Traveler Alessa Bakkum busks for some room money in the Valley West shopping center. She’s also featured in
our cover this week on Arcata’s proposed panhandling ordinance
… although busking per se is not the target of the ordinance.
This article appears in Where To Surf.
Heidi,
Glad to see that you are so smitten with a homeless traveler whose decided to hang around in Arcata a bit longer.
Maybe you’ll find a loaded hand gun along with a bottle of urine and a pile of trash next to your house like my friend did a few days ago. When the group of travelers “moved on” to the next spot.
Michael
http://arcatacanbebetter.blogspot.com/
I played a gig on a sidewalk once. It was pretty cool.
The strangest place I ever played was a restroom on a beach. A thunder shower chased me and my girlfriend and about 10 other people into the concrete structure. I had a battery powered keyboard and played about 5 or 6 songs to a small but verry receptive audience that even joined in with the vocals. Great reverb.
And oh yeah, Mr. Moore, there were no bottles of urin because a restroom was provided!
Good times.
I’d give her a dollar. At least she’s creating something of value; she’s contributing to society. Better than the scumbags on the plaza.
Anybody remember the dude who used to play violin down near the plaza? Around 2001/2002. Was his name Lincoln?
Way to lump in a talented young musician with a gun-runner, Michael Moore Junior. Maybe if you weren’t so busy fucking up another CenterArts show with your piss-poor sound engineering you could provide the Final Solution to getting the wretched, tired and poor out of your precious gentrified sight, you fucking bigot.
I believe Michael was taking issue with a sentimental view of the homeless situation in Arcata when the reality is often much more grim. As the blog post even implies, this person is likely not the type of person the panhandling ordinance aims to regulate.
As a former Arcata resident who has heard more than one transient conversation outside his bedroom window, I have some idea.
Thanks for unleashing your baseless anger on us though.
Bottled urine, trash and loaded handguns left by my house? Not a fan of.
Observing, interviewing and writing about anyone in the community (not just the folks we — or you — like and approve of)? Part of my job.
"Smitten"? That’s just your poop-colored glasses putting a spin on it, dear Michael. But I will allow that perhaps your poopy view has been earned by repeat encounters with slobs, and now you can’t help but paint everyone with the same poopy brush because you’re fed up. That’s your equally relevant story.
Moreover — bonus! — I will concede to you a slight moral edge on one point: I confess I do have a soft spot for buskers. My sister busked when she was a starving artist in New York City. She had a tiny shared apartment to go home to at night. She also worked "real jobs" and numerous official gigs at fancy hotels. Not that anyone would know any of that without asking her. A photo of her playing her small harp, case open for donations, on the steps of the main library appeared on the front page of The New York Times once. The caption referred to her as a harpist performing for the lunchtime crowd. The sentimental nerve!
Incidentally, that city and many others have a roller coaster history of busting buskers.
But back to your, Michael’s, main point about bottled urine, trash and loaded handguns abandoned on other people’s property: That’s bad behavior no matter the slob’s charming sideshow. I think we can definitely agree on that.