monkey city

Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey presents an image of the city of San Francisco through the eyes of a young Chinese-American poet, Wittman Ah Sing. The city Wittman lives in is one of an eclectic mixture of people, poetry, and contradictions. Wittman struggles with his personal identity. He contains within him multiple identities that seem at times to contradict one another. For example, he is a true American; he was born in California and attended Cal, but he is equally Chinese. He relates to his Chinese ancestry and even resembles a saintly monkey found in Chinese legends. Furthermore, his name exemplifies the cohesive juxtaposition of his seemingly contradictory nationalities. His first name comes from the quintessential American poet, Walt Wittman, while his last name is traditionally Chinese. As Wittman traverses through the city, he struggles to accept that his complex personal identity cannot be simply reduced to any one thing in particular. Furthermore, the novel alludes to both Chinese and American literature, music, and pop culture which are interwoven into the fabric of the city. Kingston produces an image of both Wittman and San Francisco as 'living' things that contain multitudes of that may, at first glance, appear to contradict on another. However, it is the ongoing dialog between these opposing realities that make Wittman and San Francisco into such dynamic and complex beings.

Rebecca Solnit's Hollow City presents an image of San Francisco as a city that has culturally and historically been hollowed-out by the rich White yuppies. Solnit shows how gentrification—is the change in an urban area associated with the movement of more affluent individuals into a lower-class area—is transforming the city into an area that looks more like a cookie cutter-perfect façade than a richly multicultural area where the history of a place is more important than its outward appearance. Furthermore, Solnit goes on to note that the inflated real estate prices in the city are making it impossible for the people that build the houses to be able to afford to live there. She argues that the increase of wealth flowing into the city is harming it rather than helping it. She states, “when the new economy arrived in San Francisco, it began to lay waste the city’s existing culture—culture both in th sense of cultural diversity, as in ethnic cultures, and of creative activity, artistic and political” (18). She goes on to argue that the condition necessary for Bohemia to thrive is being squeezed out by gentrification. As new buildings arise, the memory of San Francisco is being evicted. Without the conditions to thrive, the essential quirky eclecticism of the city is struggling to survive.

undgomshuset

1967 was the Summer of Love. Tens of thousands of young people gathered at Haight-Ashtray and began a cultural revolution. Hippies swarmed to San Francisco, which became a melting pot for music, psychedelic drugs, free love and communal living. One popular form of social experimentation that arose was communal living. Groups of people formed communities where the all of the members of a particular residence were free to share resources amongst one another.
Nearly two decades after The Summer of Love, the same type of counterculture ideas emerged half way around the world, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Young left-wing activists started a social movement that would provide housing as well as an outlet for an alternative culture that, following in the footsteps of its hippie predecessors, rejected mainstream ideals. In 1982, Ungdomshuset, ("The Youth House") a building located at Jagtvej 69 in Nørrebro, Copenhagen was a hangout for different youth groups whose political and cultural alliances differed from the established society in Denmark at the time. In the early 1980's the municipality of Copenhagen assigned the house to the founders of Ungdomshuset, and over the next few years the property gradually grew into an active commune. It functioned much like the hippie communes of the 60's. Many of the original inhabitants were residents of Copenhagen who could no longer afford the rising prices of housing and were therefore relocated by the government into less costly neighborhoods like Nørrebro. Reminiscent of the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, the poor Danes who were transferred to the new neighborhood banned together and formed a community amongst themselves. Ungdomshuset, in particular, was centered around non-commercial based music concerts. Artists such as Bjork and Nick Cave performed free concerts at the commune and it quickly gained notoriety as the city's premier scene for underground punk music. Along with up-and-coming musical artists, international squatters flocked to Ungdomshuset. The combination of alternative living, music, and culture, as well as a complete lack of formal government gave the squatter a form of autonomy that was otherwise very limited through out the country. Their reaction against their conservative government and social norms mirrors the hippie counterculture movement born in San Francisco in the 1960's.
Over the years, inhabitants of the commune built a free movie theater, cafe, repair shop, and bookstore, among other things. Weekly Monday night meetings helped ensure that Ungdomshuset was running smoothly. Although the commune did not have any definitive leadership, certain rules and principles were upheld. Both violence and hard drugs were forbidden. No one could be turned away from using the house, and all forms of discrimination, such as racism and sexism were not tolerated.
The municipality of Copenhagen made plans to renovate the building for safety reasons, but encountered resistance from the occupants. Then, in 1999, the municipality put the building up for bid after the squatters failed to pay rent. The inhabitants of Ungdomshuset felt betrayed by the commune and refused to leave. Eventually, the house was acquired by Faderhuset, a religious right-wing group in Copenhagen. The court system granted Faderhuset the right to sue four of the activists living at Ungdomshuset. The court did not recognize Ungdomshuset as an organization and therefore, Faderhuset was unable to sue all of the inhabitants. In 2006, Ungdomshuset was denied the right of appeal to the Supreme Court. Unable to take any further legal action, the squatter barricaded themselves inside until the police threatened to evict them in 2007. In December of 2006, inhabitants and supporters of Ungdomshuset held a demonstration that turned quickly turned into a riot. Burning barricades were set up by demonstrators and the police were attacked with fireworks and stones. Three months later on March 1, 2007, all of the occupants of Ungdomshuset were evicted by the police, with the help of military helicopters, fire engines, and cranes. Further riots ensued, and within days, the entire city of Nørrebro was overrun. Police raided the neighborhood in order to find and deport foreign activists, who were relentlessly targeted. Many claim that undercover police joined the riots and spoke in foreign languages in order to catch any non-Danish activists. The high number of foreign arrests in conjunction with the use of teargas by the Danish police against the demonstrators, led to a heightened international interest in the riots. The police involvement was so severe that the event has been qualified as as "a 'laboratory experience' in police repression" by Le Monde diplomatique.The police came under further scrutiny when they designated the neighborhoods surrounding Ungdomshuset as an area where any citizen could be searched without any reasonable suspicion, going against Danish law. Some have even gone on record as stating that the Danish state used the riots as an opportunity to test out their anit-terrorist security forces, which is supported by the Danish police's admission to having mistakenly used Ferret 40, a potentially lethal form of teargas, against demonstrators.
The young people who sought out to create a safe environment for a countercultural movement were ultimately taken down by the rules, regulations, and sheer force of the cultural institutions they sought to gain autonomy from. Even after their eviction, the youth from Ungdomshuset fought for, and won the right to a new house in the city where they currently reside. The communal way of living that sprouted out of the hippie era in San Francisco is still alive in the streets of Copenhagen.

http://www.ungeren.dk/

http://www.ungeren.dk/en.php3?id_rubrique=4

http://www.jagtvej69.dk/?OPSLAGSTAVLE%3A

http://www.emoware.org/ungdomshuset.asp

http://nyhederne.tv2.dk/krimi/article.php/id-6270998.html?ss

Holy Moloch!

The second section of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” focuses on “Moloch”--Ginsberg's euphemism for the military prison state of the United States in the 1950's. Ginsberg sees America as having given itself over to the worship of oil and money. He states that Moloch's “love is endless oil and stone!” (22). And he goes on to state that Moloch's “soul is electricity and banks!” (22). For Ginsberg, Moloch represents a death-like war-god who controls America. In the second section of “Howl,” Moloch turns into a dynamo—a machine whose force drives society. The second section of “Howl” continues the poem's ascent from the inferno up to purgatory and eventually to the holy paradiso. Ginsberg viewed San Francisco as capitulated to military-industrial complex. His vision is an eclectic hybrid religion. Moloch, the “incomprehensible prison” and the “soulless jailhouse” (21) that Ginsberg sees as taking over America.

Ginsberg employs the “cannibal dynamo” of Moloch in order to prompt the reader into a spiritual dynamo: one which will help negate the destructive physical and psychological effects of Moloch on society (21). Moloch is “pure machinery” and yet it personified as something much more human, complete with a “mind...blood (and)...eyes” (21, 22). The speaker attributes these life-like qualities to Moloch in order to help the reader gain a clearer picture of the evil force running America.

The relentless force with which Moloch constantly bombards American society is compounded Ginsberg's endless use of exclamations. The reader is repeatedly bombarded with “Moloch! Moloch!” to the extent that it is not only impossible to ignore but actually quite annoying (22). The only punctuation used at the end of a line through out the entire section of the poem is the explanation point. This repetitive form expresses the urgency in the speakers voice. He is not passively commenting on the destructive force of Moloch within society; rather, he is proclaiming loudly and clearly to anyone who willing to stop and listen to just how destructive of a force Moloch has become.

For the majority of the poem, every stanza begins with “Moloch!” until the focus shifts to the America people who “broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!” (22). Only after sufficiently painting a picture of Moloch and it's totality of control does Ginsberg shift towards the people responsible for “lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us” (22). Ginsberg offers the ubiquity of Heaven as a peaceful refrain from the overpowering Moloch, which his dominated this section of the poem up until this point.

The final stanza of the poem offers the reader with an option for getting away from Moloch. The people in the poem free themselves from the oppressive power of Moloch by “jump[ing] off the roof” (23). Unfortunately, this kind of freedom will cost you your life. This rather drastic solution points not only to the necessity Ginsberg sees in freeing oneself from the death-grip control of a Moloch government but also to the urgency with which one must act. One can either sit around and wait to be eaten alive by Moloch, or he can go “down to the river” (23) and take his own life. Ironically this political act of protest won't stop the insatiable Moloch.

SAN FRANCISCO’S CHANGING LIGHT

Ferlinghetti uses the constantly shifting movement of light to paint a poetic image of San FranciscoSan Francisco. Rather than confining the city to a strict perimeter of boundaries, Ferlinghetti’s image of the city is one that expands beyond tangible limits. in ‘The Changing Light.’ He uses the image of light in order to show the fluidity of the contado of

Ferlinghetti tropes San Francisco as “an island (of) light”—a special form separate from the rest of the America. Unlike the rest of the country, San Francisco is not destined to one particular, physical local. Instead, “the city drifts anchorless upon the ocean”; it is weightless and unrestricted. Despite the images of San Francisco as a malleable light source that “floats in” and just as quickly “drifts” away, the speaker has a very concrete attachment to the city. The constant flow of light in and out of the city establishes an image of the city as a contado of peripheries. Ferlinghetti creates an image of the ever-changing city that “the sun paints white” as quickly as it “[blankets] the hills” in a layer of fog.

The use of “your” creates a separation between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ within the poem. The speaker clearly asserts his alliance with San Francisco and contests that it “is none of your…light” (76). He gives off a sense of prideful ownership of “the light of San Francisco,” which does not and cannot belong to anyone. The use of “your” sounds defensive because the whole poem is Ferlinghetti trying to defend an undefined, amoebic space. The city he describes is constantly morphing and changing and yet he is desperately trying to hold onto it by defining it in terms that make it his and not ‘yours.’

The description of the city as glowing “white” creates an image that is imperial and regal. Ferlinghetti’s diction reflects his reverence for San Francisco. In his eyes, the city’s beauty trumps that of the “East Coast…Paris,” and even “Greece." Ferlinghetti presents an image of San Francisco in ‘The Changing Light’ that encompasses his pride and admiration for his city without pigeonholing it into a confined space.