Even sans Motown mojo, Detroit still a great city

Work took me to a place Americans call Motown this week. Detroit, Michigan, is as well known for its cars as it is for its music. Of course, African Americans played a big role in both. They laboured in the car factories that dot the suburbs of Detroit and at the end of a hard day’s work, made heartfelt pop music that gained worldwide popularity in the ’70s thanks to Motown records. This wasn’t any pure genre, like gospel, jazz or blues. It was a bit like Bhelpuri, with a whole lot of fresh ingredients and the earthiness of blue collar effort behind it. Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder came from Detroit. It might be worthwhile mentioning that Madonna and Eminem did too, but for me, the music of Motown has always been associated with an abundance of melanin.

My journey there didn’t involve any kind of music though. The airline I flew plied me with a 1000 movies, including every Bollywood movie that was released last year and left a suitcase of TNT at the box office before making its inglorious exit. They had some Tamil movies too, and these were even worse. Good Tamil movies are watched in theatres. So-so ones are bought from the neighbourhood’s illegal DVD merchant. Bad ones are downloaded (not even worth the purchase of a DVD), and the most atrocious ones make it to in-flight entertainment. I noticed my co-passenger watching almost every one of them, fast forwarding all the dialogue and action scenes and only focusing on songs where the sartorial choices of the heroine were of a minimalist nature.

And then there is the user interface of the entertainment system itself. In a world of iOS and Android devices, it would seem that any designer with any modicum of skill is clearly not working for the team that designed the UI for this. If I had a nuclear missile launch system and I didn’t want a trigger happy president to figure out how to use it too easily, I’d hire the chaps who did the UI for in-flight entertainment systems. There is a controller of sorts with a large number of coloured buttons and for some unfathomable reason, an entire QWERTY keyboard. There is some manner of vague correlation between pressing of those buttons and some actions being executed on the screen but it was not immediately evident to me, not particularly helped by the fact that there was an ice-age level latency between button press and screen refresh.

I landed in Washington DC before taking a domestic aerial share auto to Detroit. It was quite tiny and I have seen share autos in Chennai accommodate more passengers per cubic feet than the Bombardier CRJ-100 that flew me to Motor town. There were still a healthy number of Indian passengers, one of whom particularly failed to make a remark about the advanced age of one of the Delta flight attendants. Old women are frowned upon only when they choose to keep their jobs as an Air India flight attendant. White old people get away with anything really.

The Detroit airport is quite large actually, and mostly empty, a bit like the American car industry itself and I was not surprised to find that the city mostly stayed patriotic and drove only American cars. Patriotism likely helped by employee discounts, ie, There is something about American cars though. They look good. Sure they mostly incite American aggression in the Middle East for control of oil, but you’ve got to admit that their sense of design beats the staid Japanese anytime. But the design flavor of 2012 seems to be this unholy combination of curves and muscle, like John Abraham wearing lipstick perhaps. The Detroit automotive design paradigm of the ’60s and ’70s was the classic American muscle car and things eventually got a lot more curvier in the ’80s and ’90s. Now, it’s all metrosexual. I saw an SUV that looked like a cross between Sunil Shetty and Sonali Bendre.

One does not visit an American city and not complain about the pusillanimity of the local chicken wings. I did the same, except that I made the mistake of ordering ‘BBQ sauce’ instead of ‘hot sauce.’ Now, for those of you who might not have visited the US, when Americans say ‘hot’, they are merely referring to a slight lack of generosity when it comes to the sugar serving size, so when you order something that does not explicitly say ‘hot, spicy and intestine melting’, you are likely ordering concentrated sucrose, and that’s exactly what this BBQ sauce was. It was smokey flavoured in the way that the chap harvesting the sugarcane might have smoked a cigarette while doing the harvesting and it was almost entirely sweet. I might be a global citizen, but there is enough India in me to give me a visceral dislike for meat that is sweet. Well, at least, I didn’t pay for it, so it was sort of okay really.

Detroit’s a nice place. It doesn’t have the automotive mojo it once did but it is a great American city.

Slightly techie, moderately musical, severely blogging, timepassly tweeting.