Getting to Know Us ~ with Emily Scott, Los Angeles Urban Rangers ~
~ Fall 2006 ~ 12:00 - 5:30pm _ 09.19.06 ~
Beginning within the schoolhouse and then into the schoolyard and beyond, we will collectively explore the local environment in relation to its broader urban context. This will serve as a group-generated orientation to the site, but also allow us to sharpen our observational skills, consider what it means to actively inhabit the city, and seed ideas for place-responsive projects down the line. Bring one field tool of your choice (e.g. camera, map, test tube).
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The first day of school began for all of us, including our inaugural instructor, Emily, at 8 AM with yoga in the dome and fruit fresh from the Farmer's Market. Emily is one of our only instructors to spend the entire day with us at Sundown Schoolhouse and the only instructor who braved the entire final event, all 12 hours of it, on bicycle, touring eight different homes (and parks and doughnut shops...).
Thank you, Emily.
As a perfect preface to Emily's class, Getting to Know Us, we introduced ourselves to each other and several through presentation of what we had each brought with us from home to school. The things we brought were: one Thomas Guide, one small plastic frog that hops, one hand-held tape recorder, one yoga belt, one heirloom necklace, one jar of snow from Vermont, seven teeth from childhood and one container cinnamon, one box with a skeleton inside, one doll in a little plastic egg, four photos of family in France, and two bird's nest. Later, we would meet Eileen Myles who says that whatever's next to each other counts, that the assemblage makes the truth, the truth of a poem.
Emily's class officially began a little bit later, with a writing
prompt: I come from. Pablo, who had arrived in Los Angeles from France at midnight the night before, only 8 hours before the start of Sundown Schoolhouse led us off.
Where Do I Come From (not even one day after moving to L.A.!) by Pablo
I now live on Isabel street, number 1133. It's close to the Gold Line Metro, and not too far from downtown. It's a nice residential area of Los Angeles at the bottom of hill. There are a lot of trees, and it's a pretty calm place.
Devin, who lives in the same house as Pablo, wrote:
I COME FROM a house that has been home to many: built as a hunting cabin when the mountain was still wild with deer and, I've heard boar, as well, and then so many others: a Mexican family who planted chayote and fruit trees in the front, an Armenian family that paid very much for large tile with cosmic spirals and granite counter tops fit for a palace, green architects who messed with the washing machine and half installed a grey water system, a man who fancied himself a builder: he threw up a deck made of two by fours and plexi glass and used large fence posts for beams that hang in high vaulted ceilings.
Now it will be mine and Dennis' and Pablo's.
I come from steep streets. It is at the base of Mt. Washington, yes, but sometimes if I do not shift the gears fast enough on my bike, I have to dismount and walk the final stretch.
I come from a place where ice cream trucks drive by all day and morning and night long. They play "Its a Small World" mainly, but also sometimes Christmas songs.
I come from a divide: across the street is a place labeled Cypress Park and then in front of our house, a sign "Mt. Washington" ... so this is where someone seemed to think the park ends and the mountain begins.
Most of us had read the assigned "Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience" by Yi-Fu Tuan. A good, solid reading we thought. In fact, some of us thought it was so good and so solid that we quoted it for the remainder of the semester. "Remember? A space is not a place until we have an experience with it," Tracy liked to say.
Emily had asked us to bring field tools, as we were now Sundown Schoolhouse Rangers, and with these rulers and recorders and cameras in hand, we explored our site—the dome and beyond. Then we made maps of our journey to the site.
"[The day with Emily] was an orientation of space, time, person,"
Michael said. "A perfect way to begin an intense and intimate 12 weeks."