I started going to all these housing meetings to over thwart the government in some sort of way. I camped out in City Hall Park and froze in the middle of winter. I met squatters who let me move into an East 13th Street squat on the Lower East Side where I did my art and lived there until the City evicted us military style with riot cops, helicopters, tanks and the whole nine yards. These days the building on East 13th Street where I used to live has been renovated. Young Urban Professionals or yuppies now live there.
Some people say with death comes rebirth and transformation.
The revolution still lives and the only thing constant for me is change and survival. I now walk down the streets a war torn survivor witnessing the drastic changes of the neighborhood that has taken place over the past few years. Every neighborhood seems to be undergoing the process of what I would call Gentrification or Genocide, the extermination of a whole race of people, something similiar to Nazi Germany. I have all these revelations of what gentrification could mean. Every city has its own gentrified neighborhood or its own Soho, the pioneer of gentrified neighborhoods, and for me it is the Lower East Side and the East Village where I currently live which now have become like Soho, which has become like Beverly Hills and the one big strip mall effect.