This is a complex weekend. Passover for some, Easter for others. Good Friday was a holiday and yet plenty are working and many are taking Monday off. Accountants are working straight through. For an expatriate under-employed lapsed Catholic, however, this weekend is not much different than all others. Nothing applies, as Joan Didion would say.

Noon spin class on Friday was filled with the usual array of bored-looking ectomorphs and chiseled men prepping for summer at Fire Island. The instructor surprised us with a special Good Friday edition of Studio Cycling™ (all the classes here are trademarked)—the Jesus Christ Super Spin. Yeah! I never imagined a dance version of Mary Magdalene’s “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, but it makes so much sense. Okay, so we didn’t make it to the obligatory three hour mass this afternoon, but the body is a temple, no?

Formerly known as “the gym”, the membership-only unemployment drop-in centre is full all day, every day. This should come as little surprise, with 663,000 more jobs lost last month here in the US and unemployment spiking at 8.5 per cent—the highest level since 1983. Frankly, I think it’s great to see so many people revving up their dopamine levels and getting buff while they linger in the bread lines.

For others, a more classic tool of escapism and procrastination prevails. Online video gaming is up 27 per cent versus a year ago, with visitors spending an average 42 per cent more time on the sites. A new game called “Layoff” gives players the chance to rightsize their own workforce, hitting the bank bailout option to start over.

Nevertheless, there is a certain coolness in numbers. At a park in the Lower East side, the Unemployed Olympics provided a recent afternoon of frivolity. The purpose was “just to get unemployed people psyched that they’re unemployed.” As one participant put it: “all the cool people in New York are unemployed right now.”

These days are a blessing and a curse. More time to go to the gym, spend with your kids, read books. No income to pay the membership fees, send those kids to private school or enroll in that creative writing symposium at, ahem, Columbia in June, for example. Aye, there’s the rub. Only the lucky few ever have both time and money simultaneously.

Meanwhile chocolate bunnies are on the market, which is reason enough to get psyched… happy Easter, happy Passover and a big Obama-style shout out to the atheists this weekend.

by Edward Wilkinson-Latham

The first thing I notice after disembarking the plane in West Palm is the herd of wheelchairs and electric buggies gathered like an assembled posse. Polyester-clad blue rinses and vintage toupées battle in slow motion to be the first to climb slowly upon these complimentary electric chariots, as the nonchalant airport employees dressed in light green blazers and peach pink trousers watch with blank expression, their eyes dulled with tedium of seeing another plane load of aged lizards searching for warmth. What they crave is some drama, like someone who needs carting off the aircraft, bound and gagged after expressing a nasty dose of air rage. Hell they look so bored they’d probably be happy with a school party of ADD kids with hyperactive disorder.

The Intracoastal Waterway separates the city of West Palm from the more affluent Palm Beach; a 26km long spit of some of the most expensive sand in the world jutting out from the mainland like a dangling penis with erectile dysfunction. Once over the bridge, convertible Bentleys, Porches and Mercedes patrol the green palm fringed boulevards. As well as these prestige vehicles there are the well kept “Jew Canoes”—near mint ’80s luxury automobiles driven by the undead, their tufts of silver hair barely visible over the steering wheel. They veer across the central yellow line with addled nervous aggression in their eyes as they nearly career into another oncoming vehicle. Car parks at sunset can seem like dodgems at a fun fair.

These days around Palm Beach you occasionally make out small white signs no bigger than a bill envelope, stuck in the turf outside the odd picture perfect mansion. These are the barely visible and tasteful ‘for sale’ signs which over the past few months have become more numerous, proof of the recent economic downturn and the familiarity of locals with the conman of the century—Bernie Madoff. Bernie used to have a lot of friends down here. [more]

(Photo: Heidelberg Project, Michael Takasaki)

Following up on last post: In Detroit, at least, there’s already a number of projects underway that are designed to staunch the bleeding in neighborhoods struggling with urban decay and foreclosure. Boing Boing led me to James Griffioen’s marvelous set of photos of the abandoned Detroit Public School Book Depository, which led me to his passionate, excellent blog; it describes several initiatives reclaiming once-derelict homes and neighbourhoods and putting them back to productive use, including:

The Power House Project, which is converting a foreclosed house into one capable of generating power to sustain itself and supply power to those around it.

The Yes Farm, a group of transplanted San Franciscans trying to turn a street into an art and gardening community.

And the Georgia Street Community Garden, which has planted gardens on the lots of now-demolished houses and are rehabbing an abandoned store to become a community centre and store to sell the food they grow. They even have movie nights in the garden.

Addendum: Yves Marchand and Roman Meffre’s website has other photos of Detroit not included in the Time essay.

More from the Heidelberg Project:

[Photo: Heidelberg Project]

While staying in Detroit, we head out toward 8 Mile and stop at the Heidelberg Project. It’s a two-block public art exercise that consumes the sides of houses, empty lots, the sidewalk, and even the trees of a long depressed, black (but once racially integrated) Eastside Detroit neighborhood. Tyree Guyton, who grew up on Heidelberg St., launched the project in 1986 as a way of revitalizing his ‘hood through low-budget DIY creativity and it’s since become an ever evolving outsider art installation.

Guyton, who believes Detroit never really recovered from the riots of 1967, was disillusioned after returning home from his military service—finding a neighborhood (known as “Black Bottom”) seemingly beyond repair, and, as far as wider America was concerned, beyond care. He began by painting bright pop-art polka dots on houses, and artfully affixing them with detritus collected from surrounding vacant lots.

The site vibrates with energy and a playfully anarchic spirit. But while it’s ostensibly about restoring pride of place to the residents—and attracts 275,000 visitors a year to an area that people were once afraid to walk through—it still feels like the deeply personal work of its creator, eliciting a conflicting stew of reactions.

Heidelberg St. is not simply a feel-good restoration project; there is a palpable anger on the flip-side of its hopeful communitarian face, backed by an affinity for the grotesque. Guyton’s paintings on salvaged planks of wood, his welded sculptures and conceptual set pieces (stray, incongruous items assembled together just so, like the flag and phone on ironing board at top), riff on themes such as war, displacement, addiction and poverty almost as often as they seem to engage in pure silly fun. And because Guyton has a fixation for certain objects and images—brightly-coloured polka dots, painted numbers, shoes, chairs, crudely drawn faces, television sets, children’s dolls, stuffed animals, the word “God”, telephones, bicycles—there’s a perverse kind of unity to the whole scene.

Guyton was there while Mike and I were milling around on Heidelberg St. We introduced ourselves; he was polite and asked where we were from, but he was obviously preoccupied with the next idea he was working on. It’s a never-ending piece, a fragile, self-contained world, that he obsessively keeps adding to.

(Note: We’ll throw up more images from the Heidelberg Project in coming days.)

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Many are now looking to Detroit as an indicator of what many struggling cities in America’s post-industrial northeast may soon look like—or in the case of Cleveland, already do (see the feature in last week’s New York Times Magazine on how Cleveland is dealing with the foreclosure crisis). TIME Magazine has just posted a photo essay by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre on Detroit’s many derelict, long vacant, but once magnificent twentieth century buildings (Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline).

(Photo: Michigan Central Depot, from Forgotten Detroit)

In addition to visiting the Heidelberg Project, we spent a couple hours scoping out the architectural decay. The most iconic of its ruins is probably the Michigan Central Depot, once the city’s main train station, now a hollowed-out shell that really does look like the last building left in a war zone. (When you cross the Ambassador Bridge and go through Customs it’s one of the first things you notice—this stolid, once stately, monolithic slab you can see right through.) A Detroit preservationist who hosts an excellent web archive called Forgotten Detroit, says, “I like to view [the MCD] as the ultimate symbol of the automobile’s complete triumph over public transportation.” Which, thanks to recent events, gives the building a whole new layer of irony, tragedy and resonance.

Maybe the MCD needs a Heidelberg Project of its own. Hell, so does the whole city. For that matter, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more Heidelberg Projects—ingenious, intensely personal, quotidian stand-offs against the backdraft of history—all across the country.

[Photo: Zingerman's Delicatessen, Michael Takasaki]

I’ve dreamed of visiting Ann Arbor, Michigan for years. Because that’s where Zingerman’s Delicatessen is. As soon as I read co-founder Ari Weinzweig’s book Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating, I knew I had to go.

Last week, on the way back from Indiana with Chris, I finally made it. There was a sandwich involved, of course: a traditional, perfect Reuben. I realized ten minutes after finishing that I hadn’t even thought to add mustard, as I usually would. That should be the new test: if it makes you forget condiments, it’s a proper sandwich. It’s also an expensive sandwich. At $14.50 for a large, if I lived in Ann Arbor I’d be fat(ter) and poor(er).

You can eat for a lot less, too. As I gawked at the cheeses, a counter guy bounded out, asking what I wanted to taste. How about the $15/oz Spanish jamon iberico de bellota? The Iowa-raised, acorn fed Berkshire prosciutto I’d just read about in the New York Times? (“The best ham Jews have ever made,” according to the counter guy.) How about the farmhouse cheddars from Neal’s Yard Dairy in England, source of the filling for what Ruth Reichel deemed “the platonic ideal of the cheese sandwich”? No problem. Each sample is accompanied by a lesson in the where and the how of the thing.

Eventually I opt for a single $8 ounce of the Iowa acorn ham and some of the Neal’s Yard cheddar. But I want some bread as well. Nothing big—just enough for breakfast the next day. A half-baguette is suggested. Then I’m simply given a whole one. At the register, the cashier tells me, “That’s the best thing about coming at the end of the night: you almost always get something for free.”

They close at ten. If you’re likely to drop a bundle like I did, aim for nine-thirty and at least you might get a free brownie. If you don’t, you’ll still leave happy. And full.

[Photo: First Christ Church, Eliel Saarinen, 1942]

Indiana Detour: Took a day away from the China in Africa symposium to check out the southern Indiana town of Columbus, which is a little-known hub of 20th century architectural showpieces, boasting buildings by Eliel Saarinen, Harry Weese, Gunnar Birkerts, Eero Saarinen, and several Pritzker Prize-winners including I.M Pei, Kevin Roche and Robert Venturi. Was a sunny, spring-like day, perfect for wandering among these mostly modernist articulations in brick, glass, concrete and steel, thinking about form and function, and what connection it all has to the people who live here.

The diptych above shows off Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen’s First Christ Church, which was completed in 1942 and helped kick off the town’s conscientious embrace of modernism in Hoosier country. The main building and clock tower—in-laid with glass tiles ascending one side—are Scandinavian solemn without being austere, demonstrating an easy gracefulness and humanism that at times makes its precise lines almost appear to bend in the afternoon light.

Other notable sights include a couple by Eliel’s son Eero Saarinen: Irwin Union Bank (1954), an elegant single-story glass and steel square, the transparency and lightness of which was an anodyne to the reigning convention of bank as neoclassical stone fortress; and the ready-for-lift-off geometrics and otherworldliness of North Chrisitan Church (1964)—staring at it long enough I began to hear Arvo Pärt music in my head.

[Photo: North Christian Church, Eero Saarinen, 1964]

The town’s quality of design is the legacy of the late J. Irwin Miller of Cummins Inc., a local diesel engine manufacturer and still the area’s largest employer. Miller introduced a program in which his company would pay the architect’s fees for any new building in Columbus provided that the client select the architect from a list Miller supplied. (No open competitions here.) As a result more than 60 notable projects were financed, many of them high schools, fire stations, churches and corporate offices. Miller also created a foundation to subsidize new works in the city by promising, younger architects. Today, the American Institute of Architects ranks Columbus (pop. 40,000) sixth in the country for innovation and architectural importance, behind Chicago, Washington, New York, Boston and San Francisco.

What’s worth seeing is spread wide across the sprawling town, but there’s a cluster at its downtown core—many of the modernist pieces facing across well-preserved 19th century commercial blocks, almost all of their shops and offices currently occupied. Which suggests that Columbus’s historic downtown has not been eroded by the decades of economic decline that’s afflicted much of the state. Nor has it been hollowed out by newer mall, box store and commercial developments nearer to the Interstate freeway and other regional highways, as has happened to most small and medium-sized cities across North America.

While I was poking around Columbus’s downtown, however, it was pretty much dead, aside from a couple packs of well-behaved skateboarders who were most interested in a new four-story parking garage. It was a Saturday, but still, I’d expect the area not to be entirely evacuated. Aside from a few bars, most establishments were closed. Everything so well-kept, the glass panes polished and trimmings freshly painted, it made the dubious impression of a Potemkin village.

More scribblings from recent trip to New York City, in part for book-related research. & in part to confirm that what happened on November 4 actually did happen. (Pics from Lisa K.)

November 10, 2008
Paying sporadic attention to the news one item stands out: Gun and ammo sales are booming surging (insert your own punning headline here). It would appear some folks are afraid that the new socialist president is intent on stripping the citizenry of their armaments, so they’re stock-piling. A store in Houston reported that sales on the Saturday preceding election day were seven times higher than for a typically healthy one.

We hit a few more galleries and the trip’s art highlight ends up being the exhibition DOWN by Kehinde Wiley at Deitch Projects. Seven monumentally-scaled paintings that riff on historical images of fallen religious and warrior icons by situating urban black men in heroic poses—sacrificial, ecstatic, sanctified while often tricked out in bling and hip hop gear. The colours vibrate and the scenes are startling for being both so modern graphic and yet classical; epochal mashups enhanced by the floating latticework of textile patterning (patterns based on the kind of designs once found on African-produced textiles for the European market). They’re subversive but seem to have a sense of humour about themselves. And their scale is overwhelming; the largest painting is 24 feet across.

We also check out shows by Andreas Gursky, Phillipe Parreno, Zak Smith and Bill Jacobson.

Which has me wondering: how goeth the art market? Not well I discover by perusing the previous day’s New York Times.

“Works by a wide range of artists failed to sell at a Christie’s auction in New York [on November 5], and items that did go fetched disappointing prices… The contagion has infected the art world. Collections from the estates of two New York philanthropists were expected to generate at least $104 million in sales; they brought in $47 million.”

Tuesday, November 11
President George Bush is in town for Veteran’s Day.

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It’s estimated that New York has already lost 45,000 finance-related jobs. Those terminated can console themselves at one of the now hot & happening Pink Slip Parties, which function as both networking events and drunken gripe-fests. Beer comes cheap at only $2 for a Bud. Former hedge-fund manager Mike Grimm said farewell to a $500,000 annual salary only a couple weeks ago. Mike tells the New York Post: “No one is an investor anymore. Everyone’s a speculator.”

Wednesday, November 12
Several interviews today, but the one most pertinent to current events is with William Easterly, an economist at New York University who specializes in development and foreign aid. In his book The White Man’s Burden he gamely takes on the many failings of not only traditional development models and big-letter aid agencies, but also the overly ambitious and technology-centred solutions proposed by Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Development Goals. He’s not saying the Goals are themselves are unworthy, only that the methods we keep employing to get there don’t work. Easterly pushes for a more modest, flexible, bottom-up, trial-and-error approach that considers what works in one political, cultural and economic context may not necessarily work in another.

But Easterly doesn’t restrict his criticism to well-meaning NGOs and international development agencies. He’s pointing out all the ways in which our interventions have gone awry in the developing world, which includes the sorts of policies forced upon countries by the IMF and World Bank, through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and the like. Which brings us to the current moment—the IMF had been struggling to overcome its bad reputation and make itself relevant again when the financial crisis landed its lap. Now it’s suddenly an active lender again, to Iceland, Pakistan, Hungary, Ukraine, and others. I asked Easterly what he thought about the return of the IMF.

“I’m afraid they’re going to go back to the old models—the course of conditionalities. The anti-globalization types who talk about neo-liberal economic policies as such a bad thing, I sympathize with them a lot but disagree at the same time. On one hand I believe that a lot of neo-liberal economics is common sense, time-tested stuff that works in the long-run to promote prosperity… But it’s not some kind of ideological dogma that you rigidly apply, and it’s certainly not something to be coercively imposed by outsiders. Because the moment something goes wrong, and things always go wrong along the way, you get a wave of xenophobic populists come to power who say it’s all the fault of evil foreigners and their ideas. You’ve just set back the cause of trying to find sensible ideas for economic management. Instead you get this pendulum of extremes.”

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Afterward, I make the move from hotel to home, relocating myself and travelling things to a friend’s place on the Upper West Side. But there is bad news: Her husband was laid off today from the company where he had worked for ten years. The economy in general, and slumping sales in particular, were cited as the reasons why. Over dinner he’s distracted and not very hungry; he keeps migrating to his laptop as he’s sent out some messages to friends and family, and, I suppose, is seeking some comfort or counsel in their replies. As he’s a foreign national, there is also the matter of his soon-to-be cancelled work visa. And they have a one-year-old baby.

Thursday, November 13
George Bush is still in New York. As if to say: you won’t be rid of me so easily! He’s making a speech to a forum hosted by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which I’m watching simulcast on a local television station. It takes a vigorous bout of arm pinching for me to again re-affirm the utter meltdown of the past couple months. And there’s Bush delivering his dispatch from bizarro world: on the one hand he’s justifying his administration’s de facto nationalization of many major U.S. banks while advising against any new substantive measures to regulate global financial markets.

He insists that the crisis “was not a failure of the free market system,” but, presumably, some greedy, loose nuts operating inside of it. Which sounds something like the argument that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” while neglecting to mention the regulatory conditions and business culture that enabled/encouraged the reckless behaviour.