Getting your dollars worth...kinda

We often correlate value with rarity; if something is rare it must be valuable and if something is valuable it must be rare. Rare things are expensive; the first edition of Action Comics (June1938), in which Superman makes his first appearance is said to be worth $440,000, the last record John Lennon ever signed, a copy of Double Fantasy autographed five hours before Lennon was shot, is worth about $525,000.
Counter to this idea, rarely do we equate the things needed for survival with much value.
Is this the best Superman comic and will it most aid your ability to sustain? No, modern comics make this early attempt look like a tofu dog next to a rack of ribs and as far as getting you out of the woods alive one would be better suited with a plastic grocery bag. Is Double Fantasy the best Lennon album? Certainly not (half of the songs were written by Yoko which might actually be a detriment to your survival) but because of humanities desire to detach from the natural world we give irrational value to impractical objects.
In a survival situation two of the most valuable things, things that increase the chances of living exponentially, are not things at all. They are perspectives about the situation that cannot be strapped to a utility belt or bought at REI; a sense of humor and a sense of purpose.
A sense of purpose is manifested most effectively in an injured or near dead member of a group. In all logical terms this makes no sense. It is assumed that the injured should be left for dead. Only the strong survive, survival of the fittest, a bad apple spoils the bunch. But clichés are so cliché. You would never think to strap a martyr to your utility belt, but making a dying person live can make someone believe that their own death is not an option. A sense of purpose is valuable.
A sense of humor is valuable. When you can laugh at the ridiculousness of your situation you no longer are a victim of unreasonable chance and circumstance. It like saying, “Hey, fuck you god, you can take my legs but you can’t take my funny bone.” The heart rate slows and endorphins are released to ease physical pain. Interestingly the active element in your endorphins is morphine, no wonder laughter is so popular in rehab. No one would ever think to pack a whoopee cushion backpacking in the Andes, but the laughter could save your life.
I work in an insanely high volume Chinese restaurant, with a demanding clientele on a competitive slab of real estate. The pressures of this job can be so intense at times that I regularly have coworkers quit mid shift with a section full of hungry tables frothing out the jaws for an plate of crispy sugar meat. On average I train two new servers a week. On average about half of them show up for a second day of work.
I would call this a survival situation. Business usually comes all at once and hard, unpredictable, like a levy breaking or an engine failing. Then suddenly, you are free falling, tray loaded, fake smile cemented, running rapidly for the safety of the moment when all drinks are down, all food is rung in and finally when all checks are printed.
This moment usually resolves in what I call a “red light,” something that makes you stop and change your course of action because a weaker server needs your help. Sometimes they ask; usually they are too blindsided to realize that they even need it. In the dash of a salt shaker, suddenly five tables need refills, two tables need to pay, all of the food is taking an unreasonably long time to cook and a party of 15 (the new owner’s family) just went down. When I begin to fall in and help the drowning server all of the responsibilities to my tables no are longer as dramatically important, they become periphery. It becomes more important to save the dying member than to save my own ass.
When in the heat of a rush I mistakenly order a kung pao chicken “PLANE, NO SAUCE,” instead of “PLAIN, NO SAUCE,” and I have to explain this message to Chef who understands very little English. I am able to laugh at myself and in that moment all of the momentum, all of the pressure is put into perspective.
These pauses are so important to my survival I cannot understand why they are not marketed, traded and sold. They are illogical and common, and of great value to me. In my restaurant I honestly believe that my illiteracy is often my Action Comics #1. It is what is valuable to me, because it is what allows me to survive. My signed Double Fantasy is an empty glass on a co-worker’s table, not rare at all but I need it more than anything I can buy on Ebay.

Inflation and Fall of the U.S. Flower

Financially, America is starting to resemble a middle-aged ex-homecoming queen trying to squeeze back into her old cheerleading skirt for her wedding anniversary, just praying that she won’t bust a seam. She isn’t fooling anyone; things are bad and now it’s just about how you define it.
A recession, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is a “significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP.” I define it as a period of time when daisies wilt in flower shops before people buy them.
In the month of May, inflation raised at a rate of .8%. That is the biggest monthly leap since 1981. Over the last three months the president gave $77.9 billion to (get this) normal people. Regulars in my restaurant are sharing $10 salads and drinking tap water.
National unemployment has been rising for the past seven months leaving us at a four year high of 5.7% California is currently at a 12 year high of 7.3% unemployment because of the gaping wound on the side of the housing/real-estate/construction beast. In the last two months my work has fired 7 servers.
Record stores are closing. Outlets like Ross and Marshal’s are reporting huge sales because people are not buying what they really want, just what they need. Socioeconomically, we are about a month away from drawing an eyeliner seam down the back of America’s legs and calling them a healthy economy.
In the years when people still bought things and hand-to-hand CD sales still had an impact on a band’s relevance, my band spent a lot of time standing in front of hardcore shows on the Sunset Strip. My hands usually full with stacks of hot Kinko’s flyers and CDs, I would wait until the shows let out into the streets, spewing bodies like a broken hydrant. Desperately we would compete with the flashing freakshow of the strip for a moment of attention. It was hard and frustrating then. I can’t imagine what it would be like now.
Some of our biggest competitors were a small group of Spanish speaking ladies carrying bundles of fresh flowers for five dollars apiece. They could burn through a bundle in about three clubs.
It was impressive to say the least.
I now work waiting tables in a little restaurant on Sunset Strip, about a mile east from where I used to hawk CDs. I have come to know one of these flower ladies, Anna, relatively well. She is patient and kind, placating my shoddy Spanglish. Anna tells me we are in a recession, not because of the GDP, but because of the flowers.
Sunset is a silly selfish pleasure for most people; A tourist destination for burnt out, sobered up butt rockers with bad tattoos and no coffee shops to go to. Flowers are things of temporary luxury, the impact of which only lasts a few days.
Flower wholesalers have been cutting staff due to a rapid decline in demand. Anna who has been in the business since I was 4 (she works at a flower shop in Culver City five days a week) used to spend Tuesday through Saturday nights from eight to three in the morning trolling the strip empting bundle after bundle of roses, now can hardly get through one a night.
Shipping of flowers by air cargo is down in some places 17% from this time last year. Anna has started scaling back her time in front of rock clubs and spends more time in restaurant patios.
“There is no one here anymore,” Anna tells me. “The money is bad, the people are cheap, and most of the other girls don’t want to try anymore.”
We have a game; I see her walking up to our patio at about a block’s distance I move to one of my tables, usually an affluent tourist couple looking for a chunk of 1989 rock nostalgia or at least a photo of the two of them wearing Guns and Roses shirts in front of the Whiskey. I bring up the topic of chivalry to the lady and ask her if she can remember the last time she met a true gentleman. At this point Anna is usually behind me. I then give a look to the prospective gentleman letting him know that this is all a set up for his benefit. I then turn to Anna, wink, point and watch her go in for the kill.
We can usually go through at least a half a bundle this way, but lately, gentlemen are hard to find. Anna sold a whole bundle last Wednesday to one guy for half of what she get selling them by flower. Chivalry is now more dead than ever and that is how Anna and I define a recession.

I Kinda Have Something That Might Kind of Maybe Like a Dream/I Hope No One In My Neighborhood Reads This or I Could Get Shot

In the post-college world it is becoming increasingly absurd to want to devote one’s life to a creative field of work. According to the Princeton Review of the top ten highest paying college majors, only one if them (Marketing/Marketing Management/Marketing Research) is remotely creative, half of them include the word “engineering,” and only one of the ten most popular majors is in the top ten highest paying. Dreaming for a living is dying in America.
Without perspective between what we have, what we want and the foresight to reach unreasonably far into the future for an intangible (a dream), we are essentially purposeless. Guitar Hero, The White Album, Cirque de Soleil, the Internet and this moment of journalistic insight are all results of a faithful devotion to a creative dream. These things give us purpose and make a life worth living.
In order to trust an idea/creative thought/dream you have got to be a little mad. Essentially all creative ideas, regardless of how practical, are based in faith. In order to commit to a dream you have to first believe in it. The dreamer must conceptualize an intangible, yet to be conceived thing. A writer sits down to start a script trusting that the script can exist, their task then becomes translating the script into tangible terms.
Perhaps this is all a little too ephemeral and reeking of patchouli to make sense of. Take for example my landlord’s son. This 19-year-old runs drugs out of my apartment building as a full time job. Up until about six months ago, he had a part time job as a sales associate for a large commercial retail establishment and he had a dream. The stress and labor of his part time job was offering him little sense of reward or accomplishment. In order to deal with the stress he often came home and self-medicated with copious amounts of beer and weed. With a little foresight and a lot of faith, he began scaling back his hours at his job and devoting more of his time to achieving his dream. His logic was simple; he found something that brought him joy, so he decided to devote his life to it, regardless of feasibility.
He had to trust in the existence of a way of life that had yet to exist for him in reality.
This is still a bit abstract, so let’s take one more example involving the same individual. In order for my landlord’s son to get out of plain view of police, competing drug dealers and unwanted clients he must be able to move quickly from the stoop in front of the apartment to behind the cast iron gate protecting it. This is a complicated task because the automated lock system is broken and will most likely remain so until God gives up and lets Satan get hammered off of communion wine. The keyhole is also quite difficult to maneuver and requires a good two minuets of feverish manipulating and handle shaking. If one wants fast access between the inside and outside some creativity is essential.
Many have devised intricate systems of folding of magazines, cigarette butts and coat hangers but none have been able to create a consistently successful method. The gate is heavy, and while logically many of these doorstoppers should work, it is nearly impossible to slow its momentum as it swings closed. The landlord’s son however had a creative dream. He discovered that crumpled up newspaper not only keeps the gate from fully closing it also works as a shock absorber killing the momentum rendering a space between the gates latch and the door frame.
Before he decided to try his method of door stopping he had to have faith that it would work. He had to have faith in an abstract concept, a dream. It is this faith in dreams that is responsible for society’s accomplishments. It is also this faith that is becoming increasingly rare.
Interestingly, only three of the ten highest paying majors appear on Princeton Review’s top ten recommended majors. The others are all open to dreaming. The point: Guitar Hero beats accounting, and dreaming beats running around in endless circles regardless of the paycheck. At least that’s what I’m banking on.

How I Learned Not to Screw Up in America

America boasts the sixth highest standard of living in the world. Every union strike and million-man march has lodged another carabineer into the face of liberty that we trust will hold us on our ascent to political perfection (excuse the Bushisms for a moment). We hold five percent of the world’s entire population but strangely; we also have 23% of its prisoners. That means that more than one in every 100 adults in America is in jail. The struggle towards freedom and rising incarceration exist in direct ideological conflict with each other. Thus a strange relationship exists between the rise of intangible political freedom and the decline of actual physical freedom. Free Americans are content with this relationship because the world of Un-free Americans is at a safe enough distance. This is the story of one of the Un-free.
Our first time in Provo, Utah, my band played at a club named The Starry Night after a mural on the inside that resembled what a 4 year olds fingerpaint impression of a Van Gogh would look like. There were holes in the stage. There were holes in the floor. The stage was the floor. The whole place sloped hard to the center, like a funnel, where there was a 3 by 4 foot rusted metal grate that regularly sent bands and kids to the hospital.
Brad was the soft, skinny 21-year-old doorman/soundman/promoter. He lived in a converted loft space behind the club; he had a tattoo of a good luck Indian shooting a star (the kind found on Tootsie Pop wrappers that were rumored to yield a free lollipop). I don’t know that he was ever paid or if he ever knew that he was supposed to run a show until a band pulled up and started knocking on his door (which was how we met Brad). He greeted us with a gentle smile and a firm handshake (rare), he talked to us (more rare) and showed a genuine concern for our well being (unheard of), especially considering the had never heard of or listened to our band. That night there may have been five people at the show including Brad. He bought a CD but I doubted he would ever listened to it.
Over the years we came to know Brad considerably well. He didn’t have much going on other than the club, a girlfriend, an outstanding record collection and an innocent whisky habit. He had a hand full of hipster drinking buddies and a small reputation in Provo for being a pretentious scenester. Most Provo high school girls had crushes on him and most Provo high school boys wanted to be him.
We talked about books, tattoos and the sad symptoms of small town citizenship; second layer conversations that are sewn in emotional investment and yield connections that are lasting. I felt a little guilty talking to people like Brad; good people raised in towns that were unfairly small in size and opportunities. The kind of towns where dreams never grow bigger than their cages. I could have easily been Brad.
On one of our trips Brad showed me a new tattoo. On his hip about the size of my hand was one of my drawings from the CD I sold him the first night we met; a girl in a dress dancing, arms outstretched with the words “hold me” below her.
The girlfriend became a fiancé, the record collection became a pregnant girlfriend and the whiskey habit lost its innocence. Brad stopped showing up every time we played and I would have to go find him at the bar next door to The Starry Night.
One night at the bar someone hit one of his friends. Brad’s friends were few and important to him. Brad, being drunk and loyal ended up putting his friends attacker in the hospital. This was the first time he had ever been in a fight.
A few weeks later I got a call from him while we were on the road. I didn’t recognize his voice. He told me he wasn’t going to be coming to our shows for a while and that there was a new doorman at the Starry Night. He told he was getting a new tattoo, the word “friendship,” across his chest. The guy he hit pressed charges and Brad was going to prison for assault. He wanted the word across his chest so that whenever anyone asked him or whenever he asked himself why he was in prison he had an indelible answer.
In America we have learned to imprison the convicted behind a safe stereotype. People don’t end up in jail, “those people” do. This has helped us to forget the severity of the 1/100 ratio as we become freer in ideology. We hide from recidivism statistics (63% with in the first three years) and a failed justice system ($60 billion annually) by removing ourselves from the individuals who are those statistics. Brad is not one of “those people,” and if he is, then I am too.

A Public Space

I have seen the kindest hearts reduced to irrational, fist wielding primates over parking spaces. Although it may seem negligible, parking lots have strongly influenced the course of architecture, sports, and rock and roll. While there is much to be said about “tail-gating” outside of a Judas Priest show or losing your virginity in the back seat of a Honda Civic after your junior prom, parking lots have a more subtle, and profound influence on our lives. They are a cultural and economic nexus where there is no written law governing order or etiquette; the way we act in parking lots is just who we are.
Parking lots have been pivotal in the development of the man that I have become. My parents are divorced. Until I was 18 my mother possessed primary custody of me. My parents talked through lawyers, fax machines and me (though they swear it was never their intention). Parking lots were neutral zones where my parents were contractually obligated to be civil. These desolate, disregarded chunks of land are set aside with the purpose of putting the things one needs (car, trailer, boat) when one doesn’t need them. For me however, this was the only place where I could see the things I needed (my family) in an important context; the dad world, the mom world and the kid world all at once. We had to stop the cars to do this and we had to put the cars somewhere where when they were stopped. When they stopped our worlds collided.
Weekly, my Dad would drive the 60 miles up the coast to have dinner with me. We would inevitably end up in a well-lit empty asphalt car lot. Homework was done, Frisbees were thrown, and important life talks were had. The only reason I graduated high school was because my Dad and I sat in his pickup in a parking lot every night for the last week of school as I did the work I blew off my senior year of high school.
As a skateboarder, I saw parking lots as a series of opportunities—a blank canvas. Every parking block and speed bump is another shade that could be used to in my picture. As a surfer, parking lots are a locker room where we strip off socioeconomic hierarchy, wrap in a towel and a wet suit and become the same kind of bohemians.
I can’t support Wal-Mart’s politics, labor policies or their heartless monopolization of small town economies, but I can’t say that the world would be better off with out them. On the road, parking lots take on a completely different form, for a broke band, the parking lot is a temporary home, a place to sleep, to eat and to recharge. The parking lot of a Wal-Mart super center at 4a.m. to a touring band is sweeter than any kind of deli platter guarantee a venue can offer. While I support their business practices, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Harris Teeter have the most inhospitable and difficult parking situations that I have ever seen. No one looks twice when they see shirtless road-worn musicians hanging out of a tour van eating a cold can of Chef Boyardee outside of Wal-Mart, but security would certainly be called just about anywhere else.
As we begin to wise up to the greater impact of car culture on the environment, it is easy to forget the carbon footprints imbedded in our hearts. Its easy to resent all things associated with a car driving world because of the trouble it got us in, but we should also remember the fun we had before we got caught.
Frank Lloyd Wright had to rethink his understanding of human habitation as cars began to move into family’s everyday life. People began looking at his designs and asking, “It’s beautiful, but where do we put our car?” Wright went on to design some of the most famous and copied gas stations and parking lots the world has ever known. A world with fewer cars is beautiful, but where will we put our hearts?

But Burnout Sounds So Much Worse Than Fade Away

Waste deep in a blistering, fleeting summer tour my old band had two days off in New York City to see the sights on a punk rock budget. We jumped turn styles, drank $.99 Arizona iced tea tallboys and slept in the destitute McCibons lofts. This was six months before CBGS’s lost it’s lease and stories about its closing were making fount page print in the New York Times. For me, there was nothing more important to see.
America is an ignorant teenager in many ways, our leaders are actors, our actors are our leaders. All but few of our landmarks are more than some pop culture nexus. In Hollywood one goes to Man’s Chinese Theater and puts there hands in the bacteria bath handprints of the stars. In Nashville you go to the Grand Old Opry and buy a cowboy hat and an engraved flask. In Vegas you get married and buy a shot glass. Even our historical land marks are more notable for the celebrity events that took place there; the Alamo was where Ozzy was arrested for urinating in public, Bourbon Street is where they shoot Girls Gone Wild.
Taping into my hardcore sensibilities, I walked across half of the city refusing to pay for the subway. This was essentially a pilgrimage my teenage Mecca. Growing up, I watched the Filth and the Furry a few times a month, my room was wallpapered with a hand made Ramones collage, and although I listened primarily to contemporary hard-core I knew that the music I loved and wanted to play would never have come about without this edifice to defiance.
New York is mean; the only kind of place where a club like C.B.G.B.’s could survive. In all honesty, and I was a coy tourist, asking strangers for directions and getting lost in a big scary city.
I have done this other places and I’m ok with looking out of place in foreign countries, fumbling with unfamiliar syllables, usually resorting to the international sign language of point and nod. I have had unreasonable expectations of the beauty that I had traveled to see and been disappointed by the pile of rocks that was supposed to hold some profound spiritual significance.
In the end the culture of the new people I am encountering has so much more intrinsic worth than the picture taken of me in front of said pile of rocks, therefore the trip is worth it.
But this is New York, and New York is mean, and I had in fact traveled to see something that was the antithesis of beautiful.
As I turned the last corner my hands were clenched balls of anticipation. I was wearing my ugliest, most apathetic scowl prepared to encounter an army of syringe thin, spike studded crust punks talking about class war in an apathetic yet relevant way. I expected to see a loaded marquee and a road worn band loading in. I expected to smell piss, aggression, body odor and beer. I broke the cardinal rule of punk rock tourism; I expected what I had seen in the pictures.
Instead I was assaulted by consumerism; anarchy symbols turned dollar signs. From a block off every boutique and storefront was selling nock off chunks of punk rock memorabilia, CBGB’s coffee mugs, and New York Dolls shot glasses. Of course there is much to be said about the all out lack of sincerity in punk rock (that was the point rite?), but this was just kind of pretty, well organized and pleasant.

There was nothing on the marquee and the club was closed. However, the CBGB’s art gallery/coffee shop/gift store next door was open and it appeared to have a long list of “CBGB’s like” events in the coming week including book signings, wine tasting and poetry readings.
This was diet punk, the walls of the place looked like a low-budget Hard Rock Café. I didn’t buy a tee shirt or take a picture of me standing in front of a smashed guitar.

In order to motivate myself to finish the tour and to keep up the steal toe lifestyle I had entertained since I was a teenager I needed to remember this landmark as what it should have been, and not what it was. That is part of the beauty of America, our history my not be accurate, but since most of it was written by the same sweaty palms that built the entertainment industry (a business of putting a price on creativity) it certainly is cinematic enough to enjoy with some popcorn and ignorance.

Green Is The New Indy Is The New Alt Is The New Yuppie

Neck deep in the Hollywood Farmer’s Market with my trendy reusable grocery bag filled with organic, overpriced local produce, drinking filtered tap water out of my reusable nalgine bottle, I began to feel a little guilty for carpooling with family and girlfriend instead of taking public transportation. Looking around my insecurities were rising; my bag was a generic black mesh instead of the fashionable “I heart my planet,” or the ironic Magritte throw back “I’m not a plastic bag,” I was wearing my organic bleach free converse made from recycled materials but they just didn’t seem as cool as the Toms slip-on’s (a company that donates a pare of shoes to a child in a third word country for every pair purchased) that everyone else was wearing. When did this happen? When did green become the new Yuppie? The cultural evolution of the hipster although seemingly convoluted, is essentially as predictable as a passive aggressive teenager home alone with a new a guitar amp and dime bag. Hippnes until lately has been comprised of a generalized disdain for authority and mainstream media while maintaining an ironic, slightly leftist moral matrix.God, how I have longed to be a hipster, even in the days when I was living in the breast of the beast touring the country in an independent hardcore band, desperately on the brink of obscurity. Like the Buddhist ideal of enlightenment, the struggle to be hip made me eternally not. It is not something you can study for or win. It is something that you are, and I am not There is hope however for those of us on the edge, recently things have begun to change for the hipster. Political awareness has swum its way up the main-sub-stream, faster than heroin in the 90’s. At any given time at least one article on the Vice magazine’s home page is about a global warming related topic. The Onion can be found sprawled across just as many coffee shop tables as Juxtapoz and Chuck Palahniuk. Most of the political information I used for this post in fact I found on pitchforkmedia.com. Most shockingly perhaps is that the hipster has a presidential candidate this year that isn’t Ralph Nader. Barack Obama has officially earned his white belt and Roy Orbison shades. In fact street artist Shepard Fairey of Obey fame has created a pro Obama poster that is selling for $2400 on eBay. Wilco, Superchunk, and The Arcade Fire have all played free shows promoting voter registration paid for by the Obama campaign. Barack even spoke at a Decemberists show in Portland Oregon.
I missed the age when my generation was strong with Beavis and Butthead logic and Kurt Cobain indifference, but it looks as though I may get a second chance just as I was getting the hang of pretending that I didn’t read the newspaper. I guess I need to buy a new bumper sticker for my Vespa, “smart, it’s the new cynical.”