“6 Feet Back From Life”:
A Homeless Man’s Photo Essays on Life During the Corona Virus
“And what did you hear, my darling young one?”
“I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall”
-Bob Dylan
When the lockdown went into effect, I was homeless in the Fairfax District. My homelessness wasn’t a temporary thing. I am career homeless. I’ve been homeless my entire adult life. It’s a lifestyle choice. That’s why I was nicknamed “Bumdog.”
Some guys were asking me once why I was homeless? “You smoke dope?” I told them no. “You drink?” “No.” “Then why you be bumming everywhere?” “Because I’m a bum.” They laughed and started calling me Bumdog. The name stuck.
I didn’t have any problems. There was a garage doorway in an alley that I slept in at night. Every morning I got up early before anyone showed up, and push my shopping cart with all my possessions in it into West Hollywood to shower at the Saban Community Clinic, then went about my business for the day. For money my hustle was to sell custom made T-shirts, or DVDs of two feature films I made while living on the streets. In the past year I had taken up photography and I would sell prints of my photographs for $10 each. It was a little change here and there that got me by.
I didn’t have many expenses, just food and coffee shop money, which is what I spent every day while I sat in Coffee Bean or Starbucks for hours, charging all my devices and editing my photos and videos.
Since I live in Los Angeles I don’t really have to worry about “weather.” The weather here rarely gets extreme and even then not for very long. Whenever its gotten bad with rain or cold, friends of mine would offer to pay for a hotel for me to stay in, but I always declined. If I couldn’t deal with the weather what was the point in being a bum? Besides in case of rain I would sleep under a building’s carport. Around 5:30 a.m. before the workers or security guards arrived, I would get up, walk a few blocks in the rain to a Starbucks or Coffee Bean and stay there until it stopped raining. Even though it was unusually rainy this year, it was all pretty manageable.
The coronavirus talk made little impact on me. It was like hearing a hurricane or snowstorm might hit Southern California. It’s not that I didn’t believe it or had any false sense of security. I simply had no consciousness of what it would mean to me. I was either gonna get sick or not get sick. Seemed as simple as that, until I learned otherwise.
The flattening of my learning curve started on March 16th when the governor and L.A. mayor announced the city and state were being locked down. It took a few days to process what a “lockdown” on a whole city meant, but when I did all of a sudden the coronavirus MEANT something to me. I could no longer go to a coffee shop to get out of the rain. In fact, I couldn’t go anywhere out of the rain. Libraries, gyms, restaurants, and community centers were all closed to the public. How was I supposed to charge my things? How was I supposed to work on my projects? How am I supposed to stay out of the rain? Rain that the forecast said was supposed to last another 10 days.
On the first day of the lockdown, I’m walking down the street and I realize: The hourly weather said there is a 100% chance of rain in a few hours. Where do I go? I can’t even buy a taco at Jack in the Box and stay there and watch the rain. People are told to stay home and not go anywhere. And if you don’t have a home, stay where you are and die. And try not to cough on anyone in the process.
I made it over to the Coffee Bean at 3rd and Fairfax. Although they didn’t allow anyone to sit inside and had removed all the chairs from the patio, there was an awning that I could stand under for want of anything better to do. As I stood there, the rain started coming down. I wasn’t getting wet but I was getting damp. I was depressed, stressed, and tired, standing there and breathing all the damp air I started feeling sick. Thinking another 10 days of this and I’ll be dead — not from the coronavirus but good, old-fashioned pneumonia.
I needed a roof over my head. I hadn’t felt like that in decades, but now I had to get a place to stay. That was the only conclusion. I called up a friend who had offered to put me up in times of need, which I had always declined, and he got me a room in a nearby hotel for a week.
That gave me time to acclimate myself to the situation and access my options: I couldn’t stay in the hotel. It was too expensive. I was eventually going back out on the streets, there was no escaping that. One thing I kept reading online was that even newspapers were telling their reporters and photographers to stay home. But they still had a lot of photos of the homeless. If they didn’t want to risk the lives of their valuable employees to take the photos, how about risking the life of someone completely valueless to them? Me.
I could take photos of the streets from a homeless person’s perspective (although to be honest many of the articles I read, especially in the LA Times are pretty accurate descriptions of homelessness, albeit from the outside in). I contacted a few news outlets but the only one that returned my email was the LAist.com. They wrote back and gave me the green-light.
After 12 days in the hotel, I had finally adjusted to this brave new world, but not just as a bum, but as “BUMDOG: PHOTOJOURNALIST”
I was pushing my shopping cart through the alley when I saw these two girls talking to each other with masks on and from a safe distance. I was struck still by what a good photo it would make. In fact I just stood there staring at them framing the shot in my mind. The girls glanced at me carelessly and went back to their gossiping. The typical response of young attractive women when being leered at by an old homeless man in an alley. I finally took out my camera and said I was a photographer and would like to take a photo of them. Although they didn’t hid their pronounced uninterest, they said “fine, just stay back 6 feet”, and then resumed their conversation as I shot them.
Derick sitting in front of Coffee Bean with Julio in the background on his computer. This picture encapsulates what the lockdown means to the homeless. We aren’t locked down, we are locked OUT: OUT of libraries, McDonald’s , Starbucks, community centers, gyms, you name it. There is no where even to SIT anymore, which is why Derick brings with him his own chair. Both are OUTside of Coffee Bean where we all use to hang out, charging our stuff and using the internet. Now we have to find one place to hang out…then another place where we can charge our stuff…then ANOTHER place to get any internet. Coffee Bean still has its internet on so if we need it we all just stand (unless we carry our chair around with us like Derick) in front of the shop until we get too tired or our phone/tablet/computer’s battery dies. Julio is in special need of internet as he is a writer who makes money with his self published horror novels on Amazon.
The only bathrooms that are open that I know of are the ones in Pan Pacific Park and The La Brea Tar Pits. Although there are several bathrooms in each, technically that means there are only 2 public bathrooms spots within a 5 mile radius.
And thats not just for the homeless, thats for everyone. More and more Im seeing people get out of their cars in alleys and piss behind a trash can or their car doors. Come this summer these streets are gonna to get rank.
Kristen also believes she caught the Corona Virus at the same time D-rock had it. But her’s only lasted a couple of days then she was alright.
The squat that they live in will be demolished in a few months. They have been on the waiting list for an apartment for several years. They hope that with the crisis, the process will be speeded up and that they get an apartment in time before they must leave.
She is hoping to get a hotel room through Project Room-key, until her Section 8 comes through.
As I try to write about this “new normal” we are living in, I realize it’s hard to remember what the thinking process was like in the old normal, even though it was just a few months ago. While it seems people are getting used to the situation, the human mind looks for a certain predictable stability in which to center itself. But the biggest part of our current situation is the total disorientation. There is nothing you can hold onto as being true.
In the beginning, one of the world’s most renowned respected scientists described how dire the crisis was, and how it could worsen. Then another equally respected scientist said how quickly it was going to pass. Then another scientist presented solid empirical evidence that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, and then quickly after ANOTHER RESPECTED scientist provided equally solid proof that it was worse than what we were seeing.
And that was just the beginning! The opinions rapidly multiplied with everyday that passed, and with every person you had a conversation with. Before the opposing thoughts would be between groups of people. But now it was between each and every individual, in each and every group. “Disintegration far outpacing integration.”
This increasingly fragmentation of the American mind, if it doesn’t stop (and there’s no sign that it will stop, but that this is just the beginning) is showing a clear path to collective schizophrenia. That’s not hyperbole; I know what schizophrenia looks like. Living on the streets for decades I’ve seen people who were fairly cognitive, who over various amounts of time slowly (and quickly) become insane right in front of me. I know the signs of inevitable insanity. And this America, is it.
One of the first signs of this slide into dementia is the questioning of the reality that is presented to you. This is always a very healthy beginning, but the road ahead is divided down the middle by a thin line between enlightenment and the hyper-awareness of paranoia. If you have the mental capacity to stay in the state of questioning reality of ”I know, I know nothing”, that state which no words can describe, then you’re alright.
However the “mystic swims in what the neurotic drowns in”, and a drowning man will grab onto any sword offered to him. The paranoid are those who grab on to any “sword of truth” because they can’t deal with the descending into the abyss that would mean their own psychological oblivion. That’s why presenting them with facts is useless, because it’s not actually the facts that are important or even relevant to them by this stage, it’s mental survival. To this end the paranoiac will bitterly and violently insist that they are not insane but aware. While the truly enlightened don’t care if they are insane.
Meanwhile back in the United States it’s just starting: It’s not just that no one knows, it’s that no one trusts anyone who may know. This is the first time in my lifetime when there has been no general consensus of what people agree on. Before, even if you didn’t agree with the general consensus, or were rebelling against it, at least you knew what you were disagreeing with, and rebelling against. Now even in negation, there are no coordinates by which you can orient yourself.
Flight pilots call this phenomenon “Spatial Disorientation.” I was at a lecture years ago when I first heard the concept described by a speaker:
If you’ve ever flown as a pilot across the ocean, you would know how easily it is to become spatially disoriented. The blue ocean and the blue sky are often indistinguishable from each other. Some pilots look out and think, “I’m flying upside down!” But when they look at the console, all their navigational instruments are telling them that they are indeed flying right side up. But when they look out in front of them they say to themselves, “I’m flying upside down!” This is when some of them trust what they are seeing more than their instruments, and turn themselves around and crash right into the sea.
As a result in flight training they drill into you the importance of trusting your instruments, and not do a Luke Skywalker and “trust the force.”
Personal principles are like your navigation instruments, they tell you exactly where you are in life when nothing else does. Sometimes you don’t know what is happening; you have no real idea what to do, you are just reacting to what you think you see happening in your immediate environment. That’s when you need personal principles that you can coordinate yourself with. When you become confused by circumstances around you, those principles are your compass that tell you where you are…what you should be doing…. and how to get where you want to go.
I have always considered myself to be a fairly perceptive person compared to most. I can usually feel out when someone is telling me the truth, or just saying what they want to emotionally believe, and used to dismiss paranoid people out of hand. But time has taught me the mistake of this prejudice. As the crazy conspiracy theories that I laughed at in my youth, proved to be shockingly true as the years rolled by. All those silly paranoid Twilight Zone science fiction predictions of future dystopian nightmares, of a world run by sociopaths and morons determined to destroy the planet, aren’t so funny anymore as I’m currently watching exactly those scenes now materialize with horrifying accuracy.
And when it comes to paranoid schizophrenics, I’ve come to realize that just because a person is crazy, that doesn’t mean they aren’t right. And just because they are right, THAT DOESN’T MEAN THEY’RE NOT CRAZY!
On the one hand, if I trust people I can get led down every rabbit hole there is. If I don’t trust people, I have to attack everything that moves in a constant state of defensive paranoia. Is that the sky above me? Or below me? The only thing I can rely on are my own personal principles to guide me through…through…through God only knows what the future will bring next.
One of the principles that guides me is creating. In my darkest of times it’s the only thing that gives me a sliver of space to breath. It’s both my survival instinct and my true north. Every once in a while, when I’m able to put my rather pedestrian writing and visuals skills to use, that’s when I’m most confident, most assured, most happy. That’s when I don’t need to know what will happen in the future — as long as I am creating NOW.
And so here it is:
Friends who initially warned me to “not touch anything” and “constantly wash your hands” or I will get the virus, were basically telling me I was gonna get the virus. There was simple no way I could see myself not coming in contact with it, so I mentally prepared myself for it with lots of garlic, airborne, herbal tea and Louise L. Hays’s “How to Heal Your Body” ready to reference on my iPhone.
People ask me how hard has the Corona virus been in the homeless community? It’s made things difficult, but not anymore then what I see other people deal with. I know several people who have had it, but no one who has actually died from it, or even known anyone whose known anyone on the streets who has died from it. I know many blacks and latinos in the general population who have known people who have died of it, just not anyone on the streets.
Reggie. A screenwriter with several credits to his name, he isn’t really homeless. He lives with his wife in the Miracle Mile. However they fight allot, and when it gets to a certain point Reggie cusses her out, leaves, and sleeps in the park for a couple weeks until he cools down. However since the lockdown he hasn’t been able to leave when they fight. He says now he just stays there and keeps fighting with her.
“It’s like living in a prison. Although I’m just assuming. I’ve never been to prison myself. Prison might be better, I don’t know.”
I met Ray in Hollywood while he was panhandling. I asked him if I could take a photo of him for five bucks? He ask “What was it for?” I replied it was my hustle.
He said “Say no more.”
A simple OPEN sign doesn’t do it anymore. It has to be
“YES WE ARE DEFINITELY OPEN”
Here is another Ray in front of one of those signs at Okie Dogs.
Long before the Corona Virus, I often heard the numbers that the city was spending to help the homeless. Sometimes they threw out the number as 2–4 billion a year. I knew that was bullshit. Either that number is an out and out lie, or it must be getting siphoned off and scammed before it gets to the streets, through poor, or non existent oversight. Because despite all the big talk in the six years Ive been back in LA on the streets, I have seen absolutely nothing done to aid the homelessness. And even less effort to even begin to stem the newly homeless that everyday flood into the streets at a rate unprecedented since it became a real issue back in the 80’s.
Doug Smith a reporter for the LA Times, has written several articles on the homeless in this neighborhood. I emailed him asking what the actually number was? He wrote back:
Hi Bumdog,
There’s no simple answer to your question. The city and county both put in money. Under Measure H, the county has been putting around $350 million of sales tax revenue annually into homeless services since 2017. The city is spending $1.2 billion of borrowed money on housing over several years.
Both the city and county have committed other funds to homeless services through their budgets and council and supervisor office funds. I think the city is spending about $100 million on Mayor Garcetti’s Bridge Home shelters, most of it coming from the state. I don’t have a good accounting of all these. The number is probably in the ballpark of $100 million a year. To some extent the city has gamed the numbers by including the value of city-owned land that was offered for homeless housing.
In addition, there are indirect costs, such as paramedic and police response, jail costs and hospital care. There have been efforts to quantify these, but those are, at best, hypothetical. Nobody knows for sure how much would be saved if there weren’t homeless people.
Overall, I’d say the estimate of $2 to $4 billion a year is high unless it includes an estimate of those indirect costs. It would be hard to add up all the known sources to more than $1 billion.
Doug
Well, whether it’s been hundreds of millions or billions, I’d never seen a dime of it manifested on the streets before the pandemic. On the other hand, since COVID hit, they have been opening up shelters left and right, setting up much-needed portable potties on the streets, and hand washing stations at places where the homeless congregate. The state, county and Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) came together to start Project Roomkey to get people off the streets and into hotels. It was amazing to see more done for the homeless in one month than the previous six years combined.
This mobile shower program is one of the more visible results. Like the porta potties, it became a true blessing when the lockdown closed all public restrooms and gyms, where many homeless took their showers. In the summer heat and humidity, when you see one of the shower units in front of you, you know there is a God.
Jaime Gregory, the shower attendant at the Saban Free Clinic. A Big Mellow/High Yellow/Fellow, he is one of those characters that takes life slow and goes with the flow. However he also a former street gangster from Watts. He lets guys get by with a lot, but if they start talking too much shit, he will very slowly raise up all of his 6’3 300 pounds right in their faces with:
“What’d cha say? Say it again.”
That’s usually enough to end any further rebellion against his authority.
I’ve been going to the Los Angeles Free Clinic since the 90’s. It had the best services not just for the homeless, but for all medical needs for those with low income. Check ups, tests, minor dentistry etc., they even helped you fill out health insurance. It was one of the most helpful organizations in the city as far as I knew.
But then a couple of years ago the administration of the clinic changed hands and the neighborhood started complaining about the amount of homeless in the area, as if the increase in homelessness wasn’t a citywide problem. As a result the new administration cut back on the services to the homeless, down the the bare minimum require by law for them to still qualify for city funding. And made it subtlety and openly known the homeless were no longer welcome at the clinic.
For the Corona Virus Crisis, while the top officials in the rest of the city have finally cut through their bureaucracy to extend all services possible to the needs of the homeless, the Saban Free Clinic used the COVID-19 crisis to increase their bureaucracy as an excuse to slash their homeless services in half. The shower program for instance, used to run for 7 1/2 hours a day. With the shower time 15 minutes per person, they served 30 people a day. Now thats been cut it down to 2 hours. Which means instead of 30 people being able to shower there is only 8 spots. Several fights have broken out when when 16 people come from miles around in the 90 degree summer heat to find out there are only 8 spots available. And then there are days when they arbitrarily decide not to open at all.
Quentin Tarantino owned a theater in the Fairfax District called the New Beverly Cinema, “New Bev” for short. He showed mostly old schlocky B-movies and his own movies. I used to sit in front of it and panhandle my movie “Sketches of Nothing by a Complete Nobody” on DVD there. In the summer of 2019 Tarantino came out with his “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. He played it at his theater everyday and night for over 2 months. When I was sitting there selling my wares I noticed this foreign looking guy in a wheelchair. On both the wheels he had implanted a poster of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. He came to the same showing several times, and on Facebook and Instagram people would take photos of him with those posters on his wheels and post them. On top of that I kept seeing him everywhere I went. He was always with another foreign looking blonde guy walking with him as he pushed his own wheelchair.
Id yell out “Hey! I see your photos on Facebook!” He never said anything he just nodded and keep on going.
One day I went to take a shower at the Saban clinic on Hollywood and Gower instead of the one in West Hollywood. I was waiting on the corner for the light when I saw the guy in the wheelchair cruising down the street with his friend.
I said to him “What the fuck man? I see you everywhere!”
He laughed and we got to talking as his friend went into 7–11. His name was Per-Ingvar but everyone called him “Pit”. He was from Norway and he was here to see “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. He was a big Tarantino fan and every time one of Tarantino’s films comes out he comes to America to watch it in the theaters. He had been doing it since “Kill Bill”. He and his friend Raymond were staying in a AirBnB a couple of blocks away.
He then said he liked my BUMDOG T-shirt I was wearing. I told him I sell them if he wanted one. He said he did. Cool, I told him to meet me at the New Bev theater tomorrow. He said ok and we said goodbye.
The next day I met him in front of the theater. I didnt have the shirt ready yet, but he gave me the money for it anyway. He also gave me a DVD of a movie called “CHRISTMAS CRUELTY”. It turned out he and Raymond were filmmakers in Norway, and they were making a documentary about their travels in America. They even had the new BLACK MAGIC CAMERA to shoot with. Thats when I told them I was a filmmaker too, and I sold them a DVD of my movie.
Then I asked them if they would like to shoot some stuff with me while they were here? They said sure. In fact they were moving from the AirbnB they had in Hollywood to a Hotel closer by, which by a wild coincidence was on 3rd and Hauser across the street from the coffee shop I worked out of.
A couple of days later I met them at Coffee Bean and I pitched my idea: film a short “mockumentary” about homeless filmmakers living in Hollywood. Now I was the only REAL homeless filmmaker, but in his wheelchair Pit would be easy to pass off as homeless. Plus we could get my friend Joe Black who was a regular at the New Bev. He was also a filmmaker. He was 31 years old and making feature films since he was 17. 14 films, all low budget guerrilla style films that he wrote directed and starred in.
My idea was a Spinal Tap style of shooting. Film enough for about 15 minutes of each of us, and make a 45 minute short film called “Tarantino’s Basterds: The Homeless Filmmakers of Hollywood”.
They said they loved the idea, and they were all in. In fact they were quite excited by it. They said they always wanted to make a “Hollywood Movie”. I said well this isn’t a real “Hollywood Movie”. But they replied “Hey were in Hollywood. And it’s a movie. Thats good enough for us.”
We started at the beginning of August with Raymond as the camera man. They had to leave September 1st. We shot sporadically throughout the month, they had they own documentary to shoot, and as always coordinating everyone was the biggest challenge. A couple of times I got Raymond to go with Joe and shoot some scenes without me there.
I had the plot in my head but I kept it loose as we improvised all the dialog like a real documentary. Of course we only got 60% of the shots I needed and at the end of the month as they were about to leave, Pit said to me, “You know Bumdog, we know what you shot. You only have maybe 5 minutes of watchable film.”
I said I know. But I think I can get 15 minutes out of it anyway. At least it was something. Pit said “Yeah something is always better than nothing.”
They gave me the footage on a hard drive and left for Norway. After a few days I started looking at the footage and editing it at the same time. The footage that I hadn’t seen before was what Raymond shot with Joe, and as I was editing it I was shocked how well it edited into a narrative. It took me a couple of days to put everything I had together. But by the time I had finished the rough it was an hour and half long. Of course I was gonna edit it down from that, but I realized if I could fill the holes in the story line I would have a feature length film.
I messaged Pit and Raymond in Norway and told them we had a feature film on our hands. They said “Really? Are you sure?”
I said yeah I was sure, but I needed to film some more to complete the storyline I knew it would be rough getting all those pick up shots by myself. The other problem being one of the three main characters was back in Norway. That means I was only able to shoot myself and Joe Black.
Well with my zero skills of organization, getting those pick up shots almost killed me. But after a couple of months with the help of friends as camera men, I was able to get all I was gonna be able to shoot with just me and Joe Black. But I could see I was gonna have a real problem without being able to shoot Pit. Because it just went back and forth between me and Joe. I needed Pit to form that third angle of the triangle for the film to work. I sent them the rough draft of the film. They said they were impressed with what I had. I asked them if they could shoot the pick up shots of Pit that I needed in Norway. They said that would be hard. It was already winter in Norway, and it didnt look like summer in LA. I asked them to try anyway.
During this time I was also looking around for a place to screen it. I didnt have any money to rent a real theater, so this was gonna be a challenged. I kept asking people if I could use their garages, but wasn’t finding any luck.
Someone told me about the Irish Import Shop on Highland in Hollywood. It had a small theater in it that they rented out. I push my shopping cart over and went in. I asked for the owner. The owner’s name was Tom. I said my name was Bumdog and I had a movie I wanted to screen. He showed me a section of the shop that was a 30 seat theater with a stage in it he called “The Wren”. He had a projector and everything. He told me the price, and it was in my price range. I said Id take it. He said good. Then I told him.
“Listen. I have a real movie I want to show here, but also you should know Im a real homeless bum. My shopping cart is right outside. Now do you still want to rent this theater to me?”
Tom said, “Yeah sure. Sounds like its gonna be interesting.” Right on.
I premiered it in February 2020 at the Wren Theatre. About 30 of my friends showed up. Afterwards I was feeling out the vibe of the audience. Nothing more easier to spot than someone struggling for some thing good to say about something they thought was shit. But that wasn’t the case. They were happy…that it wasn’t THAT bad.
I was feeling the same way about it. I wasn’t happy with the movie, but I wasn’t unhappy with it either. I needed those pick up shots. I booked the Wren theater again for two weeks later, and I asked Pit and Raymond if they could shoot the pick up shots in Norway. They replied “impossible”. There was not a single spot in all of Norway in February that could pass for Los Angeles in August. They were in small town in the middle of nowhere, where there was nothing but snow as far as the eye could see. I told them without those shots the film just didn’t work. Just do the best you can.
The second screening was on Thursday. On Monday they said they would try to shoot the scenes and send them to me. They were also going to Skype me while they were shooting. Monday morning they texted me to ask where I was? I told them I was in my spot in front of the window at Starbucks on Beverly and Detroit.
As I sat there on my computer waiting to Skype them in Norway, in front of the window a man in a wheel chair rolled up and waved to me. I waved back…wait a minute…that’s PIT! Then Raymond came into view. WTF!?!?!?! Wasn’t I just texting with them in Norway???
It turned out they decided at the last moment to come back to America and shoot the pick up shots here, and also see the film in person at the screening. I was shocked beyond belief. Over the next couple of days we got the pick up shots, and I edited and premiered the new cut at the Wren Theater that Thursday. That screening I was genuinely happy with. The film worked now. In fact it was the first film I ever made (short, feature, or documentary) that I could say I was genuinely happy with. And it reflected in the audience’s reaction this time. Everyone said they liked it, but it doesn’t really matter what people feel they have to say to your face, its what they choose to say when they don’t have to be polite about it that matters. And I got many texts and calls from people afterward saying how much they enjoyed it.
I got the best “review” of any of my films from Aliah Whitmore:
“My homie BUMDOG Torres made this film with his small but mighty crew. I am rarely riveted by art. I love art but things have to come together in a really specific way to affect me. This movie hit me at the center of my being, for a lot of reasons. It touched a part of my own identity that made ME feel seen, which is totally selfish but that’s what happened. SEE THIS MOVIE! BUY THIS MOVIE! Make your thing that you want to create! Stop waiting and just do it! Thank you BUMDOG for reinforcing that!!!”
Several people who were in the business said it was a sellable work, and that I should shop it around. Pit and Raymond showed it to some companies in Norway who were interested in distributing it. And there was a company in LA that was interested in seeing it. I wasn’t really expectant, but it wasn’t bad for a movie me and a few friends made while fucking around. This could really get some where……
THEN WHAMO!!!!
The lockdown in the entertainment business was particularly rough. Hollywood is a boulevard of broken dreams, dreams that can crash right in front of you on an hourly basis, but I never saw this many people get their hopes smacked down so unilaterally and simultaneously.
And it wasn’t like the story I just told of 3–4 guys fuckin around and making a feature film. These were films and tv projects that people had spent years, maybe even decades trying to develop. Who put their hearts and souls into getting this far. Me, I had no expectations for the film I made. Whereas some people were expecting on their projects to save their lives. Shows and productions thousands of people depend in for their survival. And it all vanished like vapor in the Santa Ana winds.
Projects that were supposed to start production with in weeks terminated. Film festivals they were accepted to were canceled. Deadlocked distribution deals and sign contracts no longer worth the paper they were written on.
On the other hand in “Hollywood” or what you could call the “movie industry” in general, 95% of people are talkers. Only 5% are doers. For that 5% the lockdown was a huge blow to many of their plans.
However to the talkers the pandemic was a huge boon. Because the most creative pursuit the talkers engage in is talking about what they are gonna do, then making excuses why it didn’t get it done. COVID-19 gave them one of the greatest excuses in history. For them the pandemic was indeed the great equalizer, because it erased the line between them and the actual doers. Now they could say because of the coronavirus their films, that they were definitely gonna make this time, like Steven Speilberg’s, James Cameron’s, and Tarantino’s, were on hold. Once COVID ended how many more years they would attempt to milk this excuse was the question.
Ive known Aaron Landy for about 15 years. Poetically speaking he is an eccentric. Medically speaking he has got some screws loose. Especially when it comes to dealing with the reality of his life. He lives out of several vans that he is constantly buying and selling, but he refuses to consider himself “homeless”. His thing is going to art shows with a video camera and telling people he is a filmmaker. For decades he’s been talking about the films he is going to make with the footage he is shooting, along with books he is gonna write, and projects he is going to create that never get beyond the talking stage. At the same time all these years he has been constantly insisting that I have no talent, skills or creativity for filmmaking, writing or photography because Im not educated, unlike himself who graduated from UCLA Film School and worked in the “movie industry” for 40 years. I shot back by pointing out that with his college education and 40 years working in the “movie industry”, he still ended up a homeless 60 year old man living out of his van(s), making money delivering for Postmates. Of course that was nothing to be ashamed of, but he was in no position to put anyone else down. But he didn’t hear any of that, and just repeated that everything I ever produced was “worthless dreck”, and the only reason people didn’t tell me so was because, unlike himself, I was homeless.
I admitted that may be true but, unlike himself since Ive known him Ive actually produced feature films, written books and created and completed community art projects while being homeless and uneducated. But during these same years he’s been telling people he is a “artist” and “filmmaker”, and all the things he is gonna do with the tens of thousands of hours he’s amassed with a video camera forever with him, he has never even been able to piece together 90 minutes of it into a watchable feature film. Which with todays technology, any fifth grader (or homeless bum with a 5th grade education) is capable of doing. That got to him.
When I finished “Tarantino’s Basterds” I needled him that it was my second feature length film while he still hadn’t made one. Thats when he announced to me and mutual friends that he was going to make a feature film of his own, and like myself do it while he was still homeless. He said it would be about climate change, relationships, sex and the human condition. That it was going to be an original work of art, full of bold creative ideas and better than my two feature films put together.
Every time he said this I laughed. I knew it was all talk. His mind was too far off into left field to organize even the smallest “no budget” feature film production. Because people who get their joy out of talking about doing things, rarely get any joy out of doing the thing itself. And men like him with a need to criticize and downgrade, never develop the skills needed to create and build up. To wit, all the creativity these critical trolls may possess they put into criticizing those who create, and constructing iron clad excuses as to why they themselves aren’t creators.
I knew this was what Aaron was going to do. He wasn’t going to make his movie, but he was going to create another elaborate excuse as to why he didn’t make it. That was something he was genuinely good at. I was curious as to what it could possible be this time. But fate created a far more epic excuse for him then anything he could have possible dreamt up for himself. Like the other 95% of talkers in the town, the plague of the century got him completely off the hook. After a while I tried to cajole him into committing to making his film again. But he was too creative for that. He didn’t take the bait, and he proclaimed that not only was he not going to make his movie, but that he was never going to try to make a movie ever again. Why? Because according to his new gospel, filmmaking had become inconsequential, and that it was downright immoral to make movies considering the global pandemic, economic downfall and climate change. He stated:
“Movies are dead. Reality became too crazy.”
Congratulations……..BEST. EXCUSE. EVER.
My photographer friend Jessica Sherman is a professional personal portrait and movie event photographer. Here she is taking some photos of me (while I take some photos of her) in an alley behind 3rd street.
COVID:
Once the lockdown happened all the public movie screenings that she was hired to shoot were canceled. Because she is also a care taker to several elderly senior citizens, she has canceled all of her portrait photoshoots out of concern for them. She only leaves her apartment to walk her dogs, and even then always fully masked and gloved, and will leap out the way of anyone she sees without a mask. She doesn’t want to go back to photography until there is a vaccine but like many people she is running out of savings.
The Corona Virus has also done some good things for me too. The first and foremost, is the opportunity to make these photo essays like the one you are reading here. Contributing to the LAist has given me a project to create for. It’s what’s been keeping me sane through the ever increasing madness that the world is descending into.
However there is a Catch-22. Because of the lock down all the coffee shops like Starbucks, Coffee Bean and the like, no longer allow sitting inside. Which is where I could plug in my laptop, get WIFI and work on my photos, video and writings, all day if I like as long as I kept buying something.
But after the lockdown I had no place to work. Not even restaurants allowed people inside anymore. There were certain places where I could highjack some WIFI from the outside, and others where their where were outlets I could plug in and charge my stuff with, but there was no place anymore where I could do both at the same time and work.
The only thing I could do when I had work to do was to rent a hotel room. That was the only place where I could have electricity and WIFI simultaneously, as well as the time I needed to work. I always went to this hotel on Beverly Blvd. The Bevonshire. When I first went there it was $107 a night. But since then travel slowed down to the point where they now only charge $85 a night. And they let me park may shopping cart in the back.
I would never spend money on a hotel unless it was something really important I had to have it for. I paid for a hotel 3 or 4 times in the last 6 years. But having a project to focus on is important to me. People ask me is it worth it losing all that money? I say its better then losing my mind. In fact Im in the hotel right now as I type this out, not only finishing up this essay but getting out of the 95 degree furnace outside.
Sometimes when Im working on an essay and Im not finished, but I run out of money, I’ll beg one of my friends for enough for another day or two until Im finished.
Right now I would like to thank those friends without whose generosity I would not have been able to create.
My deepest Gratitude to Avi Mittlman, Stacy Sweetman, Bill Miller, Naomi Reyerson, Daniel DiGiallonardo, Evageline Kelly, Asher Luzzatto, Mark Krigbaum, Tirzah Tyler, Mark Walsh, Nancy Blanchette and JT Boyd.
BELOW: Family Portrait with Pam who works as a substitute teacher at home through Zoom, where she also has her two children, Noa and Asa, to look after for the last 5 months. Just before this photo was taken her husband Zach was furloughed from his job. They are now ALL together, ALL the time.
When Alex Angel originally moved into her two bedroom Spanish style apartment it was lavishly spacious. Then she married, had twin girls, and then another baby girl. When the lockdown went into effect, she and her husband had to work from home, while dealing with homeschooling her three children, making her two bedroom apartment not so lavishly spacious anymore. Adding to it, because she works in the public health sector the pandemic has given her several times the workload.
“Sometimes I have like a hundred emails I have to answer, while trying to make sure the girls are on zoom for school, and deal with their minute by minute needs. Its constantly ‘Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!’ All day long. The pressure of my job, dealing with three kids who demand constant attention and then being bottled up around each other. Sometimes Im in the shower and I just start crying. Im wondering how much more of this I can take without losing my mind.”
The fact that the homeless community has not been greatly affected by the epidemic has been a miracle. However, the Orthodox Jewish Community is even more of a mystery to me. The Orthodox Jewish Community is one of the most physical close communities that you can imagine. They all go to temple twice a day. On the sabbath and high holidays they don’t use cars so they walk and interact with each other on the street with far more commonality then their non-Orthodox neighbors. And indeed when the virus started to spread it was just around the large gatherings of the Purim celebration, where many of them were exposed to it. And from there, a huge swath of the community came down with it. They tell me they know people who have died of it back in New York, but amazingly in the whole the Jewish Orthodox in Los Angeles, not just Fairfax but Pico/Robertson and the Valley, Im told there have only been 3–4 deaths. Many of them will say G-d is protecting them. I don’t know about that, but something is keeping them immune.
Daniel lives and works in the orthodox community doing odd jobs and helping out synagogs and older people with their various technical needs.
With COVID his workload was significantly lowered, but the Orthodox Jewish Community has social nets that help those less fortunate within their community. And Daniel says he is grateful for all the assistance he has been given during the pandemic to keep him above water.
Yossi was born and raised in the Fairfax District, but now he lives in Israel. He came back home to be with his family for Passover in March. When the Corona virus spread, Israel closed its borders to non-citizens and Yossi was “stuck” in LA. He was planing on returning in a couple months as soon as Israel lifted the travel ban, however after further cases of infection, Israel announced it had no immediate plans to open the country back up. Here is Yossi with his sister Channah, and his brother Mendi after hearing the happy news they will be together as a family indefinitely.
PRE COVID:
Steven Arroyo is often mistaken for being of middle eastern decent. His is, in fact an old school Chicano. He owns the Escuela Taqueria and Totem Chicken restaurants on Beverly Blvd. Here is his Pre-covid, hanging out outside one of his restaurants. He is known for being a warm approachable guy.
Here is the same man in COVID-19 mode, establishing a safe social distance between him and his customers.
When the locked down went into effect he lost 50% of his business Now the majority of his food is made for delivery. And delivery services take out a good size commission fee for every order.
“Im basically in partnership with Postmates now.”
Like many other businesses he has used this downtime to renovate the interior of his restaurant.
Daniel Alfonso Men’s Salon is one of the more famous hair salons in L.A. However, since the lockdown most people, famous and otherwise, have been famously putting personal hair styling farther down their “to-do” list. But Alfonso’s reputation is such that he still gets enough business to get by better than many. Here are customers Mace and Ryan outside the salon eagerly waiting for their appointment, after what they both say has been several months of neglected hair care.
Couture wedding dress designer, Claire Pettibone. With the coronavirus lockdown and subsequent gathering restrictions, most weddings were canceled and the bridal shop had to close. However, she and her husband Guy, began to make masks instead of dresses in order to keep their workers employed, and themselves busy. Here they are with their young daughter, Lorelei. They bring Lorelei to work with them where she takes her classes online.
Another section of the economy that took a big hit during the Corona virus was the physical fitness sector. In the health conscious culture of Los Angeles, this was one of the most physical difficult restrictions imposed. Without being able to go into gyms anymore, you saw people who exercised EVERY DAY OF THEIR LIVES either gaining an unusual amount of weight or visible shrinking in muscle mass. And working out was a major part of their not just physical, but mental health as well.
I personally worked out in the gym at the Pan Pacific Park that had a weight machine. There were only a few of us who used it so there was no competition for the weights, and we would push each other. I could never work out by myself. I needed other people to work off, I liked the competitional element of it. I could work out for an hour with one guy, and if he stopped and someone else showed up, I could work out another hour with that person. But all by myself, forget about it.
With the coffee houses closed I was hanging out in the local parks more. But eventually I got run out of the parks as well, because of all the personal trainers having to train their clients out in the open air. I’d be sitting in the park in some corner or far off isolated place to read, eat or just relax and stare off into space, when all of a sudden I look up and there’s a bunch of grunting power lifters going at it, or a group of 9 year old girls forming a yoga class right in front of me. For the latter that’s when it’s really best to get the hell out of dodge.
Along with toilet paper and sanitizing gel, personal weights became one of the most sought after, and scarce items during the pandemic. There was an initial mad rush on them, and afterwards they were impossible to get a hold of. Walking around I would see the few people who were able to acquire them, setting up gyms in their garages. I would look hungrily at the weights, my muscles starved for some power flexing. One such garage was right around the corner from the alley I slept in. I’d walk by after dark and see them working out. Eventually I got to talking to them. It was a “minion” group, not more than ten selected people working out together to create a quarantine “bubble”. I briefly thought about asking if I could work out with them. But that thought disintegrated quickly when I found out they were “cross fitness” training. They didn’t just casually work out. They went at it like goddamn Marines. Just watching them put the fear of god into me.
I myself took a hit business wise with the coronavirus. With everything locked down the streets were empty. No point posting up somewhere and selling my DVDs, T-shirts or Photos because at first no one wanted to touch anything. My hustle was dead in the water. Then I saw one of the guys who print my shirts making masks. I asked him if he could make masks for me with my logo on it. He said sure, so I had a bunch printed up and started selling them.
2020……FUUUCCKKKKK!!!!!
After the May 30th riots in LA protesting the death of George Floyd, I was asked by Megan Garvey one of the senior editors at the LAist to write an opinion piece on the events. I wrote A Day at the Park/ A night of the Iron Heel” in June, but I asked that they hold off publishing it until I finished the other photo essays I already planned out. Which I believe would take about two months. Instead it took five months and I was only able to turn it in a week before the election, by which time most of what I originally wrote had become obsolete, but I print it here also as a record of one man’s thinking in the MIDDLE of 2020.
But I also need to say something about the election. I wanted to write this not for those of you here and now, but for you who are reading this either in a far away place, and in a time when I am no longer alive. Because for you, 2020 in America will either be a vague foreign description or a mere number in history.
The next couple of pages are “Fear and Loathing in 2020”, is a very brief sketch of the 2020 election for you (not YOU reading now, but YOU reading in the future). In this I was inspired by Walt Whitman’s “Drum-Taps” and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72”, two books that by reading gave me a consciousness of a time and place I had no consciousness of. Not from a wide objective opinion perspective as a whole, but from a very personal subjective, narrow, prejudicial, individualistic one.
Fear and loathing in 2020
December 29, 2020
After all the hub Bub, it looks like Biden will become President. I went on record as believing he didn’t have a chance. I even bet my stimulus check with Aaron Landy that he would lose. I tried to bet him that Hillary Clinton would lose in 2016, when he proclaim there was no doubt about her becoming president. And when she lost, like many Clintonites he was in foam mouthed rage against me for next 4 years. And even though I belonged to the Green Party and supported Bernie Sanders, he accused me of being a paid Russian internet troll, and a secret Trump supporter because I was racist against white people…yeah
But this time everything went the DNC’s way. Mainly because of COVID-19 which not only killed 200,000 on Trump’s watch, but allowed them to keep wraps on Biden. Obama had advised Biden’s handlers to keep his public appearances to a minimum, to prevent him from embarrassing himself. It was the COVID mandates (more the COVID itself) that prevented him from being seen in front of crowds sniffing people’s hair, or massaging little girl’s shoulders. And the once every one or two weeks when they did let him out he appeared remarkable lucid…for Biden. Its like they pumped him full of coherency medications in the interim because when he spoke he wasn’t making any of his chronic gaffes and mental lapses. With the democrats cheering that he was “totally aware and sharp as a tack!”, because he kept remembering what state he was in and what century he was born.
Trump repeatedly tried to draw him out into public, but the DNC was able to use the CoronaVirus restrictions to keep Biden “campaigning from his basement”. Neither Trump or Biden campaigned on their differentiating visions of what the country should be. Both campaigned solely on who was more incompetent, who was more of a molester, who was more senile and who was going to die first.
I also believed if Biden couldn’t win in a landslide the republicans would be able to cheat it in court, now having a majority on SCOTUS. But the margin of victory was slightly beyond argument. It’s slim but nothing that can be seriously contested, despite Trump demanding the Republican Party do so anyway. But the thinking on the republican side seems to be that they could finally get rid of Trump and his buffoonery. And that in comparison Biden will be just like Clinton or Obama: they will get 95% of what they want instead of the 150% they would get with Trump, and still repeatedly label Biden as a radical left wing socialist.
After I paid him Landy crowed over his victory and made his predictions of what would happen next. Among other things he prophesied Biden would be the next FDR, Trump would be in indicted and flee the country and:
Nancy will get her golden crown — impeaching Trump. She’s out in two years on a high note. Dems will make big gains. Virus under control, economy, global warming. Rooting out homegrown terrorists. Landy nails it again!
Ridiculous. What should happen is that with control of the Senate the Republicans can block just about everything Biden may try to do that doesn’t align with them, and still blame him for all the problems he will inherit. Problems that were only planted and kept in check during COVID, will fully bloom under his watch. Discontent with Biden will be even higher then it was with Obama during his first two years, because no one actually wanted Biden to begin with, and now that they have him their only relief that he isn’t Trump will eventually wear off, giving the Republicans the house in two years along with the senate which is also what happened with Clinton and Obama.
Trump prosecuted? No. I think there’s a good chance Biden for the sake of “reconciliation” will pardon him. He doesn’t want to piss off his base any more than they already are.
Overall this is worked out really well for the power establishments of both parties. For Republicans in power they finally remove the albatross of Trump from around their necks and take back control of their party as Trump supporters were more loyal to him then they were to the party. They will no longer have to deal with his buffoonery, while still using him as a rally cry for his troops. The RNC will have a President and Vice President that have openly said (the way Obama said AFTER he was elected) they have no intention of changing anything, and everything (for the establishment) will be back to normal.
I’m not a Trump supporter but as a far left winger, it’s one of the reasons I wanted Biden to lose. Having Trump as president was as energizing a force for the progressive movement, as was the very existence of Obama as POTUS brought the right wing movement to new heights. If the DNC had lost again it might have put some cracks in the power grip the “let’s be as much like Republicans as possible” Democrats hold over DNC. Enough democrats would abandon the Clinton/Obama moderate conservative strategy to such that the party would have to give way to Bernie Sanders and AOC having a greater influence over its strategies and structure.
But the opposite has happened. For the Democrat Party this marks the end of any power struggle with the “progressive movement”. The movement that started with Bernie Sanders and continued with AOC and the “Squad”, is now over. Just as the DNC establishment had counted on, the progressives swallowed their principles out of fear of another four years of Trump. In doing so progressives have given over all their power to the establishment they said they were dedicated to fighting against. It’s no longer Sanders and AOC, but Biden and Harris that are now the leaders of the progressive movement, as progressives have proven to the DNC that they will vote for them when presented with far worse opposition. Vindicating the DNC’s “pied piper” strategy. The strategy of elevating the most extreme far right candidate, in order to frighten far left progressives and moderate conservatives into voting for the Democratic Party ‘Blue No Matter Who” nominee. It didn’t work in 2016, and it almost didn’t work in 2020. However it was effective enough this time to justify staying with it.
It’s highly unlikely Biden will survive even his first term as President, and it will be given to Kamala. Which will be an even greater lightening rod for all right wing causes. They will be enraged, and rightfully so. Having their beloved President Trump replaced with not just a woman of color, but a woman of color who only 5% of democrats wanted to be president against anyone but Trump.
I’m trying to calculate a positive result coming out of all these logistics. It’s still possible. But it’s a dim unfocused spot of hope. That keeps getting dimmer.
Hey neighbor let me give you some advice
The Russians are about to pulverize us
In our sleep tonight
That is if the crazy Arabs
Or the riots don’t get us first
And the fire will rain down from the sky
The fire will rain down from the sky
People will die
People will die
But go ahead sleep tight in your beds
Remember what the wise man said
There’s nothing to fear (but fear itself)
If they don’t turn you into a junkie or a zombie on the street
If they don’t turn you into a yo-cat or a grinning Jesus freak
If they don’t take away your brains or turn your body inside out
If they don’t take away your passion with a color TV set
They’ll take away your heart and soul
Don’t let them take away your heart and soul
But remember what the wise man said
There’s nothing to fear (but fear itself)
Oingo Boingo 1982
“A Day at the Park/ A Night of the Iron Heel”
“We are in power. Nobody will deny it. By virtue of that power we shall remain in power. When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In the roar of shell and shrapnel and in the whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. You have been in the dirt since history began, and in the dirt you shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words — Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.” — “The Iron Heel” Jack London
In 1908 Jack London published “The Iron Heel” in which he wrote out his prophecies of what would happen in the United States in the coming years: First there would be a great accumulation of wealth. America would be one big party, until the world’s financial markets crashed creating a worldwide depression. Foreseeing not only the prosperity of the Roaring 20‘s but the Great Depression of the 30‘s that followed.
In the rest of the world, Japan would conquer the far east and join with Germany in starting a world war. He predicted though tempted, the United States would stay out of the conflict — he failed to envision the attack at Pearl Harbor, that dragged the originally reluctant U.S. into the war and ultimately doomed Japanese domination of Asia. It’s strikingly one of the few events he was unable to foresee.
He wrote with remarkable accuracy how the labor unions would become incredibly powerful during the depression, demanding more pay and better working conditions. However he also foresaw how specifically the steel, iron, and transportation unions would sell out to the corporations after getting concessions that would make their members lives a comparative paradise.
“They were set apart from the rest of labor. They were better housed, better clothed, better fed, better treated. Good dwellings, modern and sanitary, were built for them, surrounded by spacious yards, and separated here and there by parks and playgrounds.” London was already seeing the inevitable emergence of suburbia that became reality in post World War II America.
Ultimately these unions would slowly weaken and go soft with their well fought for comforts, and eventually their children, and children’s children would loose all the reforms they had fought so hard for. As for the middle class: “The sturdy skeleton of it remained; but it was without power.”
The dismantling of workers rights in the former Labor strongholds of Scott Walker’s Wisconsin and Republican Michigan would prove this out.
As the middle class evacuated the cities for the suburbs, those left in the inner cities are what London called “The People of the Abyss”. Through decades of neglect and repression their lives would be made below livable. Whose only life options would be prison, death or a lifetime of dead end labor.
“The people of the abyss, were sinking into a brutish apathy and content with misery. Herded back at the bayonet point to their tasks in the cities, there they broke out in ever recurring mobs and riots, they had nothing to lose but the misery and pain of living. And to gain? — nothing, save one final, awful glut of vengeance.” He even points to Chicago as being the one of the largest epicenters of these political riots.
These inner city dwellers would be kept under control by police forces or “Military Mercenaries.” He said these mercenaries would be officially of the government of the people, but in fact they would be wholly in service of the Oligarchy.
“The Mercenaries constituted a race apart. They dwelt in cities of their own which were practically self-governed, and they were granted many privileges. They were losing all touch and sympathy with the rest of the people, and in fact were developing their own class morality and consciousness.”
We are only now beginning to see the realization of this Dystopian nightmare notably documented in Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. (NOTE: When I wrote this in June I believed that London was referring to the militarization of the local police forces. However since then there has been a rise in the Right Wing Militia Groups aiding the police. Which indicates that London’s description of nationwide “Military Mercenary Force” will prove more accurate.)
During this time a handful of secretive powerful intellectuals would be the driving force behind the creation of an Oligarchy, which began a slow and silent takeover of the government until “the captains of war will be commanded by the captains of industry” . See what Smedley Butlers wrote in “War is a Racket” in 1935:
In his day London apparently encountered one of these secret collectives, still in their infancy, which he describes and named “The Philomaths”. It seems to be the same type of elite secret society that JFK was aware of a half a century later, by then in full bloom, and who he was referring to in his speech months before his death.
Today while many look with eager anticipation at the fall of capitalism, as its current state seems unsustainable, London warned more than 100 years ago that from the rotting corpse of capitalism will not emerge a new form of Democratic Socialism, but the rise of true Oligarchic Fascism in America. This Oligarchy or “Iron Heel” he wrote would eventually crush all serious resistance for 300 years before it would be finally overthrown, ushering in “The Brotherhood of Man”.
112 years later
May 30th 2020
Los Angeles, CA.
Im used to seeing videos of cops beating and killing black people, and those videos eventually moving off the collective timelines, and then ultimately dealing with the frustration of the police completely getting away with it 99.9% of the time.
That’s what I sincerely believe is going to happen again, so I tried not to get emotionally involved in the whole story. But the situation was impossible to shake off. Social media was awash with the images and video. And every time I saw them it stuck in me and didn’t leave. It never does.
Curiously for some reason this story, unlike countless others that happen everyday and vanish, wasn’t going away. More and more people chimed in on the narrative, and the feelings of frustration and hopelessness about what I saw as the eventual outcome just kept piling up inside my guts.
Encase it’s not known I’m a career homeless black man living in Los Angeles. I sleep in the alleys in the general vicinity of the Fairfax District where Pan Pacific Park is located. I had heard there was gonna be a protest in the park the day before. Because of an old hip injury I needed a shopping cart to get around. That morning I was thinking of asking someone to keep an eye on it while I go down into the park and take some photos of the protest.
But when I went to get some breakfast at Coffee Bean on Third St., I was taken back by the number of people with professional cameras. As people began to arrive, it seemed like a minute wouldn’t pass without seeing someone with a mid range to high- end Canon, Nikon or Leica in their hands or around their neck. Sometimes two cameras at the same time. I started to think there was nothing I was gonna photograph down there that any of these photographers weren’t gonna get. Besides I don’t like shooting just for the sake of shooting. I’m no fan of big crowds of any type, and I didn’t know where I was gonna put my shopping cart. That was three strikes for me.
I stopped there at Coffee Bean and sat on the ground. Because of COVID-19 they no longer put out chairs on the patio. My friend Derrick was also there to use the internet. He’s homeless too, but he always brings his own foldable chair.
I sat there on the concrete and watched people headed to the park with their cardboard and paper signs, most often in groups of people or couples. The atmosphere was very calm and peaceful as people walked by, almost cheerfully. I started taking out my various cameras and photographed them as they passed by from a low angle. I was hopeful that if I could get one good shot the day would be worth it.
People who I knew in the neighborhood would occasionally walk by me and ask me what I thought of it all. And whether this was gonna be like the ’92 riots?
I assured them that was impossible. The burning and looting and rioting in ’92 was all done in South Central, where the cops let them have at it. They wanted them to burn their own neighborhoods down, to teach them a lesson on how much they needed the police force.
But this was too close to the people of power. They won’t let it happen here around all these $2.5- $5 million dollar houses. Because they had the power to hold the cops accountable if shit kicks off. This is too close to Beverly Hills, Bel Air and the Hollywood Hills, where the people of power live. No way the cops would let anything happen here.
I took some photos here and there, and even though I had all my cameras around me, some people thought I was sitting on the ground panhandling, and gave me some bucks now and then. And water, they gave me a lot of water. The day was passing by quite idly.
There were still no bad vibes in the air when the reports started to come back that there was trouble. On Instagram and Facebook, posts were coming in that the protest had gotten ugly. But as I was watching the same people who had come with their signs walking toward the protest earlier, who were now walking back, nothing seemed unusual. That same peaceful calm feeling pervaded.
Then a friend of mine down the street posted on Instagram that an angry mob had set an SUV on fire just two blocks away from where I was. What??? I couldn’t match that with the people in front of me. There was nothing on their faces that indicated anything was amiss. There was no anger or confusion in the air at all. What was going on?
People started coming back saying there was fighting up on Fairfax, and that the cops were starting it. The news from social media and people I was talking to was getting hairier. Now there was talk of looters. I was thinking why would the cops start shit up on Fairfax. Why would their bosses LET THEM start shit on Fairfax?
I started to hear shotguns and large booming sounds that seemed to come out of the sky. Talk coming back now was the cops were now firing tear gas and rubber bullets at the protesters. I still wasn’t grasping it. Usually when something like this is about to happen, I can feel it in the air. But sitting there I wasn’t feeling any danger or tension that corresponded with what people were saying, and the battle sounds I was hearing.
It was around 4 o’clock when I started seeing people moving towards the park again. However these weren’t protesters. They were young men and teenagers, Blacks, Latinos and I was surprised how many Whites were walking in groups, but they weren’t carrying signs and they didn’t have any girlfriends with them. They had masks on, but not for COVID-19. Some were in black from head to toe, and they were headed towards Fairfax. It was obvious that as word went out about the rioting and looting what they were there for. They weren’t here before because they were not interested in coming to peaceful political protest (anymore then I was), but now that it was turning more action packed…well.
My friend Derrick who was still in front of Coffee Bean with me in his own chair, got up and said “We better get out of here, I can feel it coming our way.”
I didn’t agree. Where we were, there was only a Coffee Bean and an Organic bedding and mattress store. If there is going to be any looting it’s gonna be on Fairfax with all those high end shoe stores.
But I was finally starting to feel something, and I had been sitting there all day anyway, so I gathered up all my stuff and left, walked down the alley to another stoop to sit, and figure out what I wanted to do.
I was sitting there for a while when I started seeing people walking down the street carrying organic beddings all wrapped up in plastic. I later found out soon after I left, that the mattress store and Coffee Bean got busted into.
NOW I could really feel the tension. When the announcement went out of a city wide 8 o’clock curfew, the sky over these $2–5 million dollar homes was darkening, as it filled up with the chopping sounds of police helicopters and thin films of smoke.
The next day I was beginning to grasp what had happened. Not the events themselves, but what they meant. Talking to the people who were in various parts of the neighborhood when things kicked off, it turned out they didn’t just let the rioting and looting occur on Fairfax. But on Melrose they had several hours of looting before the police were even seen. And they even let the protests reach all the way to the heart of Beverly Hills: Rodeo Drive???? One of the wealthiest parts of the city??? This is where the people in power were!!!
Then it started hitting me. It always gave me a headache to listen to people’s over emotional opinions, loopy conspiracy theories, and naive primitive postulations about political situations they had neither the knowledge or intelligence to grasp. But in that context my own words had come back to haunt me.
“They won’t let it happen here around all these $5 million dollar houses. Because they have the power to hold the cops accountable if shit kicks off. This is too close to Beverly Hills, Bel Air and the Hollywood Hills, where the people of power are. No way will they let anything happen here.”
I suddenly realized that was one of the most naive, stupidest things I had ever said in my life, and I genuinely believed it until this very moment. I honestly thought the powers that be lived here, or at least close to these $5 million dollar houses. What they LET happen 30 years ago in South Central, and they would NEVER LET it happen here.
But I had left out of the equation 30 years of exponentially accumulated wealth, not by the 1%, but by the top 100, maybe even just the top 15 people in this country. They had concentrated so much wealth and power into their hands over the last 30 years, that $5 million dollar homes in Beverly Hills was now the equivalent of South Central to them!
The powers that be were no longer here, or anywhere near here. They lived in a galaxy so far far away, that they could watch Beverly Hills burn as if it was Compton. On an intellectual level I knew this already. When I ran into people who talked about how I hadn’t made anything of myself, I pointed out that a billionaire riding by here could say the same thing about them. And seeing the two of us side by side, me with my shopping cart, and them in their Mercedes SUV, from their level of wealth they wouldn’t make all that great a distinction between us.
Their petite bourgeoisie self importance was such a joke. They refuse to believe they were as expendable as I was. It was a dream of mine to be there the day they found out that wasn’t true. Because it wasn’t new to me. I grew up knowing my life was expendable. It was one of the first things one learns growing up black…back when I was growing up anyway. In my fantasies that are directly inverse to my powerlessness, I imagined gloating when they observed how useless they were in the larger context of REAL power and wealth.
That was the dream, but now the dream was reality. And I didn’t feel like gloating at all. In fact…..I was overwhelmed with grief realizing so many lives were worth nothing. And should it come to a necessary sacrifice, the potential of them all being so easily wiped out. My perpetual anger, hate and most sick and twisted desires of revenge, seemed to me now of microscopic importance.
I felt this crushing disappointment to my naive optimism that I hadn’t experienced since I was a teenager. The optimistic teenage love for the humanity that is slowly calcified and calloused by the years of actually physical contact with humanity. In that moment I was no longer conscious of all the whips and scorns I had endured over a lifetime. For some very brief moments I was what I was before I consciously developed the scar tissue to prevent me from living the rest of life experiencing the world like an open wound. I was re-experiencing that youthful state of painful naivety, right before finding out what the real world is like, at the age of 51.
QUESTION: SO IT’S NOT ABOUT RACISM, IT’S MORE ABOUT CLASSISM?
BUMDOG: “It’s not about race, it’s about class” is a phrase that stands on equal steps as: “ALL LIVES MATTER”, “The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery.” “Segregation had nothing to do with racism.” “The Holocaust never happened.” And my favorite “The American Indians were all killed off in self defense.” They insist on these beautiful lies because the world would be a much more beautiful place if they were true. But they aren’t true. And the world is a much more uglier place because they aren’t.
It is a phrase that at worst is deliberately deceptive, and at best a high purely intellectual point of view. It’s so high that it has nothing to do with anything down in the real world. Or as Woody Allen said, “The problem with intellectuals is you can be absolutely brilliant and still have no idea what’s going on.”
To a certain degree it’s clear that there’s no fundamental difference between races. But to conclude from that fact that there is no such thing as racism, shows someone is just living in a world of theory in their own minds, and confusing it with the real world everyone else lives in. It’s a mental state that says: If there is no rational reason for something to be happening, then it isn’t happening.
They completely leave out human experience. They, as white people, may have no experience of being racially discriminated against for being black. But they, as white people, may have been discriminated against in terms of their class status. So according to their experience, racism doesn’t exist, just classism. And when blacks recount experiences of racism to them, whether by the police, getting jobs or housing, or just randomly everyday events, just because of their black skin, these intellectuals scoff at them. “Oh you silly, silly people. You aren’t discriminated against because of your race. You’re only discriminated against because of your class. Same as me. You just need a good historical, sociological education on the subject.”
Then you will hear some white women intellectuals who will admit that racism does exist, but only to add that sexism is even stronger. A view they establish on their non-experience of racism, their own experiences with sexism, and watching Hillary Clinton not being elected president… twice. Their conclusion to that is: privileged, college educated, white women elites are more discriminated against than black men. Of course only a few of them come right out and say it like that, because most are smart enough to know how ridiculous it would sound out loud.
FOR YOU CLASSISM AND RACISM DON’T HAVE THE SAME EFFECT?
There is a quantum difference between the two. And I am speaking from experience, not from a college educated thesis I’m writing. I know what it’s like to be black in incredible racist environments. I also know what it’s like to be discriminated against because of classism, myself also belonging to the lowest class in society pushing a shopping cart around one of the wealthiest cities in the world. I’ve experienced the ill effects of both, from all different classes and races. There is a difference between racism and just being discriminated against. You can be discriminated against because you’re poor, for example in an expensive clothing store or restaurant where they may not bother to serve you. However if they find out that you are not poor and can actually afford whatever it is they are selling, their attitude, treatment and opinion of you can change on a dime. And this is where racism and classism can overlap. Not where racism ends and classism begins, but where what race you are in defines what class you’re in. Because for many if you are black, you belong to a certain class, the lowest class, and they don’t care if you are driving a Mercedes or pushing a shopping cart.
Racial discrimination is different from what you could call honest open racism. Honest racism is not just discrimination, it’s also an open desire to control, humiliate, torture, rape and murder. It’s also one of the many reasons why people who are blatantly prejudice, resist being called “racist”, because they say they don’t want to humiliated, torture, rape or murder black people. Or at least they aren’t honest about it, but these same people will make endless excuses for it when it actually does happen.
Racism has nothing to do with classism. They can hate black people, and if they find out you personally are worth a billion dollars that hatred might increase or decrease, depending on which way they swing. But it doesn’t go away.
If you are white you can escape the discrimination of poverty, or your “class status” if you want to be more vague about it, and that would be the end of it. But if you are black you can raise yourself above all of your circumstances, and still be thought of as the lowest of the low, and still have to deal with racism everyday of your life. Not being just discriminated against, but people being able to control, humiliate, and murder you, and get away with it. And knowing it’s not just you, but something your children, and children’s children will have to deal with it as well.
That’s the kind of experience these “it’s not racism it’s classism” types can’t even conceive of. In fact it’s hard to conceive of it even while you’re experiencing it. Just listen to Elijah McClain and George Floyd’s last words:
AND TO YOU THIS PURELY INTELLECTUAL POINT OF VIEW IS A HINDRANCE TO PROGRESS?
No, I think it’s a hindrance to anyone who isn’t purely intellectual. There has been a historic shift in thinking in America. Some people are comparing it to the sixties. I wouldn’t know I didn’t live during the sixties. But it’s definitely the most powerful shift in consciousness I’ve experienced during my lifetime.
This shift is from a purely intellectual and practical thinking consciousness to a very emotional empathic consciousness. The white intellectuals and pragmatists are complaining that the protests are too emotional and reactive. Of course they are emotional and reactive, if they weren’t emotional they wouldn’t be happening at all. Intellectually speaking everyone knows about police brutality, but they’ve reacted the way intellectuals always do: observe and comment on it. And this observation and commentary is what they consider “action”. And pragmatists will say there is something wrong with what’s happening but will only support “practical action”, which 95% of the time means just accepting the situation as it is as a matter of pragmatism.
But this time, and why this time is up for infinite debate, this time white people reacted not intellectually but emotionally. They don’t want to just comment on it anymore. For the first time their empathy was with the man slowly being killed, not with finding justifications for him being killed. For the first time they didn’t care whether he had broken the law, whether he was resisting arrest, or if he was drunk or on drugs, or he had a criminal record. Again why this time after all these decades is a mystery, but this time they were sensitively empathic to the point of pain, and said this must stop, and they don’t care how practical or impractical an approach has to be taken.
However it must be pointed out this was the white Americans reaction. Black America’s reaction was something different. For us watching it caused a collective depression. We saw this and just gave up. The thinking being “This is never gonna stop. They’re gonna keep on doing this to us and nothing is ever gonna change.”
Metaphysically it’s only when you let go, and surrender things happen. And that’s what occurred. The moment we gave up was the same moment White America finally decided to do something.
I’m talking about this shift in consciousness with Black Americans because that’s my culture, and White Americans because that’s the dominant culture. What this shift in consciousness was, if there was any, in the American Hispanic, Asian and Middle Eastern cultures obviously I cant speak on.
DO YOU SEE THIS SHIFT AS PERMANENT OR JUST PEOPLE JUMPING ON THE BANDWAGON?
First we have to acknowledge there are people who haven’t been affected at all by this shift in empathy. They are the ones who see empathy as a weakness. I know this conservative white guy I met in person once, who I argue with allot on Facebook. He himself was once brutally beaten up by the police, which even he says they did just for kicks. And he had a friend who he said was wrongfully shot dead in the streets by the cops. And he still supports the police against the protesters.
“If I can watch my friend get killed by the cops, do you really think I give a rat’s ass about police killing black people?”
When I questioned him further about it he came right out and said “I have no empathy. I’ve gone beyond that. I think personally you have to.”
There are people who honestly don’t believe in empathy even when it comes to themselves.
Still others go even further, getting real pleasure seeing people in pain. Who loved watching videos of cops beating up and strangling people to death. Watching George Floyd slowly die was not tragic to them, but a moment of entertainment. There is an incredibly large block of people like that in America, many of them in power. And not just police power. Which means it may be awhile before we see any real advancement from this shift in consciousness.
Still it is a shift. It’s a very visible viable change in the way many Americans feel about things. How effective it will be remains to be seen. Maybe the full effectiveness won’t be realized until years from now, but it definitely marks an important flash point in history.
And this shift in consciousness is really represented by the people who were against the BLM movement to begin with. Like Roger Goodell and John Elway saying they were wrong about the kneeling. There is no benefit to them to say that. In fact its the opposite because they are going against a large part of their fan base. NASCAR banning the confederate flag is huge, because the majority of their fans are actually for it. They aren’t jumping on a bandwagon, they are going against their own. They are in the minority and they are taking a stand no matter what. That also goes for the police who’ve been taking a knee which for many is career suicide.
People talk about these people jumping on the bandwagon. But who I see really jumping on it are all these people who never had a real opinion on it either way, and probably still don’t, all of a sudden talking about how wrong it is. The people in the march with Black Lives Matter signs, but as soon as they see me on the side street, women pull their purses over their shoulders, and men put their arms around their girl friends. All the “BLACK LIVES MATTER” signs in store windows who would still call the police if they saw me in front of their store too long. The people jumping on the bandwagon are those looters who didn’t go to the peaceful protest hours before, but when word got out there was a possibility of looting, and being able to bust into the stores where they buy their $200 shoes, then they arrived. Those were the people jumping on the bandwagon. Along with the poetry jams for Black Lives Matter, bike rides for Black Lives Matter, meditation circles for Black Lives Matter etc.
There are also allot of black people doing their best to cash in on it all. The whole “buy black” campaign, while is founded in altruism, there are allot of blacks who themselves actually don’t give a fuck who the police fuck up as long as it isn’t them. Even the actual groups who call themselves Black Lives Matter, they are getting millions of dollars in donations, but what exactly do they even do?
WHAT ABOUT THE PROTESTERS PROMISING “NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!” TO THE ELITES IN POWER? DO YOU CONSIDER THAT A VALID STRATEGY?
When you talk about the “elites in power” you have to realize that there are two types of elites. The left wing Liberal/Intellectual elites. And the right wing Power/Ruling elites. Both of these sides are white, although the right have newly given in to tokenism as in Herman Cain and Ben Carson, and the left practice a “Equality among Elites”, Obama being the greatest example of that trope.
As far as “No Justice No Peace”, that threat only works on the left liberal/intellectual elites, who we know want peace for themselves, but only care about the facade of justice when it comes to the rest of the populous, in other words enough of a facade that it doesn’t disturb their peace. But the mistake that we’ve come to believe is by attacking them we are attacking power. We are not, because they have no power. Left wing liberal elitism is a privilege, the effect or result of the accumulation of power, not the cause or root of it. The real power is held by the right wing Ruling Elites. These Ruling Elites want neither justice nor peace, and the threat of taking away the latter to achieve the former is a belly aching laugh to them. Not only are we barking up the wrong tree, we are setting the wrong tree on fire.
HOW DO WE APPEAL TO THESE “POWER” ELITES?
You don’t. Or at least you can’t appeal to right wing power with left wing liberal ideals. They only understand power and force, they don’t give up anything unless something with superior power and forces compels them to. The American Revolution was not fought by common ordinary Americans against the King of England, but by the richest most powerful men in America, who even at that time were some of the richest most powerful men in the world, against the richest most powerful men in England. Slavery was stopped because the most powerful men in the Northern states resented the unfair advantage Southern plantation owners had with the free labor costs of slaves. Add to that a hundred years later the power of the North forcing those southern states to desegregate, not by negotiation but by brute force.
The only time the power establishment of any entity is defeated is by superior power, and circumstances that have evolved beyond anyone’s control. Not just by one or the other, but both in tandem. And to the right wing it is “defeat”. The right wing has no consciousness of compromise. Unlike the left which considers compromise a victory in of itself. To the right wing there is only absolute and total victory, or defeat. With any ‘compromise’ constituting defeat.
AND YOU THINK BECAUSE OF THIS THERE WILL BE NO REAL REFORM?
I’m saying these two factors have to be in play for real reform to occur. There is a lot of talk about Camden, NJ, where they defunded and overhauled their police department. And if you look closely those two factors were in play: superior power and circumstances beyond anyone’s control. Let’s look at the circumstance evolving beyond anyone’s control. Camden was broke. It literally didn’t have enough money to pay their police at union salaries rates. A union is powerful as long as the company is profitable. If the company starts going under, the union loses all its bargaining power. Police unions are one of the most powerful and politically influential in the country. But they were also up against a superior power in the coalition of not just progressive reformers, but also Republican conservatives all the way up to Chris Christie who was the governor of New Jersey at the time, who despite their law and order dictum, consoled themselves with the opportunity to cut costs and wipe another Labor Union off the map.
WHAT’S BEEN YOUR GENERAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE POLICE?
It’s been different at different times and places. When I was growing up the cops were just another gang you had to deal with. When you encountered them you never knew what was gonna happen. They could fuck with you for no reason, just like gang members. Like gang members they all seem to have some chip on their shoulders, and they’re just out to hassle you in general. Both could kill you if they wanted to, and both liked letting you know that. The police take it as an insult if you say to them they are no better than gangsters, and gang members take it as an insult if you tell them they are no better than cops.
The difference was the cops lived way out in suburbs like Simi Valley, and they came into the neighborhoods with the mentality of big game hunters. Or as Jack London called “Military Mercenaries’’. They came in as if everyone they saw was the enemy. While the gang members who lived there, they also had the same “anyone not in my clique is the enemy.” Their instinct was paradoxically warrior like, self preservationist, as well as self destructive, and having a good time while they did it. Whereas the cops seemed to function on purely sadomasochistic urges that their “qualified immunity” gave free rein to, and like the gangsters, having a really good time while they did it.
An ex cop once wrote that 15% of cops are just in it for sadism sake. And the fact that they know they can get away with anything. Then he said there are the 15% who are genuinely “good cops” incorruptible and who will do that right thing no matter what. The remaining 70% follow the lead of whoever they happen to be with. Which is clear when you look at the George Floyd killing. The three cops, who represent 70% of cops, were following their lead cop, who in this case represented the most sadistic 15%.
HAVE YOU HAD ANY POSITIVE EXPERIENCES WITH THE POLICE?
Yes. And that is important to note. When I was homeless in Santa Monica, I lived right on the border line between the City of Santa Monica and the City of Venice. Venice is patrolled by the LAPD, whereas Santa Monica has its own police force separate from LAPD. And in that one block on Rose street I got fucked with more by LAPD than I did in all my time in the city of Santa Monica. I later found out that Santa Monica kept their police force under control. The Santa Monica city council made it very clear that they would not allow their police force to intimidate and bully them. So it was basically against the rules for the police to fuck with people. And they didn’t, I had lots of run ins with the police while I was in Santa Monica, but they usually just told me as long as I don’t cause any trouble there won’t be any problems. Some even went so far as to say if I needed any help with anything to let them know. Which was really bizarre to me, and that’s was the first time I realized that most police officers didn’t even want to fuck with you. If they are told not to do it they won’t. There was those times when I ran into some cop who I knew wanted to fuck me up. But it was against the rules so they couldn’t do it.
When I read up on how Camden NJ disbanded the police and put it back together again under city council control, I realize that Santa Monica already had something very similar in place.
Also when I got back from Thailand in 2014 something had changed in the policing of the homeless in LA. There was obviously some sort of directive from the top to stop fucking with us. I see the cops coming at me and I’m thinking “Aw fuck, what now?” But almost all my encounters with the police have been of them giving me info on homeless resources. They’ve been going out of their way to be helpful. While I did run into cops who I could see wanted nothing better then to fuck me up, luckily they were with a lead officer who wasn’t gonna allow that to happen. Again in the George Floyd killing the cop on his neck was the lead officer.
WHAT DO YOU SAY ABOUT THE ISSUE OF “BLACK ON BLACK” CRIME?
It depends on how the issue is used. Because it’s almost always used by the police to comparatively minimize, or even justify police brutality and killings. Sometimes they even use it in the context of equal rights. “Blacks kill blacks all the time. Why can’t we police get it in on the fun?”
Idealistically speaking the police should have the OPPOSITE EFFECT to the murder and mayhem that occurs in a community, not just a smaller contribution to it. And when you add to it the blatant discrimination of the justice system and prison for profit industry, instead of being the answer to the problem of crime in the black community, all three are in fact huge contributing factors to the problems that black communities across the country have to struggle with.
On the other hand the term “black on black” crime when phrased primarily by activists in the black community, is used to rightly identify the most destructive issue facing black communities. But I still think it’s a misnomer. If you need something but don’t have anything, you look for someone who has something. That’s the basic criteria for theft and robbery. Then there are reasons separately for gang violence and drug violence. Although all three can intertwine, they are all three different types of crimes, and they are all committed for three different reasons. It is true if you commit a crime against a black person you are far less likely to get caught, or even sought after, then if you committed it against a white person. And there is an expressive self creative/self destructive dynamic that is intrinsic within Black culture. And a certain percentage of the human race are just born career criminals, it’s a matter of simply being born into an environment fertile to it. But black people don’t start out robbing, killing or selling drugs to other black people because that other person is black, or because they are intentionally trying to destroy their community. So trying to appeal to them to stop because “they are black, and they are harming other black people’’, or because it’s destroying the black community, is not addressing any of the root causes of their motivations to begin with. Which is why it often goes in one ear and out the other of the people they are trying to communicate with. And when I say “black person” I would have to put out a caveat for the Candace Owen types.
WHAT EFFECT DO YOU THINK THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT WILL HAVE IN THE FUTURE?
An amazing amount has been done already in the conversations, proposals and actual policy changes that have been made in just the last couple of weeks. But I’m not optimistic. Not at all. I base that pessimism on the two other popular movements I saw get crushed over the last decade: The Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, and Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016. In both cases at first they were dismissed, then they began to swell and get serious popular support and it seemed like something was really going to happen. Then the corporate media completely blacked them out, and the Democrats co-opted their lingo while systematically dismantling them.
It’s almost hard to remember but Occupy Wallstreet had tens of thousands of people together across the country protesting. You would think something on that scale would not be easily stopped, much less ignored. But that is what happened to it. The media simply stopped reporting on it, and we know that the Obama administration while giving lip support for the movement was using the police and FBI hand in hand with Wallstreet to actively undermine it. Which punches a hole in the argument that many progressives have, that its best to vote for Hillary or Biden because they will be easier to hold accountable and pull to the left when they are in office. Many of those protesters pinned their hopes on Obama responding positively to their protests. But the opposite happened. They were given hope, then that hope was snuffed out. Very symbolic of the Obama administration in general.
Same with the Bernie Sanders campaign. That was even more dramatic, the amount of enthusiasm and passion that it brought out in people was stunning. It was really unprecedented, and it went way beyond Sanders himself. People got so involved. My mother sent him $27, the first political contribution she had made in years. Even I started campaigning for him, went to rallies and phone banked. I saw people who hadn’t done anything creative in years, suddenly bought markers and paints to make signs and T-shirts. It was really a cultural happening.
You would think that the media would have covered it the way they covered Obama campaign in 2008. But they purposely black out any news of him with shocking disregard. Rallies with hundreds of thousands of people, and nare clip of it on mainstream media. Then you had the DNC establishment openly say that they were gonna pick who the nominee was, and that the voting process was really a mere formality.
That seems to already be playing out again. The media reported non stop the looting and violence, which if you added it all together would barely constitute one square city mile. But the protest in Hollywood with a 100,000 people peacefully marching wasn’t heard of at all, or downplayed. And the Democrats are doing their kneeling in African scarfs on capitol hill, while already making deals with the police unions to insure the best way to water down the “police reform bill” as to make it meaningless.
DO YOU THINK BLM MOVEMENT WILL HAVE ANY EFFECT ON THE ELECTION?
It could have an effect on regional politics. Something could be done about the voter suppression of blacks in Georgia and the rest of the south, which hasn’t been done so openly since the 50’s. There might be something finally done with Flint Michigan’s water pollution. Maybe even places like Standing Rock. There are several proposals to reform the police and systematic racism in housing. Whether they will win or not, the point is at the local political level people are fighting and not backing down. And that could have an effect on local elections of the Congress and Senate.
But as far as the general election, I believe there is zero chance Biden will beat Trump. (In June of 2020 Biden was leading Trump in the polls by double digits.)
WHAT DO YOU BASE THAT ON?
It goes back to when Obama was elected, in his inauguration speech he talked about how the cynics were wrong about him ever becoming president because there had been a paradigm shift in the ground beneath their feet. He was right. That was the most accurate statement I ever heard him make. And that paradigm shift that elected a black man named Barack Hussien Obama President of the United States in 2008, was the same shift responsible for electing a openly clownish, inexperienced, unqualified, con man, reality show star to be the most powerful man in the world 8 years later.
People wanted radical change in 2008, and thought the act of electing a black man, which was quite an extraordinary historical event at the time, with his promises of hope and change would do the trick. But it was all smoke and mirrors, as Obama campaigned from a strong left position that he never had any intention of following through with. No sooner was he elected he made it clear that the fact that he was black REALLY didn’t matter, that there wasn’t going to be any changes, and he wasn’t going to govern from the strong left, which is why most people voted for him, especially in the primary, but that he was going to govern from moderate conservative middle-right. Which is what the majority of people had just voted against, in the primaries and the general, and he followed through by being frustratingly disciplined at Bill Clinton’s “middle road” “third way” and “leading from behind” strategies for 8 straight years.
In 2016 people still wanted radical change, since they didn’t get any of it for 8 years, even though they voted for it 8 years before. And this time it was gonna be real change. There was going to be no more middle road. The democrats had had enough of the “Conservative Liberalism” of the Clinton/Obama eras. And the republicans were not going to elect another “Compassionate Conservative’’ to lead the party. While all the political analysts on the left and right were making their supremely confident predictions as to who was gonna win the primaries (and later the general), based on history, statistics and conventional logic, they were completely oblivious that the emotional FEEL of the country was that Americans were going to elect someone historically unconventional to either the right or to the left. That was one of the many reasons they couldn’t see that Hillary Clinton was never going to be president. That’s the main reason Jeb Bush was never going to be President. Neither were those who were just a little to the left or a little to the right like Elisabeth Warren, Ted Cruz or Rubio. And that’s why Joe Biden was not then, or now, or will ever be President. In 2016 America was going to vote in someone who didn’t just say they were going to change things, but someone whose very existence was going to change things. That was either going to be the Jewish Socialist or the Orange Reality Show Star. They didn’t allow the Jewish Socialist to be an option. So the country decided to give the Orange Reality Star a chance. Which even more than Obama’s election was an extraordinarily shocking historical event.
People are promoting Biden as a “return to normal”. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if they made that his campaign slogan.They are again underestimating how many people would rather risk things changing for the worse than to return back to what that normal was.
SO YOU DON’T THINK ANYTHING WILL FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGE?
All the levers of power are controlled by those who either don’t want any fundamental change, such as the financial establishments, the DNC and the corporate media, which you could probably classify as one single body. Or those, ‘those” being the Koch Brother Libertarians, who want radical revolutionary change, but in the direction of abolishing all social programs that benefit anyone but themselves, such as public schools, medicare, social security, welfare, minimum wages, nationwide infrastructure etc.
The Democratic Party’s platform, and the mainstream corporate media message that works in lockstep with them is “Things will either stay the same for you, or they will get worse.” The DNC obviously offering the first option, and using Republican Party as the threat of the second. And the Democrats and the corporate media have been shocked that the public keeps choosing the Republicans, with the conscious knowledge that things will get worse, rather than things staying the same. Or as the democrats like to call it “People voting against their own best interests’’. I say “keep choosing” because it didn’t start in 2016, it was the 2014 midterms when the Democrats were appalled that not only didn’t they win back the house but lost the Senate, just when they thought they were doing such a magnificent job. Instead of taking stock in themselves, and wondering if maybe they weren’t doing such a great job. They simply blamed the voters for being stupid. That was a harbinger of what was to come two years later, and maybe the same this November.
(Biden would go on to win the Presidency aided by the greatest world wide cultural effort in history to remove a US President, a once in a hundred year plague, and two shocking GOP loses. One in Georgia due to Stacy Abrams extraordinary work in voter reform, and in Arizona caused by the equally remarkable organizing of the Native American communities who were adversely effected by COVID-19. Biden won 7 million more votes than Trump, but that didn’t tell the whole story. Like Hillary and her 3 million more votes in 2016, those 7 million votes came from running up the score in New York and California. But Trump would win more votes than Obama in 2012. Pointing out that in 2016 Trump was elected by the electoral college by less than 80,000 in 4 swing states. In 2020 Biden won the electoral college by wining only 48,000 more votes in three states.
And that bares repeating: with 200,000 Americans dead from Corona virus, threatening nuclear war with North Korea with his Twitter account, and an uncountable four years of hourly “Duck Soup” news stories coming out of the White House, DONALD TRUMP WAS 48,000 VOTES FROM BEING REELECTED. While most dems were dancing in the street with joy, the DNC itself was unable to hide their disappointment. They predicted a landslide, solidifying their majority in the house and winning back the senate, but they lost 12 seats in the Congress and only tied the senate because of Stacy Abrams in Georgia’s two senate race runoffs. And were only 48,000 votes and a pandemic away from losing to Trump again. Predictable this underperformance the Democrats openly blamed on the voters, not themselves. However a few were thinking more clearly. If this was not just their best, but their greatest effort, and they barely won, what’s gonna happen next time? Most didn’t even consider that, as they were too busy cheering how the country has been “saved” and had turned away from disaster. But those remembering further back and thinking further ahead noted: isn’t this the way people reacted when Obama was elected? That his Presidency was a new era and the country had finally turned the corner on politics and race relations, completely oblivious to what lay ahead. People are crying tears of joy at the first woman of color Vice President, the same as Obama inauguration [and some of the exact same people]. But if Obama’s two sound victories over competent candidates laid the foundation for a Trump presidency, is Biden/Harris just squeaking by the most incompetent leader in history of modern world politics signifying a future, not only more horrifying than Trump, but more prepared, competent and permanent than him?)
THEN WHAT DO YOU SEE HAPPENING IN THE NEXT COUPLE OF YEARS?
There is no way of predicting the future like that. Or at least I can’t. We are certainly living in nonlinear times. The center is definitely not holding. Just when you think you’ve gotten used to the “new normal”, every time it seems the horror has plateaued, it goes up another level. A few weeks ago we were grinding on 100,000 Americans dead from a once in a 100 year plague. Today 100,000 people dead is a mere afterthought. In fact it’s nostalgic now to think back a few years ago when our only worry was nuclear war with North Korea. I think it’s becoming inevitable that in a year or two from now we will be living in circumstances that will make us look back on 2020 as the calm before the storm. What those circumstances will be I can’t conceive of, and really don’t want to think about.
AND YOU DON’T FEEL THERE IS ANY HOPE THAT WE CAN AVOID THAT DISASTER?
In many ways I don’t think we can avoid it, and in some other ways I don’t think we should avoid it. When Jack London wrote “The Iron Heel” in 1908 he was a politically active socialist. But even he predicted that it would be 300 years before socialism would be able to take hold in America. This centuries long prophesy completely caught his socialist contemporaries off guard with its pessimism. Primarily because they were optimistic in 1908, that a socialist revolution in America was just a few years away.
But London wrote “I should like to have socialism. Yet I know that socialism is not the next step; I know that capitalism must have its life first.”
Trump is not the cause, but an unconscious, and maybe even unwilling result of a constricting energy that’s happening all around the world: Brexit, Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, Duarte, Bolsonaro etc. the list is quite tiring. This authoritarian rebirth has a collective consciousness and will to live all its own, and it is determined to march through all left wing appeals to logic and empathy. Trump simply being the ultimate example of it.
There’s no doubt that our day will come, but there is no denying that for Trump, Koch, the Brexiters, Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, Duarte, their days are now. They are in power and by virtue of that power they, and those who come after them, will remain in power for a very long time. Maybe even beyond our lifetimes. That is until a superior power, and I’m not talking about “people power” I’m talking about “POWER POWER”, goes up against them along with circumstances that go beyond anyone’s ability to predict or control.
People talk about how another four years of Trump could turn this country into something like Hitler’s Germany. I think that’s over dramatic. For one because, and this is an understatement, Trump doesn’t have anywhere near the level of mind it takes to recreate the culture in that Germanic model, even if he did aspired to it.
However what I do see him “achieving”, is pulling back the curtain on the Oligarchy that this country has already become. Remember all the powers he has now he didn’t create, he inherited them from Bush and Obama. The Patriot Act, that Obama campaigned on toning down, but instead subtlety increasing its powers after he was elected, such as giving the president the power to arrest anyone without cause or trial. Trump now has those powers, and he won’t be subtle about using them. And when he does he will reveal this country to be no better than a Banana Republic. We don’t think of the country in those terms because of the comparative competency in which the United States is run compared to a Latin American dictatorship. But another 4 years of Trump could irreparable cripple the competency and efficiency in which this government functions. Because he openly eschews those two qualities in preference to his own personal survival instincts, whims, and will power.
Which are all the traits of an incompetent dictatorship, and personality traits that a huge swath of his supporters share. There’s a good chance he will imprint those personality traits on the presidency itself from here on in. His legacy might be that he openly and permanently puts the “Banana” in front of the American “Republic”.
But as to concerns of America becoming another Nazi Germany, you have to remember before World War II, the pogroms of eugenics, racial superiority, segregation and Imperial colonialism were not outside mainstream thought. The truth being in America it was mainstream thinking. The only thing that concerned most people about Hitler was that he was German. And their primary fear of him was not his racist laws and beliefs, which many countries shared and were sympathetic to especially in the US, but the historic power and the willingness of the Germans to go to war with their neighboring white Europeans.
It was only after the Nazis had run their inevitable course and the world saw the results of those long held beliefs finally taken to their ultimate conclusion, that such catch words as racism, anti semitism and colonialism began to acquire negative connotations, as did the first genuine efforts to confront them.
In just a few short years what occurred was the most powerful transformation of human thought in the known history of the world. What about the 70–80 million people that were killed? I know it may sound pathological callous, but death and transformation can’t be separated. Both results are locked to each other.
Which is what makes me so dreadful and simultaneously hopeful for the future. Although I have to admit there is very little basis for hope, and overwhelming evidence for dread.
THAT’S A PRETTY DEPRESSING NOTE TO END ON.
Maybe, but you’re the one who just asked a career homeless bum sleeping in an alley for his political opinion. What were you expecting?
June 2020
A Bumdog Coda
Some people say my “identity” is wrapped up in being homeless. Thats true on a superficial level, but not more than that. The truth of the matter is I learned long ago my mind functions better when Im on the streets. I had an apartment from late 2001 to early 2004. I got it with the purpose of concentrating on getting my long to-do list of writing done. But once I was inside I didn’t do any writing. I didn’t do any reading, I didn’t do anything. I had to get a job to pay for the apartment, and I used the place to sleep, eat, watch cable TV, illegally download music and movies, sleep, wake up and do the whole thing all over again. For 2 1/2 years I did that. I stayed there that long because it was easier to keep the apartment then leave it. Towards the end when it became easier to leave it than to keep it, I left.
I knew guys who were homeless, got themselves together, got a job and an apartment for a while, then fucked it up and ended back on the streets. Id see them practically in tears “Oh god I had it! (Sob) I finally got off the streets (sobbing), and was doing good. Now Im back exactly where I started from! (Sobbing uncontrollable).”
The night I left my apartment I went back to the Fairfax District, laid down in the same alley I had years before with only a blanket. I thought maybe I would have some regrets being back on the streets after all this time. I woke up the next morning cold, on the cement and staring up at the open sky…and didn’t feel anything. No regrets, no sense of defeat, no nothing. My only thought was that I needed a better blanket.
Thats when I realized having a roof over my head meant nothing to me. And the chaos and forced interaction of being homeless enforced a kind discipline on me. Probable the greatest irony was now that I was BACK on the streets, I started writing again. I wrote out the first draft of a novella, but didn’t know whether to rewrite it as a screenplay or a larger novel. A few months later I moved to Downtown LA, where I slept in a parking lot, but still managed to write, direct and star in a one man play at the Downtown Playhouse, called “Masterbation Theatre Presents”.
Sleeping in that parking lot is where I realized I could make a feature film with a cheap video camera and a computer to edit it on, all while I was still homeless. A process that took me 3 years from the idea to its completion. During those three years I was also curating art shows around the district with the local artists and photographers. It was the most creative period of my life. And it all started after I finally got out of that apartment.
Just about everything I’ve creatively accomplished Ive done while homeless. In just the last few years I started a series of film tutorials, called “The Bumdog School of Film”, my photographs on the streets have been shown in a gallery in Denver, I made another feature film, and became a PHOTOJOURNALIST.
When Im on the streets I’m in my element. For one I love opening my eyes, seeing the sky and breathing the fresh air. I don’t even like tents for those reasons. On the streets if I wake up depressed or just don’t want to engage with anyone, I can’t just lay there all day, because Im usually sleeping in a business parking spot or doorway. No matter how much I don’t want to move, I don’t have a choice. I gotta get up, Ive got to interact with people. My dread and lethargy isn’t given the time and space to self-cultivate.
Pushing my shopping cart down the ally in the sunshine (god bless Los Angeles weather) greeting the early morning workers and joggers, my energy and mood instantly shifts to appreciation and looking forward to the rest of the day.
I originally picked up a shopping cart 6 years before when I got off the plane from Thailand, I needed it to carry my bags until I found a place to store them. Because of a teenage hip injury it helped me walk, and from that day onward I went everywhere with it and I kept everything in it: blankets, groceries, clothes, books etc. I could go anywhere and lay down sleep. Stop anywhere and eat or read. At first I resented the need for such a large appendage. But eventually I began to see it as my portable Diogenesic Barrel.
And exercise! Sometimes it could weigh 250–300 pounds of just…stuff. And Id pushed it an average of 2–3 miles a day. Twice that amount if I felt like cruising up to Hollywood and back. The day after something like that, I could go into the gym and bench press 400 pounds sets on the machine.
My haters said I was just using the shopping cart because I liked getting the sympathy of people. First of all people who say that don’t realize exactly how cruel this world can be. It’s not that I liked getting the sympathy of people, it’s that I liked seeing the sympathy of people. I like seeing people for who they are. When people see me with that shopping cart, there’s often a relief, a relief that they don’t have to pretend to be something that they are not. They can be as kind, or as cruel as they truly are with me. I like seeing which way they go. And there are those who for various reasons tighten up and look away if they see me pushing that shopping cart. Sometimes the reason is because around me they don’t need to pretend to be someone they are not. And they WANT to pretend to be someone they are not.
The saying that “If a person is kind to you, but cruel to the homeless, then that person is cruel.” And I apply that to my best friend or my own mother. My most honest and genuine friends Ive met from behind that shopping cart. In fact it galls me to meet someone without it, knowing the same person smiling in my face, wouldn’t spit on me if I was on fire if they saw me with it pushing down the street.
For the all the above mentioned reasons and then some, I was kind of afraid of ever getting a place ever again. I was afraid of living without the “enforced discipline”. Over the years there were several agencies that contacted me to arrange a place for me to stay. It was a long odious process. I always declined. Give it to someone who really wants and needs a place to stay, was my thinking. The worker that was supposed to be helping me I heard from two times in six months. Which was fine with me.
But during the first few days of the lockdown I was desperate to figure out what I was gonna do. The current situation made being homeless a disadvantage to me for the first time in years. Around this time Catalina Hinojosa a worker at one of the agencies happened to contact me through Instagram. She offered to become my worker and help me find a place. This time I accepted the offer. Catalina was a hustler, she really went to work to get me a place. I appreciated her efforts, but after the first month of the initial shock of the lockdown I was becoming adjusted to the new reality. I was no longer as desperate as I was that first week. The grip of uncertainty was loosening, as was the need for the security of a place to stay.
By the end of summer I felt I no longer needed it, like most people I had developed a routine that worked around the inconveniences, and I looked back with humorous nostalgia at my initial panic. But Catalina kept hustling for me. I tried to tell her not to make me a priority, but she was still going full speed ahead to help. I felt really bad that she was wasting her time on me, but I didn’t have the heart to tell she should stop.
I never quite understood the process, but apparently I had some kind of voucher, and if I didn’t take an apartment by the end of November I was gonna be off the list. That was something to consider, but I was still on the side of staying out in the streets. Besides things were starting to ease up. The restaurants were opening up again, and the people at Starbucks said in a couple of weeks they were gonna open up the inside to seating. I would be able to work in there and I wouldn’t have to spend all that money on hotels anymore.
Then the SURGE happened. Everything was locked down AGAIN! We were all right back to square one. And I was looking at a whole winter of being locked OUT. Thats when I finally decided to take them up on a place. They offered me a spot in Korea town, which was close but I got a bad vibe off it, and didn’t even check it out. It was getting close to my deadline, it was now or never.
The next place they offered me was in Hollywood, I said Id take it. They said they wanted me to see it to make sure I liked it. I said it didn’t matter, I’ll take it regardless.
And so here I am. Since Ive been here I’ve been determined to get as much work done as possible. But unfortunately what I had feared would happen, has been happening. There are days where I don’t want to get up from bed and just I don’t. Sometimes I have to pry myself out of the room just to go outside and get something to eat. I still grab a shopping cart, walk down into the Fairfax district to hustle, take photographs and hang out with friends. But it’s gotten less and less.
I wrote out a list of things to do: Self publish five photo books. Finish my Bumdog School of Film video tutorials. Self publish an updated collection of my writings. Write and direct another feature film. As well as enforcing a discipline on myself in terms of work, meditation and exercise. My success has been….its…um…better than nothing.
And that’s it for now. I know this is a fairly anti-climatic way of ending this book. But I get the feeling the future for all of us is going to become much more…eventful.
March 2021
Bumdog Torres
[ If you would like a copy of the printed version of this book its $75 plus $15 postage bumdog@gmail.com]
