Reinvention in Merchant City

TriadCity's Merchant City neighborhood is about reinvention.

The people are transforming the public space they've inherited, or maybe it would be better to say confiscated, from history. Once a Victorian enclave of brownstones and pocket parks, where nannies and prams and public monuments to empire and order all spoke unsubtly of prosperity and self-satisfaction and dominance and trade, the neighborhood increasingly resembles The People's Republic of Berkeley, as theater collectives and punk hair stylists and hip entrepreneurs slowly morph the shops and monuments and squares into public resources resembling themselves: good-humored, egalitarian, decidedly communal.

They're transforming themselves at the same time. Everyone's a runaway. Convicts, divorcees, abused children: forging new lives as waiters or hair cutters or shop clerks, living inexpensively in nearby St. Andrew's Scone or the collective homes around the corner, bringing their kids with them into new futures. Many are borrowed characters. I'll cite Rayette Dipesto as one favorite. Freed from abusive beau Bobby Dupea she's returned to waitressing, now in an entirely new context she can at least partially control. Or another waitress, Carol Connelly, able to live independently in NorthWest where her sickly child's medical expenses will be taken care of by the community.

These dynamics aren't narrated so much as depicted. In a novel, the motives and prior histories of these characters would be spoken out loud, probably at length. Here, they're sketched in a line or two, and the characters are shown going about their days. The nature of this medium is less about telling, more about showing. Narration accumulates through interaction, repetition, juxtaposition. By assembling these "flat" characters in a concentrated space I can show you their broad commonalities. Narration is not the precondition but rather the outcome of these technical practices.

Merchant City is my new favorite place in TriadCity. Nobody's getting killed there, there are no adventures happening, nothing epic unfolding. Except, there is. It's just on a far more gradual, more individual, and at the same time more collective scale than we're used to. The people there are exploring the practical meanings of "democracy". They rule — they really do. Now what? How to build a thoroughly egalitarian society profoundly controlled by the people themselves? Experimentation is in order: let's try things and see what happens. This is very precisely what Marx meant by the term "socialism". I like it there a ton.