Man - Chrysler's Super Bowl ad is just, simply, stunning. I can't stop replaying it.
We lived in downtown Detroit many years ago - right out of grad school, in fact. Since then, we have lived in 7 different places - big cities, small towns, wealthy neighborhoods and modest both. If you were to ask SWMBO where her favorite place was out of all of those, she would instantly reply "downtown Detroit".
Me too. For some reason, I identify with Detroit - even though I lived in 10 places before I even went to college. And, even though they tore down my beloved Tiger Stadium [a pair of reserved seats are out back on the patio, and my Whitaker jersey's in the closet].
But Detroit - man...I've been pretty much everywhere in the USA and a lot of overseas, but Detroit is the one true cultural melting pot. The stories behind it - Henry Ford's $5/day and the trains full of people out of the Mississippi Delta with their blues, the immigrant Poles, and Lebanese, and Iraqi Chaldeans, and so many more. And even the Purple Gang running a flood of Seagram's illicit liquor across the Detroit River during prohibition, to supply Chicago and the west.
Neighborhood after neighborhood that was built by the people that came to build cars in the factories. The sheer grit and determination.
That ad captures it all. I have never intentionally listened to an Eminem song, but his casting and execution was spot-on. Even the guy doing the voice-over. To me, he sounds exactly like a guy sitting at a bar with his friends right after their shift ended at the factory just down the street, talking about he city and people he loves............"This - this right here - this is who we are."
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