KA$H FOR KART$

By Trent Hayward

The Coalition on Homelessness and four kick- ass local bands linked claws on a Saturday night in August at the Hotel Utah in a joint effort to buy shopping carts for homeless folks.

If you have never had the pleasure of seeing the sun gleaming off the black, chitinoid armor of a Free Kart rolling down past the tourists in U.N. Plaza, you have not yet truly lived. If you can for a moment imagine a cross between the Stealth bomber, an angry dung-beetle and the Batmobile, you'd be getting close.

The "FREE KARTS" program was originally conceived and birthed in April of this year as an art/activist collaboration between POOR magazine and the C.O.H.

Willy, an artist out of Oakland affiliated with POOR magazine was in large part responsible for the savage, heart wrenching beauty of the flagship five carts given out at the April 27th press conference at City Hall. A large part of the predatory beauty was due to him spot welding two steel fins to the frame of the Kart itself.

The original concept was to supply our homeless friends, brothers and sisters who use carts for either their property or for doing recycling work "street-legal," privately owned carts that the cops can't legally touch.

All of this was and is in response to Supervisor Amos Brown's "Cart Anti-Removal Program," a proposal as silly and uninspired as its name would suggest. The real impetus behind this is to continue terrorizing homeless people through the confiscation of their personal property, via making local supermarkets responsible for their carts under the threat of imposed fines. This would result in even more instances of freelance cart Gestapos being paid on a cart-by-cart basis to physically threaten and harass our poorest citizens.

In case you don't already know, Amos (shit, not again!) Brown has tried on more than one occasion to treat people like they were bi-pedal cattle by herding them up, branding them with stigma and nasty misinformation, and corralling 'em up to stockyards with names like Mission Rock and 850 Bryant.

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If you've never heard this self affirming "man of god" (yes, he's a reverend!) bleat out his hate sermons before, he comes off sounding crazy and not just a little bit scary. Amos spits hate with the authoritarian delivery of a righteous preacher, and we are not talking about a great man like Dr. King here by a long shot, folks.

After telling loads homeless folks that they could probably get in for free and to park their carts in a diagonal fashion on the sidewalk outside of the Utah, and that hey, if you show up I'll buy you a beer, The door guy said to me, "As long as you're 21 and not hygienically offensive, you're in!" I thought that was pretty cool of him, since he was backing up my big mouth.

The bands were really good. Slow Poisoners were a kind of space-rock-psych outfit that I thought were as hilarious as they were talented. I especially dug the guitar/keyboardist's chops. M. Headphone were great as well, I felt myself floating away a coupla times with them but maybe that was in part due to a large quantity of cheap beer. Heavy Pebble, with Erika their stellar presence on the bass and vox started to make me more than a little homesick in that they reminded me a lot of the circa '86 Pixies.

I cannot say enough about not only how cool these guys all were in their respective musical soups, but also individually in talking to them. In my experience playing in a bunch of bands back east, it's more of a you-gotta-pay-to-play-kinda deal, you do pretty good when you can get some beers after the show and maybe tip the sound guy something decent, so to have these guys donating not only the door but t-shirt and CD cash to keep the concept and acquisition of Free Karts alive through their sweat was really freakin' cool. Kinda like finding a diamond in a turd. After all was said and done, KA$H FOR KART$ raised roughly $700.

Keep your eyes trained on the streets. Free Karts are comin'!

Harpo Corleone

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Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco 468 Turk St.
San Francisco, CA 94102
vox: (415) 346.3740
Fax: (415) 775.5639
coh@sfo.com
http://www.sfo.com/~coh

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THERAPY COSTS TOO MUCH!!!!
Dee Gray, M.S.W., M.F.C.   Licensed Therapist specializing in advocacy and crisis counseling. Mother, daughter and family counseling. Adoption and juvenile dependency. Literary and creative art counseling. Individual and group therapy. Sliding scale fee. (415) 541-5629.