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Go to the Berkeley Daily Planet original

Filmmaker Michael Moore and novelist-essayist-screenwriter
Cecil Brown, San Francisco 2008
Courtesy photo

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MICHAEL AND ME

By Cecil Brown

The Berkeley Daily Planet  | 1 October 2009

In the early ’70s, I lived at 2700 Virginia St. in the Berkeley Hills with a sublime view of the Golden Gate Bridge. My next-door neighbor was Adam, a Jewish guy who took care of his son, David, while his wife taught at UC Berkeley. I, as a black writer, and Adam, a stay-at-home father, had a lot of free time on our hands. While taking care of David, we talked a lot about writing fiction and the books we loved. And, of course, we also talked about how we were going to change the literary world. With the publication of my novel, I was something. I threw parties and invited everybody—English department celebrities like Mark Schorer, Larry Ziff, and Leonard Michaels, and lots of writers, like Richard Brautigan, Claude Brown, Richard Pryor and Ishmael Reed. Adam was always invited.

Years passed and we left the idyllic abode in the Berkeley Hills. When we crossed paths again, we celebrated our latest successes—I had written a film for Richard Pryor, and he had co-founded a magazine called Mother Jones.

We were still so fond of each other that we wanted to realize some of our ideas about writing and publishing. The next thing I knew, I had written the cover story about Richard Pryor for Mother Jones.

Several years passed, and we ran into each other again. What was he up to? He was starting a Writer’s Union. Would I like to lead a panel on the ills of writers? Of course.

Years passed and I ran into Adam again. He was excited about his new editor at Mother Jones. Did I want to pitch him some ideas?

I went by the office to meet the new editor, Michael Moore. Even back then he was a big guy—a big white guy with a friendly smile. I remember his great sense of humor, though he did turn down some of my stuff. However, before we could get started, Michael was fired.

There was a big ruckus at the magazine, and my interest wandered; after all, I was running with Richard Pryor, and Hollywood beckoned.

I heard through the grapevine that Michael Moore had sued Mother Jones and, with his $87,000 settlement, he made his first film, Roger and Me.

It always hurts to be fired. But it must especially hurt to be fired by Adam Hochshild! Adam is not a bad guy. He’s a sweet guy. A writer. I read somewhere that after the film turned out so well, Michael wanted to thank Adam for firing him. Otherwise, he would have never found himself and his calling. In the film, he admits that, “It wasn’t that I was upset about getting fired, it was going back to Flint, Michigan.”

I could relate to that, it was the personal voice. He then uses his persona as the allegory for larger problem—the factory layoffs and the GM culture.

I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought another thing about Michael Moore if it hadn’t been for a very beautiful woman in Berkeley who asked a favor of me. She had a young son who wanted to be a writer, and since I was a writer, would I talk to him? His problem, she said, was that at 17, he was too smart for Berkeley High; all he wanted to do was “smoke dope and read Michael Moore.”

Of his two vices, I was unfamiliar with one of them, so in order to talk to him I decided to read a book by Michael Moore.

I walked into a bookstore on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, and picked up Dude, Where’s My Country? After a few chapters, I was laughing loud and hard.

I saw immediately what all the fuss was about. Moore has a wonderful technique of picking an outrageous topic and making the reader laugh. While the reader is laughing, he connects the humor to an underlying meaning, or idea. I loved that technique; it seemed so familiar.

Where had I seen that before? Richard Pryor, of course. This was his method, too.

Richard and Moore always introduce themselves into their stories because they need a persona.

Apart from technique, there is this thing Michael has about commitment to ideals. Not long after that, I was driving in my car listening to the radio. There was a commentator saying that, as a filmmaker, he didn’t want to work with whites any more. He wanted to work with black people. I didn’t know who was speaking and assumed he was a black filmmaker left over from the 1960s. But who, could that be? Melvin Van Peebles? He was in New York. Gordon Parks? No, he’s dead.

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Image © Jonathan LaRocca

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Detroit, the country’s most depressed metropolis, has zero produce-carrying grocery chains. It also has open land, fertile soil, ample water, and the ingredients to reinvent itself from Motor City to urban farm. Mark Dowie’s immodest proposal …

Go to the original: Güernica/a magazine of art & politics, August 2009

FOOD AMONG THE RUINS

By Mark Dowie

Were I an aspiring farmer in search of fertile land to buy and plow, I would seriously consider moving to Detroit. There is open land, fertile soil, ample water, willing labor, and a desperate demand for decent food. And there is plenty of community will behind the idea of turning the capital of American industry into an agrarian paradise. In fact, of all the cities in the world, Detroit may be best positioned to become the world’s first one hundred percent food self-sufficient city.

Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in America to becoming a food desert, not just another metropolis like Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cleveland with a bunch of small- and medium-sized food deserts scattered about, but nearly a full-scale, citywide food desert. (A food desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce.) About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.

Detroiters who live close enough to suburban borders to find nearby groceries carrying fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables are a small minority of the population. The health consequences of food deserts are obvious and dire. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and obesity are chronic in Detroit, and life expectancy is measurably lower than in any American city.

Not so long ago, there were five produce-carrying grocery chains—Kroger, A&P, Farmer Jack, Wrigley, and Meijer—competing vigorously for the Detroit food market. Today there are none. Nor is there a single WalMart or Costco in the city. Specialty grocer Trader Joe’s just turned down an attractive offer to open an outlet in relatively safe and prosperous midtown Detroit; a rapidly declining population of chronically poor consumers is not what any retailer is after. High employee turnover, loss from theft, and cost of security are also cited by chains as reasons to leave or avoid Detroit. So it is unlikely grocers will ever return, despite the tireless flirtations of City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Michigan Food and Beverage Association. There is a fabulous once-a-week market, the largest of its kind in the country, on the east side that offers a wide array of fresh meat, eggs, fruit, and vegetables. But most people I saw there on an early April Saturday arrived in well polished SUVs from the suburbs. So despite the Eastern Market, in-city Detroiters are still left with the challenge of finding new ways to feed themselves a healthy meal.

The most intriguing visionaries in Detroit…were those who imagine growing food among the ruins.

One obvious solution is to grow their own, and the urban backyard garden boom that is sweeping the nation has caught hold in Detroit, particularly in neighborhoods recently settled by immigrants from agrarian cultures of Laos and Bangladesh, who are almost certain to become major players in an agrarian Detroit. Add to that the five hundred or so twenty-by-twenty-foot community plots and a handful of three- to ten-acre farms cultured by church and non-profit groups, and during its four-month growing season, Detroit is producing somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of its food supply inside city limits—more than most American cities, but nowhere near enough to allay the food desert problem. About 3 percent of the groceries sold at the Eastern Market are homegrown; the rest are brought into Detroit by a handful of peri-urban farmers and about one hundred and fifty freelance food dealers who buy their produce from Michigan farms between thirty and one hundred miles from the city and truck it into the market.

There are more visionaries in Detroit than in most Rust-Belt cities, and thus more visions of a community rising from the ashes of a moribund industry to become, if not an urban paradise, something close to it. The most intriguing visionaries in Detroit, at least the ones who drew me to the city, were those who imagine growing food among the ruins—chard and tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the city, sixty thousand owned by the city), orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where cars were once test-driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the frames of single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided with Plexiglas—a homemade greenhouse. Those are just a few of the agricultural technologies envisioned for the urban prairie Detroit has become.

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