Category: Uncategorized

homelessness, foreclosures, and squatting

Some homeless people turn to foreclosed homes for shelter: HeraldTimesOnline.com:

The nation’s foreclosure crisis has led to a painful irony for homeless people: On any given night they are outnumbered in some cities by vacant houses. Some street people are taking advantage of the opportunity by becoming squatters.

Foreclosed homes often have an advantage over boarded-up and dilapidated houses abandoned because of rundown conditions: Sometimes the heat, lights and water are still working.

“That’s what you call convenient,” said James Bertan, 41, an ex-convict and self-described “bando,” or someone who lives in abandoned houses.

cartography

  On tour, I got to catch up with some reading and finished The Power of Maps, which Chiara gave me for my birthday.  One of the things that was most compelling about the book was a brief overview of movements trying to redefine the role of geography and cartography in society, aknowledging the knowledge of any person and their ability to express that knowledge through maps.  One project was the Society for Human Exploration, founded by a geographer named William Bunge  and their mapping of Detroit, The Detroit Geographic Expedition I.  I was able to find a little more about this in an article titled The Academy in Activism and Activism in the Academy: Collaborative Research Methodologies and Radical Geography.

From that article:

Bunge in his description of the early years of this experiment reclaims the use of the words ‘expedition’ and ‘exploration’ so tied to the geographical tradition but redefines their use (Bunge in Peet 1979; p. 31-35). While mentioning the usefulness of the expedition/exploration tradition for those that undertook them he goes on to establish the ideas behind a new exploration. Bunge defines this ‘new’ type of expedition as a “human” one: it is “a democratic, as opposed to an elitist expedition.” “[H]uman explorations are ‘contributive,’ (resource contributing instead of resource taking)…Priorities are totally reversed,” (Bunge in Peet 1979; p. 35). The traditional idea of the ‘field’ and the geographer’s relationship to those who lived there also changes dramatically and here one can also see some more of the organizational philosophy behind the D.G.E.I. experiment:
“Local people are to be incorporated as students and as professors. They are not to be further exploited. Their point of view is given first place. It is democratic also in that if planning work results, and that is one of the main purposes of the Expedition, then the planners, the geographers, are expected to live in the mess that they create. (Bunge in Peet 1979; p. 35)

Los Angeles is cold …

… and people are selling  hats on the metro.  “Peruvian style hats.  Keep your ears warm, in colors to match your outfit or your shoes.  Only five dollars.”  The mans sales partner then repeats the pitch in Spanish.  A teenage boy staggers down the aisle and asks, “can I please have a dollar.  I need something to get something to eat.  I’m starving.  My stomach hurts.”  He seems so young, in the childlike way that his voice expects someone to take care of him, implores that someone take care of him.  Seconds after the hungry boy moves to the next car, another teenage boy in a fashionable jacket and wearing headphones enters the car.  He looks like other boys I have seen on big city public transportation – stylish and handsome, but this boy moves with a quiet confidence instead of the usual swagger.  In a minute, I look over and see that he is covering his face and silently crying.  He tries to compose himself, but the tears keep coming.  The people nearby steal nervous, sympathetic glances, unsure of whether to risk embarrasing the boy by aknowledging his tears.  Finally, the woman sitting across the aisle from him hands him a tissue.  He takes it and gets off at the next stop.  The woman and a man sitting nearby talk about their jobs.  The woman gets off the train and the man shots after her asking if he can give her his number.  The woman says that she’ll see him tomorrow.  The man sighs, contentedly as we sinks back into his seat.  The man and I get off at the same stop.  It is raining steadily now.  He says, “it’s like they say, the further west you go, the wetter you get,” and I can’t wait to be moving eastward again.

purchasing oppression

I was reading this glossy, colorful magazine about revolutionary anarchism and was a little bummed that some of the articles about actions read like the articles in Soldier of Fortune that my friend got when he was going through his self-ascribed “paramilitary skater” phase in his early teens.  It’s always hard for me to read stuff like that because there’s always this seductive quality to it.  It makes me think that most of my political involvement has been by choice and not because my physical or even emotional survival was really wrapped up in whatever cause I was advocating.  And even though I can intellectually construct, not even untruthfully, the connections between those struggles and parts of myself or my history, I always end up having conversations with people who just seem to have this incredible sense of connection and of neccessity to their struggles.  I don’t exactly know what to do with only this disconnected sense that things are wrong.  Ultimately, I think what might be so appealing about clashes with the police is that they, at least for a moment, make a more general injustice a personal injustice and, sometimes, a question of the survival of a community, the individual lives of which one has have often abstracted into an abstract whole, into a matter of personal survival.  To me though, this connection or urgency feels purchased (Has a feeling of personal oppression and a lifestyle stemming from this become a purchaseable commodity like fast food or personal electronics?) and fleeting, but it is seductive.  For those lucky enough to be able to choose quite a deal of the landscape of their lives, choosing to do the right thing, and what exactly composes “the right thing” can seem terrible daunting.

walking through san francisco

“What I’ve come to know is that the death of a loved one and the death of an era are equally sad.”  – Jonathan Wilson in The Best Time in My Life, a selection from the Who We Are exhibition

In San Francisco, on Market street, they still have vintage street cars as part of the public transportation system.  The cars seem to have been collected from cities all over the US that have long since abandoned their street car systems.  It is a strange collision of the active and the nostalgic as the cars creak and clatter but the doors open automatically by some weight sensor when you exit the train.

…

San Francisco Trip

I’m on vacation in San Francisco with my family. It’s been a long time since we’ve been on a family vacation, and it’s crazy how, even at 27, and even if it’s been more than a decade since I’ve lived with my parents, how some of the roles and scenarios feel so repetitive or familiar when we spend time together. Maybe the best way to describe this trip is in the map that Tim and I have been using to navigate our way around the city and note points we’ve been to and points we want to visit.

Title: My Bay Area Map
Description: Map I made of locations relevent to my current trip to the Bay Area

View Larger Map

Exclusion Acts

In researching the details of a museum that my father wanted to go to on our trip in San Francisco, I read this.  It’s crazy that, more than 100 years later, the motivations for limiting immigration and the use of legislation to exclude certain classes of immigrants persists.  The faces of the undesireable immigrants is all that has changed:

During the 1870s, an economic downturn resulted in serious unemployment problems, and led to politically motivated outcries against Asian immigrants who would work for low wages. In reaction to states starting to pass immigration laws, in 1882 the federal government asserted its authority to control immigration and passed the first immigration law, barring lunatics and felons from entering the country. Later in 1882, the second immigration law barred Chinese, with a few narrow exceptions. Imperial China was too weak and impoverished to exert any influence on American policy. This law was originally for 10 years, but was extended and expanded and not repealed until 1943, when China was our ally in World War II. However, only 105 Chinese were allowed in legally each year, so the exception process actually continued into the 1950’s. Chinese were not on a equal immigration footing with other nationalities until immigration laws were completely rewritten in the mid 1960’s.

link

[tags]chinese,history,american,immigration,sanfrancisco[/tags]