get evaporated

I want to get back into the stream of consciousness....
When I went back to Albuquerque, and was driving around I realized that the city I grew up in is a lot like many of the small, western towns I have driven through--Flagstaff, Holbrook, Winslow......Gallup...Places where the railroad was the genesis, where downtowns are small, nostalgic and dusty...places that seem to be defined by their insignificance in the vastness of the Western desert. Albuquerque is surrounded by a landscape more ancient, more vast, more beautiful than anything people could hope to construct on that spot betwen the Sandias and the West Mesa volcanoes. Yet, Burque is different, because in its bulging size (by NM standards) it is reminescent of Los Angeles, with its mix of high and low density residential tracts, the military/prison industrial complex, the ubiquitous automobile, the strip malls, and the Valley-Heights inequality.
This combination perplexes me. Damn.
Culture seems more unified there in Burque. People cling to a small-town mentality, choosing to ingore the growing pains of a mid-sized metropolis. I roll through Los Duranes, Los Candelarias, San Jose Barrio.....places where the original Burquenos lived simple farming lives for generations....they are forgotten, archaic, decayed, remnants of a dignified (and shameful) past.

Los Angeles confuses me. Where is its historical core? Where is its memory?

Last weekend, i was with my brother along the train tracks. It was a cold, grey day. John, me and Evan Moore(by brother's friend from middle school) had gone down to San Jo to take flicks of the piece John, Rock, Buket and Banks had rocked the night before on a new chrome holy roller in main yards. We were walking along the tracks, between abandoned warehouses, dead grass, industrial wreckage....a place that was depressing in its forgotten-ness. This is the residue of industrialization...so familiar in this country's cities. rusted barbed wire fences, unused rail spurs overgrow with tumbleweeds and vagrants' garbage, piled of old scrap metal that had been sitting there for years. No other people to be seen. We came to a place by a crumbling brick building sat beside an old rail spur. A chain link fence with razor wire on the top. apparently someone still thought it was worth their effort to protect the rooftop from guerilla artists like my brother, known as Veck on the streets by taggers, OG''s, homeless people and 16-20 year old Jainas from Belen to Santa Fe.

I sat watch while Evan and John climbed through the delapitated mess to catch the flicks. I sat crouched and i watched the wind blow across the grass and old newspaper in frot of me. I realized, this is the kind of place I am drawn to. My parents think it strange that i would choose to live in an "urban area." But this is not a new tension. since i was young, i loved the chaos of obscure corners, decaying city blacks, old buildings and refuse with stories to tell. crouching there by the tracks, I felt like i could read this place like no one else could. It, and every place like it, was like a home that would hide me, understand me, protect me from the polished and busy mainstream, the glare of material life and consumption and image in the world on the outside.
John loved this reality more than I did. he made his home in the urban wastelands of this city, of Denver, Las Vegas, El Paso, New York.......
I remember last march when him and i got off the subway on a random stop in the south Bronx. Sidewalks torn up, empty lots beside warehouses and tenements littered with garbage, dirty melted snow collecting in muddy puddles under graffiti stained walls. i felt the same feeling. we didnt have to talk to each other. we knew it was a place of repose and affirmation to us. on the other side of the country, but the same home.

for me, it is imperative that i enter into the human life of these places. i am called to love the city, to become a neighbor. to John, he is alone in this hostile environment. Writing a stylized name on the trains and rooftops is a way to solidify his place here. it is an empassioned strike against the anonymity that engulfs the lives of so many kids like him.....warfare...over who will have a name in the urban space---McDonalds, or John Vigil. The corporations, or the culturally dislocated youth of a forgotten city. Who decides who will have the right to occupy that public space? Why is his art, his name less legitimate than the billboards for beer, cars, TV shows and fast food places that thrust themselves into our field of vision at every turn....

more later