history archive at let’s get awesome

Tag: family history

i found this picture today. it’s of my grandmother on her wedding day. this morning i was at my aunt’s house in massachusetts. i was helping her move boxes out of her attic because she’s selling the house and moving into an apartment. my sister was there, so was my grandmother, who recently turned 93. many of the boxes were filled with slides, old 8mm and super 8 film, photo albums, and letters. there was too much stuff to go through, but we did sift through some of it. in one of the big boxes was large roll of paper, yellowed with age. it was the family tree mapped out by my great uncle joe, my grandfather’s younger brother. the photo below is just a section of it.

joe lives in maine and is the person on my father’s side of the family who holds the most knowledge about our history. i interviewed him a few years ago and have a couple hours of footage of him telling stories about our family’s history. i have a fragmented digital version of the family tree, but, i had no idea of the amount of work he’d put into unearthing our family’s lineage until i unrolled the tree he’d painstakingly written out (in carbon copy duplicate) by hand.

looking at the tree, it’s immediately clear that joe put a lot of time and love into this project. the story of his research alone is something i’d like to hear more about. the tree is wide, spanning far beyond our immediate family. given it’s width, though, the tree is not quite as deep as it should be. it extends all the way back to the 1500’s, but scanning across the paper, most of the lines are truncated a few generations before the current one. looking more closely, you can see that a lot of them end in the 1940’s with: “killed by nazis.”

(click to view detail)

all my grandparents were born in this country, so the holocaust has always been somewhat of an abstraction to me: films, books, music, what i learned in school, and the occasional conversation with elderly jews usually opened with a disapproving comment about my tattoos. today i had this moment in my aunt’s living room, standing there by myself with ice running through my veins. it was the first time that i felt my own history moving inside of me and it felt uncomfortable and disorienting and like getting kicked in the stomach. more later.

Tags: activism, friends, history, media, politics

In the winter of 1997 i was living on Avenue A and 5th Street. I was just finishing college and pretty clueless about…well…most things. But for the purposes of this post, let’s be more specific and say that I was pretty clueless about the squats and the anarchist scene on the Lower East Side. At that point, the only experience I had resembling an interaction with that scene was walking into Blackout Books and getting vibed…hard.

One morning, just after my 23rd birthday, I was walking down Avenue A and saw a whole bunch of police barricades set up on 5th Street between A and B. I asked someone on the street what was going on and they said that the city was about to demolish a building on the street. There had been a small fire in the squat in the middle of the block, and the city was using this opportunity to rid the neighborhood of the building and its residents.

I ran home and grabbed my super8 camera and walked down towards the barricades. I started shooting. I only had one cartridge– about 2.5 minutes. While I was standing on the street, I ran into an acquaintance who lived opposite 5th Street Squat. She let me come up into her apartment and shoot from the fire escape.

The city demolished 5th Street Squat that afternoon, in defiance of a court-issued injunction. The residents’ clothing, belongings, identifications, and even pets were inside. As was Brad Will. Story has it that it was a space heater in Brad’s room that may have caused the fire. Maybe this is had to do with why he would pull something as crazy as defending the building while a wrecking crane was smashing it to pieces. But I imagine, had he not been responsible for the fire, he would have defended the building in the same exact way.

Three weeks ago, while doing video journalism for Indymedia, Brad was shot and killed by plainclothes police (paramilitary) in Oaxaca and a community of people in and beyond New York City are filled with grief and rage. There is a lot of organizing being done in the wake of Brad’s death to show solidarity with the popular movement in Oaxaca. I think he would be proud of his friends.

Over the last ten years, as my own late-blooming activism began to take shape and direction our paths crossed more often and I got a chance to know Brad a little– though not well enough. This footage I shot of him back in 1997 was my first and clearest memory of him– and also a visual representation of one of the most politicizing moments of that part of my life. It’s sad to be digging it out under such shitty circumstances, but important to share.

For more on the situation in Oaxaca, check here.

For the Shadow’s article on 5th Street Squat check here.

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