“When you say “I am_____…” meditations by poet Bill Lavender

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Bill Lavender, Xavier Review

To say that it is complicated to talk about work in America is an understatement. Work is an outsized religion, with equal numbers zealots and agnostics shouting about its ability to build character -or to ruin it.

That complication has been in my own life many times, when I took a particular (down?) turn in my work life so that I could honor a gig or a hustle that I had in mind, and watched employers, friends, and family furrow their brow when I told them what I had done.  But because I live in New Orleans, announcements of giving up a full-time job to pursue something less defined are usually met with understanding and even admiration. In way of appreciation, I began this particular blog to pay respect to the New Orleans ease around different work types and the often-necessary hustle.

One such person who personifies the glorious tangle of it all, refusing to comb the strands out in order to make it easier for others is my pal Bill Lavender who is (from my view) the multiple choice of poet, publisher, explainer, musician, builder, tinkerer, fisher, mediator, backyard griller, agreeable drinking/dining companion, kitchen helper, father,  cat-tender, back-up dog walker, interested grandfather, designer/part-owner of my favorite backyard pool and screened porch, full-time partner to writer/professor Nancy Dixon. Nancy is, by the way, another who fully understands and has lived the job, gig, and hustle life.  I’d even say that because she lived it for so long, with such honesty, she interprets life with far more intuition than either Bill or I or most people can. I know without a doubt that most of her circle deeply respect her ability to suss out any situation and that skill is clearly derived from a life lived rather than a workplace taught. I’d like to write more about her some day but she is a much bigger presence in my life and harder for me to observe without a little awe and a great deal of gratitude.

I write about Bill here because I returned today to a piece about his life as a poet that he had written a few years back. I have read this piece maybe a dozen times already, often finding  one or two paragraphs that I wanted to reread, or longer passages so I could accurately quote them to friends. This is one such passage that charmed me:

For me, poetry (as a vocation, an identity, a life’s work, an obsession) did not grow out of English class, but out of passing notes at the back of it, handing around scraps of paper that one would get one in trouble if the teacher saw.

Throughout the piece, he puzzles over the role of language, truth, other people, emotion, and the world to his poetry.  He shares the struggle in keeping poetry in his life, which took him into prominence in academia, but where his success or his person or his politics or his diffidence or none of those at all but just general university stupidity (we all have our theories), resulted in a well-publicized firing, shocking many. I remember having dinner with he and Nancy in the days directly after, and how flummoxed he was by it and what it meant and what he should do as protest.

In the end as he says,

“Then they fired me and I was, after a brief flurry of petitions and irate letter-writing, relieved.

Now I’m back in construction, this time as an employee, though a well-paid one. I run my little press from my house, with help from my wife, New Orleans scholar and writer Nancy Dixon…and/or an occasional volunteer or intern. And though there is always this problem or that, and though I work too hard and there is never enough time for this thing or that (including writing), it’s pretty ok.

There is much more to find in this piece than how his vocation fits into his definition as a worker. The passage with granddaughter Roxy and the cracker is so beautifully illuminating about the poet’s mind that I am humbled by it. Additionally, the clarity he sees around the role of Occupy is one that I share and yet had not been able to explain to others before reading this and so it remains the anchor for me in this piece. I know I will use those few words of analysis for a long time.

But in terms of what AJG&H (this blog) is meant to do, I think Bill offers one fine idea in it:

When you say I am_____, the number of words that you can use to fill in that blank , either adjectives or nouns, is not infinite. You select from a multiple choice list given to you by the culture, by the long bloody, political history of the world. 

That is the truth. We are defined by the list of words that we are labeled with, some we gladly choose to be known for, others that are forced on us. Infinite it is not. The list I gave you about Bill at the beginning of this piece are how I know him: through his poetry, by what he has built around town, and through social time with he and Nancy, sometimes in the company of their family.  If he saw my list, I am sure he would be surprised or bemused by some. Or maybe not.

“In the Thick(et) of Poetry: Meditations on 50 Years in the Language Game,” Xavier Review 37-1

 

 

OUT TO LUNCH : Intellectual Property Podcast

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Cheryl Gerber, intellectual property

This podcast features Photojournalist Cheryl Gerber, my neighbor and pal who is a award-winning freelance journalist and documentary photographer.  She  is a staff photographer for Gambit and a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Associated Press, and New Orleans Magazine.

Her book Life in the Big Easy is a standout; find my review here.

On the podcast, Cheryl talks about her diligence in keeping track of her work, using a law firm in New York.

The work has changed a lot since she said she “used to drive to Gambit’s offices holding wet photos out of the window!” Yet, the digital format is “made for her” she says.

Out To Lunch

 

 

Cleaving to the Medieval, Journeymen Ply Their Trades in Europe – The New York Times

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Wandergesellen

Wonderful story about Wandergesellen, Germans who have finished their required training in any number of trades and are traveling to gather experience.

While on the road, journeymen are not supposed to pay for food or accommodations, and instead live by exchanging work for room and board. In warm weather, they sleep in parks and other public spaces. They generally carry only their tools, several changes of underwear, socks and a few shirts wrapped into small bundles that can be tied to their walking sticks — and that can also double as pillows.

The color of their jackets indicates their trade: Carpenters and roofers wear black, tailors maroon and gardeners deep hunter green

Traditionally, a journeyman was not allowed to travel or seek work within a 60-kilometer radius of his hometown — a guideline intended to encourage an exchange of ideas among those practicing any given trade. Today, it remains a way to ensure that the journeyman develops independence.

 

Trump’s Blue Collar Base Wants More Jobs And An America Like The Past

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capitalism, Cleveland model, Evergreen Cooperatives, informal economy, makerculture

As I have long predicted, the alt-right revolution has as much chance to come out of the Midwest as anywhere. Having watched the growing misplaced anger among blue-collared whites in Ohio and surrounding states, it is clear that we need to consider this area even after HRC wins. The undying belief in corporate America and the right to become successful through winning the job lottery is the bedrock of this group of voters (see a couple of quotes from this story at the bottom of this post). And so it cannot be surprising that they have chosen one who has been allowed by the media to become a demigod (word chosen carefully) even though his own record belies the media’s slavish devotion to his myth of coming up by his own bootstraps.
In order for this group to not keep growing, becoming more violent and more opposed to the multicultural reality of the US, it is time for the Dems to truly embrace entrepreneurial activity at the local and regional level. The cultural economy is growing smart and capable local leaders with every type of background and the ecological sector is dreaming up innovative, practical ideas that can offer jobs and reduce the damage we have done to our earth since the start of the Industrial Age. Those areas along with the need to invest in vocational education for every region and in large-scale infrastructure repair should be the plan. Green City Blue Lake is one effort right there in NE Ohio doing excellent work connecting jobs (including cooperatives) to repairing the environment and creating a new economy. That initiative and others are brave enough to make the case that it is time for a post industrial solution for NE Ohio, or at least time for a sustainable future. Much more of that type of effort is needed across the Midwest and in every other region.
Also, those of us in already-emerged disaster zones know how the economy stabilizes for a while when recovery starts, mostly due to federal intervention. Yet that intervention overwhelmingly favors multinational, military industrial complex companies over locally controlled ones which short-circuits real recovery and allows developers to entirely control the agenda as happened in New Orleans. Therefore, the Dems should also create a sector that feeds off the resiliency movement already begun and creates opportunities for workers and small companies to help better prepare our regions for those events that happen in every part of North America. Show up at actions, like today’s Solidarity with Standing Rock events across the US or Wednesday’s anti-TPP social media & email action day.
I used the word revolution earlier, and the appropriate response to that is often devolution. Here in the US, it is time for regions to lead and the Dems would do themselves a big favor if they began that process during this election cycle.
“He also says he thinks Trump will eliminate some of the environmental regulations that have affected industries in the region.” “she said. “I know it’s never going to be the same with General Motors or Packard, but with Donald Trump negotiating on trade, maybe we’ll get some of these jobs back.”

Trump’s Blue Collar Base Wants More Jobs And An America Like The Past | FiveThirtyEight

Criminalizing the hustle: Policing poor people’s survival strategies from Eric Garner to Alton Sterling – Salon.com

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Alton Sterling, Baton Rouge, police

The danger of the hustle

The contemporary era of policing and mass incarceration emerged precisely to confront black people with limited or no access to formal work. As the sociologist Loïc Wacquant puts it, “in the wake of the race riots of the 1960s, the police, courts, and prison have been deployed to contain the urban dislocations wrought by economic deregulation and the implosion of the ghetto as ethnoracial container, and to impose the discipline of insecure employment at the bottom of the polarizing class structure.”

In other words, prisons supplanted social aid and the criminal justice system became the state’s main tool to discipline the black poor, locked into segregated neighborhoods and locked out of good jobs.

In New York City, a model focused on so-called quality of life offenses took root, aimed in large part at the public face of informal work, from panhandling and squeegee men to drug dealers and loosie sellers as drugs and violence filled painfully long stretches of unrequested time off. The policing theory, known as broken windows, posits that cracking down on low-level offenses helps decrease crime across the board. That’s heavily debated, and it’s notable that recent decades’ widespread decline in crime includes cities that have employed variable policing methods. What’s certain is that it renders poor people’s survival strategies a crime.

Source: Criminalizing the hustle: Policing poor people’s survival strategies from Eric Garner to Alton Sterling – Salon.com

Will This New Labor Classification Save Gig Workers’ Careers? – Forbes

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gig, informal economy, job, labor organizing, unemployment

With the debate over worker classification in the Gig Economy raging, many employers who hire freelancers and contractors live in fear .

 

“That was the biggest issue: If you create something like this, are companies going to take advantage and coerce people to do it?” says Zaino. “We think they are not going to be able to coerce people above a certain income level. They are not providing a routine service that is a commodity.”

It is also possible there could be considerable political opposition to such a proposal–even if freelancers like it.

With labor market trends pointing to a future in which more people do independent work, governments in the U.S. and other nations are moving toward aggressively reclassifying workers now doing contract work as employees, notes Zaino. “They don’t want to lose that payroll tax,” he says.

Source: Will This New Labor Classification Save Gig Workers’ Careers? – Forbes

Issue One: Invisible Labour | mice cms

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capitalism, labor organizing, outsider culture

Thanks to “sophistiratchet #blackademic beast from/in/of New Orleans” Terri Coleman for highlighting this publication on her Facebookistan page. Cultural appropriation is so constant in colonial economies that artists are forced to enthusiastically participate in maintaining its dominance.  The artists in this issue intelligently and sensitively address how labor as a commodity when it comes to creating and sharing art assists that frame of events.

How can we account for all of the invisible labour that’s required for us to do our so-called radical work? Informed by intersectional and materialist feminisms, Issue 01 foregrounds forms of labour that go unrecognized in the white spaces of contemporary and media art worlds. This issue is concerned with the before, the after, the behind-the-scenes, and the off-camera. How much not-art is required to make the art? What’s the cost and who puts their life on the line? Without reducing all forms of life to labour, the works featured in this issue allow us to think value differently, to acknowledge all that we do to keep ourselves and our communities vivacious and resilient.

Source: Issue One: Invisible Labour | mice cms

 

About mice

Mike Davis on the long game

The despairing often believe that successful impact is immediate and direct or nonexistent; the hopeful know it is often indirect, slow to unfold, complex and not easy or even impossible to trace.

 

In an interview with Maria-Christina Vogkli and George Souvlis that first appeared on the LSE Researching Sociology blog, Mike Davis discusses the 2016 US Presidential primaries. 

4) An argument that you make in your study about the American working class is that the Democratic Party cannot be the political organization that will bring significant social transformation in favour of interests of the subaltern classes. Do you continue to believe it? Did Obama make a significant difference among the other leaders of the party or was he one of the same?

The evil (I use this word precisely) of Clintonite neo-liberalism screams back at us from every Trump rally. Jessie Jackson’s exciting Rainbow Coalition campaigns in the 1980s proved that it was entirely possible to ally the rustbelt and the ghetto but his center-right opponents in the Democratic Party – Bill Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council – blew up all the bridges of progressive economic unity between imperiled white manufacturing-sector workers and the working poor of the barrios and ghettoes. Consistently championing global free trade, information elites, and financialization over manufacturing, the Clinton and then Obama White Houses have presided over the death of the industries and industrial unions that were the backbone of New Deal Democracy. Under Obama, who has continued the teacher-bashing and government-job-slashing policies of Bush, public-sector unions now face a similar decimation.

Perhaps most shocking has been the passivity of the Administration and the Democratic leadership in the face of Koch-financed offensive to destroy unions and slash public budgets in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. Less dramatic perhaps, but no less consequential, has been the absence of any initiative to address catastrophic job loss and the disintegration of social fabric in the industrial and mining belts of the piedmont and mountain South, including the once impregnable Democratic stronghold of West Virginia. (If you will, this is the American East Germany). The conservative religious agenda has gained such electoral salience in these areas precisely because the Democrats offer no serious counterbalance in the form of economic policy.

5) How do you comment on the Trump Phenomenon?

The Trump phenomenon considering what I said above should not have been such a surprise. For years, the ex-Nixonite demagogue Pat Buchanan has advocated a nativist economic nationalism with an America First foreign policy. A star-spangled Le Pen with a long pedigree. As a presidential candidate, Buchanan won some spectacular Republican primary victories but without the support of the mega-churches or the billionaires, faded quickly. Trump, with a vast personal fortune and a shrewd use of the outrageous to stay at the top of the news, is independent of the far right establishment and its ideological scriptures. His success partly answers the famous question of Tom Frank in his 2004 book ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas:’ why do white workers support conservative crusades whose economic policies are totally opposed to their own interests? The Trump campaign, with its demagogic emphasis on jobs, clearly shows that false consciousness has its limits and that downwardly mobile whites are no longer robotic followers of the Heritage Foundation or the Christian Right. If Trump, like the satanic George Wallace in 1968, mobilizes the dark side, he also exposes a degree of alienation amongst former ‘Reagan Democrats’ and their offspring that may well destroy the post-Reagan Republican Party brought to power by Newt Gingrich in 1994.

6) Do you see any potential in Bernie Sanders’ candidacy to make a difference?

Sanders, or rather his base, are the more novel and unexpected phenomena.  As someone who was skeptical about the Occupy Movement (too dominated by elite kids and pseudo-anarchism), I find the current generational revolt astonishing in its scale, passion, and inclusivity. Although the top 100 colleges supply much of the campaign’s full-time cadre, the soul of the Sanders movement is elsewhere: farm colleges, high schools, rappers, and the endlessly swelling ranks of the credentialed but marginally employed young. And the children of the new immigrants are increasingly visible in the campaign as it moves West and into the big cities. Although any personal comparison between Al Smith and Bernie Sanders would be absurd, 2016 increasingly evokes memories of the presidential election of 1928.  Although the conservative Democrat Smith (the first Catholic to run for the White House) lost to Herbert Hoover, the election was the overture to the Roosevelt era, as the children of Ellis Island – urban Catholics and Jews – first marched to the polls in great numbers. Likewise, the Sanders campaign, even more than Obama’s miracle in 2008, is proof of a fundamental realignment being driven by a new electorate and future majority with a distinctive agenda.

 

7) Would you like to elaborate a bit more on what type of political “realignment” is currently taking place within the Democratic Party?

‘Realignment’ in modern American political theory is a controversial concept, less popular than it was in its interpretive heyday of the late 1960s and 1970s. Too many small earthquakes have been wrongly construed as the ‘Big One.’ Yet I can’t think of a better term to describe what is currently happening within the Democratic Party. Unlike the Republicans, who are genuinely imploding and ‘dealigning,’ that is to say, going berserk, the Democrats are in the throes of a generational transition which clearly points in a coherent, more leftward direction. A hyperbolic claim? Not according to the polling data where Sanders’ support amongst voters under thirty is unprecedented (as is Clinton’s deficit in the same demographic). Even more so is the vogue for ‘socialism’ amongst Millennials. National polls since 2011 have consistently shown a plurality of under-30s choosing ‘socialism’ over ‘capitalism – an astonishing sea-change in opinion, even if the categories are poorly defined.

Sanders may be mocked for supposedly wanting to turn the US into Denmark, but the real reference point of his campaign, as he has consistently emphasized, is FDR’s proposal for an Economic and Social Bill of Rights, the platform of his 1944 campaign and the highpoint of modern liberalism.  In our post-liberal political system, however, rights to health-care and free college education are arguably now ‘socialist’ demands (or ‘transitional demands,’ in Trotsky’s sense).

8) What main limitations do you see in Sanders’ campaign?

The Sanders’ campaign, of course, is easily disparaged as one-dimensional: his foreign policy positions, for example, are disappointingly unclear and in many respects little different from Clinton’s. His specific economic reforms are also less radical than they seem. Breaking up the Big Banks, for example, is the Progressivism of La Follette and George Norris (great 1930s liberal Republicans) redux; socialists would propose instead to nationalize them as public utilities. He would tax the superwealthy at the same levels as LBJ but less than Eisenhower. Moreover, he has carefully sidestepped traditional left demands for reductions in military spending and abolition of the surveillance state. And his employment strategy (the right to a decent job was the cornerstone of FDR’s program) is timid and unoriginal: all recent Democrats have routinely and without conviction advocated job creation through infrastructure investment. Hardly a remedy for permanent stagflation.

Despite this, Sanders provides the partial template – even if cobbled together from New Deal era policies – for a politics that corresponds both to the equal-opportunity values and survival-economic needs of the new majority. The missing link, apart from a genuinely progressive foreign policy critique, is obviously his reluctance to acknowledge the structural persistence of racism beyond the catastrophe of mass incarceration. The resegregation of public education and the fiscal destruction of non-white majority cities are two giant issues crying out to be addressed. Young people trust Sanders to defend Dreamers and their parents, but it is unlikely that his campaign will produce a policy even remotely as radical as Pope Frances’s insistence on the priority of human rights over national sovereignty. But no matter, old granite face has accomplished far more than anyone would have conceived possible and its up to the movement, embryonic in the campaign, to take up the long game of coordinating labor organizing, rights campaigns and electoral insurgency.

 

The six-hour working day

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job, labor organizing, Sweden

At Toyota service centres in Gothenburg, working hours have been shorter for more than a decade. Employees moved to a six-hour day 13 years ago and have never looked back. Customers were unhappy with long waiting times, while staff were stressed and making mistakes, according to Martin Banck, the managing director, whose idea it was to cut the time worked by his mechanics. From a 7am to 4pm working day the service centre switched to two six-hour shifts with full pay, one starting at 6am and the other at noon, with fewer and shorter breaks. There are 36 mechanics on the scheme.

“Staff feel better, there is low turnover and it is easier to recruit new people,” Banck says. “They have a shorter travel time to work, there is more efficient use of the machines and lower capital costs – everyone is happy.” Profits have risen by 25%, he adds.

The Svartedalens experiment is inspiring others around Sweden: at Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska University hospital, orthopaedic surgery has moved to a six-hour day, as have doctors and nurses in two hospital departments in Umeå to the north. And the trend is not confined to the public sector: small businesses claim that a shorter day can increase productivity while reducing staff turnover.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-turnover-down-sweden-experiments-with-six-hour-working-day

Making It in the Quarter: A Conversation with New Orleans Service Workers

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job, New Orleans

• Our city thrives on the French Quarter, yet the people who make it run day to day–the bartenders, hotel staff, tour guides–are often overlooked. Join us for a panel discussion on what it takes to make it in the Quarter. Moderated by Aziza Bayou, the panel will feature mule carriage driver Sandra Holliman; Michelle Mueller of Jazzed Up Tours; Gee Foley, an assistant manager at Banana Courtyard; Thomas Proctor, a lead server from Brennan’s; artist Russell Gore, who sells his jewelry in the French Market; Carol and Jack Siekkinen, owners of the Hemmerling Art Gallery; and Robert Watters, Director of the French Quarter Business Association. Join us for what promises to be a fascinating discussion!

  6-8:30 pm Wednesday September 16,2015

  Chris Owens Club 500 Bourbon Street