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by David Roth and David Raposa

David Raposa: So did you see my public plea to read Frank Deford’s abominable plan to destroy baseball?

David Roth: I feel for him. I like Frank Deford as an idea, and sometimes as a writer. I will always ride for an old sportswriter who rocks elbow-patch blazers and acts like someone who rocks elbow-patch blazers. There will not be more like him. It’s not like Gregg Doyel is ever going to lose the TapouT tees and Thousand Island-magnet facial hairs and somehow age into class. So it’s a drag to see Old Frank trolling.

David Raposa: Even with the well-maintained moustache, pomade, and monogrammed cigarette case, he’s only a few cheap shots and pejoratives away from being fully optimized for an “Around The Horn” guest spot.

David Roth: And that’s a drag. Getting Woody Paige Pringle-spittle all over him. Deford, at this point, should just be doing his thing, not working as some sort of sports-journo Walmart greeter. He should be sipping old-fashioned vermouth-y cocktails and writing at his leisure about going to steakhouses with Alvin Dark while Eisenhower was president. Still, the piece is terrible and I don’t know who really thinks baseball needs tinkering-with right now.

David Raposa: You mean besides the man that has an exhibition game decide home-field advantage in the World Series, makes the Padres play the Mariners every summer, and thinks George Will has worthwhile baseball opinions?

David Roth: Oh, Bud. He just needs something to do. But the game works — it’s fun if you like baseball, the teams and league make money, and it kept Milton Bradley off our streets for, like, 12 years. It’s not the most popular sport in the country anymore, but I think that’s mostly attributable to the populace getting worse, and (thus?) more NFL-friendly.

David Raposa: Exactly. The problem with baseball isn’t that it’s not like football (or the NHL, which: really, Frank?). It’s that it WANTS to be like football, at the expense of its innate baseball-ness. I can’t think of a sport whose long, leisurely regular season better complements its general mien than baseball. Though (cheap shot alert) watching football every week does make me feel like I’ve been repeatedly concussed and chop-blocked.

David Roth: Also, and this is saddest: no one really cares about this particular conflict. Frank Deford’s wingtipped ass certainly doesn’t care. Also, Deford has to know that owners aren’t giving up a month of ticket sales and concessions. So it’s silly for that reason, too. We have now written more words on the piece than he did.

David Raposa: Granted, he has a limited space to fill. I imagine he listens to folks like Susan Stamberg and the “Planet Money” team rattle on and on about jewelry makers or upside-down mortgages and wonders how many times he has to get on HBO to earn ten Inskeep-introduced minutes on Rafael Nadal and The Return Of Tennis. Or the overwhelming non-statistical excellence of Jeff Mathis. You quoted me some stat off-chat a few days ago about Mathis’ pitcher-like ineptitude?

David Roth: Yeah, he’d rank 10th in OPS among pitchers with 50 plate appearances. Mostly I was just lonely. But I fondly remember a time when all catchers were like that, except for Lance Parrish and Gary Carter. Now we’ve got all these fancy new catchers that don’t have .244 on-base percentages and don’t slam tall boys in the dugout during games. Dave Valle and Tim Laudner would serve wedgies to these new dandies all day.

David Raposa: I love me some competent hitters, but I do miss the Tony Pena splits.

David Roth: I think the risk-unto-certitude of significant testicular trauma has led to its demise. But yes, it was exciting to watch.

David Raposa: What do you think all that equipment is for, though? Style points? Rollerball auditions? If your marbles are getting in the way, then you need to do a better job choosing your groupies.

David Roth: I read “groupies” as a euphemism for “balls,” there. But what I mean is that if there’s a reason to be sad about better stats — as a certain kind of sportswriter invariably is — it’s that we don’t get to see outlier scrubeens like Ron Karkovice get thousands of big-league plate appearances. Which reminds me, any luck getting Karkovician into the Oxford English Dictionary?

David Raposa: Wow, an actual negative OPS+!

David Roth: If you will it, it is no dream, dude.

David Roth: At the risk of romanticizing shitty things, I liked that every team used to just have these weird random forklift-driver first basemen or catchers with Civil War mustaches in the lineup. It made for worse baseball, but it also made teams more like actual workplaces, which I think isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Every office I’ve been in, there has been a guy with weird scars that he needs to explain to you — “it was one of those old Xerox machines, with a lot of razors in it” — or some dude who never blinked and had a really idiosyncratic take on certain books of the Bible or a pale person with a novel of supernatural erotica that keeps getting left on the printer. Major League lineups need those guys, too.

David Raposa: I almost think it’s less that those types aren’t around, and more that those types don’t get the focus. There are more than a few heffalumps roaming the baseball veldt. And plenty of sartorial facial mishaps.

David Roth: Yes on the facial malpractice, of course. The Reds bullpen, earlier this year, looked like time travelers from Andersonville who had suddenly and inexplicably been thrust into situational lefty roles. But there are fewer old-timey wind-machine “sluggers” or no-hit/no-field humps, I think. Although you know what? Maybe I am wrong.

David Raposa: The Fraternity of Backup Catchers will forever be on some Jimmy Hoffa shit.

David Roth: Basically as long as Brian Sabean has a job there will be a few of these old-school sucktards out there.

David Raposa: You mean the GM that would be starting the most-excellent Buster Posey right now if not for a broken leg? I’m all for giving Sabean’s vet fetish a public airing, but give Ned Coletti his due. Hell, he had Joe Torre turn one of the good ones (Russell Martin) into a craptastic banjo hitter seemingly overnight, AND traded a potential keeper (Carlos Santana) for a middleweight third basemen!

David Roth: All true. If Coletti didn’t exist, the Mets would be bankrupt by now. There but for the grace of God and Ned Coletti are the Mets not somehow paying Andruw Jones $24 million this year.

David Roth: Also Andruw Jones would weight 315 pounds if he were a Met. He would look and hit like Madea.

David Raposa: I admire Andruw’s dedication to inertia, though. He put away the Shake Weights and the protein powders, and simply let the ravages of time and sloth have their way with his preternatural athletic gifts.

David Roth: He got one last contract and then basically decided to embark on his own self-produced season of “Man v. Food.” I imagine him making “slugger shakes” in the morning based around lite mayo, Malibu and frozen mozzarella sticks.

David Raposa: I only wish I had the ability to cultivate that kind of potbelly.

David Roth: You kind of need to be an athlete to get big in that way.

David Raposa: Yeah — you must’ve once possessed a fine-tuned metabolism used to burning 8000 calories a day to be able to go large that majestically. Just replace the wind sprints with Wendy’s, and it’s go-time at the Big (Not Tall) store!

David Roth: So the guy the Orioles got for Mike Gonzalez at the it-really-doesn’t-count-after-this trade deadline is named Pedro Strop, which is a great name for a human and a terrible name for a band.

David Raposa: I heard the lead singer from Jenifer Convertible’s new band is called Pedro Storp — so close!

David Roth: Just seeing Jenifer/Jennifer Convertibles makes me want to address this season-long Bob’s Discount Furniture issue I have. But I am not going to do it because it is narrowcasting except to point out that Bob could’ve taken his cellphone bra/holster thing off for the commercial maybe? And also those commercials look like they got shot in Keir Dullea’s bedroom from the end of 2001, there’s so much white space involved.

David Raposa: So you’re saying Bob is The Starchild with a two-car garage?

David Roth: And a creeper beard, yeah. Do you have the MLB Season Ticket? And if so have you gotten to see local-market commercials on different broadcasts?

David Raposa: Yes! Though I have to say, I’ve been numbed to their charms over the years.

David Roth: The Mets have had some choice ones this year. There’s one targeted entirely at older women in ethnic-white Queens. A father-and-son duo of Vincent Pastore impersonators talking about plastic awnings, and these older ladies saying things like “Order these awnings. YOU’LL BE PLEASED.”

David Raposa: I’ve seen a more suburban version of that, except they’re for sun porches, they’re retractable, their prospective owners brew their own iced tea with lemon wedges the size of frisbees, and they’re the perfect accompaniment for the Crate & Barrel furniture you paid too much for.

David Roth: When I was young, that was all NJ cable was. Cheap/freaky puppets trying to get you to go to family-style Italian restaurants. Smutty-ish commercials for hot dog places. A great many uncomfortable-looking Italian men and their kids pitching dinettes and crummy paisley couches.

David Raposa: I’m happy there are still local businesses out there that can’t find people to semi-naturally read a cue card. “If John Boehner can do it, so can my 15-year-old daughter!”

David Roth: A nation of aspiring Papa Johns.

David Raposa: Most of the local joints that I can recall from around my parts were simply semi-servicable semi-awkward attempts to sell cars. And then there’s Good Old Tom?

David Roth: Disturbing, but great musical score by The Funereal Synths

David Raposa: I can’t wait to nominate them for Best New Music-dom! And speaking of music…

David Raposa: Please note the tune in the background. This must’ve been made before Debussy got those Ocean’s 11 dollars.

David Roth: Tom is basically what I imagine Drayton McLane to be like. Only instead of “I’m cleaning out my jewelry box,” it’s “I’m Brandon Lyon, and I’m mostly pretty terrible when I’m not hurt.” And instead of $500, Tom gives you $12 million over three years.

David Raposa: “I gave Drayton a heavy-set Miguel Tejada, and he gave me tens of millions of dollars! Good Old Drayton!”

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

David Raposa writes about music for Pitchfork and other places. He used to write about baseball for the blog formerly known as Yard Work. He occasionally blogs for himself, and he also tweets way too much.href=”http://www.jockish.com”>Yard Work

. He occasionally blogs for himself, and he also tweets way too much.

Photo by Keith Allison.

Back in 2008, one brave lone American tried to make Matthew Vadum famous for his views. But do you know who Matthew Vadum is? Perhaps you do not! You are not even following his rude Twitter. Here’s something Matthew Vadum wrote this week:

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.

Good stuff! (via)

“Every time anyone says the words ‘crazy’ or ‘baby’ in any of her songs. In chronological order.”

Today’s the last day to vote for SxSW panels!!! Freak out on it! You too can help set an agenda for conversations you will likely not attend. Let’s game this system. NO WAIT, LET’S GAMIFY THIS SYSTEM!

“Are brands social listening or just social hearing?” “What happens to Nyan cat after we stop looking?” “Does being a designer suck?” These and 3000 other questions await you. If you won’t answer them, WHO WILL?

by Drew Magary

When I was in school, I was forced to read any number of books that I hated. By this method, schools do a pretty solid job of turning off many kids from reading for good. God forbid you should read anything “fun,” or “readable,” or “not boring and shitty.” No, no: It’s a steady diet of Johnny Tremain and opaque Toni Morrison novels for you. Your assignment tonight is to read 70 pages of Song of Solomon, or slit your wrists and never come back to school. LEARNING.

Everyone has a classic book, one that’s adored by English teachers and hipsters the world over, that they can’t stand. I don’t think you should feel guilty about it. I don’t think you should be forced year after year to sit in silence while other people rhapsodize about a classic book you secretly despised. Here are three such books I never want to see again.

THE GREAT GATSBY

Not only did this book cause people to think that rich people are interesting (they aren’t), it essentially created the entire modern “white people problems” class of novel that still persists to this day. OOOOH, LOOGIT ME! I’M JAY GATSBY AND I’M FILTHY RICH AND I THROW HUGE PARTIES BUT MY HEART STILL ACHES FOR THE ONE GIRL I CAN’T BANG! Way to go, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Way to cause every rich Ivy League douchebag out there to throw white parties and drive while shit-faced. I hate you. Did you know that Baz Luhrmann is making a movie out of this, and that it’s going to be in 3D? And that it’s going to be fucking horrible? There is nothing good about a book that inspires the Moulin Rouge! guy to make a movie no one wanted in a format no one likes. I bet it features a six-minute musical number, because Baz Luhrmann is a shithead.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

There are paragraphs in this book that go on for DAYS. In fact, that seems like a staple or any and all Russian literature: NO PARAGRAPH BREAKS. Just an endless march through a literary gulag, with no stops for water or peepeeing. God forbid Dostoyevsky ever bother to hit the carriage return. No, no. Wouldn’t want to let the reader off easy like that. No, best to write paragraphs that are 10,000 words long, so that your eyes aren’t allowed to blink and re-moisten for 20 minutes at a time, until you just wanna find an old woman and bury an ax into her head. Let my eyes BREATHE, dick. When I was in school, everyone referred to books like this as “eating cement.” These are books that you have to sit there and just will yourself to digest, taking in page after goddamn page without remembering one single thing that you had just read. Oh, I tried absorbing the book. I really did. And when my teacher asked me a question about it and I gave him a blank stare because all that shit went over my head, it wasn’t because I had failed to read the book. I read it. Honest to God. But I took in NONE of it. They may as well have left it in the original Russian for me to read. And you know what? I just looked at an excerpt of it today for this piece and I still begin glazing over the words after two sentences.

THE HOBBIT
Why wasn’t Bilbo the one who killed the dragon? I spent hundreds of pages waiting for Bilbo to get to kill the dragon, and then what happens? Some random-ass Bard does the deed. From out of nowhere! What the fuck? Then everyone fights over the dragon’s estate, like it’s a goddamn episode of “Dallas” or something. Total bullshit. This is why we have Peter Jackson: To make these stories better. I don’t give a shit about the bureaucratic difficulties of an imaginary realm. THAT ISN’T THE FANTASY I HAD IN MIND.

Drew Magary writes for Deadspin, NBC, Maxim and Kissing Suzy Kolber — a humor site dedicated to the NFL. The Postmortal, now out from Penguin, is his first novel. You can follow Drew on Twitter.

We’re in the era of service economy, but the image of a back room filled with people frantically working the phones to confirm transactions feels redolent of the older era of manufacturing. Of course some parts of the country and many parts of the world are still in that era; in New York however the nostalgia for that time is palpable. Coming to the store I passed a huge banner advertising the TV show ‘Pan Am,’ a ‘Mad Men’-style spinoff celebrating America’s version of the Victorian era, starring (I was amazed to see) Christina Ricci. She once read slush for Open City, the magazine I edited, many years ago; her father was a Reichian therapist who practiced scream therapy and never realized that his otherwise soundproofed basement office had an air vent that led directly into her room. She’s been an actor with, I think, a genuinely interesting streak of deviance. It seems odd to see her in a show whose pitch meeting might have involved a phrase like, “It’s ‘Charlie’s Angels’ meets the Mile High Club!”

— Actually some thoughts on Steve Jobs.

I get all suspicious when I hear about a “growing outcry,” in the classic Times parlance. This particular “outcry” is said to have led to the cancelation of Mike Bloomberg’s weekly radio chatfest, and is over the resignation of deputy mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who is at least five different kinds of schmuck. (This is snowstorm removal failure dude!) The mayor’s office said he was leaving to pursue private sector work; but when Goldsmith resigned, he himself cited his recent arrest, which has now been made public. This “hiding” of a “crucial detail” (more Times parlance) has “engulfed his administration in controversy” and has “roiled New York’s political world.” (Sheesh, sounds like the Hindenburg hit City Hall!) So various future mayoral candidates (from Scott Stringer to Jon Liu) and some nonprofit folks and a couple of newspaper editorial boards are angry.

Goldsmith’s arrest was for “simple assault domestic violence.” (That’s the legal term of art in D.C., where he apparently resides, which…???) His wife (Dan Quayle’s cousin, which is so weird) did not press charges, for what that’s worth, and called the arrest “over my wishes,” which: sister, that’s what happens when you call the police and tell them your spouse is assaulting you, and there’s reasons for that? No takebacks! Also, perhaps you two should never see each other again, okay? But as for the rest of us? Dude resigned, and he was allowed to resign. And he is going to pursue private sector work! (I mean, he’s been pursuing private sector work throughout his tenure as deputy mayor, so.) As for the rest of his personal life (in… D.C.???), not really sure we all need to consume the tabloid report on his totally hideous and grotesque relationship. Is that terribly weird and old-fashioned? It’s not like he was hosting pit bull rings in his basement (in… D.C.!). Dude departed. Great, sounds like we’re rid of a hot mess. And while City Councilmember Letitia James’ point that “They tend to protect their own” is a good one, I do think if they were actually protecting their own they’d have refused his resignation and would be doing the exact same thing they are today (that is, not talking about it) and the administration would be “engulfed” and “roiled” and whatnot anyway.

“Since employment peaked in September 2008, local government has lost 550,000 jobs.”

— Hooray, America got its smaller government! Of those jobs, 345,000 disappeared in a year. But let’s not even get into these August employment numbers, just released. Why bother? It’s a long-term trend, the not-working, and that’s the way they (“they”!) want it.

It should perhaps however be noted that the August report does some serious correction on the June and July reports: “The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from +46,000 to +20,000, and the change for July was revised from +117,000 to +85,000.” So yeah, strike those 58,000 jobs that weren’t created this summer from the permanent record. Happy Labor Day.

by Willy Staley

Early this year, John Patrick Leary, a professor of American literature at Wayne State University, published a story in Guernica called “Detroitism” about, primarily, the two competing journalistic and artistic narratives about the Motor City.

There’s the Detroit Lament, which he describes as an examination of the city’s decline that is mostly told through the examination of physical spaces. You may have heard it referred to as “ruin porn.” And there’s the Detroit Utopia, stories which purport to show a new way forward for the city, be it through urban farming, $100 homes or bicycling. (Utopian depictions of Detroit, Leary noted, tend to involve young creative white people.)

Leary used the publication of two recent monographs of photographs Detroit’s ruins as a jumping-off point: Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled (now on view at the Queens Museum) and Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit. He identifies them as a part of a broader “Detroit culture boom,” which has included the massive proliferation of these two types of stories — those that declare that Detroit’s decline marks the end of American postwar prosperity, and those that suggest Detroit is coming back in ways that will create new kinds of prosperity — as well as expanded coverage on television (“Detroit 187”) and in film (Gran Torino).

One salient feature of the Detroit Utopia stories that Leary does not identify is the tendency to deny Detroit Lament stories of any and all claims to authenticity. Take, for example, this VICE Magazine article “Something, Something, Something, Detroit” with the subhed “Lazy Journalists Love Photos of Abandoned Stuff.” This story is an excellent example of this unique blend of media criticism and Detroit boosterism. It is singularly dismissive of the utility of photographing Detroit’s ruins.

The section below involves photographer James Griffioen, who, as it happens, takes pictures of abandoned buildings in Detroit for a living. (Griffioen says he doesn’t earn a living from this; he does sell them (you may inquire within!) but receives income from other sources, including his blog, which explains more.)

James [Griffioen] took me out to the grassy mound where he photographed a long shot of the abandoned elementary school. For several blocks on either side there’s nothing visible except waist-high grass and crumbling strips of asphalt.

“If you angle the camera the correct way it looks like you’re in the middle of nowhere — but then you turn a little to the right and there’s a well-maintained, fully functioning factory, and to the left there’s this busy office park. Still, people love to take this shot, crop it so it’s just prairie, and be like, ‘Look, this is a mile from downtown, it’s turned into woods.’”

The other problem with everybody on the prairie’s jock is nobody ever bothers to differentiate between which patches went to seed on their own and which had a little outside help.

“These blocks didn’t just fall apart by themselves, the city did this intentionally. They spent $15 million clearing everyone off the land so it could be used as an industrial park that stalled out.”

For those wondering what the logic of Do’s and Don’ts would look like applied to media criticism and urban policy instead of street fashion, here you have it: there are blocks upon blocks gone fallow, but, hey, there are one or two businesses still chugging along, and what’s more, the city spent millions of dollars to make some of these blocks empty with some future economic development plan in mind, but never followed through with it. Ta da: Detroit is doing just fantastic, thanks for asking, and to suggest otherwise with pen or camera is to deny reality.

This attitude typically comes from hip young urbanites who have good lives going for themselves in Detroit. Check out Part 1 of the Palladium Boots-sponsored Detroit Lives series, hosted by Jackass’ Johnny Knoxville, for more of this strange form of reality denial that takes place when you accuse others of denying reality. It opens with a rapid-fire series of soundbytes from “Artists” and “Musicians” talking about “ruin porn” and “pick-and-choose journalism.” One interviewee in particular, Ko of the Dirt Bombs, complains about a “story in the media” on Detroit’s renowned Cass Tech High School that focused on the abandoned old building that used to house the magnet school, and ignored the new campus right next door, which was completed in 2005. Perhaps the story was about the historical preservation battle that raged over the old building’s destruction, or that it was somewhat dangerous to have an abandoned high school across the street from an operating high school, but that does not matter to Ko — what matters is that journalists dared to turn their attention to the abandonment when there are occupied buildings and cool bands just as worthy of coverage.

After this opening salvo, the disembodied voice of Toby Barlow, professional Detroit booster, tells us that because Detroit has lost one million people over the last four decades, “As a human being you do have a sense of your own voice and your own physical presence and your own possibility. When you’re riding down a big, wide city boulevard and you’re the only thing on it you feel a little like The Omega Man. You know, it’s like, ‘I am here,’ you know, ‘This is my city!’” You and I know The Omega Man as I am Legend — it’s a postapocalyptic thriller. You see, it’s okay to invoke postapocalyptic imagery when discussing Detroit if you don’t benefit directly from the ruin and the waste in the form of a coffee table book.

And young hip Detroiters do benefit directly from the city’s abandonment. It’s a version of Brooklyn gentrification made all the more grotesque because it provides these people with a pedestal of righteousness to stand on and declare that there is nothing wrong with the city.

Immediately after Barlow speaks, a DJ/Producer tells us that the city of three-quarters of a million people is a “blank canvas,” an objectively false statement brutally lacking in history and context, which mirrors Leary’s critique of ruin photography and the Detroit Lament.

For Leary, one photo in particular encapsulates the “overwrought melodrama” typical of Detroit Lament photography (and journalism): a photo by Moore taken in a house now left open to the outdoors with a graffito that reads “God has left Detroit.” Ahistorical and contextless, the photo is little more than a visual “Whoa, bro.” Leary is right to point out: “Who ever said God was here in the first place?” (This is related to another valid criticism of “ruin porn” in its omission of people, another version of ahistoricism.)

Given all this bickering over who has the story right, what seems like a more reasonable question is: how many people have, overall, “left” Detroit? According to the US Census Bureau, a better graffito might read “237,500 people have left Detroit.” That’s what the numbers told us a few months back, and that’s why I’m packing my Jansport full of black Montana cans, a Holga and 20 rolls of 120 color slide film that I will have cross-processed for my monograph: The Number 237,500 Spray-Painted Onto Blighted Properties in Detroit, in Weird Colors with Shaved Negative Carrier.

The United States Constitution mandates that we make a count of ourselves every ten years so that we may properly apportion the number of Representatives in our lower house, and in more modern times, the Census also helps federal agencies divvy up their funding, some of which is doled out on a formula basis, in proportion with population. For a city, the most obvious of these is perhaps the Community Development Block Grant, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development gives out on a population formula basis — the smaller your city gets, the less money it receives.

Detroit, the Census Bureau tells us, lost 237,500 residents since the day we all woke up to discover the Y2K bug had not launched all of our nukes. That is about one-quarter of Detroit’s population circa 2000. Maybe they moved out, maybe they died, maybe they were out of town for the entire duration of the Census, maybe new arrivals just didn’t replace the various outgoing folks, but either way, our trusted temporary federal employees found that Detroit had shrunk a great deal more than it seems anyone expected. (Especially Detroit’s City Hall, who, in an unintentional hat tip to the year 2000, are demanding a recount.)

237,500 might not sound like much to someone in Chicago or Los Angeles, but in normal urban America, especially in the Midwest, that is a lot of people. Try this: Jersey City: population 247,597. Or try Orlando, FL, population 238,300, meaning such a loss would leave it with about 800 people, or approximately the number of horticulturalists that the city’s Magic Kingdom employs. Madison, WI, population 233,209, would not survive such devastation, but at least it would get rid of Scott Walker. Likewise, so long Providence, Salt Lake City, Richmond or Baton Rouge.

If the number of people who left Detroit in the last decade all moved to the same place, it would be America’s 80th largest city, and, assuming they didn’t also flee Michigan (which they probably did), it would be the second largest city in the state, behind Detroit. It would fall into that category of mid-size cities that no one feels that passionately about, that motley crew that consists of dusty state capitals, large municipalities in sprawling Southland metropolises, and the mill towns of early American industry in Upstate New York, Central Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, each of which seems to feature its own regional take on processed meat.

Not to retread the territory of a Detroit Lament, but on a visit to Detroit last November, it was hard not to notice the abandonment. You’ve likely seen photographs of the Michigan Central Depot and the remains of the Packard Plant, both of which have been closed for decades, but have you driven down the residential streets of the East Side — or the West Side for that matter — and seen a block pockmarked with fire blighted homes, or worse yet, blocks where you can see clear through to the next street? Grandiose and symbolic as the larger ruins are, the neighborhoods of Detroit tell the real story.

But what Detroit is doing with its neighborhoods, using federal funds, makes the debate over ruin porn even more interesting. The Neighborhood Stabilization Program, which was authorized under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2008, provides grant money to state and local governments to “acquire and redevelop foreclosed properties that might otherwise become sources of abandonment or blight within their communities.” In the first round of funding (there have been three), Detroit received $47 million, of which $16 million went towards demolition. HUD put a ten percent cap on the amount of funds that can be put toward demolition of blighted structures, but Detroit asked for and received a waiver that allowed for a thirty percent allocation.

Mayor Dave Bing announced his plan to take down 3,000 abandoned structures in one year a little more than a year ago, and he came close to meeting his goal. He plans to take down 10,000 blighted buildings by the end of his term. The mayor’s website has three links under the heading “Initiatives”: a job-creation project called Detroit Works, a volunteer project called Believe in Detroit — and then there is the Residential Demolition Program. This is absolutely central to the city’s plans for long-term stability, and they may very well be right — no one knows yet whether “rightsizing” really works.

We can take a brief look at how it works. Here is a list of addresses on one street in Detroit, West Robinwood Street, that Mayor Bing’s administration has planned to raze using federal funds:

151 W Robinwood, 184 W Robinwood, 192 W Robinwood, 215 W Robinwood, 223 W Robinwood, 231 W Robinwood, 440 W Robinwood, 446 W Robinwood, 447 W Robinwood, 454 W Robinwood, 457 W Robinwood, 462 W Robinwood, 48 W Robinwood, 480 W Robinwood, 500 W Robinwood, 506 W Robinwood, 512 W Robinwood, 525 W Robinwood, 533 W Robinwood, 541 W Robinwood, 556 W Robinwood, 561 W Robinwood, 576 W Robinwood, 590 W Robinwood, 618 W Robinwood, 64 W Robinwood, 674 W Robinwood, 680 W Robinwood, 681 W Robinwood, 690 W Robinwood.

I count 30. West Robinwood Street lies just inside of 7 Mile, east of Woodward Avenue, in a neighborhood called Grixdale Farms, which was subdivided and built in the 1920s and 30s on a man named John Grix’s land. The street exists for only two blocks — i.e., all those structures listed above are on two blocks — and runs right under where Grix’s farmhouse stood, if we can trust olde-timey maps; it ends where the nearby Palmer Park golf course’s front nine were built. Homes in Grixdale Farms, the neighborhood website tells us, “enjoy some of the best architectural elements available to middle class Americans in the early and mid 1900’s.”

You can see all of W. Robinwood here in this panorama made by none other than the above-mentioned James Griffioen: 60 of 66 structures on W. Robinwood are abandoned (let’s imagine James Griffioen interviewed by VICE: “But what about the other six!?”). Bing’s bulldozers will leave 30 abandoned structures standing, at least after phase one of the demolition.

Detroit is in such a position that the best thing it thinks it can do with a massive chunk of federal change is use it to tear down blight on streets like West Robinwood to save them for the people who still live there, but still leave behind a lot of blight. A necessary measure in the short term that offers very little in the long-term, “rightsizing,” as it is euphemistically called in planning circles, is little more than an urban mastectomy — vacant homes bring down surrounding home values, and provide safe haven for illicit activity, and are in this sense a cancer on the neighborhood. This is not some knowledge unique to urban planners and community activists, either. You can watch 8 Mile to see some citizen-led Detroit rightsizing: The movie’s hero and his friends identify a vacant home as the source of many neighborhood problems, specifically a recent rape, so they burn it down to prevent that from happening again.

What the characters of 8 Mile and Mayor Bing have in common is that they cannot offer Detroit a cogent vision for exactly what will happen to the neighborhood after the demolitions. While blight-as-cancer is a useful metaphor pre-demolition, it falls apart afterwards. Mayor Bing’s NSP3 plan — for the third round of NSP funding — allocates only $1.2 million for demolition, out of a $22 million grant, but also only allocates $1.5 million for redevelopment. Acquisition and rehabilitation get the lion’s share of the grant, with $17 million apportioned, which is fantastic news. But all that money can only fight blight, and blight actually isn’t the “cancer” itself but a secondary symptom of the actual illness that plagues the city — a lack of jobs, commerce, safety, and now, people. It’s not just that 237,500 people left in the last decade; overall, 1,135,791 left in the last six decades.

Now, after six decades of hucksterish boosterism — stadiums, casinos, Renaissance Centers! — Detroit has finally decided that it will have no massive reboot. The city is packing it in by tearing down thousands of vestiges of its old self, its gangrenous appendages that need to be amputated. It has finally come to terms with what it has become.

All that our college-educated neophyte boosters have to offer us is denial of this diagnosis, and denial prevents treatment. Those who deny Detroit’s illness benefit from it; and they have created a sexy counterargument (even using the word porn!) that dismisses all documentation of Detroit’s decline out of hand, claiming the moral high ground while doing so.

Recently, a rapper from Detroit, Danny Brown, has made a strong case for ruin porn being not only a worthwhile, compelling art, but that it is also the best way of describing the reality. He isn’t moralistic about it, either. If anything, he sounds frustrated. On the back half of his latest offering, XXX, Brown gets a bit more serious, eschewing his punchlines about blowjobs and cheap beer for downbeat ballads about substance abuse, some of which are quite personal. From there, he has two back-to-back tracks about the Motor City’s current state, which are nothing short of devastating.

“Fields” comes first, where Danny, on the hook, describes the rhythm of what it’s like to drive down a block in Detroit: “And where I lived, it was house, field, field. Field, field, house, abandoned house, field, field.” He recollects memories from his childhood, mentioning an old friend’s house, which he describes as “just another shortcut to the store.”

The next track, “Scrap or Die” is where Danny makes things even more interesting, as we find out what his role is in all this blight. It takes the form of a street rap standby: the crime story track. But instead of telling another tale about a motel-room heist or a harrowing trip down the 95 corridor with a trunk full of coke, Danny describes in detail the process of stealing scrap metal from abandoned houses, and selling it at junkyards.

Tonight’s that night we about to get right
piled up in the van with a couple flashlights
metal crowbar gon’ get us through the door
take everything, nigga, fuck the landlord
so now we at the place skullies on bare-faced
bout to leave this bitch bare, strip the whole damn place
my Unc’ took outside, he stripping out the gutters
so we inside tearing up this motherfucker
bust open the walls just to get the wiring
took the hot water tank and leftover appliances
aluminum siding, and had to come back
cause the furnace so big it wouldn’t fit in the back

From the abandoned house, Danny takes his loot to the junkyard, where he gets shorted by the man running the operation. As he and his uncle go to steal computers from a shuttered school (Detroit, by the way, has made plans to close half of their public schools by 2014) he gets caught by police. One more hook, and the song is over.

This is the life of one musician from Detroit. It doesn’t sound like he thinks its ruin provides a great landscape for creativity. While Mayor Bing has planned to destroy Detroit to save Detroit, Danny must destroy Detroit to save himself.

And so the city is in such a state that it is destroying itself through both formal and informal channels, and the two may be feeding into one another in ways it might take decades to understand.

With so much of Detroit about to disappear, does this not provide us with an excellent opportunity to document that which we will not be able to document in the near future? Instead of decrying voyeurism, why not consider these photographs and stories a reminder that in America we actually do abandon our neighbors and let our cities die, time and time again.

That, or we can just read about Slow’s Bar-B-Q every few months. Have your pick.

Willy Staley also has a Tumblr.

Photo by Emily Flores.