Why You Should Not Move To New York City

It had to be done. I can no longer endure, in good conscience, the number of dear readers who come upon this post, and write to Pretty Lady for Personal Advice. These innocents ask such questions as: "We have four dogs, and pay $800 a month for a three-bedroom house on half an acre. Where in New York City can we obtain a comparable situation?"

The answer, "You can't," does not BEGIN to cover it.

You see, darlings, there are some circumstances in which Positive Thinking, and Grit and Determination, and all those other excellent traits of character simply Do Not Cut It, and living in The City is one of them. Positive Thinking may get you into college; it will not pay off your student loans. Grit and Determination may enable you to sustain yourself, but Thriving is another story altogether.

So, here are a few Facts that anyone considering a move to NYC ought to be in possession of.

1) Wages and salaries in New York do not EVER come close to compensating for the cost of living there. Unless of course you are a hedge fund manager.

Once, back in the late sixties or so, companies would offer salaries commensurate with housing costs in a particular area. Yes, your Manhattan apartment would be smaller than your average Cincinnati split-level. But the Corporate Office would understand this, and of course they'd boost your wages, as well as covering your moving costs, to entice you into the Big Leagues.

This does not happen any more. 

Pretty Lady does not have the time, any longer, to look up average regional salaries and hourly wage rates. She merely has Experience. And she can tell you that the average hourly wage for say, an administrative assistant, in New York City today, is about equivalent to the average hourly wage for a similar position in San Francisco--in 1992.

No joke. Twelve to fifteen dollars an hour is what you got in San Francisco twenty years ago, and it's what you get in New York City right now. This will of course increase if you have experience and specialized skills--provided your field has not been entirely outsourced to unpaid amateurs, otherwise known as 'interns.'

Which brings us to:

2) If you want an interesting job, be prepared to work for free. Forever.

You say you have Artistic Aspirations? You'd like to enter the film industry, the music industry, the publishing industry, the field of journalism, the art world, the academic world, the literary world? You are an Idealist? You'd like to heal people, improve their lives, clean up corruption and pollution and environmental degradation?

Congratulations. You can get started right away! Make sure your landlord, utility companies, grocery delivery service and credit card companies know to send your bills directly to the office that manages your trust fund. It's annoying when the heat runs out in midwinter, otherwise.

 3) If you want a boring job, see #1.

Did I mention that the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan is upwards of $3500 a month? In Brooklyn, $2200? That the cost of insurance, groceries, utilities, transportation, and just about anything else you require reflects this? And that your salary will not?

4) But Pretty Lady. I'm brilliant! I'm an Entrepreneur! These petty concerns do not apply to me! I set my own prices, work my own hours, start my own enterprise, make my own rules! That's why I CAME to New York, to take on the world!

4) a) Yep. You and everybody else.

b) But it was really nice to meet you!

c) Who are you, again?

One thing that is rarely mentioned, by those who tout the virtues of living cheek-by-jowl with millions of talented, ambitious, hard-working people, is the Centrifugal Leaching Effect. This is the invisible force which drains all your endeavors of critical mass, by continually picking off and dissolving any productive relationships you attempt to create.

Let's say you meet a Brilliant Person at a party, or a yoga class, or a networking event, or a conference, or a training session, or a coffee house, or on the subway. You have a scintillating conversation, you discover a harmony of interests and perspectives, you have complementary strengths and parallel ambitions. You take this person's card. You give them a call. You put them on your list. You never hear from them again.

Rinse and repeat.

It has been said that it is impossible to date in New York City, because every prospect you meet is alive to the possibility that he or she could run into Kate Moss or George Clooney at the next party but one. This psychology of the eternal upgrade applies equally to your professional endeavors. It matters not that you are gifted, reliable, engaging, witty and profound. Your prospective client, business partner, friend or neighbor could always do better.

5) New Yorkers will appreciate your characteristics of honesty, competence, reliability, diligence, generosity, and superhuman talent. They just won't reciprocate.

Pretty Lady, as she has written elsewhere, was raised to adhere to a strict set of Standards. One of these was Follow-through. Every time Pretty Lady met a prospective client, business partner, friend or neighbor in New York, she took care to deliver on any promises she happened to make, on time and under budget. By this naive method, she hoped to build a network of loyal friends and colleagues.

In practice, she soon found herself besieged by a bevy of flaky prima donnas, for the simple reason that New York is full of creative types with a superhuman sense of entitlement. When a person treats them well, they do not think, "hey, I'll recommend this diamond of a human being to my employer/dealer/best friend/investment manager!" They think,"At last! I am receiving my due!"

Or, as Pretty Lady suspects in her darker moments, "Suckaaaaaaaaa!"

6) New Yorkers have no taste.

This one is particularly counterintuitive; of course New Yorkers have taste! That's why it's the culture capital of the world! That's why you can walk down the street dressed like this and get away with it!

Again, Pretty Lady does not have the wherewithal to dredge up the statistics. She will merely state her empirical observation that excellent bands, in New York City, attract a minuscule following of their own friends and neighbors, which does not expand or diminish with time, until the members have children and/or move to Germany. Terrible bands attract exactly the same sort of following. Excellent artists and terrible artists, ditto. It is as if New Yorkers are so overwhelmed by sensory input that they make aesthetic judgments based solely along tribal lines.

In fact, the only way to Make it Big, in New York, as measured by income, visibility and platinum album status, is to forget the art and get an MBA from Harvard. Your former Harvard classmates will oblige you by buying and promoting your work. Et voilá.

Any questions?

Related posts:

• How to Move to New York City 
• How to Date in New York City
• Mailing List Etiquette

How To Leave a Loser: Now with Crowdsourcing!

Hello darlings! It is so lovely to be here once more, and with such good news!

Rather than floating off into the ether, or wherever burned-out bloggers go, Pretty Lady is working on a book. And you--yes you, darlings--can help!

You see, one of my most salient (albeit well-disguised) sins has always been laziness. For example: whilst performing the duties of an Information Lady, upon receiving a difficult call, some earnest librarians would simply dive into research. Whereas I, Pretty Lady, would laze back in my chair and think for a moment. "Who is the expert in this field? Upon whom, then, may I fob this off?"

This technique is known in library circles as 'working smarter, not harder.'

So friends, as you may have surmised, my time these days is limited. I am Racing Round. I have not the leisure for the maundering ruminations you have come to love so well. However, I have been doing a great deal of study on the topic of Modern Entrepreneurship, and learning how to save time by making liberal use of other people's Brilliant Ideas.

This technique is called, in entrepreneurial circles, 'crowdsourcing.'

Pretty Lady, then, has a proposition for you. She will write, and publish, a book. (Most likely in your choice of convenient electronic formats.) She will provide the title and the themes. She only asks you to provide her with your most personal, private, shameful secrets and concerns. Of course the strictest anonymity will be mantained.

The title, as of this writing:

How to Leave a Loser

(and other love stories) 

by Pretty Lady 

Pretty Lady would be more than honored if you would provide her with one or both of these items:

1) Your burning questions on Losers, and how to leave them.
2) Your horror stories regarding Losers, and other love affairs.

Bonus question: Are you a Loser? What's that about?

Please direct your materials to: prettyladymylove at yahoo dot com. Or leave them in the comments. Or on Pretty Lady's Facebook page. Or in an unmarked envelope slid under her door. Your choice.

(You may also have noticed, on the sidebar, that Pretty Lady has a Light List. This List is for the sole purpose of distributing Treats to her admirers. You must Subscribe to discover of what these Treats shall consist. A word to the wise.)

Tally-ho!

Hire your Neighbor

Friends, though it may seem that way, Pretty Lady has not been Slacking Off, no sirree. For the first time in this lifetime, we have Books! Quickbooks, to be exact. A 2012 edition of Quickbooks which now bears a roughly accurate correspondence to the state of her financial affairs.

This would not have happened if Sally the Bookkeeper had not providentially shown up at Women's Power Networking last Thursday. After over a year of fretting, Pretty Lady decided to take the advice of her business coach, and Delegate. She may have the brains to learn Quickbooks on her own, but circumstances suggest that inspiration is lacking. Sally the Bookkeeper charged a very reasonable hourly rate to hold Pretty Lady's hand while we set up several Accounts, and we have a meeting two weeks hence to set up several more. Easy does it.

After we were done, Sally the Bookkeeper casually mentioned the state of her own financial affairs, which, not to be indiscreet, were rather startlingly unfortunate. Friends, there are many, many persons who have been Hit Hard in this recession. Persons who, through no fault of their own, find themselves facing long-term unemployment, late in their careers.

Not too many of us, sadly, are capable of offering these people full-time jobs at decent salaries, with benefits. (Not at the moment, at least.) But those of us with any semi-disposable income at all are not doing anyone any favors by hoarding our cash.

So do yourself a favor; hire a bookkeeper. Hire a lady to clean your house, or to do your laundry, or give you a much-needed night out without children. The idea that it could be a 'waste of money' is illiberal thinking; money does not disappear when you spend it. To do any good in the world, money must be kept moving. At the moment, your indulgence might be groceries, transportation and the electric bill for someone who would not have them otherwise.

The Definition of "Freedom"

Darlings, it has been SO long! Pretty Lady has been a bit busy, what with founding an empire and raising her offspring. But Recent Events have gotten a bit out of hand; plus, this morning's client failed to materialize. Thus I shall seize the opportunity to set the minds of the populace at rest about a few things.

So. Contraception vs. Religious Freedom is the order of the day! Complete with Defamation of Character, Socialist Oppression, and a Universal Mandate to post porn videos of oneself! Gracious. I thought Pretty Lady was given to rhetorical excess, but this situation trumps her completely.

Overmatched as I am, I must perforce be blunt. Since when does "religious freedom" mean "the freedom to force others to comply with one's own beliefs"?

Religious freedom, let me remind you, means "the freedom to practice one's own religion, adhering to the strictures thereof, in one's own personal life." Nowhere does this imply that one has any right or obligation to control other people's habits, practices or decisions.

And to those of you who declare, "What a lady does in the privacy of her home is no concern of mine; I just don't want to pay for it," let me set your mind at rest. You are not paying for it. The insurance company pays for it. You may pay the insurance company, but once you have done so, the money is no longer yours to control.

Perhaps this offends you. You may certainly choose to be offended. But let me ask you; have you ever peed in the ocean? If so, it was terribly irresponsible of you to have caused that distressing tsunami in Japan last year. Please see that it doesn't happen again.

Now, if you will excuse me, there is potty-training going on.  

Pretty Lady for Hire

Yes, darlings, it is true. Pretty Lady sold her soul--or at least, her idiosyncratic Voice--for bargain-basement prices. Alas, one must live. Behold:

Extreme Window Shopping

Achieving A Timeless Style (on a Limited Budget)

The Ideal Cheap Date

Please to forgive the rather inane content, as well as the choppy editing. The commercial world has not yet caught up with Pretty Lady's more esoteric sensibilities.

As well, please do Pretty Lady the honor of ignoring the fact that this atrocity has her name upon it. I have been forever cured of the notion that having a professional editor actually improves one's readability.

The Return of Pretty Lady

Hello darlings!

Truthfully, I have been stalling. I have been unable to decide whether to make Pretty Lady an official archive, leaving her all perfect and unspoiled, or to forge ahead with current events, time permitting. Pretty Lady has therefore been in Limbo, although Time Out NY is now following her, much belatedly, on Twitter.

For motherhood has been the least of recent upheavals. We are living in Philadelphia, in the bleeding-edge community of East Kensington; I am a startup entrepreneur, much to my own surprise; and Joe is producing (and directing, and mopping up after) a heck of a new production for the Philly Fringe.


Since this is Joe's baby, and I've been wrapped up in learning how to grow a business (Inc. Magazine is now my favorite coffee break reading material, I kid you not), I haven't been directly involved in the process. But after reading the original script by Richard Kirkwood, I made the independent decision to get behind it one thousand percent, risking the possibility of embodying all kinds of horrific stereotypes in the process--Stage Wife and PR Harpy among them.

Because not only is it Noises Off-level hilarious, it's relevant. It's relevant to the bleakly absurd economic climate that's driven millions of people out of their jobs and their homes while the top .1% grow ever richer. It baldly displays the cant that pigs use to justify their actions, and the sophistry which makes asses of all of us. It's an extreme play for extreme times, and it deserves all the limelight it can get.

So, will Pretty Lady be writing again? Well, CBS Local in Philadelphia has hired her/me to do a little Primetime blogging, promoting a couple of shows called '2 Broke Girls' and 'How to Be a Gentleman'. Also I'll be working on an e-book entitled, tentatively, Pretty Lady's Guide to Harmonious Relationships. Also, there are about 10,000 things I'd like to say about startup entrepreneurship, which don't quite fit into the theme of my new blog. So that's probably a yes, darlings.  

New Blog

I'm writing about my healing practice, beautiful spaces and my gorgeous new neighborhood on my Practical Bodywork Blog. Come visit!

We Are the Dupes

There's a protest against censorship on the steps of the Met today, because of the Smithsonian banning of David Wojnarowicz' video, 'Fire in my Belly,' above.

I, for one, am disgusted.  I am disgusted because people are such goddamn dupes. 

You don't have to censor art to get rid of it.  All you have to do is ignore it.  'Censorship' was the best thing to happen to Wojnarowicz' work; tens of thousands of people have now watched this video who would otherwise never have heard of it.

We're still completely missing his message, however.

For those of you who are confused as to exactly why an ant-covered crucifix offends some people; it's because the message of Christ is that he was crucified and resurrected.  Ants imply the presence of rot; Christ, allegedly, didn't.  But we, the people, crucify each other every day and leave the corpses to rot.  That's the message.

David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992.  Today, there are saviors dying of hideous diseases all around us, but we're ignoring them on behalf of self-righteous protests, for and against 'censorship.'  We are allowing ourselves to be overtly manipulated by the forces which profit from people's deaths.

Because do you know what ELSE happened this week?  Republicans, on behalf of the wealthiest .1% of us, filibustered a bill that would have provided healthcare to 9/11 first responders who are dying of cancer. 

They did this because it is in the financial interests of the ruling class for the other 99.9% of us to be distracted and at each other's throats.  While we're blaming our neighbor for being bigoted, immoral, intolerant, depraved, degenerate, lazy, and generally a Bad Person, we're ignoring the ways in which ALL of us are being exploited by the plutocracy which is destroying this country.

Artists: Christians are not the enemy.  Christians: Artists are not the enemy.  I know that it is scary to realize that YOU could be the one abandoned by the system when you fall ill, lose a job, or help someone else at your own expense, but sticking your head in the sand doesn't change the reality.  Your neighbor is your natural ally, whether he be a starving artist, an offended Christian, an illegal immigrant, or a dying firefighter--as long as you look at who is REALLY pulling the strings, and refuse to be distracted by trivialities.

Wake up.

In Praise of Facebook

What's with all the Facebook bashing?  'Facebook users are narcissistic.'  'Yes, and also immature.'  Facebook 'friends' aren't real friends!  Get over it!  Move on!  The rest of us have. 

Well, I love Facebook, and I'm not ashamed to say it.  I love it because it satisfies two of my primary neuroses--wanting to know how people are, in perpetuity, and not wanting to pester them. 

I was beyond delighted, the first time I was 'friended' by someone from elementary school.  I had been looking for that girl for twenty-five years.  Just because we're not seven years old and living down the street from one another anymore doesn't mean that I stopped liking her; it's a real thrill to know that A. is doing just fine, is happily married with two kids, and living in Dallas.

Is this so strange?  Reading the comments in this letter, I get the feeling that there are a lot of people out there who can't understand it.  They regard Facebook as an onerous burden, or a popularity contest, or a haven for the self-involved.  But it seems to me that there's nothing less self-involved than being interested in other people, whether you see them every day or not.

The reason I love it is that it takes so little effort.  What's narcissistic, as well as time-consuming, is emailing a thousand people five times a week; Facebook is great because you can ignore it. You can share as much or as little as you like, and everybody out there is free to take it or leave it.

Also, it helps me to avoid one of my existential terrors--that of Calling At A Bad Time.  Thanks to Facebook, I will never run the risk of inviting someone to see the latest Harry Potter film when they're on the way to their mother's funeral.  I can limit my guest list to people who are not in labor.  I can send congratulations, condolences and silly jokes at the right moments, not the wrong ones.  How is this not a fabulous thing?

Of course my Facebook 'friends' aren't all my friends.  I'm not an idiot.  It's a good way of helping me decide who I want to get to know better, however.  If I 'friend' a new acquaintance and discover that she's a member of 'One Million Strong For Sarah Palin,' that saves me the price of a cup of coffee.  

 

I'm not going to 'defriend' her, though.  Since Facebook is such a minimal-impact medium, it perplexes me when people feel a need to purge their 'friend' lists for trivial reasons, such as 'I don't know who all these people even are,'  or 'We haven't spoken face to face in three months.'  The only things that will cause me to defriend you is: 1) I don't know you, and you keep sending me press releases for events in cities that I never visit; and 2) I know you very, very well, and you know what you did.

Tipping the Proletariat

Memo to Greg Beato: go pick on someone in your own tax bracket.

But if tipping isn’t exactly a rational exercise, it is an ingenious and metaphorically valuable contrivance. It gives plate-schleppers a chance to act like entrepreneurs. It gave men who can’t afford dessert a chance to act like philanthropists. It imbues the players on both sides of a transaction with a greater sense of autonomy. A waiter isn’t locked into whatever limits his boss might set for him — he can partially determine his own fate. A customer can exert some power in determining the ultimate value of his dining experience.

Greg, forgive me, but you've tipped your hand there.  "It imbues the players with a greater sense of autonomy."  Not the real thing. The reality of tipping is that it places the livelihoods of the lowest wage earners at the mercy of the whims of the self-righteous.

Ask yourself; how many waiters do you know who have health insurance?  Bartenders?  Baristas?  Estheticians?  Hairdressers?  Have you ever taken a moment to consider the economic realities of life in the service industries?

Let me clue you in.  A massage therapist who works at an average spa (as a not-so-random example) is a contract employee.  That means they receive a flat rate per service provided, which averages between 20-35% of the retail price of the service.  If there are no clients, they do not get paid.  They receive no guaranteed minimum salary, no sick leave, vacation, workers compensation, health insurance or overtime.  When they blow their backs out working on an overweight client or catch the flu from a sick one, they're two weeks away from indigence.

Your average waiter or barista has it even worse, because employers use tipping as an excuse to pay less than minimum wage.  It is perfectly possible to work a 9-hour shift without even a bathroom break, and net less in wages than your average customer just spent on dinner.


Under these circumstances, tipping is not just a 'metaphorically valuable contrivance.'  It's bus fare, groceries, diapers and the gas bill.  When a client exercises her option not to tip, she is making a unilateral, uninformed decision to deny basic sustenance to the person who has just fed her, cared for her, and relieved her pain.  Is this liberty, or is it exploitation?

As one Facebook friend put it: "The way service providers are treated certainly reflects how people feel about service--as though it were a terrible fate, but one that was deserved, thereby justifying the Darwinian bully attacks."  It rarely occurs to the American consumer that service might be an honorable vocation, not a desperate option for the ignorant and the feckless.

     
Greg Beato rails against making tipping automatic; in this way, he declares, we lose our option to 'starve the beast' of taxes, Big Government, and all the ills thereof.  So why is it, Greg, that 'starving the beast' all too often requires starving the ones who barely glean a living from the crumbs it drops, rather than those who gain the most from its excesses?

The Long Silence

I almost need to steal the title from Franklin's latest post: Patience With Everything Unresolved.  In fact, I almost need to steal Franklin's template.  Being is becoming, and blogs are becoming something else.

It's not that I haven't had anything to say.  I've shamelessly blogged my way through several major life transitions; maybe it's in the nature of the current one to be different.  In any case, I'm not making any promises. 

Briefly, the news is this: I've decided to become a physical therapist.  It's a doctoral degree that will take me five or six years to complete, including prerequisites.  Although I've got two bachelor's degrees already, they're--surprise!--virtually useless.  I recently sent for my transcript, and its dominant theme is 'Course Of Study Undertaken By An Adolescent Mind.'  People under twenty-five should not be allowed to go to college, I swear.

What this means is that I will be broke and working my ass off for the foreseeable future, which will not be a big change.  What will be a big change is that when I'm done, I will be employable at a solid middle-class salary for the first time in my life. 

This could not have happened if I hadn't become thoroughly and irremediably disgusted with the state of the art world.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that I am an idealist--stubborn, possibly naive, certainly foolish.  Art represented part of an ideal to me, and I invested a big chunk of my soul in it, along with considerably more money than my actual income. 

And 'art,' as practiced by the self-styled elite of the global art scene, is a giant confidence game.  I used to think I could either change it or create a niche for myself within it; now I think that my values are incompatible with its founding principles.  Continuing to sacrifice my time, money and attention to this cynical game doesn't make me a dedicated artist, it just makes me a chump.

I've long been aware that I have three vocations--artist, writer, and healer.  For the last couple of decades, I've been weighting the 'artist' as the primary part of my identity.  Letting go of that is a wrench to my ego, but necessary to my soul.  I will have a studio again, I will paint again, but maybe not for a good long time.  Now is the time for exercising my lazy but adequate left brain, and taking the adventure that comes.  

The Consciousness Painter

 

'Sunset Holocaust,' Elisabeth Condon, 2009
Acrylic on canvas, 118.10 x 78.74 inches

Every now and then I meet an artist who reminds me that with all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, art can still be a meaningful occupation.  When I do, I often notice that artistic mastery is a non-linear process.  Elisabeth Condon is the real deal, and in the last couple of years her work has hit an exponential curve.

Over a year ago, I was lucky enough to visit Elisabeth's studio in Brooklyn with my critique group.  I'd seen her exhibition at Lesley Heller Gallery in 2008, and one painting in particular had impressed me; it started to become metaphysical jazz, blurring the boundaries between space, time and consciousness.  But it was hard to tell if this was an accident or not.

During her crit, it became clear that Elisabeth throws the entirety of her heart, mind and soul into her work, and she's got a lot of these things to throw.  The details of her trajectory make up a respectable résumé--influences ranging from Chinese scroll paintings to Dr. Seuss; trips to China, residencies in Miami, Spain, Yaddo and Taiwan; figure painting intensives, architectural studies, paint pouring. If I were a real art critic, I'd feel obliged to trace these influences in sober detail.

But I'm not.  I'm just another painter, who believes that great art transcends both biography and intellect.  "The Chinese believe that paintings must have chi," said Elisabeth, and her paintings have tons of it.  They come at you like a tidal wave, immersing you in the full experience of color, sucking you into spaces which twist and bulge and drop away, altering the fabric of your mind.

 'Gaoxing, Beijing', Elisabeth Condon, 2009

Acrylic on canvas, 118.10 x 78.74 inches

The paintings she was working on when I went to her studio were a quantum leap beyond the work in her Lesley Heller show; bigger, freer, less literal and more graceful.  One of them, an enormous blue poured abstraction, was half finished.  In standard crit group fashion, we suggested she leave it that way.  She replied, "I can't, I just can't."  Elisabeth doesn't hold anything back.  Art doesn't occupy a cool, political corner of her life; it IS her life.  And her life is a joyous and generous one.  

Since then, things have only gotten better.  In her best work, the distinction between abstraction and representation becomes meaningless--form, space, color and architecture dance among themselves as limpidly as thought.  Standing in front of one, you find yourself remembering experiences that aren't necessarily yours.  Elisabeth's work communicates directly, without any need for translation. 

After Art

Art is not the end of the line.  I used to think it was, but that was just my ego talking. 

'Tis the Voice of the Asshole

Some asshole gets hold of the intercom:   

Two South Jersey Wal-Mart customers who heard a racist message broadcast over the store's public address system say the whole ordeal is no laughing matter.

Sheila Ellington and Virginia Tinsley were shopping inside the Washington Township Wal-Mart along Rt. 42 in Turnersville, N.J. just before 5 p.m. on Sunday when they say a man came over the PA system and said: "Attention Wal-Mart customers: All black people leave the store now."

"It was a disgusting comment," Ellington said. "Once I heard that, I was absolutely shocked and appalled."

Why do we listen to assholes?

Statistically speaking, we are less likely to be overrun by Mongolian hordes, Roman legions, conquistadors, or renegade cowboys than in the vast majority of human history.  In most countries, rape and kidnapping are frowned upon as a means of obtaining wives.  Brute force is no longer the final word in most social interactions. 

At no other time in history have we had quite the luxury of shrugging off the perspectives of assholes, in the way we do now.

And yet our bruised psyches do not believe it's true.  Thousands of years of brutality have left their mark; we still behave as though the Voice of the Asshole will inevitably be followed up by an unanswerable blow to the head.

As a result, the psychic power of assholes is magnified beyond their natural scope.  Thus I propose a mantra: call it the Mantra of Emerging Civilization. 

The next time you hear some asshole broadcasting his assholery to all and sundry, say to yourself, "Dude, you're an asshole."  Then mentally flip the switch.  Turn off the Glenn Beck in your head. Consign Rush Limbaugh to the trash heap of history.  Open your mind to a new era of freedom.

Pain and Ignorance

The more I learn about chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia, the more it is clear to me that medicine is still in its infancy.  From the New York Times:

The cause of this disorder is unknown. Physical or emotional trauma may play a role in development of the syndrome. Some evidence suggests that fibromyalgia patients have abnormal pain transmission responses.

It has been suggested that sleep disturbances, which are common in fibromyalgia patients, may actually cause the condition. Another theory suggests that the disorder may be associated with changes in skeletal muscle metabolism, possibly caused by decreased blood flow, which could cause chronic fatigue and weakness.

Others have suggested that an infectious microbe, such as a virus, triggers the illness. At this point, no such virus or microbe has been identified.

Pilot studies have shown a possible inherited tendency toward the disease, though evidence is very preliminary.

Could this be any more vague and tentative?  We're only about a decade away from dismissing the whole thing as 'crazy woman syndrome.' 

Fibromyalgia is one of the reasons I became a bodyworker.  I saw people close to me suffering from it, and I saw the medical establishment making their suffering worse through ignorance, indifference and judgement. I may not be able to cure people's pain, but at least I can do someone the honor of taking it seriously. 

People with chronic pain, for the most part, cope with it by coping.  That's not a tautology.  Coping is a fluid process, different for every person and at every time.  Exercise may help, or not.  Pain medication, ditto.  Massage, sometimes.  Acupuncture, heat therapy, yoga may work, then stop working.  It never ends.

One thing I have observed, in over a decade of giving and receiving bodywork, is that there seems to be a powerful and complex relationship between fascia and the nervous system.  I have noticed that often the subtlest forms of bodywork can have the most profound affects.  I don't pretend to understand the mechanism behind it, but there are a couple of areas where I'd like to see some research done.

One is network spinal analysis.  The theory behind it is that by stimulating the spinal cord in areas where it attaches to the spine, you enable the body to release spinal tension and adjust itself.  After one treatment by an NSA chiropractor, I found my hips releasing the turn-out stress of twelve years of ballet training, and re-aligning in their natural forward-facing stance.  This chiropractor reported that many of her clients saw significant improvement from conditions as serious as MS, from treatment over time. 

The other is the M.E.L.T Method, a simple self-care technique that uses balls and rollers to rebalance and hydrate connective tissue.  It is now primarily used by athletes and personal trainers, but the results I've seen have been so dramatic that I'd like to see more research into its effectiveness on fibromyalgia and other chronic pain syndromes.

The more bodywork I do, the more it seems to me that the mind/body dichotomy is meaningless.  I'd describe it as a mind/body continuum.  At the very least there is a constant feedback loop going in both directions, both consciously and unconsciously.  An adjustment at any point in the loop can have wide-reaching effects; my interest is in finding the most efficient points of intervention.

Satan Unmasked

Jerry Seinfeld was always abhorrent. It is simply that it took most people a couple of decades to notice:

The one star who appeared to be immune from the curse was Jerry Seinfeld who enjoyed relative success in stand-up comedy despite ill-conceived endeavors such as Bee Movie. But now with his new near-universally loathed show The Marriage Ref his legacy seems more threatened than ever.

'Seinfeld' was not a brilliant sitcom.  It was evil and vile.  It was wilfully and self-righteously shallow, trivial and vain.  It was not funny.  It was vicious in its banality.

I may have watched an episode of 'Seinfeld' in its entirety once or twice, but I never managed to do so without feeling that I had been spiritually spat upon.  Most of the time I did not last for more than two or three minutes.  Even now I feel my stomach seize up if someone tunes to a rerun in my vicinity.

The fact that Jerry Seinfeld's new show is being universally panned merely demonstrates that our collective consciousness is catching up with reality.  Smarmy, facile spite is not only destructive of the fabric of society, it is not even good for a chuckle.  

Spiritual Necessity

It's about freakin' time.

What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand. A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name where museums are concerned.

It's sad, really, how over the top was the reaction to Roberta's editorial. Jerry Saltz's Facebook page exploded with expressions of gratitude from hundreds of artists.  The Brooklyn Rail posted a remarkably militant expression of solidarity:

We would go a step further and state unequivocally that many of these individuals have not only shirked their public responsibility, they have turned the museums into playgrounds for an elitist group of trustees and globetrotting art fair devotees, stocking their exhibitions primarily from “powerful galleries.”

Parallels to the financial institution debacle did not go unnoticed:

Sometimes the art world actually lags behind society, and the bursting of its preachy-self-indulgence bubble follows rather than leads the collapse of the economy's credit bubble by a couple of years. In the money world, anybody could borrow any amount for practically anything. In art, anyone could claim to be addressing any social issue with just about any work, and curators believed it.

So the question remains, why should we care? 

In my opinion, Roberta's much-quoted phrase 'intense personal necessity' does not go far enough.  It conjures up a vision of the obsessive, solipsistic artist working alone in the studio, churning out quirky, useless objects for purchase by wealthy people.  Given the dire economic conditions in which we find ourselves, fighting a battle to bring more painting into museums seems a little quixotic, and I say this as a painter myself.

Artists, as a whole, are pretty good at dealing with poverty.  We have to be. To look at the 'art' in museums, you'd never know that artists today have meaningful responses to real-world problems; you'd think we were a bunch of useless, smarmy man-children.

What is truly disgusting about the museum playgrounds is the way in which they siphon energy, resources and attention from artists who are working not only out of personal necessity, but out of spiritual necessity--responding to the world in ways that expand our ideas of what is possible.  Artists like the members of Urban Farm Syndicate:

Our goal is to turn Central Brooklyn’s biggest problem into its greatest resource by working with landowners instead of against them. 13% of the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, is vacant land. This vacant land creates opportunities for crime, vermin and dumping, and drives down property values. We believe this land also has the capacity to give rise to the very things that grow a community: dignified living wage jobs; a thriving local economy based on delicious, healthy food and an enduring educational resource for local schoolchildren and academia alike.

Or artists doing what we always do, going into neighborhoods that might as well be war zones and revitalizing them:

Artists are being pushed out left and right, publications folding, galleries closing, all while more and more MFAs continue to be churned out than can possibly be hired on by Manhattan’s service industry. Space is at a premium. Do we continue to go even further east into the cramped, treeless, concrete, PCB infested jungle of Bushwick, eventually reaching East New York’s hour-long commute for valuable studio and exhibition space? Or do we begin to explore other venues west of the Hudson? In the wide-open (*gasp*) NEW JERSEY!? In our case, we're going with Jersey.

Contrary to the apparent beliefs of the curatorial set, 'meaning' does not reside in facile, arcane references within a pile of visual koans.  It does not reside in unintelligible wall text.  It most certainly does not reside in the cynical manipulation of political and economic systems to grab a share of money and attention that is totally disproportionate to the quality of one's contributions.

Spiritual necessity is about a lot more than making objects.  It is about allowing the world to change us, as much as we change the world.  Most artists don't plan to become community organizers, entrepreneurs, healers or activists; it's what happens to us when we the irresistable force of our creativity meets the immovable object of the physical world.

How Not to Be a Terrorist

Glenn Greenwald describes Joe Stack's manifesto as 'perfectly cogent.'  Except for his conclusion that 'violence is the only answer,' I tend to agree.  Partisan ideologues are running in circles, each trying to blame his act of terrorism on the Other Side, but if you bother to read what he wrote, it's clear that it's not that simple.

Contrary to the various labels that the pundits are flinging around, Joe Stack was not a populist.  Neither was he a Communist, a Tea Bagger, or a liberal.  He was a smart, creative guy who empirically discovered that Big Systems in this country are designed to drain him dry--specifically, the smart, the creative, the independent and the non-conformist.  They drain everyone else too, but they work much faster and more viciously on people like Joe.

Item: The Labor Department estimates that up to 30 percent of companies misclassify employees as 'independent contractors' in order to avoid paying Social Security, unemployment, health insurance or worker's compensation.  Among the most often misclassified workers are truck drivers, construction workers, home health aides and high-tech engineers.

Item: The United States has the highest documented incarcaration rate in the world.  Over half are imprisoned for non-violent offenses.  

Item: A homeless man get a 15-year sentence for stealing $100 and returning it, while corporate officers who steal billions from taxpayers, investors and their own employees keep the money and write the laws.

Item: The average debt of a medical student who graduated in 2009 is $156,456.  

Item: The Catholic Church.  

I could go on, but as Joe Stack has clearly demonstrated, that way lies madness.

So how do we cope with the fact that institutions which supposedly exist to sustain and connect us--schools, corporations, churches, and government--have turned into parasitic monsters which extract ever more and give ever less, using our finest characteristics--honesty, intelligence, compassion, creativity, discipline--as levers to enslave us?

The reason terrorism does not work, as an instrument of change, is that fear paralyzes the mind.  The best weapon against institutional thuggery is not violence; it is the freedom of thought and action which emanates from a mind at peace with itself.  This is why institutional thugs bring out their most vicious tricks when confronted with a decent person who thinks for herself. 

This is also why we cannot look to institutional leaders to get us out of this mess.  They created it; they have a vested interest in sustaining it.

So I have a few suggestions.

Learn to care for yourself--really.  Learn to eat well, exercise well, meditate well.  Learn to live on less, even if you still have a job.  Revel in joys that are free. 

Quit looking upward.  Quit looking for someone to hire you, fire you, take charge, change the rules, enforce the rules.  Quit waiting for the grant, the donor, the collector, the award, the promotion.  Stop buying lottery tickets.  Consider long and hard before you pay for another degree.

Connect laterally.  The person you see as your competitor is potentially your ally.  That guy who might take your job, could be your business partner.  Collaborate, encourage, experiment and assist. 

Nurture love and meaning wherever you find it.

 I suspect that before much longer, systems and ways of living we took for granted will vanish, or undergo a radical transformation.  We can either give way to panic, violence, rage and despair, or we can take the opportunity to heal ourselves, our society and our planet.  It's up to every one of us to decide.