THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 92

We used to live in West Oakland, next to an abandoned theater, in the old rehearsal space of Flipper. West Oakland at that time (2001-2002) had already crumbled & was mostly empty feeling & devoid of energy. The BART tracks were right across from our front windows & we’d have to stop talking when they showed up. I spent a lot of my time conjuring up old Afrocentric ghosts in the place. My attempts were futile, not even a Black dude could have got blood out of that stone. The place had been bled dry, its heyday was in the 50s & 60s. It was knocked out with the 1-2 punch of disinvestment in the 70s & drugs & gangs in the 80s. There was an electrical fire in the unit below us, a perpetually about to open cafe. Katie called me at work, panicking to let me know there was a fire, I rode as fast as I could on my bike home through ChinaTown, Downtown Oakland & the warehouses & factories of West Oakland to see what I could do. Luckily we just experienced a lot of smoke damage & the firemen caused more damage to our place than the fire itself. Our poor air filter died valiantly trying to get all the smoke out of the air. We were doing the Oaklandish/Nonchalance project at that time with Jeff Hull. Trying to wake up the soul of Oakland with art. There was definitely a spark & that lit some fire that turned Oakland into an arts hub in the 2000s. Part of that attractiveness is what made the city so viable for the rapidly increasing tech world across the bay. I’m not sure how connected it was, but the tech stuff had been attached to the counter-culture since the 70s so the die had already been cast. I felt pushed out by economic forces that I had helped channel. This probably wasn’t how things were actually working, but I felt intensely defeated. The old true-ism about gentrification cycles gets trotted out, about waves of Punks then Artists & Gays & then Yuppies transforming old dying neighborhoods into places viable for the kinds of businesses that don’t play with those kinds of risks.