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Aesthetics

Post #77 – Saturday 10 March 2018 – Detroit

February 22, 2018 by MG Leave a Comment

Posted in: Aesthetics, City, Letters from America, Travel, Urban landscape

Letters from America

Saturday 10 March 2018

Recently I made a new friend who is an Australian living and working in the US.  We talked about America and he asked me where I had visited.  One of the places was Detroit where I visited for work quite a few years ago now.  My new friend immediately asked whether I knew Shinola watches (which I didn’t).  Shinola is all about the best in Detroit’s legacy of quality industrial design and processing.

I later spent time enjoying the Shinola website.   I really appreciated learning about this venture.  Here is a fine example of what they are about:

And here is a version for women that I like:

When I visited about 10 years ago Detroit it felt a city with a great past and great past wealth.  The most striking thing first up was the miles of abandoned houses in what must have once been affluent suburbs.  It was the closest thing to a culture shock I have experienced, just for a few moments, in the Anglo world.

When I first visited Detroit I had just finished reading a novel called Middlesex by Michael Eugenides which was set in part in Detroit, including Detroit during the civil unrest and race riots in  1967.

So when I arrived my conception of what had happened in Detroit was a work of my imagination based on this novel.  And as I was driven from the airport into the centre of the city through these abandoned suburbs I could not believe what I saw.  Street after street of empty boarded up overgrown and burnt out houses – a living testament to a disruptive modern historical event,  a bombed out war zone that the survivors had never rebuilt, but had just been abandoned there for 40 years.  And the houses were clearly houses that had formerly been grand.  There was an established well heeled life that went with these streets, and it was visibly wiped out.  It was just inconceivable to me that this could be part of a modern peace time consumer city culture.

I searched the internet and found photos of the once splendid houses in those abandoned suburbs. The photos I have included here show the houses all overgrown with green.  This is what it looked like to me because I visited in summer.

I recently saw  a 2017 film by director Kathryn Bigelow simply called Detroit.  It deals with a key incident that occurred during the race riots of 1967 and is quite a harrowing watch.  I had heard about this film long before I saw it, in a radio documentary about the process of depicting living history.  The documentary had remarkable interview material from people who had lived through the violence 50 years before.

Detroit already had problems by the time of the unrest in 1967 – the chief being declining manufacturing sector and car industry.

Sadly the GFC brought more disruption to the political geography of Detroit when the collapse of mortgage securities enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saw more houses abandoned in outer suburbs, with owners forced to walk away (literally) from their untenably financed houses.

But there is often talk of rebuilding Detroit – with high tech, the film industry and similar ventures.  First stop Shinola watches.  Thanks to my new friend for telling me about them.

MG xx

Post #65 Sunday 10 December 2017 – Black and White and Sex

December 9, 2017 by MG Leave a Comment

Posted in: Aesthetics, Erotica, Escort services, Film, Ideas, Letters from America, Male sexuality

Letters from America
These letters are my glamorous aunt’s posts on her adventures and her life and times as a
♦ mature Sydney escort ♦

Sunday 10 December 2017

It’s the bane of the oldest profession to be depicted in the media and arts in a way which is misleading, sensationalised and frequently harmful. I haven’t ever seen a depiction of sex work any better than in the short Australian film Black and White and Sex,  which was released a few years ago.  Here is a link to a short review on an amateur blog.

http://www.sassisamblog.com/2012/03/22/film-review-the-provocative-thought-provoking-black-and-white-and-sex-movie/

The official website with the distributor’s contact details is included here as well,  in case you wanted to buy a DVD copy, which I would strongly recommend:

https://www.blackandwhiteandsex.com/

The short film raises a wide range of issues in an undogmatic way.  I dislike art being used didactically.  This film deals with genuine “social” issues but from intimate points of view, and it doesn’t “solve” any problem or preach any particular thing.  The closing episode addresses the mystery question whether the main character Angie, who is played by eight different actress personas (sounds complex but it worked well), actually experiences orgasm in the course of her work – does she “really” enjoy it.

Which brings me to another interesting thing.  A number of escorts keep blogs and internet diaries.  From my observation most of these deal with their personal experience of being an escort, feelings about work and clients and views on the industry.  The diaries differ from the Letters from America because the Letters are generally less reflective in that personal way, and are usually more about music,  landscape, trees and small adventures.

Anyway, long and short of this is that the subject of an escort’s orgasm is very well addressed in a recent post from the escort blog of Asha Grace.  Asha Grace is an experienced escort and lovely soul based in Brisbane.   She says some wise things that some of you might be interested in.  The post is called Give and Take, here’s the link:

http://escortashagrace.com/blog/give-and-take

Well, it is a beautiful Sunday morning so I am signing out now for the next adventure.  I am looking forward to a great week and hope you are too – notwithstanding it is the lead up to Christmas and the Sydney traffic is mental.

Look out for yourselves and take care not to fall off your bikes, figuratively – and literally.

Yours ever
MG xx
your mysterious glamorous aunt

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