Heterogeneous Spectacles(Jamie Lyons News) ❖ Jamie Lyons

Heterogeneous Spectacles

PowerPoint Presentations Over Buried Bodies: A Wednesday in Bayview

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 LLC is here. The San Francisco Department of Public Health is here. Amy Brownell is here with her PowerPoints and her institutional voice. And the people, the actual people who live here, who breathe this air, who’ve watched their neighbors get sick, they’re here too, and they’re done being polite about it.

Bayview Hunters Point isn’t some abstraction. It’s not a “disadvantaged community” checkbox on some grant application. It’s where people raised families on land the Navy used for decades as a toxic playground where they tested God-knows-what during the Cold War and then walked away whistling. Left it for Tetra Tech to “clean up”, which they did by allegedly faking soil samples like some kind of environmental crimes farce that would be funny if it weren’t so fucking evil.

India Basin. Parcel A. These bureaucratic designations that sanitize what we’re really talking about: land that might kill you. Development projects that promise renewal but deliver the same old pattern, displace the poor, pave over the poison, pretend everything’s fine.

And here’s Amy Brownell from Public Health talking about “restoration” and “land use” while the room fills with people who’ve buried friends, who’ve watched cancer rates that make you want to scream at the sky. The slideshow continues. Professional. Measured. The language of agencies that have learned to talk about problems without ever actually solving them.

You want to know what environmental justice looks like? It looks like this room. It looks like people who’ve been systematically betrayed by every institution that was supposed to protect them, showing up anyway to demand accountability. It’s the opposite of giving up. It’s the refusal to let them memory-hole you, to let them pretend that “vulnerable citizens” is just some phrase in a Ta-Nehisi Coates quote and not actual human beings with names and stories and a right to not be poisoned by their own neighborhood.

The Shipyard looms over all of it, that massive contaminated ghost of American militarism and corporate greed. Lennar wants to build luxury housing there. Luxury fucking housing. On toxic land. Because… Because in San Francisco 2018, even poison can be gentrified if you put enough stainless steel appliances and fiddle fig trees in the rendering.

This meeting is resistance in its purest form: showing up, speaking up, refusing the convenient narrative. BUILD LLC presents their mixed-use development plans like we’re all supposed to believe this time will be different, like the community hasn’t heard these promises before. But the people in this room know the difference between development and development for whom. They know the difference between cleanup and cover-up.

And the whole sick joke is that this shouldn’t require a Task Force with “Environmental Justice Response” in the title. It should just be called “not poisoning people.” But we don’t live in that America. We live in the America where you need a goddamn task force just to get someone to acknowledge that maybe, maybe, you deserve to live on land that won’t give you and your kids cancer.

This Wednesday night in August, in a community facility in the southeast corner of a city that prides itself on being progressive: which is bullshit by the way. This is where all the pretty urban planning talk faces the hard truth of environmental racism, of decades of institutional indifference dressed up as bureaucratic process.

The resistance isn’t heroic or cinematic. It’s exhausting and necessary and it looks like folding chairs and PowerPoint presentations and people who are so tired of fighting but who show up anyway because what else are you going to do? Let these assholes win?

No. You show up. You demand answers. You refuse to be invisible. Even when every system is designed to make you give up, make you fail, you don’t. That’s the story of Bayview Hunters Point. That’s what was happening on Wednesday night. Not a meeting, a reckoning that’s still ongoing, still unresolved, still demanding we ask ourselves what we owe people we’ve spent generations betraying.

Bayview Hunters Point Environmental Justice Response Task Force
Community Meeting, Wednesday August 15th, 2018
Southeast Community Facility
San Francisco

Aug 16, 2018 | Categories: Resistance | Tags: Lindsey Dillon | Leave A Comment »

The Streets Didn’t Ask for This

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.
William Faulkner

I’m not documenting ballet here, I’m documenting an invasion. Real ballet, not the sugar plum bullshit, is already an act of defiance. But when I’m tracking these bodies through my viewfinder as they claim space in Chinatown or in the shadow of some brutalist ruins of Sutro Baths, I’m complicit in something else. I’m saying: watch this happen HERE. Not just in the sanctified spaces where art is supposed to happen, but in the places where people are actually living, grinding through their days, wondering what the fuck it’s all for.

I’m shooting San Francisco and it’s perfect because this city is already performing this high wire act between the sublime and the ridiculous. I know where the light cuts through fog at 4 PM. I know which alleys echo with footsteps and which ones just swallow sound. The city is my co-conspirator, all those angles, all that vertical ambition crashing into horizontal reality, all of it conspiring to make thes dancers vision hit harder.

The space isn’t just a backdrop in my frame, it’s in conversation with the dancer. The grime argues with the grace. The indifference of passersby becomes part of my composition. A guy walks through my shot and suddenly he’s part of the piece whether he knows it or not.

It’s guerrilla transcendence and I’m the one stealing it, freezing it, making it permanent. It’s beauty as a Molotov cocktail, and I’m lighting the fuse every time I hit record.

Ancient Grief in a Modern Gym

So here’s the thing about these images: they’re documentation masquerading as art, or maybe art pretending to be documentation, that beautiful, fucked-up place where nobody’s quite sure what they’re looking at anymore. Rush Rehm’s doing Euripides like it still matters, like these 2,400-year-old words about women destroyed by war and men destroyed by their own certainty could punch through the academic fog and land in somebody’s gut. And maybe they did. And Rush, probably the best professor in the full sense of that word I had at Stanford, undergrad and grad school both, understands that Greek tragedy isn’t some dusty artifact for seminar dissection but a living thing that should still draw blood if you stage it right.

The chorus, Aleta Hayes choreographing bodies into geometry, into this collective organism that Greek tragedy demands, they’re reaching for something primal in a gym that still smells like institutional disinfectant and forgotten athletic ambitions. The lighting’s harsh, unforgiving, the kind that exposes every tremor and doubt. There’s nothing precious here. It’s raw. Bodies contorting, faces caught mid-transformation between character and actor, that liminal space where performance becomes possession or at least convincing desperation. The chorus formations look like suppliants, like refugees, like every displaced person who ever begged indifferent gods or governments for mercy they weren’t going to get. These women steel show.

Stanford Repertory Theater, this presumably well-funded machine of culture-making, stripping Greek tragedy down to movement and text in what looks like borrowed space. There’s something honest in that poverty, that refusal of spectacle in favor of the thing itself. Hecuba and Helen, two women defined entirely by male violence, by being taken, used, blamed, mourned. And here we are, still staging their grief, still trying to locate meaning in catastrophe. Still believing, against considerable evidence, that theatre can do something beyond entertaining the already comfortable, that it might actually remember how to wound us into recognition.

Stanford Repertory Theater’s Euripides Hecuba/Helen

She Bomb / Science Exchange: Now I Am Become Disruption – Death of a Dry Cleaner

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

Robert Oppenheimer: Interview about the Trinity explosion, first broadcast as part of the television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), produced by Fred Freed.

Here’s this pathetic little storefront that used to press some orthodontist’s khakis. Now it’s got a name that sounds like a pharmaceutical startup crossed with a Tinder bio. Science Exchange. Jesus Christ.

I’ve got the Oppenheimer quote sitting here like a neon sign screaming “THIS MEANS SOMETHING,” and maybe it does. These weren’t the guys splitting atoms in Los Alamos, they were splitting market shares, disrupting dry cleaning into obsolescence so they could disrupt everything else.

Oppenheimer at least knew he’d become Death. These assholes? They thought they were becoming Life, man, they thought they were saving the world with APIs and pivot tables and whatever the hell else gets venture capitalists hard. The dry cleaner knew what he was, a guy removing stains. But Science Exchange? They were removing the very concept of limitation, or so they told themselves between funding rounds.

And that’s the real mindfuck: the dry cleaner probably did more actual good for his neighborhood than whatever algorithmic wet dream got funded in his old space. But he didn’t scale. He didn’t disrupt. He just cleaned clothes until he didn’t anymore

Jul 22, 2018 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: Palo Alto | Leave A Comment »

She Made Beauty All Round Her or The Getting Dirty Is the Point

She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad – she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes – the toad became beautiful.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

So here’s the thing about mud that nobody wants to admit because we’re all too busy pretending we’re evolved beings who’ve transcended our animal selves, mud is REAL in a way that almost nothing else is anymore, I mean really real, not Instagram-real or LinkedIn-real or whatever performative reality we’re all participating in like good little consumers of our own lives, but actual earth-and-water-combined-into-this-primordial-ooze-that-makes-you-remember-you’re-just-a-mammal REAL.

And Lindsey gets it, she GETS it in a way I’ve rarely seen anyone get anything, the way she just plunges into this muck like it’s not even a question, like the whole point of having a body is to drag it through difficult terrain and come out the other side covered in proof that you actually existed for those hours, that you weren’t just scrolling or thinking about scrolling or thinking about what you’d say about scrolling if someone asked you about it.

The mud clings to everything, your boots, your calves, your sense of who you thought you were before you started slogging through this beautiful horrible mess, and she’s laughing, actually LAUGHING, like she knows something the rest of us forgot sometime around third grade when we learned that being clean was somehow more important than being alive.

Jul 18, 2018 | Categories: Adventure | Tags: Lindsey Dillon | Leave A Comment »

a park, a policeman and a pretty girl

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
Charlie Chaplin

Bodies moving in a public park at whatever-the-fuck-o’clock on a Tuesday is a beautiful fuck you to the entire premise of art as commodity. You’ve got these dancers, trained Alonzo King LINES Ballet dancers, the kind who’ve destroyed their feet and their personal lives in the service of something most people will never understand, and they’re just out there in the goddamn bandshell where anyone can stumble across them. Some guy walking his dog. A cop on patrol. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Chaplin knew. Park, cop, pretty girl. The basic elements. Not because it’s simple but because those three things contain every possible human story if you are paying attention. These photos are not trying to sell you on the transcendence of ballet or the purity of the human form or any of that marketing bullshit to get you to buy a ticket. Rather, I’m trying to show you what happens when something as disciplined and unnatural as classical dance collides with the organic chaos of just being outside… in the rain.

That 1900 bandshell, Spreckels Temple of Music, what a ridiculous name, it’s seen everything by now. Seen its purpose get smaller and larger and disappear and return. And now it’s hosting this photoshoot thing, which is nonsense for “we’re doing it here because here matters, because the space is part of the conversation.”

And the conversation is: what the hell are we all doing? These dancers know they’re being watched and not watched simultaneously. Most people will never see this. Well, no…that first image of Adji will probably be on muni buses all over the city promoting LINES Fall Season… But in reality, the right now, it existed for maybe ninety minutes and now it’s gone except for these images, which aren’t the thing itself but the ghost of the thing. The shadow. Which might be all we ever get anyway.

That’s not cynicism, that’s just paying attention.

LINES Ballet in The Music Concourse

Bodies Against Brutalism: Notes from the Wave Organ

The thing about photographing dance is that I’m not actually photographing the dance at all. I’m photographing the spaces between moments, the electrical current that runs from one impossible position to the next, the split-second where a human body tells me something about physics and grace and mortality that I can’t articulate any other way. It’s like trying to photograph music, which is exactly what I’m doing at the Wave Organ because the whole goddamn place IS music, the slap and gurgle of bay water through those pipes creating this ambient soundtrack that sounds like the earth breathing.

These LINES dancers, they’re not just good, they’re operating on some frequency the rest of us can’t access. Alonzo King trains bodies the way other people train racehorses or fighter jets, all precision and power and something that looks effortless precisely because it’s anything but. I’m standing there with my Leica, waiting, and then a dancer extends into some position that seems to defy structural engineering, backlit by that merciless California light bouncing off the Bay, and I either get it or I don’t.

There’s no retry. The moment passes. The wave breaks. The body reforms.

The honest truth? Most of the shots I captured this day are garbage. The light’s too harsh or too flat, I was too early or too late, my focus was off, or the composition is just slightly off in a way that turns poetry into PowerPoint. But then, maybe once every thirty six frames, something happens. The dancer catches air, the light catches the dancer, and you catch both. That’s the shot that makes me forget the salt spray coating your lenses, the way my back’s screaming from contorting yourself into positions almost as ridiculous as the dancers’.

It’s absurd, really, this whole enterprise. Building a sculpture that turns wave sounds into art. Having dancers perform on slippery rocks for an audience of seagulls and fishermen, or a few bewildered tourists who wandered too far from the Marina. Me, standing there trying to freeze the unfreezenable, to make permanent what only matters because it’s ephemeral. But absurdity, it turns out, might be the whole point. The Wave Organ doesn’t make sense. Dance doesn’t make sense. Photography doesn’t make sense. But put them all together on a Tuesday morning with the tide coming in and something happens that transcends sense entirely.

That’s what you’re after. Not beauty, fuck beauty, but truth. The truth of a body moving through space. The truth of light at a specific angle at a specific moment. The truth that all of this, the dance, the photograph, the wave breaking against concrete, exists and then doesn’t, and that’s what makes it matter.

The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves

haunted in the city I love

I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.
Rebecca Solnit

The fog comes in off the Pacific like it owns the place. Because it does. And somewhere in Sea Cliff, where the money lives quiet and the views cost more than most people make in a lifetime, there are ballet dancers on a balcony.

LINES Ballet. Alonzo King. Bodies that have been broken down and rebuilt, over and over, until they can do things that seem to violate the basic laws of physics. And they’re performing on a balcony. Not a stage. Not a theater. A fucking balcony with the Golden Gate Bridge doing its iconic thing in the background.

This is the kind of San Francisco moment that makes you understand why people lose their minds over this city. The collision of high art and high real estate, human grace against industrial grandeur, fog rolling through it all like nature’s own special effect.

These dancers have sacrificed everything, their joints, their social lives, probably their sanity, to move like this. And here they are, suspended between sky and sea, the bridge watching like some massive steel witness to the ephemeral.

Ghost and haunted, Solnit wrote about San Francisco. Yeah. These bodies, this moment, this city, all of it passing through, all of it already memory.

the end of the land

This is the physical manifestation of erosion meeting precision, meat meeting myth at the absolute crumbling edge of America. Sutro Baths was always a monument to hubris, some gilded age dream of swimming pools carved into coastal apocalypse, and now it’s just honest ruins, which is when things finally get interesting.

These dancers aren’t in that space, they’re of it. That figure against the grey Pacific brutalism, limbs extended like architectural failure made graceful, that’s the whole goddamn conversation right there. The human body as the only thing that still moves with intention while everything else just weathers and falls. Those broken concrete walls aren’t backdrop, they’re co conspirators. They know something about collapse that the dancer is learning in real time.

There’s this moment where I’ve caught someone mid gesture and the Pacific is eating fog in the background and I can almost hear the cold, that specific bone deep San Francisco cold that tourists never dress for. The dancer’s probably freezing but the line of that movement suggests otherwise, suggests something about discipline overriding every screaming nerve ending. That’s the tension. That’s what makes it real.

The ruins provide what stages never can: consequence. Miss your footing here and you’re not rolling onto sprung floors, you’re meeting rebar and sea slicked stone. Every extension carries actual stakes. That focus, that presence, you can see it’s earned, not performed.

My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land – the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.
Sylvia Plath

Nature is imagination itself

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
William Blake, Letters

I point a camera at human bodies moving through space at the edge of the continent, where the cypress trees grow sideways from decades of wind telling them to get the fuck out of the way, and something happens. Or it doesn’t. There’s no middle ground out there at Lands End.

The thing about LINES dancers is they don’t negotiate. They don’t ask permission from the landscape. They just move through it like they’ve got every right to be there, which, of course, they do, and the eucalyptus and the fog and the whole brutalized beautiful geography of that place either submits or it doesn’t.

I’m standing there with my camera, and I realize pretty quick that I’m not in control of anything. Not the light coming off the Pacific, not the way a dancer’s leg cuts through the air at the exact moment the fog decides to roll in like some hungover ghost. I’m just there. Witness to a collision between intention and chaos.

This is not the sterile geometry of the studio. This is bodies negotiating with entropy in real time. Wind, gravity, uneven ground, the whole pitiless machinery of the natural world grinding away, and somehow these dancers make it look like they planned it this way. Like they choreographed the fucking wind.

And I start to understand: the camera doesn’t capture this. It just tries to keep up. I’m scrambling, reframing, losing the shot, finding it again, completely at the mercy of these moments that will never happen again. Not like this. Not with this exact light, this exact gesture, this exact second when everything lines up and I think, yes, this, and then it’s gone.

That’s the whole game. Being present for the unrepeatable.

The William Blake quote about imagination… yeah, okay, fine. But what Blake doesn’t mention is that imagination requires a body. Requires muscle and sweat and the risk of looking absolutely ridiculous. These dancers, out there in the trees at the edge of everything, they’re not imagining shit. They’re doing it. And if I’m lucky, if I’m paying attention, I get to document the evidence.

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