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January 13, 2016 - Image 13

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The Michigan Daily

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Wednesday, January, 13, 2016 // The Statement
6B

Personal Statement: On a Couch in Detroit

by Adam DePollo, Daily Arts Writer

A

few weeks ago I was at a show in Detroit, sitting next
to my friend David on a white leather couch in the de
facto VIP section of a club/art gallery in Midtown. We

were surrounded by about 30 artfully dressed rappers, paint-
ers, producers and filmmakers who were all passing around
blunts and talking about their work. Someone was actively
selling weed and possibly cocaine on the other couch about
three feet away from us. There was
a girl twerking in the corner while
she waited in line for the bathroom.
Everything in the room was illumi-
nated by a set of blue neon lights, and
it felt like we were in either an arcade
or the movie “Spring Breakers” — but
the drug deal going on right next to us
made it feel a lot more like the latter.

The image of James Franco fellat-

ing a pistol popped into my head, and
I started laughing. Then I looked over
at David, who I’ve known since my
sophomore year at Detroit Country
Day School — a very expensive pri-
vate school in Beverly Hills, Michigan
that we both attended on scholarship.
I thought about how we used to play
“Super Smash Bros.” and talk about
“Top Gear” in our homeroom dur-
ing lunch hour, between meetings
with college prep advisors. I let loose
a stupefied “bruh.” We both looked
over at the drug deal for a moment,
and then I asked the question that’s
almost always gnawing at the back of
my head when I find myself in a room
full of musicians in Detroit: “What
the fuck are we doing here?”

David, I found out, was asking

himself the same question for many of
the same reasons. When you’re grow-
ing up in a middle-class household in
Southeast Michigan like we both did,
you’re given a sort of default narrative
arc for your life that, frankly, doesn’t
include an episode with you sitting
on a couch in Detroit across from
a rapper named Ka$h ThA KuSh-
MaN. It goes more like: work hard
in high school, do your extracurricu-
lars, get into a good college, figure
out what you’re doing with your life,
get a respectable job making more than your parents, marry,
kids, retire, rinse and repeat for the next 15 generations. If you
play the game right, you end up in a nice city like New York
or Chicago with a comfortable apartment, good clothes and a
well-fed 401k. If you had interrupted us mid-“Smash” back in
high school and asked where we thought we’d be in six years,
our answers probably would have been “Episode 3: Foot in the
Door at Business Corp.”

But there we are, and there’s Ka$h. He’s not evaporating

— in fact, he’s talking about the time he took 25 tabs of acid
at once — which means one of two things: Either we really
fucked up, or we found a way out of the Matrix.

On the one hand, like, shit, we’re on the damn VIP couch!

I’m a journalist — I interviewed the guy that just said he took
25 tabs of acid at once. David is a DJ — he has done shows on
the same stage as the guy that just said he took 25 tabs of acid

at once. There’s a concert going on in the next room over, and
we both know the guy who’s performing — personally! This is
the most well-dressed roomful of people I have ever seen and,
for all I know, anybody in this room could conceivably become
a world-famous artist one day. We’re also in this room. We’re
cool goddammit!

On the other hand, what the fuck are we doing here?!? We

should have jobs with benefits! We should have places to be at
8 a.m. tomorrow! That guy just said he took 25 tabs of acid at
once, is he insane?!? There’s a drug deal going on in this room,
shouldn’t I be calling the cops?!? Weed is legal here?!? Don’t
they know weed is a gateway drug? Does anyone in this build-
ing know CPR?

We sat there on the couch for a while longer, going back and

forth about how absurd and incredible and confusing and just
plain lucky it was for us to be where we were — this VIP couch
that our parents probably never would have had the chance to
sit on when they were our age, a couch that wasn’t even in this
room until someone decided it was a good idea to open a club
and art gallery in Detroit a few months before we sat on it, a
couch right in the beating heart of an astonishingly vibrant
underground art scene that’s still in its infancy.

The music was still thumping in the other room, but it got

quiet where we were sitting as I stopped talking and started
thinking about the realer side of “what the fuck are we doing
here?” Maybe it’s OK to go bump around Detroit, sitting bewil-
dered on strange couches for a while in my twenties with no
particular goal in mind.

At the same time, just sitting on a couch feels like a waste of

space — I’d like to do something more to help the city and its

culture, but do I have any right to think
that I could or should help? I grew up
in the suburbs fed on a steady diet of
horror stories about urban blight and
corrupt mayors and general post-apoc-
alyptic decay in Detroit. Before friends
like David started inviting me to shows
and really introducing me to the city,
Detroit’s culture, for me, was limited
to the Detroit Institute of Art, Eastern
Market, Greektown, Tigers games and
the occasional concert at Orchestra
Hall — everything else in the city was
just a foreboding network of wrecked
houses and dark streets I was told to
avoid driving around in at all costs. I’ve
since learned that there are a whole lot
of incredible artists living along those
streets, and they’re immensely gener-
ous, community-minded, industrious
and unbelievably talented. Things have
been tough in Detroit for a long time,
but the artists living and working there
have built up a thriving culture through
the struggle — they were doing fine
before I started coming downtown to
take new profile pictures, use up space
on the couches and write articles about
wondering what the fuck I’m doing
there. Detroit was never my home, but
maybe it will be one day. Yet would my
presence there be adding something
positive to the city and its culture, or
just taking it out of the hands of the
people who were there from the start?

Later that night David and I got off

the couch and walked into the other
room. My friend Martez was DJing
a footwork set, dancing on a make-
shift stage in the middle of the room
between song transitions. About half-
way through his set, a 40-something
salt-and-pepper-haired
white
dude

wearing three winter coats stepped up onto the stage and
started waving his arms around as though he were doing tai
chi. He alternated between undulating and rolling around on
the ground for the next half hour, and nobody seemed to know
what the fuck was going on (the way his eyes were bugging out
of his head, I’m not sure he knew either). Nobody stopped him,
but it kind of felt to me like I was watching the hostile takeover
of a creative space. Martez kept DJing, and the guy kept doing
his thing. Maybe it was performance art — just another weird
art happening in Detroit, another addition to the surreal post-
modernist dreamscape that is the city’s arts scene.

Eventually a few people got on stage and started dancing

with him. I looked around the room, wondering what every-
one else was thinking. I looked back toward the couch. My
palms were sweating, and I didn’t know what to do with my
hands.

ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM DEPOLLO

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