Wild Bill Ketelhut provides the "blog" to this anti-blog
Wild At Heart
About 8 years ago I was living in Toledo, OH working for a company that was getting ready to close up shop. They gave me the opportunity to transfer to their a new acquisition in Detroit and I took it not knowing if after the three month stint at converting the company over to our policies if it would lead to a permanent position. Prior to this, my time in Detroit revolved around a few areas (Henry Ford Museum, the Majestic Theatre, the State Theatre (before it was the Fillmore), Canterbury Village, Great Lakes Crossing, Pine Knob, the old Tigers Stadium and Royal Oak). With the exception of some trepidation driving around the back streets Downtown near the Majestic or near the Tigers stadium, my time in Detroit was in some of the nicer areas. I didn’t really know Detroit but had heard it was a tough town and economically depressed.
After my temporary position ending, they liked my work and I was invited to stay which meant moving from my place in Northwood, OH to an apartment I found in the northern boundary of Pontiac, MI (right near the Palace of Auburn Hills and Oakland University). For the first year I was kind of skittish going downtown for anything but eventually I found myself getting involved deeper into the city and learned what made the city tick. I never really identified with a big city before but Detroit just had a feel I liked as I explored every aspect of the city from the guy who answered the door (was doing a canvassing job) in Gross Pointe with a smokers jacket and martini to the areas of Detroit that looked like a war zone.
In 2008, the company I worked for did some big layoffs and I thought about leaving Detroit to go back to NY or hang on living in Detroit. I had a nice life going despite not working except for part-time work and a stint with the Census. With my time working for motorcityblog, Live Nation and WXOU, I was in a place where I was taking full advantage of the cultural aspects of Detroit from 150 concerts a year, numerous plays, restaurants, sporting events, festivals and museum experiences as well as doing day trips to the surrounding areas. I was totally in love with the city and it was being very good to me. It took my mother almost dying to rip me away and despite being back in my hometown of Spencerport, NY, I still feel a strong connection to Detroit, a town which feels more like my home than here.
That brings me to the newest documentary, straight from Sundance (where it won an award for Editing), about the plight of Detroit entitled “Detropia”. If you like your documentaries to have a strong narrative focus, this might not be your cup of tea. Instead, the makers of this film (Loki Film’s Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady who were nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature for “Jesus Camp”) take an approach where we have brief snippets of the lives of a wide range of people from Detroit including Mayor Bing, the Detroit Opera House’s Dr DiChiera (one of my first Detroit interviews with WXOU), an auto worker union leader, a night club owner, a waitress, etc. The documentary gives us some facts as to brace up the work such as that back in the 50’s a Henry Ford inspired Detroit was the fastest growing city in the country to the fact that today at barely 700,000 is now the fastest shrinking city (a loss of over 1 million residents) then allows the people to paint us a picture of what Detroit is in the process becoming.
One of the few segments of the population that is seeing an increase is young artists looking for inspiration. Just before I moved back to NY I had run into and talked to numerous members of this growing community that have come here to live in an urban setting with cheap housing to become inspired to create unique works of art. Like the music of Detroit which spawned the greatness of not only Motown but the works of Iggy Pop, Bob Segar, Kevin Saunderson, Alice Cooper and the White Stripes (to just name a few), the art community (painters, filmmakers and sculptors) has come to have a similar renaissance in the area.
That is partly what happened to Detropia’s co-director Heidi Ewing. Originally from Farmington, where she went to Mercer High School, she had a front row seat to the manufacturing ups and downs as her father and brothers had a manufacturing business which catered to the automotive industry so she had a “real appreciation of things being made”. She fell into documentary work while in DC around 1995 where she found a “passion” and “curiosity” about these type of “real life stories” with “real people”. In a brave move, Heidi moved back to Detroit when so many people are moving away and found herself immersed in this documentary.
It is these real life people that add to the story as she finds long term Detroiters to talk about what is happening to the city. Detroit has set itself up as the proverbial “canary” as vacant houses litter the city. Having worked the Census in Pontiac, I personally got a feeling for that as I would hit street with 6-10 vacant houses per block. One of the big things Heidi looks at is the shrinking middle class who lived in a lot of those homes. They worked in those factories that are closing down, moving overseas or reducing work forces. It is a lot cheaper in some cases to just leave the house and start anew somewhere else.
The crew was lucky to capture some footage from the local 22 when they were discussing taking a pay cut from the company where you can feel not only the frustration and anger of the workers, but their pride in their work. While tough to watch, it makes one wonder what role the upcoming elections will have on helping not only Detroit, but our manufacturing base as well. A lot of tool & die shops have closed here in upstate NY as well as my dad’s hometown of Meadville, PA. Heidi says “the elections matter if people press officials on these matters” since we need to see services maintained such as bus lines and other services.
In Detroit, we see some footage of Mayor Bing working to address these issues knowing that Detroit is broke as well as some footage from the area town halls. She says “Bing is doing the best he can” though he “seems tired”. The Town Halls “see people confused and if only one person is on a block what do you do”. This makes for “uncertain” times and seeing “core Detroiters” feeling a little left out as the mass media talks a lot about the artists coming to Detroit as revitalizing the area but that is just a small number of people in the grand scheme. A “sense of a stronger bridge is needed between the new people buying up lot and artists” with the old time Detroiters to build a strong collaboration between the two groups as well as working to get over racial tensions.
The film really is a slice of what is going on in Detroit and succeeds as a sounding board for what it means not just for us but for the nation. With screenings at Sundance, Heidi finds “If people have never been to Detroit they can still see their own lives in the film” especially as the economy stays where it is. Some people are getting the idea that it is not just Detroit but Detroit might be the poster child of things to come esp as we see cities in California, like Stockton, being taken over. Are we going to have to bail out our cities?
While the film doesn’t really give the big picture, like a painting it gives us a moment in time where things in this city are not going well and it sees us on a precipice waiting for a last minute rescue or to simply fall off the edge. The film has that feel to be of someone coming in to just capture this moment with detachment yet fondness for the subject matter. We can hang this documentary on the wall and sit back taking in all the different brushstrokes, constantly seeing new things. If you care about the state of Detroit, this is as good as any place to start searching for ideas as it can be a good springboard for discussions that will hopefully lead to further action to get the ship that is Detroit on course.
I give the documentary “Detropia” a B+.
You can see it at The Main Art Theatre this Friday, September 14 and Director Heidi Ewing & Producer Craig Atkinson will be there in person on both Friday and Saturday, September 14 & 15 at 7:15 & 9:50pm! Be part of the discussion!
