Archive — Jamie Lyons
I've always been suspicious of people who use the word "resistance" like it's a fucking lifestyle brand. You know the type, they buy the Che Guevara t-shirt, post the black square, maybe show up to a march if the weather's nice and there's a good brunch spot nearby. That's not resistance. That's tourism with a conscience. Real resistance? It's the abuela who's been running the same taco stand for thirty years while developers circle like vultures, offering her peanuts for the corner that her sweat and her grandmother's recipes built. It's the fisherman watching his waters poisoned, his livelihood destroyed, who still shows up to tell anyone who'll listen what's being done to his community. Resistance isn't theoretical. It's not abstract. It's personal and it's local and it tastes like something real. Every time you choose the neighborhood joint over the sanitized chain restaurant, you're participating in a small act of resistance. Every time you learn someone's actual name, the person who serves you, cleans after you, makes your food possible, you're resisting the machinery that wants to make us all invisible to each other. Every time you refuse to accept the glossy, focus-grouped version of culture they're trying to sell you, you're drawing a line in the sand. The cultures worth knowing, the food worth eating, the stories worth hearing, they exist in the margins, in the neighborhoods that haven't been "revitalized" into oblivion, among the people who've been told they don't matter. And maybe that's the most important resistance of all: refusing to believe that lie. Insisting that these voices, these places, these traditions matter precisely because they're authentic, uncomfortable, and real. Resistance c. mid-14c., from Old French resistance, earlier resistence, from Late Latin resistentia, from present participle stem of Latin resistere "make a stand against, oppose". Meaning "organized covert opposition to an occupying or ruling power" is from 1939. Electromagnetic sense is from 1860. Path of least resistance is from 1825, originally a term in science and engineering.
Resistance 2024
We met in prison. San Quentin, to be exact. Which sounds like the beginning of either a really good story or a really bad one, depending on your tolerance for irony. Turns out it was the former. When we were first dating she’s took me all around Hunters Point. The southeastern corner of San Francisco […]
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Resistance 2024
I am shooting a ballet rehearsal at LINES. Beautiful people doing beautiful things. It’s all very controlled, very precise. Art with a capital A. Then I walk outside. City Hall steps are packed. West Coast March for Gaza. Thousands of people, and they’re pissed. Not the polite, NPR-liberal kind of protest. This is urgent. Raw. […]
ReadResistance 2020
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.Stephen King Halloween 2020. The year we learned that the real monsters don’t wear masks. They’re invisible, airborne, and they don’t give a shit about your plans. So here’s some beautiful lunatic in Santa Cruz, climbing up on a bronze surfer, making their own […]
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Resistance 2020
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to themAntoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince Children and families gather at the road block on Highway One in Santa Cruz begging the state for more resources to fight the CZULightningComplex Fire. Here’s what you need […]
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Resistance 2018
Look at this beautiful goddamn relic. A payphone. At a boat launch in Palo Alto, ground zero for the tech apocalypse that murdered these things. There’s something almost obscene about it standing there, isn’t there? This monument to a slower, dumber, better world. Back when “faith backed by dollars” meant stringing copper wire across America […]
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Industries / Resistance 2018
Anna Halprin Blank Placard Dance: at the invitation of the De Young Museum, A piece originally performed in 1967 with members of the San Francisco Dancers Workshop in San Francisco as a reaction to the Vietnam War and the growing social unrest of the time. The dance is a walk by some forty dancers who carry […]
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Resistance 2018
An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy, 2017 BUILD […]
ReadFalseArt / Resistance 2018
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the […]
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Resistance 2018
The streets swelled with bodies and noise and raw electric fury, not the manufactured kind you get from some corporate sponsored spectacle, but the genuine article, the kind that rises from the gut when people realize silence is complicity. San Francisco, Market Street, and the air itself seemed charged with purpose, thick with the understanding […]
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Resistance 2017
Some developer, Lennar, or “Five Points” when they want to sound like they give a shit about community, throws a “Grand Opening” for luxury townhouses called “Monarch.” Because of course they’re called Monarch. Because nothing says “we care about the people who’ve been living here for generations” like naming your overpriced boxes after royalty. And […]
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Resistance / Wanderlust 2017
The Fifth Circle Interstate 5. The great American scar tissue running through California’s gut. You want to know what we are? What we’ve become? It’s all right here, stretched out under that merciless Central Valley sun for mile after goddamn mile. You smell them before you see them. That’s the thing nobody tells you. The […]
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Resistance 2017
The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn art introduced me to the Revolution! Albert Einstein Nobody sets out to document the end of the world with a camera. But there I was at Berkeley, at The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) and DataRescueSFBAy hackathon where the word “data” gets thrown around like it […]
ReadResistance 2017
Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us. Once we had a country and we thought it fair, Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there: We cannot go there now, […]
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Resistance 2017
Oakland Women’s March, 2017. So here’s the thing about photographing a protest: you’re already lying. The minute you lift that camera, you’re making choices about what matters, what’s worth preserving, what truth, if there is such a thing, you’re selling. It’s a hustle, like everything else. But sometimes it’s a hustle worth committing to. Oakland, […]
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