"Fuck off."

The citizens of Bayview in southeastern San Francisco are in a land battle with the Lennar Corp., a massive development corporation that is looking to bring 25,000 new residents into the area but with no plans for revitalized transportation or how to handle the expected sea-level rise. Moreover, Bayview Hunters Point is home to one of the most devastated superfund sites in California. As the Navy's former nuclear testing facility, the Hunters Point shipyards got blasted with radiological contamination. Currently, Bayview has the highest infant mortality rate in the state, and the highest rates of cancer in the city.

Residents are arguing for sustainable growth, which would mean cleaning up the land (as opposed to capping it with concrete, which is Lennar's proposal), keeping low income and affordable housing as a priority (as opposed to 37% of new units sold at below market-value, which is not even necessarily affordable), and a protection plan for the Ohlone burial sites that are there.

To make their case, residents turned it out last night, at the City Hall meeting of the SF Planning Commission. They argued strongly for responsibility on the part of the Mayor as well as City Commissioners, who have a legacy of letting communities of color in the city down. But there was also a disturbing number of testimonies from the commerce department, from carpenters, from an SF Labor Commission rep (who, along with ACORN and SF Organizing Project were bought out by Lennar last year) who support Lennar's plan of irresponsible development. Their argument is that the City has sat too long on this plan: the time for action, couched as revitalization, is now. This "economic engine," to quote several arguments for Lennar, needs to keep turning.

But when we really look closely at this economic engine, all we see is crisis and devastation. This is the economic engine that obliterated the Fillmore district in San Francisco (I've talked about this a bunch here and here). In fact, it's the same engine that transformed Chicago in the 1950s by declaring 23 miles of housing and public services a "blight" and developing high-rise projects to contain black people, which, half a century later would be declared failed anyway. (James Baldwin calls this kind of urban renewal "Negro removal.") In fact, it's the same engine that has worked in DC, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and New Orleans (just to name a few major cities, although this chameleon-like engine can rear its head outside the city just as well). The process is always the same: capitalism and racism work together to create depressed zones of color by first forcing migration in relation to capital and then divesting in communities of color. Eventually, capitalism and racism work through city planners and representatives to name these zones blighted (this particular bit has its roots in the Federal Housing Act and its local iterations of the 1940s and 50s). Then, capitalism and racism work together through developers and politicians to clear out the blight without regard to the structural issues that have caused it in the first place, building condos and overpriced houses on toxic landfills like Bayview Hunters Point. And then what happens?

What frightens me about this engine is how much it looks like US imperialism in general. The past two weeks of climate talks in Copenhagen have highlighted the current tensions between the struggling white superpower, the brown nation states clamoring for first world status, and the dark global south. In their courageous resistance to imperialistic environmental racism, small island states and African nations have walked out and spoken up against money as some kind of compensation for global instability. Clinton's attempt to convince states to agree to an unlivable increase in global temperatures in exchange for $100bn has been met with a resounding "fuck off" from more than a few delegates.

The desire to profit in the face of global destruction expressed by the U.S., Canada, and others, is strikingly similar to Lennar Corp.'s desire to build (probably) shitty housing on toxic land that is susceptible to flooding and liquefaction in the case of an earthquake. Rich people all over the US live in shitty houses on shitty land like this. Their children have black runny noses and asthma. They drink out of water filters and Fiji bottles. They develop cancer in their 40s, but they have insurance and organic grocery stores. Because of the way that capitalism and racism work together, people of color and working class white people have often been forced to do the work that we should all be doing: identifying the total lack of responsibility capital has to human lives and saying, like those brave nations at COP15, "Fuck off. We don't want your environmental structural adjustment. What we want is to live."

It is the work of current residents of Bayview Hunters Point (and rad organizers at POWER) that potential future residents should be paying attention to. No one wants to live on dirty land. Just as all of us (including Mrs. Clinton) live on this rapidly warming planet, we all have a right to live somewhere safe, where we can drink the water and breathe the air. These are basic rights. Any future Bayview homeowners (unwanted or otherwise) should heed the rights that current residents are fighting for, because their struggle is all of ours.

Incest in the Image World

[a critical response to Susan Sontag, 1 Oct. 2009]

In her essay The Image-World, Susan Sontag convincingly details the means by which photography works as acquisition – not simply creating spectacle or surveillance, but also creating consumable subjects out of events, places, and individuals.  Sontag likens this last process to “a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end” to explain the simultaneous participation and alienation that photography invokes.  Anyone watching the Oprah show may recognize this feeling – particularly if they tuned in last Wednesday when Oprah interviewed Mackenzie Phillips of hit TV Show One Day At A Time about her new memoir revealing her heavy drug addiction as a child and her 10 year incestuous relationship with her father (John Phillips of 60s group the Mamas and the Papas).

            On last Wednesday’s show, Phillips sat in a living-room type chair, fluctuating between nervous laughter and uncontrollable tears, as she detailed the illicit sexual encounters that developed into a consensual relationship with her father.  Oprah leans in beside her, listening intently with a motherly furrowed brow, gently interjecting leading questions every so often to refocus Phillips’ monologue.  The audience moans and gasps appropriately to Phillips’ confessions, apparently unaware that father-daughter incest is the most common form of the most common kind of child abuse – incest in general.  Which is to say that it is more than likely that at least a handful of people in Oprah’s live audience that day – and probably over 24 thousand people in her audience worldwide – have had some kind of experience with incest.[1] And while watching the star that many audience members grew up on (as I did, watching cable re-runs of One Day At A Time each day after school) discuss incest so candidly was surely liberating for some, it was also undoubtedly the manifestation of Sontag’s photography binoculars.   Audience members gaped as the “exotic thing” – in this case, a former drug addicted incest survivor – seemingly became near, in contrast to the familiarity of incest, drug addiction, and childhood sexual assault – which, through the alienation of the image-world, became “abstract, strange, [and] much farther away.”

---

[1] These numbers are based on a comparative analysis of U.S. incest statistics and Oprah’s global estimates (according to Nielsen, about 7.4 million viewers worldwide each day). However, incest is incredibly hard to gather numbers on because of the amount of shame and mis-education surrounding it, in addition to the amnesia that survivors often experience. Therefore, David Finkelhor’s 1983 estimate that 1 million Americans have experienced incest is likely very low. David Finkelhor, The Dark Side of Families: Current Family Violence Research (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1983). 

new beginnings

                                            

Desire to keep this space conflicts with a lack of time for proper reflection. 

But, I am mandated to write reflection papers at least once a week...

Here's hoping someone may want to read them.

dispatch from Istanbul (with limited internet access).

carpets in the home of some brothers.

       

hot air.

Kapadokya. 

The abandoned cave-homes of Kapadokya.  Where people lived for centuries the state eventually declared a "Zone of Emergency" due to rock-slides.  In the past 20 years, people have been moving out and into modern pre-fab homes, leaving the ruins for farming, tourists, and pigeon-shit collecting (which is a major form of fertilizer all over Turkey it seems).  Even more recently, very wealthy foreigners have been buying back these cave-homes, restoring them, and turning them into luxury resorts and vacation homes (despite their precarious positioning on the edge of cliffs).  I suppose if you are only staying in a place 2 months out of the year, there's barely a 20% chance of you dying, right?  Kapadokya could be a case of Gentrification v.2.0, the 2010 edition.  The truly historic homes of a marginalized people, lost to a government that declares their neighborhood a blight, and re-sold to wealthy outsiders.  

Right? Or do I just try to hard to understand everything through the lens of U.S. urban politics?

  Kapadokyan blight.

Me and money. (pt.1 of the Lonesome Wolfboy series)

My family is a family of wanderers. One might call them travelers.  My mother is a working class midwestern expat, my father a segregated  sharecropping south/ern Baptist reject, and my brother a true adventurous nomad (all National Geographic and shit).  I have always felt culturally dislocated: I said to Michael and Anissa "I feel invisible.  I do not know where to place myself."  It is why I am a performer; I am overcompensating.  Me and my brother and my mom and my dad are all people who believe in roots while at the same time practicing a kind of rootlessness... never fully invested in the place where we are.  I think my brother is the only one who admits to living this life in earnest - he readily admits he will be ready for a new adventure after another year in Japan, and maybe it will prompt him to enlist in the armed forces.  Regardless, each of us believes in stretching out our legs - even if for only a minute - as if to make a home in whatever place it is that our homelessness has brought us to.

Anyway, I never would have said we are tourists.  

Until Istanbul.

My parents are old now.  They are in their mid and late 60's.  It is important to them to continue to travel, but they do not have the physical luxury of their youth.  They do, however, have the luxury of credit cards and a middle class delusion of endless wealth.  So they got a tour guide.  This made me slightly uncomfortable from the outset - paying someone to book us expensive hotel rooms, drive us around while we do windshield tours and snap photos of bazaars sounds a little imperialist-creepy to me and is not really the way I like to travel.  But what is the way I like to travel to another country whose language I don't speak, whose culture I don't know?  (Trying to answer this question, I typed and deleted a number of statements just now about different experiences in different cities.  And I realized what I have been realizing for some time now: one's experience of a place is almost entirely about the way that the people are there.  Spending all of my time with the same person or people colors a place in a particular way for me.  Just because I was attached at the hip to my friend Sarah in Paris for two weeks in 2005 doesn't mean I did not experience the city - it just means I experienced a different city than what the tour books talk about, and a different city from what art students talk about, and a different city from what infoshop.org talks (talked?) about.  I also realized, in trying to answer that question, that often my experience of a place is colored by the fact that I am a young person who passes as a straight woman, despite my efforts.  I have been propositioned on three different continents.  Men take me on tours, want to explain history and folklore to me, want to buy me a drink at their favorite bar.  It helps. Right?)

So why the hell not try something new in Turkey?  We are in Turkey now - Cappadocia (Kapadokya).  It is stunningly gorgeous.  We are full-on tourists.  The conversations I have had with Turks since arriving have been based on commerce (tour guides, shopkeepers, two salesmen my parents call "the Carpet Brothers" because they bought thousands of dollars in carpets from them).  My mother's wallet was stolen and we ended up at the police station for an hour, so I guess that was kind of different - but we couldn't really communicate with them because none of us speak enough Turkish to get past "Hello, how are you, big man?  I'm feeling strong like a rock / beautiful like a peanut."  

Today was spent almost entirely without Turks (except for our tour guide).  Most of the afternoon we spent alone, jumping across beautiful rock formations in which Cappadocians carved out homes a thousand years ago - it is like a scene from a Spaghetti Western on Mars here.  No sounds, just flies humming and the sound of rock falling somewhere, and the occasional call to prayer that bursts out across the country over loudspeakers five times a day.  Then we went shopping.  "Supporting the arts," my brother calls it - a large man-made cave where they make world-famous pottery.  The work is beautiful, and the cave is full of European tourists.  The nice man (everything here seems run by men; women are often working at a table behind them or pictured in photos on the wall as rural folk who have been given resources to produce the goods the men sell) showed us around a bit and talked about the fascinating history of miniature painting.  Then we entered the storeroom where we spent at least two hours laboring over what plates to buy, how much is too much to spend, what colors look best in the bathroom, haggling haggling haggling.  A relationship that had begun as friendly, informative and jovial, ended in jockeying over prices (plates start at around $300, and can be in the thousands).  I could see sweat breaking out on my dad's forehead.  My mom had already maxed out her credit card and had her entire purse stolen the day before.  Can we get the price down to 800?  My brother offers to thrown in 500 Turkish Lira in cash.  Can we do it, without shipping, for 900?  My dad groans.  I leave the room for the 3rd time; I feel so shitty.

Back in the car, after it is over, everyone looks at what everyone else purchased and proceeds to distractedly follow their script:  "It's beautiful.  How much was it?  ...Oh, you did great."  I remember this from West Africa with my parents.  This pleasure in the haggle, the joy of knowing you got one over on the local and you got a beautiful piece of craft.  And, ultimately, these plates (or gloves or carpets or tin works) are generally finely made and your patronage is what sustains their making.  That is to say that in many places where tourism takes up a huge amount of space in the country's economy, traditional fine craftsmanship is kept alive through its wholesale to foreigners - often the same foreigners whose ancestors colonized the ancestors of the traditional artists, and even more often whose ability to travel and tour and buy is predicated by wealth that comes from a history of exploiting the artists' people.  In globalized capitalism, nothing is worth anything if it doesn't make money.  Laboriously hand-crafted and highly decorative traditional items need to make money, too.  People still gotta eat.*

Tomorrow we go in a hot air balloon ride we cannot afford.  My mom and dad didn't understand the brochure and thought it was in dollars, not euros.  We have offended the guide taking us up by trying to get out of the commitment.  So we will go up, and have a good time, and be together, and it will be about being together.  We will be half way across the world, in a thousand dollar balloon ride, together.

I'll keep ya'll posted.  

*for more on notions of tourism, capitalism, colonialism, and traditional practices, check out chaska's entry on shaman practices in peru, where millions of white people come each year to have a cathartic spiritual experience.

Why February is black history month

Just saw Medicine for Melancholy, the newish film by Barry Jenkins.  Some are calling him "the new Spike Lee," as if there can only be one black man in film.  He is nothing like Spike Lee.  This film is quiet and leads you nowhere.  It is completely inconclusive.  And it occupies the space of awkward liminality, rather than the nervous threshold that made films like Do The Right Thing and Bamboozled so powerful.  But that's ok... you don't have to be Spike Lee to be a black person making movies people want to see. And Medicine is worth seeing.  

It is hard to give a synopsis for this film because as many narratives as it incorporates, it is not really about anything.  Two 20-something black hipsters wake up the morning after a house party in San Francisco.  It is awkward - especially since the girl has a boyfriend who happens to be out of town - but the boy is persistent, and they end up spending the next 24 hours together.  It turns into one of those amazing day-long dates with someone you've never met before where everything normal becomes new and utterly magical.  This is one story.  Another story of the film is that they are living in San Francisco, a city like many cities: gentrification issues run deep and San Francisco's PR has had an erasing effect on the memory of the place.  Neighborhoods (like Bayview) that became relocation centers after the first wave of gentrification somewhere else (like Fillmore) in the city are now being gentrified themselves.  The film features an actual housing justice meeting where a lot of these issues in relation to the future of the city and the potential loss of rent control are laid out in plain language.  A third story that appears in Medicine is the story of being young and black and "indy" - a scene that the main character claims is all about being white.  As Micah (the guy) and Jo (the girl) go through their day this issue comes up over and over again.  Jo is sort of post-race.  She wants Micah to see himself as a human and she doesn't want to have to feel guilty that her boyfriend is white.  Micah on the other hand is in a love-hate relationship with the city he was born in and, like many non-white SF natives that I've met since moving here, can not shake the feeling that his claim on the place is rapidly being pulled out from under him, and that he and the other black indy folk might be doing most of the pulling.  He talks about going to a show and out of three hundred people only seeing one other black face - that has probably "got their arm around somebody white."

Walking out of that theatre tonight I realized I had just experienced what it must feel like to be white and heterosexual and upper middle class and a filmgoer.  You see yourself reflected on the screen.  Not in a campy way, not in a way where you understand this reflection of you is only partial and is being used to talk about something not-you.  It's just people like you who happen to have a camera filming them.  It's like... you get the jokes.  This isn't a film about gentrification and it's not a film about being black.  If anything, it's a kind of meandering first date movie where no one gets the girl in the end.  But everything about the space - from the scene at the Knockout to the opening views of Noe Valley - and the people - riding fixies downtown to the Museum of the African Diaspora or Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (which is also a neighborhood known for it's Redevelopment slum clearance, something which, interestingly, goes unmentioned in the film) - was a story that I can understand.  For perhaps the first time in my life I went to a movie and felt myself on the other end of the gaze.  That is, the one being watched and not the watcher.  Whenever Laura Mulvey and her peons would talk about scopophilia and the pleasure of watching an "other," I always knew that something didn't hold completely true for me there.  Either the characters on the screen were half-people, failed representations and unrealized idealizations, or they were simulacra of a dominant society I have never been a part of - and so a sort of "other" to my otherness.  But this time, with Medicine, there was no other.  It's as if being young and black and strange and sort of yuppie-ish and melancholic were normal; it's as if these things that are me were things worth watching, not for the sake of discovering something else (like housing injustice in the Bay), but with the understanding that all those something elses are part of this normalized existence.  

Please Don't Shoot.

Eating popcorn in bed for dinner while watching The Times of Harvey Milk sometimes just seems like the best idea.

Earlier this week I played a show at El Rio with Chicken and Jen and Rae Spoon.  (I forgot to practice again.)  The last time I played a show at El Rio and forgot to practice, it was a benefit for the New Jersey 4.  This time around, those of us who found ourselves on the too-big dance floor of El Rio's back room were notable for where we were not - downtown Oakland, protesting the January 1st murder of Oscar Grant and the DA's and local authorities' mishandling of the case.  All of these events - the immediate arrests and subsequent convictions of 3 and a half to eleven years for each of the four young black lesbians from Jersey, and the close-range shooting of a young unarmed black man with his hands behind his back, as well as the two week delay in arresting his assailant Johannes Mehserle - are not unrelated.  They are both ultimately about power, and how it plays out in our justice system - rooted as it is in the post-slavery scramble to keep black youth outnumbered and outgunned.

On the one hand, seven women who knew of Sakia Gunn and understood the threat their young black and queer bodies posed, defended themselves.  They were not unarmed and pleading "Please don't shoot" with their hands behind their backs.  They were immediately arrested for the un-fatal stabbing of a violently homophobic misogynist, the original testimony of the "victim" was erased from the record, and the supposed weapon was never tested for DNA.  On the other hand, a man was on the ground and pleading when he was shot by a cop (protected by his fellow cops on the scene) in front of hundreds of Bay Area Rapid Transit users.  The killer was allowed to roam free - roam all the way to Nevada, in fact - despite the fact that several witnesses caught the shooting on video tape.  On the one hand, we can defend ourselves and get locked up; on the other, we can lay on the ground helpless and get shot.  We can get locked up or we can die.  It is an old and familiar tale. 

The first time folks out of the west coast really heard about Oscar Grant was not when Oscar Grant died.  It was when Oaklanders rose up in the streets a week later, burning trash cans and jumping on top of cop cars.  It was not until then that the national press found any reason to talk about the shooting death of a young black man, and even then it was only in passing, a side-note to the real point of the matter which was/is property destruction.  Maybe if New Orleans had burned over Adolph Grimes' murder, we'd be hearing about it over here.  (Although I think not, considering the national press' moratorium on non-hurricane related stories in New Orleans post-Katrina.)

At the conclusion of The Times of Harvey Milk, we are told that Harvey never wanted any violence over him, that he would have been unhappy with the riots that ensued after Dan White was convicted to just a few years with the "Twinkie defense."  And then there's Harry Britt, Milk's reluctant replacement on the SF Board of Supervisors, saying that "We were responding with anger.  We were angry."  Riots are what happen when angry people are not listened to.  

We are again at a moment, in 2009, of anger.  There is a movement against the options - to be locked up or to be laid down - that is being ignored, like a pot of soup on high heat.  No one seems too interested in history repeating itself.  I wonder what will happen this year.  

*special shout out goes to riotstorebellions for this one.