it’s kinda hard to believe because I really feel like a time travelling timecard but over a decade ago my real entry point to picking up the video camera was to record what was going on in my local community. I had been looking for something to record, something that needed it’s story sharing and this kinda manifested itself to me.
You will have to forgive my editing, recording, audio choices, interview technique and all of that, I was pretty naive at the time to all of those things and was really just trying, playing, trying to get used to the wall that a video camera seemed to put between person and person — I felt the story and the information came across thou and actually in hindsight it really did influence a bunch of changes including a redaction in the local press that they did have a problem in the local area.
newspapers said we had no problem locally
I remember it as clear as day, I was speaking to my new friend at a greek restaurant about homelessness and his job in his own country, how he can come to the uk to find a similar job because his pay in his own country was poor and that he wanted to progress in the ranks to have a more senior position.
After getting to the uk ben managed to get a great job and we would always talk about his progress what kinda of things the people he would meet would talk about (of course service level agreements meant we could not talk about it specifics) and generally we would bat the reasons back and forth while I prepared the drinks for the customers of the restaurant we both work in in our spare time for that extra money :)
His name was ben and he had been in social care for a number of years, I was reading the local press when the conversation came up about our social issues in society and the local town — he told me of a place that he attended every so often where lots of homeless in the area met for some warmth, tea and biscuits and a floor with a mattress to sleep from the cold for a night — it was way better than the streets anyway.
council people arrived three days in
I’m not sure what video it is in so you will have to forgive me for not looking but I remember clear as day how the focus of attention shifted from a visit to a potential issue, I remember the nervous nature of the people from the council, the fact that this small contained issue was potentially bigger now because I had put a lense on it and they didn’t know who I was and what I was going to do with the footage.
You have to remember back in the day someone with a fairly up to date video camera recording video footage was not like today, it was kinda rare for someone just to have a camera and be shooting video no matter what you said to people, oh I’m a blogger, citizen journalist, documentary maker, storyteller etc — they all looked at you with a contained terror in their eyes, it was obvious to me that they were concerned as to my presence.
‘If she’s not priority then what chance do I have’
It’s a sentence I’ll never forget, the concern from one mans discussion points that I captured about a girl that was pregnant with child but still could not find a place to stay, a confusion from him knowing that if she was not getting access to a place to stay then he had no chance — if she was not priority then what chance do I have.
I’d asked what the situation was in around about way as to what brought him to this junction in life, was it drink or drink, the usual ones that you head to when you think of someone losing a job, a place to live. I was surprised by a lot of peoples answers some from broken relationships through to gambling addition.
Not being able to go to jobs that they had been offered simply because the job wanted them to interview and they needed resources to get a train ride to go to the job, to then finding out if they did get the job that they could probably not get paid because they needed a bank account as they only paid direct with BACS or CHEQUE — no home, no address, no address no bank account.
Of course today we don’t really use cheques but we do have direct payments, bank accounts, bank accounts that you need to have an address tied too, not everyone in my field of work stays in the same place for long so they have to find workarounds to make sure information gets to them — maybe crypto currency was a perfect solution for an underlaying needed that stayed just below the surface.
closer to ‘escape from new york’ more than ever.
In over a decade I don’t really think things have gotten better, the whole one pay cheque away from homelessness when your invested all in from having fiat funds in a bank account to pay for your ‘lifestyle’ really shows how snared in by direct debits, standing orders we really are. propping up a poorly built and often in-effective banking system that takes gambles because of our often headless participation.
A classic film of mine that rings many alarm bells in my mind about the state or vision of a future world is ‘escape from New York’ if you have never seen it you must, not only does it have Kurt Russell being a bad ass it also has Lee Van Cleff aka the original ninja master in and together with other classic actors you have this seminal potential future film about the island of Manhattan and how now the island is a walled of jail, nothing goes in and nothing goes out, people living beneath ground, living of scraps.
Not only is there a section about landing on the twin towers and a very clear graphic showing an impact on the towers (we don’t know how these things inspire other cultures and ideas) it also shows a breakdown, a decay of society at street level, who becomes boss based on the most crazy, the most deranged, the cliche of street level gang lifestyle.
Films like this have become almost a formal memory of a potential future we are heading into, where things are zoned, closed in, people in real like dark web locations keeping up mesh networks with solar power for a part of the day until darkness comes around, lithium wars, battle hardened teslas with spikes in the wheels — I know it’s all a bit ‘far fetched’ but if biff tanner can become president of the United States today then who know’s what’s possible in the future right?
until then, look after you local homeless, keep it frosty on your resources and always have a go bag just in case of shit hitting the fan.
It is very sad to see many young people homeless and struggling for survival. They are supposed to have good families caring for them. Some of them are helpless and others are lazy to look for opportunities.
Everyday new people end up on the streets and only some of them find support.
Nice videos, thank you for sharing :)
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we can all do our bit, even if just something to eat and a quick chat. they are humans just like us and anything we can do can be the difference between another day or not -- when our lives are completely AI choice driven we won't know anymore what it means to be human if we don't.
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