After my employer complained to me last November about taking my two weeks of paid vacation consecutively, I took my first week of vacation last week, finishing it off with a trip to Detroit, the Motor City/Motown, in part to catch a game between the Detroit Tigers and my Boston Red Sox at Comerica Park (new Tigers' stadium). In the aftermath of my trip, I had a few diverse, heterogeneous comments to make on the nature of vacation, road trips with friends (when you're driving a rental over 500 miles), the peculiarities of economic development in American cities, and the joy, confusion, and indispensability of everyday routines. I'll deal with each in the order in which it appears in my mind (in who else's order do you think I would be orienting things?!).
1. I love driving west along the New York State Thruway.
This point is extremely minor (all points on this blog probably are!). I can remember a trip that I took with my parents to Niagara Falls, Toronto, and the Thousand Islands when I was probably about 11 or 12 years old. It fixed the New York Thruway in my memory as this endlessly long expanse, longer than my everyday memory could comprehend. The Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge between Syracuse and Rochester seemed to extend to infinite distances. I have since traveled the Thruway to Buffalo and beyond three times (this time, once to go to a job interview with the New York State Department of Transportation for a job in Buffalo that I did not get (!), and once to ferry a group of Mexicano immigrant rights activists to Chicago, a trip which lasted another nine hours beyond Buffalo!). The feeling that I have when I am driving through, especially westbound, is peculiar, perhaps something close to the sensations that accompanied James Fenimore Cooper in his imagination of the travels of Natty Bumppo off into the prairie, if only because, with my post-modern sensibilities, I need to touch the soil of the earth and the leaves on trees and flowers to comprehend the physical reality of a place beyond Western Massachusetts. Having felt the mist off Niagara Falls and having enjoyed a good evening drinking in a very friendly pub in downtown Buffalo, I know that both are real, but I still have this surreal feeling traveling across the Thruway as if they might both become unreal for the fact of their sheer distance from home. At this very second, the water is still tumbling over the edge of the Canadian "Horseshoe" Falls and the pints are still pouring at pubs I visited on Delaware Ave. and West Chippewa Street in downtown Buffalo, but they are distinct from my day-to-day reality watching the water flow ever so slowly down the Connecticut at the Northampton Oxbow and sipping pints at the Northampton Brewery. Geography fascinates me - the fact that there are places that I just cannot access instantaneously. When I am driving to a place like Detroit, at sixty five miles per hour or somewhat over 100 kilometers per hour (on Canadian highways), I keep wishing that I could somehow bend space to get where I am going faster! Spatiality is a network, as in the imaginations of theorists like Bruno Latour and John Law - it is piecewise, connecting multifarious individual increments of physical ground at various speeds depending on the particular technological implements (automobiles on highways v. airplanes on predetermined aeronautical trajectories through airspace) grafted piecewise onto the process of traversing space in relation to time. I don't fly as a pilot, and I don't like to sit around in airports or pass through TSA metal detectors to get on an airplane (even if I appreciate that all of those security personnel are doing the best they can to keep air travel safe in the U.S.). I guess that I would get used to all of that if I traveled regularly over long distances, but I am generally stuck and stranded in Western Massachusetts, which is not a bad place in which to find oneself stuck! Having said all of this, I can appreciate the entire geographical connotations of vacation and getting away, at whatever velocity, from home. And, in that respect, I really like my trips through the Mohawk Valley drifting through the land of my imaginations of American history and the American present.
2. Driving is a network.
This reflection follows as an addendum from the previous reflection. I do not own a car, and I have not of late found myself driving along highways. For over a year after I sold off my last car, I drove a van owned by my employer until he figured out that my driving the van out to Boston for the weekend was not covered under his insurance! At that moment, my little victory over the American financial sector came to an abrupt close, although I am glad that it ended on such amicable terms! Now I just Zipcar, ride buses, or pedal my bike. This last weekend, however, I rented a car with Enterprise, which I found very reasonable. Under other circumstances in which mileage is not an issue, Zipcars are great, but you just cannot take a Zipcar 650 miles and expect that you are not going to have to sign off your firstborn in order to pay for it. Traditional rentals still have a place even if you can Zipcar over small distances (under 125 miles or so one way) for more finite spans of time. Having said all of this, my larger reflection has to do more strictly with the relationship between thoughtful introspection on the nature of driving on a highway (in a large, metal-framed object with another human being in the passenger seat and many other human beings in other vehicles sharing the same road(s)) and the instinctual process of driving. In this manner, I insist that driving is an instinctual relationship between an individual and the road, mediated through an automobile (and all of its individual, mechanical and automated systems). In conformity with Actor Network Theory, we could identify such an configuration of human being, automobile, and concrete pathway as an actant hybrid, and we could analyze the technology of the automobile as an immutable mobile, defining particular means/vehicle for transcending spatial or temporal distances for objects in a fixed configuration (e.g. human being traveling over long geographic distances or wide temporal expanses). In these terms, we must identify the process of driving across space (in relation to time) as a network - it constitutes a continuous relationship between physically defined agents (e.g. human being, automobiles as complex, non-living hybrids of mechanical and automated systems, roadways as complex expanses of relatively continuous surfaces, etc.) extending across spatial coordinates at diverse and divergent rates of time.
Having suggest, thus, that the process of driving is a network and implying, therefore, that, in accordance with the principles of Actor Network Theory, it involves a perpetual negotiation and mediation between the agents involved in the process in order to achieve the desired results, the realization that driving is a network is perpetually frightening!! By this I mean that it is frightening to realize that a process, which at earlier moments in your life you regarded as instinctual, is not strictly instinctual (but a continuous negotiation!). Every inch of highway that you drive is an experiment in maintaining the configuration of the network of which you are simply a single participant, along with many, many other drivers using the same roads. It can be very difficult to drive under such circumstances, if only because you realize how consequential your own involvement in the maintenance of the network actual is, especially when you have a friend asleep in the passenger seat alongside, it is 10:30 at night, still thirty minutes drive at 65 miles per hour from your destination, and you are getting drowsy! A cultivated appreciation of ontology is not always a gift - it is occasionally a dire curse. Such drives never used to bother me, which simply reflects the fact that I am out of practice, not having owned a car and driven one daily in some time. I wish that I could just (instinctively) drive across the Thruway, through the southern Ontario peninsula, or, perhaps (even though it was not in any way involved in this trip), along the TransCanada (route 20) from Drummondville to Montréal without some knowledge that everything I did behind the wheel was a mediation or, otherwise (and even worse!), an overdetermined (!) outcome.
3. On Motown (the record company as opposed to the place).
This section really doesn't belong within the larger structure of this post, but I am putting it here anyway. Reflecting back on my trip to Detroit, my friend Kirk and I, oddly enough, didn't bring any Motown to listen to on the way. Aside from my MP3 player (for which I didn't have the appropriate jack to use the rental car's auxiliary audio input), Kirk had brought a cd of an old Western Mass hardcore punk band, the Outpatients (from 1983-85 time range, a time before I ever had any appreciation of punk rock) who sounded amazingly like DC hardcore band Minor Threat (with or without straight edge commitments) and, even more oddly, a greatest hits collection of Buck Owen (who I primarily remember from the tv show Hee Haw, a sad relegation of a gifted musician to a gaudy prime time tv-land caricature of country life) - Kirk is blessed with some rather eclectic musical tastes!
Motown apparently exists again as a record label, but I would have to confess that I do not know any of the artists listed on Wikipedia as currently under contract with the label. My understanding of Motown is framed by the music produced in its heyday during the 1960s and early 1970s. A few names immediately stand out - the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, and, later (early 1970s), the Jackson Five. I am not qualified in any sense as a musical historian, but these artists and the many others that made Motown iconic symbolize a period in which American pop music was rapidly integrating African-American music artists into the mainstream cultural milieu in ways that previous generations of Black artists never experienced, even to the extent that the influence of Black music (especially Blues) is everywhere implicated in the evolution of "White Pop"/Rock-and-Roll and Country emerging from the 1950s (although, for that matter, in previous generations, Black artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance were instrumental to the transformation of Twentieth century Jazz music). Moreover, this broader crossing over of Black artists in mainstream pop facilitated, in part, by the success of Motown from the beginning of the 1960s spurred efforts by other record labels to cash in. Atlantic Records (originally in collaboration with Stax Records of Memphis and, after 1968, by itself), as a principal competitor of Motown in the late 1960s and 1970s, created a platform for such artists as Aretha Franklin and the numerous bands categorized under the broader rubric of the "Philadelphia sound" (e.g. the O'Jays, the Stylistics, the Spinners, etc.).
Musical styles and musical tastes obviously evolve. In theoretical terms, we might characterize such evolutions within the broader framework of the overdetermination of cultural processes. In this respect, in order to come to terms with how and why music changes over time, we would have to investigate not only the particular ways in which the technologies of instrumentation change but also changes in patterns of everyday life, living standards, religion and expressive spirtuality, political enfranchisement and/or struggle, and, approaching from a Marxist perspective, the lived experience of the class process (production, extraction/appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor). Simply stated, music is transformed over time, in complex ways, through its interaction with myriad other social processes against which it is shaped even as it simultaneously shapes the cultural, political, and economic processes that constitute it. It seems clear that many good historians of the American music and, more specifically, African-American music have undertaken analyses to situate the integration of Black music into mainstream pop against the larger evolving context of Black economic enfranchisement/dis-enfranchisement in the U.S (see, for example, Norman Kelley (2002), "Notes on the Political Economy of Black Music," in Norman Kelley (ed.), Rhythm & Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, 6-23, New York: Akashic Books, available at: http://www.lipscomb.umn.edu/rock/docs/Kelley2002_politicalEconomy.pdf). The continuing history of the struggle for Civil Rights is critical, in this respect, to the development of African-American music and to its evolving relationship with "White Pop."
Motown, in its heyday, no doubt expressed a certain innocence in its expressions on love and sexuality, characteristic of the moral compass embodied by its audience, both Black and White. On the other hand, America at the time was engaged in radical transformations both with respect to sexuality (i.e. the sexual "revolution," expansions of availability of reliable birth control, alternately increasing and diminishing freedom of women in sexuality and reproductive choice) and to race (i.e. Civil Rights, Black Power). The transformations of these two critical axes of American life invariably shaped the music produced by Black America, transforming it in ways that are still emerging at this time. Important treatments of themes, engaging in various facets of social change and social crises, indisputably arise with Motown artists by the end of the 1960s (e.g. the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion(That's what the world is today)" (1970), Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" (1971), Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City"(1973)). Evolving manifestations of rap and hip-hop, from the 1980s to the present, reflects, in certain respects, the continuing struggles of urban African-American communities against poverty and economic marginalization and the continuing negotiations of sexuality by Black men and women. Critically, like every previous generation of Black music, the generation that first produced hip-hop had to emerge from a kind of cultural marginalization/suppression to become one of the dominant strains in contemporary American music. Moreover, like previous generations, contemporary artists in hip-hop reflect a long process through which clandestine Black music has gone mainstream, to the benefit of record company executives, strip-mining the talents of young men and women from poor African-American communities.
The themes introduced in this section raise concerns demanding much more detailed research and a book-length synopsis of the relationship between diverse economic, political, and cultural processes in the constitution of African-American music and the further relationship between African-American music and "White Pop," a relationship that, as an amateur in music history, I would characterize through recurring patterns of convergence (especially in the heyday of Motown and at the present time) and divergence (with the introduction of rap and hip-hop in the early 1980s, as a clandestine and marginalized/marginalizing expression of the lived experience of urban African-American community). With this in mind, I probably won't be writing any book-length accounts on Motown any time soon, but the social existence of Motown and of music in general is something that continues to capture my imagination.
4. Detroit: Another Casino Gaming Economic Developmental Miracle
This month, the MGM Resorts International, a Las Vegas (Paradise, NV)-based corporate casino operator, has been granted the right to operate a casino in the south end of Springfield, Massachusetts, an urban municipality across the Connecticut River from the town in which I grew up (West Springfield). Like many Frost-belt urban communities with under-utilized and deteriorating downtowns and a decaying, whithering industrial base, Springfield has been looking for some time for some magical economic developmental formula that would elevate it from its persistent problems of poverty, crime (especially violent crime associated with the drug trade), and lack of indigenous entrepreneurial activity and innovation. When the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed the Expanded Gaming Act of 2011, the city seized the opportunity to solicit proposals from multiple casino operators for what would be, under the terms of the enabling legislation, a single casino resort to be situated in Western Massachusetts (west of Worcestor County). Three casino operators (MGM Resorts/MGM Grand, Penn National Gaming, and Ameristar Casinos) developed formal proposals for which they anted up the $400,000 fee to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission for initial consideration for a casino license. In the end, after Ameristar aborted its ill-conceived plans to locate a casino at a rehabilitated Westinghouse factory space in East Springfield, city officials excluded Penn National in its plans to build a casino in conjunction with a broader multi-modal transportation rehabilitation project in the city's north end to deal exclusively with MGM, and voters, in a rushed referendum process that solicited poor voter turnout, approved in principle the locating of an MGM casino in the city's south end, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission has granted MGM the exclusive right to operate a casino in Western Massachusetts.
At various points in the past, I have thought to develop a detailed, Marxian class-analytic analysis of casino gaming as an urban economic developmental strategy, a document that I would tentatively entitle "The Political Economy of the Sewer: Casino Gaming as Urban Economic Development." Pointedly, I hold a distinct quantity of contempt for the idea of casino gaming as economic develop, in principle, and I hold contempt for the idea of situating a casino gaming facility in Springfield or anywhere else in Western Massachusetts, in particular. I may still write such a document in the near future. For now, the backstory of Springfield, seeking an economic miracle at the hands of a casino corporation that also, to my knowledge, owns the Mirage Casino (a fitting metaphor), fits ever so perfectly in a parallel to the story of casino gaming and urban decline in Detroit. Reiterating an obviously pertinent background story, the municipal government of Detroit is bankrupt and in receivership/emergency management through the state of Michigan. The reasons for Detroit's bankruptcy are multifold. To a substantial extent, pension liabilities/"legacy costs" constitute the instrument through which Detroit's municipal government faced an increasing and insurmountable accumulation of debt, for which it was facing downgrades in municipal bond ratings translating into higher borrowing costs to finance pension obligations. Behind the story of pension liabilities, however, lies the economic decline of Detroit, as the increasingly hollow urban core of an agglomeration in which economic growth was increasingly concentrated in peripheral communities. Succinctly, as numerous other economists associated with my particular brand of post-structuralist Marxian theory would be apt to observe, the decline of Detroit as an urban economy was overdetermined by a range of economic, political, and cultural processes.
Accounting for the wide range of processes culminating in the contemporary economic geography of metropolitan Detroit/Wayne County would require a book-length narrative. My sole intention here is to argue that, as an economic developmental strategy pledging to arrest the decline of areas of downtown Detroit, casinos have not lived up to their promises. Wandering on vacation through the streets of downtown Detroit (my friend Kirk and I did not venture on foot beyond the northwestern boundary of Temple Street out of interest to view the Masonic Temple Theater up close), I could attest to the substantial care afforded in the maintenance of Detroit's three downtown casinos. I can also attest, in some measure, to the appauling state of certain other structures downtown or on its immediate peripheries. In particular, one building on Temple Street just east of the Masonic Temple stood out. It was apparently a high-rise residential complex of two towers at one time, both of which are now unoccupied. On the top floor of one of the towers, over the open spaces, where windows once existed to keep out the cold of Michigan winters, is inscribed in spray paint the word "Zombieland." Of course, when we saw this, we had to take a closer look. It certainly is a metaphor for the current state of a once proud industrial center, the Motor City, where there are now in excess of 80,000 abandoned properties, many under possession of the city from which it no longer enjoys a penny of property tax revenue. As such, the tale of Detroit, at this moment in its history, intertwines strands of anti-labor/anti-pensioner, pro-financial sector politics in the articulation of a post-bankruptcy municipal restructuring with the lingering effects of economic developmental formulaic gimics, like gaming, and the overall decline of residential and commercial infrastructure to accompany an exodus of populations that might have contributed to an entrepreneurial renaissance. Maybe such populations will return in the future, when the political powers that be are more interested and committed to making the redevelopment of Detroit, as a meaningful and important central place at the heart of the larger metropolitan region, a critical goal.
The original conception of this section aimed to advance a graphic juxtaposition of photography, showing abandoned buildings in Detroit alongside images of Detroit casinos. After an appropriate second thought and some examination of copyright law regarding the "fair use" doctrine, I decided, I think wisely in view of my desire to avoid litigation in which I might stand a fair chance of losing a significant quantity of money, that it would not be prudent to construct a work of photojournalism with copyrighted images of casinos to denegrate casino gaming. I neither have the time nor the financial resources to wager my First Amendment privileges of free speech against the privileges of casino operators to maintain images of their own production for use according to their permission. In this regard, I think I have articulated one more reason why I need to purchase a camera in order to take my own images for which I might be able to exercise a copyright for partisan political purposes.
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