One of the reasons frequently cited for the bailout of the American car manufacturers was the strategic, and perhaps nostalgic, role they played/play in national security and defense. Someone asked: Who builds the tanks these days? I don’t really know, but here‘s some of the past.
via things magazine
N55.
I am not sure why this appeared suddenly in my stream of connections. Wherever it came from, I think it caught me for a couple of reasons. When I was a kid, there was a small column in the local papers called, if i remember correctly, “Vessel sightings” that recording in a very simple code, the movement of major ships up the Detroit River. And there was the story my father and brother told me one day.
There is a mailboat on the Detroit River in the Detroit area that, people tell me, is the only way that sailors on commercial and other major vessels can get snailmail along the entire St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes.
Whatever other reference got me here, it immediately evoked memories, envious memories, of the story my father and little brother told me after they had had the opportunity one day to hitch a ride on the J. W Westcott as it made a delivery many years ago.
The freighters that make their way up the river are from all over the world. From my office, in a tower on the riverfront, I can watch them as if slow-moving buildings sliding past the city, some of them 3 or more city-blocks long and stories high.
The Westcott is a 45-foot tug-like boat that makes its deliveries in thrillingly dynamic action in the middle of the Detroit River. Heading out to meet one of these monsters, the Westcott has not only the river current, weather, and speed of the freighter to contend with (no, they don’t stop), but also the force of the wake that these massive ships toss out, both repelling anything that gets close, as well as sucking in anything that gets too close.
But this is the effective dynamic of the Westcott. Heading our into the river, its captain first gauges the speed of the freighter. Finding a target location on the side of its huge hull, the captain guns the engines of the Westcott on a broadside collision path with the big boat.
Once over the wake, the Westcott’s captain, now caught in its influence has to suddenly spin the boat onto a parallel path with the freighter. At this point, the smaller boat, almost uncontrollable, is sucked into the wake and slammed up against the steel side if this massive moving vessel.
Now riding in tandem, a sailor on the big boat drops a line to the deck of the Westcott. The captain ties on the mailbag and the sailor lifts the boat’s mail up onto deck.
To escape this threateningly intimate embrace, the captain now, again, throttles up to maximum speed and, with engines racing and a rapid spin of the wheel, pulls from the big boat and over its wake into the main stream.
I remember the thrill of my brother and father in the telling, and I cannot imagine a theme park ride more exciting.
Returning home empty-handed from a recent several-hours foray into the local manifestation of the global economy—Christmas shopping at the malls and local downtowns—I found myself yearning for something we have very little of around here: local stores selling the works of local producers.
Wandering the malls with the realization that Somerset, and Michigan Avenue, and Fifth Avenue, and so many others sold the same stuff here as there and there and there, I felt the frustration of being unable to be imaginative and thoughtful, and the disappointment of being unable to express my appreciation for others in this season with something original, select, and authentic.
Later that day, I was cruising through my subscriptions. and hit KK*. Kevin Kelly is a Wired magazine founder, has been doing a reprise of his 1998 book, New Rules for the New Economy, on his website.
The key premise of this book is that the principles governing the world of the soft–the world of intangibles, of media, of software, and of services–will soon command the world of the hard–the world of reality, of atoms, of objects, of steel and oil, and the hard work done by the sweat of brows. Iron and lumber will obey the laws of software, automobiles will follow the rules of networks, smokestacks will comply with the decrees of knowledge. If you want to envision where the future of your industry will be, imagine it as a business built entirely around the soft, even if at this point you see it based in the hard.
Kelly argued that “plenitude drives value.” He pointed to three key new rules for the new economy—”It is global. It favors intangible things–ideas, information and relationships. And it is intensely interlinked.”
However, this is also a week that wraps up a rather incredible year. Bernie Madoff has made off with $50 billion of others’ money in an extraordinary graft, the White house has stingily granted $14 billion to preserve auto manufacturing and jobs in the country, Hank Paulson is on his way to spending $700 billion to restore a global financial system that is doing nothing to restore an economy, and Barak Obama’s ambitious program to create 3 million jobs now looks feeble as the fallout from the excesses of virtual plenitude is predicted to cost over 4 million jobs.
It is yet early in the new cycle to see what trend there is in reaction to this very dangerous and fragile economy we are now in. But this reaction, combined with the interest in sustainability, and the “practical” rather than :ideological” character of the new administration, might all be pointing to a rewrite of those “new rules.”
My suggestions—
Kelly subtitled his book, “Radical strategies for a connected world.” It will be interesting to see how sustainable these strategies are. Does the loss of plentude cause value to collapse, or does it reveal true value in the local, the tangible, and the social.
My wife and her great work.
SALT (sôlt), n. Sodium chloride (NaCl):
a semi-transparent granular substance
company concept:
The company name, saltlabs, makes for a good word tango as it relates to my various products.
Salt: for its surface resemblance to the glass objects I make; for the transparency it evokes; for its global and historic use as a trading commodity; and for it being an essential element of life.
Labs: to denote my “experimental” interest in diversifying my products through combining, testing and trying new things – all for the fun of it. No scientific stuff here.
Salt is indigenous to Michigan and part of our local legacy in Detroit. The Detroit Salt Company still mines salt under the City of Detroit. We live with a virtual city of salt under our feet.
handmade and vintage/global products:
The focus: my own “handmade-in-detroit” products, plus vintage/global products – hand made by others – that reflect good design, and authenticity.
The objective: a mix of old and new; of well-traded, well-worn artifacts vs. the simple & modern. Each fuels my design sense in different ways. Both co-exist in my home & work environment.
product design:
This site’s “handmade” products are original in design and handmade by me, Robbi Lindeman.
The product designs are based on images I collect, redesign and print. Transfer application varies per product. Inherent in handmade objects are occasional minor imperfections that are meant to be part of their uniqueness and appeal.
New designs and product are introduced whenever possible. Keep an eye out for them – by browsing my product menu. Use the shop menu to make a purchase.
Recently there has been this and this about the disappearing reality of the city.
One of the more exquisite programs to come to television, only to die for its quality, was “EZ Streets.” (1996)
Among the most compelling images on the program was in its opening credits (as I remember them). A helicopter shot…circling over a city, one sees a closer and closer vision of devastation as the camera descends to the scene of the core action. At first you see a recognizable urban pattern, but then the camera reveals block after block of urban decay, focusing eventually on blocks of six, or three, or one standing house or building.
This place—the never-recovered city of Detroit after the 1967 riots—featured prominently in this very dark program about civic corruption. Among the most memorable scenes in the series took place in an abandoned (aren’t they all now) Albert Kahn designed factory. A newly-elected, young, first black mayor of the city, standing among the cadence of concrete-capitaled columns, has his family threatened unless he votes for the casino initiative in the city.
I remember, as then-president of Detroit’s AIA chapter, calling Dennis Archer, a new, but not the first, black mayor of the city, to offer the organization’s site-selection and zoning assistance after he threw his support behind a new casino initiative. This was about three years after this scene appeared on “EZ Streets.”
Now, more than ten years later, Detroit’s latest mayor is in jail, one of the three licensed casinos is in bankruptcy, Congress has denied funds for the sustainability of the city-sustaining automobile industry, and the city lacks the funds to demolish the abandoned and progressively collapsing houses I have seen on my drive to work every day for the past decade, that represent the move of more than a million—more than a million!—people from this city in the past generation.
When I was working on the design of the Chrysler Technical Center —the move of the auto maker from Detroit’s Highland Park neighborhood to the suburbs beginning a decade earlier in 1988—we often talked about planning for that which was left behind in the city. One of the more startling images was offered by a Chrysler exec, “We should turn Highland Park into a cornfield,” he said. “Everybody wants to build in a cornfield.”
I think I’ll start planting.
It’s hard to reconcile this image with the GM defense as reported in today’s New York Times:
Today, a top GM executive and the head of the United Auto Workers defended GM’s management this morning, saying that the near collapse of the company can’t be blamed on chairman and chief executive G. Richard Wagoner, Jr., and that his departure should not be made a condition of federal assistance.
Singling out Wagoner “is like blaming the mayor of a city hit by an earthquake,” GM vice chairman Robert A. Lutz said in an interview on business cable network CNBC this morning. Noting the global collapse of demand for new cars and the slowdown in the U.S. and other major economies, Lutz said that calls for Wagoner’s resignation was “in the category of some sort of sacrifice to the gods . . . If we punish some of the innocents things will get better.”
In a separate interview on the cable channel, UAW president Ron Gettelfinger also came to Wagoner’s defense, saying of the industry’s immediate crisis, “I don’t know how you can blame that on the management . . . I am not sure removing an executive is going to clear up the problem.”
