sarah – Page 27 – somebody else's paradise

the city is my sweetheart

Arriving to San Francisco via the Bay Brigde is amazing.
As if the city were standing there to meet and welcome those who cross the bridge, with the incredible beauty of its skyscrapers.

So good to be in the city. A new friend Lydia gave me a small painting on wood she found earlier that day,
it says: the city is my sweetheart.

The emotions of seeing Diana and Natascha after all these years. Emphasized by Diana’s impressive U-turn crossing a double yellow line, when she saw us standing in front of the bus station.

A beautiful weekend. A strange territorial ritual on Treasure Island, indecent exposure as Natascha prefers to say. Our most impressive supermarket experience (the biggest fruits and vegetables of all kinds and variations imaginable) so far, in Berkeley. Amazing food (ah the perfect risotto we made – despite what Diana and me were doing in the kitchen – the wonderful American breakfast, the delightful Taqueria Cancun Maria and i stumbled upon) and even better company.

Exploring and enchanted by the mission.

Watching the L-word with a community, in the Lexington Club. Ah Rutvica, you should have been there, you were there – Natascha and i got you a little something. This episode was a strong anti-Bush one – Bette gets to do an impassioned speech at a court hearing on how moral issues in this country are used as a smoke screen to avoid talking about poverty and economic injustice, the education system in ruins and the illegitimate war. I couldn’t help noticing that the lovely L-crowd only began sheering when the war was mentioned. A reflection of how much more difficult it is to raise awareness and mobilize politically around issues on the homefront?

Lots of visible poverty. Friends back in Europe haven’t really asked yet about the extent of the poverty in this country, as they sometimes do when i travel to so-called third world countries. Strange, these distinctions. This is the so-called first world, and the poverty in the streets hits you in the face. And while there are in fact many homeless people in Santa Cruz, it’s in an urban environment like inner city San Francisco that the extent of the break-down of social systems of security, welfare and care becomes clear. The extent and visibility of structural poverty makes you gasp for air. All those bodies marked and modified by not having enough good food to eat, by having slept in the streets too many times, by having been denied access to useful education.

And somehow i find it less tough to be here than the social environment of Santa Cruz cushioned with privilege. The truth of what Sahar wrote, about living in Harlem almost the Bronx: “Poor and dirty… but psychologically less alienating than let’s say Stockholm 🙂 or even East Manhattan. Kind of familiar… strange that one doesn’t feel best when in conditions next to “ideal” she imagines for all humans… Maybe due to knowing that most humans live way far from that…” This strong need to be connected to where injustice and inequality is not covered up: this is where we are, this is where we stand and must start from, and let nobody tell any damn lies about it.

greyhound

greyhound bus station in santa cruz

We’re about to leave for San Francisco. And for the moment being we’re not getting a car while we’re this country – our little act of resistance (and let’s not forget that i don’t have a drivers license). We believe in public transport. So we travel with the Greyhound bus. Okay, it will take us three hours to get there, which is more than twice the time of a car ride. Mais voilÃ , on assume. Nothing more to say, as Diana, who will pick us up (with her car…) in San Francisco, wrote: “How silly that there are so few bus time options!! Ugh…. this country and its damn lack of public transportation. I won’t begin apologizing for it, because if I start, where would I stop!?”

hiking

And in the same breath of beauty i should mention my first weekend in California, when Clea and David took us hiking, near Corralitos, in a protected forest area owned by a land conservation trust and open to the public but few people know. Clea and David once lived in that place of relative wilderness (one winter a landslide cut them off from Corralitos for three months), with only one neighbor and Jim, who takes care of the whole forest.
Our view on Monterey Bay during the pic-nic…

the beauty of it

Maybe i need to start all over again. Arriving to California. The impressive insistent beauty of nature.

The ocean is immens. So present. On my very first day William took Didier, Maria and me to a beach near Davenport (ah Ailin, you were right about Davenport beaches!), to collect mussels. Running around in the sand like a happy dog. Hugh (fat) starfish all around us. Open shiny oyster shells.

And then there’s the forest, the redwoods.
The ancient out-of-this-world mystery atmosphere they breathe.

The beauty of it all. The awe it inspires.

of the forest

She once said that i came from the forest.
And when she said that i knew how true it had been, all along.

“It is something like this: I, an animal of the forest, was at that time barely in the forest; I lay somewhere in a muddy hollow (muddy only as a consequence of my being there, naturally); and then I saw you out there in the open, the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen; I forgot everything; I forgot myself totally, I got up, came closer, anxious to be secure in this freedom that was new though familiar; I approached even closer, came to you, you were so good, I huddled near you, as though I had the right, I placed my face in your hand, I was so happy, so proud, so free, so powerful, so much at home – and yet, at bottom, I was only the animal, I’d always belonged to the forest alone, and if I was living here in the open it was only by your grace… It couldn’t last… I saw more and more clearly what a sordid pest, what a clumsy obstacle I was for you in every respect… I recalled who I was; in your eyes I read the end of illusion; I experienced the fright that is in dreams (acting as though one were at home in the place where one didn’t belong), I had that fright in reality itself; I had to return to the darkness, I couldn’t bear the sun any longer, I was desperate, really, like a stray animal, I began to run breathlessly; constantly the thought, “If only I could take her with me!” and the counterthought “Is it ever dark where she is?” / You ask me how I live: that is how I live.”

Franz Kafka, Briefe an Milena.
Thanks to Peter Steeves,
for his beautiful talk Monkey See

And i love all the differences she makes.

And so it happens that so soon after i turned my back to an old forest i find myself in the middle of the impressive ancient forest of the redwoods.
Not the forest was left behind, but the world became forest.
It is Maria who made me see all of this.

Will you come and visit this forest/world, sweet amoureuse?

reflections on katrina

Here’s an impression of some of the talks at the Reflections on Katrina Conference organized by the Center for Cultural Studies that took place here at UCSC last Saturday.

Craig Colton elaborated on the link between vulnerability and poverty: how the poor are more vulnerable to extreme events, how drought and flood damages first felt among the poor. He gave a historical perspective on the patterns of floods in New Orleans, and the structural respons they were followed by, mainly the building of levees. He also highlighted the links between social stratification and who inhabits the higher and lower parts of the city. The rumour of intentional flooding, he mentioned, has at least one historical base in the big 1927 flooding. Jordan Flaherty, connected to Left Turn, talked about different dimensions of what kind of disaster exactely hit New Orleans. The city was not devasted by the hurricane, but the following day when the levees broke. Crowds put on buses without knowing where the buses were going; no cars allowed near 17 miles of the camps; army shooting on the people who tried to cross the bridge by foot. No matter the amount of chaos, it is clear that such kind of evacuation would have never been tolerated if the people were white and/or rich. And now people are being stopped from coming back. An official “prediction” says that 250.000 (half of the population) will be back by 2007. The truth is: there is an elaborated policy to police who is allowed back in the city. “Residents need to change their attitude before they are allowed back in,” according to one of the officials. The plan that neighborhoods will be demolished if not enough residents are rebuilding the neighborhood thus effectively ties into a plan about which neighborhoods are to be demolished. An assault on the strong traditions of community and resistance of New Orleans. The disaster industrial complex. The first public building reconstructed after the hurricane where prisons. Clyde Woods spoke of Katrina as a striptease of American humanism before the eyes of the whole world. Cracking open the discourse on racial equality, making the extent of racial division painfully visible. The media discourse on looters and savages echoes very old racist discourses – the discourse had effectively gone beyond the the coded (pacifying) language for racism. Woods also spoke of the importance of the city of New Orleans in Afro-American culture, New Orleans as a sacred and spiritual space in that respect. And the current struggle for displaced residentes of New Orleans, internal refugees, to get back to their city. “Afro-Americans never thought they would have to fight for “a right to return” within the U.S., and here we are… and it is going nowhere.” Paul Ortiz spoke about how natural disaster and capitalism work together. His contribution to the collection Hurricane Katrina. Responses and Responsibilities was partly prompted by his disturbance at the assumption that the Katrina disaster would harm the Bush administration. In fact the disasters offers major opportunities for the destruction of public goods and community and for the further privitisation. For making the poor even more poor. The state respons thus should not be considered as “a failure”, but a logic extension of Reaganism. Ortiz talked about the dominance of the ideology in which people are trained to be hostile versus any kind of goverment, leaving the American people with little tools to reclaim their goverment. Instead the reflex is: defend yourself, get your own resoures, get educated, rely on yourself… Somebody brought up the proposition in a newspaper commentary to divide spend the total sum needed for reconstruction of New Orleans into individual checks to damaged residents. Where does that leave the value of the reconstruction of a city, of community, of collective memory… In a last session about remembrance, Elizabeth Spelman talked about the relationship to the land, to physical environment through material objects, through “belongings”. Functioning as a link to the past; mediating our relationship to space. And what these considerations mean for the construction of a city: commemoration, the preservation of memories of those who inhabity the city versus the selling of memories: the reconstruction of the French quarter for tourists imaginations.

MarÃa and i were very struck by the extent of (planned, organized) “social hygiene” and ethnic cleansing operations involved in the disaster that hit the city of New Orleans… As i write this up, the Bush administration is under fire for having ignored the warning that the levees wouldn’t hold a day before Katrina hit – given that the levees broke the day after the hurricane, that adds up to the precious time of two days to try to organize… “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans, we couldn’t do it but God did,” an official said earlier. This unholly alliance between the Bush administration and (their) God doesn’t stop to get more worrisome…

A hopeful moment at the conference: a group of students announced that they would be organizing a week of thinking and action around the issues raised by Katrina, and the situation in New Orleans, in February. Kristy, Sam and MarÃa, you girls rock!

Other references to groups during the conference:
Common Ground Collective
Community Labor United
New Orleans Housing Emergency Team
Latino Outreach Project
Safe Street Strong Communities

small town blues

In American English, the word “suburb” usually refers to a separate municipality or an unincorporated area outside of a central city, according to Wikipedia.

But this is suburbia without a real city,
only a small town and a campus…

Only small town…

“There is only one good thing about small town
There is only one good use for a small town
There is only one good thing about small town
You know that you want to get out

When you’re growing up in a small town
You know you’ll grow down in a small town
There is only one good use for a small town

You hate it and you’ll know you have to leave”

(Lou Reed and John Cale)

suburbia

So i need to start investigating a bit into this suffocating suburbia thing which troubles me so much.
And look what i found, the suburbia project on the Living Room Urban Ecology web zine.
An excerpt from Philip Allsop’s Why Suburbia Fails, and How to Succeed:

“Our bizarre zoning regulations that force single-use zones (housing only–no mixed housing and shops or offices etc.) in order to preserve property values, which in turn feed local tax bases, have already wreaked an unintended and hazardous consequence for those who have to live there. We are less fit, less healthy; we use more health care services more frequently and earlier on in our lives than ever before; we spend $12.00 going to the local strip mall just to get a pint of milk (gas cost, car loan/lease or cost of capital plus the car’s depreciation); and we have become so afraid of outsiders from having spent three generations riding about in our hermetically-sealed cars that we incarcerate ourselves in super-sized McMansions and starter-castles behind high walls and security gates.

The idea of community went out of the window long ago when General Motors (see the movie “Taken for a Ride” for more on this) started buying up and destroying suburban transit lines to encourage people to buy cars instead of riding the tram. What was good for GM was good for the country, so the saying went. So, in the re-build of New Orleans and Biloxi for example, chances are that what’s good for the developers will again be deemed “good” for the country. Once again we will probably see tracts of McMansions being extruded from the mud, and unsuspecting new owners happily occupying them, not knowing that those houses will not outlast the warranties on the shiny new built-in appliances. Meanwhile the developers brought in and encouraged by federal and local politicians “to re-build the community lost to Katrina….” will soon be skipping and high-fiving it all the way to the bank.

Today, community remains an idea, but its manifestation seems to be limited to syrupy realtors’ brochures that describe sylvan settings for new developments with “fwightfully Bwitish” or “European” sounding names. These gated tracts are the places that developers and politicians deem proper for most Americans to live in–and it’s killing us by the tens of thousands every year. The great American dream of having a home of one’s own in a nice, clean suburban neighborhood is, I believe, proving to be a waking nightmare with insidious consequences for us, all and from which there are precious few avenues of escape if we continue doing things the way we do them today.

[..] If suburbia as we know it is to change, and cities are to be more livable places, we have to start this education early and often as part of the standard school curriculum. “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us” (Winston Churchill). Churchill’s saying is as true today as it was in his lifetime. As a consequence, it is too important to leave the planning, design, and construction of our homes to the developers, the realtors, the builders, and the “architectural designers” who have already amply demonstrated their ignorance about the built environment, as well as their contempt for community.”

our house

Kathy’s house bathes in light. The morning sun in my room is such a delight. The golden late afternoon sun visits Maria’s room, where at night the stars and moon shine through the window in the roof. We have an open fire and a big kitchen. A garden with a jacuzzi â€“ something totally unimaginable for us and most of our friends back home in Europe. Here it is part of the lives of many people we come across. It’s amazing to be in the jacuzzi and see the morning sun or the stars at night.

The dark side: our house is in the middle of SUBURBIA. The film set of so many soap operas – we had no difficulties describing it to those friends back home who watch television. Now you’ll have to mow the lawn and put your pick-up truck or four wheel drive on the driveway, Wendy said. Yeah, i might first need to learn how to drive. And then Maria saw the black workers coming in these oh-so-white neighbourhood to mow the lawns. How uncomfortable such this division of labour feels. Fortunately Kathy finds it ridiculous to have a lawn, so our garden is wild. Let’s comfort ourselves by saying that we don’t really fit the clichÃ©, which no doubt is the case for so many people stuck in suburbia. But suburbia continues to exist despite, and also through, all the misfits.

What is suburbia? What i see is a well-organised pattern of broad streets and small parcels of land containing a single house, a garage, a car, a lawn,… An overwhelming feeling of dominion: one individual kingdom besides the other rooted in the absolute rule of private property. The pedestrian walk further down our street just stops all of a sudden. Because somebody’s lawn stretches all the way to the street. Sure. And i’ve hardly ever been bothered by feelings of fear when walking the streets at night of a good number of European cities. But here i must admit that it can get pretty dangerous as soon as it gets dark: without decent public light you simply don’t see a thing (some houses might leave a light burning by the door or on the porch, others don’t). And forget the idea of quickly running down the street to get bread, or some more vegetables, or a bottle of wine. In these endless streets with little dominions there’s not even chance on a lost night shop. Actually, forget the idea of running anywhere, you basically need a car to organise life in a way that is not terribly time consuming.

People are really open and friendly here, that’s a fact. Very refreshing after the way in which people in Belgium can be really unfriendly, uninterested, xenophobic and closed. But being nice and leaving the light on in front of your house is not a replacement for a public sphere and the creation of common goods. The terribly old-fashioned European in me can’t help asking: where’s the polis, where’s the notion of a public sphere, the public good, a political body, a political community? Suburbia as the obscene celebration of their destruction…

visit the set

My first experience of seeing a movie that represents a place i know very well, a place which was my home for a while, was an unsettling thing. I’ve been particularly attached to that movie ever since (Left Luggage, a story which takes place in the city of Antwerpen, in particular in its Hassidic neighbourhood). The fascinating alienation of it: those familiar streets i walked so many times, that park i loved to spend time in. Suddenly all of these lose their more intimate locations in pictures taken by Lotte or me, in memories and shared stories: they are out there on the big screen. The strangest feeling of displacement.

Arriving to California: a similar kind of alienation, but the other way around. A place that feels intensely familiar but very strange and unknown at the same time. I haven’t really been here before, so it’s supposed to feel strange and different, that part is fine. But all the images of California that circulate in movies and television shows give the place an uncanny familiarity. It’s like visiting the set, as the advertisement suggests. [In that capital of brilliant advertisements, London, what a good stop-over on the journey to seeamerica.com] Walking through the other side of television, Maria said. So i guess it’s kind of being on the set and in the backstage area at the same time. How to relate to a place like that, where reality somehow has this intense fake quality (and once more Hollywood is to blame)? Perhaps the beginning of some kind of Alice in Wonderland.