Current Journal Page
<+>
Contact Us
If you send us your comments we will (probably) post them.
<+>
Our Web Sites
The Common Wheel
Collective Book on Collective Process
<+>
Journal Archives
2003
|
m |
j |
j |
a |
s |
o |
<+>
Link to Us
<+>
Book List
<+>
Thrifty Tips
<+>
Radical Thrifty Tips
<+>
Recommended
Web Sites
50 Years is Enough
AKPress
Anarchist Communitarian Network
Anti-Slavery
Better Times
Brazilian Landless Workers Movement
Brecht Forum
Catholic Worker
Collective Action Notes
Committee to Protect Journalists
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador
Crimethinc
East Bay Food Not Bombs
End Page Archives
Enough
Free Free Now
Fundación ESPERANZA
Green Socialist Network
Indymedia
Infoshop
Institute for Social Ecology
John Gray
Just the Facts
Kamunist Kranti
Kensington Welfare Rights Union
Noam Chomsky Archive
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty
Organic Consumers Association
Overcoming Consumerism
Oxfam
Pacific Environment
Path to Freedom Urban Homesteading
Peasant Movement of the Philippines
People Against Oppression and War
Peoples´ Global Action
Poor News Network
Reclaim the Streets
Ruckus Society
Shack/Slum Dwellers’ International
The View From the Ground
We the People Media
<+>
Odd and Interesting Links
<+>
Journals and Weblogs
Abada Abada
Alana's Dear Blog
Aldahlia
All About George
Blankespoor Blogs
Blogalization
Bluebird Escape
The Cold Days of Chicago
Crazy Woman
Darrel Moen
Dru Blood
Experiment
Fuck Corporate Groceries
Hobopoet
The Homeless Guy
Involuntary Simplicity
Keywords
Lorenzo's blog
Madame Insane
Mobtown Confidential
Modern Peasant
Monumental Mistake
Nature is Profligate
Pink Prickly Pear
Path to Freedom
The Professionalization of Zoe Mitchell
Red Polka
Rough Living
Shauna Curphey
Steven Rubio's Online Life
Suburban Guerrilla
Sustenance.org
Treesit Blog
Veggie Mama
Vermont Homeless Journal
Virtual Homestead
Where Is Raed?
Where We're Bound
Wood's Lot
Working For the Man
<+>
^^^
Current Journal Entries:[R] Goth Music Listening List <^><^> [R] Mob Mentality (Lynch Mobs and Witch Hunts) <^><^> [a] Shared Property Rights <^><^> [a] Yay, we have comments! <^><^> [a] Embroidered Pillows Against Petty Cruelty <^><^> [R] Letter From Newburgh <^><^> [R] "America's homeless become new small-town pioneers" <^><^> [a] Poverty and Land <^><^> [a] Moving and Stuff <^><^> [a] Peace and Quiet <^><^> [a] Garden Pictures <^><^> [a] Fancy Colleges <^><^> [R] Staten Island Ferry <^><^> [a] More on Community <^><^> [G] Re: Living on Less <^><^> [a] Happy Birthday to Richard! <^><^> [R] "Ah, But I Was So Much Older Then, I'm Younger Than That Now" <^><^> [a] Community <^><^> [a] Everyday Poverty <><> [R] "Underemployed: a euphemism for violent lifestyle change" <><> [R] Personal Musical Discoveries -- and Rediscoveries -- Caused by Poverty <><> [a] Phone Bill <><> [a] Contents of Our Fridge <><> [a] The Joys of Unemployment <><>
<^><^><^><^><^>
^^^
October 31, 2003
Goth Music Listening List
x+(*x+(*x+(*x+(*x+(*x+(*+
^^^
October 30, 2003
Mob Mentality (Lynch Mobs and Witch Hunts)
+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+x+
^^^
++)(++)(++)(++)(++
^^^
^==^==^==^==^==^==^
^^^
::=::=::=::=::=::=::
^^^
October 26, 2003
Letter From Newburgh
*::*::*::*::*::*::*:*::*:*::*
^^^
October 25, 2003
"America's homeless become new small-town pioneers"
[....][....][....][....][....][....]
^^^
October 24, 2003 Poverty and Land
* ^ * ^ * ^ * ^ * ^ *
^^^
=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=
^^^
+#+#+#+#+#+#+#+
^^^
._._._._._._._._.
^^^ ""==""==""==""==""
^^^ +0+0+0+0+0+0+0+
^^^ +=-=+=-=+=-=+=-=+
^^^ *=*=*=*=*=*=*
^^^ !|!|!|!|!|!|!|!|!|!
^^^ +==+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
^^^
October 9, 2003 Community ::~::~::~::~::~::~::
^^^ **==**==**==**==**
^^^ @#@#@#@#@#@#@#@#@#@#
^^^ *)(*()*)(*()*)(*()*)(*()*(
^^^ ==^^==^^==^^==^^==
^^^ +|+|+|+|+|+|+|+|+
^^^ (*) * (*) * (*) * (*) * (*)
[Richard]
Dead Can Dance
Najma's new "Indian Gothic" music
Kate Bush
Black Tape for a Blue Girl
Miranda Sex Garden
Ministry
Happy Halloween.
[Richard]
I saw an interesting video the other night while hanging out with friends at the IMC video hangout, Walker Space (aka Walker Stage), located on the border between Chinatown and Tribeca, about five to ten blocks north of Ground Zero. This was a video showing what happened when my friend Warcry went with a friend of hers down to Ground Zero this past September 11, carrying anti-war signs urging people to "Love Thy Neighbor" and talking about how the U.S. government/military bombing of other countries is not an adequate response to terrorism but just a further perpetuation of it. In essence, in response to Warcry's anti-war messages, she and her friend nearly got lynched. They had what amounted to an angry mob (a relatively small one, but threatening enough) shouting them down, ripping up their signs, and eventually pursuing them and shoving them around somewhere down the street.
Of course, it is pretty sick that participants at an event commemorating thousands of people killed by violence would, themselves, react so violently to two folks coming over with a message of peace. Most likely, however, this small mob wouldn't have been so stirred up and the conflict would not have even happened were it not for a couple of instigators. The strange thing is, as I looked at the main instigator documented by this video, I could swear that the he was the same person who had harangued me almost two years earlier, in September or October of 2001, when I was at a meeting with a couple of people in Union Square Park, making up signs for an upcoming (and somewhat disastrous) march against the WTO. If it is not the same guy, then it is a very, very similar kind of asshole.
People talk a lot about how police and federal agents are planted to stir up this kind of trouble. And considering that I, myself, was followed all over town by undercover cops (who weren't so undercover) following the February 2002 protest in Manhattan against the World Economic Forum, I don't doubt that there are often undercover cops planted in particular places with the assignment of stirring up trouble. However, I am far less inclined than some other people to draw that conclusion in every situation. That is because I don't really think that agents of the state are needed to make life miserable for those of us trying to work for social change. The state doesn't need to pay its agents to do this job when so many people are perfectly willing to do it for free.
The sad truth is that the same might be said about the situation within groups fighting for social change. Often, when activists are somewhat turned against each other, there will be someone making noises about agent provocateurs and COINTELPRO. But once again, the government doesn't have to pay anyone to do this job when there are plenty of people around willing to do it for free.
I, myself, have not always been an angel in my dialogue with other activists. Especially a couple of years ago, I had a tendency to needle some people, especially in e-mail, especially when I'd perceived them to be playing power games. But I have never tried to stir up a mob. I have always expressed my own opinion as my own opinion and have never tried to influence others to gang up anyone. Yet, within the "activist" community, there often have been people who indulged in that tendency, and too many others who either were perfectly willing to be led in this manner or, at the very least, were not willing to stop the manipulations from happening.
I suppose I would understand this mob mentality better if I ever felt inclined toward it myself, rather than always reacting against it. I've seen this kind of behavior in many different kinds of places, including discussions on public e-mail lists. Very often in such discussions, when someone says something that is a little strange or disagreeable to others, or when someone commits a politically incorrect faux pas, a group reaction develops that far exceeds the level of response appropriate for that particular transgression. The problem is, there is almost always a bandwagon and people who are willing to jump on it. Personally speaking, I tend to react against any bandwagon. I am often instinctively inclined to stick up for the underdog. Once in a while, I imagine, I am inclined in this direction excessively. Nonetheless, I just don't think there is such a thing as being too negative about mob behavior and too demanding of rational responses, individual/critical thinking, and/or a fair hearing.
It might be that mob mentality is a universal human tendency; some might even declare that it is a built-in aspect of "human nature." Yet, I could never bring myself to accept that kind of reasoning. I think even the most common behaviors can be traced back to social conditioning. And maybe someday, in a better world after the great social revolution – or the great social evolution -- the human race will stop creating lynch mobs and witch hunts.
[asfo_del]
In a book I just started reading, Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-first Century, there's a great essay about private property, written by Prasanna Parthasarathi, which argues that current insistence on individual private property rights, usually presented by the mainstream-right as not only desirable to the free market system but as an inevitable necessity, is just as much of a threat to the world's people as free trade. Its most widely known alternative, state ownership of property, as under Soviet communism, is no better; if anything, it ends up being even more unequal and unjust. But there are other possibilities. In southern India, as well as in other regions, including the Netherlands, there has been a tradition, according to Parthasarathi, of shared community ownership of the fundamental assets needed for survival.
Members of the community own shares in the arable fields, for instance, and receive an equal share of their harvest. Shares can be bought or sold with the approval of the other owners, but not to people outside the community. Local control and rights of inheritance ensure that sustainable practices will be followed, since no one, one would hope, would want to defile or damage an asset in their own back yard and which will be passed on to their children.
He argues that this system could work here and now. "If property rights were reconceived as a share of output, we would ... have a more egalitarian society. The extremes of wealth and poverty that exist in the United states today would be narrowed as property would be diffused widely among the population."
I myself don't have the knowledge, of course, to evaluate this idea. But it's very intriguing. Communal ownership, when it is practiced haplessly [as it is for instance, in many roommate arrangements], only leads to unfair divisions and resulting recriminations and bitterness. One of the appealing aspects of this model is its clarity. As a kid who always seemed to end up with no birthday cake at parties because more aggressive kids would finish it first, and as one who has had even more recent experiences with the cruelty and selfishness that runs amok in so-called egalitarian collectives, I have some reservations about the notion of casually shared property. But the issue I have trouble with is the absence of clarity as to who is entitled to make use of what.
I have been thinking about the many situations where we don't stop to consider that we are in fact engaging in communal property ownership. Something that we label "ours" often does not belong to us in the market sense that we are free to sell or trade it, but is merely something that has been assigned to us by a larger group, of which we ourselves are a part and in which we usually have a say. When we are children growing up in our parents' homes, we may have our own room, bed, desk, etc., but those items are only ours in the sense that they have been assigned to us for our use. Then, of course, there are the kitchen and living room which are used by everybody in the household. In school we are assigned textbooks that we keep all year and return at the end of the term, and the school facilities as a whole are made available for our use, as needed. If it's a public school, these items are owned by the state, but in a private school the institution's assets are jointly owned by the stakeholders, of which you as a student are one. Yet we have no trouble accepting these transitory rights of usufruct that are not tied to a specific title and that we cannot sell or trade.
Why should it be so different when it comes to land? Why can't there be a parcel of land that is owned jointly by the community and where each family unit or individual is assigned whatever portion they need for shelter and sustenance? The answer that is usually given is that our society is too complex. Individual property rights are the most flexible and convenient way to apportion land, piece by piece. There is something to be said for that. Having legal title, which can be enforced by the courts if need be, is a kind of insurance that what is yours is clearly demarcated and cannot be taken away [except when it can...]. The problem is that this system leads to terrible injustice. As long as whomever has the most purchasing power can own the most land [and that's without even going into the issue that land the world over has very often simply been taken by force by its current owners, or their forebears, with no compensation whatsoever given to its previous tenants] there will always be millions left behind, who have nothing, not even the barest of essentials to survive.
[asfo_del]
Thank you to fellow blogger Indigo for the tip on how to add a comments feature to this journal. And thank you to Dave [whose blog narrates his Experiment in legal tax resistance, which he accomplished by simply not making enough money to owe any federal income taxes] for sending us a link to a web validation service, which I've been using to correct some of the many mistakes in this page's HTML. There are still errors that I have not yet been able to figure out how to fix - I can only hope that people are more or less able to read the page.... I tried viewing it in Netscape recently and it was all screwed up!
Although I find making web pages, to the limited extent that I am able to do it, pretty interesting and engrossing, the learning experience has also been a bit like trying to rummage around in a dark closet for bits and pieces of usable information. I've only had this computer since May of 2002, and I had never had one before [except for a very early Mac 512]. We wanted a web site for our project, Collective Book on Collective Process, and, not having any geek friends to guide me, I just dove right in. I'm not thrilled about supporting a huge corporation like Yahoo/Geocities, but I have to say their service has been extremely helpful to a total greenhorn like myself.
I started out with one of their pre-formatted templates and then began gradually making changes. A lot of HTML is pretty self explanatory: where is says "color" must be where you specify a color, where is says "font" must be where you specify a font, etc. That's how I learned, by trial and error. Geocities also offers some rudimentary HTML help and a very handy Table Maker. And then there are the hundreds of web tutorials all over the web. I also made my own color chart to use as a reference, because I am such a nerd [I couldn't find any that arranged the colors the way I wanted them arranged]. Of course, it's hard to catch mistakes that don't show up on one's own browser when one relies on trial and error. So, as humbling as it sometimes is, I would welcome any advice or corrections....
[asfo_del]
I'm feeling so discouraged about the meanness and selfishness of people. I've pretty much isolated myself except for my closest and dearest because I find it so difficult to accept and cope with the wanton disregard for the most basic decency that, disturbingly and bewilderingly, seems to be astonishingly prevalent. But I can't get away. Mike's former wife seems to be willing to hurt her own child for the sake of her own spitefulness and selfishness. It's hard for me to believe. It's hard for me to accept. I don't know how one is supposed to deal with petty cruelty, in this situation or any other. There seems to be absolutely nothing you can do about it other than take it, as if someone had punched you in the gut. You just stagger back helplessly, clutching your stomach, wondering what the hell happened. And I don't know how I could help the child, either. It seems like all the available choices would only make it worse: talking about it; ignoring it; urging him to develop his own independence, which he only interprets as having more pressure put on him.
My other coping strategy is to retreat into making things that are pretty and homey. So I have been making embroidered pillows. The drawback is that there is no absence of frustration in the fact that sewing is so very time-consuming, therefore somewhat tiresome, and, since I'm not that good at it, its results are never quite as fulfilling and joy-inspiring as one might have hoped. Still, I think making pretty things can be a comfort and a small happiness.
This is a pillow I made last week and sent to my friend Mark in Houston.
These are some antique pillows whose pictures I found on the web that I think are heartbreakingly beautiful.
These are the web pages they can be found on:
1. http://www.nightingaleantiques.com/textiles/10470.html
2. http://www.nightingaleantiques.com/textiles/5152.html
3. http://www.nightingaleantiques.com/textiles/9494.html
4. http://www.samarkand.co.uk/nomad/nom13.htm
5. http://www.antique-carpets.com/centasia/centasia11.html
6. http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/tokens_and_treasures/presidents/
image_2_hoover.html
[Richard]
I spent three days this past week visiting my friend Eve H. in Newburgh, NY. Eve's done significant work as both an anarchist and a feminist, but she's most recently been involved in a lot of anti-war activism in Newburgh, organizing meetings for the Women in Black, among other groups. (People who want to know more about her recent endeavors might want to get a few editions of her nicely written "Letter[s] From Newburgh," which she sends out periodically.)
I met Eve about two years ago, when we were in an anarcho-communist group that we both later fled. As often happens in the wonderful world of activism, we became friends because we were fighting with some of the same people. But we got to know each other better through a much more positive experience, organizing a dinner/discussion with Eve's old friend Ben, who had founded a legendary '60s anarcho-artists'/activists' "street gang" called Up Against The Wall Motherfucker. I (and a lot of other people) think it's really incredible that Eve hung out and did stuff with the Motherfuckers (as they were affectionately called) way back in the day. Plus, it was great last year listening to Ben during our organized dinner, getting his first hand accounts of some fine moments in radical New York history.
I had been planning to visit Eve for a while, but temp work and other problems kept interfering with my ability to schedule even the shortest vacation. Finally, though, I decided that it was important to my mental health just to say to hell with the temp agencies for a few days, go a little more broke (again) and get myself the fuck out of New York City. I hadn't left New York prior to this trip for close to year, since the Common Wheel Collective gave a workshop in Washington, DC last January. (I have done a lot of travelling in every borough but Queens...but I don't think that's exactly the same thing.) And sometimes, it's incredibly important just to get out of the usual environment -- some day, I'd like to explore why, exactly, and write about it a little...
The visit, itself, was both fun and relaxing for me, as well as somewhat healing. It was freezing cold up in Newburgh during those three days, but I still enjoyed standing (with teeth chattering) on a high and scenic peak, staring out at the dazzlingly colorful foliage. We also had an interesting dinner with Eve's friend Mona, who some call the "Muse of Newburgh." Mona was quite an entertainer for us on Wednesday night, reading us a long poem and then playing the piano. (And Mona's daughter is, reportedly, an expert musician with the serangi (an Indian violin that I often love to hear) -- too bad she couldn't be there too, but she was reportedly thousands of miles away, somewhere in Asia, doing some real travelling.) However, I most enjoyed our time with Mona when we were all just sitting and talking about this screwed up world and how we're all trying to deal with it through both art and activism. When Eve and I both mentioned some of our bad experiences with activism, Mona opined that a lot of activists are too single-minded and tend to approach problems in a narrow sort of way, with blinders on. She told me I'd be better off just forgetting about most of these activist groups and focusing (once again) on being a writer. Sometimes that seems like good advice, but as I always say, I don't want to limit my time or (especially) my identity so much to one particular kind of activity. And, I still am far too committed to at least trying to work with other people in order to help effect some sort of social change and/or participate in some kind of resistance to the present condition and the present system(s). Writing alone just isn't enough -- which is actually something I think we all more or less agree on...
Back at Eve's place the second night and third morning-to-afternoon, I watched more TV than I'd watched in ages -- discovering, to my surprise, that I could actually become a fan of The X Files -- and listened to a few records I hadn't heard in a long time, including some great old David Bowie.
And that's what I did on my fall vacation and why I was absent from our journal for a while... Now it's almost 9:00 Sunday morning (Eastern Standard Time, no less) and I should probably think about getting to sleep within an hour or two so I can be up in time in the event that somebody calls me for an evening shift (as opposed to midnight). I'll probably end up paying my overdue utilities with a credit card check this month (again), but, like I said, sometimes it is really important to get away (especially when that involves visiting a good friend), even if the trip is only about 60 miles.
[Richard]
I would like to recommend an interesting and inspiring article from The Guardian, "America's homeless become new small-town pioneers." (Note, you can also find an excerpt from the article, with room for comments, at infoshop.org -- which is where I first found it, of course.) This article is about a group of homeless people in Oregon (many of whom once had good regular jobs but fell on hard times) who have formed their own successful living community and have recently submitted some proposals to the Portland city council, asking that they be allowed to stay on the site for another decade. The story of Dignity Village and the thoughts that its residents have expressed fit in well with the ideas and ideals that we have been discussing here at Living on Less. For example, here is a good excerpt:
"Pirate Steve surveyed the eccentric collection of shacks and cabins that is now his home on the outskirts of Portland. 'Quite frankly, being here has been the best period of my life,' he said. 'Not the time when I had my sports car, my condo and my jewelry.'
"Known as Pirate Steve because of the patch which covers an eye seriously injured in a car accident, the former laser optics technician is one of more than 60 homeless people who have turned an uninviting patch of land near the city's airport into a model for living.
"Dignity Village, as the ragtag collection of dwellings is known, has its own council, legislature and bylaws, and is now in the process of creating its own judiciary."
This story is particularly inspiring because it tells the tale of a living community being formed autonomously, without the direction (or control) of big business or government, by people who probably would have had to sleep in the streets or move into inadequate and dangerous homeless shelters if they had not innovatively taken action for themselves. Increasingly, in many different nations and communities throughout the world, people must and will get together, resorting to their own collective resources, to build new homes and lives, creating existences that are more independent and dignified than any that they might find through the usual official channels.
It is also encouraging that the people of Dignity Village have made such a strong attempt, right from the beginning, to work out their own democratic processes. It is unclear from the article whether the community government that they set up is intended to create a more direct democracy than our ruling political system, or whether it is intended simply to fit into the larger system, conforming to its political rules. But in either case, it is good that they are working on such matters, as I have seen bad stuff happen within a few squats and other "radical" intentional communities that didn't really bother much to ensure internal democracy -- eventually, they became fightfully cultish, elitist, and/or authoritarian.
Judging from the description of Dignity Village, I would say that this attempt seems to go a step beyond many others that I have seen. Lots of luck to you, Dignity Village, and solidarity.
[asfo_del]
Even though I think it may be a little unseemly for them to whine, I do have sympathy for those who have lost their $60,000 a year jobs and are now having to subsist like so many others on a very modest income. It's a shock to have the rug ripped out from under one's feet. And it's a shock to learn that one's former income was actually one that afforded relative wealth. A belief system was created [by the media, society, corporations, who knows?] that portrays a certain model of living that people have come to accept as normal. It's hard to blame someone for not having been a maverick and not rejecting the societal norm.
I've said this before: poverty is the universal norm for the majority of the world's people, including substantial numbers right here in the U.S. Half of working people in the U.S. make less than $25,000 a year; many make less than $10,000. Half of all people worldwide live on less than $730 a year. Four fifths of all people live below what is considered the poverty line in countries like the U.S. and Britain.
But income level is not really the issue. It's the free-market model that assumes that people have to work for wages in order to subsist. That model depends on there being a very large number of people slaving away at the bottom of the social pyramid to sell their labor for low pay in order to create wealth to feed into every subsequent layer above them, until the resulting surplus is concentrated in the hands of the very few at the very top. It's a system that works for some but cannot, inherently, work for all. For millenia, most people have supported themselves through subsistence farming or hunting and gathering. That may not sound ideal. I myself don't think I would gladly take on that kind of life, which is certainly far from easy.
But subsistence drawn from the land may be the only truly sustainable model for the world. The alternative is what we have today, where millions are being forced off the land that had been providing for them and their ancestors, only to end up in squalid and unsanitary urban slums, working under conditions of near-slavery for long hours and extremely low wages. There are currently struggles being waged on every continent by people who only want the right to usable land so that they can survive.
In the Philippines: "In the early 90's, ... large tracts of productive farm lands were converted into industrial zones and economic corridors to attract foreign investors. Land-use conversion was rampant, which displaced families, including indigenous peoples, from their sources of subsistence."
In El Salvador:
"As ever-expanding plantations claimed the best arable land, subsistence farmers were turned into dispossessed, migratory, semi-proletarians. This forced dislocation has obvious social implications; people have an increasingly difficult time feeding their families."
In Vietnam: "A number of inter-related processes are serving to alienate subsistence farming and fishing communities from the natural resources to which they have traditionally had access. A key mechanism of marginalisation is the process of privatising communal resources such as forests, fisheries, land and water, for the purposes of market production rather than subsistence uses."
In Botswana: "The recent forced removal of 2,000 Bushmen/San people from their homeland in the Kalahari area of central Botswana is not just a brutal act of ethnic cleansing; it also means the end for a hunter-gatherer society whose care and knowledge of their fragile eco-system hold many lessons for the rest of humanity."
In Brazil:
"Over seven thousand Indians are working in the charcoal
factories and in the sugar cane processing plants. They live
in a state of slavery. This is the integration that white society
offers us. But we Indians, the first owners of this land,
cannot accept this humiliating and inhuman integration.
Marta Vitor Guarani, president, Kaguateca Association
for Displaced Indians"
Also in Brazil:
"500,000 great estates, averaging 600 hectares each, occupy three-quarters of the arable land."
"Since 1985, over a thousand people have been murdered, executed or have ?disappeared? in the process of appropriating unused land or confirming a usually precarious right of occupation."
"About 150,000 families have recently been settled on over five million hectares in more than 1,500 assentamentos, homesteads set up for the beneficiaries?or the victors?of the battle for agrarian reform."
"Brazilian economist Celso Furtado goes so far as to say that it offers 'the only answer to mass unemployment in Brazil' because 'a return to subsistence agriculture is preferable to urban poverty.'"
See also the amazing and moving pictures that accompany this article.
[asfo_del]
Continuing with the last journal entry: when I moved away from my parents' house after living there for about a year and a half, I had the opportunity to figure out what I consider the bare necessities. I carried my stuff in plastic bags on New Jersey Transit and the subway, by myself, in two trips, initially. About a month later I made another trip, since the first place I stayed already had bedding and furniture and I now had to get that stuff for myself.
This is what I brought:
-bedroll, made up of a sheet of foam covered in fabric
-pillow, sheet, and blanket
-alarm clock [clock radio]
-several T-shirts, underwear, and socks
-two pairs of pants
-a pair of shoes [canvas sneakers]
-a sweatshirt and a wool sweater
-nail clippers
-comb [broken in half]
-toothbrush
-sewing needle and spool of thread [dark green]
-TV [yep...]
-small stainless-steel saucepan with lid
-a ceramic bowl
-a fork, a spoon, and a medium-size kitchen knife
-coat [wool overcoat from thrift store]
-winter hat [fleece - a gift]
-wool scarf
-scissors
-notebook
-two pens
-adhesive tape
-backpack [small, book-bag type]
-wallet
-walkman and a couple of tapes [pop-punk]
-clamp lamp
-stuffed bunny toy
I moved around several times since then. New York is a very difficult place to live. It's so expensive that you end up having to put up with untenable situations until you can't stand them anymore and have to go look for some other untenable situation. Of course, now and for the past two-plus years I've been living in tree-lined Staten Island with my sweetie and have had no housing problems.
Every time I've moved in New York it has been with a wire folding cart [the kind you sometimes see older ladies towing to and from the grocery store] as my only moving van. Mike helped me move from my last place of residence [the Brooklyn YWCA] with my overstuffed plastic bags and cart. When we were waiting for the Staten Island Ferry late at night to get back home with our bundles, a charity called Midnight Run, which gives away free sandwiches and blankets to people who are spending the night in the ferry terminal, asked us if we wanted any food. Some folks may feel indignant or ashamed about being mistaken for a homeless person, but I was grateful for their thoughtful offer, although I declined it.
[asfo_del]
The most recent time I was able to support myself by working was 1996. I lived in Texas and worked at a retail store part time, making $135 a week. It was a great place to work: friendly, nice people, an eccentric and kind boss. The customers were sometimes difficult, and, in the end, dealing with them was the hardest part of the job and the first one to become untenable when my condition [chronic fatigue] got to be too much for me to continue working.
I mention this because I too was faced with a choice of what to do when I could no longer support myself, just like so many who are now struggling to find work. Many have been jobless for so long that their options are running out, leaving only the choice of either living on credit cards or moving in with their parents. I had a pretty high spending limit on my credit card, so I could theoretically have coasted for about a year on credit alone, but I never really considered that because I didn't have any prospects of being able to make money at some future date [and because being mired in debt pretty much goes against anything I would be able to tolerate in terms of anxiety and dread...]. So I moved in with my parents, who are wonderful people.
For a little over a year I lived in a leafy, fairy-tale-like suburb, taking walks every day under a canopy of yellow maple leaves - and later on in the season braving cold wintry breezes - to visit a duck pond. There was never anybody else out on foot, ever, and only very few out in cars. We had tea and cookies every afternoon. I made a gingerbread house from scratch at Christmas. In over a year I saw virtually no one except my parents and my sister, who visited every weekend. I had been so scared after I lost my livelihood and had to leave my life behind in Texas that a year of total peacefulness was what I needed, as strange as that may sound.
[asfo_del]
This is among the very last of the zucchini [can you see it?]. And after long waiting and perseverance, the bell peppers have finally turned red!
[asfo_del]
I will indulge in this entry in the whining of the overprivileged.
Gong back to posts a few days earlier, where we discussed the downwardly mobile yet highly educated, it comes as no surprise to me that an expensive education provides no safeguard against hardship and unemployment. That's not to say it doesn't confer some significant privileges. One of those may be the gathering of important contacts, though I wouldn't know. When I was younger, I was so shy I rarely spoke to anyone. Another privilege is the occasional break: an occasional employer might actually like the idea of hiring a graduate with a fancy degree. More often, in my experience, potential employers had never heard of my particular university. At least one supervisor went out of his way to look up my educational record and then used it against me, claiming that I thought I was better than him as a result of it, and he eventually fired me for it. This was when I worked as an ice-cream scooper and coffee server.
The greatest privilege conferred, I think, is the actual education. Learning to evaluate ideas, to analyze, research, to formulate insights. But who's to say that couldn't have been obtained elsewhere? In fact, I'm convinced that it could, although it might take a little more digging to uncover pearls of wisdom when they're not being handed to you on a silver platter [yes, I know that's a mixed metaphor...].
The greatest irony is that the only real academic difference between very-expensive and less-expensive colleges is the prior academic achievement of their students. College professors are out of work in droves. Even the most neglected institution can hire very well qualified instructors, though it may not shell out for famous faculty. [And what intellectual advantage is there in being taught by a famous person?] But only the most hyped institutions attract the most qualified [though for the most part only the richest among them] students. So, as a student at a high-priced college, you're paying a lot of money for the privilege of being in classes with other overachieving nerds like yourself. Seems like we could have skipped the middleman and just gotten together with one another, for nothing, or for the price of hiring a number of underemployed college professors to help us along in our quest for learning.
But, of course, most parents, and probably most students as well, don't choose elite universities because of those institutions' commitment to the life of the mind. They think an expensive diploma will translate into a good-paying job. And often it does, but only if the student goes on to professional graduate school, like business school, medical school, or law school. A liberal arts degree alone, even from the fanciest of hallowed halls, doesn't do much more than squat.
And there's another more insidious problem with all of this. Not only are these institutions banking on lies*, selling ephemeral concepts like "reputation" that cannot be validated and implied promises of a vague future of success and achievement, but their attitude, that you are special because they picked you and they are special because how else would they be worth $30,000 a year, is, I believe, damaging to the psyche of a young and impressionable person. There is nothing healthy about telling a kid that she is better than other kids and even adults. It can lead to a kind of self-image based on magic-thinking, like children in fairy tales who are only invisible, or smart, or beautiful, as long as they're holding on to an amulet. If they drop the amulet, then everyone can see them for who they really are: ordinary.
It's also very confusing to a kid when he leaves the institution and everybody on the outside doesn't automatically identify him as special. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that the kid will learn humility as a result of being knocked down; he may well just continue to be angry at a world he sees as mired in mediocrity and that is not capable of understanding or appreciating him.
If I were choosing a college now, I would probably go to the University of Houston. The tuition is about $2000 a year, there's an outstanding art department, and the academic courses are serious and rigorous. I knew a number of people in Houston who went there. Most importantly, it isn't pretentious. And, as far as I know, it isn't wildly out of touch with the reality that everybody is special, everybody is smart, everybody is academically gifted, and everybody deserves to be considered, listened to, educated, challenged, supported, etc.
----------------------------
*If there's any doubt about their motives, consider this: a few years ago I sent away for the annual report of my alma mater. Although the financial figures are arranged in a way that does not yield a whole lot of useful information, I thought this was a very telling tidbit: Amount raised for the year by soliciting contributions from alumni and other individual supporters: $10 million; Amount spent the same year on development [fund-raising] and alumni relations: $12 million. What does that tell us? That the purpose of fundraising is just public relations. It's a way of keeping the alumni interested and personally invested in the success of the institution, because it's the alumni who keep up the "reputation" that the university depends on as its major selling point.
[Richard]
The big "I" -- IRONY -- strikes again. At 6:30 yesterday morning, I was staring at stormy skies in the dawn twilight from the front of the lower level of the Staten Island Ferry and mentally composing my next post to the journal, which would have been (and still is, to an extent) an appreciation of the Ferry and the aesthetically breathtaking experiences that it has offered me during my early-morning trips home. Sunday and Monday, the sunrises were particularly incredible. To the east, the rising sun let out streaks of the deepest red and orange; to the west, the sky had just begun to brighten to a magnificent shade of blue. I would have to think and write for a long time to accurately describe the beauty of New York Harbor as seen from the front-bottom edge of the Ferry heading toward Staten Island at dawn. I was also going to talk about -- and here the IRONY gets bigger -- how SOOTHING an experience my rides on the ferry were after a pressured midnight shift.
Will the ferry be so soothing to me anymore? Hard to say... As the world knows by now, a little before 3:30 PM, the Ferry experienced its biggest accident in over a century, killing at least 10 people, and injuring many more, some of whom lost limbs. The area that was most affected was the area that I usually ride home on (bottom-front), only mainly on the right side.
It remains to be determined (probably quite some time from now) whether this disaster could have been prevented. Certainly, no one ever expected anything like this to happen... Mostly, everyone was on the lookout for terrorism instead. Walking through the bottom of Manhattan during the past few days between 5:30 and 6:30 AM, I couldn't help noticing what a highly protected, guarded, blocked up, barricaded military zone the area had become. Especially late into the night and the early morning, the bottom of Manhattan must perpetually be on "orange" or "red" alert. From what I could tell the past few mornings, there were dozens to hundreds of cops and other security people out there on the night shift, looking out for the next big disaster -- which would be, so they presumed, an attempt to blow up Wall Street. But I bet they weren't thinking much about the Staten Island Ferry, which takes off from a terminal in basically the same neighborhood, or that the next big disaster would be just a big, horrible accident.
It would be nice to say something profound, but what can one say? Maybe that we should never take the safety of our long-established public transportation for granted at any time... And that life's a crapshoot (and I do mean crap shoot). And, probably, there are other good cliches...
Personally speaking, while the thought of yesterday's events is quite chilling, I'm not going to let it discourage me. A dawn ride on the Staten Island Ferry is one of the most beautiful experiences that you can encounter in our urban environment, and it's still absolutely free.
If I do the same midnight shift tonight, I intend to go right to the bottom-front point again, to take my usual ride. If I believed in prayer, I probably would offer a prayer and a moment of silence (though I'm always silent during this ride anyway) for the people who lost their lives in such a stupid, horrible, pointless way. Most likely, however, I'll just end up checking out the sunrise again.
[asfo_del]
I think my previous post about community was slightly whiny. Yes, I did have a terrible experience with a particular artificially created community. I do feel there is a basic issue that is illustrated by that experience: if a community is based solely on ideology and a common goal, and not on genuine concern and affection for the people within it, it can very easily become doctrinaire. People who are seen as not fitting in with the program, or who are merely not well liked or considered an annoyance, can be callously eliminated.
On the other hand, there's a basic humanity and compassion that flows unbidden from family. That's why I think societies that arise out of kinship ties are able to function as aggregations of closely knit and interconnected groups. And why "anarchist" and "anti-authoritarian" activist groups often fail as models for community building: the people within them care more about achieving their goals than they do about each other.
[However, a common problem with close family structures is that they tend to enforce strict conformity to traditions and rules of behavior, especially when it comes to dictating the behavior of women and girls.]
In the U.S., it is considered laughable or sad for grown children to live with their parents. Yet this is the norm around much of the world. By insisting on a cultural norm by which every person has to be self-sufficient and strike out on her own, we have a created a society of people who, apart, are struggling to survive. A society in which every person or nuclear-family unit has to pay for its own housing, buys its own car, its own TV, computer, stereo, furniture, etc. is one in which people are stretched to the limits of their resources. It's a society in which there is greater consumption, greater pollution, greater indebtedness, and less self-sufficiency, if self-sufficiency is understood as every person's ability to thrive and have her needs met. One of the fundamental problems with individualism is that it does nothing to insure a broadly just and equal society. Even if it were true that anybody can strike it rich or that anybody can grow up to be president, it's obvious enough that everybody can't strike it rich and that everybody can't grow up to be president.
On the other hand, if several generations shared one roof, their resources would also be shared. This is one road to sustainability that I rarely see advocated. Maybe we just value our independence too much.
A book I'm currently reading has been the inspiration for many of these thoughts: To See and See Again, by Tara Bahrampour. The author is the daughter of an American mother and an Iranian father and grew up in both Iran and the U.S. A great deal of her writing revolves around balancing her American self's need for solitude, personal achievement, and independence and her Iranian self's desire to find comfort in the traditions and unshakeable love and affection of her extended Iranian family.
[Guest - Frank]
I just finally wanted to get around to giving some praise to your
Living
on Less webpage and the thoughts you so strongly put forth. I
sympathize
and collaborate with many of them, and it is so good to find this sort
of
thought about living right, when it is so hard to come by, both in real
life and on the web. The latest entry on community hits home too. I
know how hard it can be to find community. In my experience you either
come across it right away when you encounter a new place, or it is
fleeting and difficult to ever find. When I first moved to the
Harrisbrug, PA area last January, I tried to search out like minded
folk,
but between the conservative nature of the area, the young person
brain-drain to other locations, and the urban cells we all place
ourselves in (homes/apartments with little open shared space, few
places
to experience nature and peace of mind easily accessible, dominance of
concrete steel and autos all contributing to solitary confinement in
many
ways)I too felt welcomed but not embraced when I made myself available.
My wife and I wonder what we could do better to make this place a home
with community and not just a geographic spot for ourselves, our
garden,
and our possessions. I hope to continue picking up and reinforcing great ideas and references from your site. Be well -
Frank
www.bicyclecommutingnow.blogspot.com
[asfo_del]
He had been too embarrassed to post this, but now here it is:
Happy birthday, you old curmudgeon*!
[ * "a crusty, ill-tempered and usually old man"]
[Richard]
It's actually not in character for me to start off something with an old Bob Dylan quote. I used to like to listen to Bob Dylan a lot when I was a child and sometimes returned to him throughout my adulthood, but right now I'm much more inclined to listen to some techno or something like that. Lately, I've acquired an increasing dislike of folk music. Maybe it's because my roommate plays it so much, because it's such an overplayed medium among activists, or because I'm just tired of it... But the only folk music I can stand listening to these days is Fairport Convention, specifically their music of the late 1960s, mostly because of my weakness for great female singing voices (whether it's driven by pure aesthetics or maybe a bit of libido too) and because Sandy Denny had one of the most wonderful voices I ever had the privilege of hearing. But otherwise, if you want to play a lot of folk music, especially if it's from the 1960s, I might just leave the room.
I think it's a little funny that my roommate, who's ten years younger than me, is right now hooked on all this '60s music, with sincere voices and guitars...and I'd much rather listen to techno. But a lot of times, I seem to have gone against common trends and expectations related to age. I'm not saying this because I crave to be part of the youth culture or anything like that. In fact, I find youth culture to be extremely annoying in many ways. It's just that, when you hear about how people are supposed to change as they get older, I can't help feeling that I've definitely defied the trends.
I was born on October 12, 1961. So that makes me 42 now.
At such an advanced age, sometimes it's interesting to look back on younger years and make comparisons. So, I think about how I was 15 years ago, when I was 27. And when I was 27... I had a stable girlfriend whom I'd already been living with for over seven years. I had a stable job that I seemed to be pretty settled in. I had a dependable vocation (which proofreading was in those days) and a set career goal -- writing -- which earned me publication now and then. I also seemed to be fairly content living a relatively normal life. Politically, I was a lefty, but I hadn't formulated any strong revolutionary philosophies, I wasn't involved in radical activism, and I always went to the polls to vote for the most liberal available candidates, without much reservation at all.
Now, fast forward to my 40s... My 40s have been characterized by a number of interesting things: I've been much more involved in radical politics, and I've come to question all the basic assumptions behind the capitalist system and to challenge all forms of hierarchy. Concurrently, my life has become very unstable by most standards... I've had no steady girlfriend (actually, you might as well just delete the word "steady" for a length of time that I am reluctant to admit), and I've had no steady job. Life has become very much something to live day by day. I don't really know what's going to happen to me in the future, and I don't much think about it anymore. I'm also not feeling quite as much like an independent adult as I used to... I have to share an apartment now (with someone other than a lover or common law wife), and I have no idea how much longer that situation will last. And I can't say with confidence that I'm someone who can make my own way all the time; sometimes it's seemed pretty tough.
As far as careers go... For some reason I've lost the whole idea of a career. I just don't believe in careers anymore (though I probably always believed in them a lot less than many people in our society.) In fact, I've come to question the whole idea of careers and have come to detest most specialization, as I seek a world in which we are all free from the division of labor and the limits that it imposes on us (as I discussed somewhat more extensivly back in August).
By many standards, my situation might seem to have become bleaker. And I won't argue with that -- I'm always perfectly happy to gain people's sympathy as I impress them with all the troubles that I've seen. But in some ways, things are actually better. Since I've come to question everything, I've been feeling freer from everything. I never was exactly a conformist, but nowadays, I care even less about what "normal" people think about me and the way I live. (I also have been living my life stranger in many ways -- take, for instance, my weird and fluctuating hours -- it's a strain sometimes (as evidenced by all my recent whining), but I'm still grateful to be free of the normal, everyday nine-to-five.) Additionally, even though I've been through a lot of hard times lately, I've also been through some exciting times. Around the time that I was 40 (and, actually, since I was about 35), I was very involved in international protests; I was travelling around a lot; I was exposed to a lot of very interesting things. Right now, I am involed in some kind of retrenchment, a slight return to quiet (which is more what I was like in my 20s), but I feel that all my crazier experiences of late have helped me to achieve a much more open and interesting perspective on life than I ever had in my 20s.
So, it's really funny when I think about all the typical ideas that so many people have with regard to age and maturity... People are supposed to be more radical when they're younger; then they get more conservative. Youth is supposed to carry with it an openness to experience, and middle-aged people are supposed to become set in their ways. It's young people who are supposed to live less stable lives, finding more stability in their relationships and careers as they get older. Looking at all of this, I find it remarkable how much I've regressed by most standards.
But how many people these days really do follow the typical trends of age and maturity anyway? Considering the trends of unemployment and underemployment -- i.e., "violent lifestyle change" -- I think that a lot of people might find themselves going, by all appearances, in reverse. And considering the high amount of divorce and the ephemeral nature of all relationships... It could be that the old, stereotypical ideas about aging and maturity are going to hold less and less weight now.
Meanwhile, I actually have benefited somewhat from being unanchored and unhinged. As with falliing into poverty, these drastic changes which at first seem quite traumatic and unfortunate can have some ultimately beneficial, eye-opening effects. Sometimes I feel trapped because of economic constraints, but I know that during my 40s (so far, at least), I've been feeling a lot less constrained than I felt in my 20s. I've been going through some hardships, no doubt...but, on the other hand, life has seemed a lot more open, more eventful, and, in many ways, less boring than it was when I was younger. I really was so much older then, at least according to the cliches.
=============================
P.S. I guess I should point out that while I find this line from Dylan's song "My Back Pages" convenient to describe my own experiences, that's about the only connection that exists. The song itself never had any great significance for me, and I'm sure I heard it long after the era in which it came out. When this song came out, I was two or three years old.
[asfo_del]
DruBlood writes an insightful entry about building community. It's an issue I've been grappling with myself, although only theoretically, I have to admit. I myself don't belong to any community other than the very immediate circles of my home life with Mike, my friendship with Richard and few others, my connection with my old boyfriend, Bill, and my family, which in this country is comprised only of my parents, my sister, her husband, and their 4-year-old son.
I read a book recently written by a man who grew up in Afghanistan: West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary. His description of that country in the 1940's provides a great example of solid community. Afghan life was defined and structured by family and kinship ties. Each extended family lived together inside a walled compound, within which all life was intimately shared. There were very few personal possessions. Being alone was unheard of. Eating, sleeping, talking, discussing, and learning were all shared activities. "Being at home with the group gave them the satisfactions we associate with solitude -- ease, comfort, and the freedom to let down one's guard." [p. 17] Because the landscape was so harsh and life difficult, it was understood that the broader family would always offer help when there was a need.
Now, I'm not suggesting that mid-20th century Afghanistan is some kind of ideal model for society. There are several drawbacks associated with that particular culture, not the least of which is the second-class status of women. But what strikes me as a common thread among this society and so many others - possibly all others - is that the community is based around the family. Within families, there are almost instinctive bonds that determine that you will take care of each other no matter what [maybe grudgingly...]. At the very least, it's unlikely that you would irreparably shatter ancestral ties on a whim, over trivialities.
The problem I've seen with communities that are created artificially is the fickle nature of the relationships within them. I've been a part of activist community groups in which various members turned on people within the group, time and time again, over the flimsiest of disagreements, often with vicious nastiness and venom. I watched it happen in puzzlement and disbelief until they finally turned on me. I should have defended the people who were being vilified sooner, of course, but when it first happened I thought it must be for good reason. I didn't think people who were committed to equality and collectivism would attack someone merely out of spite and glee. And then when I did try to defend someone I became a target myself.
Richard and I have written a whole book [well, a short one...] on this subject, so I won't go into every detail now. Suffice it to say that this is a very common pattern in egalitarian activist groups, and this uncomfortable and unfortunate fact raises a real concern in our common desire to build just communities based on equality and collaboration: How do we create communities that do not degenerate into petty power-struggles, lockstep group-think and Machiavellian maneuverings?
I don't know the answer to that, except to say that I believe meaningful communities, imperfect as they may often be, are and always have been based on kinship and family ties. They are not created but have always existed, sometimes for millenia. When I was growing up in Italy I always believed, instinctively, that my relatives were in my corner. And they were. My parents and my sister are to this day unfailingly generous. [I know not everyone is blessed with a supportive family.]
The subject of community is a difficult one for me personally, because while I believe that mutual aid, collaboration, and togetherness form the essential basis for a just society, I myself don't like people. Except for my closest compatriots, people have generally proven themselves to be selfish and vicious. I don't like to believe this. It even goes against my principles and my most cherished tenets about what's important in life.
Although I'm generally a quiet and enclosed person, I tried to be part of a community when I first moved to New York. I joined an egalitarian collective for arts, activism, and community service [or so I thought]. I was open and giving and supportive, to the extent that I was able. I helped as much as I could with whatever I could. In return, no one extended their friendship to me. And ultimately, I was kicked in the face, hard.
In 1940's Afghanistan: "Going back to the ancestral village meant going home to a warmth and belonging that today, in my basement office in san Francisco, I can only imagine.... In this Afghanistan, this lost world, no one left the home village, or wanted to, and the concept of 'dysfunctional family' had no meaning. Oh, quarrels and disagreements abounded, and they were never really buried; they were hashed and rehashed till they had been thoroughly mulched into the clan soil." [p. 31]
[asfo_del]
I know I probably will not earn myself any sympathy from the downwardly mobile and underemployed when I say that in spite of being 39 years old and a college graduate myself, I have never - except for one year when I made $10,072 - earned a yearly income that broke the five-figure mark, including gifts and other sundry sources of cash [I am currently a landlord, for instance, which earns me $300 a month]. Whenever I tell people this, they usually respond with a chuckle. I'm not sure if they think I'm joking or if they see me as such an incurable eccentric that my personal experience doesn't count in their minds as a real-life example for any "normal" person to consider.
We live in a world that is self-destructing. To try to reduce the environmental degradation and human suffering that result from the greed for money and power of the few, the least we can do, as individuals, is not support the structures that make this destruction possible. That means opting out of the system of money and greed whenever possible, by not needing or wanting or buying its products and services. I myself am far from perfect in that regard. I'm typing on a computer right now that I don't strictly need. I just ate most of a box of chocolate chip cookies made by a company that I am told is owned by the Moonies. Nevertheless, in spite of my lack of perfection or consistency, I choose poverty as a positive force for social change and as a positive way for me to live that is unencumbered and low-stress [at least when it comes to worying about money...].
[Richard]
Over at infoshop.org, ChuckO pointed out another great article that some of us can relate to oh-so-well: "Underemployed: a euphemism for violent lifestyle change," by Barbara Card Atkinson. Infoshop shows the beginning of the article and leaves room for comment; you can find the full text of this very moving article at the Christian Science Monitor.
The second paragraph of the article goes right to my heart and pretty well parallels my own journey into Living on Less:
"My husband and I are two of the almost 1 million 'underemployed' in this country -- a demure label for a violent lifestyle change. We, with our college degrees and previous incarnations as latte-swilling yuppies, are now attempting -- and failing badly -- to keep our family of four afloat on an average combined income of substantially less than $1,000 a month.
There are some differrences between my own tale and Atkinson's. For one thing, though I also worked in publishing at my last real long-term job, I never reached quite as high a socio-economic status to fall from (possibly because I did not have a spouse of higher socio-economic status from the dot.com boom, and possibly because I never even envisioned myself as being upwardly mobile). I therefore don't have anything like equity to fall back on, just several hundred dollars left on my credit card. On the positive side (sort of), I do not have a family to support, and I never did go into low-level retail and entertainmnet-outlet work. I think I would have tried this kind of work if I did not have a kind of a phobia about it, which comes not from snobbery but from dread of the constant public contact all day. I have tried a couple of downwardly mobile stints, though, including a very part-time $10-an-hour gig last year, reading out loud to a legally blind guy who was trying to finish college because he wanted to go to law school (which work I actually felt good about, even though the guy himself was kind of a jerk), and a more recent part-time job at the same wage for somebody we know from our local political circle, working my ass off trying to type stuff into his data base. (Unfortunately, that last stint ended pretty badly, as this "comrade" turned out to be an abusive and utterly incompetent boss.) I also tried a couple of times to help Mike out on the construction site, but I found out that I would have a long way to go to get anywhere near the pace that he needs to work at (an idea with which I'm sure he would agree). And, I have sent out countless applications for $8-to-$10-an-hour jobs at offices, for secretarial work, data processing, etc., most of which were completely ignored...
As readers of this journal should know by now, I've kept myself in underemployment mainly by running out, usually in the middle of the night, upon a moment's notice, to do "ASAP" proofreading jobs that pay twice or three times the hourly wage of standard low-level retail work but are available an average of only one-fifth to one-quarter of the time. Given the choice, of course, I would always much rather work fewer hours to bring home the same total poverty wages. But I am really starting to get tired of the extreme job insecuity, and this lifestyle is starting to cause severe damage to my body clock (not because of working midnights, but because I now need to be open evenings and afternoons too sometimes). Considering, also, that I still can't find healthcare coverage, this limbo is beginning to seem more and more unsustainable. Should I look into flipping burgers too, or might I be able to get a job at a produce stand, like my roommate? I really do have to consider the other, dreaded choices now and then. (I have thought about a job at Virgin Record Stores or something like that -- though they're probably demanding some kind of retail experience, I would guess. I have also looked into working as a security guard, but for some reason, I don't think the security industry would be very happy to receive me. But, you never know...)
Regarding this whole issue of underemployment, as well as the bigger issue of our whole sinking (and stinking) economy, ChuckO really knows how to find articles that tell it like it is... Chuck originally mentioned the above-referenced tale on his blog, Monumental Mistake, where I have found quite a few rants that I could relate to. Chuck and I have had similar experiences in terms of both our economnic hardshp/downward mobility (Chuck's hard times have been going on for almost exactly the same amount time as mine) and our simultaneously increasing frustration/disillusionment with various aspects of the anarchist/activist scene (not exactly supportive, let's say). It's no wonder that sometimes when I read Monumental Mistake, I feel as though he's just taken the thoughts right out of my mind.
[Richard]
One positive by-product of my own condition of unemployment and chronic underemployment is that it's led me to make unexpected discoveries and rediscoveries in music. Back about five years ago, when I had a regular $30K+ job, I used to go buy a new CD just about every week. I would generally shell out $15 to $20 on some artist that I knew about or some compilation that had stuff on it that I knew about. For the most part, the experience was enjoyable, but also both predictable and expensive. And about eight years ago, when I had a few regular CD-reviewing gigs for small music magazines, I would acquire CDs through comp lists as well as regular purchases. This helped me to find a few more surprises, but I was also a bit impatient in my music listening and, like many people hooked into new-music culture(s), a little too stuck on the quest for the latest-greatest thing. In both situations, I think I never really stopped long enough either to discover some of the more subtle contemporary pop pleasures or, especially, to rediscover things.
Nowadays, the only time I'll get myself new music is through incredibly cheap bargains. (I can't really do the file sharing thing, because I don't own a computer with a sound card, so I guess I'll have to miss out on that experience and spare myself a threatened lawsuit or two.) Otherwise, I am simply left digging through my CD/tape/vinyl collection to rediscover things. But both approaches actually have been surprisingly fun and illuminating for me.
My last music bargain-hunting experience happened about two weeks ago, when I found a three-tapes-for-a-dollar sale at the J&R Music World discount outlet over by City Hall. As an aside, let me say I am amazed at how much people are sold on the digital format as the only way to get their music. If you ask me, CDs are really overrated, especially if you're the kind of person who leaves recordings lying around a lot so that they get scratched. My 25-year-old vinyl plays through better than my two-year-old CDs. But I've really come to appreciate cassette tape. It doesn't get scratched, so even though it's never quite as crisp-sounding as the other formats, it actually lasts better than them. (Though once in a while, a cassette will get destroyed if my cat gets his paws on it. For some reason he has a very strong taste for cassette tape and on several occasions, he's gotten at a cassette, eaten a bunch of tape, and puked it all over my couch. But that doesn't happen all that often.)
In any event, I couldn't be happier with the cassettes that I picked up for 33.33... cents each. I got one compilation of house music, one compilation of techno, and one cassette from the "trip-hop" DJ Tricky. It's a good thing I live on the first floor, because otherwise I'd have downstairs neighbors raising hell over all the dancing noises in my livingroom.
The house comp is Warning: Maxi-Mum Dancefloor Capacity, from Maxi Records, copyright 1995. It opens with a real house music classic, "(Why is it?) Funk Dat," by Sagat. Some people might remember this song; it hit as high as 63 on the pop music charts. It consists of a number of verses that begin with the phrase, "Question: Why is it that..." and go into a description of frustration over one everyday thing or another that most not-so-happy, not-so-rich, bugged and harried urbanites can relate to easily enough: Why is it that bums come to me asking for money when I ain't got no money... Do I need to be reminded that I ain't got no money?... Why is it that one neighbor's...always looking at me as though I'm the one who go her daughter strung out last week?... Why is it that every time I turn on the radio, I hear the same five songs fifteen times a day for three months? And after every instantly recognizable observation comes the exclamation, "Funk dat!" followed by an irresistibly funky piece of music, followed by the next question... This has got to be one of the most fun singles I've ever found on any compilation, and in true Living on Less style, this song by itself cost me under three cents.
Other songs on the house compilation are also very good. I particularly like Cocodance's operatic "Angels of Love." The other eleven songs are almost equally enjoyable and danceable, though once in a while, like much house music, it does get a little close to...disco, but I can look past that if I'm in a real house music mood. (It's hard to say what, exactly, separates house from disco. Maybe a higher tech quotient, combined with a little more jaded wisdom and irony. And much more room for weird, unexpected innovations, I think.)
The techno comp is from Nervous Records, Euronervous Techno Travel. The title kind of describes it -- fast, nervous energy driving pure, relatively uncomplicated technological dance music. It's good, and it's danceable, with compelling beats and lots of fun synsthesizer sounds. It's got no lyrics, so there's no poetry to inspire you but also no dumb lyrics to distract you (as is much more often the case). It's much better than lots of techno comps that I used to pay $18 for as new CDs.
The Tricky cassette, Grass Roots, actually features Tricky and a couple of other artists working with him, in the Tricky "trip-hop" vein. As with all Tricky stuff, it's a little funky, a little jazzy, definitely bluesy, and alternately -- or sometimes simultaneously -- mellow/chill and hard/grating. It's accessible music, but it's often got a refreshingly experimental edge. This is another recording that surpasses lots of CDs that I used to buy back when I was a real middle-class person caught in the earn-and-spend trap.
I've been digging through a lot of my old stuff and have come to rediscover -- and further appreciate -- a lot of things. I'll probably get to much of that other stuff in future posts, but right now, I wanted to spend some extra time to talk about the British band Saint Etienne.
I think I've developed a special new appreciation for Saint Etienne. I always liked their first album, Foxbase Alpha but never got to appreciate the second one, So Tough. Now I've come to realize that both albums, which came out about ten years ago, are brilliant. Foxbase Alpha is a deliberately spacey yet surprisingly catchy kind of album, combining good dance-club rhythms with dreamy pop meolodies, odd snippets of dialogue from movies, and near-ambient, psychedelic sound effects. It produced something of a hit, a somewhat off-the-wall cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart." So Tough used to seem too dance-popish to me, but that's because I didn't have the patience or time to really listen to it. Now I realize that along with the disco-ish rhythms on this album, Saint Etienne do some very interesting, more subtle things with dub-reggae-based rhythms and recording techniques. And the singer, Sarah Cracknell, may sound overly popish at times (she reminds me most of Petula Clark, sometimes with a touch of Debbie Harry); however, if you listen to Cracknell closely, you'll find that her pop singing is chock full of offbeat humor, strange sophistication, and her own unique, melodic sensuality.
I've got three other Saint Etienne albums, most notably their third release, Tiger Bay, which is an odd mixture of pulsating techno, very sweet folk-pop, and movie soundtrack music, with short, often ironic little stories in almost every song. (This,incidentally, is the album that earned them the most critical acclaim.) I've also got You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone, which consists mainly of alternative mixes from the first two albums and related singles. And I've got Good Humour, from 1998, which delves a lot more into the '60s pop sound but, like all Saint Etienne, isn't always exactly what it seems.
I don't know why I didn't appreciate this band more before... I think, for a while, I was looking for bands that did more obvious things on the surface. I spent a lot of time in the late '90s listening to Chumbawamba. Like my roommate (who's always listening to politically correct music) I was captivated by Chumba's tendency to combine accessible pop music with anarchist politics. And their politics are good, and they do have a politically terrific Web site. But for me, the politics don't always make the art, and while digging through my old Chumba collection, I've come to realize that they have just a few top-rate pop songs and some vaguely more interesting experiments (such as their a cappella folk album of Rebel Songs). The downside of Chumba is that even their experiments are pretty obvious. What you see is what you get. In other words, since they generally do most of their work on the surface, they're not the sort of band that you can rediscover, going back to the music later and unearthing new things.
But I think the deceptively popish Saint Etienne is exactly such a band. They're not overtly profound or political, but they are sometimes startlingly innovative, and cleverly disrespectful of familiar divisions between different niches of pop. I'm kind of glad that I was left digging through old music for lack of ability to buy much new stuff...so that I could rediscover good stuff such as this.
[asfo_del]
Having a phone in New York City is outrageously expensive. You have to pay for every single local call that you make from home. The per-call fee used to be 10.6 cents during the day, 6.4 cents after 9 p.m. and during part of the weekend, and 4.6 cents after 11 p.m. and during another part of the weekend. Now it's 9 cents per call all the time.
This is the bill we just received:
Monthly Charge for Dial Tone: $8.61
Surcharges and Taxes: $15.73
Local Calls (275 calls at 9 cents per): $24.75
Total: $49.09
That's not including long distance nor any premium services.
I may have to switch to the unlimited service, which is relatively new and would cost about $41 a month. The thing I don't like about it is that there is never any possibility that we might pay less than the flat rate, for instance if we went on vacation for part of a month.
[asfo_del]
Contents of our fridge:
Door:
plastic tub of sour cream, unopened
box of cinnamon buns (3 left)
partial bottle of barbecue sauce
partial package of cheese
partial jar of relish
can of beer
mustard squeeze bottle
mustard packet
partial bottle of ketchup
partial package of margarine
mustard packet
soy sauce packet
duck sauce packet
Freezer compartment:
2 ice cube trays
Top shelf:
teacup of salsa
partial container of cake frosting, vanilla
covered pot of leftover yellow rice
pot of leftover refried beans, covered with a plate
partial box of margarine
1 eggplant
mustard squeeze bottle
bunch of fresh cilantro
6 already-toasted tortillas, some with cheese, on a metal tray
Lower shelf:
partial plastic tub of sour cream
small saucer with 4 hot peppers on it
bowl of fresh guacamole, covered with small saucer
2-liter soda bottle (diet wild-cherry cola flavor)
1 dozen eggs
one bell pepper
can of beer
Crisper drawer:
4 tomatoes
2 cans of beer
partial package of tortillas
partial jar of mayonnaise
(beer is left over from guests)
Compiled October 4, 2003
[asfo_del]
Thank you to ChuckO for this link: The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed. He recommended it on his blog specifically for us! I should mention that Richard and ChuckO are old friends. I have only met ChuckO once, but I have enormous respect for him [readers may know that he is the driving force behind Infoshop and has contributed to or initiated countless other activist projects and activities].
I myself am not, strictly speaking, unemployed, since I am not looking for work. The U.S. government certainly does not consider me unemployed, since it only counts in its statistics people who have been looking for a job in recent months. [U.S. unemployment figures are kept artificially low by discounting part-time workers who want but can't get full-time work, people who are not looking for a job, either because they've given up, can't find work, are disabled, etc., people who work but are still living in poverty, and people who can't work at a regular outside job because they are in prison.]
Although I'm so exhausted sometimes that I can't take on simple tasks like taking a shower or doing the dishes, I still feel badly about not being able to support myself. Years ago, when I had just finished college and felt it was my ethical duty to go get myself employed, I thought it was simply a moral failing on my part that I could not muster the energy to get up, get dressed, go out every day at dawn, and spend the entire workday, every day for five days in a row, doing whatever.
I can sympathize with folks who are struggling to find employment because, at that time, the search for work was for me a bewildering puzzle. I had just graduated from an ivy league university, where I had been constantly harangued with the information that I, along with the tens of thousands who are graduated every year from the ivy league alone, was special and anointed, simply for having had the institution itself open its hallowed doors to me for a very hefty fee. At the time [the mid 80's] the popular refrain from the college's career counseling office was that employers prefer to hire liberal arts graduates, as opposed to graduates of professional training programs, because the former have been broadly educated to apply their knowledge to any challenge at hand. Apparently, no one informed employers of this.
I was turned down for jobs as dishwasher and cashier because I did not have experience. One store owner actually told me that she did not think I would be able to figure out how to use the cash register. I also applied for more professional jobs, primarily as a teaching intern at private boarding schools, a job which usually paid between $3000 and $7000 a year [plus room and board], but received no offers. One reason may have been that I was painfully shy and generally confronted interview questions with panicked silence. Having an obtuse personality is enough to make one unemployable.
Through persistence, I did stumble into a part-time job teaching high school English at a small - tiny, in fact - private religious school in Providence. I had sent them my resume, and when one of their teachers suddenly quit only one week into the school year, they called me in desperation. My fancy education actually helped this time. I made $6300 that year teaching two ninth grade English classes and one elective. It was difficult and exhausting but actually quite wonderful. We moved away at the end of that school year, so I did not continue in that job. I tried to stay with teaching, even going on to take most of the required courses for teacher certification, but in the end I had to give it up because teaching adolescents and having chronic fatigue just don't mix.
I was not unhappy with working as a retail sales clerk after that - a job that even an exhausted person can more or less sleepwalk through [and this is meant as absolutely no offense to people who work retail; I know full well how infuriating and offensive customers can be, not to mention employers who don't respect workers whom they can get away with paying so little] - but as my condition progressed even that got to be too much.
So now I'm in the ranks of the not-employed. And I can certainly relate with the ruminations offered by David's essay on the benefits of non-employment. Perhaps the greatest gifts are humility and clarity. Humility because whatever pretensions we may have had are probably no longer in our budget. Clarity because when you don't have a lot of money and are not constantly being pulled by the struggle to work at a job, you find out what matters to you. Since a more comfortable life is no longer affordable, there is a lot you have to strip away. As a result, you have to figure out what you can discard and what you will choose to keep until it's humanly possible. And because now you have the time to ruminate.
[Continue to September Archive]