This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. Hello everyone and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Human-Humane Architecture. I am the co-host of this program, DeSoto Brown. And we had a little hiatus there for two weeks for Christmas and New Years. We're now in the new year of 2019. And I just want to acknowledge that I had a decorated holiday season and I think Rob can show you what I'm talking about. Look at that. Isn't that spectacular? Oh, that is a decorated beard for Christmas. Well, let's get away from Christmas. Let's get away from the New Year frivolities. And let's now welcome the host of this program, Martin Desbang. And Martin Desbang is joining us from his current position in Germany. But you can't tell. Looks like he's right here in Honolulu. And then good afternoon, Mr. Desbang. Although it's probably not afternoon for you. It's probably early morning, something like that. It's Martin's sabbatical time, 3 a.m. in the morning, cold, cold Germany. That's terrible. But good to be back, makes me feel warm. Good. To think about our island, so jump right in. Yeah. Okay, let's go to slide number one. Yeah, and this is, you know, I have my personal copy here. This is actually our tropical tourism expert, Suzanne's personal copy that she gave me from the magazine that Timothy Shuler was writing the article of Brutes on the Beach. And it started a really vibrant and vital conversation amongst three of us. And you had the chance to respond to the article. And this is my turn now, right? Yes. So we've each had a chance we did a show with Timothy and then we each are doing a separate show in which we talk about brutalism here in the tropics. Exactly. And if we can get to slide number two, please, this is the perfect demonstration how if you are as excited about this subject matter as we are, it's going to be around you everywhere. For example, in this case, when you fly out of Honolulu, this is the international airport. And you see to my surprise, not to say disappointment, that they're modifying the airport with this very clumsy, chunky, unelegant steel construction probably caused by security paranoia. And I wish they would have listened to our previous show about not to touch the airport as you don't touch Eroseranum's TWA building in New York City, but remodel it back to the original condition and then whatever you have to add to outside or if you have to do here, do in the notion of the architect, which is Asipov here, which you live in an Asipov house by the way. I will soon live in an Asipov house. I'm not there yet, but someday I will be and that will be a whole new world to deal with. But you grew up in one, I should correct you. I surely did grow up in an Asipov house, that's correct. So let's go to another encounterment with Tropical Rulism slide number three. This was me and this was my Mahalo Mili Kallikimaka from some local ladies at the district court because Martin supposedly had parked incorrectly and his ladies waved his fees. So I ended up in the district court building that reminded me a lot of the building that you showed last time at the very bottom right here, which is the Frank Fonzi government building. Both buildings are very stereotypic, very monolithic. Both their lobbies are kept very open and easy breezy. And actually in this case, even more than in the Frank Fonzi building, which is surprising as we said yesterday, we were talking about what we're going to say today because this is a building that has even higher security demands, right? Correct. So it's very refreshing that once you go up and you are in these offices, it's a missed opportunity because the building is, you know, potentially, you know, able to be biochlametically operated, but people don't take advantage of that and basically hermetically sealed in AC. So our recommendation would be open the buildings up as they were intended to be designed in some case. Right. And you do have that wonderful shot of looking down the escalator at the open court at the bottom and that is a nice element that hasn't been changed. It surely is. So if we go to slide four quickly, this is just remembering what we talked about, you know, at least in the show with Tim, which was a little bit more about the surface and the sort of aesthetics of tropical brutalism. But today we want to go to slide number five, which is also a permanent background and I think you brought something to illustrate and demonstrate. Yeah. So let's, Rob, let's go back to the studio here and let me show you what we want to make a point about with concrete. Concrete is something that will hold on to heat. So if I am putting a flame up to this piece of concrete, the heat is being absorbed into it and that is the point that Martin wanted to make about his, we can come back to our slide here, about your lanai in the Waikiki Grand because the concrete is bombarded by the sun all day and as the sun goes down, the concrete will start to give off the heat that it accumulated and that can be a problem. As you said, it's not comfortable sometimes to sit on your lanai even if the sun is not out because that concrete is giving off the heat that it already absorbed. Perfectly put to solo and that means a little demonstration basically tells us that thermal mass per se and exceptions to the rule as it always is the case but principally there's a no-go for thermal mass in the tropics so that's a principal problem. However, if we go to the next slide, number six, from the previous show, you can modify the concrete. For example, instead of mixing the salt into it, you can mix coral into that and then you get something that you have a perfect branding name for. I do, you get what we are calling blonde brutalism. If you look in the lower right corner, there is a beautiful blonde lady for a Pan-American poster for the Pan-American building and I many years ago got to meet her when she was later on in her life but she'd been a model in the 1950s here in Honolulu so she's the embodiment of blonde brutalism for this particular moment. Certainly is. So we're going to talk more about substance today than surface. So number seven is the building that until most recently the main tenant was American Savings Bank who have now moved to a new office building that we promised each other and you now that we're going to do a show about it. So this building here maybe then all things considered that we were just talking about maybe isn't so exotically tropical because it has an amount of windows that are pretty flush with the facade and it also has a lot of concrete that could be overheated by the sun.  Yes, there are. And if we go to the next picture here in number eight, the image on the left side shows a glass tower here by Joe Paul Rongstead who we also want to get on the show and on a talk story at Doko Momo and I paired him with a car in front. The white car both get blasted by the sun and are hermetically sealed so they need fossil fuel to basically operate, right? So we call that an invasive approach while the exotic approach is the one on the right side. So the building that's also on the foreground on the left picture, you can see that these breeze slays and these slabs are basically shading the amount of glass on the building and I pair this with my car in front of it which is when the top is down uses the trait winds for thermal comfort. So both have an exotic tropical approach, one could say. And I should say backed by palm trees to emphasize the tropics. And I'm glad you mentioned that because that's the smoothest transition to the next slide, number nine. Because this is our most, we agree, this is our most iconic piece of tropical brutalism on the island, the central plaza of the Pacific going more into detail, however, your analogy and your reference to the palm trees, the building, if you see on the right picture at the very top, different than a palm tree that basically gets more intense and more dense and more fluffy until you go up. Because that's where the most sun is and the plants need the sun. Buildings basically shouldn't open up and shouldn't become more glassy to the top because that's where you overheat. So at the top, the architect unfortunately turned to formalism and didn't stay so much with performative measures as they did on the lower parts of the building. Right? Yeah, but it's still a very iconic structure, the castle and cook building. You're absolutely right. It's not as firm as well as it could, but it is iconic and is part of that very important financial plaza construction. And I believe that's the next thing we're going to look at as well. We will. And I endorse what you just said and we continue to try to convince our CEO and founding uncle Jay Fidel who we see here talking to a bunch of... Oh yeah, we need to go to the next slide. There we go. There we go, exactly. There was some interesting on-shore features of that composition and that traces back to one of the most famous architects in the landscape area of brutalism and that's Lawrence Halprin. At the very bottom left of this page, you can see what used to be what he is very well known for, a water feature. And unfortunately, the client had taken out the water, had put turf in there. So we urge the client to be aware that they have a Halprin here and if you have a Halprin, you basically conserve it. So please put the water back in as we're telling the clients or the owner or the tenants, whoever. And if we jump to the next page, this is the encouragement for you to do so. So this is one of the most famous Halprin pieces here. This is in Portland, so not that far away. And this is Kella Fountain. And the bottom picture is one that I took when I first ran into it, literally. It's just like threw me off because it's a fantastic proletarian approach to bring the waterfalls that normal people can't go to because they've got to drive for a long while to get into the mountains. And here Halprin brings that sort of natural feature, waterfalls into the city with his brutalist public pool, which is amazing if you haven't seen it, you've got to go there. Yeah, and I can say too that these forms are very hard-edged concrete. And yet the water flowing over them softens them. And that's something that you and I have discussed of the use of vegetation to soften and contrast with the hard concrete of the brutalist structures. We're going to be talking, we're going to see a little bit more of that as we continue through here. Yeah, and why don't we jump to the next page here because it's not authored by Halprin but very much in the notion of Halprin. This is one of my favorite places in downtown Honolulu here, this little canyon here approaching, again, American saving banks at least previously on the left side. You can see here how it has everything that a tropical jungle, a man-made jungle needs. It's got shade, it's got wind, it's got water, it's got sun, it's got seeding. And here again, we're checking this out with the emerging generation. Very, very fun place to be and shows how alive and how less, you know, brutalism is not brutal, it's very gentle, right? I agree completely, this is one of my favorite places too and I think it's really successful and just as with the fountain we just saw, it starts as a small creek and a small source of water and goes around to the front of the building where it expands into a giant pool, which people can sit next to and which is a beautiful feature of Tamron Square right where we're talking about. And we'll move on to the next page. Why are we continue to do this getting so uptight and overly excited about tropical brutalism because it's in danger? And it's also up for being on the register because it takes 50 years to be eligible to be conserved. And so we're talking 70s and they're coming up. Actually this year here for many of these pieces and unfortunately some developers take advantage of not quite being 50 years old and here at the top we lost what warehouse by Steve Vow which we did a show about. And we have sort of lost but not really there's some hope if we could retrofit our poverty most other most iconic piece of tropical brutalism which is the Rosalind Shopping Center which we keep talking about and I want to bring back the pictures you showed last time next page please here which was until the end of the last century it maintained its original very brave and very sort of ambitious design agenda of sort of bringing back what Calacao Avenue was at the beginning of the century was a big palm grove and one street being cut through and in the 70s the architects wanted to bring this back and it lasted until I think you said at the top left you took this in the early 2000s. And that is when basically the bling sort of capitalism and the mercantile typology took over and cut down all the trees and had to put its corporate signs not just signs on it but it's facades right they can stick it on cheesecake and all these things which is very unfortunate so I want to guide you to where this design intention is still noticeable and actually to be experienced and we should go to the next page this is the backside of the Royal Wine Shopping Mall facing the Royal Wine Hotel and you can see it still sends the original design intent there is a jungle in front of this sort of chunky piece of bush hammer concrete you can see some monkeys in there at the very top left doing some maintenance right so check this out and imagine how beautiful that was very very sort of intellectually a sophisticated approach that unfortunately didn't survive a predator capitalism of bling commerce but I'm really glad that you were able to take these pictures and show that that element still exists on one side of the building even though it's been lost on the other side that faces the street mm-hmm our fellow Tropic here David Rock would encourage us to get off the island at least well in my case physically not without sort of mentally let's jump to number next page number 16 which is an icon of architectural modernism by the architect Ricardo Bofill who is sort of unfortunate of me and not without his contribution considered to be one of the most postmodern architects but he started out here again in the heydays of brutalism in the 70s with his own home and studio moving into a out of commission a cement plant so there's this sort of ruin this concrete industrial ruin that as you said before he used green and vegetation as the major element to soften it up and then inhabit it in a very warm and cozy way so it's a great sort of artifact from what led to brutalism in general and sort of with the vegetation us having a 12 month growing cycle potentially at our islands than anywhere else in the world where is this located? this is in France Bofill is a French architect so it's somewhere in France because there are palm trees growing on it and next to it so it must be in the south of France because it has some tropical yeah it's got some tropical elements to it so let's go to the next page and make some suggestions how to continue the evolution of the tropical modelism on our island this is a project here by a colleague of mine from a while ago at the school I first taught in Bremen in Germany this is Clemens Bonnen who did a project for a client and he was basically applying at that time fairly new and still pretty cutting edge technology which you call ultra light concrete and what it is that you engineer concrete in a micro ferocity that it causes trisillions of little visually almost unnoticeable little air bubbles and infuse them into the concrete so the concrete basically is insulated so you can build exactly the way we're used to from tropical brutalism but it performs better because the concrete doesn't overheat as you perfectly demonstrated with your lighting little experiment there and we did it out to that this is not unlike the traditional Hawaiian which also doesn't get hot because it is filled with air spaces the thatching on it is composed of multiple small individual elements with air between them so you don't build up the thermal mass that then retains heat perfect building scientists you are by now yay and moving on to the next one there's also another way to basically make it more tropically appropriate for brutalism and this is not to use concrete in sort of a steratomic way that we have seen before chunky way, massive way but a more light way a more airy way a more sort of ethereal way if you want so here is one of the last shows here with John and Mayumi Hara who have shared with us how our mission probably you know who we consider the master of brutalism in general and thanks for bringing the book and just having hold up the book this is about Paul Rudolph and this is a book by my former colleague in Arizona at the University of Arizona Christopher Dolman who wrote this book about pretty much here his early phase in life which he spent in Florida where he grew up and then he transitioned slowly but surely to actually the east coast, the upper east coast and that's where he fully developed to be the master of the more steratomic so this building he chose for the cover that we saw when he were holding it up and here on the upper right is sort of in this sort of transitional phase in the early and so this is a suggestion and there's another if we go to the next page another example from architectural history by a Swiss architectural firm they're called ATLDA 5 and they were very early starting in the we were doing research and finding out in the 50s and surely 60s and 70s and I think ongoing we were doing very innovative high density low rise housing all concrete and then softened with vegetation as one can clearly see here so moving on to the next page we have opportunities like that plenty on the island this is the new construction here on the slide number 20 on Picoa Street close to Capliani Boulevard again making basically concrete frames and then we're very disappointed they get hermiticized and fixed glazing gets put on it and it's all going to be AC so we wish leave this open put in the good old glass jealousies the evolved technically optimized form of them obviously and then there you go and so don't miss out on opportunities that you create right right right so the basic structure could be handled differently you could still build it the same way but what you put on the facade and what you face it with could be something different that doesn't necessarily require tremendous constant use of fossil fuels exactly so me being here next picture is sort of this sort of deja vu with our own work here and you know when you said Martin you know doesn't your work from the past look somehow brutalist and I have to say well it's a lot of concrete yeah it's a lot of framing it's a lot of massing so here we got examples from transportation from education from in habitation and I have to agree and say yes there's sort of a brutalist thinking behind it in a very sort of inclusive and in a very social and proletarian way as concrete being a good material being very durable but also being very suitable for you know being creating a stage for social event and activities but how this is Germany and we're in Hawaii and so how could we do that in Hawaii and let's go to the next page and this is Timothy had closed the article referencing me with suggested propositions, polemic propositions for an evolution of tropical brutalism and what are we looking at on the first slide here well we are looking at some of the projects we look at three of the projects that Martin has done in his classes at the University of Hawaii Manoa this is the first proposed building it's called Primitivo number one it's a circular building that has a concrete interior core but then as we've been just discussing we leave the exterior open so that you've got places for people to congregate who live in the building you've got the outside coming in you've got places where there are not only gathering places but private homes or private spaces as well and you also are open to the elements and so you're not heating you're not cooling you're just living in a more tropical environment and we move on to the next one which no surprise is Primitiva 2 now this is a different structure it's not circular or cylindrical but it does have an open quality to it there's the proposal that in some cases there could be a water curtain wall exterior rather than a solid wall you again are living with plants you're living with a sense of being open to the environment and we've also got those exterior stairs that's something we've talked about in the past for something that isn't required here we don't have to include we don't have to enclose our high-rise stairways but we can leave them open so that's another way that we are getting away from the enclosed hermetic sealed environment and why we moved on to the next slide here as we say it just like in a palm grove you know there's like a consistency all the same species but then each individual plant is different right correct so based upon that sort of biochromatic tropical genetic code you can grow what we see here on this page a sort of a jungle system a grove that most likely you know it's material it's stuff it's going to be concrete because making a skinny tower probably concrete is the most appropriate material to do so so we're heading to the end of the show so let's go to the next slide which is that's why we're doing this because then you end up in a fabric that is basically the framework for inhibitation of the national environment and it's going to be the birds and it's going to be the sun it's going to be the rain it's going to be the people and all live in happy harmony in their main jungle and we want to close the show with the last slide here which I was so thrilled to see that Tim's article was back to back with his other article here about promoting a lifestyle and at one point we're going to do one of our most challenges shows is going to call a dress code a dress code it's going to look about skin it's going to look into skins and how we have a first skin obviously the second skin is what we wear and now we're dressed up you know more than we usually do where we're out on the beach right correct and then the building facades are the third skin and we should be critical about the second and the third skin as this article points out right because once you know in a jungle no lion is dressed up right they're dressed up naturally and they don't put on different clothes no they do not nature has provided them with all the clothes they need exactly so I think with this we're at the end of the show we're going to see each other again in two weeks we're going to have another show about Harat Hawaii and this time we're going to talk about his design for the West Oahu campus that's right that's right and until then we hope you all stay as sexy as the beachy brutes and we'll see you again in two weeks goodbye and thank you everybody bye bye


Thank you, Hadrian. Thank you so much And indeed we acknowledge that this gathering is situated on the Lenape homeland and we pay respect to the Lenape land water and Ancestors past present and future and this is our institutional Position, but I ask all of you now individually to think what such a land Acknowledgement and recognition means to you and how it impacts what you're doing and what your actions are now And of course in the future You saw previously if I low risked off one of our fellows this year From one of his works asked us to use the future wisely And I think that's really an Important motto or theme for today if I know are you here? Ah, so if I was here, you'll see his work throughout the day on the screen. Thanks if I know So I'm delighted to welcome you to this first full arts link assembly It's an annual gathering of international and US artists curators arts professionals cultural institutions academics arts funders NGOs and policymakers. Let me know if I missed anyone But we we see it as a vital forum for Sharing both critical practices the way in which our fellows are working on the way artists are engaging in the world But also the key ideas that emerge from that and how we could all re-imagine future possibilities Because at the moment, we're currently sharing an extraordinary cultural moment in our in our history the impact of human activity on the earth's Geological and ecological systems is now Irrefutable and we're experiencing some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded and the coldest winters. We have known the oceans temperatures and its water levels continue to rise and we're seeing extreme and catastrophic weather phenomena from wildfires currently in Australia and California and Floods and with increasing frequency some of the most destructive hurricanes on record But as the population exponentially grows currently 7.7 billion and climbing We're experiencing widespread civil unrest and indeed revolution Currently in Hong Kong in Chile in Bolivia in Iraq and in Lebanon. We have Amanda Who arrived from Beirut yesterday speaking to you this afternoon? But all these are ignited by broadly similar concerns Economic and political systems that suppress free speech and democratic values and at the same time foster obscenely unequal distributions of wealth Resources and opportunities. It's happening all over the world Here in the US a recent paper by New York University economist Edward Wolf points out that today the top 1% of households in the US now holds more wealth than the bottom 90% of households and Since 2013 that division is increasing So these geological and political developments are now threatening the ecological the civil and the social systems That we have come to rely on and that have nurtured and sustained what we know as modern humankind Whilst this current moment seems extraordinarily bleak I Remain optimistic and its artists you guys that give me hope We recognize that living together and maintaining productive peace is a complex and fragile process requiring myriad forms of dialogue sharing and mutual engagement But here artists are often at the forefront of building fellow citizens awareness and understanding fostering engagement and stimulating action This is happening all across the globe and has spawned widespread and diverse practices amongst artists Developing a vast range of socially engaged approaches and methodologies and many examples of that you'll see from the artists Who'll be presenting this morning Artists are truly unique in their ability to generate dialogue between and within communities between and within countries Artists help create a safe and engaging space for sharing ideas Sharing values and perspectives and thus play a critical role in this ongoing process of building and developing the healthy peaceful society We know is possible As well as fostering understanding and cooperation internationally This I feel is what we must protect nurture and develop as a Bullwork against humankind's darkest and it seems most selfish Instincts. I hope today's arts and assembly can give us a glimpse of what is possible and inspire us all to renewed energy and positive action But I'm thrilled now to introduce another one of my inspirations Someone who has tirelessly and feellessly worked to expose injustice around the world and Since 1996 when she established democracy now the award-winning journalist host and executive producer of the Daily Independent New Show Amy Goodman. Amy. Thank you


Why did you choose AESM as your master's program? During the years of exploring computer engineering in National Polytechnic University of Virginia and parallely working as an IT specialist in a consulting company, I found the good and inclusive source data science and AESM was a unique bridge between my growing interest in data science and my engineering background. How did the program boost your career? Give advice to those interested in embarking on studies in AESM program. My advice to those who are eager to apply for AESM program is to research the program quite well to make sure that it aligns with their career and academic goals, to be ready to dedicate much time for the studies, to attend every training and seminar that may lead to future job opportunities and to never hesitate in themselves.


Yeah, this has an addition to the previous speaker. The Texas farm workers marched from, were separate and different from the United States, but they marched from Harlem to Washington, D.C., and Jimmy Carter wouldn't even meet with them. They both were, both were, like, three. But yeah, you might as well be two or no, it's a problem, but six people, so. Yes, what I thought there is that it was too much to put, so I just put another. Between 1960 and 1981, there were 32 organizations that were founded here in the Senate to remind men and women, like Mulder, like Cox, and others. To me, that's very important because all those organizations are now 50 years old, the ones that have Bob. We will be celebrating several in the year 2018, and those organizations, most of them are still doing good work, some of them nationally. What's important about that for me is that after 1981, there were a lot of other organizations that had created, and they continued to be active, like Esperanza, like personita, a lot of groups. And those groups are now doing what the Chicanos did in the 60s. In other words, they're the ones that are working outside the system, holding the system accountable, and they're not getting the press, they're not getting the support. And it's sad because a lot of the leaders right now are Latinos and Latinas. And we have to be very careful that as we celebrate what we've done in the past, that we recognize and honor those rebels of the 60s, and we know that they're the rebels of now, that maybe we'll be celebrating 50 years from now, but can we learn that we need to honor them now, and they're the promise. During this period of time, the world works forward. A local fellow named John Stanford, organized in this community and the areas around it, which ultimately led to a Supreme Court decision to dramatically expand free speech and the right access to the power for particular political ideologies. Okay, so in 1965, that kind of life, it was an urban renewal. 1965, hemisphere started construction, so we don't look for that. Of course, you have to demolish, pick out all these people, demolish the houses, and then construct the hemisphere. And then 1968, the hemisphere was created to have the world's fair, the hemisphere, and it was the world's fair. It was the hemisphere. That was fair. That's how I learned. Okay. And then somebody put working class communities marginalized. Move. Move. Okay. And two. Then 1970 put 1971 UTSA put far from inner city residents, so they had an opportunity to be downtown and they went 30 miles north to Bernie. In 1974, COPS Metro, or COPS was founded. So 1976, San Antonio City Council created member districts. Single member districts. 1976. So before that, it was the good government making decisions, having their token black and Latino and everybody else came from the north side, and so Maldiv basically was going to sue the city and I guess the city, agreed to some single member district. I don't know if you want to talk about it. No. I put both of those things down, but mainly it was actually childhood experiences more than anything else, because I remember the UTSA in particular. My oldest sister, Mary Alice, was on the second graduating class of UTSA, but she was one of the ones that had to travel so far. And she's actually a good friend of mine. He has like a sister to me. And then when I was in high school, I remember that battle to the member district and a lot of my teachers at Central Catholic, one in particular, a retired lieutenant colonel was very much against it and voiced it to all of us. And of course, I was hearing at home that you were in favor of it, so I voiced my displeasure. I didn't care what my teacher was. Yay! Can I do a little bit more? I didn't even know there was a San Antonio in those years. I grew up in southeast Michigan, right outside Ann Arbor. I grew up in the sister city, the other side of the tracks. I grew up in Ypsilanti, and I know there are a lot of people in the room that dies to University of Michigan. But I grew up on the other side of the tracks. U.S. 23 was in the early 60s with the intent of separating the clean white Ann Arbor from the factories of Ypsilanti. And when you go under U.S. 23, you go from Ypsilanti to Ann Arbor. And you go from Howard Johnson's on one side, the old Howard Johnson's, and the other side, the big new shopping mall and the Marriott. I'm the high-rise Marriott. My point is, I remember the integration in the early and mid-60s, school integration and what those freeways did to separate our working class communities from the intelligentsia in Ann Arbor. Eastern Michigan beginning to grow as a teacher school for the kids who couldn't quite work quite good enough to go to the University of Michigan and on and on. So I guess, even though I didn't know, the first time I met someone with a Latino surname was when I was in college. But the African-American communities is where I grew up. I went to high school. That was about 65 percent African-American. And I remember 1968, and the Detroit riots very well. And the cleansing of the urban white because Ypsilanti was an old town, factory town, and the same things were going on. My point is, the same things were going on in my work. That's what I grew up with. That's what I saw. And so it wasn't just here. It was an international thing. So I think we have to keep a world perspective in mind when we talk about what was going on in New Zealand. Do you remember the slang name for Ypsilanti? Ypsilanti? That was quite against white because the force found, you know, the, what was it? Ypsilanti. I actually grew up in Ypsilanti. They had come up and that's how they separated Ypsilanti. Ypsilanti and Ypsilanti. Ypsilanti, Tennessee, is what a lot of people call it because it was a mixture of poor working clients, working with factories. You couldn't call it poor. Okay, we're going to move on. Yeah, thank you for that. Thank you for those larger perspectives. So again, Ypsilanti's West Side Urban Removal. In 1979, Alvin Edo Aguilpe to engage in economic development in the West Side. So that's when they were coming in. That's what I think I lived with that night. I put the West, that was in the 70s was when my neighborhood was erased. The Guadalupe South and it's what we're calling the historic West Side. So thousands of, you know, everybody left the neighborhood, got pushed out over to homes out of the area and some of us were able to stay. But the whole history and culture and traditions from that community, like a canister, like so many other communities gets destroyed in the late 60s or the 70s. So then you're entering the 80s, 1980s, but 1980 West Side buildings demolish. Urban removal. Okay. Well, I call this renewal, but it's renewal. That's the main thing. I think the three goals, I just don't work. Third, good policies deal with liberalism. In 1981, Maria Villasalva was elected to stay. Yay! The policies were in there a day. Right. And with that single-member district, she would have never gotten into the West Side. But it was also early years, so actually you got to speak your mind at that time. It seems like... Well, I think for the community, which I think we feel some of our problems. Yeah. Well, that was the beginning of hate government, no government, you know, to the government for a while and all the money we had been receiving before. Those were the years where we began to feel government policies at a local level and there were various years. Right. Again, going back to Juarez, I'm certain all of these have national and international policies that have a global effect. I'm going to have to bottle off the college, a community-driven effort to locate the first institution of higher education on the South Side of the country. Go ahead. Okay. If I hadn't not written that, that would have been a blank spot and that would have been the South Side where there was nothing in terms of higher education on the South Side. The community stood up and said, we want to have something, an institution of higher education. That was a very good move. The trend now has been to, and this is kind of one of the concerns that we have, that it becomes a facade of higher ed and being watered down into jobs raining forward from the community was then not once there. The students, I wrote over here, wanted to, at some point have, keep the majors and visitors under transcripts of faculty who supported the students. They stood up and fought against it, because it's an independently versed college. The centralization movement of the community college took control of, basically, what happened at the local colleges and they said, no, no to the students, no to the faculty. And so they don't have, or some of the participants is the major on the transcripts. So it's like we're moving back in terms of trying to help the community and listening to them. It's, you know, you don't know what's best for you. Don't tell you what's best for you. Project, we just wanted to do more in the early 80s, maybe 90 days, even after the community wanted it real hard. And then we kept on fighting it for 10 years, the college was very active because they kept wanting more money and more money and more money. Followed her at the time. Am I right? And both of that, Barbara. I have her, you hit it. Yeah. Something about proposed office towers. Right. Over it, the developers came into the neighborhood, your later Tarlas neighborhood and started buying up single family homes that were mostly parishioners, older, Elkwood parishioners of our Lady of Sorrows. Where is that? Over at St. Mary's in Mulberry. And started buying it up and developing it in Walter Emory to put in office towers. And so because of that, I might go down the road on it a little bit, we wound up with Maria's help, thank God, getting some, we created a senior housing corporation to build elderly housing forplexes, which still exists. And we did not want it to be under a housing authority, which it still isn't. And that was, and we got the street close things to Maria for and the negotiated developer for the dirt to build those on. And a big victory was that it was a coalition of intercity neighborhood associations, not just the ones that were there, the neighborhood associations at the time saw that it meant something for them, so they went back together. And we kept the high, intense development, like Valero and so on, from coming to the other side of the expressway. Because that's what they wanted. They wanted to build two tall towers. Or saw towers? And now across the street, where our Lady of Sorrows is. Across the highway. In 1989, so it says Oldest Hood, Los Pastoros is demolished. Right. That was the same, where Valero is today, or what is it now, saws, sorry, there was a neighborhood, and it was the Olden, it was a neighborhood and his training was built to quarry. And so that was the neighborhood of Los Pastoros. That was when... That was when... Right. This is one of the saddest things that happened in the Spartans. What happened was, the developers, same developers, tried to have people relocated. And what happened was, they were relocated to places like on the other side, down Walsham Road, crazy places they went, they went up Lucy. But that was when the developer actually said, because of the pressure of this, the same group decided to just, to relocate people. The Olden decision? Yeah. That's Christy Newton. He's the first major national trans decision, hard worker, decided and wrote the decision in this district. He said that the gender you're born with is the only gender you can ever have, and that started a national trans movement. But, and it is, for many years, it was other national decision that founded on that decision. And it wasn't overturned in Texas. And then other districts, like Houston, came up with the same, depending on the same decision. And so, you could get, different people could get marriage licenses in San Antonio and in Austin, depending on your name and gender marker changes. And so, it affected the LGBT community a lot in South Texas. And it wasn't overturned until after the marriage decision, June 26th of last year. Just a little bit, I don't know the exact facts of this case, but this case involved Christy Lee Milton John, who was a transgender woman who had married a man. And then he, it was a wrongful death suit and she had wanded a suit. I forget how much money. And it went, they appealed it. And when it went up on appeal, that's when, who was it, former mayor, Mark Berger wrote the opinion that said, that the marriage was invalid because Christy Lee Milton was not a woman and because the definition, at least in this opinion, of women was chromosomes. And basically, completely, you know, botched up the issue about what it means to be a transgender. And she was a Latino woman who married an Anglo man and by then she wound up marrying a relative of Latisha Vanderpute and they were related. And so it affected Texas politics again because they are the greatest supporter in the world, in my opinion, of Latisha. I'll just real quickly that in July of 1989, the city council voted to create apple wine, which would have been a reservoir on the south side of the city that would provide 40 million acre feet to supplement the aquifer up in the north side in case when it dried up. And that's when the city council passed. But fortunately in 1990, the community got signatures over several years and in 1994, 1991, it was defeated. The people defeated it. And even though we hadn't spent 50 million dollars, they had to abandon it. And then it came back. Nelson Love brought it again in 1994. That was apple wine too. And our community defeated it again. They wanted apple wine because at that time in the 1980s, you still had a lot of vacant land in the north side that is the land over the aquifer. And there were community people that if you built and you brought gas stations and impervious cover to that area, eventually we would pollute our only source of water. So the developers were real smart and they said, why don't we build this reservoir? It's really not going to take care of the problem but it will look like we're solving the problem. And also there was a clean water act of amendment that Henry B. Gonzalez passed that said if you build over there, you're not going to get certain federal assistance because it's the sole source of water. You just have one source. But if you build this puddle down there then you have another one so you would notify the amendment. And that's why they wanted it. It was a sneaky way to build more. And even though apple wine wasn't built, the powers that we and the community are so powerful that if you get a certain lobbyist like Bill Kaufman or Brown involved, they passed all the zoning cases. For ten years on the city council between 1981 and 1991, I voted against every single zoning case but every week they passed and passed and passed because there were never six folks who would go against the developers. And still today there are not six folks that would go against them. Isn't that what the pipeline is for now? The pipeline is the same thing. Now we're getting the water from over there because we know that eventually we might not have this one. And people want to go get somebody else's water and also because the people that run the city want to keep on having their golf courses and their grass lawns and pretending that we're not in their community. So they don't want us, they don't want to have to live by the limitations of the construction. So if we have all this water coming then they can go on living like they have on their own. They again, the city development organizes the parents to be aware and force the housing authority to do their work. I was a very successful experience for me and I had to go on that course because my department has done a lot here to help clean up the apartments and get them ready. Basically there were over 500 families that were on the waiting list for the apartments and the housing authority was not as easy as they were very, very slow in releasing the apartments so that only about two thirds of the apartments were actually occupied at any one time. So we had all of the people from the public school, every little thing in school and and a lot of young people volunteered that day and we weren't doing hard but they made a point of having each of the crew leaders, the people who would live in the Al-Qaqjals apartments and had subsequently been able to move to their own homes in the neighborhood so they were really inspiring to work with them and hear about how Qaqjals apartments had actually been a step up for them. So I have 1991 for 1994 Sanita comes to being after they're pushed out of their jobs when they buy drugs and moves to Costa Rica. It's also the same time frame where Clinton comes to San Antonio to sign NAFTA, the NAFTA, the American Retreat Agreement. COPS Metro presses SAWS to charge full impact fees to developers who want to sell them their apartments. So basically for the entire time that the city has been developing infrastructure for having water mains and sewers and so forth to new neighborhoods the developers were getting their expenses paid for out of the costs that were borne by the existing residents and so it for many many years COPS Metro was trying really hard to try to force them to make the developers pay for the part that should go become part of the price of the houses or the buildings will be built. So they finally pressed SAWS to charge the impact fees and very next year the state legislature and the request of the developers put a cap on it such that now only one of the state legislature raises the cap that any of that is living from. So all of the existing residents have been subsidizing the infrastructure to build all of the new homes, everything outside of the interlude for all of these years and basically they are forced to. I just want to tell a little bit more about the aquifers because this is a moment in 1992 in 1993 there was a huge effort by the communities by the Apple way to put a moratorium on development over the aquifers and so the city in response appointed a special committee including Gene Dawson in order to allow Gene Dawson to be on that committee they had to enact a special resolution waving him from the concept of interest permissions of the state government that committee came out with a draft moratorium which was passed by city council to an overflowing crowd of cheering community finally were going to be able to save the aquifer and so the moratorium was passed in December of the same year the city attorney together with Gene Dawson and other members of the committee announced to the press oh my goodness there was a mistake in the moratorium and it's not effective and so we're going to work to get an effective one so then for the next five or six weeks Gene Dawson plotted filed property planes or property plans virtually all of the aquifer land after that they enacted another moratorium but by that time because Dawson and others had filed these plots they were quote grandfather so they were not subject to the moratorium that was PGA well we discovered that in PGA but the fact is that Gene Dawson and the bill he did can I have just a little bit on senate bill 66 what the developers did when they went to the legislature and capped the impact fees they also made sure that Texas could not do what other states do in other states developers actually pay for other things like drainage there are a lot of things they can pay for with impact fees and what it is is the impact your development has on the public and it was a whole bunch of things so they made sure that the only thing that they can pay for is water they eliminated drainage they eliminated everything else we do we do okay quickly again out of the movies 1992 first movie festival at the Guadalupe San Antonio Leslie all in the early 90s City of San Antonio offers up some new gardens for these that's me and river run we shaded on it and it became so detailed that all of the potential developers left and then the parks foundations came in and it was Patty Radle was on the council at the time and it was agreed upon at the council level that there would never be a charge to enter the sunken gardens coalition forces those came to not the witty garage right the witty garage was not the witty garage that's a hard part because there are so many signs that say witty parking but the park the garage on avenue B between Toledo and Kitty Park Mulberry is basically a city garage that is never supposed to charge and it was the first of the garages now there's a lot of them being proposed in Bracken Ridge Park and the idea at the time the idea that it is now that people would park there and take their things into the park but there was never any talk of people movers or anything like that but that was the first garage that was built now there's subsequent proposals but that was it 1997 as Fadanza gets defunded again targeting our LGBT work but we know that it's because more posting gatherings like this and challenging the developers some of the road battles Seattle opens up dialogue about neoliberal capitalism 1997 United Students Against Sweatshops is founded the Sapa Pista Rise Up actually 1994 La Gloria Falls in 2002 PGA Struggle starts around 2001 and goes on for five or six years 2001 as Fadanza wins the Boston Against the City Federal Court St. Bridge and then there's like an arrow the boat's all the way through and who wrote the speech? Is that the one about the line there? About the East Side Resident St. Pastry Okay, please share your charges That one is a it's the new London decision where the Supreme Court of London said that a city could take a neighborhood and hand it over to developers and then the state legislature in Texas said no you can't do that in Texas and I'm not a lawyer I'm wondering if we haven't ever used that law to protect exactly that kind of thing Well I mean it's true that they haven't done that either I don't think there's any evidence that they did have a sphere but it's unlimited that protection is very limited Re-opened in 2006 2005 someone holds reopened after long wait Innovation Alliance was founded in 2009 Does anyone who's from the WK want to post that? I took a break Let's just go I'm ready for lunch I'm also in the West Side Family Channel Alliance and we decided that the only way we're going to tell our history is by documenting ourselves and what we've done is we've talked to different residents we've talked about kind of did our own survey of what buildings we thought had to qualify for historic destination and just talked to people and we've been doing that for several years now and we've been able to landmark several buildings So we're always looking for new members to come help us and tell us stories about their particular neighborhoods in the West Side and stay active with that We were involved with the Pacific Rocks Building which is that sewing factory on Sasamora and West Martin and that was bought by a developer that wanted to make a family dollar store there that wanted to demolish it That building was built in 1929 It was a sewing factory and it was very prominent and has been a manufacturer of women's ready to wear clothes There have been several dress factories in San Antonio and I believe that's the last one that the building is still there It's been several business over the year and we had a meeting with the developer and told them what we felt that that was a strong building that should not be demolished We're still talking about that They withdrawn their demolition order but it's just like that's too much of our history of San Antonio Can I say something I think it's a terrible looking building besides the manufacturing that was done at the top part it was an EFW and to that it's been empty all windows are broken the bottom is terrible There's not much history to that building It's just sitting there looking very ugly and they could have built a new building there We need some new buildings to enable them because some of the old ones they've been buried there's nothing to do with it there's no history I used to go to the dentist there's not what they wanted it was a piece of piece but you don't have to worry about it We need to tear down that building Thank you Not all buildings we're trying to cite are perfect You know, it's there They look in terrible shape with the Apostle Lentry Parry but there is a lot of history to that building I'm going to look at it but unfortunately parents don't always that marks are not always beautiful She's asking a question I heard a commotion No, no, don't Okay She's asking about time that was late I was asking about they work a lot on the east side and there was a big change when the east side terrace housing projects were torn down and then a lot of people at that time were displaced and also set in the homes but I don't remember the exact date It was seven nights and east side terrace No, actually the night because east side terrace was huge you had a huge displacement of people from the east side to the northeast side These two apartments CRAS Oh, I see I have good information from Maria I don't know the exact detail because in my opinion it was gone very quietly and some people that are usually away from paying attention were totally unfamiliar with it and it's a type of infill housing and they can do it anywhere now and they like to come in in the lower income neighborhoods because people are less organized they have to go to work every day they can't go downtown and fight sleep and what's going on is they try to tear down houses and build up to eight houses in a spot if you want to see a prime example they didn't tear anything down but that's what our future looks like right across from Hay Street's bridge they call it north Cherry Street modern and if you know anything about construction they have ten Meadowton Roof they have to be used for chicken coops on their porches and whatever and these people came from somewhere else to pay over $200,000 for these boxes and that's what they want to bless us with in the inner city wherever they can squeeze it in and they will pound you with that wonderful glue from Houston with the help of your local realtor and if you resist to have personal experience then they will send you coal compliance and make your life miserable and that's nothing new but they're also doing it in downtown areas wherever it's popular right now in south town somebody referred to this disco district and they're bringing in arts and restaurants which is fine but they should provide parking and they should stay out of people's front yards everywhere else if you want to build a bar or a restaurant or whatever you have city ordinances well in the lower less developed area they throw the baby out with water and we're looking at big problems you guys better stop pay attention and fight there was a case that was won by thank you for that it's actually 12 I want us to finish this for maybe 15 minutes so we have one more thing we want to kind of look at a power nap if y'all interested in that who's making all these decisions can we pass over to the park that got here we're actually there now we're in 2010 so the reason why we wanted to do this timeline was because it's like so I just want to say my age I'm going to out myself I'm 23 years old I know right especially because I spend so much time with my grandmother with other people who know this history I have a better sense of okay this is not new but there's too many people who say this is new so that's why we're doing this but yeah 2010 2010 to 2020 and definitely in downtown really is this idea of like this revamping of downtown and so that's where you have all these locks that we're seeing that are in downtown that's where you start seeing downtown expanding into the west side east side south side and that's kind of what's happening now you have the haystree bridge lawsuit which is 2013 to now this is another battle where public spaces becoming privatized someone who speaks to that later if they wanted to there's some folks that were part of that battle here the hemisphere hotel fight started in 2012 four years ago okay so I'm from related lake university area my park is on the floor park four years ago there was they wanted to revamp that area and I remember the rhetoric of the president who was there at the time of the president of the university saying that we need to make this area better because people who are coming to school here don't like think it's ghetto and they don't want to live they don't want to go to school there and I said I live in that area and I went to school there I said well I don't watch like races in my school that's why they wanted to revamp the park and they said the community came out they just gave us our pool they got rid of the pool and now we don't have it and they said maybe five years from now you'll have a pool yes me too so then we have domesticas we need us created in 2012 we have the destruction of univision 2013 we have another community folks another community organizations came together to save the univision building because it's a historic site but as you know that was lost and if you go downtown it's right across from Tennessee those are the agave apartments now and I looked up the cheapest apartment it started at like 1,500 for a studio and then it goes for a loft and they're supposed to be for people like me who are young millennials I could not afford that I would not live there it's for the awesome millennials that's right they kind of put awesome in there too many college debt now we work your house sorry to bring people back we have even for a full campus in 2012 you have mission trails it was a big site 2014 one quick statement about that one of the populations we haven't mentioned at all we've talked about neighborhood etc what about the displacement of homeless a great example is a survivor's loss they built the survivor's loss in a project of the county and they cleaned it up and rid of the homeless youth who've been there so do you think a couple months later when they busted multiple trafficking trap houses two blocks from there that it was an accident? absolutely not the only ones who really profited from the building of the survivor's loss are the developers and the traffickers because there was no they weren't displacing any communities but in reality they were how many beds do you think there are emergency beds in this city for the LGBT community under the age of 18 zero zero 41% of the homeless population youth population in this city is LGBT 10% of the general national population is a high investment the point is when we're displacing homeless youth especially we have to have forethought in where those people are going to go just like we're talking about communities and displacement of communities and people who own homes and things like that in many cases they stand a better chance than those homeless individuals especially the homeless youth of myself so I just want to mention these because I know a lot of us know about these just so that we can move on to the power map and then we can discuss it if we have time we can stay here longer to talk about them more and also just wanted to throw it out here we do want to continue these discussions and have more meetings so that we can really delve into what's happening currently now that we have this historical view so that we can actually strategize further so we have the okay so I said I said this fight the master plan started last year being developed being members were not invited and then that's when you have this summer when and other folks realized we weren't invited for community meetings and that's what happened recently then I put 2017 this is more looking for what's happening now to the future that we're kind of focusing we talked about this storage pipeline how it's bringing water into San Antonio but the water grid is going to be all over Texas bringing water from Oklahoma and Louisiana so that's the way to major cities in Texas and so that's going to really vamp up for the cities and really have it in all the major cities in Texas where they're just going to be very you know all of the laws very congested so that's what's happening what we wanted to get through was Gregory, Kate Doxton these are just some of them you kind of have this idea you have the tech which is a new kind of subsection of developers like Rackspace, Eatsum, TechBlock and actually they put into all three but Mr. Weston who was the founder of Rackspace also founded Eatsum and TechBlock and he's behind the Uber he's behind really kind of bringing Google Fiber into San Antonio and why that might be good is also bringing a certain they're saying they want these people to go into the law so when you think of millennials the people that work at TechBlock and have tech jobs and have lots of money to spend $3,000 on law what is the color represented um do you do you want to explain the colors they don't mean anything they don't mean anything okay, all right there you go public power public power does anyone do you want to speak to this arm public power so the green part is also growing into an estimate it's like the slower amount of power than after what has to go into power so corporate mostly concentrate on the law and until there's going to be something so green is corporate and money power pink is policy power red is political and blue is people power thanks I've been working on on a paper with years of problems and it's not done yet but I wanted to share when we look at this there are certain areas that connect all the issues there are different issues as water is developed and it's policies what are those things one of them is the policy and one of them is the one that you mentioned for example the night crib, inner city reinvestment into policy it is effective all inside loop 410 so right now everything inside loop 410 is at risk because they can get incentives they can get new zoning they can get waivers they can get grants they can get things such as parking so the eye crib is very very important the policies the exclusion the voices are being shut out you can go to meetings you have three minutes at a meeting but sometimes you'll get two minutes if you're lucky so the policies that have been enacted that are exclusionary and the process that has been elected to me the biggest example of the violence that's been occurring right now that has to do with displacement mission trails and we should put that on the top because to me mission trails shows what this community is capable of in other words if that was done to that group of people it can be done to all of us and one of the things that's happening with mission trails is they have to leave close to 1604 where there's no city services or county services so right now there are people creating the new favelas of the future new Polonias and that's very very dangerous another area that connects everybody is the removal of the city oversight we have created these quayside public groups like the Tobin Hill Conservancy the Red Enriched Park Conservancy the Hemisphere Conservancy the main class of Conservancy so what that does is the policies the policymaking is being removed from the elected officials that are elected under one person one vote and that mirror the community so the people that are making a lot of decisions are not only the business people but they are the officially sanctioned city Conservancies that tend to be white and powerful men because they want them to have to produce the money so the authority is being taken away from the people the other one that I think is very very important is that we have so many different issues and we're limited in time so everybody concentrates on their issue it's water it's neighborhood associations it's demolitions it's all the issues that we've mentioned so all of us are limited in time so each of us concentrates on our issue so to me the biggest thing that I have seen in many years that stands in the way of community addressing the problems is that they are so diverse and that we're split and it's divide and comfort and unless there's we as a community find a way to work across all kinds of communities we're not going to do it because they're going to cause these problems and it's not and I don't blame anybody for that because you think for your own so for example the official neighborhood association system that I credit myself for helping back in the early 80s need to understand that the issue of gentrification affects everybody and it affects them too it's not as long as we say that group doesn't affect me it's not good if water rates affect them too they're affecting us too so to me those are just thoughts to have on this and the final one is one that's very personal to me because I was asked by Julian Gastro to serve on the mayor's task force on preserving dynamic and diverse neighborhoods and I did better judgment and it was fair, it was a farce and under the new leadership so we need to be also careful how we are used and for me I like it better to be outside the system and holding it accountable and being together and strong because this is what we have to address and it's going to see allies me to address the issue of controls and I wish all of you would read my book because I explained it there, it's no big secret but I call it the 17 white men who run the city because it doesn't matter what the name of the person is it matters that it's the people who have the power because they have businesses that can hire thousands of people on their own it's the construction companies that are going to build it's the engineering companies like Dave Dawson it's the banks, it's the media and they sit together they sit together and they're the ones that decide on these big issues so until we know that that's what the cost or the ones that are creating the changes and it's two words that we have had in San Antonio since the 1950s


I got myself a Taylor Swift cardigan. I'm having the best time of my life. I'm trying to add a little Christmas tree for some festive energy. Hello! So I am back in the U.S. I am back in good old Maryland and I came home like probably a week ago, no not a week ago. I came home on Saturday and so there is a five-hour time difference between Edinburgh and like D.C. For the first like four days I was home, I was waking up every day like three in the morning. So that was a very, that was an interesting experience. But yeah, this is not going to be like a very structured video. It's just going to be like four like my like long-time subscribers like and new ones. Welcome if you are here because we hit a thousand. I mean, yeah, I don't even know. That's like a cringey way to put it because like the channel hit a thousand, but like, you know, because of people. That's thank you. And I like started making money, which like that's just kind of crazy. And I like want to address this because like obviously it's not much. But like God, it feels good. Like it feels so good to like have that like to celebrate like and I know that that's like literally absolutely nothing. And for the amount of work that I have actually put into this channel like that's like if I was getting paid like based on like hourly work. Like like it's just kind of funny, but that's just like very cool. And like I did that. Yes, you know. Yes. So I have been doing less of like chitchatty videos, which I like doing chitchatty videos. But I also have been liking like doing the vlogs and like showing you guys like my life in Edinburgh and like my travels and those kinds of things.  If you are going to study abroad or like you are moving to a new place by yourself. I have knowledge now that I'd like to share. That is probably what I'll be doing sometime in the next month. And I also want to do like some fun like old videos. Like I know that I've been getting some really terrible ideas from my brother. I'm going to be doing one of those classic videos. So if you don't know, if you don't know what that is. Last year I would take my dad's like terrible video suggestions and like make it into one video. And it's like fun stuff like that too. Yeah, that is what's what's going on. And I'm really glad to be home and like having a little break before I go back. Yeah. So I studied abroad and I got really got back to like my life again after the pandemic like weird. And actually over the last like month or two, I've been getting a lot of comments. Not okay, not a lot like two. I got two comments. Okay. I got two. I got two comments. The video where I, it's basically called I've been having an existential crisis for a year. I'll link the video down below. It's really the ramblings of like a girl trapped in her room for a year too long. And people are asking for an update. Two people were asking for an update. And I thought that that would be like kind of an interesting way. Because if you have been on my channel since the beginning, like that's why I started my channel is because I wanted to talk about like my experience taking a gap year during a pandemic. I don't know. I thought like in my head, I thought like that could maybe be helpful to somebody out there or what. And I'd always wanted to make videos and it just seemed like a good, a good time. I had free time to do this now. So you know, it worked out. And I knew that I always wanted to do it when I went on my year abroad. I was sort of prepping and maybe you guys, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, like I had a YouTube channel before this one that will never see the light of day. I forgot where I was going, but I always wanted to start this YouTube channel and like and do it. And now that like I've hit like that first milestone, like I'm like, yeah, I can do it. And but yeah, I want to talk about this video that I made a year ago called I've been having an existential crisis for a year. I did get two comments asking me about like how I'm doing after that. And I just went back and I rewatched the video because I don't really, I don't often rewatch my videos. Wow. Like I was not doing okay. I really, I vividly remember this day because I went and I had a social distancing picnic with my friend in the park. And it was March and it was like right around the year mark of the pandemic. And we were both like not okay. And yeah, that was, that's a really kind of funny. So people are wondering how I'm doing. I'm doing really good. Like in all honesty, I think as well as you know, we can all be doing right now. And I think it was like a weird thing to go from a year of not talking to literally another human being my age to having to throw myself into a new city halfway across the globe like meeting new people. And I literally like I chucked myself into it. I was saying, and I'm gonna like talk about this later, but like the first like two weeks I was in Edinburgh were absolutely crazy. Like I just, I talked to so many different people and it was so overwhelming, fun. And the whole time I was like nervous about COVID, but like I haven't vaccinated. Most people in Edinburgh have been vaccinated students, you know. So okay, I'm back. Sorry, they're, they're like leaf blowing outside. Yeah. Okay. How am I doing? I am doing good. I think that it would be a complete lie to say like my life is perfect now. Like I have everything that I want and like I have all the answers and I know exactly what I'm doing with my future because that is literally the opposite of the truth. Yeah, no, like my life has not been perfect. Like I moved to a brand new city on my own again, which is a really hard thing to do, especially after a pandemic. I had a really nice time and I learned a lot and it felt so good to like have goals and meet them again and try new things, challenge myself. I think looking back and like watching this video again, like I just, I basically, I went to work. I came home, I did YouTube, which are, it was all very like solitary assignments. And like I literally, I was thinking about this too. Like I literally didn't make a new friend or talk to somebody else or like make a memory almost like a memory. But like, no, I think that that's like a proper term because it just, time just kind of like blended together. Like nothing, nothing happened.  Like you have to make life happen. But like during the pandemic, like there was just absolutely no way to do that safely. Like you just, I tried to put myself out there like in this way. Like I did do that and I'm really proud of myself for doing that. But it's completely different than like putting yourself out there with like people. Cause like this is just, this is again like an isolated like experience. Like obviously it goes, it goes to people, but like I've never really met anybody in person who's like seeing my videos. I don't know, I don't know how to explain it. But it was so cool to like see the world again. And honestly like moments where I could like talk to my peers, like new people, not just people who experienced like the same pandemic as I did was really good just to like, just to talk about it. So I know one girl or one, I know one person commented on the video just sort of like asking, asking how I'm doing because they're sort of in it right now. And I talked a lot of that video about like having an existential crisis and like not knowing the point of like, I think that everybody just questioned so much in their lives, like their relationships, the direction they were headed in, like what they wanted out of life. And I, those things don't go away. Like I think that the, I think that the pandemic just like made it so we didn't really have anything else to focus on. What I have learned the most from it is like, I don't, I don't need to know those things. I just need to keep finding little things to look forward to. And obviously I don't have little things this year.  Like I get to like live in a new country and have all these great experiences and travel. Like I'm so lucky this year that that is my life. Even when I do go back to like my real life next year, when I go back to school and when I go back to, I don't know more like my normal like day-to-day life, which I don't even know what that is anymore because next year I get to go to college and kind of like restart my life in Charleston because pretty much everyone I knew there will have graduated or moved on and I'll be living with new people or I don't, I have no idea. I still have to figure all that out and that's going to be really weird. And then after that one year, like I move on and I'm going to do something completely different and I don't know what that is yet. And I think that sometimes it's really frightening because when you do move to a new place by yourself, like being in your 20s is just, it is very like isolating sometimes. But I'm really trying to see like the joy in that because like I don't really have, I don't really have roots anywhere right now.  But meeting new people and pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, trying new things, those are the things that really made me feel like I was like living my life again and living my like my own independence. But yeah, that's really what I have been thinking about. And I'm really grateful for everybody for sticking around if you've been here for a while. And it's been really cool to like see other people do stuff because of this channel. Like I got DMs that like some of you like became friends because of like my channel, which like that's just kind of crazy to me. Yeah, comment down below. Maybe you'll make a friend. I will be getting back on my normal posting schedule, which is on Fridays. But we're going to see if I don't know if this video is going to get up today. Yeah, it's Christmas, so happy holidays, whatever you celebrate. And subscribe if you're not already. Give this video a like and yeah, comment down below. And I don't know, just be introduced yourself because then I don't know, we can all be friends. Yeah.


He wasn't feeling it. Bro, I am just stomping! How's it going, everybody? Dot, did I hear back with some more Dragon Ball Fighters rank matches, this time playing a Dragon Ball Super Broly team? And we're also on Namek, so I guess if he destroys it, he could dramatic finish me or... Wait, did... He didn't have Blue Gojira. Oh, no, that was Super Saiyan 4 Gojira. Anyway, Reed's... Oh! But if it had worked, though, I would have been remembered as a leg command grab. Alright, defense is not looking too good, but when is defense ever my strong start to a video? Offense ain't looking too good either, that's... Ooh, I can't even do that. I forgot I wasn't playing Jiren. Wow, I'm getting comboed. Oh my goodness. Alright, so we didn't... Defense ain't looking too good, offense ain't looking too good, but you know what? No, never mind. I was going to say something positive, but we're going to switch out for now. We're going to buy some more time to warm up. Get in the corner. Oh, there's no way I started mashing in between there! Oh, I just got slapped up! Double slap! My goodness, that beam is fast. That beam is really fast for some reason. I don't know if my eyes just aren't adjusted to 21, but... That assist is good. But she is so quick with that beam. Why can't I? I'm not comboing anything. Nope, back up. Alright, finally, wow, 21's actually dead. I guess I just got enough hits that 21 did not need too much more to die. All she needed was a few more strings. One good combo, and she is out of there, which I'm thankful for. That beam was cooking me. Baby, what are we going to see from Baby here? That's where I start. Pretty confident round start, I must admit. That's not the way I thought we were going. Oh, a little bit faster on the draw. We could have been looking at something sick. Instead, we're going to be looking at a revenge death ball. No, he missed. Embarrassing. That was embarrassing, dude. 2H is what I would say if I was confident enough to believe I was going to hit that. I'll take that. I forgot I had already done that. This is the sloppiest game. Oh, my God. This is my sloppiest game of fighters of all time. Hold on, give me a chance. Give me a chance. I can change.  What are you getting level seven for? You don't need that. This is so sloppy. I have drawn... This is like the sloppiest thing ever, dude. I could have punished. I hit a random button. I'm not calling any assist until he uses level seven, by the way. I am not moving until I see a super, which we might see it soon, to be honest. He doesn't have the bar for it right now, but... We might see it right here. He's already level seven. He didn't know he was level seven. Oh, no. Now we're in a real pickle. Oh, now he can level seven, Broly. Oh, no. This is bad. He didn't have to do that. Why did he dragon rush right there? I thought he was going to do a raw out of fear. Wait, mercy? Perhaps some mercy? All right. I can't even be upset. I deserve to be level seven. Honestly, that was bad. That was my worst game of fighters in a minute. And he did destroy Namiq. Damn, the foreshadowing on this match went crazy. All right, hold on. I'm going to take a Mr. Clean to this game, Bro. Watch this. You are about to witness a transformation. Okay, I was almost a little bit worried we weren't going to get a rematch. You're about to witness a transformation.  Never mind. Just remember me for... Oh, I put my head in my hands. No, you're so sloppy. I can't play the game. I can't play the game, Bro. Wait, wait, wait, I can play the game. That's all I needed, one bit of confidence. Okay, I don't mind that. Okay, I got to hit my buttons better. I got to choose better buttons as well. Let me just, let me get my stance right. Let's go. That's dead super baby right there. I'm happy with that. That's the wrong super. You know, I wanted Broly to do the work. That's what we'll say, dude. That's what we'll say. Anyway, oh, you got to block that low, man. That move was quick. I don't know. It's just been a little while, I guess. 21 is like very scary for some reason. 21, please stop. Oh, my range hit me with your fingernails. I did hit a button in the corner. My man wanted that to hit. Too bad. All right. I didn't have super dash. Oh, I should have done the EX grab. EX stomp almost worked, but it was a little too slow and didn't have the invulnerability we needed. All right, anyway, that was sick. I'm sad. He's going to get a stack from this too. Okay, he might have gotten a stack for it, but we got a decent bit. Mashing. All right, that time I knew he was going to mess. The jump was a good decision. Normally, in this set, that would have been a mis-input. All right, we're doing fine. We're doing fine. We're doing fine. My confidence is somewhat restored. It was getting bad, though. He's been so passive at round starts. I forgot he could kick me in the face. And he did just that. A cruel reminder. That's game. That's game. Come on. That's going to wrap it up. All right, all right, a little better. Still, though, we started that one pretty sloppy. So if we can clean that up, we're looking at an easy win here, boys. I hope. I hope. Forecast calls for a win in this next one. If not, we've been wrong before. Looking like an incorrect forecast today. Oh, my goodness. That, we just got lucky there. We just got very lucky. What am I doing? End of bad jump, too. Super baby into the corner. Dragon rush. I'm mashing vanish. What? Out of the corner with that? Keyblast came back to hit me as a bit of insult to injury? I got to remember to be just ready to block that. I'm trying to turn around and get a hit in. OK, OK, all right, all right, all right. We're chilling, we're chilling, we're chilling. Really could have gone for the game there. Not sure why I didn't. And I did the same mistake again. Damn. I could have just went for the kill. I did not, though. I guess the meter cost was looking a little higher. Bad clash. Should have went for 2L. I'm so focused on not losing. Oh, I got grabbed. What? I don't know what about that grab seem so unnatural to me. He's spending his level five. That's cool.  End of level three from 21 in the air. Do we use spark or do we let Vegeta handle this? So slow. I thought I lost that. Vegeta help. You know what, I'm still confident. Why am I still confident? No idea. All right, so my god, the movement's bad. The movement's my worst thing right now. Adjust the hands. Get them warm. Keep them warm. He's going to try to kick me. No. I jumped right into his loving arms, bro. Oh my god, I don't even think that works. All right, I'm pretty sure he was getting ready to DP me. I think that's why I got hit. I'm just going to stick it with a level three. I'll save the three bars, but I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, we'll just save it. We'll just save it. All right, it's cleanup time, dude. Baby Vegeta versus Vegeta. Let's go. No. No, we're not allowing that. Get my three bars back just in case rainy day.  It's done. You're cooked. You're cooked. It's time to level five. Oh, just barely not enough health to add in the punch, but we'll take it. It's more important that we just get the win. Let me adjust my suit here. I'm glad we were able to get away with that. Dude, we got to play better than that. That was a scary set. Great games, though. All right, now we actually are up against the blue Gojira. So if there was ever a time to get our act together, it would be now. There's so much blue hair in this match. I just also realized that I had no idea which where Vegeta blue even was. I'll take it. Get a sliding to see jump. Damn nice. I really should have thrown in something after that, but I wasn't thinking. He goes into Gojira blue. What's the combo from here in the corner? That's it. Oh, get up me. I got to play some defense on the ball defense. Oh, he's going crazy, though. He's trying to get fancy. He's trying to go crazy. It not timed that correctly. Doesn't matter, though. Does not matter. It doesn't matter if you time it correctly as long as you get the accidental reset. The accidental reset is all the mix is. All right. Gojira's out of the way. Oh, we really lined my spleen up perfectly to get just absolutely destroyed there. Neutrally try to back dash in midair. Not going to allow it back to the ground. Damn. It's a transmission. He didn't even see me. All right. That was kind of cheap, bro. You just couldn't see me down there. I'll take that. We're just going to get some cheap hits in here, but you know what? It's fine. It's fine. I need it about as much as I can get to him. Yes. Oh my goodness. I didn't I wasn't confident he would just run into it, but I will take it. I was this is cheap, dude. All right, I'm getting my let me slip into something a little more comfortable. I want my power boost. I also want my reads. I'm a run up EX grab. Believe it. Believe it. Uh-oh.  Oh, I am desperately reaching out. I am reaching at this man. I am trying to command grab. All right, I hit a button. He was right. He knew he knew I was going to hit a button. I have been hitting my fair share of buttons, but now Goku's the one that's been cooking. Oh, that's that's probably game. That's game the Goku blue and Vegeta blue combo. Whoo. All right, that was kind of sick into the into the big bang assist for the connection. I'll take it. Can we follow it up though? I want the follow up game. I just want a clean follow up game.  Counting on you. Uh-oh. He's counting on me not to decrease my performance. No.  Shouldn't have gone for the read. No, not time to take just yet. I'm jesting right now. I'm jesting, I guess. You jest. Wow, I'm running into everything. Oh, beautiful 2H as well. I've got a compliment to it, even if I don't like it. I thought the match there was actually the strat. It wasn't. I'm going to go ahead and say it. We got pretty lucky there, but I'll take it. What? Wow, he caught me with that. The runaway 2H? Oh my god. He had a lean in to punch me on that one. I try to stand up and reflect. Your man grab might spark here. No, not feeling it. It's still doing a decent bit of damage anyway. It's doing a lot of damage. It's doing a ton of damage help. You thought I wouldn't get a match. Bro, you clearly have not made me defend enough.  I don't think he doesn't need to make me defend. All right. I don't know why I'm focused. It's going to take a little more than focus to get me out of this one. OK, all right, I can work with this. Something I can work with, something I can work with. That's all I ask. All right, he's probably not going to spark here, so I'm not going to try to read a spark. OK, he did spark eventually, but I'm glad I didn't try to read it. He seemed like he was patient with it. I got caught scrambling to get away. I don't know if Goku Blue got this comeback. If he does, I'm impressed. Oh, oh, I was so concerned with how he caught me. Oh, oh, we still got a chance. Nice, I'm just playing max speed. I'm playing max speed, no thought process. Well, I wish I didn't have to bring him out of the corner. Oh, don't even try that. I got stuck on the wrong side. I ended up going for EX command grab. Wait, forgiveness? Oh, no. EX command grab. If it had worked, I ain't even going to lie. I would have taken full credit. I would have taken full credit. I would have said it was planned. I would have said it was a godlike read, but it would have been a lie. It was not planned. And we've a nice command grab start. Can I go for a dragon rush? OK, he wasn't feeling it. Bro, I am just stomping. I am just stomping across the entire thing. Oh, don't ever try that on me. Goku, why am I playing so terrible? Why don't my brain work good anymore, man? I got eight hits there, and I dropped every opportunity. Hold on, hold on. If I dropped it, it was probably meant to happen. Oh my god, I got reset. Jump, a little hop in the combo. Damn. Damn. OK, we can turn it around. We still got the blues. We still got Goku blue and Vegeta blue. We should probably save Goku blue. We should probably get Goku blue out of here. I'm going to do that. I mean, if there was ever a time to clean up the play, it would be with Vegeta blue out. Nice. Nice. I was mashing. No, I had to mash. Oh wait, forgiveness path. Oh, we traded? Oh, I deserved it. OK, now it's Goku blue time. Hopefully we warmed up the old play a little bit. I didn't look like it, but you know. I'm fishing for two rounds. No, no to age. No to. This is bad. This is very, very bad. Bro, I am out of there. You will not catch me playing defense. That is something I am just not available for at the moment. Save jump. Stay with me, Sparky. Stay with me. Stay with me. Just stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me. Oh my forgiveness path. He's actually, he's been very generous with his forgiveness. Oh, he's gone like. But I'm also God like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let me give my confidence back. Let me get some fake confidence. Level one kills. So we go with level one. We save four bars. All right, next. Nice dragon rush. Probably wasn't expecting that. Dragon rush a little risky when you're the only one left. I get every options a little more risky, though. We does go for Spark. Oh, I got jump key blast. I wanted to reflect. Accidentally a jump. Maybe he'll choose the path of forgiveness one more time. Oh, great sets. Oh, yeah, that's going to be that was the fighters. I just got I got my eye. I was getting destroyed. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it, though. If you did, definitely let me know down below in the comments. And hopefully we'll be back with some cleaner play. But other than that, if you did enjoy the video, make sure to leave a like, subscribe and check out some of the other videos that should be on your screen right now. Other than that, I have been dotted to it. And I will see you in the next one.


Vocabulary and Reading – Exercise 5 Vocabulary study through context. These lessons are designed to teach you vocabulary and context and through exercises. Each lesson consists of a short reading about a place in the U.S. and provides 10 common words at the intermediate level. This article is about a beautiful event in the U.S. Capitol. The Cherry Trees of Washington, D.C. Part 1 – Pre-Reading What types of things do tourists like to see and do in your nation's capital? What monuments, buildings, historical sites, and events are attractive to visitors? What times of year, seasons, do most people visit your nation's capital? What do people expect to see when they visit Washington, D.C.? You might wish to pause the video to discuss or think about these questions. Part 2 – Here are the words you will see in this article. Repeat for pronunciation. Attract Bloom Blossom Donation Infested Insect Magnificent Monument Previous Tourist Do you know any of these words already? Part 3 – Match the words on the left with the definitions on the right. I will read the definitions. Happening before or prior to something else. Great Grand Outstanding Six-legged, bug-like creature. Structure made to remember a person or event. Person who travels for pleasure or sightseeing. Draw attention. Flowers that appear at the beginning of seasons. Contaminated by large numbers of bugs. A charitable gift of money, time, or substance. The process of flowers opening up. Part 4 – Take time to read the article. The Cherry Trees of Washington, D.C. For the reading, stop the video and click on the link in the description below, The Cherry Trees of Washington, D.C. You may wish to read it out loud for pronunciation. Part 5 – How was your reading? Talk about what you learned with your partner or teacher. Use some of the vocabulary words from Part 2. Part 6 – Want to try the quiz again? If you would like, you can pause the video for more time. Part 7 – Here are the answers to today's vocabulary exercise. Attract Draw attention Donation A charitable gift of money, time, or substance. Loom The process of flowers opening up. Blossom Flowers that appear at the beginning of seasons. Infested Contaminated by large numbers of bugs. Insect Six-legged bug-like creature. Magnificent Great Grand Outstanding Monument Structure made to remember a person or event. Previous Happening before or prior to something else. Tourist Person who travels for pleasure or sightseeing. Come back and review these words often. And remember to check out our other videos for reading and vocabulary practice. Thanks for watching. Our websites will help you even more with your English language study.