The Weekly's Swamp Buggy Girl

If I ever start reading the Seattle Weekly regularly again, it'll be Aimee Curl's fault. About a month ago, she took the community organization SAGE to task for their pathetic waffle on the Multi-Family Tax Exemption. This looked like an activist alert to testify at a hearing, followed by an email asking members to NOT testify. Some thought there was some sort of quid pro quo happening with the Mayor, but that's probably too simple an explanation. My guess is that it had more to do with complicated alliances and strange bedfellows in the community and on their board.

I know it's wrong, but I have to admit to a certain amount of evil glee in watching SAGE Director David West twist in the wind that week. These quotes pretty much had me rolling on the floor.

"The common assumption is that we're just rolling over to the powers that be," he says. "But it's actually more complicated than that."

Alrighty then. This brings up certain images I'd prefer not to have in my head. And then there was this:

"Chances are that we will be in a position in the future that maybe we won't agree with the mayor. That's quite possible."

Ya think? Jesus Dave, don't go too far out on a limb there!

But all of that is last month's news. This week, Nickelsville is on the cover of The Seattle Weekly, and Curl has written a surprisingly in-depth piece on the cracks in the Ten Year Plan and the 2,600 or so people who have fallen though. It being in The Weekly, I sort of expected it to suck, but Curl rises above. She's like one of those big-tired dune buggy drag racer monstrosities that bubbas race through the fetid swamps of Florida. The environment of total suckiness seems to have little hold on her.

Since she managed to write 4,400 words on the protest of Seattle's homeless sweeps without mentioning Real Change — the group that has already held three high profile encampments on this issue — I can only assume The Weekly's still pissed.

Yet, overall, she got it right. For someone who has attended just two Nickelsville organizing meetings, she captured the disturbingly grassroots tone of the group admirably, and raised some compelling doubt as to how successful this enterprise might be. She notes that the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness isn't, and asks the hard questions that too seldom arise outside the pages of Real Change. Bill Hobson at the Downtown Emergency Service Center and Alison Eisinger of the Coalition on Homelessness get in some solid hits. The usual Greg Nickels toe-suckers defend their boss and castigate Nickelsville organizers as off point. A few advocates and allies — who I'd hope might better understand the usefulness of finding a consistent target and then polarizing — graciously let Greg off the hook as well.

The whole Portland digression was sort of weird, but Curl apparently has a thing about that, so we'll forgive her. The point of comparing Nickelsville to Portlands Dignity Village when SHARE/WHEEL has successfully run a Seattle tent city for about a decade was lost on me. This, however, is a small flaw in an otherwise fine piece.

To answer the question that the article sets up, of course it's fair to hold Greg Nickels responsible for the City's failure to adequately address homelessness. He's sold the city to developers, made affordable housing an endangered species, and declared war on homeless campers while hiding behind a Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness that's clearly failing. She should have just asked me. It's not a hard question.

Apesma's Birthday

It was a year ago today that I posted this Captain Beefheart spoken word bit and thus launched my great adventure in bloggery. At the time I really didn't get blogs. My limited experience was that most of them suck, and that the popular political ones were a little like on-line talk radio, but more geeky. I didn't see the attraction. My motivation was simple. I was a writer who wasn't doing much writing. The blog, I figured, would be a daily discipline to sharpen the skills. That was all.

Along the way, a few things happened. The first was that writing everyday changed everything. Between the blog and teaching my class on homelessness and poverty, I developed new insights into an issue I've worked for twenty years. I decided that the federally encouraged ten year plans had more to do with neutralizing than ending homelessness. I realized that homelessness and the changing nature of our cities flows from the logic of globalization. I started to see past all the layers of "compassion" bullshit to reality, and became more intentional about building alliances across class. I became a better speaker and a more forceful advocate. I embraced conflict as an organizing strategy. I made new friends. I began a personal biography project. I got a divorce. I started working on a book. Life changed dramatically.

Clearly, blogging is not for the faint of heart.

The other thing is that I gained readers. The map above offers a geographic snapshot of recent readership. The graph nestled at left shows the steady climb to more than 4,000 unique visitors a month. The late-March spike last year was the blogospheric event when I clashed with the Seattle Weekly. Since October, Apesma has rountinely exceeded those numbers. A very cool chemistry has arisen in the comments section as well, and several friends have started their own blogs.

Apesma's gone from a Technorati rank of up in the three-millions somewhere to below 250,000. I'm hoping that this year I break the top hundred-thousand blogs barrier. With well over a hundred-million of these things out there, I'd be among the blogging semi-elite. Otherwise, I hope things slow down. I don't know how many more years like 2007 I can take.

A Season of Holiday Hate

Given the confluence of a recent grossly uninformed Seattle Times "Squatters, Be Gone" editorial, Nicole Brodeur’s recent revelations that the homeless are to be hated and feared, and yet another alarmist op-ed regarding the extremely sudden scourge of armed homeless drug addicts, C.R. Douglas’ very Seattle Crosscut piece asking whether it might be time to crack down, and the tasteless yuck fest at the expense of those who don’t have shit that appeared issue before last in the Seattle Weekly, I’m beginning to wonder whether the holiday season has been rededicated to hating the homeless? Hey Seattle, let’s start a new tradition!

When Real Change moved the Mayor’s official-but-lets-preserve-deniability policy of homeless sweeps to front and center by surfacing hard proof through our FOIA requests, we knew that we ran the risk of creating a backlash. The Mayor’s office, along with the top parks and human service honchos on city payroll, has responded with a lying disinformation campaign that is based in the denial of plain facts and the tight control of information.

Meanwhile, the smear campaign is on. In a city where the shelters turn people away every night, those who survive outside are being depicted as subhuman, diseased criminals. Alongside this, the phony compassion rhetoric wilts to slime like two month-old lettuce.

Pushback begets pushback. Week after next, homeless people are going to see who their friends are. Details on Monday.

Radical Transparency

Our Real Change wiki has been recognized as a Top Ten Nominee for Innovation by Seattle NPower "for introducing radical transparency in how they do business" and I'm pretty tickled with that. This is one of those areas where being slightly OCD pays off in the end. When I created the thing, the idea was to simply build an on-line space where documents could be made available for our board. Then I just sort of got carried away. By the time I started writing our thirteen year history, I was down the rabbit hole for the next week or so. Anitra and Wes happily followed. After I was done, the majority of our internal documents were on line, and I was inviting anyone who cared to come take a look. Here's how NPower sees it:

Nominated Innovation: Real Change took a bold measure in revealing their most sensitive documents to the public, staff and board via their online wikispace. With financials, grant applications and circulation information completely open to public scrutiny and comment, Real Change has redefined transparency in a radical way.

The wiki came in handy during our blogospheric event last April when I was being accused of the poverty pimp thing over on Seattle Weekly's blog. All I had to do was send the guy to the wiki, and suddenly I was cleared of all charges.

It's funny how here in Seattle one can lose sight of what's innovative. When I raised the idea at our North American street paper conference last weekend as a possible best practice for others, ninety-percent of the people in the room didn't know what a wiki was. Thats OK. To me, the whole text messaging thing seems strange and bizarre, so I guess we're all Luddites in our own way.

Why Are People So Angry? An Answer.

Is Seattle really the uptight, liberal-totalitarian, stronghold of political correctness that Huan Hsu describes in his Seattle Weekly blog post today? I don't think so. If folks at the Weekly really believe the parody that they publish each week, that's their issue. I think there's something else going on.

The top layers are the most obvious. People care about their vendors, and don't like the idea of press that might do them damage. Real Change is something that's sort of abstract. That's just an organization. But their vendors are real people. You fuck with them at your peril.

Beneath that is a sense that The Weekly isn't a Seattle paper anymore. There's anger around that. When the paper that's seen as having no loyalties or ties targets the paper that's part of what makes Seattle special, it's salt in the wound. Not a smart choice. Huan wouldn't have known this, but his editor should have.

And beneath that is the premise of the article itself, which was misguided in its assumption that Real Change is a charity rag.

When we give out of charity, there is a power relationship. I am the bestower. You are bestowed upon. I am powerful. You are grateful. The positions of giver and receiver are affirmed.

If this is what buying Real Change means to you, then it follows that the vendor should be certifiably poor. When they are not, we feel conned. We want the recipients of our charity to be abjectly wretched, not just vaguely-near-the-poverty-line poor.

It's an objectification thing. That's the lens through which Hsu's story makes sense.

That's not what Real Change is about. Most of our readers see our vendors as working people. That's why they like it. They know that we're about offering a paper people want to read. That it's not a pity purchase.

And when people work, the assumption is that they do it to make money. To ask whether that's a problem is to completely miss the point.

Singularly Bizarre Pre-emptive Diatribe

Just returned from the Richard Buckner show at the Crocodile, and it was pretty OK, especially the last 20 minutes or so. Six Parts Seven, the band he was touring with, mostly just got in the way. Buckner's amazing. He doesn't need a band. He just needs to sit there doing his trance-like semi-autistic genius thing.

He soloed for a few songs at the end and then for an encore. I think anyone who was there would agree that's when most of the magic happened.

For those of you who don't know of him, here's a clip from UTube of Buckner doing 22, a songwriting miracle if ever there was.



Meanwhile, today the new improved Real Change comes out, along with the long awaited Seattle Weekly article. They're all all in a tizzy over there about being placed on the defensive. Apparently, the rule is that one is supposed to wait for the snarky journalist to actually publish his story before publicly questioning his angle.

I prefer calling attention to a bad story before it gets published, but I guess that's just me. Call me crazy. Or defensive. Or singularly bizarre. Or whatever else you like. I don't care.

Six months ago, I wouldn't have been concerned. I knew The Weekly. They were our friends. But, since the buy out, everyone I knew there has left. The chain that owns them now has a reputation for the kind of journalism that values sensationalism over fairness.

When pretty much everyone you trust at a publication leaves, that's the sort of thing you notice.

So when friends tell me that a reporter who just moved here two months ago is asking a bunch of loaded questions, my trust in The Weekly's professional integrity doesn't exactly carry the day.

I've talked to a whole lot of people about this over the last few days. Journalists, writers, community activists, and other people who think and read and watch what's happening with the media in this town, and no one sees the weekly of today as being The Weekly we once knew.

So they've got something to prove. We'll see how they do.

Everyday, People Blow My Mind

Today was more than a little interesting.

I got to spend my morning at the home of Paul and Cecile Andrews bemoaning the increasingly sterile, anxiety-ridden, mono-culture that is the American white middle-class, and discussing how creating a counterculture of conviviality and community is the alliterative answer to all our ills.

Cecile recently published Slow in Beautiful: new visions of community, leisure, and joie de vivre. She'll be the keynote at our annual breakfast next October.

Doing these interviews and getting free books is one of the perks of my job. It doesn't make up for the absence of a retirement plan, but it helps.

Apparently, I'm not in this life for the money.

I was at Real Change for maybe half an hour when Huan Hsu, the reporter from the Seattle Weekly that I posted about yesterday called me back.

I answered his handful of questions. No. We don't make our vendors pay us for their turf. No. The turf system doesn't create division and tensions. It eases them and makes it possible for 250 vendors to share the city without killing each other. Yes. We support vendors moving on when they want to. No. We don't make them stop selling the paper when they succeed.

And then he told me this was the first time he'd gotten mail before a story ran, and that he saw my blog post from yesterday.

This was a big day for Apesma's Lament. The normally sleepy blog that I started about six weeks ago had around 350 visitors today, which is around ten times what's normal.

Two different journalism friends independently offered to set Hsu up with fake leads, make him look stupid, and hopefully ruin his career.

I had no idea journalists could be so evil. I asked them to please not go there.

Another local journalism luminary whose name you'd all recognize took the occasion to significantly increase his giving to Real Change.

Sweet.

Several other writer friends bemoaned the invasion of the pod people, and offered various strategic perspectives.

Which was also fun.

And our friends at The Stranger, the only other newspaper in town besides Real Change, mentioned that this made them even more glad to be our friends.

So, when Huan Hsu called, I was feeling that odd mixture of benevolence and cockiness that comes from knowing that one's back is covered.

He said that there wasn't much to quibble with in my version of events, other than that he did ask to take photos during orientation, which is probably true. My bad.

My staff only said that his taking pictures was annoying. The not asking part was my inference.

I explained that I saw a story very much like his do The Big Issue London some serious damage around ten years back, and that I wanted to be in front of it. "I don't do 'victim' very well," I said.

Huan wasn't real happy about getting beat up over a story that wasn't written yet, but we found common ground. We agreed that he'll write whatever it is that he is going to write, and that the ball is in his court.

I'm perfectly happy to have my predictions of snarky attack journalism disproved, and thereby be made to appear somewhat paranoid and dyspeptic.

"Boy," I'll say, "what was I thinking?"

"I need to get more sleep."

Follow the thread to the Singularly Bizarre Pre-emptive Diatribe.

Seattle Weekly: What the Fuck?

The first I heard about a story was when our vendor manager said he'd been talking to a Seattle Weekly reporter for a few weeks, and that Huan Hsu wanted to attend a vendor orientation and go sell Real Change. I said fine.

"This has been done a few times before," I said, "and it's always the same. They find out that it's hard, and that people act like you're invisible. Then they write about how it sucks to be homeless and selling Real Change. But I'll call him."

"Don't assume the media is your friend," I added. "And next time you talk to a fucking reporter, tell me."

Poor, dear, innocent Craig.

If you haven't heard of Huan Hsu, it's because he just got to Seattle. Two months ago he moved here from DC to take a job at The Weekly. People have been trampling each other to get out the front door since New Times Inc. bought them out last summer. The word is that The Weekly is a pretty sucky place to work.

Apparently they're hiring.

When I called Huan, he said that he'd heard from a vendor that some people buy cartloads of papers at once, and that they get all the good turf. He thought there was a story there.

Our 3-4 top-selling vendors each month are generally in the 1,400 to 2,000 paper range. Of the 250 vendors who sell the paper each month, they're pretty atypical.

The turf system is the core of Real Change's success in our community, and promotes the reader/vendor relationships that can be so transformational for our vendors. When Real Change vendors work the same spot consistently, people get to know them and they develop repeat customers who wind up functioning as a kind of caring community that most of our vendors have never had.

That's where the magic is. Lonely people finding community, and privileged people taking the time to care about a stranger. So turf is something we encourage.

I told him that we're a transparent organization, and that pretty much whatever he wants to know is on our wiki.

I also told him that I was doing lots of media work around the launch of our redesign next week, so timing might be an issue for him. He said his story was slated for next week's issue. Great.

Then he asked if anyone could sell Real Change.

I said we don't means test our vendors, and are a low-threshold employment alternative for people who generally don't have a lot of better options. People who are down on their luck, or otherwise thrown into the underground economy.

I gave him the breakdown. 92% homeless or formerly homeless. 63% reporting a disability. 83% over 40.

Illiterates. Addicts. Felons. Disabled people. Mentally ill people. Etcetera.

I said that I'd know who he was. He'd be the guy with nice teeth.

At this point, I was still assuming good intentions.

He showed up at orientation today and annoyed people by taking pictures without asking.

Later, I got a message from my friend Israel Bayer in Portland. Israel took a break from running Street Roots for a year to come work at Real Change. Now he's back in Portland, kicking some major ass with a few tricks that he learned here.

"I assume you know about the Weekly story," he said. "I didn't give him anything he could really use. Call me."

I did. From the questions he was asking, Huan's angle wasn't hard to suss out.

"What do you think about them having some vendors who make $1,500 to $2,000 a month selling Real Change?"

"Does it bother you that people who aren't homeless sell the paper? Don't most people think everyone who sells is homeless?"

"Is this really who street newspapers are supposed to be helping?"

Israel said he explained that the few really successful vendors worked a ton of hours and are the success stories, "but that's not what he wanted to hear."

So this is what journalism at the new Seattle Weekly has come to. The paper owned and staffed by out-of-towners is out to do an expose on the fact that three or four vendors make as much as $24K a year selling Real Change. With no benefits.

At that rate, they can afford a cheap apartment. Hold the fucking presses!

Our top selling vendor is an African American senior citizen who, after years of spotty employment and homelessness found a job where there's no boss to make him miserable. He's worked the same spot for fifty plus hours a week for more than 10 years. He takes care of his grandson. Christmases he flies to Chicago to see his family.

The Seattle Weekly, apparently, is out to expose him.

What brave, cutting edge journalism.

They should stick to stories about how it's OK now to wear loud sweaters, or how there's too many cigarette butts on the sidewalks since the smoking ban.

It's really what they do best.

To read what happened after this was posted, click here.