January 21, 2013

From “Breadcrumbs” by Steven Koneval

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As with any form of human expression, graffiti has undergone the full spectrum of reactions from proscription to embrace by the avant-garde. From the crude tags put up by amateur vandals to the sophisticated pictures that enthusiasts proclaim as “street art,” it is in the public eye as never before. Once might even argue that, with the international success and recognition of graffiti artists like Banksy and Invader, that the form has become respectable, even passé.

Well, it’s at least as true that whenever a form of human expression seems to have said all it can say, when it’s become too comfortable, someone will shake it up.

Urban explorers poking through Detroit’s Michigan Central Station found a sumptuous graffiti tableaux featuring an infant held in an unfolding flower bud. Text ringed it like a picture frame: they were born into a world overgrown/of crumbled walls the rats called home/but beauty springs from any soil/of its own but often with toil. Next to it was another painting, this one an almost photo-realistic picture of a blank wall in a decaying building.

The explorers, struck by what they saw, documented the find online and appealed for help in identifying the location. They soon established that it was the nearby Roosevelt Warehouse, also in Detroit; upon locating the wall depicted in the previous graffiti, they found it bedecked with another painting. This one depicted a small child of ambiguous gender and race wandering through weed-choked ruins and beholding a luminous golden keyhole bedecked with jewels and, impossibly, golden wings.

Its accompanying text: potential is there, in they and you and me/all that’s needed to unlock is the key/but though we know where the keyhole be found/where might a key be when falsehoods abound.

Another near-photographic scene accompanied it, a breadcrumb to the next stage of the story. Before long, the secret had spread well beyond the tiny community of urban explorers in Detroit to encompass a website, where enthusiasts cataloged the location of each new stage of the story and collaborated to decipher the clues as to the next location of the art.

All this independent of the artist, who remained anonymous and unnamed. By the apparent conclusion of their first “story,” fans had taken to calling the artist Breadcrumbs.

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July 5, 2012

From “Secrets of the Marlowe Days Festival” by Melida N. Wrisley

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I even tended to refer to him with the informal pseudo-affectionate nickname “Teddy” even though I knew through a little bit of research that he’d hated being called that by anyone who wasn’t a close family member. Then again, Theodore Marlowe was the sort that knew the value of a name: born John Theodore Marlow, it had taken the judicious dropping of a too-common first name and the addition of an unnecessary vowel to make his a name fit for literary immortality.

Deerton held its annual Marlowe Days events at the same time as the county fair as the only vestige of tourism a tiny burg like that was able to eke out. After all, Teddy had been born at what was then Deerton General (now Infrared Health Systems Mid-Michigan Campus no. 27) and attended what was then Deerton Elementary (now John T. Seymour Elementary) until the age of 10, when his family had moved to Grand Rapids and thence to Detroit. He’d been shortlisted for a Nobel, his novels and stories were still in print, and film adaptations had made millions of dollars over the years.

I prickled a little under the management role I had in Marlowe Days, though, for the simple reason that Theodore Marlowe hadn’t been all that find of Deerton at all. Biographies tended to give us a sentence, if we were lucky, before going into exhaustive detail on Marlowe’s days in Grand Rapids and Detroit. I had been through reams of interviews, and all the man ever had to say about us was negative. There was the CBS interview from 1969 where he talked of “escaping the stultifying atmosphere of small-town mundanity,” for instance, or the 1978 radio talk where he said “everything that made me who I am is of the furniture and automotive cities.”

As in not Deerton.

After moving away, he hadn’t visited once despite plenty of Marlow and Higginsfield relatives. Invitations to speak at DHS commencements or other events were returned unopened. His books, powerful as they were, spoke to the salad days of Michigan industry giving way to the rust belt.

Big city problems.

Only in death, it seemed, did Teddy have anything for us. His estate agreed to Marlowe Days less than two months after the author died in 1980.

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