You decide:

The Functioning Alcoholic

Wasted

The Old Miami refutes and refuses the various misconceptions which both precede and plague Detroit.  It distorts the comfortably generic misunderstandings which crowd legal documents, suburban narrative, and newspaper headlines…

These are just a few from amongst the many construscts by which people view the city.  These newspapers testify to the absurdly dated, uniform, and entirely accessible guidelines by which many chose to experience, and fail to experience, Detroit.  Upon entering the bar, one encounters the immediate deletion of the city as it is often written, recorded, and consumed.  It becomes provocatively foreign and disorienting, alcohol aside.  The thoughts which are provoked by the crowded room, serve as the ethereal mouthwash for the reprehensible taste which has embedded itself in the bleeding gums of the outsider.  It removes that which perpetual misconception encourages and perpetuates.  As the veterans and hipsters crowd the tables and spill out onto the floor, one forgets the dwindling population; the departing crowds which are this city’s familiar history.  One forgets the pressed, dry-cleaned uniform of the National Guard officer that blankets the front cover of Time magazine.  One forgets the oppressed.  One forgets the devastating effects of “trickle-down” economics, and the Belle Isle bridge incident of 42′.  One is consumed by the immediacy of the crowd, instead of those that vacated apartment complexes and housing units after 67′, and those that left nearly ten years earlier.

One assumes that the impact of the highly publicized endures; that the events which transpired at 12th and Clairmont propelled a sudden cerebral hemorrhage or debilitating aneurysm.  Yet, the vessels remain, and the warm blood flows through the streets, through the neon lights which remind one of temporality, and through the accentuated noses of bar regulars who are undoubtedly aware of it all.  How does one describe the simultaneity of that which has both infected and vaccinated Cass Avenue? Does the microfilm, stored at various public libraries, do it justice? The conventional narrative begins with out-movement and ends with economic disparity.  The streets were inarguably crowded with those who decided to leave.  And, they did leave.  And, they experienced the defamiliarizing effects of distance and time.  A veritable infrastructure of thought arose to justify the abandonment.  Yet, many stayed, and waged the almost unconscious war against misconception.  Old Miami is inevitably, for these very reasons, the anti-narrative.  Violence manifests in attempts to live a refuting, un-subordinated life.  How does one’s own history in Detroit not belong to others? How does a personal history defy the encapsulating effects of the daily headlines? How does it refuse movement to the periphery?

A hundred thousand were dying to get out. Nobody’s dying to get back in…Or are they?