Rating:🩶
On the Lower Frequencies is an anthology by Erica Lyle, FKA Iggy Scam. The book (according to its website) is “a manual, a memoir and a history of creative resistance and fun in a world run rotten with poverty and war”. The chapter formats include interviews with activists and artists, stories from Lyle’s time in San Francisco from the early 90’s through mid-2000’s, reader letters, and poetic prose. The author’s note reads:
Stories that were once dispatches from an ongoing political struggle or that were, literally, given away free on the streets, have now become this book. Virtually all of the material in this book originally appeared in the following publications: my magazine, Scam, issues #4 (2000), #5 (2005), and #5.5 (2006); my street newspaper the Turd-Filled Donut, issues #1–8 (1997-2001), Nosedive (2002), Rice Harvester (2006), Full Gallop (2001), 949 Market (2001), Long Ago and Far Away (2004); Chris Carlsson’s book The Political Edge (2004), or NPR’s radio show This American Life. This is the first time they have been assembled all in one place.
Erica Dawn Lyle is a fascinating character. She produced the SCAM zine from 1991-2016, the Turd Filled Donut community newsletter from 1997-2001, worked at the Coalition on Homelessness, has been part of various punk bands through the years, produced amateur film including this visit to Cuba where she attended a baseball game with Castro, has been an antiwar and anticapitalist activist and community organizer for decades, and is currently touring in Europe.
In a 2019 Pitchfork interview, Lyle said:
I’ve always longed for a lot of freedom. I figured out how to rig my life so that I can spend most of my time doing things that engage productively with other people. I’ve made a lot of choices to not have money or stability or security in order to be able to pursue that state of creative engagement.
I’m not sure what’s driving me. When I was a kid, I was motivated by revenge, mostly because my parents tried to kill me. I was going to prove that I was not going to be killed. There’s still a healthy dose of that inside me. Also, who can not be motivated to fight against the horrific conditions that we’re living under right now?
I have a profound sense that the world should be different. I want to be very visible and join others to change things. Visibility is a trap, though. On the one hand, if you’re visible you’re more in danger: Many trans women I know who have done political things in public have been doxxed or physically attacked. But on the other, being visible is the only way to explode the secrecy and shame around queer and trans lives. It’s the only way to change the mainstream’s mind about who transgender people are: by simply existing in a public way.
Anyone who is living, has lived, or plans to live in San Francisco must absolutely read this book. Anyone with interest in the punk scene, collective action, and building a better world wherever they live should also read it.
I finished it about a month and a half ago but have had trouble writing a review for it, as it feels somewhat insulting to compress all the multitudes the book contains into this dingy little review format. There’s just so much to think about and reflect on. I’ll give it a go anyways, but seriously, read the book.
On the Lower Frequencies primarily documents SF’s Tenderloin and Mission districts through vignettes and interviews. Lyle discusses the history of the Mission through the biases of a pair of famously crooked Irish cops, for example. She discusses community, crime, and homelessness in the Tenderloin through a history of Hunt’s Donuts (“open 25 hours!”). She talks about tenants rights through the genuinely hilarious epic of their greedy landlord attempting to take advantage of the dot-com boom and unlawfully evict Lyle and her friend Jimmy to sell their Mission Victorian:
But the Mission was changing. Streets that had been called “down and out” were now called “gritty,” and the Mission’s turd-and-graffiti motif was now fashionable. Termite-ridden, drafty old Victorians were bought at exorbitant prices, not to live in, but to immediately resell, like Internet stocks. Everyone in San Francisco had a dream that somehow hinged on real estate. The stock market was pumping so much easy cash into the neighborhood—the good times were so GOOD—that the dream even had a name: “Cleaning up the Mission.” Developers and slumming hipsters congratulated themselves, believing that ordinary greed was actually a moral force, a rising tide to lift all boats.
She helped set up an artist’s squat at 949 Market St (the same building as the current IKEA) in which they ran music and art shows and gave out free food:
What would you do with a block-long chunk of open space on Market Street? Is it more important to use it for housing, or entertainment? Would you spend a month working on a space that might only last for one night, and maybe not even that? Should it just be opened and used to do a massive feeding to the guys who live out back in the alley, or should it be used for a punk art show? Can a space that’s illegally opened really be open to everyone, safely? What would you do with a block-long space on Market Street?
I’m not sure that Lyle’s political ideology is a complete one. It is certainly steeped in a lot of anger and pain. But it is courageous, it is different, and it is important to hear. If the status quo in SF props up the billionaire demigods through corporate factions and has “fuck you, get mine” at the center, then Lyle aspires to prioritize the common person above all else, with a messy “fuck you, retake what was already ours” at the core.
It’s impossible not to compare scenes of SF in the 90’s and early 2000’s to today. A gold rush that reshapes the city, from which many residents are either left out or shoved aside. Politicians and media that represent powerful interests more often than the people’s will. An overwhelming concentration of suffering within certain SF communities, persistently bleeding out through the cracks of the aspirational techno-utopia…
The book humanized people on the street for me in a way that not much has before. It influenced the way I voted on certain propositions in this election, and made me learn more about the city I’ve lived in for almost eight years now. I’ve bought multiple copies and gifted them to friends (if you’re a friend and want one, let me know!). Definitely one of my more challenging, important, and entertaining books of this year.
We wanted to do shows or art events that were more about what we are FOR than what we are against. I’m not saying we shouldn’t protest; George Bush will certainly keep our hands full with that these next four years. I’m just saying that I’m tired of being expected to self-identify as someone under attack, someone who is powerless and who is being forced out. We wanted to do shows that asked, “What do we WANT the city to look like? How can we make it happen? If we really had all the space everyone says they need to do stuff, what exactly WOULD we do with it?” We wanted to do shows that remind people of the power that they actually DO have.