Washed in Dirt: Steve Hughes's Stupor

Quite often when I read mainstream American social science, especially of the "quantoid" variety, I'm reminded as to how much I appreciate literature. While acknowledging the importance of objective data collection and analysis in distinguishing social facts from all-too-fallible everyday perceptions, I also can't help thinking that deeper, perhaps more significant meaning goes missing in the process. This occurred to me again recently as I perused the latest issue of the zine called Stupor, which for more than 15 years has surveyed the inner terrains of the shell-shocked victims of the class war known as neoliberalism.

Stupor was started in New Orleans in the spring of 1995 by writer and construction-business sole proprietor Steve Hughes and his friend Bill Rohde. It was originally supposed to be a vehicle for authors to publish experimental, confessional material. Not not longer after, Hughes relocated to Hamtramck, Michigan, a mostly Eastern European enclave almost completely surrounded by the city of Detroit and once home to the now-demolished Dodge Main Plant, a massive automotive manufacturing facility that competed with Henry Ford's River Rouge Complex as a paragon of vertically integrated mass production.

With the move, came the conversion of Stupor into Hughes's solo project. Instead of publishing stories written by others, he began writing all of the stories himself, using anecdotes he collected from people he met or conversations he overheard in working-class bars, construction worksites, and elsewhere he came upon people talking.

As is typical of the genre, the early issues of Stupor are crude cut-and-paste affairs, produced in small quantities using one-color quick-printers and extremely low budgets. (According to the "History" section of the zine's website, the first four issues of 1000 each were all published for the cost of two cases of beer.) With experience and the capabilities afforded by newer improvements in desktop publishing technology, the production values have been raised somewhat, but not to the level where one would call them slick. More recent issues have been done in collaboration with visual artists who interact with the author to create thematic mashups of image and text, form and content. The narrow, vertical format (the common letter-size sheet folded in half lengthwise) is intended to make the publication suitable for display on top of the toilet tank.

By the same token, the subject matter revels in all manners of abjection, chronicling the usually humiliating misadventures of those some might label a clueless pack of losers, but who I interpret as merely hapless unfortunates trying to cobble together some semblance of a life in an age of severely diminished expectations. (And there's arguably no more iconic place for these hardscrabble social bricoleurs to do it in than among the ruins of the modernist utopia that is latter-day Detroit. One of my favorite Stupor lines that perfectly encapsulates the situation: "How can I jump, when I'm already falling?") Rendered in the first person, each story is identified only by the gender and hometown of the putative narrator.

The newest issue carries the theme "Washed in Dirt" and it was done in collaboration with international art star Matthew Barney, who Hughes had met when the artist was in Detroit two years ago to work on a performance piece titled KHU, the second of a seven-part performance cycle inspired by Norman Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings. (For my review of the event published in the Brooklyn Rail, click here.) With its consistently typeset font, neat, unbroken text columns, and color images throughout, the package seems a little un-Stuporish to me, a little too tidy and professional, especially given the theme. But the stories don't disappoint, especially "Male, Clinton Township," an episode about a young man "spiraling into a pit of impurity" with his Bible-study partner. The centerpiece drawing by Barney, part of the KHU performance documentation, depicts the effluence of the City of Detroit sewage system at the intersection of the Detroit and Rouge Rivers, spreading out at the foot of the ecologically challenged Zug Island, to form a shitty brown triangle of eddying water current that also reads as a thatch of pubic hair, is another nice element.

Many statistics can be and have been compiled to represent the ebb and tide of various flows -- of capital, of population, jobs, home occupancy rates, etc. -- on Detroit, patterns of what these days free-marketers call "creative destruction." Stupor limns what it feels like to be left floundering in the wake of that process.

Click here to listen to an interview with Steve Hughes on the "Washed in Dirt" issue of Stupor done in collaboration with Matthew Barney, which originally aired on public radio.

Public Pool on Model D TV

The webzine Model D posted this three-minute clip on the Hamtown art space Public Pool, featuring an interview with co-founder Steve Hughes. In the perennially beleaguered Detroit art world, there are always at any given time spaces that serve as facilitators of community, spots where the tribe gathers to reaffirm some semblance of identity and self-respect. Back in the days of Cass Corridor it was the Willis Gallery and before that the Red Door. After that it was spaces like the Michigan Gallery (which had the added benefit of possessing a rather robust pick-up bar scene, all the more active for being disguised under a layer of artsy hifalutin-ness), the Cement Space, AC,T, detroit contemporary/CAID, etc. Public Pool has all the requisites: four walls that maintain the proper level of authentic rawness, a keg (provided courtesy of the good folks @ Traffic Jam & Snug), and bit of entertainment, usually off-beat enough to again project an aura of vanguard cred. The show opening Saturday, January 15 riffs on the Detroit International Auto Show, featuring nine artists who address the effect cars have had on the landscape and our lives.

Detroit Art, Time & Space @ the DIA

Tonight I've curated a group a readings to follow the Detroit Institute of Arts Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art meeting. The event starts a 7 pm and is free. (Click here for information and here for a reservation ticket.) It kicks off the FMCA's year of programing based on the theme "Making Space: Imagining Architecture, Art and Intimacy."

We take "making space" in two senses, the processes of creating space, objective and subjective, and the location, i.e., the studio, the museum, the writer's desk, in which those processes take place. I will talk about that a little bit plus introduce the other speakers. Each writer will then speak from a location in the modern and contemporary galleries that provides a context for their presentation. People will move from speaker to speaker to take it all in, a kind of intellectual moving feast. There will be two groups, each presenting their work again to allow everyone to cycle through. I think it's going to be a great event. Here's the line up and what they will be doing. In parentheses is the artist whose work each reader will be giving their presentations by.

Group A:

• Louis Aguilar is an award-winning journalist and nonfiction writer. His writing gigs include the Washington Post and Denver Post, and since 2004, he has helped to report the epic nature of his native city for The Detroit News. While in Washington, D.C., he ran a Latino film festival and consulted to the Smithsonian Institution on Latino programming. His 2009 book Long Live the Dead: The Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato, is about a Mexican city’s complex relationship with 112 of its mummified citizens. Tonight he’s going to talk about his complex feeling for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. (Diego Rivera)  
• Lynn Crawford is an art critic and a fiction writer. She is also a founding board member of the Museum of Contemporary Detroit. Besides her art criticism, which has been published internationally, Crawford is the author of two novels, Blow and Simply Separate People as well as a collection of sestinas inspired by art titled Fortification Resort. Her newest novel, Simply Separate People, Two, comes out this fall from Black Square Editions—Brooklyn Rail. She reads tonight from a passage of Shankus, a novel in progress, inspired by Dashell Hammett. (Giorgio De Chirico)
• Chris Tysh is a poet and playwright who teaches creative writing and women’s studies at Wayne State University. She is the author of several collections of poems and plays. Her latest publication is the play Night Scales: A Fable for Klara K due out later this month from United Artists. It was also performed at the Hilberry Theater under the director of Aky Kadogo. Tonight she will from Molly, the Flip Side, a “transcreation” of Samuel Beckett’s novel, translating it from French to English and also from prose to poetry. (Alberto Giacometti)
• Matthew Olzmann is poet who has worked as a writer-in-residence at the InsideOut Literary Project since 2002. He also teaches composition at Oakland Community College and is the poetry editor of the online journal, The Collagist. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including American Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Salt Hill, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Oboh Prize from Boxcar Poetry Review. Tonight he will read a selection of poems organized around a fictional museum. (Willem De Kooning)

Group B:

• Craig Wilkins is an award-winning architect, urbanist, educator, and author, and director of the Detroit Community Design Center at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the 2007 book The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture, and Music, which won the 2008 Montaigne Medal for Best New Writing and the 2009 National Indie Excellence Award in the Social Change category. He is also co-editor of Activist Architecture: A Field Guide to Community-Based Practice to be published next year by Princeton Architectural Press. His design and narrative work mines the nexus between identity, the city, and the spoken, and he will read from that work tonight. (Hughie Lee Smith)
• Rachel Harkai writes poetry and essays about memory, survival, collapse, and sometimes about the post-urban landscapes of Detroit. Her work also often deals with other art forms, including visual art, which became an inspiration after she began making regular weekend visits to the Detroit Institute of Art as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. After graduation in 2007, she was writer-in-residence with Hub City Writers Project of Spartanburg, South Carolina, before relocating to Detroit in 2008. She has written poems about a number of pieces in the DIA's collection, a few of which she will share tonight, along with thoughts on the inspiration and process behind their creation. (Donald Sultan)
• Steve Hughes is a beer drinker with a eager ear for listening. He collects stories from people he meets at local bars. He writes them then publishes them in the format of a small magazine titled Stupor. Hughes has collaborated on the layout and design with many of Detroit's artists. The art for his newest issue titled "A Hole for Brains and Candy," was accomplished by Faina Lerman. An event celebrating the release of this issue will occur at Hamtramck's Public Pool art space on Devil's Night. Tonight Hughes will be reading stories from past, current and future issues of Stupor. (Mike Kelly)
• Vievee Francis is the author of two poetry collections, the 2006 Blue-Tail Fly and Dark, which is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Best American Poetry 2010, and Angles of Ascent: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. In 2009-2010, she poet-in-residence for the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholar’s Program at University of Michigan and in 2009 received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award. She is a Callaloo and Cave Canem Fellow and currently visiting artist/scholar at College for Creative Studies. She will read several selections from her impressive body of work tonight. (Kehinde Wiley)