was riding shotgun, and we were driving at night through an area of downtown Detroit filled with huge buildings which had been breweries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but which had been abandoned for some time more recently. The city government had begun a program to reclaim these brewery buildings, putting new homes and businesses into them. I told Mom I thought this was a great idea, and I thought that these buildings looked very solid and that they would provide great "shells" for the new development. 

In real life, although I know of a few "Brewery Districts" in which old brewery buildings have been re-purposed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, I have no idea whether brewery buildings are inherently superior to any other buildings in any structural way. 

 

I would not be able to look at any large old abandoned buildings and be able to tell you much of anything about them. And I do not happen to know anything at all about any breweries, past or present, anywhere near Detroit.

Mom seemed skeptical about this renewal project -- and in real life she knew far more about construction and renovation than I do -- but I told her that it had already begun, and pointed out some new renovation here and there: a hotel, a micro-brewery, some apartments among the windowless wreckage. 

 Our destination was on  the other side of the brewery district: less built-up, mostly residential, home to many Swedish-Americans whose ancestors had immigrated in the 19th century, many of whom could still speak Swedish as well as English, and often could read and write it, too. A second-hand bookstore in this neighborhood was reputed to have a copy of a Swedish Bible which was interesting to me for some reason not explained in the dream. It was a small store. A woman about my age owned it and seem to be the only employee. 

Mom said she had to go. I said I'd be fine, there was a bus stop nearby.

The bookstore owner had been waiting for me, and she happily handed me two books about the Bible I was looking for. It turned out that she didn't have a copy of this Swedish edition of the Bible itself. She showed me some other books she thought might interest me, but it was clear that she wasn't on my wavelength when it came to books. For example, she showed me a copy of a Swedish translation of Nietzsche's Götzen-Dämmerung. A very large proportion of her inventory seemed to be modern non-Swedish items translated into Swedish. To me, a real scholar is someone who avoids translations whenever he or she is able to read the original language, except for very rare exceptions when a translation has some intrinsic interest, as did the Swedish Bible did, which this bookstore didn't have.

Then the dream changed completely, and I was inside a virtual-reality discussion group where participants were able to print out messages telepathically. An image of the sender's face came automatically with each message, on virtual objects reminiscent of those in broadcasts of American football which come onscreen showing a player's face and some information about the player. The participants seemed to be mostly Swedish-American, to judge from their names and the fact that most of them were blonde. Everyone was talking about the changes to the Brewery District. Then I woke up.

12 Rules to Change Your Life and Make it Swell

1. There is no such list of rules anywhere. There is much too much diversity among human personalities, bodies and predicaments for one book to be able to help all of them. The whole self-help industry is a scam. Which doesn't mean that none of the self-help gurus are sincere. The sincere ones are fooling themselves as well as their followers.

Repeat Rule #1 11 more times if necessary.

2. Now that we've got that nonsense out of the way, there are 11 more slots in which I can say something interesting, edifying or otherwise useful (to some).

I wonder whether the world is divided up into Giorgio Moroder fans and Dario Argento fans? Moroder and Argento were both born in 1940 in Italy and they both compose music and produce musical recordings, although you might not know it from Argento's Wikipedia entry. Moroder has produced albums by the Bee Gees (disco version), Donna Summer, Blondie, David Bowie, Janet Jackson and many others, as well as composing and producing some movie soundtracks. "Stayin' Alive" and "I Feel Love," that's him. The soundtracks to Cat People, Scarface and DC Cab, that's him too.

Argento, on the other hand, may be more well known as a movie director than for his music. He made the soundtracks for some of the movies he directed and for some movies directed by others, notably, George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead.

Anyway, back when I used to hang with a bunch of film aficionados, it seemed we were divided into those who liked Moroder and those who liked Argento. And I can't remember anyone from that group except me who liked Moroder. Anyway, it just seems to me that it would be very difficult to really like them both.

3. There's a squirrel who lives outside my house who's as black as the blackest black-eyed cat you ever saw.

4. I had schwaerma for the first time yesterday. It was okay, I'll probably get it again. I first heard about schwaerma toward the end of the first Robert Downey Jr -- Scarlett Johannson Avengers movie. I wonder how many other people first heard about Schwaerma this way. (It is also spelled shawarma and other ways.)

5. I spend a significant amount of time, maybe too much time, worrying about whether the populations of cities are measured in ways which are similar enough around the world that people from one part of the world can get a good idea of the sizes of cities in other parts of the world without quite a lot of world travel and attention to population statistics. For example, the population of Detroit is around 700,000, or a little under 4 million , or a little more than 4 million, or almost 6 million, depending on how you define it. Which means that Detroit has less then half the population of Phoenix, or almost as many people as the entire state of Arizona, depending how you measure it. Forget other countries -- is Phoenix measuring even close to the same way Detroit does?

6. I finally figured out, a little while before I stopped hanging with New Atheists, that New Atheists define religions much more strictly than most of the adherents of those religions do. A New Atheist may well insist, "A Christian literally believes that an old man in the sky created the entire universe, and gave souls to humans but not to any other forms of life, and that there is no life anywhere in the universe except Earth, and that Jesus was born without his mother becoming pregnant or having sex, and that Jesus died and then rose from the dead, which was necessary to give humans a chance of not spending an eternity in Hell [...]" and they may go on in this vein for quite a while, adding more and more items to the list of things which Christians, they say, literally believe, when in fact many people who identify as Christian don't believe any of those things.

7. I keep reading the figure 750,000 for the number of copies Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules has sold. I think that figure might be out of date. Or maybe it only counts US sales. The damn thing is still selling, #52 just now on the Amazon bestsellers' list, and hasn't yet come out in paperback, I believe. Peterson has claimed sales of over 2 million (perhaps he was referring to worldwide sales), threatened to sue one reviewer for a negative review and to slap another one.

8. By the end of WWII over 40 countries were at war with Nazi Germany.

9. When Pulp Fiction was filmed, there were no Red Apple cigarettes and there was no restaurant named Jack Rabbit Slim's. Since then, several bars and taverns have opened which are called Jack Rabbit Slim's. I do not know whether Quentin Tarantino has sued or slapped any of the people who opened those establishments.

10. With few exceptions, mostly within the Soviet bloc, cars have only been exported in significant numbers from companies headquartered in the US, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Korea, Japan and China.

11. Some of the earliest watches were made in Switzerland, and they say it had something to do with Calvinism. (Make as much much money as you can but be sure not to enjoy it? I don't know.)

12. More than 7% of the electricity generated in Germany is solar.

There IS a Detrot Watch Company That Makes Mechanicals! No, it's NOT Shinola!

As I've mentioned before on this blog, Shinola knows that real watch enthusiasts want mechanical watches. 5 years in, they've made it pretty clear that they don't care what real watch enthusiasts want, because they're too busy selling watches with quartz movements. For $550 and up. As to how much they're actually made in the US with Swiss parts, as opposed to merely assembled in the US, from Chinese parts, let's just say that Shinola and the FTC disagree about that. Which is unfortunate for a company which constantly presents itself as 180% pure local Detroit manufacturing.

Or maybe it's not unfortunate for them. Maybe they're totally getting away with their scam. Maybe their executives don't often wake up screaming in the middle of the night because their subconsciouses are not okay with what they're consciously doing.

The company seems to be doing very well. They have brick-and-mortar stores springing up all over the place. One of them is about a mile and a half from where I am right now. I've been in there. They seems to be doing brisk business. I honestly admired the looks of the watches, and bought a notebook.

But that was a couple of years ago. Since then I've gotten tired of waiting for them to finally roll out a mechanical watch, and things like their differences of opinion with the FTC have made me wonder more whether they're just basically straight-up MBA Starbucks-and-Nike-style hucksters, hot-air salesmen, who DON'T actually care about Detroit, or integrity, or craftsmanship, or quality watches, or anything else other than your money and mine.

And I don't really know much of anything about this other Detroit watch company I just stumbled across, either, except: they DO make mechanical watches. But maybe, just maybe, they're more of a company with a soul than Shinola, which has been riding this huge marketing campaign about how they're a company with a soul. I see a few encouraging signs in this other Detroit watch company.

This other company's name is really easy to remember: it's called the Detroit Watch Company.

They use movements which aren't made in Murrka, but on their hompepage, under "Movement," they tell you what movements they use: Sellita, Eta and Miyota. They prominently feature a thorough rundown, on their website, about exactly what happens in what country in the making of their watches. Completely unlike Shinola. (And maybe because of Shinola, and aimed at those of us who've noticed how Shinola is less than 180% honest? Hm. Maybe. Who knows. Maybe it's a total coincidence, and the guys at Detroit Watch Company have never even heard of Shinola.)

The movements are the same as those used by many prestigious Swiss firms, and by high-end watchmakers in other countries. All of the watches are automatics which can also be hand-wound.

The retail prices for Detroit Watch Company watches run from $845 to $2050. Does this make them good deals compared to other watches in general? Or would a true expert tell you OMG no! Not when you could get -- say -- an Omega for the same price? I have no idea. I don't know enough about the Detroit Watch Company, and I still don't know nearly enough about watches in general, to be able to tell you that. But it's hard to imagine that watch aficionados wouldn't find those Detroit Watch Company prices awfully attractive when compared to the prices of Shinola's quartz watches.

Dream Log: An Ineffective Approach To The Issues Facing Detroit

I dreamed I was in a part of the main branch of the Detroit Public Library unlike any part I've seen in waking life: circular hallways bent around the center of the building, and the circles got smaller as I climbed to higher floors. The circular hallways were carpeted and lined with bookcases, and crowded with people who all seemed very serious and aggressive and efficient, like the more serious characters in His Girl Friday. On a rather high floor someone took me by the hand and dragged me to a television studio. In the studio everyone started treating me as if I were the Mayor of Detroit. (I'm not.) No one actually came out and said that I was the Mayor or called me "Your Honor" or "Mr Mayor" or anything like that, and I also didn't get the impression that anyone present actually thought I was the Mayor, but they all clearly had decided to act as if I were. And I didn't like this. It annoyed me quite a bit.

I was shown onto the set of a morning talk-show. Someone attached a microphone to my lapel, and a makeup woman fumbled around briefly with me. One of the hosts of the show was also on the set, as well as Katy Kay, the anchorwoman of BBC World News America. Not only was everyone treating me as if I were the Mayor, they were also treating Ms Kay as if she were a lifelong resident of Detroit and deeply involved with the minutiae of its politics. Ms Kay didn't seem to care for the situation any more than I did.

The TV people turned on the cameras on the set, and we were on the air, and the host started peppering both Ms Kay and myself with questions to which we had no answers whatsoever. Ms Kay glowered, removed the TV microphone from her lapel and walked off of the set, and I followed suit. She and I assured each other that we had had nothing to do with this bad idea. Then I woke up.

Reports of Detroit's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

It's still there. Really. Specifically, Julien Temple's recent essay on the "last days of Detroit" is -- well, pretty silly. Temple published the essay in connection with his recent documentary, Requiem for Detroit, which the essay does not put me in the mood to see. Temple describes certain parts of town where the police will not bother you as long as you haven't murdered anyone. What nonsense. It's a distillation of some stereotypical attitudes toward "urban jungles" held by people who only visit them as tourists.

Toward the end of his essay Temple mentions a few hardy souls who, to his great surprise, in spite of everything, are determined to stick around and make it work.

To be greatly surprised that Detroit is not actually emptying out, that not everyone is leaving who can -- not to mention the few people *gasp!* moving there -- I don't recall Temple having mentioned any of the latter -- ah say ah say to be greatly surprised here, one must be pretty ignorant not only about Detroit specifically, but also about the way cities work in general, not to mention about some pretty universal constants in human habits and behavior. Julien Temple has lived on this planet for over 56 years, and has worked in the UK, in Los Angeles and New York and other cities as well, now including Detroit. One would've thought that as a movie director he would have had his eyes open at least part of that time. Maybe not. Let me run it down for Julien:

Cities rise and fall, prosper and go through hard times, in cycles. In times of higher unemployment and the various problems which are a part of decreased prosperity, people do tend to leave cities, to seek their fortunes elsewhere. But others tend to move in in their stead. Abandoned industrial districts become gentrified. Other sorts of industry spring up. But apart from the yuppies and speculators, there are also the stubborn natives, exemplified by Gabby Johnson in Blazing Saddles who put it in this very memorable way:

"Hell, I was born here, and I was raised here, and goddamn it, I'm a-gonna die here! And no sidewindin', bushwhackin', hornswogglin' cracker croaker is gonna ruin my biscuit-cutter! Rahruhruh!"

These Gabbys are everywhere, and their grim determination to by God stay everywhere they are, combined with the entreprenurial spirit of those who move into and renovate the places left by the discouraged, and with the application of governmental grant money, and with the influx of people just looking for plain old cheap rent and small mortgages, turn urban jungles into boomtowns: in Temple's hometown of London, and in New York, to name a couple of recent examples, and in Cleveland, to name another close enough to Detroit that plenty of Detroiters have easily been able to observe how it's done.

Again: what on Earth has Julien been observing? (Not economic cycles, one presumes.) Requiem? The mind boggles.