He did not have me at "Mies van der Rohe townhouse," but I must admit, I am falling in love with JD's Detroit. If I were a young artist I'd bail on NYC and make a beeline for that place, I swear.
That said, I like to think I keep pretty much aware of the extent of the bubble we live in, but reading JD and Wood's account of their scoutabout visit to the hospital makes me realize I have no idea:
The nurse shakes my wife's hand but ignores me until I follow them into the hallway. "Oh, and you are her support?" She asks. "My husband, Jim," Wood says. She shows us to a small examination room, where an initial ultrasound takes place, and where dilation is checked. "Dad is not allowed in here," she says.Not the hospital for us [sweet-juniper]"Why not?" I ask.
She puffs out her chest indignantly and says, "Because this is where we ask the mother if the male with her is an abuser and whether she wants security to escort him off the premises."
"Oh," I said.
It became clear over the course of the tour that this hospital has different protocol when it comes to fathers than the one where Juniper was born in San Francisco.
I'm resisting the transformation from "Dutch" to Jim and JD, but, yeah-I would read that man if he wrote about lint. Writing about Juniper and Detroit just makes me forever hungry for more. He had a lengthy comment within flickr, IIRC, about some of the feedback he gets on his Detroit pictures and all it did was to throw fuel on the fire of my need to understand that city. He has already made me love it. You know, in an internet stalkerish kind of way...
[I'm with you on the Dutch thing; I kind of think that when someone updates his name, the folks who knew him before still have license to call him by his old name. -ed.]
I love the writing, but I wonder about how much his experience squares with other people's. I live in San Francisco (in roughly the same neighborhood they did), and the city he described had almost no relationship to the one I know, other than the streets and stores all being in the same places. (Although he could not have been more right about the 1 California, which is the bus line from hell. I was stared out of my seat while eight months pregnant on that bus.) It makes me think I would probably loathe Detroit.