Interview by Matt D’Angelo, December 2008
Since 1991, Erick Lyle has edited Scam, an influential ‘zine that featured personal writing, politics, reports on protest events, and interviews with activists and punk bands. He has been a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the anthologies, San Francisco: The Political Edge and Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority. He has also written and performed several pieces for NPR’s This American Life. Satellite contributor Matt d’Angelo conducted this interview through e-mail with Lyle in November as a preview to the author’s 2 p.m., Dec. 14 book reading at the Downtown Alachua County Library.
Q: On the Lower Frequencies is a history of San Francisco, have you documented the underground of any other cities, big or small? Are you an underground anthropologist?
I have written extensively about Miami, too. But I think my writing might have more in common with ecological writing. It’s about a deep sense of place, though it takes place in the city instead of in the wilderness.
Q: At the beginning you write about living in San Francisco, saying, “I had a place to live, food stamps, and spending money left over….life was good.” Have you received any slack for portraying living on welfare positively? Or crime?
Not too much. Some people have accused me of glorifying welfare, but I have to remind them that I am, after all, writing about my own life. Just because I wrote a book doesn’t mean I’m not an authentic poor person. My mom worked at Office Depot, and I have no secret trust fund or even college tuition coming my way. And when food stamps are all you got, sometimes romanticizing things a little helps you get through it. That said, the quote you are talking about is really about a lifestyle philosophy. I believe that most of the work people do in our society is meaningless and that it serves nothing except to create environmental waste and to make us unhappy. Do we need to work so hard to accrue wealth and material goods or do we really just need food, shelter, artistic inspiration, community? For me, having enough to get by and plenty of free time to write and read is the good life. I’d like to see a world where more people could share that.
Q: It seems like your book takes place over the span of a decade, when did the writing of this book begin? Can you talk about how you compiled the writing that you chose to include?
On The Lower Frequencies is a history from the bottom of up of life in San Francisco during the past 10 years. The vaunted dot-com boom felt a lot different down on the streets of SF’s skidrow. The permanent war on terror that followed wasn’t really news to a down-and-out population that is already used to being rounded up and fingerprinted at random by the police. The book is the story of recent history from a different perspective – as seen from skid row or the SRO hotel room, from the line at the welfare office or from behind the lines of riot cops at a protest.
Q: There’s a segment when you talk about asking people what they wanted the city to look like and showing “people of the power they do have.” Can you trace back and explain how you got to those sentiments and what the outcome of it was?
As many of us have noticed in these past eight years, it can be highly exhausting to be fighting back all the time, especially against what seems to be an immovable brick wall. Sometimes, instead of just reacting to and fighting back against whatever hateful stuff Bush and Co. were putting out, it seemed more important to do events that built up our own sense of community or that celebrated our own values. After the dot-com era went bust, those of us left over came together in that time of lost friends and vanished art and community spaces, to take over an enormous abandoned building downtown that we turned into a squatted arts and community space for several months. Artists collaboratively designed murals that covered the walls around the huge space. We had big shows where 500 or 600 folks came to eat free food, listen to speakers, watch bands and dance. We also used the space to run a free Sunday morning café where people could come in off the streets, eat some good, free breakfast and check out the art in the space. It felt really powerful to just take that space and live in it the way we wanted to after all that fighting back against eviction. It was a way to show an alternate version of how the world could be and to give people a way to directly participate in it.
Q: There was a part in the book where you see the front door of your free-space squat on the cover of the newspaper with an article that talked about turning the abandoned building into a center of arts, culture and housing when it was already happening under that radar. How do you take responses to your works of activism? Did you ever receive or want acknowledgment from the city or community at large?
I’m not sure what you mean. We were representative of the “community at large” in many ways. When we took over that building, we knew there was a large constituency who wanted to participate in not just going to shows in a space like that, but who actively wanted to participate in running it. Our efforts shame the city administration that allows absentee landlords to leave large swaths of Market Street abandoned while they await money from the redevelopment agency to turn the spaces into condos, thus creating the very “blight” conditions that the city government was complaining about in the news story you mentioned. We are showing that if housing and community space was a right and not a privilege, there would be plenty of volunteer labor willing to turn these empty buildings into housing for the homeless who now are forced to sleep in front of their shuttered doors.
Q: There are a few times where you hint at seeing things differently, like during a protest you said, “the city seemed to unravel from it’s everydayness” or from inside Hunt’s Donuts, the donut and coffee shop “Open 25 Hours Everyday.” How did looking at the city from these places keep you motivated?
It is an incredibly powerful feeling to stand with hundreds or thousands of other protesters in the center of streets normally full of cars and to declare your opposition to “business as usual.” When SF protesters completely shut down the city on the first day the war started in 2003, there were thousands of people bicycling around or marching around in car-free streets. It provided a vision of a radically different world in which we could be living – a world in which people actually talk to each other and hang out in public and in which none of them have to go the jobs doing mostly meaningless work that we hate. Much of the protest activity written about in the book is really about the theater of showing people another way to live and enabling them to directly participate in it. When you have a punk show powered by generator at a public plaza and it turns into a big street party with folks of all types from the neighborhood, you have an example of how much more fun our daily life could be. When you have an art space and free café in an abandoned building its shows a more positive use than simply leaving the building empty with people living on the streets in front of it. And so on.