Mobile Stories

My favorite hour of the weekend comes three times in LA. The brand new, non-repeat version of This American Life is played on Saturdays at 10am (on KCRW), again at 1pm (on KPCC) and a third time on Sunday nights at 6 (also on KPCC). Then, if I'm really itching for another good narrative, or I missed it the weekend before, I can listen to last week's show at 11am on Sunday. Of course, you can hear the entire archive on line, but there's something compelling about a compulsory pause in life's regular racket when you have to stop, and just listen. It took all three broadcasts of 'Origins' this weekend for me to really hear parts one through four.

A few weeks ago, my friend Whitney and I got tickets to the sold out live screening of the one hour This American Life television special. Now a half hour Showtime weekly, host Ira Glass was screening the "John Smith" special episode for Emmy consideration at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Presented and discussed by Ira and his fellow producers and writers, the story follows not one man named John Smith, where it would be impossible to document the events of a life span in a month's worth of production, but six John Smiths each at different stages of life to make up a John Smith whole. Baby John, who was expected to be a girl, was 11 weeks old. Young John, minor delinquent turned short order cook, was 23. Yuppie John was a software engineer with a new baby of his own and a taste of mortality, loss, and love through his mother's illness. Middle aged John, 46, was struggling with his son's return from Iraq and his desire to be personal and emotional in a world, both military and small town, where that is at best uncomfortable. Retired John Smith, in his late 70s, volunteered at the airport after a long life of hard work and taking care of his son who had recently succumbed to AIDS. And, finally, John Smith in his 90s in a nursing home, surrounded by his large family, who died while the show was filming.

They showed two other regular length episodes as well. One a visually fascinating time lapse day of senior portraits at a local high school, the other the story of a boy growing up with a degenerative disease who, by the time of the filming, had barely the use of his left thumb, with which he spelled words on the computer as his primary form of communication, and his eyes. Two long blinks for yes. He, Michael I think his name was, had a rebellious personality, streaks of dyed red hair, black painted fingernails and a pierced eyebrow. He had a girlfriend he met on Craigslist and an adventurous personality. That story was as much about his mom and her commitment (often over-bearing in Michael's eyes) to his health and well-being as it was about him and his adaptability.

Ira asked him, semi-jokingly, who should be his voice in the television show if they could get any star at all. Ed Norton or Johnny Depp, Michael typed. Ed Norton never returned their calls, yet Johnny Depp, the larger star, begins reading Michael's words, and his eyebrow piercing and black fingernails are so filled with the cool of a young 21 Jumpstreet undercover cop, that you can't help but admire the tenacity, and the tongue in cheek arrogance of it all.

After the three pieces, the producers and writers chatted and answered questions. Ira's love, obviously, is telling good stories, and telling them in a way that is highly crafted, expertly produced, and strategically orchestrated.

Their more amateur counterpart, I would say, is StoryCorps. StoryCorps, as told on their website, "is an independent nonprofit project whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. . . By recording the stories of our lives with the people we care about, we experience our history, hopes, and humanity." StoryCorps began in 2003 with a StoryBooth in Grand Central Station. A simple concept, two people who have an interesting shared story, one more the interviewer and the other the interviewee, reserve an hour slot for a self-directed, narrative conversation. That conversation is recorded for the StoryCorps archive and also provided in cd form to the participants. Tens of thousands of stories have been recorded, archived, edited, and aired to date.

After the tragedies of September 11th, a second StoryCorps booth was dedicated to collecting the stories of anyone affected by the events in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Included are the stories of firefighters, volunteers, survivors, rescue workers, witnesses and family members of 9/11 victims. In a two day session, over thirty stories were collected from those at the Pentagon. The archive will be included in the 9/11 memorial and held in the Library of Congress.

In July 2006, StoryCorps launched an initiative to capture the stories of those suffering from memory loss. In 2007, they began the Griot Initiative, the largest African American oral history project since the WPA slave narratives of the 1930s. A compilation cd of these interviews is being released some time in June to honor the 100th anniversary of the NAACP.

The objectives of StoryCorps are ambitious:

StoryCorps is a public service... StoryCorps reminds us of the importance of listening to and learning from those around us. It celebrates our shared humanity. It tells people that their lives matter and they won’t be forgotten. Through StoryCorps, we hope to create a kinder, more thoughtful and compassionate nation. . . . We hope to build StoryCorps into an enduring American institution.

Near and dear to my heart was the 2005 launch of two MobileBooths, housed in airstream trailers and traveling from city to city to capture the grassroots, often missed relationship tales from over 100 cities in 48 states. Right now the MobileBooths are in Wenatchee, WA and Berlin, NH. Next they go to Rochester, NY; Erie, PA; Paonia, CO and Akron, OH. In October, a MobileBooth arrives in San Francisco.

Which brings us to the cause of the week this week.

StoryCorps is trying to raise $100,000 to keep the MobileBooths operable in 2009. To date, they've raised $68,000 with another $32,000 to go. You can donate to the fund directly between now and June 30th by clicking here.

You can also buy the book, Listening is an Act of Love, or any of their cds, and all of the royalties benefit the project. You can rent a StoryKit to facilitate your own series of interviews.

Or, you can sponsor an on site recording day for six or more where a trained staff member comes to your site with professional equipment to record for a reasonable fee.

Like all of public radio, you can also listen on line for free.

I have no idea how many of these stories I have heard. Most of them are distilled into only a few minutes, so they seem to sneak in in the cracks between the stories we think we are waiting for. The stories are about adoption, cancer, anniversaries, meetings, love, survival, perseverance, history, family, strangers. It is a great democratizing effort to prize every person as equal, every relationship valuable, and every story worthy of presentation in our national public space via a road quest of American telling.

How shopping for a bathing suit is really studying for my exams

Lyn H. Lofland, sociologist and scholar, defines the public realm as the place in the city where we interact with strangers. Her definition of the city is intentionally broad and inclusive - "a permanently populous place or settlement" - and her definition of stranger is two prong. There are both "cultural strangers . . . those who occupy symbolic worlds different from our own" and "biographical strangers . . . those we have never met before". In other words, the latter are simply people we don't know, the former are those who somehow see or live in the world differently than we do. Richard Sennett - sociologist, scholar, and Guardian-appointed "public intellectual - discusses in his book The Fall of Public Man the key occupier of this public domain, the cosmopolite. A cosmopolite, as derived from the French usage in the 1730s, "is a man who moves comfortably in diversity" (the gender specificity is an entirely different dissertation).

The public realm was once a realm of necessity, when the world's population was largely illiterate and news traveled via the town crier and passed by word of mouth. The public realm was where all entertainment, if there was time for any, happened and all commerce was conducted. Everyday movements between sustenance collection and waste disposal happened in the streets - the city's most regularly and necessarily occupied public realm.

For the ancient Greeks, the public realm was the realm of freedom. The private realm was weighted with the minutiae of daily living, including the hard work of being in charge. But the public realm was a zone of equals, a place to express opinions freely, of intellectualism, debate, and the development of individuality (again, gender, slavery, and land ownership are their own dissertations). Aristotle as interpreted through Hannah Arendt, philosopher and cultural scholar, differentiates the pre-political from the political public realm in that the former was a place where decisions were made through violence and the latter where decisions were made through speech. The public realm was a place where we learned to negotiate, where we developed what Lofland calls "political maturity" and what Sennett elaborates as a place where "men can act together without the compulsion to be the same."

Much of the literature on the contemporary city discusses the death of public space (here - particularly as architects, urbanists and planners - we are assuming that the public sphere or public realm is geographically grounded in an actual place, public space). Books like Sennett's The Fall of Public Man and Michael Sorkin's edited volume, Variations on a Theme Park: the New American City and the End of Public Space talk about the postmodern city and the militarized, thematized, and commodified versions of pseudo-public space we most commonly find today. Disney theme parks are referred to in nearly every book on the subject, as they are the example in 3/4 scale of the sanitized city where everything - from experience to speed - is branded, polished, duplicated, and sold. Lofland, Sorkin, Ed Soja, Margaret Crawford are all asking some version of the following question - what is public space today? And, is this the public space we are destined to have? Is The Grove (substitute your local mall/waterfront development/downtown revitalization project here) the best we can do?

I was at The Grove/Farmer's Market last night, and it was certainly packed with 'public'. More than a mall with limited entrances, tight boundaries, and an inward focus, it does have places to wander, to sit and talk, to meet strangers even perhaps. Because The Grove is connected to the more economically congenial Farmers Market, it is sort of economically diverse. Sort of. At the Farmer's Market there are movable chairs and benches where groups of various sizes can gather, eat, chat. And though commerce happens there, bartering certainly doesn't. And though conversation happens there, debate certainly doesn't. And though there are strangers, they are most likely to be the biographical rather than the cultural kind. And, even if they are the cultural kind, they tend to be a mere skim off the top of the cultural depths that we know live in LA. And, neither The Grove nor the Farmer's Market is either a grove or a farmer's market. So, among the many, many things that keep The Grove and the Farmer's Market from being real public space - including that it's more theme than market and more mall than not - is that it's not held in common, there are no public rights, and it's not where we learn to be good citizens.

Hannah Arendt likens public space to a great collective table - held in ownership by no individual, shared by all who are seated at it, yet also lasting far beyond any meal, any set of meals, any lifetime of meals. The table connects us, yet separates us at the same time. Without the table, there would be no common ground. yet without the separation, there would be no diversity. And, too, the table outlasts us all. Says Arendt, "If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.. . . Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible."

Secondly, public space supports public rights. At a minimum, public rights allow access and occupation. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris - urban planner and expert on public realms such as the sidewalk and bus stop - documents in her co-authored book Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form, the way privatized spaces (particularly shopping malls) were initially court ordered to fulfill the public role they seemed to be hijacking from the plazas and streets of the city. Now, the privatized city is more the norm than not and we can't imagine any mall cop in America that would allow a protest, the distribution of leaflets, picketing, or political solicitations on mall property. As a matter of fact, we've reached a point where plazas and streets have developed strict regulations intended to maintain order and keep out the 'messiness'.

Order and messiness are exactly what Don Mitchell in The Right to the City discusses as the very vitality of urbanity. To Mitchell and Anthony Vidler, who writes the introduction to the text, a sanitized city is not a city worth living in. Mitchell asks very important questions about public space - who can be there, when, and what can they do? In other words, who is the 'public' and what rights do we all share? Mitchell focuses on those who are homeless and argues the very salient point that if you have no private space to return to, you are forced to live out the entirety of your life in public. If, then, you are restricted from public space - either formally (laws, regulations, gates, patrol) or informally (harassment, psychological barriers like intimidation, lighting, the removal of benches or aggressive sprinklering) then your very existence is criminalized. In his words you simply have no place at all to BE. Henri Lefebvre, the originator of the right to the city argument, takes that one step further when he claims that we all have the right to the oeuvre -- the right to be a part of the production of the city itself, the right to active participation, to identity, ownership, investment, even play. Iris Marion Young adds to those the right to self-determination and the right to self-development.

Finally, public space must maintain some form of cosmopolitanism. To be cosmopolitan, to live among difference and to recognize its value, produces tolerance. Says Lofland, a "great city is, in and of itself, a settlement form that generates cosmopolitanism among its citizenry; it is a settlement form that produces - by its very nature - a populace that is far more open to and accepting of human variability, far more inclined to civility and less to fanaticism and smug parochialism than are the residents of more homogeneous and intimate settlement forms like tribe, village or small town." In other words, urbanity makes us a more open civilization, more willing to accept -- even invite -- strangers to sit at our common table.

The loss of all these attributes is blamed on everything from the industrial revolution which first separated living space from work space to the car and the computer. The most interesting theories, though, don't wax nostalgic for a pre-technology era but recognize the value of advancement and call for new ways to be public which, in turn, create new geographies of public space. Urry and Sheller who call for a "civil society of automobility" pose one of my favorites.

Which brings me to the point.

A friend of mine posted a link to a 2006 video that I had never seen (though 43 million other people have). It's a completely hokey, tear-jerker of a story, turned movie, turned movement. The free hugs movement. (Click here to see the movie and read the story) But it's also about free speech rights, breaking gender stereotypes, embracing difference (literally), and the risk of urban messiness. What I love about the movie and the movement and the DOING of it all is that it's about making public space. As Lofland also said, the public realm is ageographical until it HAPPENS somewhere. This is one reason big empty corporate plazas are not all that public - there is no one there doing anything and those who are, according to Loukatai-Sideris's case studies, are mostly white middle class males in business suits. Or they were.

Public space is changing for many reasons, but most importantly, because we want it to. Because those same people who don't want to work in a cubicle and hold out for retirement benefits are also a growing collection of mixed race, emergent entrepreneurs who volunteer in Africa and do reverse graffiti.

Because we're looking in new places, too. Street vendors are hip in LA. Tight money means alternative capitalism and it means being more wise with limited resources - space included. And higher gas prices, even though they've gone down since last summer, mean more walking, more public transit, more bus stop use, more biking - more ways to be in the public realm, to mix with strangers. But to become cosmopolitan, you have to choose to recognize and appreciate difference and the responsibility of the commons. You don't have to hug a stranger - though there is something really joyous about that Juan guy - but you can recognize the value in difference, the importance of conversation with strangers - in every sense - and the significance we gain by being actively intermixed with the messiness of the city.



References:

Arendt, Hannah. (1958) “The Public and the Private Realm,” in The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lefebvre, Henri. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Lofland, Lyn. (1998) The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Territory. Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter.

Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia and Tridib Banerjee. (1998) Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form. Berkley: University of California Press.

Mitchell, Don. (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: The Guillford Press.

Sennett, Richard. (1992) The Fall of Public Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. (2000) “The City and the Car,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 24(4). 737-757.

image credit: Damon Winter, The New York Times

Five Dollars a Day

I spend $1 a day on breakfast, $7 a week. I get 100% of almost every vitamin and mineral in that and I'm basically eating a whole grain, organic brownie. Yumm. I thought I was pretty efficient and frugal until I started following Julie's blog. In honor of Hunger Action Day (May 20th), Julie Flynn is committed to spending only $35 a week on food, the equivalent of the typical food stamp allowance. When I first got her email I ran my food budget quickly through my mind. I thought the $7 breakfast deal was pretty good (a few cents per vitamin?), and add to that about $3 for lunch per day, $21 a week. So, that leaves me about $7 for dinner, snacks, and treats, not including the occasional glass of beer or wine or (forget it!) a $1.75 Diet Mountain Dew. Living in LA, I've seen glasses of wine that cost more than the value of a full week's food stamp allowance. It's certainly a city of extremes.

I went back through my budget over the last three months (yes, being a student again and living in LA, you've got to keep track of every penny) and I spend somewhere between $96 and $112 a week on food, about $15 a day. That's groceries, eating out, caffeine, snacks, and alcohol (including one magical, smoky, heavenly beer float at Golden State Cafe and a highly subsidized set of birthday dinners - thank you everyone). At that rate, which is not so extravagant, those on food stamps could eat for two days, and lunch on a third. What happens the rest of the week?

Julie is also doing this whole experiment as a vegan, and selectively as an organic vegan (she has some great tips on her blog about priorities and resources). She's asking us to just simply read along, offer pointers and suggestions, provide support, think about what we consume, and, most importantly, recognize how difficult it is to be healthy, socially integrated, and low-income (yes, food and alcohol are huge aspects of our social lives and pressures - see the grilled cheese incident of May 19th on Julie's blog). Also, be sure to click on the "Congressional Food Stamp Challenge" and see how Congress members in 2007 - on $21 a week - fared in their own efforts to understand the dire consequences of poverty on health.

Eating on a miniscule budget for a week is hard, for a month is at least four times harder yet brings with it real awareness and activism, but for a lifetime, having to eat on $35 a week is truly tragic, with consequences beyond malnutrition like diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease from eating cheaply which often means high carb, high fat, and low nutrition. In addition, we often equate food with love, ritual, celebration, seasonal cycles, not to mention pure joy, sensuality, and sensory stimulation. I can't imagine a life lacking the simple beauty of good, healthy food. Though it happens in this country for millions of people each day.

Here is Julie's original message:

To all my friends, family, and supporters:

Today, May 20th, is Hunger Action Day.

In honor of that, I would like to invite all of you to follow my Blog. For about a week and a half now, I have been living on $35/week for food as a vegan. I am attempting to eat a healthy, environmentally sustainable diet on a budget that represents a typical food stamp benefit allowance. I am only shopping at stores that accept food stamps. Through this experience I am exploring the barriers low-income Americans face in the quest for healthy food by living the challenge myself.

This is a month long experiment, and the Blog will likely continue to explore these issues all summer. For now, I am posting every day. Each post is different - sometimes an article, sometimes a recipe, sometimes a reflection. Here is the link: http://onfoodstamps.blogspot.com/

I would love if you would support me by "Following" this Blog, or by passing it on to friends. A large part of this is about increasing awareness about the intersections between poverty, food, health problems, urban pubic health, and sustainability. The more people that know about this experiment, the better. As you will see in the first post (it gives all the background info- I suggest you start there), there is an interactive/participatory element to this. After reading, let me know if you want to contribute as well.

Have a great day, and thanks for reading.

Best,

Julie


A final note, there are many people trying to be proactive in combating their own limited choices, limited space, and limited access to healthy food. The South Central Farm was the largest community garden in the country and was lost due to a various and shady mix of greed, deals, and development. In June of 2008 a new documentary was released on the South Central Farm called The Garden. It was nominated for a 2009 Academy Award (along with Trouble the Water, one of my very first posts on this blog). It documents an ongoing story of activism and injustice. At the end of May it will play in DC, New York, Telluride, Salt Lake City, and Amherst. In June it will play in Charlotte (at Park Terrace, my old movie theater), Portland, San Diego, Denver, Louisville and Tucson. For updates, specifics, and more locations see their website or their page on Facebook. You can also volunteer or attend the rally to mark the third anniversary of their eviction from the abandoned incinerator site at 41st and Alameda. This is one small way to combine our new awareness with action.

Hope and Loss

I don't remember who spoke at my commencement - either of them. My best friend's girlfriend was valedictorian, which was a total shock at the time as I had never even noticed that she was all that smart. I might have fallen asleep from complete exhaustion at my grad school graduation. I hope for this next (last?) one, I'm well-rested and old enough to appreciate whatever stellar scholar, statesman, or activist (!) is chosen to impart wisdom on my not so new steps out into a not so new world. That one is still a few years away. As a faculty member, I teared up on more than one occasion at the small, College of Architecture ceremonies where the full faculty and student body march together into the salon space of our building, and we let go of the hands we have held so tightly (see the blog entry three weeks ago) and reward their unique skills and often flamboyant personalities with big name and beautiful book awards. The Randy Beavers award has always been a personal favorite, awarded (if I remember correctly) to the graduating senior who lives life to the fullest and exhibits some form of computer savviness. Almost inevitably, that award is given unanimously and with little debate. The Randy Beavers winners are quirky visionaries - odd, energetic, funky, some would say dancing to the beat of their own drummer, but they sparkle.

Today Barack Obama received an honorary degree and gave the commencement address for the graduating class of 2009 at Notre Dame University. It was controversial for a pro-choice President to be given such a dual honor at a Catholic University. It was controversial, and brilliant. Brilliant for Notre Dame, sure, because they are a University first, a place of learning and a center of knowledge whose faculty and graduates most certainly want to be a part of national debate on important issues. But what was truly brilliant was the speech itself or, rather, the event itself. Today issues of women's rights, reproductive freedom, prevention and wellness, humor, humility and educated options took center stage and close-mindedness, narrow visions, cynicism and condemning rhetoric were rebuked. Today our President recognized the opportunity, like he does on occasion, to take often litigious animosities and daylight them on common ground. There are objectives we can all agree on, he said, and for those where we do not, let us all have the decency and maturity to conduct intelligent and informed debate at the common table of humanity. His is a world free of extremists, and I want to live in that world.

Though Obama received a standing ovation on entry to the ceremony and loud support for his pro-active stance to reduce unwanted pregnancy and support stem cell research, several key figures in Notre Dame administration refused to attend. Notre Dame President Emeritus Theodore Hesburgh was shown regularly on camera with a face blank of any expression (this may or may not have been intentional or negative, but the guy was most definitely not clapping). Obama referred to "Father Ted's" accomplishments several times in his speech, but the most moving was the last. As this date marks the 55th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision that integrated our schools, Obama recalled the Civil Rights Committee appointed by President Eisenhower that influenced the 1964 legislation. Father Ted was on that committee. From Obama's speech:

And years later, President Eisenhower asked Father Ted how on Earth he was able to broker an agreement between men of such different backgrounds and beliefs. And Father Ted simply said that during their first dinner in Wisconsin, they discovered they were all fishermen. And so he quickly readied a boat for a twilight trip out on the lake. They fished, and they talked, and they changed the course of history.

The fished, and they talked, and they changed the course of history. It's the telling as much as the tale, is it not? Remember that next time you find yourself arguing with an unreasonable zealot.

For those who don't see the world our way, Obama said, that's alright. That's alright, he said, as an abortion protester screamed out during his speech; we do not shy away from discomfort. And we do not do things easily. To me, those are the most significant diversions from the path of the eight years prior. Mediocrity is easy. Sarcasm and cynicism are easy. Compromise for the sake of compromise is easy. Laziness is the path of least resistance. What isn't easy is getting it right, doing the work. What isn't easy is demanding the best case scenario, the best quality, the fairest option, the most thorough information, and an outcome that is good, not just good enough.

In California, we have an election this coming Tuesday. It's astonishing the difference between the values inherent in Obama's speech and those latent in the California initiatives. It's not a big election, so it's not content that I'm comparing so much as approach. As you may or may not know, California is going bankrupt and its legislators submitted their annual budget months and months beyond the official mandatory deadline. This alone led to a financial crisis as government-paid employees were forced to take unpaid days off and reduced pay to help ride out the unknown conclusions. When a budget was finally delivered, California found itself deep in a bad financial hole.

Propositions 1A-F that we will be voting on this coming Tuesday are supposed to help fill in some of that hole. I'm no economic or government expert, but in reading my ballot and my 63 page voter reference guide, my conclusion is that the California legislators are lazy, baffled, and ineffective. This is obviously not news to some, but even a glance at the quick reference guide shows the absolute absurdity of the current measures. Try this one: Voting Yes on 1C means both that "Lottery payments to educational institutions would end, and the state General Fund would increase its payments to education to make up for the loss of those lottery funds" and "Prop 1C guarantees schools get the same level of lottery funding as they do now." These two sentences are in the same column of the same government-produced voter education guide. The summary in the back tells us that it's this very General Fund that is facing a $40 billion shortfall over the two year span from 2008 - 2010. So, if 1C is approved, do schools get the same level of lottery funding they do now, or do they get replacement funding from the already bankrupt General Fund? Both? Neither? Nothing?

Each of these propositions seems to be some form of complicated shell game, where money is borrowed from the future, moved from here to there, and those who lose out are the educators, the children of the poor, and the mentally ill. An LA Weekly article quotes Paul Goodwin, a researcher on how this ballot is being received, as calling it "paralyzing-confusing". Yes, and then some. Again quoting the voter information guide:

"The 2009-10 budget depends on access to about $6 billion related to three propositions on this ballot - $5 billion by borrowing from future lottery profits (Proposition C), up to $608 million by redirecting dedicated childhood development funds to help the General Fund (Proposition 1D), and about $230 million by redirecting dedicated mental health funds to help the General Fund (proposition 1E)".

If these are not passed, "the Legislature and the Governor probably would need to agree to billions of dollars of additional spending cuts, tax increases, and/or other budgetary solutions to bring the budget back into balance. It is unknown what these alternative actions would be, as they would be determined after this election." Probably?

Oh, and it goes on: "Even with the adoption of the 2009-2010 budget package and assuming that all of the propositions on this ballot pass, it is expected that the state would face multibillion-dollar budget shortfalls in the coming years.... Consequently, based on current projections, the state will need to adopt billions of dollars in additional spending reductions, tax increases, or other solutions..."

So, the options are this - we can, on Tuesday, say it's okay to cut K-12 educational spending, children's services, mental health services, and simultaneously raise taxes OR we can refuse to grant consent to our 'leaders' irresponsible treatment of our most vulnerable, most marginalized, and most at-risk and demand that they go back to the drawing board and seek options that are not mediocre, lazy, and abusive.

In light of all that, 1F we should all approve. This initiative prevents pay raises for our legislators in budget deficit years. My gosh, how generous.

For more information, give it your own shot at www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov

Bonus photo of Notre Dame architecture graduates with building models on their mortar boards a la Beaux Arts Ball: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30796091/displaymode/1176/rstry/30782728/

Mail for people who need it most.

I love mail, which means I love mailmen (mailpeople? letter carriers). These are folks - men and women - who deliver to our doors the gift of words. Sure, this was more common before mail went digital, but I still covet the perfect postcard - that ideal combination of collective image and personal thought, recto and verso as Derrida said, the Kodak-spot image we all share of the world on one side, and the scrawling, hand-written, forcibly succinct personal story on the other. Postcards are a kind of history - of a place, of a relationship, of a person. The lineage of image, caption, selection, notation, address, stamp, receipt, display, save, and rediscover can knit together a life. The Raleigh 2000 project was about this, as was the A to B work I did here in LA last year.

But there's something special about the fact that a person, a live person, hand delivers the mail to you. Oftentimes they are walking from house to house, carrying that big blue mail bag like they have since the mid-1800s. One of the few provisions in the American constitution regarding the form of the country itself requires that the government upkeep routes for the delivery of the US mail. Newspapers and correspondence via horse and stagecoach tied us together long before highways and the internet. The westward expansion is the dual story of population migration and mail delivery.

More so, mail is ritualistic. My mother writes me real letters in her beautiful handwriting. My father sends me articles with my name written at the top - a record of his reading with me and my interests in mind. My friends send me postcards when they travel, particularly postcards of roads.

But this Saturday, May 9th, all of our mail carriers take on some additional weight. For 17 years the NALC (National Association of Letter Carriers) has conducted a nationwide food drive on the second Saturday of May. Members of the 300,000-strong postal union in 10,000 cities across the country will collect non-perishable food items from us, then deliver them to food banks, pantries, and shelters in the neighborhoods where they are collected. In New York and Chicago you can take your donations directly to the post office branch near you between May 4th and May 9th.

Appropriately, Campbell’s' Soup will donate an additional 1,000 pounds of soup to a food bank chosen by each of the ten post office branches that collect the most food. Last year, letter carriers collected a record 71.3 million tons of food; this year, the need is even greater.

Rain, sleet, or snow, they bring you your mail. The bills and junk, yes, but also the surprises and treats, birthday cards, reminders, love notes, books, and memories. And only once a year they ask you for something back, and offer to be the free conduit that delivers your goodness to those who really need it. This Saturday, let's help our letter carriers fill up those big blue bags with food. For more information, go to the NALC website.


Two quick congratulations: Loveswell's opening night got rave reviews. It plays through June 7th (see last week's entry for more information), and my friend and founder of the Street Soccer USA league, Lawrence Cann, is on the front page of the NY Times Region section for his work with homeless players - check it out (and see previous blog entries on the Charlotte Street Soccer team, or see Kicking It! now on hulu).

Altruism meets Art

I've been lucky enough to meet a lot of really interesting people doing a lot of really great things since I moved to LA. Last summer, in my month of wandering with Whitney, we found not only a great new restaurant and amazing bar, but also my favorite LA bartender and altruistic actor, John Fortson. John's 2005 production of Loveswell was long over by the time we met him, but a new one was in the works and has finally arrived.

Loveswell is a one-man show about love and relationships told through the eyes of the most prevalent of Los Angeles archetypes - the surfer. In addition to being entertaining and, according to reviews, quite illuminating of the mysterious male perspective, the opening night performance this Friday, May 1st, is also a fundraiser for Heal the Bay, an organization devoted to "making Southern California coastal water and watersheds...healthy and clean." When a disappointing and disturbing beach closure due to post-rain contamination kept John from giving his nephew a surf lesson, he was inspired to combine his theatrical talents with his environmental altruism. This special gala night is hosted by actress Alexandra Leighton and pro surfer and “ecowarrior” James Pribram and includes treats from Terroni after the show.

Tickets for the fundraiser and more information about the show can be found on line (click here). If you can't come to the opening night, the show runs Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through June 7th. John will be accepting donations for Heal the Bay throughout the entire run. And we will most certainly be missing him at Terroni until then.

One more quick reminder about the LAPD performance on Saturday night (seeing as you'll all be at Loveswell on Friday). Studios open at 6 and the show,"CPR: a Public Training in Life Saving Skills", starts at 8:30. We're hoping to 'drive' our survival station down Olympic from OPCC before the Saturday show. A big thank you to my new friend Cooper Bates who has volunteered to photograph the event for us. Hope to see you all next weekend.

More information at:

http://lapovertydept.org/

http://www.18thstreet.org/

the haphazard and unpredictable fine art of teaching

The side effect of teaching is that we often learn things ourselves we didn't even know we needed to learn. When I ran the first Mobile Studio I learned how to live with other people on a constant basis. It made me more tolerant, more flexible, and more empathetic. When I collaborated on the Artpark at the Urban Ministry center I learned about patience, trust, and value. All of these are traits I've tried to internalize, but still regularly consider and often need to re-negotiate.

Sometimes teaching reminds us how little we know, terrorizes us into a state of panic and insecurity, but just as quickly can show us how far we've come and that we know how to know things whether we actually do know them or not. That is a useful and priceless skill.

Sometimes teaching reminds us how much we know about our areas of expertise, and how little others know, and we must learn to uncover the elusive tracks of knowledge past, point them out, and show the way. The trickiest balance, particularly in the arts and design professions, is knowing also when not to show the way, when finding the way is the knowledge itself and one more bread crumb is too many, one fewer is not quite enough. It's been said in one way or another at many a curriculum meeting that in addition to complexity and depth the difference between teaching second year architecture studio and fourth year architecture studio is the degree to which you let go.

Returning to school in the middle of a teaching career is even more destabilizing and, hence, twice as educational. For every bit of content I learn in a course, I learn as much about how to teach and how not to teach, storing up the unconscious lessons of the unintended consequences of one act versus another, one word versus another, one strategy, one method, one task. Having been there, I know more readily where to look. I recommend switching sides of the desk for all teachers, at least for a little while.

We can never see the world through the mind of another person, but teaching - the constant and required interaction with the metamorphosizing minds of others - requires an intellectual vulnerability; a mental giving; regular re-negotiation of self and other; and a weekly psychoanalysis of mood, mind, and emotion that remains invisible and avoidable for much of the non-teaching world. I have never met a good teacher who was a bad person, nor a bad person who was a good teacher. It's too much internal work, too much emotional risk, and way, way too much effort to not do it for bigger reasons.

I am still in the middle of learning for this semester. The one day a week, Integrated Learning course that I am teaching with Dorit Cypis at Otis College of Art and Design, The Right to the Street, is currently a full time array of relationships and expectations, learning and unlearning, lumbering rapidly towards an amazing collaborative conclusion that will be shown publicly in Santa Monica two weeks from yesterday. It is exciting to be engaging with the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) and their theater workshop with OPCC. It has been enlightening and inspiring to work with the old and new members of their troupe - Kevin Michael, Riccarlo, Sheeba, Luis, RW, Rochelle, and others. The day Riccarlo turned a meeting-gone-gripe-session into a mock press conference for a pre-inaugural Obama, my mind began spinning around the opportunities that theater possesses, for those without homes, yes, and for those with them as well. It is amazing that Otis has this program and is willing to explore what it means to put 7 disciplines, a teacher, a mentor, and a partner from different worlds at the same busy, sometime treacherously shaky, table.

Within our Otis class, we are finalizing the three projects being developed in conjunction with the performance in May. My giant bag of current learning certainly revisits flexibility, empathy, tolerance, and patience, but it also includes new visions of multi-disciplinarity, the real skill that is collaboration, and the simple reality that teaching is a moving target, particularly if you are willing to stretch beyond what you think you already know. In the end, though it should seem obvious, good teachers must also be good learners, and by stretching what, when, or where we teach, we stretch what we know and what we are able to do with what we know. In addition to bits and pieces of content and skill, what we pass on to our students is that ever so slightly weighted bag of learning and a hopeful passion for them to continue collecting and filling the bag to over brimming.

This semester, in addition to all we have learned about homelessness, public space, and guerrilla tactics, we've also broken stereotypes, reached out, looked in, juggled, compromised, tried, stretched, improved, opened up, and negotiated.

Join us in two weeks and see how we're doing. (details below)


LOS ANGELES POVERTY DEPARTMENT TO PERFORM
"CPR, A PUBLIC TRAINING IN LIFE SAVING SKILLS"

On May 1 & 2 at 8:30 p.m. at Highways (1651 18th Street, Santa Monica, 90404), the Los Angeles Poverty Department will present a new production, "CPR: a Public Training in Life Saving Skills" to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of Highways Performance Space and 18th Street Arts Center. This performance is developed and performed by members of Santa Monica's OPCC, Ocean Park Community Center and the LAPD All-Stars, directed by John Malpede and Henriëtte Brouwers. Performances are free.

At a time when home foreclosures, job loss, and staggering medical bills are forcing more and more people onto the streets, undercover LAPD (Lost And Presumed Dead) heroes share the extraordinary wisdom that accounts for their return-from-the-edge, against-all-odds survival. "CPR: a Public Training in Life Saving Skills" is the first collaboration between LAPD and Ocean Park Community Center. OPCC is the largest and most comprehensive provider of housing and services on the Westside to low-income and homeless youth, adults and families, battered women and their children, and people living with mental illness, particularly homeless mentally ill women.

LAPD has been making theater with homeless and formerly homeless people for 24 years. Twenty years ago LAPD was invited to perform at Highways Performance Space during its inaugural season. Highways invited LAPD back to celebrate the 20-year anniversary on May 1 and on May 2 the performance will be part of 18th Street Arts Center's Arts Night at the same location.

This project includes visual collaboration with students at Otis College of Art and Design's Integrated Learning program, 'The Right to the Street' class taught by Linda Samuels and mentor Dorit Cypis.

Based in LA's Skid Row, LAPD creates work that connects lived experience of those who live in poverty to the political and social forces that shape their communities and lives. This project with OPCC is funded in part by a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts' Theater program.

For more information visit: http://www.lapovertydept.org

or http://www.18thstreet.org/