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KUWK: Episode 2, Pungmul

Photo Description: Ieumsae, a group of Korean pungmul players, smile upward towards the camera. They surround a table with festive items on it at Mosswood Park in North Oakland, where they practice pungmul.

For the past year, I have played pungmul, folk-style Korean drumming, with a group of mostly queer and trans radical Koreans called ieumsae. We practice on Sundays, which kind of feels like going to church. Unless it is too cold or rainy, we practice together under the sun in North Oakland’s Mosswood park. Outside of weekly practice we only perform at events oriented to communities of color such as protests, weddings, and other celebrations. Actually we don’t really ‘perform’ –pungmul has deep roots in political resistance and is more community action than performance. Before the Korean War, Korean farmers would play pungmul to unify people against the Japanese colonizers who were in process of  stealing their land. In the legacy of those  Korean farmers who used their drums for direct action, ieumsae uses our drums to fight for the people here in Oakland.

Photo Description: Nori’s drum is being strapped onto her by Caro. Both pungmul players wear traditional Korean costume called minbok. They are standing in a field with a tent structure and tree in the background.

When we come together to practice, we actively love and care for one another. We check in and share triumphs and challenges. We share food. Before we even begin practicing the week’s gut (musical piece), we practice our hoheup (breathing), and ogeum (body alignment), which grounds us and helps us enter our bodies. The drum itself has two sides on the left and right (imagine an hourglass laying on its side) and is played strapped onto the body. On the left, we use a flat wooden instrument that tapers to a point and creates a crisp “dah” tapping sound. On the right, we use a wooden instrument that resembles a drumstick with a sphere on the end and creates a deeper “gung” sound. Guts are made up of karak’s (rhythms) that include playing both sides of the drum at different paces and intensities. This gives each gut its own unique character or personality. They range from playful to exhilarating. My favorite gut is unofficially called ‘booty beat,’ notoriously known for making you move your booty. And that is the very point of pungmul to get all the people to move their booties together.

Photo Description: Nori and Hyejin stare fiercely into the camera both wearing purple shirts and headbands saying “Resist” with Korean characters.

Earlier this year, ieumsae joined forces with Third World Resistance for Black Power to protest Uber moving its  headquarters to downtown Oakland. Uber is an international, multi-billion dollar corporation whose current headquarters are in San Francisco. Their move across the Bay will likely raise perceived value and actual costs of surrounding properties and land. This furthers the displacement and violence facing  Oakland’s low income communities and historically rooted communities of color. Our protest showed me just how necessary and relevant pungmul is in the fight for justice . We led the march with a gut that mimicked an increasing heartbeat moving from Lake Merritt to Uber’s eventual new office space at 20th & Broadway. As I marched and beat my drum, I looked around at the people witnessing our disruption. Many white people had fear in their eyes and their bodies were frozen with panic. Many people of color read our signs and shouted or honked their horns in support. I thought about all the workers coming and going from their quiet office jobs in contrast with the booming, physical sound of our drums. With each beat we wake people up to the real terror that is happening in our communities. We wake up those not conscious to the rapid and pervasive gentrification that amounts to warfare, that forces people onto the street, displaces families, and divides communities. Playing pungmul together as ieumsae, we are warriors seeking to wake the unconscious and to bring power to our peope, calling everyone to the fight.

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This is how a group of [hermit] crabs performs a housing exchange …

When a crab happens upon a shell, it scopes it out – and when it is too big, the crab sits and waits, sometimes up to eight hours. More crabs show up to check out the potential new digs, and for those whom the shell is too big, they line up and wait. And get this, they line up in size order. Up to 20 crabs, lined up biggest to smallest, waiting for just-the-right–size crab to appear. And when the Goldilocks crab shows up, things get nutty. He or she sheds their shell and takes up the new one, and each crab of successive size hops out of their old shell and into the larger one ahead of it. Wow. Known as a vacancy chain, it’s a term originally used by social scientists to describe a way that people trade resources. (source: Treehugger)

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Imagine standing at a bus stop, talking to your friend and having your conversation recorded without you knowing.  It happens all the time, and the FBI doesn’t even need a warrant to do it.

Federal agents are planting microphones to secretly record conversations.

Jeff Harp, a KPIX 5 security analyst and former FBI special agent said, “They put microphones under rocks, they put microphones in trees, they plant microphones in equipment. I mean, there’s microphones that are planted in places that people don’t think about, because that’s the intent!”

FBI agents hid microphones inside light fixtures and at a bus stop outside the Oakland Courthouse without a warrant to record conversations, between March 2010 and January 2011.

Federal authorities are trying to prove real estate investors in San Mateo and Alameda counties are guilty of bid rigging and fraud and used these recordings as evidence.

Harp said, “An agent can’t just go out and grab a recording device and plant it somewhere without authorization from a supervisor or special agent in charge.”

The lawyer for one of the accused real estate investors who will ask the judge to throw out the recordings, told KPIX 5 News that, “Speaking in a public place does not mean that the individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy…private communication in a public place qualifies as a protected ‘oral communication’… and therefore may not be intercepted without judicial authorization.”

Harp says that if you’re going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your own home. He says that was the original intention of the Fourth Amendment, but it’s up to the judge to interpret it.

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Fences are going up in the Bay Area to keep people out of public space. In Berkeley, a group of protestors have been fenced out of their fight against the sale of a public building to private developers. In Oakland, older poor and black homeless people have been fenced out of the plaza they frequently inhabit. 

image 1 : Post Office // PROTEST //  Berkeley, California

Several tents and signs form an encampment on the steps of the US Post Office.The encampment was erected in 2013 to defend against the sale of a public use building to private money after the the US Postal Service stated they would sell the historic building.

image 2 : Post Office // FENCE // Berkeley, California

The encampment is gone, the protestors were forcibly evicted on April 12, 2016. An iron fence is in place around the place where the encampment and community garden once were.

image 3 : St. Andrews Plaza // PLAZA // Oakland, California

A small plaza is a triangle of space between San Pablo Ave and Filbert Street in West Oakland. A handful of black poor and homeless people are there every day, some sleep there at night.

image 4 : St. Andrews Plaza // FENCE // Oakland California

A silver chain link now fence surrounds St. Andrews Plaza, erected to keep people out while the City of Oakland redesigns the plaza. The people are gone, pushed to the sidewalks on surrounding streets.

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”The project, titled #NotABugSplat, has released a photograph, itself taken from the air with the use of a mini-helicopter drone, of a poster laid out in a field that shows the face of a girl who lost both her parents in one of the controversial strikes in the northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

“You will see how tiny people are and they look like little bugs, we wanted to highlight the distance between what a human being looks like when they are just a little dot versus a big face.

“One hope is that it will create some empathy and introspection.”

http://www.dawn.com/news/1098351

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/16nine/8415594735/sizes/h/

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Take This Hammer (1963)

KQED’s mobile film unit follows author and activist James Baldwin in the spring of 1963, as he’s driven around San Francisco to meet with members of the local African-American community. He is escorted by Youth For Service’s Executive Director Orville Luster and intent on discovering: “The real situation of Negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present.” He declares: “There is no moral distance … between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone’s got to tell it like it is. And that’s where it’s at.” Includes frank exchanges with local people on the street, meetings with community leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot from a moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and Western Addition neighborhoods. Baldwin reflects on the racial inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront and at one point tries to lift the morale of a young man by expressing his conviction that: “There will be a Negro president of this country but it will not be the country that we are sitting in now." 

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Designers Want To Put Rikers Island on the Map The guerrilla #SeeRikers campaign aims to correct a New York subway map oversight—and highlight the corrections crisis.

Know where your prisons are. 

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WE LOVE THE CITY AND WE BELIEVE IN ANARCHY

We, like most anarchists in the world live in urban areas. We call it our home and it is where we do most of our political work. Yet many anarchists tell us the city is a problem, it is part of corporate civilization and has given rise to everything we despise. Our green anarchist comrades suggest that if we were serious about anarchy we would see that cities must go (along with most of the world’s population). While it is true people can be blinded by love, we feel our affinity for the city is not blindness. When we dream, we dream of anarchy at home both in the city and in the wild. Despite where we choose to live and work, we find our passions are akin to our green brothers and sisters. Not only do we believe the city can be redeemed, we believe it might be the best hope for achieving the goals of green anarchy and healing the Earth.

Below is not simply a polemic in favor of an unsustainable urban lifestyle. We have spent years studying, thinking and working for this goal. We have read the works of many green anarchists and conversed throughout the long winter nights with travelers bringing the anti-civilization message. We have listened, we have read, we have argued but we still believe there is hope. So this is a political loveletter for the city and a promise to our comrades that our commitment to anarchy is real and our love for this planet is true. Anarchy and cities are not in conflict anymore than wildness and anarchy. This little zine is part of a larger project which in turn is part of even a greater momentum towards rethinking the urban. While it is true no leader has crystallized the different strands of these various movements, theories, communities and projects; we do believe there is a growing understanding that the urban environment can be remade along the lines of anarchy; and further, it must if we have any chance. We, raccoons, rats and feral cats, have much to share with our wild cousins. We do not shirk at the enormity of our task but celebrate its audaciousness. Others may dream of ruins but we dream of teeming lively neighborhoods.

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“Liberate Not Exterminate,” Curious George Brigade

illustrated 36 page zine in PDF format

@crimethinctank i think you might be interested in this. 

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(via One Woman's 1,000-Mile Topless Walk )

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You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city…you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn’t even know were there. Everything changes.

Samuel R. Delany (via travelforthecultures)

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musings on the architecture of Oakland City Hall : Acoustics, Police, Solid Doors + Vaulted Ceilings

I tried to get into the Oakland City Council meeting yesterday. But Police were blocking the door. I was there because of a vote that might reverse the decision to build market rate (aka luxury) housing on the E 12th St Parcel of Public Land. I waited in the atrium, flooded with light and people. Video and audio of the meeting could have been played into the atrium. It wasn't. The big doors were shut. We couldn't even see in.

Then a flood of people, (marked by their banner: Save the E12th Parcel for the People) came out of council chambers, chanting and singing. Hoping to reach through their presence and noise, I found out later, the council members that had retreated to a back room to vote. The high vaulted stone ceilings simultaneously magnified and muted their words such that they became unintelligible. It was confusing to be an outsider there, wanting to participate, but unsure of what was happening.

The council voted for the Urban Core/Market Rate housing plan 6-1. Large groups can inter-communicate through raised voices or signs. Intentionally poor acoustics and incomplete lines of sight hinder these means and seed confusion. And confusion is the most insidious antidote to organization. While violence might make people scared, injured, or dead, it also makes people angry, and angry people do things. Confused people don't know what to do.

While it was the council members that voted against more affordable housing, City Hall played its part in upholding an unequal status quo.

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“A new installation by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei makes use of thousands of life vests collected from Syrian refugees entering Europe via the Greek island of Lesbos. Unveiled on February 14, 2016, the display features over 14,000 orange vests wrapped around the pillars of Berlin’s Konzerthaus, and a lifeboat dangling in the centre of the columns that reads “#safepassage.”  The striking public demonstration aims to highlight the continued suffering of asylum seekers as they desperately try to reach safety in Europe.”

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/ai-weiwei-berlin-lifejackets-refugees

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visualization of gentrification in Boston, conducted by Governing.

Gentrifying Census Tracts: These lower-income Census tracts experienced significant growth in both home values and educational attainment. To be eligible to gentrify, a tract's median household income and median home value needed to fall within the bottom 40th percentile of all tracts within a metro area at the beginning of the decade. Tracts considered to have gentrified recorded increases in the top third percentile for both inflation-adjusted median home values and percentage of adults with bachelors’ degrees.

Tracts Not Gentrifying: These Census tracts met eligibility criteria, but did not experience enough growth in educational attainment and median home values relative to other tracts within a metro area to have gentrified.

Not Eligible Tracts: These tracts, typically middle and upper-income neighborhoods, did not meet the initial criteria for gentrification. To be eligible to gentrify, a tract's median household income and median home value both needed to be in the bottom 40th percentile of all tracts within a metro area at the start of a decade. Tracts with less than 500 residents or missing data were also considered not eligible.

Source: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/boston-gentrification-maps-demographic-data.html

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#222ForgottenCities: The Power of Melanin is on view at Betti Ono in Oakland through April 16, 2016. For more information visit bettiono.com

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Question: Why is the City of Oakland redesigning St. Andrew’s Plaza in West Oakland?

The plaza is well designed and well used due to both ample seating and good shade.

However, because the users are mostly older poor black folks, and because West Oakland is gentrifying (the plaza is within a few blocks of several new housing developments), the redesign is little more than an excuse to displace blackness and poverty from public space. If it were otherwise, the plaza could have been redesigned long ago in the interests of long term residents. 

As pictured above, police regularly raid the plaza to push the users out, but it seems the City is seeking a longer term solution. 

The Economic Development Without Displacement Coalition will be attending the “Kick-Off” meeting (which they have re-named the “Kick-Out” meeting) to stop this forced displacement. 

Find more information here:  https://www.facebook.com/events/1686264121589785/

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The Old Souk, Aleppo. Above in 2007 and below in 2013