Hey Sugar!

We threw out the old website and soon will be installing the new.

www.heysugar.net will be our new home for The Sugar Shack.

Stay tuned for plans of 2008 awesomeness including....

* SOLAR PANELS!
* GARDENING OPPORTUNITIES
* WAREHOUSE WORKSHOP DESKS
* LIGHTING UP THE CITY
* SUGAR SHACK MUSIC?
* GREENGURUS: SUGAR GETS AN ECOMAKEOVER

See you soon @ Sugar Shack!

Dude. Where's the Sugar blog??

Hello? Hello?

Hey, read the LA Times article. Interesting.

Um. So, cool weather, huh? I was just driving down Laurel Canyon and wow, all the power outages. Wind, I guess.

Yep.

(long silence)

Okaaayy, well, it was cool visiting.

Wow, shackblogging!

Watch out....someone sent me the keys to the blog. You are all in terrible trouble. I'd recommend running, not walking to your nearest exit before you blow up your computer.



So our first video clip of the day is a music video shot at Sugar in 2004 for BYO Records and the great Julie Lo. This was pre-Monster House renovations....these days our Community Room is used for gatherings, art shows and screenings, movie nights and storytellers, bands and theatre group rehearsals. We are open to future shoots and especially events for kids and our greater community. Email us at heysugar@thesugarshack.org to find out more about space use.



I host extensive archives of our studio projects at Fotki (mostly for my nonprofit org, Amoration) and this is a small sampling of our Sugar shots. More coming soon as we break out new desktop publishing skills.

Much love from the Sugar Shack,

evo amo

This is what they mean by reincarnation

So I have heard in many Buddhist circles that whatever issues you leave one place with will stay with you into the space you move into. I have heard many cubicle dwelling friends go to temple and explain their woes with a boss who is strangely like the last boss who is strangely like an ex-boyfriend and the person in the orange robe would say, "your situation will reincarnate until it is resolved. It's not the person. It's the soul of the situation."

Very insightful and something I carry in my Jesus-Conversational-Atheist heart (er, that's a whole other blog).

So, as some of you know, I no longer live at Sugar and I am an official Sugar community member. But I remember my days at the house very fondly. Sometimes with humor, sometimes with a grimace, always with love. And I now live in West Hollywood and work in Beverly Hills where I think of my home days fondly, my work days with a grimace, and all of it with love (yadda yadda).

Well, I must have the soul of a dirty dish haunting me.

At Sugar, there is always a problem with the dishes. People leave them, other people clean them, resentments happen. And the inevitable sign gets posted above the kitchen sink. "Wash your dishes, you fuckin' asshole" to paraphrase the many moist messages that have lived and died in the kitchen.

So here, in my little office in Beverly Hills, I am just a flight of stairs from a kitchen. Part of my job is to open the office at 7am. It includes clearing out the dishwasher and putting away dishes. It almost always includes moving dishes from the sink to the washer, and those dishes are always left in the sink by people quite capable of just putting it in the washer. As a once Sugar resident, I know there is nothing to do about this but take the extra ten minutes to put the dishes in the dishwasher and start it up again so they can pile up the next day and the next into eternity. No matter, doing dishes keeps me from having to schedule meetings.

Just now, I walked up to the kitchen to make some tea and low and behold, a fresh piece of paper taped to the wall above the sink:

"Guess what? Dishes go in the dishwasher. Trash goes in the trash."

Without even thinking I said "Oh my God! I'm at Sugar!"

No one was there to hear me. What is the sound of one Sugar Shackian in a karmic loop?

How the city works

LINK

First, that link is the project that I just spent two hours listening to people talk about. Oooohh..consumerism pretty.

Two days ago, I got a call from a rep of the Redevelopment PAC that I'm
on. He told me that there was to be a board meeting about the
development on San Vicente and Pico. This is huge as the Sugar Shack is walking
distance. We knew that the property was in full construction mode for a
bus depot, but a large percentage of the land was being fought over
between Target and the LA Unified School District. The meeting was
scheduled for 10am two days from the phone call. A few hours later, I got an
email from a very active Midcity council member that the meeting was
scheduled for 8am.

I was learning the beauty of beaurocracy.

Yesterday, the rep calls to say that the meeting is at 8 but this
particular topic would start about 10. He suggested getting there at 9:30. I get there at 9:22.

They were already in mid-topic. I likely missed a half hour of very
important stuff. No matter. I got enough to piss me off. Which is a surprise to me every single time it happens. I didn't even have an opinion when I walked in
that meeting and within 10 minutes I was offended.

Everyone wants Target there. Why? Because it generates revenue, it
makes jobs, it increases property value, it gives our little community
volunteer committees extra mad money (potentially high 7 figure mad money),
and most importantly, it makes us pretty. Why not a high school
(potentially the largest high school in the city)? Because it will make
teenagers spend time here. Not as pretty.

To be fair (more to the point, to not sound like an agenda toting
pinko), the school will likely be poorly funded, poorly managed and the jobs
it would create would not help the community (unless we have a
surprising amount of unemployed teachers in our neighborhood). With all that,
crime will go up, the drugs and prostitution already in our neighborhood
will get more action, and by more I mean under aged more action. And
forget about gentrification. And for all my liberal ways, I can still
appreciate a little gentrification.

So quite a few people made it. The neighborhood was there, standing room only. And they spoke. They spoke about how they were (we were) dying for a Target and did NOT want a high school.

Anyway, Target is a little stubborn with the wages they're willing to pay. Mind you, they promise to pay a living wage...a wage one can live on. But that's about all they promise and they don't want to promise in writing cuz really, define "living".

"No worries! Move on in!" The community begged. CRA (the suits) were a little less enthusiastic. Either let people get paid poorly or CRA would actually pay the difference so employees got a wage they could really live on. CRA did not like the latter option at all. So now it's poor paid or Target actually does pay well on the honor system or lose Target. The developer did not look amused by any of this. (He DID negotiate prevailing wage for his construction workers, THAT guy isn't dumb)

But the bad guy isn't Target. They're earning a buck.

The bad guy (yet again) is us. The community. Because we are so desperate for some revenue and some city clout that we basically beg large corporations to rape us.

Gentrification.

This is a word that I feel is the same as Lucifer. It means something beautiful and is actually a very ugly, festering thing.

(more later)

A past post.

I'm redoing the website, so I have no time to create an actual post for Sugar's new blog. But I really want to add something to it, so I thought I'd show y'all a post from my personal blog about a Sugar project. It's dated June 15th -when I was bright eyed and giddy over Sugar. I'm still giddy over Sugar, but not so giddy on projects. Anyway, June 15th. Here's what I said....

The beauty of working on the house
So I saw my parents over the weekend and I explained the chore rotation and special projects we have in the commune (still can't call it a collective...makes me feel like a Borg).

Mom said with just a hint of utter disdain, "You can do all that for some strangers, but you won't even put a dish in the sink over here."

It's true. I'm a slob in the parental home. But it's only cuz Mom always tells me how I clean "wrong."

Anyway, that's for the therapist session.

The point being is that I work on the house and I love it. Yesterday I dug a small trench for the next rain season. I think I'm helping the world of digging and ditching when I say that wet dirt is so much easier to scoop up with a shovel than dry dirt. And also, rocks in the dirt is a bad thing. You want to know what I wish they'd bottle and turn into a perfume? Wet dirt. That is the sexiest fucking scent on the planet. It really is. Stick some wet dirt in front of me and take me...take me!

Today, we all worked on a fence. There's this crazy ass fence we had before that made the place look like a hippy's crack den. I don't think hippies smoke crack per se, but I'm using the visual anyway. The fence was made of doors. And it was painted wild colors with stuff like "This is a hippy crack den." Just kidding. I already forgot what was written on it. But it was poetic and artistic and the only reason it was an eyesore was that the doors were indoor doors, so after a couple years of being in rain and wind, the door-fence was buckling, rotting, bowing, warping and screaming to be put to sleep. So here, we were, three girls soon to be aided by a few other people in the house, tearing down the doors and putting up a new fence that will hold up jasmine ivy. Woohoo! We were fantasizing what to say when the neighbors were bringing us cookies in gratitude. I mean, at the last neighborhood meeting, they called it a "blight". We were taking down an eyesore that's plagued them for years! They would so make cookies.

All we got were the kids coming home from school who would walk past and sneer at change. They asked what we did with the fence and we would point at a pile of pink, purple, and blue wood. Then they would heckle us. We had done them wrong. I had no idea. I almost put it back. Maybe they just liked the old fence because their parents hated it. In any case, we all felt a tinge of guilt.

The kids' reactions stick in my head. They really loved that fence. Did it speak to them? I remember reading one door and relating. Let's see if I remember....I may be able to paraphrase..."They said I was too dark. They said I was too light. I was too ethnic. Not ethnic enough. Too tall. Too short..." You get the picture. But it had an ending. I really don't remember the ending. So maybe these kids were truly missing the message from the doors. They had a little reminder that they weren't alone on their way home. Some adult somewhere understood. And we took that away.

I don't really care. I hated that fence.

This is the first post on the Sugar blog

It says nothing. But it's the first and therefore very important.