The Ypsilanti water tower

The famous Ypsilanti water tower embodies the spirit of the city: stand-up citizenship, hard work, and circumscribed living. But, you might wonder, how does it compare to the Washington Monument?

Here’s a small thing you can do to help the homeless if you live in metro Detroit. Take your gently used or new boots for men or women and give them to the Detroit homeless. The PBJ Outreach team from Our Lady of Good Counsel Church in Plymouth is collecting them and distributing them frequently directly to the homeless they see every Saturday morning.

Deacon Tim Sullivan writes, “You cannot imagine until you see with your own eyes the creative footwear the homeless fashion in an attempt to keep frostbite from taking their toes. Detroit has the highest incidence of gangrene due to frostbite in the United States, and some of our guests downtown have actually lost their toes.” If you have decent boots that will help, please consider dropping them off at the Gathering Space in the church. (Go in the main door and turn right. The Gathering Space is the seating area behind the sanctuary.) The boots are being collected in the lefthand corner of the Gathering Space. If you’d like more information, email me [laurie (at) thedistrictandthed (dot) com] and I can give you Tim’s phone number. In the meantime, here’s a map to the church:

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Please don't ask her if she comes with the car

The public days of the Detroit auto show extravaganza (formally named the North American International Auto Show) are well underway. More than a million people are expected to pour through the doors of Detroit’s Cobo Hall and ogle and touch the cars and trucks that are still the lifeblood of the city and the state.

Last week’s crush of press preview days are over, the executives have gone back into hibernation in their corner offices, and countless cases of California sparkling wine have been poured into plastic cups and consumed by the tuxedoed masses at the Charity Preview on Friday.

I love the auto show. Yes, the outdoor temperature is frigid and the indoor temperature is saunalike. Yes, by the time you see the whole show, your feet ache and you desperately need a drink, for which you have to brave the afore-mentioned freezing weather and walk several blocks. Yes, you are paying a lot at the Charity Preview for cheap wine and no food. Yes, the spouse is very likely grumpy about the tuxedo and the lack of food.

But it’s our CES, our SXSW. It’s where you can see all the cars you might personally be involved in designing, engineering, building, advertising or promoting, along with all the other cars you would otherwise not get to see without a salesman shadowing you. You can examine the interiors and the wheels and see what the competition is up to. You can think about your next vehicle purchase. At the Charity Preview, you can compile your own worst-dressed list.

This is the first time in a decade I haven’t cruised the press preview days and run into old journalist friends and old flacks. I missed it. Some of my favorite memories from auto shows past are watching Jason Vines do his standup PR shtick, talking to Bob Lutz when he was selling the Cunningham car and not surrounded by an entourage, and enjoying several of Hyundai’s Detroit Rocks parties, where the hacks and flacks of the Exhaust Tones show what they do when they’re not writing about cars.

Anyway, it’s fun. If you live in metro Detroit and still have a job, take a day off and go.

Recent posts and columns about NAIAS I enjoyed reading:

• WSJ Joe White’s review (full disclosure: he’s my spouse) Can You Imagine Driving These? Also, vote on six concept cars: build it or bag it?
• Jalopnik: An auto show model lets you know what she really thinks. She also has her own blog, Do You Come with the Car?, quite entertaining.
• Mitch Albom, the hardest-working man in Detroit with an ego to match, writes that the auto show demonstrates the pluckiness and grit that is Detroit.
• Detroit Fashion Pages’ Worst Dressed List from the Charity Preview. This could have been a much longer list, in my opinion.
• More of my NAIAS photos on Flickr

Fountain at the McNamara Terminal at DTW

Chances are you’ve seen Fuller’s work, in fountains where jets of water appear solid and ropelike. The secret is creating zero-turbulence water streams, called laminars. Some of their most popular fountains are at the Bellagio casino (see YouTube videos) in Las Vegas, which dance to music, and the leaping streams at EPCOT (one of Fuller’s early works, as a Disney Imagineer).

In Michigan, you can see work by WET at the McNamara Terminal at Detroit Metro Airport (see Youtube videos), at Campus Martius and the Compuware headquarters in downtown Detroit, and at the Somerset Collection (don’t call it a mall!) in Troy. I can attest that the fountain at DTW is a calming presence conveniently located near a Starbucks stand, a nice place to stop for a few moments and watch the travelers rushing by. In Washington, WET Design created the fountain at the International Monetary Fund Headquarters, installed in 2005.

WET Design has a highly experiential web site, with photos and videos of their creations. Click on Creations, then navigate either through the map or the timeline. Take a look at the huge Dubai fountains, completed in April 2009, and the Revson Fountain at the Lincoln Center, subject of the New Yorker piece.

Christmas Eve dinner

The Snowpocalypse has come and gone. It lasted a week. And as of this morning, the two student offspring have come and gone, off to see their friends. They lasted a week and 10 days, respectively. We’ve reclaimed the couch and the laptop and cleaned the bathroom. We’ve gathered the belongings they left behind. Soon it will be time to go back to work and throw the Christmas tree over the balcony.

And if it’s the New Year, can the North American International Auto Show be far behind? It will be strange to be in Washington where news from the auto show will be buried in the business section and where the lead will surely be about government loans and depressed Detroit, instead of on the cars,

On the positive side, however, it was great to see the snowstorm of the decade, plus have time off to spend time exploring the national museums. Plus we made some fine food (the standing rib roast encrusted in salt was a hit), watched Avatar, V for Vendetta, Planet Earth, Gosford Park and Benjamin Button.

We hope to catch up with friends and family we missed early in 2010, and to hear some rock ‘n’ roll in the D. I wish you all a happy, prosperous, peaceful New Year.

The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress

By Joseph B. White

Here’s a mind-expanding way to spend a few free hours in Washington. Go to the Library of Congress, pay homage to the Gutenberg Bible on display not far from the main entrance and visit the replica of Thomas Jefferson’s library on the second floor. Then, go see the real Library.

To get there, take the elevator at the back of the first floor entry hall to the C (cellar) level, and enter the underground tunnels that connect the LOC’s main buildings. Follow the signs for reader registration. Essentially, you are getting a library card for the biggest library in the country.

It’s easy. You show a photo ID, enter some personal data in the computer system, and soon you have a freshly minted photo ID, a bar-coded pass to the collections, good for two years. On the way back to the Jefferson building, stop at the underground cafeteria on the way back for a cup of coffee (not great) and a chunk of red velvet cake (ok, not great, either).

After my coffee break, I took my new all-access pass to the American Folklife Center reading room, back in the Jefferson building room LJ G53. This is the home of the amazing collection of blues and folk music collected by Alan Lomax during a 70-year career.

The Folklife Center librarians are friendly, and apparently quite used to dealing with blues geeks who wander in babbling about Lomax. That’s what I did, and before I knew it, I had been presented with a copy of Lomax’s book about his travels recording blues musicians in the Jim Crow era South, “The Land Where the Blues Began.” Also pressed into my hands was a computer printout listing some of Lomax’s recordings from a 1942 trip through the Mississippi Delta during which he recorded, among others, Son House and a young singer listed as “MacKinley Morganfield.” That’s Muddy Waters to you.

I asked to listen to some Son House and recordings of a gospel group called the Friendly Five Harmony Singers. (Muddy Waters seemed too obvious.)

One of the librarians rolled over to my chair an ancient, reel-to-reel tape recorder, roughly the size of a suitcase and mounted to a rolling stand. It had a sticker identifying it as the property of National Public Radio – I assume NPR donated this antique to the Library for the purpose of allowing people like me to listen to these classic Lomax field recording in a vintage way. Because that’s what you get – a scuffed cardboard box that contains a reel-to-reel tape. Not a CD. Not a cassette.

The librarian threaded the tape, handed me the headphones and Presto! My head’s in a hotel room in Mississippi in July 1942 where Son House is explaining to Lomax how he tunes his guitar. (I think he called it, “A down low.” I couldn’t follow it without guitar in hand, but if I had one, I would have had all the notes, played two or three times by Mr. House.)

I listened to two reels worth of Son House – “American Defense Blues,” about the virtues of the World War II military buildup, and more familiar songs like the “Death Letter Blues,” listed in the catalogue as “Walking Blues.” I listened to The Friendly Five Harmony Singers sing old, old school gospel. A final tape had a long monologue identified only as “Talking to colored fellow about Jefferson Davis.” But it was time to go.

This was just one sliver of the Lomax collection, which is in turn just a fraction of all the folk music collected in this section of the library.

The one downside: Even with the fancy library card, you can’t take the tapes out of the building. Of course, even if you did, who’s got a reel-to-reel?

We visited the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden yesterday afternoon. It’s the circular — actually, cylindrical — building on the Mall. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, it features a large collection of modern and abstract paintings and sculptures. It opened to the public in 1969 with the donated collection of financier Joseph H. Hirshhorn. He kept collecting, however, and upon his death in 1981, his bequest nearly doubled the size of the museum’s collection.

The architecture is striking and the art is interesting. Some of it seems kind of ’60s-ish and trite, now. For example, you can find several sculptures made of recycled car parts that would look at home at the Ann Arbor Art Fairs with water spouting out of them. Also, they often have silly titles (”Are Years What? For Marianne Moore” by Mark di Suvero, for a giant red painted steel structure with another piece of steel hanging from a cable), as if the artist disdains the idea of explaining something about his/her work.

So: Today’s activity is match the sculptures in the photos below with their titles, listed below the photos. The first person to answer them all correctly will win a high-priced coffee drink. (Leave your correct email address so I can contact you.) If you can’t see the whole sculpture in the thumbnail below, click on it to see the full image.

The sculptures

The titles
A. King and Queen
B. Monument to Balzac
C. Two-Piece Reclining Figure: Points
D. Last Conversation Piece
E. Song of the Little Frog
F. Untitled
G. Boccioni’s Fist – Lines of Force II
H. Post-Balzac
I. Column Of Peace
J. Monsoon Drift
K. Voltri XV
L. Seated Woman on a Bench