[sudo-discuss] Ladders, tables, and other horizontal surfaces

[David Keenan]

Hi Rachel,

That's a beautiful story about joining the Trayvon march. I marched through
west oakland the night of the verdict, and the next, and the next. Watching
people come out of their houses to join in, walking off the courts and
playing fields to join, was a pretty awesome thing.

For the record since I guess we are naming names, the neighbor with the
menacing demeanor I was referring to was Robert with the dog, not Timon,
but whatevs.

I'll look for your other email you mention, too.

best,
David


On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 10:01 AM, rachel lyra hospodar
<rachelyra at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi david, thanks for your response! I will come by this week and retrieve
> my objects.
>
> I am inferring a sort of farewell to Sudo, as I haven't been by in some
> time and I find within myself a resistance to doing so. I don't mean to
> impugn the best efforts of the many folks who work hard to continually feed
> & grow this community. There are a lot of awesome things about Sudo, and
> even though i have to break up with you I know we'll each go on to find the
> happiness, with others, that we both deserve.
>
> I don't want to spend a bunch of time detailing negative things, naming
> names and rehashing past events that I am not seeking resolution for. The
> folks who touched and accosted me that I mentioned in particular, are not
> landlord George or neighbor Timon, even though they both do yell a lot in a
> manner that I find wildly inappropriate. My concerns about people and
> culture are not so limited in scope here.
>
> Perhaps the other email I just sent to the list will help to illustrate
> another cultural divide I feel exists between where I stand, and Sudo room.
> I think that an organization like this, forming in the time and place that
> it has, bears a great burden of responsibility towards the city & cultures
> around it. I make no commentary on where each of you are on this journey.
>
> Here is an anecdote about my relationship with Oakland.
>
> I live right by West Oakland Bart. The house is owned by nameless Chinese
> investors who bought it with cash after it was foreclosed on during the
> single biggest extraction of wealth from the Black American community,
> ever. Management is handled by a local company who routinely break the law.
> They were excited to rent to my friend who has a lucrative software job,
> and I live in the basement like some sort of loony art nut add-on. It's
> pretty sweet if I don't think about that whole foreclosure thing or the
> fact that the lease is written in such a way to be able to kick us out
> whenever they want. I also don't think too much about the white friend who
> bought a house down the street, who lamented how he couldn't buy this one
> because the Chinese offered cash. He and I both deserve places to live,
> after all.
>
> After George Zimmerman was freed, marches went past my house every day.
> These were 'neighborhood' folks, a word many often use as a euphemism for
> black. The marchers were overwhelmingly African-American. In a nation
> marked by endemic and enduring anti-black racism and a constant narrative
> of black violence and crime, in a city with a provedly violent and racist
> police force, at a time with high tensions and no relief valve, I think the
> racial makeup of a group performing political protest is an interesting
> piece of data.
>
> I stood in my front yard, behind the stout gate that came with the place,
> looking at the backs of phalanxes of mostly white officers who were
> flanking this spontaneous-seeming march.  I wondered what would happen if I
> joined it. I felt so much anger around that verdict!  It was not an angry
> crowd but a solemn one, but still I wondered how anger might manifest to
> others.  But I looked at the police, between me and that march, and I knew
> I was on the wrong side. Whatever might happen within that crowd, they were
> speaking opposition and for my voice to be counted I had to join them.
>
> I opened my gate and went outside. I pushed past the police.
>
> I joined my community.
>
> R.
> On Nov 13, 2013 8:04 AM, "David Keenan" <dkeenan44 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure if I've met you (if I have, I am sorry to not put the name
>> to the face) - naturally I understand your deep concerns regarding feeling
>> and being safe in the space. I don't know who the accosting individuals
>> were, but I do know that there is a neighbor and landlord who rove the
>> shared areas in an agitated and/or deeply disturbed state who have
>> intimidated other members of our community. 2141 is not optimal largely for
>> that reason, and we are looking for something new.
>>
>> - I have seen a tall aluminum ladder in sudo, in the storage area
>> immediately left of the door, just before the radio studio, on the
>> left-hand side.
>>
>> - I have also seen a folding-in-half plastic table, in that it was once
>> brought over to the Bay Area Public School room for a sudo meeting I think
>> when space got tight one day - so you might check in there - normally in
>> BAPS there should be two tables in there, whose legs fold, but do not fold
>> in half. Check behind the couch / pews -
>>
>> I am not sure if you are inferring a farewell to sudo by asking where
>> your things are, but I think it would be really tragic if someone so
>> passionate and articulate spun out of our communal orbit. Is there anything
>> I or we can do, to directly address your concerns?
>>
>> Best,
>> David
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 1:29 AM, rachel lyra hospodar <
>> rachelyra at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Greetings, sudo!
>>>
>>> It has been a long time since i have visited! I hope you have all been
>>> doing well. I am taking the time right now as the year draws to a close to
>>> reflect on the current state of things in my world.  Perhaps you will
>>> indulge me in reading everything below.  perhaps you are seeking a tl;dr in
>>> which case i will ask you,
>>> have you seen my folding plastic table?
>>> have you seen my aluminum ladder?
>>> have you seen my dreams for a shared space and a common future?
>>>
>>> I believe I left them laying around here someplace, possibly with my
>>> name scrawled across in marker.
>>>
>>> The table is about 3'x6', blown plastic, folds in half.  The ladder is
>>> aluminum, 12' high or so, and quite nice.  The dreams are like hair or
>>> cuticles, forever growing back even as i try to ignore them and focus on
>>> something tangible or 'important'.
>>>
>>> At the beginning of this year I closed Coyote, a shared art studio and
>>> retail space I had been managing in North Oakland. We closed in part
>>> because of the loss of one of our founding members, who moved back east to
>>> live closer to his family.  We closed also because of a mismatch with the
>>> neighborhood, admitting reluctantly that where we wanted to have our art
>>> studio was not compatible with where we needed to do our retail work - to
>>> seek customers, and build paying business.  We struggled to integrate into
>>> our neighborhood, making friends while seeking to understand the impact of
>>> gentrification.  We struggled with an unscrupulous landlord, mounting costs
>>> and flatlining incomes, and we had to admit that the project wasn't working
>>> in its current guise.
>>>
>>> The upscale restaurant down the block sought our support, as we were
>>> closing, for a 'neighborhood meeting' about crime.  When I pressed the
>>> owner (who had never before visited, in our year and a half in business)
>>> about what their concerns were, he told me that some of their patrons were
>>> being mugged on their way from the tony restaurant to the train station.
>>>
>>> I can't say that I was surprised.
>>>
>>> I wasn't surprised that the patrons of this restaurant had been mugged.
>>>  The food is not cheap and the place is an oasis of genteel laughter in a
>>> neighborhood more attuned to sirens, car stereos, and the stacatto passage
>>> of these same folks in their cars on their way home to the hills.
>>>
>>> I also wasn't surprised that the restaurant owners, after completely
>>> ignoring the existence of their scrappy neighbors, after failing to welcome
>>> their new peers to the block, after ignoring that small business baksheesh
>>> of customer-trading, were still willing to hit us up to come to their
>>> 'community' meeting and talk about how to 'stop crime'.
>>>
>>> I ache for folks who suffer through being robbed with the threat of
>>> violence, or with actual violence. It sucks to have something like that
>>> happen to you.
>>>
>>> But.
>>>
>>> In the time that I bottomlined our business in North Oakland, we lost
>>> about 5% of our sales income in shoplifting.  This is in comparison to
>>> basically nil in shoplifting losses in a similar store that I previously
>>> ran in San Francisco, near haight/fillmore.  What's different? Income
>>> inequality.  Sure, in a diverse place, folks of all different sorts
>>> encounter each other, and there is a lot that is healthy about that.
>>>
>>> In this region there do seem to be some entrenched group identities in
>>> the culture war, and I sometimes wonder which side I am on.
>>>
>>> I have watched friends and neighbors struggle as their food stamps are
>>> cut. I have listened to the pained conflict that grows up in their loving
>>> homes around money, when there is none. I wondered most especially which
>>> side I was on after George Zimmerman was let free, and marches passed my
>>> West Oakland house every day. I saw the notoriously violent OPD standing
>>> between me and these marches, as if to protect me. This more than anything
>>> else drove me to walk out my front gate and join those marches, to show
>>> with my body where my loyalties lay.
>>>
>>> I have watched the region that has nurtured me for the last decade sink
>>> into an inequality that I am led to believe is as deep and deeply
>>> entrenched (meaning the unlikelihood of people to transcend the
>>> circumstances into which they were born) as the period that preceded the
>>> French Revolution.
>>>
>>> Only whose head will roll?
>>>
>>> In the midst of these questions I was forced to confront the inadequacy
>>> of Sudo's best and most shining efforts.  It is a place where I have made
>>> friends, many of whom stay in my orbit & community now as I re-orient. Sudo
>>> is also the only place where my hair was ever grabbed without my consent.
>>>  It is a place where I have been accosted in a dark hallway by someone who
>>> repeatedly demanded my attention despite my demurrals, despite walking
>>> away. It is a place I have been yelled at in anger, as have many others. It
>>> is a place I have feared to bring friends.  I watched a community struggle
>>> to set boundaries to protect its members, only to founder as it seeks to
>>> define what a 'member' is that deserves protection.
>>>
>>> I say these things not as a condemnation of sudo, and i hope they are
>>> not read as such.  I say them as an honest person sharing some difficult
>>> thoughts, and i remind you dear reader that we reside within a culture that
>>> is structurally predisposed against this. It trains us to see critique as
>>> attack, to see critical thought as a threat, instead of what we hackers
>>> know as the fundamental strength we bring to any situation. We can think.
>>>  we can assess. we can learn and grow and change, and we can evolve.
>>>
>>> We are meta. We are legion, and we cannot be contained.
>>>
>>> I read recently about this space starting in SF, and while i was
>>> gladdened to hear about Double Union, I am extra excited to imagine another
>>> space with such a strong commitment to inclusion.
>>> https://github.com/wallacemax/sfhackerspace
>>>
>>> I hope the east bay hackerspace scene continues to grow, evolve, and
>>> flourish.
>>>
>>> I understand sudo is changing right now as well.  It is well for all
>>> things to change, and I hope that in this case the changes lead towards the
>>> causes of transparency in governance and inclusion for all, which i always
>>> understood to be some of the most fundamental tenets of sudo.
>>>
>>> be well, good luck to all, and always,
>>> R.
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>>> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>>>
>>
>>
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