The Rust Belt Renaissance Revisited

For the past few months I’ve been a regular reader and occasional commenter on Ted Gioa’s substack The Honest Broker. Something I said on his recent post “Nine Observations on the Avant-Garde” caused quite a spark, as those comments, on music and on place, on geography, on the Midwest, caused quite a spark with other readers judging by the amount of “likes” and responses I got to the comments I made. It seems fitting that thoughts on noise music should lead to a meditation on the idea of a Rust Belt Renaissance, but so it goes.

I first started thinking about the idea of a revival of the Rust Belt in the spring of 2009 when John Michael Greer wrote his article “Rethinking the Rust Belt,” originally published on his peak-oil focused blog The Archdruid Report. 

As most of my readers know, I live in Cincinnati, and the idea of this area becoming a revitalized haven during the vagaries of climate change, gradual deindustrialization and attendant downshifting of the financialized economy was very appealing. As I have seen so much of things Mr. Greer has predicted come true in the decades I've been reading him, this remains so. I love my home town, the state I’m from, and the Midwest in general. I love other places too. I have family in Maine and my wife and I sometimes fantasize about moving there. I don’t know the exact contours of our future, but for the foreseeable portion of it, we are here to stay.  

The Rust Belt used to be a hopping place. In the mid-20th century we were coming into our own as a manufacturing economy, making cars, steel, and offering a plethora of services, trading American made goods abroad. In Cincinnati GE was one of the big companies, making plane engines, among other things. Families with one worker could bring home the bread, the bacon, and the butter, raising multiple little ones on a single paycheck. They'd even have some left over to take out their land boats onto the newly paved highways for vacations around the country. The kids could even buy some tchotchkes at the roadside attractions that dotted the landscape. It was a plentiful life even for the working class. Now the working class is oftentimes straight up homeless.

The closing down of the factories and relocation of labor to distant countries by the corporate powers sent these once powerful centers of productivity and culture here in the heartland into crumbling disarray. The same migrations that brought people up from the south to Detroit and elsewhere now caused them to move to other points and these places emptied out, many of the factories closed, and they became the playgrounds of graffiti artists, urban explorers and photographers looking for the perfect centerfold for their next piece of ruin porn.

This exodous happened some fifty years ago. The people who had made a life in the Midwest left when the opportunities were gone. They had to look out for themselves and their own after all. There is no blame. Many found work on the coasts in the seaports, receiving the goods back from overseas that they once were responsible for making to ship there. In the meantime the heartland began to rust, and like the Tinman from Oz, it remained in serious need from some tender care and drops of oil to keep its valves moving.

Yet now the Midwest and Rust Belt are becoming destination spots again as the failed social policies and expensive economies of the east and west coast put a good life out of reach for all but the elites. People who I know who moved away around the time I graduated high school in 1998 are now coming back in drove. These people couldn't wait to get out of Cincinnati for New York, Seattle, or Portland (Oregon, not Maine) are coming back, remembering all the good things about the area.

In the meantime my own neighborhood has become gentrified. A number of those doing the gentrifying are people who have left California. My wife and I have been in our neighborhood for over twenty years. It wasn’t all yoga moms and people pushing strollers with lattes when we got here. Our neighborhood was a mix of Appalachian working class folk, African Americans, gays and lesbians, and of course, artists and creatives. It followed the similar story we all know from our many lessons in gentrification. The artists and alternative types came and pioneered the run down neighborhood, put in some record stores, bars and coffee shops, and others started flocking to the microcultural mecca thus created.  That's why we were here. It was fun and funky, and there was diversity of both kinds of people and kinds of thinking. Now people are flocking to it from all the way on the other side of the country, and its less diverse. That has driven up the real estate costs, part of the same bubble that seems ready to burst all across the country, and bring down the rest of the economy with it. I couldn't move to my house if I sold it now. But relative to coastal dweller,  our homes are downright cheap. For someone coming here from LA, it’s nothing to drop half a million on a flipped house with good bricks and bones. We were lucky and got in when a house here cost less than a hundred grand (minus all the interest the bank got from us) and stayed put. 

In addition to neighbors from Californian, a stranger who was a reader of John Michael Greer’s blog got in touch with me last year to ask if I wanted to meet up for coffee. I did. It was kind of awkward but fun. He and his family had just relocated from California. He had some family connections here and they were looking to start a small farm somewhere outside the city. He was really enjoying it so far, and had mentioned part of the reason they came was how culturally chaotic and expensive things had gotten in his home state. 
  
Cincinnati has fared much better than our neighbors up north in Youngstown and Detroit, but those are coming back. Detroit had already been a destination for people with ambitions to go in, buy a really cheap house, fix it up with some elbow grease and get to work building a life and rebuilding the city, maybe with some urban farming thrown in for good measure. Some didn't even buy a house, but pioneered abandoned homes. And so the trend of inward migration from the east and west coasts continues. Part of it has to do with climate change too. Aside from risk of tornadoes and serious thunderstorms, we don’t have a lot of natural disasters in this part of the country. A bit of flooding during the heavy rain season of winter is now becoming more common along our river ways. But there are no wildfires like in California. We don’t have the same issues with regular ongoing drought either.

There are other advantages for people to come here though. We may not have the oceans, but we do have all kinds of rivers and the in the northern parts of the heartland, the Great Lakes -which according to esoteric tradition are poised to become the center of a future great civilization. Another advantage is the age of the cities here. Unlike cities further west, we were built before cars had come to dominate urban planning. Our neighborhoods were already established when walking and horse and buggy were the main ways of getting around, followed by street cars and short-line trains out to the suburbs where the wealthy magnates of industry established themselves. Our neighborhoods are very walkable, built on grids, and already densely built in many cases with older painted lady shotgun houses in rows (like ours) and beautiful Italinate architecture, as well as traditional classical and Art Deco style buildings in our city centers.

People like me who’ve had family here for a few generations don’t need to be convinced about the good life you can have in Cincinnati. But others are cozying up to the cheaper cost of living and the culture we have here. The museum, music, nightlife and art scenes are as fine as anywhere else. And that’s where this starts to tie back in with the avant-garde and the humanities in general.

I know so many people who left for the coasts in order to pursue a life in the arts. LA, San Francisco, NYC, Portland and Seattle, these were the places to go to meet “like minded” people and pursue the dream of making it as an artist, whether in the visual arts, music, writing, acting, what have you. One in particular did make it onto the national and international tier as a musician after moving to New York. He is the exception. Many others have had certain achievements in the arts  but not what can be considered continued commercial success. Not enough to "make it." But the lasting success of building a quality life has evaded quite a few of them and they have come back here, drawn by our many amenities. I'd also say they are drawn by the friendlier disposition of those of us in the Midwest (I heard the latter from two friends who had moved to Seattle, who described the people as standoffish and cold). Back in the early oughts people were talking about this migration from the inner cities of America to the coasts as the Brain Drain, and I resented it then, not least because friends I enjoyed conversing with and some making music with had left. Now I can look back and smile, but  not out of meanness. I stuck to my guns by staying here and through hard work we have managed to get out of debt, when many my age or older even, are starting over again when they come back. But all in all, I am happy they are back, and I welcome the newcomers. There is no blame. Together we can all retrofit the crumbling infrastructure and make something remarkable of these walkable neighborhoods.

In Ted Gioia’s article he cited a conference about the “crisis in the avant-garde” and Lucy Sante in particular who said, “An avant-garde needs a scene, and the cities are too expensive for scenes now. An avant-garde needs an excess of time, and that’s in short supply nearly everywhere.”

In point four of Gioia's article he says, "The avant-garde today is too much about grant-writing, and cozy relationships with the wealthy." I agree for those on the coast, but that wasn't my experience.

Cincinnati always had a small but mighty avant-garde music scene. The people who I looked up to when I was coming up in the nineties had roots in that going back to the punk, industrial and art music scenes of the seventies. It might have been on smaller scale than what was happening in NYC or San Francisco, but it also allowed us to forge our own way and remain scrappy. We weren’t tied to any of the big patrons or donors or institutions in the way the coastal elites were. 

Noise music in the Midwest came out of the feeling of this being a landscape of noise, of rusting factories. In many ways its in our bones. Trent Reznor, who is arguably the most recognizable of musicians working in the industrial genre was born in Pennsylvania and started making his brand of music in Cleveland where he rubbed elbows with the likes of Pere Ubu, the great art punk rockers. The noise in the environtment and the urban decay have gone hand in hand making the Midwest  a place where this kind of music has thrived.

As a commenter by the name of Kerem on the Honest Broker put it, “to locate the contemporary avant-garde, or at least one manifestation of it, perhaps you should shift your focus away from its traditional strongholds. Possibly the most electrifying performance I've ever witnessed was Aaron Dilloway and Victoria Shen (noise musicians from Ohio and the bay area, respectively) on a shared bill earlier this year in St Louis. St. Louis and other cities in the midwest / rust belt are home to thriving, highly localized noise and free improv scenes that operate almost entirely outside of the mainstream culture industry.” I’ve been to several shows in my neighborhood just this year from local and touring musicians myself, all put on completely underground, all put together under the rubric of the DIY ethic.

Thus those coming to the Midwest will have a certain freedom from the mainstream culture industry as another decisive bonus. What kind of music, art, writing and acting people want to do now is up in the air, but living in a place where it is cheaper to build a life, gives more of a possibility to living a frugal Bohemian art-life where less time can be devoted to a day job and just getting by, and more can be devoted to achieving individual and community visions if people are willing to do it DIY.

A Rust Belt renaissance won’t be achieved by art alone, however, but it won’t be achieved without art. As climate change, economic downturn, and limited energy supplies continue to put the pinch on the ability to outsource our lifestyles from overseas, low-tech and small scale industry will return to the Rust Belt as well. This will make the region a viable place for people starting families again and looking to get a home (after that bubble bursts). 

John Michael Greer nailed the nascent trend we are now beginning to see become fulfilled. As we proceed further we can also take to the heartland these words, “One of the implications is that transport costs will no longer be a negligible part of the cost of goods shipped over long distances. More energy-efficient transport modalities will tend to replace less efficient ones because they, and thus the goods they ship, will be more affordable; equally, diseconomies of distance will tend to outweigh economies of scale and foster the reemergence of regional economies. Among the likely beneficiaries of these changes are the towns that thrived best in an earlier, more regional economy — those that are well served by rail and water transport, surrounded by farming regions that don’t depend on irrigation, not too far from major markets, and provided with ample and inexpensive real estate for the factories and warehouses of a downscaled and relocalizing industrial economy.”

Away from the pernicious influence of the self-appointed guardians of culture and taste on the coasts, those born with the inclination to make and make do have many opportunities to put their own vision into action here in the Midwest. There will still be challenges as we adapt to the limits we can no longer rightfully ignore. There will still be challenges as we adapt to the consequences of bad past behaviors. All of this in turn can help create a resilient social and physical infrastructure. Both of these infrastructures are certainly in need of some retrofitting now. They could also use some retrovation. We should look back towards traditional ways of doing things and being together before the internet and streaming put such a vice grip on our social lives.  We need to have more “third places” where the seeds, buds and blooms of the Rust Belt renaissance will begin to form.

The Rust Belt is ready for its devoted old timers, returnees and new comers to join together and build up the book shops, cafes, bars, venues, galleries, breweries, urban farms, apothecaries, smithies, glass blowing studios, pottery barns, and wood shops and more all needed as we downshift from industrial culture to vibrant local life and bioregional communities.      

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In other news my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory is now officially available in North America. US readers can find it on Bookshop.org here , Amazon.com here and fine bookstores everywhere.

I also had the honor of being interviewed by Neil Mason for his wonderful Moonbuilding magazine and substack of the same name. You can get the print issue of Moonbuilding from the Castles in Space bandcamp page, and read the full interview over in this issue of Moonbuilding.

The Radio Phonics Laboratory also received a very nice review from the wonderful Steve Barker in the September issue  487 of Wire Magazine, out on news stands now.  Be sure to check out the magazine if you get the chance, and Steve's great radio show, On the Wire. 

And over at Igloo Magazine there is a feature with my interview with ambient music pioneer Don Slepian, material from which went into the Rad Lab.

To celebrate the US launch of the book, I've created the Rad Lab Vox Machina mix of songs utiiizing vocoders and text to speech software.