[sudo-discuss] Re: The New Parkway Theater

Heck yeah! Those are good ideas Juliana! Andrew, the New parkway is a business with something like a dozen investors. They have employees that are paid and they run a food business, I'm guessing their cafe probably makes more money than the movie theater. I noticed that the crowd at the new parkway tends to be like what the Rock Paper Scissors gallery used to be. I think we had this discussion before, but the demographics of Oakland were much different several years ago. It used to be a place where artsy young people could get a cheap room, make a living as waiters, and go to house parties. Now everyone in their twenties is pretty clean cut and makes a good living in tech (speaking as a tech person). I used to go to the Rock Paper Scissors like its as my living room - there used to be a loft upstairs with a zine library. It doubled as a storefront and was downtown directly facing the street. Most of the people who got down there walked or rode their bicycles - it wasn't like today, when we'd get people always asking us about parking. Oakland first Fridays used to be full of cool makers and the streets were full of bicycles on those days. I was free to work on whatever I wanted there - so we'd hold impromptu workshops about how to mulch wood or how to do comic book workshops. It was really cool. We had a marker art party there. It's a big contrast to today, where everything seems to be run for the benefit of people with kids or involuntarily working for some kind of non profit group's directive. I mean it's nice to help minority kids, but people in non profits get tons of money to do that. I have no idea why they keep trying to drag people who are creative into doing their work for them. My experience from my horrible time living in San Jose (which I'll never do again) is that people who favor cars and live in suburban homes have different priorities. I guess if you want to draw the smart, interesting people who want to create, it's create the conditions to make it happen. That would mean trying to attract people who aren't suburban people with families who care a lot about finding parking and driving cars. I'm sure there are various groups at UC Berkeley, unless that entire student population has become extremely bland and cares about major league sports and football games. That would be sad, because that school used to have a lot of interesting people when I was younger in the 1990s. Although I love SudoRoom and the Omni, it feels like if you spend a lot of time there the culture does all it can to destroy people's creativity. Dragging people into meetings, making demands of them to do community service, interrupting people on creative projects and trying to repurpose them into education. It's good in small doses, but I'm not sure why anyone interesting would want to come to the space then? It's died down lately, but half of my conversations the past few months have been people trying to persuade me to stop doing my creative projects of exploration and trying to get me to do other stuff, like join women's groups, teach kids, it's really weird.