Images 001
Notes
I founded Boat Magazine in 2010 while living in London. The world was deep in recession, mainstream magazines were folding left and right and I had never made one before, but somehow the first issue of Boat (Sarajevo) sold out. So we made another one (Detroit). And another one (London). And we just kept going... Boat Magazine is still one of the dumbest and, it turns out, best ideas I’ve ever had. Thank god.
1 The twelve issues of Boat Magazine: Sarajevo | Detroit | London | Athens | Kyoto | Reykjavik | Lima | Los Angeles | Bangkok | Tel Aviv | Havana | Faroe Islands
I founded Boat Magazine in 2010 while living in London. The world was deep in recession, mainstream magazines were folding left and right and I had never made one before, but somehow the first issue of Boat (Sarajevo) sold out. So we made another one (Detroit). And another one (London). And we just kept going... Boat Magazine is still one of the dumbest and, it turns out, best ideas I’ve ever had. Thank god.
1 The twelve issues of Boat Magazine: Sarajevo | Detroit | London | Athens | Kyoto | Reykjavik | Lima | Los Angeles | Bangkok | Tel Aviv | Havana | Faroe Islands
Boat Magazine
~ An independent travel and culture publication that focuses on a different, inspiring location for each issue.
From the essay Against Ruin Porn
by Jeffrey Eugenides
for Boat Magazine Issue 02: Detroit
That’s what this issue of Boat Magazine is about. To see the city of Detroit as it is today, a beaten-up, beaten-down place of incalculable difficulties, but a place where a half million people still live. What has happened to the industrial cities of the American Midwest is a travesty. St. Louis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Toledo, Flint, Gary.
It’s a big country, and if one place craps out on you, you leave it behind and find somewhere new. But not everyone gets to leave. Not everyone wants to leave. And so, if you visit the Rust Belt now, you come face to face with a central breakdown in American capitalism. No country that calls itself great can allow such a vast swath of its territory to be written off as it has been here.
The city’s founding fathers installed a Latin phrase on the city flag: Pseramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus. “We hope for better times. May it rise from the ashes.”
I don’t know if I believe it anymore. But it still applies. It’s still what any true Detroiter feels, though we’re the last people who’d ever try to sell you a little easy poetry.