Tag Archives: protest

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

For Hoodies Up!, a “Seattle Seven” of Trayvon Martin Stories

Back in March Seattle actor, producer, and all-around man of the theatre Tyrone Brown noticed that his mother, Beverly, was calling more often. In fact, she called him every evening just to make sure he made it home safely. Tyrone is 41 and has been getting himself home safely for some time now.

What had changed was the killing of Trayvon Martin, which highlighted the dangers of being a young black man in American today. “It didn’t dawn on me until I realized she was really scared for her son,” Brown said in a recent email.

That realization combined with a conversation Brown had with his sister about her sense of powerlessness in the face the shooting inspired him to do something about these conditions. “Both those events spurred me to quickly write an email (before I talked myself out of it) to the playwrights I knew and get the ball rolling,” Brown said.

The collection of theatrical shorts resulting from that impulsive email blast can be seen for one night only at Rainier Valley Cultural Center (Friday, May 18, at 7:30 p.m.; tickets $5-$20).

Hoodies Up!: The Trayvon Martin Protest Plays is an awareness and fundraising event that promises to delve into questions of race and perception with a series of short plays inspired by the Trayvon Martin case. Each play features a character wearing the sweatshirt that has come to symbolize racial profiling. Proceeds will be donated directly to the Trayvon Martin Foundation.

Brown notes that in addition to fundraising in Martin’s memory, “Hoodies Up! also has an ‘awareness’ where we will focus on the Second Chance (On Shoot First) campaign and voter registration.” This piece of the event directly addresses the concerns that initiated this project. Brown hopes that “people will leave the evening feeling a little empowered and hopeful.”

Paul Mullin, one of seven playwrights who will be featured in Friday night’s show, provided some insight to his approach. “It is less about talking about the event itself,” he said, “and more about the bigger issues and questions the event unearthed.”

Mullin believes that theatre is an important tool to help society to cope with injustice. “The justice system doesn’t help communities process pain and anger and disillusionment. They simply determine guilt or innocence in a rigidly structured narrowly scoped framework.” He sees theatre and other arts as addressing the emotional side of justice. “Without artists working through these issues a lot of hearts get left out in the cold,” he said.

The evening’s line-up will include We Have So Much To Learn by Kathya Alexander,
 Bottom Line by José Amador, Is This The Day, Walking While Black? by Najee Sui-Chang, Trees In The Window by Lois Mackey, White Boy Can Take A Punch by Paul Mullin, An/Other by Nick Stokes, and End Of The Rainbow by Sharon N. Williams.

More than a dozen actors designers and community members are involved in the production including directors José Amador, Maggie Holmes, Pearl Klein, Danny Long, and Andy Jensen. As of Tuesday morning, tickets were still available.

News, Politics

SPD Provides Pepper Spray Boost to Occupy Seattle’s Popularity

Previously, if you searched on “seattle” and “pepper spray” you just got this Yelp thread about where a good place to buy pepper spray might be. And a poll taken November 10 through 13 showed public support for Occupy Wall Street-style protests dropping: “33 percent voiced support for Occupy Wall Street, down from 35 percent in a previous poll.”

But as of this morning, Seattle’s police department has made an 84-year-old woman into the chemical-irritant-caked face of the movement. Occupy Seattle actually would like you to know others pepper-sprayed included “a priest and a pregnant woman who as of this writing is still in the hospital.”

Still, it’s activist Dorli Rainey who has netted the AP interview dedicated to her hosing with law and order:

Rainey is a former school teacher who is well known in local political circles. A self-described “old lady in combat boots,” she briefly entered the 2009 Seattle mayoral race. She quit that contest, saying she was too old.

She said Wednesday she’ll still be taking part in the local Occupy Seattle movement.

“I’m pretty tough, I guess.”

The police department’s vigorous response to the protesters occupying a downtown intersection comes in contrast to other news out of City Hall, where the Seattle City Council unanimously approved Resolution 31337 “committing to a number of actions in response to the Occupy movement.”

Councilmember Nick Licata was quoted as saying, “I am pleased to work with my colleagues on a comprehensive approach for Seattle that can also provide a template for other cities to adopt as we all struggle with how to best respond to the Occupy Movement. The Occupy message is one of a broken economy due to a growing disparity in this country’s wealth, and we can at the very least review the City’s banking and investment practices to ensure that public funds are invested in responsible financial institutions that support our community.”

UPDATE: Mayor McGinn released a statement this afternoon, saying in part:

To those engaged in peaceful protest, I am sorry that you were pepper sprayed. I spoke to Dorli Rainey (who I know personally) to ask how she was doing, and to ask for her description of events.

I also called in Seattle Police Chief John Diaz and the command staff to review the actions of last night. They agreed that this was not their preferred outcome. Here are the steps we are taking in response, to achieve a better outcome next time:

  • Reviewing with our officers the deployment of pepper spray last night
  • Developing a procedure to ensure appropriate commanders are on the ground at these kinds of events.
  • Making sure that we have appropriate levels of police resources at protest events.

Elsewhere, Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha was quoted as saying: “This poem is dedicated to the Occupy movement whose courage is changing the world. Stay Strong. We are winning.”

The beginning spills through city veins
Into the arteries
And under powers poison clouds
We move like the shadows
Through the alley ways
Through nightmares bought and sold as dreams
Through barren factories
Through boarded schools
Through rotting fields
Through the burning doors of the past
Through imaginations exploding
To break the curfews in our minds

Our actions awaken dreams of actions multiplied
A restless fury
Once buried like burning embers
Left alone to smolder
But together stacked under the walls of a dying order
All sparks are counted
Calloused hands raised in silence
Over the bonfire of hope unincorporated
It’s flame restores tomorrows meaning
Across the graveyards of hollow promises
As gold dipped vultures pick at what is left of our denial

And the youngest among us
Stare at us stoned like eyes determined
And say
Death for us may come early
Cause dignity has no price
At the corner of now and nowhere
Anywhere
Everywhere
Tomorrow is calling
Tomorrow is calling

Do not be afraid

Arts & Entertainment, Literature

Joshua Mohr’s Damascus and Keeping on the Sordid Side of Life

Novelist Joshua Mohr talks with novelist Jonathan Evison at the University Book Store, on November 17, at 7 p.m.

Joshua Mohr

Joshua Mohr is sort of a handful. His debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, has the title of a poetry chapbook, and the soul of one as well, though on the spectrum it’s more Bukowski than Wordsworth, as the the blurb from O, The Oprah Magazine, clarifies.

It’s hugely ambitious, in that Mohr wants to tell the story from the point of view of someone with dissociative identity disorder, and you probably do not want to listen to this person tell you about what exactly happened in their childhood. It’s against your better judgment that you keep turning pages, even as “Rhonda” makes staggeringly poor life choices.

Mohr writes out the sordid heart of San Francisco–specifically, the Mission District–and if you’ve spent much time by the Bay, you’ll recognize that unsettling warm-sewer-whiff-in-the-street urbanity that permeates his books. It’s a radical empathy with, or even in preference for, the stinky side of life that, mostly unseen, underlies everything.

In Damascus, Mohr returns you to a down-and-outer Mission bar with the shards of twenty mirrors glued to its painted-black ceiling, “transforming Damascus into a planetarium for drunkards: dejected men and women stargazing from barstools.” In the first two pages you meet Owen, the bar’s owner, who has a Hitler-‘stache birthmark beneath his nose; Shambles, the patron saint of handjobs; and No Eyebrows, a middle-aged man dying of cancer and on the run from responsibility of any kind.

So far, so San Francisco. You simply have to make your peace with the fact that San Francisco’s human flotsam and jetsam (Rhonda makes a cameo appearance) is of a more captivating sort than many places–and with Mohr’s penchant for mixing ripped-from-the-journal reportage with prose poetry:

And other things were happening in the world, of course. Because there always are. There has to be. A couple who’d tried to conceive a child for years finally succeeded. A son estranged from his mother for almost twenty years picked up the phone and called and apologized for his role in their corrupted history. A seventeen-year-old girl’s cancer when into remission. Separated spouses decided to keep struggling through their knot of marital woes. A sunflower bloomed in Fargo, North Dakota. It rained in Orlando, Florida.

The book is bipolar, in that partly it tracks the unlikely, hermetic romance between no-strings Shambles and no-hope No Eyebrows, and partly it observes how the Iraq War intrudes into the  Mission District of 2003–a performance art installation meant to honor dead soldiers (but featuring dead fish) attracts a more muscular critique than anticipated.

“Screw the critics,” Revv said, pushing the beers across the bar to them, then coming back around and planting himself. “You made real deal art so don’t worry whether any academic dimwits get it or not. Let them snicker at cartoons in The New Yorker. The joke’s on them.”

It’s not the academic dimwits who object, though, but returned-from-Iraq soldiers, hypersensitive to civilian slights to their honor. It doesn’t seem like it can end well, yet, again, you keep turning pages.

Mohr’s writing is appealing because it is raw and unfiltered, overheard on the street or from the next bar stool, but it can also seem merely unvarnished, with its joints showing. I’m of two minds about that artlessness, but there’s no denying the effect, that it conjures a reality that stains you with the underarm sweat of the Mission, and the naivete of 2003, when no one would have believed eight more years of war were in store.

News, Politics

Occupy Seattle, the Protest Music Video

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YouTube is not short on footage of the ongoing Occupy Seattle protests, which has, to those observing from a distance, become bogged down in a wonderfully Seattle way in argument over the process of protest. You can read all about it on the Slog, whose writers have taken up alternately cheering and deriding the protest.

Confronted by a mayor who welcomed them to City Hall, the protesters have had to weigh the significance of their presence in Westlake Park, even though nothing of any significance has ever and will ever happen in Westlake Park. Even when the protesters bring traffic on Pine to a standstill, they’ve simply managed to revert the park to its ’90s-era pedestrian-only self.

There is also the knotty issue of putting up tents as an act of civil disobedience–again, playing right into the city’s hands.

Still, this feels like a moment with import, just as the Tea Party’s early “days of racist rage” did. That’s not to assert some kind of equivalence, just to note that you don’t have to be coherent or plausible to have a political impact. It’s not necessary, as protesters, to have a 100-point plan or unified leadership.

You just need to be willing to gum up the works while hoping yours is a righteous cause that will draw support. In a democracy, sheer numbers often reframe the debate better than reframing the debate. All Occupy Seattle needs is a few nice days, a band to headline an impromptu concert, and some stiltwalkers.

News, Politics

Hordes of Journalists Occupy Westlake Park, Disrupting “Occupy Seattle” Protesters

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Follow the story of Seattle’s ragtag band of #occupyseattle protesters on Twitter. They’re back this morning, after Seattle police gave the protesters a little taste of what it’s like to be homeless–by forcibly removing their tents from Westlake Park. I suppose that’s to be expected: When you declare solidarity with the poor, you get treated like them. Since there’s nothing worse than holding a protest that no one notices, the police action most likely did the protesters a big favor. Occupy Seattle the Twitter account says that hearings for those arrested yesterday begin at 10 a.m. at the King County Courthouse.