Bright Lines and Dark Hallows: Investigating Revolutionary Localities in America
Tour Log:
Part2
Before leaving Portland Gabriel and I were sitting at my favorite taco truck – Taqueria Lindo Michocan – sharing lunch before he had to hop a plane to San Francisco for Thanksgiving. The seating area the folks from the truck have created consists of a long banquet picnic table with benches attached. A low-key Quonset hut type structure overhangs the table keeping out the elements in the winter months. Over a Barbacoa Sope that I brought Gabriel there for because I really wanted him to try it, he asked me about the trip; “what places do I find revolutionary in Portland?” He asked this almost knowingly; as if he knew that of all the places I planned on visiting Portland might be the one that was most difficult to come up with a response for. And he was right, I was stumped. Familiar spaces are crowded with our own personal histories, narratives, and associations; making us unable, or unwilling, to experience the fractured reality of where we are. There’s just too much to take in, possibly. Too many parallel historical narratives to make sense of.
This is how I felt as I arrived in San Francisco. Apart from the familiar spaces around me, there were familiar people too. People to make me feel comfortable. Something about that made me want to get out as soon as possible. That very comfortability made me feel as if I weren’t doing my job. Possibly this also had to do with how I structured my time in the city, because there was, obviously, again, so much around me at any given moment to look into.
The day after my arrival Aaron from the Center for Tactical Magic and I met up near his home in Oakland. We had planned on going out for Dim Sum before I arrived. I met him in El Cerrito and we started walking towards an Asian Mall that housed a place he liked a lot. The complex was gigantic for what it was – filled with restaurants, tea shops, video stores, a large grocery store, as well as many other smaller shops selling hello kitty dolls, and flip flops. Before we entered the building Aaron pointed out a restaurant, mentioning that he used to go there a lot on the way home from graduate school. He began to tell me a story that continued as we enter the Dim Sum place; a medium sized restaurant packed with tables, and tanks filled with lobster, king crab, and many different varieties of fish.
As the story went, each time that Aaron would go to the restaurant that he’d pointed out to me he’d be brought over to the same area to eat – a table, a little out of the way, by a large bank of windows overlooking the parking lot. One evening he arrived and the waiter started bring him over to the same familiar area. He asked to be seated elsewhere, and they gave him another seat, closer to the door. Just after his meal arrived a car slammed straight into the building, right by the bank of windows where Aaron was usually seated. A man came running up to the car, pulled out a gun, and fired, repeatedly, straight through the drivers-side window and into the driver, killing him. The shooter was an undercover cop. Apparently the driver had attempted to run him over; which still doesn’t explain the shooting much, in my mind. As this was happening all the people in the restaurant ducked under their tables. Aaron, for some reason, didn’t. Cops pulled up right away. He wanted to eat his meal that was sitting on the table in front of him. As time passed people started looking over towards Aaron – the only non-Asian person in the restaurant – with a look in their eyes that read nothing if not, “what the hells up with that crazy guy.” Feeling uncomfortable with the negative attention, Aaron half-heartedly ducked under his own table and stayed there for what seemed like the prerequestet amount of time. Listening to Aaron retell this story made me think about how unprepared we are in difficult and unfamiliar situations to think for ourselves. What struck me about that moment of the story wasn’t that Aaron didn’t go under the table at first, possibly he should have, it was the call and response that followed - the guilting of the crowd for Aaron to follow suit and “protect” himself. Not because they were concerned for him, but that his unconcern made them question their own actions. The threat of calm, thought-out indifference, made them just as uneasy as the gunfire outside. But what happens when we allow those violent moments of doubt to play themselves out with public dialogue, rather knee jerk reactions to our most apparent fears? What happens if we harness those very knee jerk tendencies and use them as tools for change?
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