Shumba Marimba

Last night Real Change was among the honorees at a dinner put on by Washington State Jobs with Justice, so we got a table up front. The program included amazing performances by Shumba Youth Marimba Ensemble. This is one of those. You can see our director Tim Harris to my right. He has more to say about the event at his blog.

Greg Nickels Is A Fool

The events of the eviction of Nickelsville from alleged city land yesterday felt a little like a Beethoven sonata to me: attack, release, attack, release. Except with a background drone. My description of it for YouTube users is intended to get the idea across to non-Seattleites:

Sept. 26, 2008. Nickelsville, a tent city with ambitions to become a shantytown for the homeless in Seattle. After three and a half days of existence, Greg Nickels, our mayor who hates the homeless, whom Nickelsville is named for, as a dishonor, orders Seattle police to evict the occupants and demolish the camp. The police don't want to do it. They tell the people privately that they know that the mayor is a liar and that there is not enough shelter to house them. They will have no choice but to find yet another place to camp. But orders are orders. In every scene the sound of news and police helicopters overhead nearly drowns out the human voices, but hopefully the sense of the hour is conveyed.

Eviction at Nickelsville

Artis

I completely forgot about this year's Pike Place Market Buskers' Festival. The man I count on to remind me that it's coming up is Artis, AKA Artis The Spoonman, fellow editorial committee member at Real Change. But Artis has been busy with a move recently, so he hasn't been around to give me the expected heads up.

But fate brought me to the Market anyway. I go there once every 3 months just to load up on El Yucateco Mayan XXXTRA Hot Sauce Salsa Kutbil-ik de Chile Habañero. Three 4 ounce bottles last me that long, if supplemented and extended by 6 ounces of 90,000 Scoville Unit Cayenne pepper. The only store I know in Seattle that sells the Mayan sauce consistently is off Post Alley in the Market.

I get the hot sauce, I walk out into Post Alley, and there's Artis, doing the next to the last set in the Alley as part of the festival.

Noise at City Hall

Women in Black usually do silent vigils when homeless people die outside or by violence. Today they made noise by banging pots and pans around City Hall, with help from WHEEL and the Church of Mary Magdalene and others. I was there, living out my dream of some day participating in a Chinese funeral procession.

The purpose of the rally was to speak out about the extreme need for the planned Summer Emergency Shelter for Women. With only $9,500 of city funding it could be open by the beginning of next week.

After marching around City Hall 4 or 5 times with the sun beating straight down, all collected in front of the building, and I got the camera out.

Noise at City Hall

Peeve: "Poor Have Too Much"

When I talk to middle-class people, sometimes I hear complaints like, "It isn't fair that poor unemployed people don't pay income taxes." Or, "Gee, it must be sweet to never have to pay a mortgage, rent, or house payments. I wish I had it so easy."

They really get worked up when they find out that some poor and homeless individuals have had good fortune. When a homeless guy wins the lottery, I have heard housed people bitch, "It isn't right, that they win big while I have to work for a living," even as they're putting a dollar of their own down for a shot at the same good luck.

It would totally suck that poor people have the occasional good fortune if their lives were a bed of clover aside from it.

A case of misplaced poverty envy occurs every year when the Seattle Seafair Torchlight Parade goes past Anitra's room, and we open the blinds and watch it from the comfort of bed. The other parade observers outside on the street often make comments to the effect that we have it too good. Ha! One evening a year, maybe!

So many poor people live in Pioneer Square because decades ago Seattle made the decision to sweep all of its poor into this neighborhood and forget about them. That it was discovered to have historic charm and turned upscale around me is not my fault. That they route the parade past our bed is not our fault.

Once the parade started people turned and watched the parade instead of us, and I took some videos.

This first video is ironic, in that the sirens heard at the beginning are just a reminder of the sirens we hear every 20 minutes on average all year round, 24-7. So we're supposed to regard all those sirens at once as a treat?

Hot Cycles



Anitra says a bad word. I respond by bad-mouthing clowns and poking fun at the lederhosen-ed. Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I clown in print and I'm part German myself. So ease up.

Color Commentary



The ability to live in a neighborhood where dragons may often be sighted is also a benefit of living in the Iron Triangle.

Torchlight Dragon

Wenches Are Good

The light is poor in some of this, but I think it still has interest as a documentation of 1) The Seafair Pirates admit wenches now (hooray!), and 2) I almost get shot in the face.

Seafair Wenches

Lions & Filipinos

More from Sunday's Chinatown Parade. The video starts with Chinese lion dancers. Unfortunately I was caught with low batteries. So no zoom. That problem was corrected by the time the Filipino cane marchers showed up. I was in heaven.

Chinatown Parade

Dragon Team

There's nothing like a Chinese Dragon. I've wanted to film a Chinese dragon team for ages. I love the pass-off, when the half of the team animating the dragon is replaced by the half that has been resting. The dragon itself never tires. I managed to get two pass-offs on this video, filmed last evening during the Chinatown Seafair Parade.

Picnic

RCOP, the Real Change Organizing Project, had a picnic yesterday evening at Seattle's Gas Works Park, and I had to experiment with the new used camera. One thing I learned in the experiment is that it's really hard to video people playing badmitton. Where do you point the camera? Do you follow the shuttlecock and see the background blur half the time? Or do you stay on the participants and get to watch them watch the shuttlecock outside the screen?

Anyway, the result also incorporates about 11 stills from the event, including a couple of shots at the end showing off the park itself, and a little bit of Royal Fireworks Music, used out of sequence.

RCOP Picnic

Homeless in Seattle & Noa Noa

Last night I slept again in a tent on City Hall Plaza in protest of the inhumane sweeps of homeless encampments on public land. The lives of homeless people are endangered by the destruction of their survival gear, done in the name of "public safety" and "hygiene." This morning that protest was followed by a civil disobedience. Fifteen of the protestors obstructed a downtown street in Seattle, a street that just happens to lie precisely between the offices of the mayor and the county executive.

First, there was a memorial service conducted by Women In Black of Seattle. They read the names of 283 people who died on the streets in King County from 2000 to date.

Homeless remembrance Service, Seattle



In the Polynesian traditions a law (taboo) can be broken only if rituals are carefully followed. It's called Noa Noa in some places. Sometimes translated as Freeing, or Release, or, Declaration of Freeing. The rituals demand a statement of purpose, and the invocation of the god governing the taboo, petitioning for release from it. That's exactly what you see in the next video, plus initial arrests.

Stand Against the Sweeps



The rest of the arrests, including a scene in which Anitra, my woman, appearing in the role of a hooded gang banger, is processed for arrest outside of an SPD bus, while I explain to someone that her being arrested and me filming is all part of the plan. "Division of labor" as I call it. Her arrest was well planned by the Real Change Organizing Project, and was joined by participants from SHARE/WHEEL, Women in Black, and members of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, and others.

The Usual Suspects

More Rythms of India

Four men with the same group we saw in Bhangra in Seattle. This is the last video I have from this year's Folklife Festival. It ends abruptly as the camera ran out of memory. But I think it's a keeper anyway.

Rhythms of India, Fragment

What's This?

According to the program the second group performing at the Bhangra and Bollywood Show at Folklife this year was Taal. Taal is the generic term for the rhythms of classical Indian music, or rhythms period, or the name of a famous Indian movie that Roger Ebert gave excess thumbs up. The announcer told us it was not the name of this group. He said the correct name was something that sounded to me like Chunny Chunny. I have looked up everything I could think of that could be a spelling of a word sounding like chunny to me, and have not found these people. Hopefully I will get an answer to who they are soon, on YouTube.

Until then, here is an amazing performance of Indian dance by a group of young ladies of indeterminate ages.

Nalini at Folklife

I just discovered that I accidentally deleted all the videos I made of the Flamenco performances at Folklife Sunday. Rats. Well, there's always next year.

The good news: I still have 24 minutes of Bhangra and Bollywood dance to upload. Here's Nalini again, on the International Dance Stage, Folklife, May 25, 2008.

Nalini at Folklife

Bhangra in Seattle

Yesterday I got to see Bhangra live for the first time, courtesy of Rhythms of India and others performing at the Northwest Folklife Festival here in Seattle. I have to say, I really enjoy the challenge of filming this sort of thing. Trying to decide where to point the camera and how much to take in at every moment is a weird, geeky, rush. My favorite moments in this occur when the dancers at one side of the stage cross over to the dancers at the other side and I succeed in following one set through the cross-over. That is so cool.

Rhythms of India

Hippy Dancing

While I was at the Real Change Organizing Project retreat, someone (the director) put some music on that sounded sort of, remotely, hippyish. So I began dancing in the hippy-appropriate fashion. I was astonished to find that almost none of the other participants knew what I was doing. They had never seen hippy dancing before. It occurred to me and Anitra that countless others around the world within the reach of the Blogger blogcast may also not know what hippy dancing is. So we decided that at this year's Union Valentine's Day Party we would do us some educating.

Before you view these I'll tell you the main rule about hippy dancing. The rule is, whether you're stoned or not, you dance like you are. Therefore, you dance to the cosmic beat, not the beat of the music. When the music is over, you keep dancing for at least five minutes or until the drugs wear off, whichever takes longer.

Anitra Demonstrates



My turn.



Anitra again, this time, with a prop.

NASNA 2007 Conference

Last weekend there was a NASNA (North American Street Newspaper Association) conference right down there in Portland, less than two hundred miles away! So Real Change sent a bigger than usual contingent to it. We had two vendors, a director, a reporter, an intern, a consultant, the unclassifiable Anitra Freeman, and the overly-classifiable me.

Bad lighting and a shortage of time and free hands prevented me from taking more than a few minutes of video. I broke the camera out first at Saturday's lunch in Portland State U's Farmer's Market. There was a shot of a Buddha, followed by me tracking down the sound of a jug band. It turned out to be the Sassparilla Jug Band, specializing in "Dust Bowl Folk".

Sassparilla



Paula (to our left) and Anitra, rise to the challenge to become impromptu music video babes backing up the Sasparilla Jug Band. I display a low threshold for repetition toward the end, but I'm only just joking around.

Video Girls



Later than day I wanted video proof that the 2007 North American Street Newspaper Association conference was not all Farmer's Market food, jug bands and music video babes. There were serious workshops, too. Here, we see two brief clips of director Tim Harris of Seattle's Real Change newspaper leading a workshop on vendor issues, intercut with a typical surreal conversation between me (holding the camera) and Robert Hansen, Real Change vendor #1188.

Anitra wants all to know that Robert and I just clown around like this all the time and it's all in fun. I want everybody to know that if you couldn't figure that out yourself you probably can't figure out whether your socks go on the inside or the outside of your shoes without tossing a coin. So half the time we know who you are.



Tim mentioned the Real Change Wiki. It's here.

More Shahrazad at Folklife

I had this all ready to upload yesterday, then accidentally deleted it. Fortunately I hadn't cleared the camera yet. You can hear both Anitra and me on this one. I'm the guy saying, "Oh man... I gotta get them all in this. Somehow." She's the one at the end hollering "yahoo."

Belly Dancing at Folklife

I got two pieces by Gypsy Caravan Dance Company (music by Mizna). Unfortunately the sound is worse than usual for the second. Not my fault! Stupid speakers.



The program had "Rags Serpentine -- Modern Dance Meets Bellydance" for the next one.



Nashita does Tribal Fusion Bellydance:



This next is the Shahrazad Middle Eastern Dance Ensemble.



The show ended with performances by Zaphara's Middle Eastern Dancers, Egyptian Cabaret Bellydancing. Here's one I got before my cheap camera told me it was full.

More Extra Te Fare

The last two dances of Te Fare O Tamatoa recall precolonial dances.

More Te Fare

Three more videos of Te Fare O Tamatoa, from Seattle Folklife, Memorial Day, May 28, 2007. First is one with the ladies in patterned blue gowns. Blue is alright. I don't care for green, but I can live with blue.



Next, drums, by teachers and students.



Third, the ladies are back in red skirts. Red is my favorite. I was taught by Lani and Lono that red was the first color, all the other came from red, that red was the most sacred color, because it's the color of a human soul.