The Unhockey

Tick tock, etc., IS IT OCTOBER YET?

Summer has many advantages, but, uh, em, no hockey. So sad. But there are other things going on in our world, things that aren't directly related to the Hockey but are, kind of, if you think about it in the woods after dark while fumbling around on the ground searching for the spilled resin ball. In some ways the stories of our day-to-day world of the headlines and 24 hour news babble are a bizarro inversion of the World of Hockey. Seriously, bear with me. Can you dig...

Your Chronicle editor doesn't know much about the Detroit, other than the following: 1) the Red Wings, 2) Motown Records, 3) late 60's garage rock sonic terror like the Stooges and the MC5, 4) the Great Cecil Fielder, 5) glorious Detroit techno, from Juan Atkins to Matthew Dear, and 6) cars or something.

Being a hockey fan you'd never know it, but apparently Detroit is having a tough time these days, even as it flourishes in the NHL. Not sure if the two phenomena--the decline and fall of Detroit's auto industry and perhaps the city itself; the Hockey greatness--are linked. What do I know is that the usually execrable TIME Magazine has put together an astonishing photo essay on "Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline." Massive and elegant public buildings, totally abandoned and left to rot. Crumbling Victorian homes. Empty, rusting factories and upturned broken pianos on the floors of luxurious hotels of the 1920s. It's stunning stuff: the city is well on its way to becoming an actual ruin, no different from Carthage or Persepolis, but one wonders if the death of Detroit's economy might actually transform the city into something new and different, something totally other to what it was before, but more interesting.

Did you know the Red Wings play there?