A Few Things I'm Excited about: Not Quite Fall Edition

School is in full swing. There are as yet no papers to grade. The late summer light stupid beautiful and golden and I've got two quarts of Number 1 Sons pickles in my fridge and a new episode of The Newsroom on queue. Just try and harsh my mellow.

My students have known each other for about two weeks now, so obviously it's time for them to start dating each other. In October, when the inevitable drama begins to unfold, I will share this genius toddler adage with them: WORRY BOUT YOURSELF.

I spent a little too much time this weekend ogling the rad food documentary site, to cure. This is the kind of food photography I want to take.

In this open letter to her older brother, Dr. Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson has written the most compelling and fascinating gentrification narrative I've ever read. A particularly poignant thing to stumble across while drinking a short americano at the Big Bear Cafe in Bloomingdale, freshly painted rowhouses on all sides:

I've come to appreciate jazz, wine, hookah, and designer pizza. I am sure you would have enjoyed these things too, if it were not for your absence that in part made space for it all.... 

...The park and still-swings that were backdrop to your morning murder are today the spot where first dates go. It's a clean green park where couples with coffee sit on benches and read. Or meander. They unwind and relax where you transitioned. They exercise a luxury of time in the place where you were refused more. Your death spot was my high school bus stop.

My former professor Michael Wenthe and his cadre of comic nerd genius co-artists are running a Kickstarter for Cartozia Tales,  "An all-ages fantasy anthology with all the stories set in a shared world, created by a team of top-notch indie cartoonists". It. Looks. Awesome. So many rad, hand-drawn backer gifts. I'm for sure getting a subscription to share with my 12 year-old sister, Ziggy.

Oh, Internet, first you give me this perfect, perfect, description of What's in Prince's Fridge, and then you tell me it was an April Fool's joke. Nevermind. Leave me alone. I'm too busy contemplating how yak milk can be "freely given" to worry about details like veracity.

Places: The Detroit Institute of Art and Rivera Court

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In 1932,  twenty-four-year-old Frida Kahlo suffered a miscarriage at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, an event which further devastated her relationship to her body, and which she depicted in her painting, Henry Ford Hospital, 1932. Around the same time, my grandmother was born healthy at Hutzel Women's hospital, two miles away.

In 1933, Diego Rivera unveiled the Detroit Industry Murals, a twenty-seven-panel fresco in a huge, sunlit atrium at the Detroit Institute of Art.  The fresco depicts the union of natural magic and human potential-- the earth gods creating iron ore, the growth of crops, the muscular fabrication of auto parts, the vaccination of a small child.

Fifty-one years later, I was born to a twenty-four-year-old mother via crash C-section, also at Hutzel women's. My mother took me to the DIA while I was still in a stroller. I ran as a toddler across the huge tiled expanse of Rivera Court.

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As a teenager, struggling to master my own mind and to conquer the unremarkable and devastating chaos of adolescent identify, I found in the Detroit Industry Murals a way of seeing the world that helped me stand still. Beauty in the order of things.  The tying together of the earth in paint. The binding of time with art.

Lots of people with much more knowledge than I are making well-reasoned and researched arguments regarding why it's a terrible idea to sell off the Detroit Institute of Art's collection to deal with the city's worsening economic problems.  I really, really hope they don't do it.

Rivera painted his frescos as a tribute to the vitality of Detroit's workers and the genius of the auto factory. These days, in the press, Detroit seems like the poster child for the death of American industry. Kahlo experienced a surge of artistic growth in Detroit, but she lost her baby, and her mother died far away in Mexico. To her, Detroit was a "shabby little town".

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If Rivera's fresco are built into the very walls of the DIA building, can the be auctioned off as well? Will they take hacksaws to the walls of Rivera Court and send the panels off in 27 different directions? I don't have a grand argument for why the DIA is worth saving. I just have this series of connections, and some shadowy ideas about their importance in my life. It's not enough on its own, but it's part of the story.

My favorite picture of Rivera and Kahlo shows them high up on the scaffolding surrounding a half-finished Rivera Court, wrapped in passionate kiss. The huge red hands which for Rivera represented the union of God and Nature reach up behind them to cup the sky. I'll spend the rest of my life figuring out why I love that photo so much. Perhaps the ties that bind me to that image are yet to be spun-- thread that will spool out over decades. I only know what I see now: these places, those people, the raw materials, and the potential it all ever holds, which might carry us forward through time.