:: esoterica ::
(click for larger view)
These camp sites are not especially hospitable, despite extraordinary measures to keep them ship shape. #OccupyIraq is no better in many ways. Sleep is difficult.
Some claim #OccupyPortland (OPDX) is frequented by Nike executives, posing as homeless. That's not really it though. Some families there, with kids, are truly homeless and are just looking for mercy, have a hard time sleeping in freeway dividers, especially with children.
If you're in social services, you're thinking "intake" i.e. there's some triage going, a sorting out, and a long menu of next stops, including some camps, but better established and set up to impart skills, give campers a new angle on life. More like BarCamps. But where? Are they secret? In Russia? The gulag professoriate should have them planned by now (or is "the future" not their business or cup of tea?).
Speaking of BarCamps with their unconference format, I got a worried email from Eve, perhaps following me on Twitter. I was bringing up those Broadway Metroplex theaters again, thinking about the spontaneous film festival we could be having, geared to an audience primed to think and talk anyway (that's about all that goes on in PDV, with sleep hard to come by). Eve also has designs on those theaters.
I was thinking of that Town Hall we held at Portland Center Stage. Theater and Town Hall go together and here's a vacant multiplex theater. Of course we would need sponsors. That would be the interesting part. Who would sponsor and who might feel like not participating because of those sponsors? That's a question for campers more generally.
Also, part of my pattern is to check out abandoned theater halls, like The Stanley, and to propose to repurpose them for curriculum use. I'm really into having movies be on the syllabus, just like books, and sometimes it's worth having a bigger screen with a serious sound system, the shared experience of others in the same space. You have a different kind of consciousness in a movie hall or meetinghouse. That's why Quakers come together, because the sum of the parts is less than the whole.
:: movie night @ opdx ::
Maybe the theaters were closed to install high def digital projectors. Livingroom Theaters, down the street, is doing a thriving business. Laughing Horse has plenty of relevant videos, like Punishment Park, that we could be screening (or maybe something less disturbing). PSU could be giving lectures, about the History we should be learning. Bring your students. Have them interview and learn from real homeless for a change, maybe sign up for career training through a booth, for duty in a Reboot City.
We may end up inventing a host of new brands as a result of the Occupation. The troops seem to be rotating, but so slowly, into more interesting lines of work. At this point, a few more arm band colors might do the trick. Give me tiger stripes and send me in a loop, recruiting others. It's an animist badge. But anyway, we don't need these to stay effective.
I've long advocated fleets of bizmos geared for inter-encampment touring, a way of cross-fertilizing the various cultures. The various bases were in on some of these circuits. Depolarize in North America and the campus will become friendlier in other Occupation zones as well -- that's the theory anyway. Or re-polarize on different axes. Doesn't happen overnight of course.
