Could you please tell this to the construction crew that starts work at 7:00 AM every day in the empty lot RIGHT OUTSIDE MY WINDOW? They don't seem to have gotten the memo.
Oh shut up everyone. Cleveland's already 100x more hardcore than Williamsburg with 1 out of 10 houses foreclosed, no industry but the hustle and people desperately out of work. So lay the fuck off, hear?
Maybe these kids will now have to return to their original burnt out cities, namely cleveland and everywhere else in the middle. Thank you for playing, but your band kind of blows...
@I Love New Jersey: they are...? and have been...? every criminal worth 5c knows to go fuck with the white nyu trust-fund retards who populate all over the l train thru about morgan ave these days, come the fuck on. hell, i'm tempted to do it sometimes.
@Mount_Prion: Yeah, but you can OWN a house in Detroit for like $8,000. So what if it's next door to one of those "dot-marked" houses with the "dead or crackhead" graffiti on it and collapsed roof? I'll take Detroit over Billburg. Plus, they have good Eastern Euro food there.
@snugbug: I think you can buy an entire block on the southwest side of Detroit for $8k now. My grandparents sold their 6 bedroom victorian in SW Detroit for less than $15k in 1999. Granted, it was next to a crack house and the two houses across the street were burned down in the late 80s, but the house had leaded glass windows, a full bar in the basement and a living room the size of an elementary school's gymnasium.
@kjack: Nice anecdote, brings back memories of me visiting with my Detroit friends for a wedding back during that "GREAT POWER FAILURE O' 2004" that crippled the entire Eastern Seabord and rendered Detroit an absolute jungle.. I'll never forget driving from Detroit to Ann Arbor at nite, while the whole general area was without electricity. We had to fence off drunky peeps who'd broken into convenience stores and gotten even drunkier, lunging at our Oldsmobile Calais from all angles.. All of that being said, I still have a huge soft spot for Detroit. It's like a contemporary art project.. All the decay has an almost.. romantic quality to it.
@snugbug: It does, especially if you keep romanticizing it. And how you cast that narrative as a zombie film, complete with racist undertones (jungle? really?) and you as the outsider hero who can see the beauty in all that ruin?
Please.
I don't mean to be so hard on you, but I wish people would stop projecting their apocalyptic fantasies onto Detroit, which is a city with real problems where real people live. It's not up to us (well, I still claim partial residency) to fetishize its decay and objectify an entire population's reality into our personal version of "28 Days Later."
@minou: Please don't call me a racist, that almost made me cry and reach for a drink.
I'm a writer, and that's how I personally experienced Detroit. Not in a politician's "let's go to work!" mind frame, but as a person who observes, and marvels at things, and then expresses those sentiments and impressions in words.
@snugbug: I'm also a writer, and that's how I personally experienced Detroit for most of my life. I don't see what that has to do with anything. You romanticized the all too real situation of a city and by extension its entire population to fit your vision of it, thereby doing reality a disservice. And as a writer, I'm surprised that you're not more sensitive to the power that words like "jungle" can have, even if the user does not intend them to cause harm. All this vague "sentiments and impressions in words" business sounds to me like the place where you should have just said "yeah, you're right, I fucked up."
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Wonderful. Now the mayor is going to go down and have his buddies option everything just as soon as they finish moving all the people of color out.
Shut up, Gawker.
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That's my hometown, thanks for the love. [repeat]
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That's my hometown, thanks for the love.
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The corner of 6th and B, East Village, 1980s:
[1.bp.blogspot.com]
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You just read it on Gawker:
The cool kids are moving to Detroit. Now go!
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Please.
I don't mean to be so hard on you, but I wish people would stop projecting their apocalyptic fantasies onto Detroit, which is a city with real problems where real people live. It's not up to us (well, I still claim partial residency) to fetishize its decay and objectify an entire population's reality into our personal version of "28 Days Later."
07/06/09
I'm a writer, and that's how I personally experienced Detroit. Not in a politician's "let's go to work!" mind frame, but as a person who observes, and marvels at things, and then expresses those sentiments and impressions in words.
PS: Now I'm sad.
07/06/09
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