Born and Raised in Windsor, Ontario

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Will to Art on 24 January 2015.



So, it looks like that rapper lived in Detroit until 7th grade. That's probably long enough to identify with Detroit as one's hometown. Also, the alternative is saying he's from Howell. He might have been fronting more to say he was from Lansing!

My dad moved from Detroit to Melvindale when he was five. By the Birmingham scale, Melvindale is just downriver Detroit, but my dad always tells people from Michigan that he's from Melvindale. He tells people from Germany and usually people from other states that he's from Detroit, because most people from metro Detroit don't even know where Melvindale is. I think he actually says it as a point of pride. The closer you get to Detroit, the more you identify with your neighborhood: Allen Park, Hamtramck, Oak Park, etc.

Also, what you were saying about people who try to superimpose their understandings of other cities on Detroit...the best example is that terrible Journey song, which romanticizes South Detroit, which anyone who looks at a map knows is called Windsor, Ontario.  But, yeah, I guess a lot of people in Michigan can't conceptualize the idea that Canada is south of Detroit and that Detroit has no south side.

I took a really cool class for my MA on Detroit Architecture--actually, that one and my Italian Renaissance class were both offered through CMU and met at the Scarab Club by the DIA, and they were both taught by a genius named Mike Farrell. Anyway, Professor Farrell always insisted that Detroit is basically Rome, and the guy knew Rome and Detroit inside and out, so I trust him. He lives in an old manse in a burned-out neighborhood behind the DIA. I think six houses are still standing on his block. I guess he and his neighbors have removed most of the ornamental features from the outsides of their houses because people from Ann Arbor keep stealing them and selling them at their architectural resale stores.

Anyway, I think that's what I mean by the Forbidden Zone comment.

Detroit is America at an accelerated pace: it lived America's history more quickly and more intensely than the rest of the country, so going there is like studying a thousand years of US history even though the US has only produced a few hundred years everywhere else. Detroit has to be dismissed as misguided and cartoonish because the alternative is to see the future of the whole country.

Lansing is the avant-garde of American mediocrity. My students always said Lansing was ten years behind.

I said it was 30 years ahead.