FOURTH AND CENTRAL — The Return of Leif the Viking (apparently a shofar is involved) — -Part Two

Urban Voices Project (UVP) is celebrating it’s ten year anniversary as an organization. It began as a music wellness program at Wesley Health Center in Skid Row in partnership with the Colburn School of Music.

Along with music wellness and community building music programs in a variety of locations and a performance choir based in Skid Row, UVP does three annual events. One is A Holiday Called Home which has happened four years in a row at Inner City Arts, a highly regarded creative campus on the border of Skid Row and the Fashion District which functions as a citywide after school arts program.

Another one is the C’Mon Sing Festival which has happened three years in a row as a sidewalk-level open mic in various locations throughout Downtown.

The third one is Coffeehouse which has happened eight years in a row.

Coffeehouse is an opportunity for individual choir members to receive several weeks of professional voice lessons to do a song of their choosing in a concert where the choir opens and closes it with a song. This year it was held at Inner City Arts.

I picked a song that I was introduced to at First United Methodist Church Los Angeles called Good People by Mumford and Sons and Pharrell Williams. The lyrics spoke to me powerfully about Skid Row, specifically about the Skid Row Action Plan, even more specifically about the Land and Labor Acknowledgments in the Plan — successfully implementing the Plan requires the right foundation.

The Skid Row Action Plan is a comprehensive strategic plan initiated by the County Board of Supervisors in June 2022 based on a Motion by Supervisor Hilda Solis.

The Skid Row Action Plan process for 2023 was facilitated by a California consultancy firm called ChangeWell Project. They organized a series of gatherings called Community Design Sessions and all of the Sessions began with a public reading of a Land and a Labor Acknowledgment. Connected to the Land Acknowledgment was Indian Alley in Skid Row, amongst Native Americans one of the most well known Urban Indian locations in the country. Connected to the Labor Acknowledgment was a photo of Bridget “Biddy” Mason, a former slave who was a major matriarch in the early days of Downtown Los Angeles.

Here are the Land and Labor Acknowledgments:

Land Acknowledgment (from Los Angeles County):

“The County of Los Angeles recognizes that we occupy land originally and still inhabited and cared for by the Tongva, Tatavium, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples. We honor and pay respect to their elders and descendants — past, present, and emerging — as they continue their stewardship of these lands and waters. We acknowledge that settler colonization resulted in land seizure, disease, subjugation, slavery, relocation, broken promises, genocide, and multigenerational trauma. This acknowledgment demonstrates our responsibility and commitment to truth, healing, and reconciliation and to elevating the stories, culture, and community of the original inhabitants of Los Angeles County. We are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on these ancestral lands. We are dedicated to growing and sustaining relationships with Native peoples and local tribal governments.”

Labor Acknowledgment (from Cal State Long Beach):

“We recognize and acknowledge the labor upon which our country, state, and institution are built. We remember that our country was built on the labor of enslaved people who were kidnapped and brought to the U.S. from the African continent and recognize the continued contribution of their survivors. We also acknowledge all immigrant and indigenous labor, including voluntary, involuntary, trafficked, forced, and undocumented peoples who contributed to the building of the country and continue to serve within our labor force. We recognize that our country is continuously defined, supported, and built upon by oppressed communities and peoples. We acknowledge labor inequities and the shared responsibility for combatting oppressive systems in our daily work.”

I brought the Land and Labor Acknowledgments on stage on a large posterboard to begin the song and in the middle of the song I did a short spoken word to make very clear the point of the song.

Here are the lyrics with the spoken word in the middle of it. Our Emcee, Skid Row Artist Mello Re-Houston, held up the 92 page Implementing The Skid Row Action Plan for the audience to see.

Back up singers sing the words in parentheses:

And I’m done being tired, so right now I’m inspired

(Welcome to the revelation)

I was once underwater and now I’m on fire

(Welcome to the revelation)

And I feel it in the air that Mother Earth ain’t steady

Feel so alive even though times are deadly

And in my soul (get ready)

Something is stirring now (get ready)

And I’m not worried (get ready)

You better get ready to see now

Good people been down for so long

And now it’s like the sun is rising

Good people been down for so long

And now I see the sun is rising

Skid Row Action Plan. Resident Community Centered. (plan is brought on stage and shown to audience) And there it is. Go ahead and read it. Resident community centered. Ooooh…but is implementation of the Action Plan resident community centered? Planners gonna plan plan plan plan and haters gonna hate hate hate hate. Im-ple-ment. Im-ple-ment. Here are the Land and Labor Acknowledgments from the Plan. Now if these acknowledgments are the foundation for implementation…justice, if justice is the foundation that implementation of the Skid Row Action Plan is being built upon — — then transformation is heading this way.

And in my soul (get ready)

Something is stirring now (get ready)

And I’m not worried (get ready)

You better get ready to see now

Good people been down for so long

And now it’s like the sun is rising

Good people been down for so long

And now I see the sun is rising

Long was the night, but you know we’ve been dreaming

(Welcome to the revelation)

The city’s getting loud ’cause the mountains are screaming

(Welcome to the revelation)

When you’ve been through it all and it won’t get no worse

And the first shall be last and the last shall be first

And in my soul (get ready)

Something is stirring now (get ready)

And I’m not worried (get ready)

You better get ready to see now

Good people been down for so long

And now it’s like the sun is rising

Good people been down for so long

And now I see the sun is rising

(welcome to the revelation)

(welcome to the revelation)

The sun is (the sun is) rising (rising)

It’s coming, it’s on it’s way

So nothing (nothing) tonight is (tonight is) Getting in the way

The sun is (the sun is) rising (rising)

It’s coming (it’s coming), it’s on its way

So nothing (nothing) tonight is (tonight is) Getting in the way

(welcome to the revelation)

(welcome to the revelation)

the revelation

The day before Coffeehouse at Inner City Arts was our Dress Rehearsal with hair and make-up to go over all our songs with the full band. One of our longtime choir singers came up to me and told me she came across some ram horns someone had thrown out and wondered if I wanted them. I said sure, thanks, my Leif the Viking helmet with horns is all plastic and maybe this is a sign to resurrect that character.

This year’s Coffeehouse was at Inner City Arts and so was the Coffeehouse last year. The year before that we did it in Little Tokyo at the Terasaki Budokan, a huge community center operated by Little Tokyo Service Center. My song was the Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin and it was sung by Leif the Viking, the new Community Engagement Outreach Coordinator Director for The North Sea.

We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow
How soft your fields so green
Can whisper tales of gore
Of how we calmed the tides of war
We are your overlords

Ah-ah, ah!

Ah-ah, ah!

When he wasn’t singing, the essence of Leif’s community outreach to the Coffeehouse audience was to explain that where he comes from they call it pillaging the village and burning it to the ground, but here, you call it re-branding. Leif invited everyone to chat with him at The North Sea information table, right next to the bench with the sharp pointy things sticking up.

The North Sea is the name given several years ago to the northeast section of Skid Row by real estate development interests based on family-owned fish warehouses. Some of the North Sea area is part of the Fourth and Central proposed development. A media article a few years ago about Fourth and Central said the development encompasses the Arts District, Little Tokyo, and Arts District Adjacent.

The day of Coffeehouse, as we were getting Hair and Make-Up, she gave me a bag and I was struck by how heavy it was. I pulled out two ram horns with a metal rod coming out of them as they must have been attached to something. Another choir member who saw this said it’s a shofar.

Wikipedia — A shofar (/ʃoʊˈfɑːr/ shoh-FAR; from שׁוֹפָר‎) is an ancient musical horn typically made of a ram’s horn, used for Jewish religious purposes. Like the modern bugle, the shofar lacks pitch-altering devices, with all pitch control done by varying the player’s embouchure. The shofar is blown in synagogue services on Rosh Hashanah and at the end of Yom Kippur; it is also blown every weekday morning in the month of Elul running up to Rosh Hashanah.[1] Shofars come in a variety of sizes and shapes, depending on the choice of animal and level of finish.

The shofar is mentioned frequently in the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and rabbinic literature. In the first instance, in Exodus 19, the blast of a shofar emanating from the thick cloud on Mount Sinai makes the Israelites tremble in awe.

The shofar was used to announce the new moon[2] and the Jubilee year.[3] The first day of Tishrei (now known as Rosh Hashana) is termed a “memorial of blowing”,[4] or “day of blowing”,[5] the shofar. Shofars were used for signifying the start of a war.[6] They were also employed in processions[7] as musical accompaniment,[8] and were inserted into the temple orchestra by David.