Upon the first time I set foot in OTR I witnessed an environment filled with a plethora of potential. Growing up across the river, a member of the other side, my life has been filled with explanations of terrible atrocities associated with OTR. A place filled with gang violence, drug addicts, homeless people, disease, a real life dodge city in comparison to the pleasant peaceful bliss of my slowly dissolving country roots. Throughout my life OTR has been a place describe to me in a fashion only comparable to that of a war-zone. A place to be avoided like the agonizing fires of hell. A place full of degenerate people who offer nothing more to civilized society than bodies in our jails and fear to our souls. I remember a time when I felt uncomfortable driving down the streets with my doors unlocked. I remember a time when walking the streets, let alone interacting with members of the community, appeared mentally as suicide. But the first time I crossed into the streets of OTR; terrible, horrific, disgusting, vile, and other such like minded descriptive prose was not the picture painted for me.

For a good portion of my life the mentality of my home community has been to avoid problem areas instead of embracing them. Despite any of the negative connotations associated with OTR, a beautiful array of culture exist. Like an intricate experiment on the Galapagos islands, OTR is a place of beauty and aw. Though it’s landscapes may be harsh to some, it truly is a place where only the strong survive. It’s culture, a totally chance melting pot is a blend of the highly wealthy and the poorest of the poor. It is a place where interaction amongst crack heads and businessmen on the verge of incomprehensible venture collide. It is a place where countless niches may arise or fall given the slightest whim by the powers at be. OTR has a culture all it’s own and as such has the potential to produce talent the world has never seen. OTR has all the ingredients, all the diversity, and all the capacity to harbor and generate individuals who can turn the world anyway it desires if for no other reason than the conversation generated by countless polarized logic!

OTR is a world stuck in transition. If ecology teaches us anything, it is that when environments are thrown into chaos nature develops creative solutions. Flowering plants, flying mammals, multicellular organisms forever stuck in countless symbiotic relationships necessary for survival. If history teaches us anything it is that man has the capacity to alter it’s environment in ways that not even we can fully understand the repercussions. The point I’m making is that chaos gives rise to creativity and humans alter their environments based off creative processes. These alterations can may result in good or bad, however you define that.

What I, what we seek is a face, a name, an entity, a voice that can help us harbor the resources necessary to develop the true underground and raw talent OTR offers. To help direct the creative processes of our relatively unknown polished eyesore in a manner that appreciates us for us. An individual who has the type of social pull capable of catching the eye’s of other like people to help us build a community center that is a positive agent of change. A person who can bring the right kind of soil necessary to grow our rose. A person like Bootsy Collins.

Right now we have a gifted community that will only continue to be ostracised as bearers of useless talents, unless a person with real status steps up and leads us.