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For Charlie From Ferndale 2067

January 11, 2021 By Tim Aten 2 Comments

My greatest teacher in 2020 was the two year old kid down the street.

I made a film for him.

In the spirit of community (an instance where social media can be an enabling and empowering platform) I need to thank Ryan Maffesoli for collaborating with his incredible footage of Ferndale, Michigan last summer and of the Black Lives Matter marches in the spring.

I splurged and purchased a Yeti Blue Microphone. It made a huge improvement in mixing from previous projects. I like the effects from MotionVFX which I used to try and enforce the vibrant and warmth felt last summer on my block. I also discovered the vast catalog of collaborators on So undCloud who so readily share music via Creative Commons.

While the piece is inspired by King’s conception of the beloved community I do find there are workplace forces at play here. I’m so fortunate I work with a company that has been so serious in the safety of its workers and families. It provided an environment for this film to happen. Even with the very unsettling recent events in DC, I sense a coming together not only in my neighbors but in my co-workers. There is a profound closeness that has happened this year with them.

And….Thank You Charlie.

Below is the text of the piece, some have asked to have it.

For Charlie From Ferndale 2067

Charlie.

This is for you when you’re 47.

You were 2 in 2020.

The number 45 induced passion this year and if you add 45 to your age you get mine.

47.

When you’re 47 2020 may be talked in terms

like 1968, 1917, 1776, or the induced passion around 1619. Or maybe it’s the years to come.

The singers, bards, and MCs of my era broadcasted

93 to Infinity

3000 and

1999 from the purple prince in Minneapolis, the city you just moved to.

A historic city in 2020.

You’re 2 and moved away. I won’t see you learning to ride a bike and go to elementary school. Won’t see you get your driver’s license. Won’t see you become a teen and then a man in this world from the sidewalk in front of our house.

I create this fast forward- to reciprocate through your next 45.

That you learn the teaching earlier than I, when I was 47.

The lesson from you.

The summer of 2020 in the Detroit suburb Ferndale.

We met on my doorstep with you dressed as Winnie the Pooh on a crisp Halloween. Through codes and signifiers your parents felt like we would be friends.

The pierce of your eyes in the bundled brown and red costume. No shyness, just acknowledgement “I’m looking at you”. Don’t lose that.

You’re cute Charlie. Cuteness fades in age.

I’d see your mother mostly when I was mowing my lawn and pulling weeds in the spring, especially when the pandemic first hit and the lockdowns started. Yard work feels like one of the more human things I do and connects me to my past. It’s what my father did and what my grandfathers did.

The smell of grass clippings.

Cleaning up a flower bed by pulling weeds and seeing and feeling the obvious metaphors.

Taking in psychedelic colors when the flowers finally bloom.

Your mother and I would make the meek hellos and smiles neighbors did in this era. Smiles and hellos that are different from previous generations. Somewhere, sometime, somehow the human connection changed and I’ll leave that to other formats, other academics, other discourses. I was one of the many ones that did not see

2016

coming.

Which maybe historians will write as the year the decades long schemes came to a head. In 2016 I saw the year through they eyes of my 14 year old daughter and the words men said. And the way the talking heads talked with toxic tone.

And the fix.

The conspiracy. The tension. The division. I saw the surveillance for what it was the first time. I saw manipulation and realized for over a decade I had been only thinking in winner loser monetary mindsets and that we had all been divided by design.

Alone.

Mowing a lawn. Pulling weeds. More meaning than the conference rooms.

In 2020 conference rooms flipped to home conference calls and virtual laptop meetings. I’d take calls barefoot pulling my weeds contemplating the global tension and the domestic division.

And then came your interrupting inquisitive look from the chariot of your stroller pushed by your Mom and Dad. Interrupting my continuous conference calls from the headphones stuck to my mobile phone. Quickly our families’ smiles and hellos were no longer meek and were filled with understanding, solidarity, uncertainty, vulnerability.

Authenticity.

Locked in our rooms and houses, the conversation quickly pivoted to both your parents glued to their corporate screens and conference calls. The babysitting offer for my daughter and wife had presented itself back in that Halloween months before. In May 2020 your folks came over one late afternoon to come in the house, meet the cats, meet the dog, and discuss how it would all work out. The first time you came over and the stroller was left in the driveway and your mother walked back up the sidewalk I learned the teaching of the beloved community.

In 2020 neighbors formed trust bubbles inward to isolate from the infection spread. And for late spring and summer of 2020 you came over Charlie. When I was 47.

I saw my wife instinctually revert to the nurturing mother she was with my daughter some 15 years before. I saw my daughter begin to realize the significance of her age and her generation. Through seeing your innocence she began to face that hers had begun to fade in 2020 when it first started in 2016.

They began to paint your nails red and purple which you loved and flaunted. I questioned because I wondered what my grandfathers mowing their lawn would have thought.

We all had unfiltered conversations with neighbors and friends in 2020 and the 8 minute and 46 second violent transition in Minneapolis in May took uncertainty and vulnerability into all our streets. In Ferndale the signs came out and the marches started. Statues 100s of years old came down all over the globe. On our televisions and our doom scrolling mobile phones the division was becoming clearer but everything I saw in Ferndale was that it was coming together. You were the lens.

Lots of conversations on privilege and bias deep into the night. I’ve heard more people cry than any year in my life.

Out my second floor room where I’d been grounded like a 15 year old on conference calls I’d see you in our backyard with my wife in the decade old duct taped kiddie pool. Pitter patting the water getting in and later shocking your mother that you loved to frolic in the water.

Other times I’d come down for the late morning coffee and see your big smile when I descended and see the picture books, blocks, paints, mini-basketballs and the trucks.

Trucks. Garbage day was a special day. The garbage men knew you and that was the most excited I’d seen anyone in 2020. My wife, daughter, and I would wave back at the garbage men. Smiles of authenticity and beloved community.

Charlie.

This is for you when you’re 47.

Detroit’s Warrior Artist Goddess

May 24, 2015 By Tim Aten 5 Comments

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Or her.

Haunted.

Ever since then when I’m at a landmark now I wikipedia the building or place. Look at the date it was created. If it was before 1933 I think maybe she’d been here, seen this, was affected by it in someway. Maybe walked the same street, sat down at a bench or looked out on the river I walk every morning.

The Guardian Building with it’s golden Pewabic tile was completed in 1929. She had to have made a point to see it. My eyes have seen what she saw!

The Detroit Zoo in it’s suburban location opened in 1928. She liked animals. Painted them in her pictures. Maybe she made the trek out there on some type of trolley car and came within a mile of my house that I lay down and dream.

Or my memories from late 1990s of late nights hanging out at my friend’s Park Shelton apartment with a commanding view of Woodward facing downtown. The very place she lived! I had no idea at the time. I lost the opportunity to take it all in. The night I stayed up till dawn philosophizing with artists at the Scarab Club under her husband’s signature in the rafters. I vividly remember walking home across Woodward minutes before sunrise and thinking the city I found myself was bolder, larger, and grander than it appeared while at the same time utterly confusing and hidden. I always sensed something significant had happened here. And sometimes it felt that on top of all the people leaving so did all the ghosts.

Whether they fully left I don’t know, but somehow the warrior artist goddess who was able to transcend and immortalize herself gave me a solid dose of my own Detroit soul and insights into what the hell happened here.

What “It” was.

When I entered the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts last week and was greeted by the initial marriage portrait painted by Kahlo something quickly and unexpectedly stirred inside me. I felt I was about to embark into a very deep story and somehow I was a part of the narrative. Part of my past was. Maybe my future. I felt appreciation and understanding what was about to unfold. It did. Confusing, haunting, contemplative, looking up build dates in Wikipedia of Detroit landmarks.

There’s so much commentary and chatter about how much Detroit is now changing. It’s a different city than the 1990s, even different than 4 years ago. This exhibit goes right to the heart of the century long transformation and reveals the story’s meaning from the ghosts that when alive changed the fabric of Detroit, civilization, and the planet. For a museum on the verge of liquidation last year because of bankruptcy I have one thing to say – thank you. With this show it’s clear the DIA has their act together.

One of the surprising players uncovered for me was the Edsel Ford painting. I knew Diego Rivera as a painter of the “labor movement” and figured him to have socialist tendencies. For decades I’d been to the DIA to take in “the mural” but never knew the story behind it. The fact the Fords were the ones who funded the mural was a profound revelation of irony. On the surface “the mural” shows the awesome destiny of man and industry, the worker, it’s hope and growth along with an undertone of warning and fear. It’s like something or someone is making this thing go and we’re actors not necessarily the directors. As time went on it sounds like Rivera and Kahlo became disillusioned with their wealthy benefactors and were eventually run out of town in New York City when Rivera’s proposed mural had Stalin. My generation grew up with the communist threat as the current generation wrestles with terrorism. The Detroit Industry fresco tackles these concepts before World War II, before The Cold War, and before Reagan and Gorbachev. The exhibit gives you the untold story behind the scenes of the dialectical drama so simply explained as black and white in schools and the media. These forces comingled at one time. Comingled in Detroit. The mural means this to me now and Kahlo was a hidden force.

The exhibit’s sketch studies for The Detroit Industry Fresco (the mural) have so much passion and energy. You sense these two forces coming alive for eternity and perhaps, because of the subject matter, you feel the presence of Ford and the auto industry that was changing Detroit forever. My generation in suburban Detroit grew up in the close shadows of “The Riot”. It’s what is used to explain all of Detroit’s issues and problems. This exhibit, this mural, goes back further and shows the beginning of an awesome journey that was so powerful and beyond our control like the blue jean workers moving engine blocks.

Which takes me to her. Frida. It’s clear she was Diego’s tempestuous muse and soul. There’s a room in the exhibit with one of Kahlo’s paintings with Ford’s name, like Diego’s portrait, but this painting titled “Henry Ford Hospital” is a deeply personal depiction of a traumatic miscarriage. Critics call it surrealist. Others call it groundbreaking for feminism and a woman owning and sharing her pain, maybe oppression. I felt pain and passion and saw Kahlo’s blood all over those white sheets on a cold unforgiving desert of industrialization. Deepening the experience for me was my twelve year old daughter under the headphones of the guided tour processing it all next to me. She’s at the age when life begins to be larger with the loss of innocence coming from heavy concepts, ideas, and experiences popping up in strange places. As I sensed the heaviness of all this I turned to my left and saw Diego’s sketch concept of the fetus that radiates today over The Detroit Industry Fresco. Whoa…is that the fetus and being that could have been? That is looking for birth today in this exhibit and in the thought processes of twelve year old girls?

So much has happened in Detroit since Kahlo was at Henry Ford Hospital. Detroit became all-powerful, fell into rage, and then cried and became abandoned. Much like Frida’s life. Now she’s a force in our culture with fashionistas emulating her style and her “selfies” monogrammed on all types of surfaces like t-shirts and tote bags.

She cracked the code, broke through the matrix for immortality and became a goddess alive today.

Belle Isle Conservatory – 1904.

Fox Theatre – 1928.

Detroit Public Library – 1921.

Footnote

Our times are just as transformative. One could argue the internet is just as disruptive as new economic philosophies coming into play like they did 100 years ago. Our threats of terrorism and global climate change are real. Elon Musk’s vision for sustainable energy with the Power Wall and Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to connect the entire globe to the internet through Internet.org are lofty and ambitious projects which have the ability to take humanity into new realms.

I need to get educated- Who are the artist’s today wrestling with these concepts and working with these type of people and institutions to document, inspire, build hope, and critique?

The Detroit Auto Show – Notes from the Underground & the Ivory Tower

February 9, 2013 By Tim Aten 4 Comments

It was the typical January Detroit Auto Show experience outside.

Finding a place to park. Steam rise creeping out of manhole covers. Cold. Dark. Hunched shoulders trying to maintain body heat walking Washington Boulevard.

I was with my father.

He’s been dealing with heart problems the past few years and this night he was chipper. He had a twinkle in his eye, happy to be out and about and wore his new big poppa shirt. We had a great time that night as fathers and sons do around automobiles. As boys do.

He was proud, I was proud. I work on the General Motors marketing team and our product is something my family can rally around. Talking about Search Engine Optimization and Display Media strategies is not necessarily something to discuss with family, but a vehicle…. everyone has an opinion.

My father, now retired, was an architect and has always been a farm boy from Greenville, Ohio. Having grown up with tractors and combines he knows quite a bit about the internal combustion engine. He is my automotive resource and is eager to point out features on car engines like variable valve timing, how Americans are obsessed with chrome, and telling the quality of a vehicle by the tightness of the seams and its lines.

On this cold night as we navigated downtown Detroit to the Bucharest Grille for the legendary Bucharest Shawarma claiming the crown over coney dogs I thought, “Wow, I’ve been a part of this city almost twenty years now.” It’s changed. I’ve changed. Landmarks that night were marks for my memory.

Some thirteen years ago I tended bar at the Ponchartrain across from Cobo Hall where the autos were under bright tungsten lights. There my bald-headed bar mentor boss hopped over the counter and got in a customer’s face to get the F out of his bar. I have melancholic memories of sitting on the dock smoking cigarettes in our ties and black aprons on our breaks. One jheri-curled co-worker with a girl’s name tattooed on his chest with a little red heart would work on his carburetor in the loading dock smoking a dangling cigarette. Working on his car carburetor in a tie and black apron and going back into the restaurant to wait on his tables in between.

The 4am breakfasts we’d have at the Met Cafe in Greektown after nights of clubbing or driving desolate ghost streets to the life soundtrack of Detroit techno. I remember getting into it with Nation of Islam guys proselytizing about our cigarette smoke negativity and Farouk, the owner from Dearborn, would tell them to get the F out of his restaurant because we were loyal customers.

Or the house party in Woodbridge where music was banging, bodies grinding, kegs pouring and then the cops came. Uh Oh? Nope. The cops wanted to know who had the new yellow Camaro out front and could they race it. I love this city.

And having lived in Detroit you know about getting your car stolen, your buddy getting a gun pulled on him, somebody going to jail, a co-worker getting car jacked and shot five times, and a co-worker getting murdered and tortured after picking up a young kid in a club. Lots of ghosts and gritty memories.

I heard on NPR one time how Detroit, the Arsenal of Democracy, was once the center of industry and arguably the source of America’s wealth and power. 70 years ago this city built the infrastructure to bomb places like Berlin and Tokyo and now it’s flip-flopped. Look at those cities and compare Detroit. It is profound, karmic really, but on a night like this with my father I felt and thought about the evolution, the change, the sense things aren’t necessarily coming back how we want or expect. As we looked at all those gorgeous vehicles and their engineering you can feel we’re not going back to the apocalyptic vibe this city had in the 80s and 90s. Detroit will be a model of how to transform. Watch.

The energy of our city’s temple at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Diego Rivera Mural, is palpable. Across the street at Scarab Club I once philosophized to dawn with a friend and a tall Johnny-Cash-Style Artist in Residence. Diego Rivera’s hand-carved signature is overhead in the rafters among other artists. You sense something great happened there. Today you can go to high-tech meet ups like Detroit Startup Drinks and meet patchouli smelling urban farmers moving in from rich New York and Connecticut suburbs with dirt caked into their fingernails. The mural captures their spirit.

At the show my father and I walked over to the dark grey Corvette Stingray on display as so many did those two weeks. Having seen the reveal I was shocked at my emotional reaction at seeing it in person. It makes your heart drop and go, “Damn, that’s a bad ass ride.” In the past two years I’ve seen myself turning into a “car guy” as I’m surrounded and live and breathe it. However, I’ve never really been a sports car guy. I tend to fall into the CTS-V or loaded Lacrosse category. But after seeing that Stingray I was a 15-year-old kid with Stephanie Seymour posters scotch taped to his bedroom wall with popped out eyes thinking “Damn, that’s a bad ass ride”.

I was looking around at all the industry types at the Auto Show and thought of the co-workers and agency folks I work with, many of whom I would now consider friends and confidants. These automobiles tend to personify us, our world, our economy, our culture, our country. We strive to have the fierce elegance of a Corvette or the refined ruggedness of a Sierra. At work I see it in the camaraderie, in the focus, the long hours, the clothes, the ipads, the cell phones, the meetings, the conference calls, the big data, the elevator rides over Hart Plaza and the sacred Power Point decks. I thought of our industry ancestors from the Mad Men era, the Don Drapers, and felt a connection with those giants when the mantra was “As GM goes, so goes the nation“. As my dad looked at that Corvette with me he got teary eyed. He really paused and his lips quivered.

“You guys are going to run out of that. That’s one of the finest cars America has ever produced.”, an Ohio farm boy said to the Detroit kid.

I love this city. Watch.