We Are Under Siege

Greetings from the occupied nation-state of Oakland.  The siege-a-palooza that is Occupy Oakland has rebranded itself as O-O, a name it has more than earned. One of many Occupy Wall Street offshoots that sprang up across the United States like flowers in an Arab spring, O-O built slowly in Frank Ogawa Plaza over the chilly summer months of 2011 while the darker, more sinister group, Anonymous, played train-stopping cat and mouse with San Francisco police in the BART system. Perhaps it was the allure of international intrigue or their masked faces, but Anonymous virtually commandeered Bay Area media with guerilla tactics expressing resentment that cell phone service was shut down within the system during another street action—an egregious suspension of civil rights in the eyes of organizers. In the summer of everyone’s discontent, irate citizens all over the country demanded work and health care from local governments that were broke or mega-corporations that were posting record profits by stripping expenses. As the Occupy movement heated up and evolved into class war, I walked off a great job in September that gave me both and flew to France. Paris offered enough distraction that for two weeks I lived in a cocoon of ‘perfect world’. While I was away, I learned that Occupy Wall Street had become THE story coming out of the United States. In the Bay Area, we had Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Oakland, and Occupy Berkeley. Of the three, only Berkeley was hard to take seriously. Berkeley has been a party in the park from the get go.
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Summer in the East Bay arrives in September and by October Oakland was sizzling. Despite the bright sunshine, O-O languished in the shadows of trendier, more hip San Francisco’s takeover of Justin Herman Plaza. Then, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan decided she wanted the Oakland protestors off her lawn. An order was given, police moved in, the rest is YouTube. Oakland, a town that loves a rumble, let loose with another spectacle that brought the Mayhem Factor to 6 in two short years: three Oscar Grant riots, a mass march of students enraged by successive and steep tuition hikes took over the 880 freeway where it cuts through my neighborhood (a young man fell to his death), a 150-round shoot out on that same stretch of 880, and now, as a bouche amuse, Occupy Oakland.
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Oakland’s version of the shot heard round the world put the city at the epicenter of Occupy action on the West Coast. National and international commentators were calling for Mayor Quan’s resignation. She took a public beat down for having given the order that sent OPD in armed and ready to use violent force to evict Occupy Oakland and then left town on a business trip to Washington. DC. Some are saying she acted without consulting the City Council—not yet clear. Either way, on Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at about 2 a.m. police ‘raided’ or ‘cleared’ the encampment depending on your point of view. It was violent. Police fired flash bombs and several rounds of non-lethal ammunition into the unarmed crowd. It was an excessive use of force; completely without honor. Hundreds of people were hurt by so-called bean bag and rubber bullets. Pictures of the wounds inflicted by these non-lethal bullets are horrifying; as bad or worse than a beating. As public outrage built, sympathy for the 99% here in Oak Town shifted the power base from the police to the protestors. Quan is now widely believed to be fucked. True dat.
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In one evening, O-O had ascended to first place in the Occupy pageant and I don’t mean Miss Congeniality. Oakland was the reigning beauty. O-O claimed the mantle of de facto government. People came from all over the world. Today, November 2, 2011, they were sufficiently organized and in control to call a successful general strike.
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Although nothing near the ‘tens of thousands’ of fellow travelers O-O predicted, when I arrived around 3 p.m. on the 2nd a crowd of about 5,000 people roamed Frank Ogawa Plaza now called Oscar Grant Plaza by the occupying forces. The order of the day was to march to the Port of Oakland and shut that motherfucker down. The community stage was busy rallying the crowd with—okay, let’s just say it—leftist propaganda. Much of what was said was true but some of it was ridiculously untrue. The Port of Oakland does make billions of dollars each year. But it does not return “only pennies” to the people. The Port provides thousands of jobs, builds Oakland’s infrastructure, donates money and in-kind services to area non-profits, attracts federal dollars that improve our city, and is the cornerstone of our economy. Economies are ecologies—kill off the major sector and you have picked at the thread that unravels the sleeve. That is not to say there are no legitimate complaints against business in general or the Port in particular but be careful, O-O, what you ask for and do. This movement has a point of diminishing returns.  I turned my bullshit detector on 'High' and listened to several more speakers including one man of color who remarked on the diversity of the assembled throng, saying,“black people, brown people, red people, and white people—whatever that is.” Fortunately, I’m gay so insult rolls right off my back. What did stun me, however, was the arrival of eight huge tour busses brought in by the Teamsters to ferry any protestors who needed a little extra help getting down the jetway to the revolution.
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At about 4 p.m., we marched down 14th street toward the gates of the Port of Oakland on Marine Harbor. In the middle of the 14th Street Bridge, which we took with the medieval tactic of clogging, I stopped. My heart just wasn’t in it—the same reason that I resigned my job. I couldn’t spend any more time doing something that I did not do for love. O-O has my respect, but not my love. It has placed itself on a world stage to broad acclaim and made its statement, one that I essentially agree with concerning income inequality and unfair tax burdens. It has shown that ordinary citizens can confront their elected government when they believe themselves to be so seriously aggrieved that they are without other recourse. They did, in fact, shut down the Port of Oakland for several hours by sheer numbers. They choked the roads and stopped traffic. It was peaceful . . . until it wasn’t and again the police used force. Broadway and 14th was again a standoff between police and citizens well into the wee hours.
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Oakland is not a police state, as some in the crowd are now chanting at 2 a.m. Those who think it is would do well to read a history of the 20th Century. I very much recommend Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times.” That, ladies and gentlemen, will school ya on a police state. In a true police state beat down, not one of those citizen protestors would have lived through the night. Yet, there they will be tomorrow morning when the smoke clears. At home in Oscar Grant Plaza. The open-flame cook stove camp fires burning. The Port-O-Potties. The free library, the free tee shirt table, the chanting tent, the meditating tent, the sage-stick purification tent, the free clinic, all the apparatus of a refugee camp.
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But this afternoon I stood on the bridge at 14th as thousands of people streamed past me and I thought, ‘This is my neighborhood. I have an obligation to my neighbors.’ And I began to walk back toward where I live in Jack London Square where small business owners are suffering. Along the way I spotted Uncle Willy’s Original BBQ and decided to stop in and support the local economy. Uncle Willy’s is run by the nicest people on earth. They make a great fish sandwich (get the snapper) garnished with a pepper inflected tartar sauce that is inspired solo but rises to perfection when drizzled with ketchup.
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If you want to build peace, get out and meet your neighbors. ‘Knowing’ is the beginning of accepting. Studies have shown again and again, the number one factor in straight people letting up on their eternal pogrom of gay people is simply knowing a gay person.
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Hi. I’m gay. I shop in your store. I teach your children. I sit next to you at work. I am a first responder. I am your doctor, lawyer, candlestick maker.
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I went into the shop and bought a sandwich for my dinner. Waiting for it to cook, I talked to the three men working at Willy’s about their thoughts on what was happening outside and their hopes for the future. When I left, I didn’t say “I’m gay.”
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I said, “I live here, too.”
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Where the skies are not cloudy all day.

This Just In from Paris

I am just back from France with an answer to Freud’s most famous question: couture. Parisian couture is what women want and we want it ferociously. Perhaps more accurately, Parisian couture is what we’ll settle for—we want absolutely everything we see in any store in the 7th arrondissement or the St. Germain des Prés district. Okay, further refinement—I’ll speak only for myself: I want everything I saw in Paris.
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Women in Paris are uniformly gorgeous. Their skin is flawless; their hair is styled; their clothes are elegant and smell of perfume. I want to look like that. Women in the United States have given up. They have surrendered to elastic waist bands, scrunchies, and flats. Not one woman in Paris would ever wear flats. Even the very old, the elderly women totter along in heels bearing not a single scuff mark; walking their small, white dogs they wear belts and carry handbags. When a young woman of Paris wears jeans, you better believe they are skin tight and designed to draw the eye down to a pair of heels, either shoes or boots, because the women of Paris need at least six inches and I don’t mean tube steak. I mean a half-foot of precarious stiletto on the uneven cobblestones of Roman streets while going at a pace that would qualify as speed walking under the rules of any competition.
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I went to Europe determined to give these Paris bitches a run for their money. Before leaving the USA, I got my hair blonded up and my teeth whitened, bought clothes despite being unemployed (in direct defiance of any logic, I quit my job in the worst economy of our life time to go to Paris and spend like a happy drunk), I took not one pair of comfortable shoes. Still, I lost on the first day. Parisian women leave the house only when they are completely put together. They wear skirts and hose; belts that match their shoes. Their handbags are sensible, not their shoes—you will never, neh-hev-er see women marching down the street lightly swinging handbags the size of a small cottage such as are routinely advertised in Vogue or Elle. Only American women would do that to themselves. The dresses are age appropriate with the young women in skirts that would be considered belts in any other country; middle aged women in smartly tailored day wear of luscious fabric; old women in enough suede and leather to have their own bar in the Castro.
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I won’t even mention the men—the men who dress so gorgeously, who are unafraid of color and style; men who actually accessorize. The men who sweep their long hair back from massive foreheads of gleaming, perfect skin. The men who wear scarves wrapped around their necks and smoke Gauloises. The men who, in the United States, would be beaten and left for dead on the street with ‘fag’ spray-painted on their heads. The men who stop mid-day to sip an espresso from a dainty white cup that clinks so charmingly when returned to its matching saucer on the zinc top of a high, round café table under an awning on the sidewalk; these men who smile and say hello and call a woman ‘madam.’
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I loved Paris every moment.

National Night Out in West Oakland

Under the relentlessly streaming axis of the I-980 and HWY 24 freeways in an industrial wasteland marked by abandoned cars, hobo camps, and a CalTrans staging lot where Castro intersects with 7th is a small triangular plot of land that is maybe a thousand square feet. The tip of the wedge points west to San Francisco. Its broad base rests against West Oakland, a neighborhood that enjoys an international reputation for senseless murders and random violence. The sidewalks are impassable—overgrown with weeds and strewn with windblown trash. Discarded veins of electrical tubing stripped of copper by thieves who sell it on the black market knot the mess together.
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On the evening of August 2, 2011—National Night Out—my neighbors and I met there to cook hotdogs, drink beers and listen to exquisite live music supplied by local bands. Those who brought their own instruments joined in as their muse dictated. About a year ago, Garden Hortica transformed this vacant, filthy lot into a multi-use urban garden and community gathering space with astonishing success.
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NNO, National Night Out, is the night Americans are encouraged to meet their neighbors and build community by talking and eating with each other, I could think of no better place to be. Young people not that far from their college graduation day, eternal hippies, and children mingled with people like me who have left the ‘old country’ of youth and latched onto a scene that reminds them of early passions for art, music, spontaneity, and the hip crowds that tune in to these things and the long-time residents who could never afford to leave their dilapidated or public housing no matter what was going on around them.
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Often, on evenings when the moon is a bright fingernail in the pale blue western sky and the back bay shines with the last of the mid-summer night’s dreamy sunlight, magic blesses my neighborhood with Shakespearian charm. Young families with children whose feet struck straight out from the chairs they sat in, ate weenies and chips or the better fare of the big, red tandoori truck that came and stayed. People opened wine and then left the bottles on the community table for others to enjoy. Some of the older women came out of their projects apartments bearing platters of cupcakes.
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We all enjoyed the small but elegant stage where a blues band comprised of a Chinese American on lead guitar, a Latino on ukulele, an African American on trumpet, and a Vietnamese guy on base belted out the American songbook to brilliant effect. Impromptu drummers sat close to the stage and pounded out irresistible rhythms as evening settled on our lot and the moon rose with the scent of chicken cooking in the tandoori oven.
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I love my True Grit neighborhood. Contrary to what the media has conditioned you to believe about West Oakland, this is a small neighborhood populated by those who care passionately about its past, present, and future. Let New York have its Highline. This is a place with a history and a soul. And one-year-old Garden Hortica, the Little Engine That Did, beat out more than two hundred other exhibitors at the 2011 San Francisco Flower and Garden Show to win the award for outstanding visual presentation.
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The Far West

I live at the far west end of the Jack London District. Our building is isolated from residential neighborhoods by formidable barriers—the racing, dirty, fumy freeway, the Port of Oakland, BART, the estuary, San Francisco Bay, and the western terminus of the Southern Pacific Rail Road. Look south and see one of the largest rail yards in North America and the fourth largest container port in North America. Look north to where the shadow of the freeway above us divides us psychologically at ground level. To the west is the silvery Bay Bridge skipping toward San Francisco off Treasure Island (Treasure Island!). And to the east the airport, rail lines, and warehouses of haute industrial Oakland.
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Amtrak keeps a huge yard as our neighbor on Third. Seventh recalls an early day when the factories weren’t quite so huge and this stretch of Oakland was called the Harlem of the west. But much of Seventh is boarded up now and even Esther’s Orbit Room, that landmark club, is empty, its awning falling to tatters, a starburst hole where a rock hit the sign.
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We are like an outpost of civilization here; my building some urban iteration of The Swiss Family Robinson. We are the only residence in the sprawl left behind when the freeway, the Post Office, and BART sewed this formerly vibrant neighborhood into a pocket. We sit like a fort out on the prairie in the mid-1800s when Custer and similar generals waited weeks for supplies and munitions.
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Thus we are alone and turn to each other for companionship and neighborly ways. The trouble is, the people I live with here are exactly the kind of people my mother would not let me play with as a child or go out with as a teen. They drink, smoke, stay up late, scream, drive fast cars, wear short shorts, you name it. We were made for each other and know it.

Summer Heat

I knew this party was going to cook when we found the place by homing in on a half dozen search lights carving circles in the night sky above the Mojave Desert. We were welcomed by members of the L.A. SWAT team who frisked us before we entered the compound. Let me translate that for those of you who don’t speak Palm Springs: out-of-work actors from L.A. in rented costumes with ‘L.A. SWAT’ emblazoned across the shoulders felt every one up before letting us in. You had to be there—it was fun. The drag queen signing people in at the door of this mid-century modern bungalow wrote ‘Fill’ on my friend Phil’s name tag. I began to get my groove on.
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The living room was hot despite retractable glass walls that eliminated the barrier between outside and in. The desert can reach 120 degrees by noon in late June. The night takes forever to cool down. A full movie screen had been put up behind the pool. Its loop showed Edie Sedgwick, young, wearing a striped French boatneck jersey, her innocent eyes darkened with kohl. She is in her twenties, a child woman, tragic, unaware the she would soon be dead. This alternated with Carmen Miranda in a sarong singing seductively about a heat wave in the tropics.
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The backyard was generous by Palm Springs standards. The pool was large enough that a few laps every morning would make you muscled and toned. The lawn at either end held a bar tent and, to the east, café tables and chairs, and, to the west, a samba band and large dance floor set out over the lawn. Just beyond the fence, a compressor pumped cool air into the yard through a hundred yards of 12” tubing. The noise from everything was deafening. The damp heat of sweating bodies was over powering. Jean and I hit the bar and then the dance floor.
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The moon was up and the heat held—over one hundred degrees as grills flared at either end of the pool and the air conditioner attempted to wrangle the fiery air to cool. We were treated to constant stimulation. Our host doubled down every hour or so, kicking the gig up a notch—or two, as when I saw a quick glimpse of glitter and skin through the garage window where Carnivale dancers, imported from Brazil, in full costume of feathered headdress reaching four feet into the stratosphere, waited in flesh-revealing bodices of lace and sequins.
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They formed a dance line that snaked out into the crowd and brought people back to the dance floor with renewed mojo and abandon. We’d sweat out all of our booze and needed more. Our host, wealthy and socially connected to Hollywood and the old guard southern California Republican party is an A-list Palm Springs fag, the first in the Coachella valley to collect Jeff Koons. Drop a name, he was just there for dinner or had coffee with them that very morning. He married his first fortune, his second comes from selling prune juice disguised as a diet plan. He is making a killing.

Spring

The air was sweet today. It was so amazing and wonderful. We live wedged between the maze where two major Interstate highways intersect, the BART lines, the Port of Oakland, and the Southern Pacific and Union Railroads. A robust schedule of flights out of Oakland International zooms overhead. Amtrak rattles along.
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But today the air was sweet enough that we could smell Spring riding on the breeze blowing into the loft. The trees are in bloom and their scent mingles with the deep hemp, raggedy raw smell of field grass and weeds, mostly thistles, grown knee high already in abandoned lots. It smells like brewing only greener, brighter. It is one of the many things I love about living in the city.