Sunday night at the Metro. Wardlow stop in Long Beach. Waiting to go back to LA via the Blue Line.
15 minutes after I get to the stop, the Blue Line to LA comes. I walk in at the end of one car, flip my bike over, see a family occupying the first few rows of seats, walk to an open window seat next to a young black lady.
Plop down. Look around.
In front of me, a black family of 6. Behind me, a middle-aged Asian couple. Nothing too remarkable, just every day on the Blue Line.
At the Imperial/Wilmington station, a pair of white kids come in. One of them looks like NBA Basketballer Dirk Nowitzki. They sit on the side adjacent to me, divided only by the aisle.
I don't notice that one of the white kids looked like Dirk Nowitzki until minutes later when a flying sour patch kid pegs him. Pegs as in darts right at him. Right in the back.
The throw looked very intentional. It came from where our backs were turned.
The flying sour patch kid originated from one snickering pre-teen, early-teen black kid near the mid-car door. He was laughing it up with about 5 or 6 other snickering pre-teen, early-teen black kids.
Another flying sour patch kid was thrown Dirk Nowitzki's way. I looked his way and he and his friend were getting visibly annoyed.
I was too.
30 seconds later.
Another one. Kid in the back smiling mischievously.
He finally turned back and looked at them.
Apprehensive about what he might say, he finally said in a British accent, "Can you please stop that?"
The British accent didn't do him any favors. The kids ripped into and played with his accent. They told the sour-patch kid thrower that he was going to get beat up by the British guy. In the meanwhile, they also flirted with the idea of possibly beating the British kid down.
The British guy could only sit looking back at them.
Before you know it, a sour patch kid, obviously thrown, landed where I was seated.
Slightly empowered by the British guy's reaction, I looked back at the offender and put my hands up as if to say "What?"
It wasn't meant to be a threatening I'm-gonna-fuck-you-up-What?" more like a "what the fuck are you doing" kind of What?
They left me alone for a good 5 minutes after I did that.
Under their breath, the British kids who'd incurred that initial barrage of flying sour patch kids were building tension. I heard one of them mumble "they're just niggers anyway." Being in this situation, I could understand why they would think that, not that I condoned race-baiting.
The black kids spent the 5 minutes they left me alone verbally playing/taunting a young Latina girl who was seated behind the British kids.
They asked her multiple times if she gave head. Witty in her own right, she said that she was surprised that anyone would consider having sex with any of them.
One of the boys then said that they would pop her. It wasn't clear whether that popping was sexual or violent, but either, way it's not really a way you'd talk to someone you don't know. She was trying to stand her ground, but faced them as if she knew them.
By this time, the entire train had grown visibly annoyed at what these boys were doing. They were annoyed at the rowdyness, the harrassment of ordinary folk.
But no one was speaking up. The Asian couple would've done a million other things than be on the Blue Line. A Latino dude with a bike and a Rose Bowl 2007 Michigan sweater looked every once in a while to the back where those boys were.
Tired of the verbal games that these boys were playing, the girl moved into the open seat next to me. I had my bag slightly on the other chair, but the Asian guy in the back lightly nudged me to move my bag so that this girl could sit.
The boys saw this and chided her out loud.
They said that she was "a ho running to her boyfriend." Having done nothing except move my bag slightly so she could sit next to me, I became the target of laughter again and said that "you in the glasses, you just protecting her to get pussy."
I looked back at one of the boys diagonal to me, remembering Adriel Luis' facebook wall post on my wall and trying to bring good vibes, I said "C'mon fam."
I wasn't trying to be mocking or anything by calling him 'fam and in a way that some would consider "deficient" English, I was just genuinely trying to engage with them.
He said, "Fam? I'm not your fam!"
I said, "Well, I don't know, you could be."
After a slight pause, I looked at one of the group members with glasses and another kid behind him he was taking up two seats.
I said, "I ain't trying to fight ya'll. You know, just chill ya'll, folks are just trying to get home." I was just trying to tell em that it shouldn't get that serious and that they were seriously stirring up something.
They nodded and seemed to be getting where I was going. I was just trying to establish an air of respect for them.
One of them remarked "man, he got a duck tail," referring to my newfound tail haircut.
I said, "yeah, it took a while to get."
One of them asked, "yeah, how long did it take you?"
I said, "eh...about 4 months."
I wish I could say that we talked some more. I wish I could say that the mocking, and them being loud in public all ceased after the interaction. It didn't.
About 2 more sour patch kids landed my way.
However, the throwing was not really recognized or celebrated by the rest of the boys. They didn't mock anyone else or me for the duration of the ride, least out loud.
The rest of the trip, we just heard them banging on drums and freestyling, conquering the shared Metro car airwaves of a Sunday Night on the Blue Line.
After interaction with the kids in the back died down, I looked at the white British kid and his friend. Reading the tension in their bodies, I told one of them "not to mind, they're just kids," hoping that perhaps they would just dismiss the incident to "being kids", rather than "being black."
That these kids were...kids.
But I could easily seeing them get into all kinds of trouble with that public bravado. Perhaps the same need for bravado that drove Cambodian and Latino kids to kill each other in Long Beach during the 1990s and 2000s.
I wanted to tell these kids that they were fostering resentment in ordinary people of other people in their category. I wanted to tell them who Oscar Grant was. Someone was really annoyed by him in the moment as well.
I could see the violence wanting to rage out in the white British kids and the black kids as the white kids walked pass them to exit towards the Staples Center/Convention Center. The white British kids wanted to show that they weren't punks, the black kids hit the window back to show that they were a force to be reckoned with.
Violence or the threat thereof, sadly one of the more used languages in America.
I figured that the black kids really were just looking to talk. Keyword is "kids." And by "kids" I mean people who can be talked to and perhaps should be talked to, instead of having "other" elements, technologies, or entities (namely institutions) "deal" with "them." Elements, technologies, entities dealing with them instead of individuals dealing with them. Albeit on a television show, individuals showed to be less willing to deal face-to-face with black kids.
These kids on the Metro on this Sunday night were an outburst of energy. They were just calling attention to themselves, probably cause they had nothing better to do. I just did my best to try and engage.
Better that than dismiss and leave them to be put in another trash bag that we call our prison-industrial complex.
Showing posts with label Public Discourse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Public Discourse. Show all posts
Technologies and Cultures of Impersonalities
On a Friday night riding my bike in the Valley to a somewhat formal engagement.
I'm going through a residential area, which tonight has considerable traffic volume. There is probably an average of 2 cars trailing, passing me for each of the 15 blocks I travel. I ride my bike to the side, allowing cars to pass when I feel the build-up of cars. In other words, there is nothing too special about the night, just another night riding my bike, following the traffic laws.
I come to an ordinary residential Stop Intersection intersection that I'd gone through hundreds of times. Stop. Let the two vehicles on my left and my right pass. Behind them are ready and eager cars. Acknowledging that the new and ready cars see me, a bicyclist, I hesitate for a split second and make my move. I pedal.
About 2 or 3 seconds later it looks like some asshole in a white GM sports utility vehicle coming from the right is going to make a right turn without stopping, which would mean I'd crash into him and probably get hurt. The driver of this White GM sports utility appears to be slightly blinded by the ready and eager car to my right. Unsure of whether he sees me or not and if he's just going to proceed with his turn without stopping (or regard for traffic laws), I stop just before I cross the intersection just to make sure.
I can't see anyone's face in the dark, just a bunch of headlights. For his seeming inability to stop and near running into me, I look at his headlights and inadvertently say and express with my lips a slightly delayed, message-sending "WOW", which the driver apparently caught. A split second later, people from the white GM appeared to yell back at me, laugh, and honk.
I pedalled for a block and then of course the white GM truck making the turn was trailing me. They tried to intimidate me off the road by pushing the gas. They honked and yelled again. "Drive-by-yelling", I'll call it.
This mild harrassment not only startled but annoyed the hell out of me. I couldn't do anything about it. Their piece of empowered technology enabled them to make a left turn and zoom off with no deserving consequence waiting for them.
I greatly dislike the ability of people who yell something from moving vehicles, usually cars and from what I can remember mostly pick-up truck drivers (though maybe I have a special hate/motivated memory for those assholes). It's for the lack of a better word, some PUNK-ASS BULLSHIT. They wouldn't yell shit if they were walking or fellow bicyclists.
Say if the GM driver's mode of transportation was modified from horsepower to just horse, I doubt those, young-sounding idiots (I suppose they could've been senior citizens, which actually would significantly sap the energy and introduce a non-seriousness to this post), would feel so empowered to yell so much at bicyclists and pedestrians. I don't imagine people speeding through at 15 MPH in a golf cart yelling at people.
I guess with a car you can not only haul a bunch of cargo, but tons of douchebaggery as well.
Let me try to put the phenomena of drive-by yelling in context.
Without the speed and ensuing impersonality of the car, I'm sure they'd still find ways to be assholes, but with a car, they have a better means to carry out as impersonal an act as they please. Kind of like how killers would probably find ways to kill, but with a gun, they have a better means to carry out as impersonal act as they please. Wonder how far Jared Lee Loughner could've gotten just stabbing people? Or to bring it back here, I just wonder how many less drive-by and gang shootings there would be.
The car and the gun are pieces of technology built on speed, and seem to promote cultures of impersonality. While they provide a connectivity over distances, we can get "lost in them" . Our attention is occupied by our usage of these pieces of technology. When our attention is occupied like that we can said to be "in transit", we are in non-places, disconnected. This saps the connectivity in the moment to our immediate surroundings.
By being in the car or "in" the gun, we build expectations that were going to get from point A to point B fast. So with the car, we expect to move fast. With guns, people expect to get a maiming or even killing done fast. With the car and the gun, we have ourselves "cultures" or ways of life built on things getting done fast. What would make us "whole" for a moment in the wider American cultural context seems to built on getting things accomplished and this is all dependent on the well-functioning of those technologies.
If something gets in the way of our being "in transit", our response is one of shock. They violate our expectations after all. The outward response is then something else. If we do respond outwardly to something that violates our being "in transit", it's curtailed by the constraints of being not only mentally in-transit and the actual speed of our technology. And so what comes out is a quick reaction, one enough to get the attention and shock the disruptor. Getting attention and inducing shock can be achieved in a wide variety of ways --- yell, intimidate, honk, and if you could get away with it...kill.
I'm going through a residential area, which tonight has considerable traffic volume. There is probably an average of 2 cars trailing, passing me for each of the 15 blocks I travel. I ride my bike to the side, allowing cars to pass when I feel the build-up of cars. In other words, there is nothing too special about the night, just another night riding my bike, following the traffic laws.
I come to an ordinary residential Stop Intersection intersection that I'd gone through hundreds of times. Stop. Let the two vehicles on my left and my right pass. Behind them are ready and eager cars. Acknowledging that the new and ready cars see me, a bicyclist, I hesitate for a split second and make my move. I pedal.
About 2 or 3 seconds later it looks like some asshole in a white GM sports utility vehicle coming from the right is going to make a right turn without stopping, which would mean I'd crash into him and probably get hurt. The driver of this White GM sports utility appears to be slightly blinded by the ready and eager car to my right. Unsure of whether he sees me or not and if he's just going to proceed with his turn without stopping (or regard for traffic laws), I stop just before I cross the intersection just to make sure.
I can't see anyone's face in the dark, just a bunch of headlights. For his seeming inability to stop and near running into me, I look at his headlights and inadvertently say and express with my lips a slightly delayed, message-sending "WOW", which the driver apparently caught. A split second later, people from the white GM appeared to yell back at me, laugh, and honk.
I pedalled for a block and then of course the white GM truck making the turn was trailing me. They tried to intimidate me off the road by pushing the gas. They honked and yelled again. "Drive-by-yelling", I'll call it.
This mild harrassment not only startled but annoyed the hell out of me. I couldn't do anything about it. Their piece of empowered technology enabled them to make a left turn and zoom off with no deserving consequence waiting for them.
I greatly dislike the ability of people who yell something from moving vehicles, usually cars and from what I can remember mostly pick-up truck drivers (though maybe I have a special hate/motivated memory for those assholes). It's for the lack of a better word, some PUNK-ASS BULLSHIT. They wouldn't yell shit if they were walking or fellow bicyclists.
Say if the GM driver's mode of transportation was modified from horsepower to just horse, I doubt those, young-sounding idiots (I suppose they could've been senior citizens, which actually would significantly sap the energy and introduce a non-seriousness to this post), would feel so empowered to yell so much at bicyclists and pedestrians. I don't imagine people speeding through at 15 MPH in a golf cart yelling at people.
I guess with a car you can not only haul a bunch of cargo, but tons of douchebaggery as well.
Let me try to put the phenomena of drive-by yelling in context.
Without the speed and ensuing impersonality of the car, I'm sure they'd still find ways to be assholes, but with a car, they have a better means to carry out as impersonal an act as they please. Kind of like how killers would probably find ways to kill, but with a gun, they have a better means to carry out as impersonal act as they please. Wonder how far Jared Lee Loughner could've gotten just stabbing people? Or to bring it back here, I just wonder how many less drive-by and gang shootings there would be.
The car and the gun are pieces of technology built on speed, and seem to promote cultures of impersonality. While they provide a connectivity over distances, we can get "lost in them" . Our attention is occupied by our usage of these pieces of technology. When our attention is occupied like that we can said to be "in transit", we are in non-places, disconnected. This saps the connectivity in the moment to our immediate surroundings.
By being in the car or "in" the gun, we build expectations that were going to get from point A to point B fast. So with the car, we expect to move fast. With guns, people expect to get a maiming or even killing done fast. With the car and the gun, we have ourselves "cultures" or ways of life built on things getting done fast. What would make us "whole" for a moment in the wider American cultural context seems to built on getting things accomplished and this is all dependent on the well-functioning of those technologies.
If something gets in the way of our being "in transit", our response is one of shock. They violate our expectations after all. The outward response is then something else. If we do respond outwardly to something that violates our being "in transit", it's curtailed by the constraints of being not only mentally in-transit and the actual speed of our technology. And so what comes out is a quick reaction, one enough to get the attention and shock the disruptor. Getting attention and inducing shock can be achieved in a wide variety of ways --- yell, intimidate, honk, and if you could get away with it...kill.
"We, the People" Festival?
Last night I was looking forward to hitting up the We, the People Festival before heading off to Watts for its Jazz Festival.
I had been wanting to go for 2 years straight, but somehow, I was always distracted and had ended up missing both years.
This year I actually remembered seeing a poster for the Festival. This time, I wouldn't miss it --- it now had a seat in my synaptic claft. I would remember to go to it.
Just yesterday, I remembered.
Then I looked at its website.
The first thing that jumped at me when I glanced at the details of this event..."Tickets". That's strange. "Tickets"? To a free event? Maybe it's only 5 bucks?
Yyyy...eah.
Within an Usain Bolt millisecond, the second thing that jumped at me and broke my back was the numerical detail..."$45"...but free if you're under 9 years old!"
Quite the disorientation for me.
Progressive, down-for-the-people talk on the website. Yeah, they were in the hood in Watts. Yeah, they've got Self-Help Graphics as one of their nonprofit people! Yeah, they're giving away tickets to families! Toss in a few buzz words that give off that feeling that the space is meant to be critical, conscious, and about resistance, but if you want to experience that space...that'll be $45 at the door.
$45!
$45 is barely what I made in 6 hours of tv studio watching/temping.
$45 is 3 weeks of groceries or gas.
I'm kind of insulted by their misappropriation of the word "We, the People" because I might confuse them for people who aim to inclusive.
They really should make a slight edit of their title to reflect its targeted audience. We, the petit-bourgeoisie-People-who-could-afford-to-throw-away-45-dollars-for-a-mostly-narrowly-
auditory-experience-Festival. Seems more like a fundraiser than an actual democratic space that is being created...except the funds are going to "help Dre get a new testarossa Ferrari fund."
I had been wanting to go for 2 years straight, but somehow, I was always distracted and had ended up missing both years.
This year I actually remembered seeing a poster for the Festival. This time, I wouldn't miss it --- it now had a seat in my synaptic claft. I would remember to go to it.
Just yesterday, I remembered.
Then I looked at its website.
The first thing that jumped at me when I glanced at the details of this event..."Tickets". That's strange. "Tickets"? To a free event? Maybe it's only 5 bucks?
Yyyy...eah.
Within an Usain Bolt millisecond, the second thing that jumped at me and broke my back was the numerical detail..."$45"...but free if you're under 9 years old!"
Quite the disorientation for me.
Progressive, down-for-the-people talk on the website. Yeah, they were in the hood in Watts. Yeah, they've got Self-Help Graphics as one of their nonprofit people! Yeah, they're giving away tickets to families! Toss in a few buzz words that give off that feeling that the space is meant to be critical, conscious, and about resistance, but if you want to experience that space...that'll be $45 at the door.
$45!
$45 is barely what I made in 6 hours of tv studio watching/temping.
$45 is 3 weeks of groceries or gas.
I'm kind of insulted by their misappropriation of the word "We, the People" because I might confuse them for people who aim to inclusive.
They really should make a slight edit of their title to reflect its targeted audience. We, the petit-bourgeoisie-People-who-could-afford-to-throw-away-45-dollars-for-a-mostly-narrowly-
auditory-experience-Festival. Seems more like a fundraiser than an actual democratic space that is being created...except the funds are going to "help Dre get a new testarossa Ferrari fund."
What I Didn't See at Park(ing) Day LA
The topic of Park(ing) Day in Los Angeles has been organized, blogged, and pictured to death by a circle of people who already seem to know each other. There are 70 posts in my google reader (which include Park(ing) Days in other metropolitan areas in the US). The crudest offenders: Streetsblog LA, Blogdowntown, LAist, and Curbed LA making sure to give me every single camera angle of every Park(ing) space.
No doubt that an event like this sorely, achingly needs exposure, but damn, multiple updates in one day is way too much for me.
It reminded me of how NBC spent about 79 hours covering some random 5.4 earthquake we had a few months ago, showing us videos, images, countless people on the street interviews, of "the experience."...of what ended up being a minor event with little damage and no one dead (damn!)
But, this is Parking Day, and I could understand people's enthusiasm bleeding over into quick and easy blog posts.
A very nice photo stream from Damien Newton at Streetsblog covering the occurrences at LACC/the Bicycle District/East Hollywood/my old neighborhood.
The Militant Angeleno supplemented his experience with a hilarious rant on Neighborhood Council old people.
CurbedLA's Dakota talking about the lack of Park(ing) spaces in the Valley, which I obviously agreed with, and headed down from the nothingness car-tropolis that is called the valley.
Per my actual first-hand, -foot, and -mind, experience...
I only went to Downtown LA, figuring that if I was going to take a car, I might as well be at the spot where most of it was happening. Like I always do when I head downtown, I plopped my car in the neighborhood hugging Echo Park, probably away a parking space from a resident. I'm a hypocrite and whatnot. Park(ing) Day and using all this fuel and polluting the environment through driving, I feel like if I told anyone that, they would've rounded up a mob and nailed me to a cross...mind you, a "green" cross complete with biodegradable nails.
I'll say more about my tendency to drive places later in a separate post.
Parking Day for me was about the "Park", the people-oriented public space, and the people, not so much the anti-automobile, ultra-pro transit and biking Park-ing. So I looked forward to seeing the different exhibits, how they used their "public space", and how they engaged people. I think it was as much a public awareness/outreach event as much as it was a artful exhibit.
On my trip downtown, I came, I saw, and I remember:
...the Community Redevelopment Agency of LA with their knitting circle and free juice, which I enjoyed primarily because they were actually quenching my thirst with some Minute Maid cherry limeade.
...the LA County Bicycle Coaltion and their symbolic bicycle rack.
...LAMP from Skid Row at the "Block party" with Coach Ron being the ubiquitous face in my forays into "that" side of downtown, next to the interactive
...EDAW LA, the people who propose turning part of the 101 freeway into a park, and their forest to the periphery of the LA Central Public Library,
...and an architecture firm's exhibit of smoky emissions from a vehicle.
Outside of this network of organizations and usual suspects behind any kind of urban living change, I kept wondering how many common, everyday people walking downtown actually noticed, took in, or even had an opinion about what was happening to their on-street parking spaces.
I gather that most of the folks wandering and working in downtown LA parked within private parking structure lots, so perhaps it didn't affect them in any kind of engagingly emotional, personal way. Families had places to go and probably figured that they weren't really invited to the fun, seeing that the people who organized it didn't look them, besides CRA/LA's Knitting circle.
I was an intentional attendee of Park(ing) Day LA in downtown, but I did not know how to find the different spaces.
While I enjoyed, I still felt like a few things were missing from making it a great outreach/awareness event. It seemed like it should've been funner, and more broadly inclusive.
A few of the things I noticed:
1) There weren't enough families.
Relative to the pictures from concurrent Parking Days in New York, it looks like families are actually participating!
Note the photos of kids playing connect four!
Note the kids on the turf!
Now turn the camera, back to LA: why such a paucity in Los Angeles?
Maybe a combination of:
...downtown being full of "working" people
...there being no real high-traffic parking spaces
...the free public spaces in downtown being inhabited by homeless folks
...luxury loft construction combined with affordable housing demolitions affecting the homeless
...the lack of kid-friendly, happening places downtown. Re: bookstores, playgrounds, music stuff...less trips for families downtown
2) Going off this apparently adult-centered Parking Day, some of the green space was just utterly uninviting.
EDAW LA's space in particular was particularly disengaging.
Yes, greening things, is a theme, but not too much of it that you lose part of the point of why you build a park in an urban setting in the first place.
It's like they aimed to build a fortress of privatized greenery ala the Beverly Hills sidewalks rather than some kind of space that actually looked to include everyone, even a 24-year old brown-ish kid in a Habitat for Humanity shirt and straight-from the Phillippines basketball shorts.
I hope Park 101 wasn't supposed to emblematic of that space.
Greenery talk seems to have infiltrated LA discourse since at least the 70s, and yeah, hope it's not all talk.
But, it was just a one-day thing and overall their idea is nothing that I could knock.
3) It was really hard locating anything until I spotted the parking space with the flags, the cyclist, and the symbolically-polluting vehicle.
Thankfully, they provided a Map for other Parking Day LA events, but even with the map a lot of them were hard to find. Still afterward, I had gotten one of their maps, it still felt like a treasure hunt...I was forcefully, intentionally, frustratedly hunting down these spots.
They needed a lot more noise pollution.
MU-SIC!
There was a saxophonist on Third Street that was playing Mas Que Nada in loop. He would seem to fit the theme of people-oriented public space.
If cost was a concern, maybe just a simple iPod for every single space would've done something. It would've been a cost-effective quick way to draw attention.
4) On the idea of community-building, I would have worked with what was available in the community and on the streets already.
Ala a Historic Filipinotown get-down featuring the Blue Scholars and Bambu, formerly of the hip-hop duo Native Guns, get an ice cream truck, or cart at the block party, get some bacon-rolled hot dogs.
Basically, the party atmosphere liked enough of the "party." An environment where people could actually play. That kind of medium
The basketball court was a real nice touch by LAMP or Ron's organization, but no one was playing with it at the Block Party when I got there. The pool up in the Bicycle district and the Valley would've been pretty cool too. If they brought some kind of swingset, soccer goals, boxing, random art exhibits like they do in Silver Lake, I think the party would've smoked up the block a bit.
But what do I know, I was just a man walking the street.
No doubt that an event like this sorely, achingly needs exposure, but damn, multiple updates in one day is way too much for me.
It reminded me of how NBC spent about 79 hours covering some random 5.4 earthquake we had a few months ago, showing us videos, images, countless people on the street interviews, of "the experience."...of what ended up being a minor event with little damage and no one dead (damn!)
But, this is Parking Day, and I could understand people's enthusiasm bleeding over into quick and easy blog posts.
A very nice photo stream from Damien Newton at Streetsblog covering the occurrences at LACC/the Bicycle District/East Hollywood/my old neighborhood.
The Militant Angeleno supplemented his experience with a hilarious rant on Neighborhood Council old people.
CurbedLA's Dakota talking about the lack of Park(ing) spaces in the Valley, which I obviously agreed with, and headed down from the nothingness car-tropolis that is called the valley.
Per my actual first-hand, -foot, and -mind, experience...
I only went to Downtown LA, figuring that if I was going to take a car, I might as well be at the spot where most of it was happening. Like I always do when I head downtown, I plopped my car in the neighborhood hugging Echo Park, probably away a parking space from a resident. I'm a hypocrite and whatnot. Park(ing) Day and using all this fuel and polluting the environment through driving, I feel like if I told anyone that, they would've rounded up a mob and nailed me to a cross...mind you, a "green" cross complete with biodegradable nails.
I'll say more about my tendency to drive places later in a separate post.
Parking Day for me was about the "Park", the people-oriented public space, and the people, not so much the anti-automobile, ultra-pro transit and biking Park-ing. So I looked forward to seeing the different exhibits, how they used their "public space", and how they engaged people. I think it was as much a public awareness/outreach event as much as it was a artful exhibit.
On my trip downtown, I came, I saw, and I remember:
...the Community Redevelopment Agency of LA with their knitting circle and free juice, which I enjoyed primarily because they were actually quenching my thirst with some Minute Maid cherry limeade.
...the LA County Bicycle Coaltion and their symbolic bicycle rack.
...LAMP from Skid Row at the "Block party" with Coach Ron being the ubiquitous face in my forays into "that" side of downtown, next to the interactive
...EDAW LA, the people who propose turning part of the 101 freeway into a park, and their forest to the periphery of the LA Central Public Library,
...and an architecture firm's exhibit of smoky emissions from a vehicle.
Outside of this network of organizations and usual suspects behind any kind of urban living change, I kept wondering how many common, everyday people walking downtown actually noticed, took in, or even had an opinion about what was happening to their on-street parking spaces.
I gather that most of the folks wandering and working in downtown LA parked within private parking structure lots, so perhaps it didn't affect them in any kind of engagingly emotional, personal way. Families had places to go and probably figured that they weren't really invited to the fun, seeing that the people who organized it didn't look them, besides CRA/LA's Knitting circle.
I was an intentional attendee of Park(ing) Day LA in downtown, but I did not know how to find the different spaces.
While I enjoyed, I still felt like a few things were missing from making it a great outreach/awareness event. It seemed like it should've been funner, and more broadly inclusive.
A few of the things I noticed:
1) There weren't enough families.
Relative to the pictures from concurrent Parking Days in New York, it looks like families are actually participating!
Note the photos of kids playing connect four!
Note the kids on the turf!
Now turn the camera, back to LA: why such a paucity in Los Angeles?
Maybe a combination of:
...downtown being full of "working" people
...there being no real high-traffic parking spaces
...the free public spaces in downtown being inhabited by homeless folks
...luxury loft construction combined with affordable housing demolitions affecting the homeless
...the lack of kid-friendly, happening places downtown. Re: bookstores, playgrounds, music stuff...less trips for families downtown
2) Going off this apparently adult-centered Parking Day, some of the green space was just utterly uninviting.
EDAW LA's space in particular was particularly disengaging.
Yes, greening things, is a theme, but not too much of it that you lose part of the point of why you build a park in an urban setting in the first place.
It's like they aimed to build a fortress of privatized greenery ala the Beverly Hills sidewalks rather than some kind of space that actually looked to include everyone, even a 24-year old brown-ish kid in a Habitat for Humanity shirt and straight-from the Phillippines basketball shorts.
I hope Park 101 wasn't supposed to emblematic of that space.
Greenery talk seems to have infiltrated LA discourse since at least the 70s, and yeah, hope it's not all talk.
But, it was just a one-day thing and overall their idea is nothing that I could knock.
3) It was really hard locating anything until I spotted the parking space with the flags, the cyclist, and the symbolically-polluting vehicle.
Thankfully, they provided a Map for other Parking Day LA events, but even with the map a lot of them were hard to find. Still afterward, I had gotten one of their maps, it still felt like a treasure hunt...I was forcefully, intentionally, frustratedly hunting down these spots.
They needed a lot more noise pollution.
MU-SIC!
There was a saxophonist on Third Street that was playing Mas Que Nada in loop. He would seem to fit the theme of people-oriented public space.
If cost was a concern, maybe just a simple iPod for every single space would've done something. It would've been a cost-effective quick way to draw attention.
4) On the idea of community-building, I would have worked with what was available in the community and on the streets already.
Ala a Historic Filipinotown get-down featuring the Blue Scholars and Bambu, formerly of the hip-hop duo Native Guns, get an ice cream truck, or cart at the block party, get some bacon-rolled hot dogs.
Basically, the party atmosphere liked enough of the "party." An environment where people could actually play. That kind of medium
The basketball court was a real nice touch by LAMP or Ron's organization, but no one was playing with it at the Block Party when I got there. The pool up in the Bicycle district and the Valley would've been pretty cool too. If they brought some kind of swingset, soccer goals, boxing, random art exhibits like they do in Silver Lake, I think the party would've smoked up the block a bit.
But what do I know, I was just a man walking the street.
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