culture
by Christopher Scott Satterwhite
Writer Erick Lyle to Speak at UWF
Erick Lyle is a writer, activist, musician and historian from the San Francisco Bay Area by way of South Florida. Originally from Miami, Lyle made a name for himself as the editor and author of the influential fanzine “Scam.” His work appears on National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” as well as in numerous publications, including the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Lyle is currently touring with his latest book, “Streetopia,” a compilation of writings about art, gentrification, resistance and displacement. INWEEKLY: Can you tell me about Streetopia, the art project that inspired your book? LYLE: Streetopia was a massive anti-gentrification art fair that took place in downtown San Francisco in 2012 that I co-curated with
Chris Johanson and Kal Spelletich. The show brought together over 100 artists, writers, activists, performers with residents of the Tenderloin—San Francisco's last low-income neighborhood—to consider utopian aspiration for the city and to strategize opposition to major redevelopment plans the mayor was proposing for the area. Mayor Ed Lee hoped to turn the area into "The Tenderloin Arts District" and turn the city's main street, Market Street, into a "dot com corridor." The city passed a law allowing for massive tax breaks for tech firms, like Twitter, to move their corporate headquarters from Silicon Valley into downtown SF. The arrival of these companies into the area brought immediate rent increases for housing units and a wave of displacement. Streetopia was a way to draw attention to the imminent displacement in the area by using the form of the art fair—right now one of the common redevelopment ideas used in "Creative Class" development throughout the world—and flipping it around to see if we could make an art fair by and for a neighborhood's current residents, rather than for an imagined wealthier audience. INWEEKLY: What did the show look like? LYLE: The show took place in several venues at once, featuring public art and performance, five weeks of daily free programming, and a Free Cafe run by neighborhood residents which
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served two free meals a day for five weeks. The idea was to make a show that received so much attention that we could get a public platform to discuss the changes coming to the Tenderloin and issues around homelessness in the city. INWEEKLY: So for those who don’t live in the Bay Area, what is the significance of Streetopia? LYLE: This kind of displacement is happening in urban areas right now across the globe and is hardly specific to San Francisco. “Streetopia,” the book, brings together the art from the show and considers the effectiveness of the show's projects and tactics while including essays that look at global urbanization, the changes in public space that accompany gentrification, and the increasing privatization of the pubic commons in our neoliberal era.
ferent types of publications with different uses and different potential audiences. Publishing for me is a way to build community—to literally find the people who are into what I am into and to group them together as constituents of the ideas included in my zines or books; to bring them together at public events or to somehow get them to know each other and mobilize. Books and zines can accomplish that in different ways. INWEEKLY: How do you write? LYLE: I get up in the morning and just do it every single day. I haven't always been this way, but in the past couple of years I had an epiphany about how it really is all up to me if I want to realize my ideas or not. And I trained myself to get up every day and work. “Streetopia,” the book, was the result of about two years of emailing and gathering materials and then eight months of writing all day, every day.
INWEEKLY: How do you see your work, especially with the counterculture, helping INWEEKLY: Why do you write? to document and spread these stories? LYLE: I write to make sense and find meaning LYLE: I began trying to document histories in my life and the lives of others. I write against of counterculture and resistance, because forgetting—especially in the case of docuthese narratives have largely been shut out or menting lost or overlooked narratives. I write to marginalized in mainstream considerations of feel like my truest self. I write for money, to pay history. “Streetopia” was compiled with an eye the bills. I write to meet people and to commuto the future…as a kind of time capsule of a nicate. I write to support community and social set of particular Bay Area values and ideas, movements. {in} tactics and histories that have been evicted from the city today, but have been dispersed like seeds to other places by this book and the [SF’s evicted] diaspora. WHAT: “Streetopia: Using Art to Build ComINWEEKLY: You’re known for munity, Fight Displacement and Reclaim Public writing zines, but recently you’ve Space" put out as many books as you SPONSORED BY: UWF Department of English have zines. Is this a departure and the English Composition Program or “graduation” from zines, so WHEN: Tuesday, April 5th at 6 p.m. to speak? WHERE: UWF, Bldg 13 (Anthropology) Room LYLE: I am actually hoping to do 230 two new issues of SCAM this year COST: Free and open to the public for the magazine's 25th anniversary. DETAILS: rgarrett@uwf.edu I don't see a book as a "graduation." I think a zine and a book are two dif-
ERICK LYLE AT UWF
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