The spirit of Detroit is hard to capture � but easy to recognize. I entered the main airport lobby and started to orient myself and had this funny but familiar feeling � then I remembered �Oh yes this is Detroit � I know how to deal with this.� Part of the secret is not to skimp on the hotel � besides putting you in a space which is bigger than my Leamington flat and having atonal funky trios to jam with, this one has a Steinway that you can chord on while you are waiting for them to unlock the Business Centre at 7.00am.

The nearest city in the UK to Detroit is Liverpool in my view. Everyone has their own view and they aren�t going to let any system keep them down. When you involve yourself in any Detroit system you have to remember that the people operating it think like that. Yesterday I chatted to two cabdrivers � one chat was about global conspiracy interpretations of the Bush administration � this guy was way ahead of me. The other was a woman � her son knew Eminem when he was on the streets and thought he was a regular guy � and we talked about the consistent invention of Detroit musicians relating it to the wider innovations that the motorcity pioneers came up with that changed the world.

The first driver told me that he was proud that on the day when the world marched against the war � Detroit put 100,000 citizens on the streets. He knew that this wouldn�t compare with a million in London and wouldn�t get the global headlines but Detroit was doing its stuff along with everyone else.

He also talked about Eminem�s new house � it used to belong to a Kmart director. Kmart is a big fraud case like Enron � the company used to be a competitor of Walmart which has bought ASDA. It went bust and all kinds of nasty practices have emerged � people are going to jail etc. This is exactly how Detroit suspects corporate America to work or what the Bush gang are really up to � and the fact that Eminem now has the big house shows that kids with the spirit of Detroit can prevail from time to time over the dark forces. Obviously a cause for celebration.

My newspaper this morning has stories about the continuing mental and physical health problems that afflicted the rescue works from 9-11 and about the resilience of former Vietnam POWs. Make of that what you will.

In the Detroit Institute of Art I bought a good accessible book on Jim Dine. Dine comes from Ohio which is a state everyone likes to look down on culturally. He arrived in NYC around 1955 and decided that he had to work with those who saw that the thing was not to become a 2nd generation abstract expressionist but to copy their spirit of adventure. Dine�s first work was the House which explored the relationship between art and its surrounding space. His second thing was The Smiling Workman which explored the idea that artists used art to express their alienation. This was a performance in which Dine drank red paint and poured it over himself. Only a small downtown audience saw this performance but it was said to be charismatic and electrifying by those who did. After that he took a similarly dramatic approach to the subject of the Car Crash. Looking from here you can see the thread from Pollock�s death to these performance and some of Warhol�s earlywork.