Reports of My Demise (interlude)

I just saw a Craigslist post for a $9/hour security job that lists "critical thinking" as one of the required skills. Evidently it is not a required skill in the HR department.

From Recent Conversations With Co-Workers

The pretty decent guy who drives a Corvette, at being told that petroleum is a non-renewable resource:

"Wow...I thought we could just keep making gas forever."


The dudebro ex-Marine, at being called out for his recalcitrance at taking orders from female superiors:

"Nah man, I'm cool with all that stuff about women being equal. I just don't want it around me!"


The smart and ambitious young lady with aspirations of cophood, at my attempts to put recent events in Ferguson, MO into historical context:

"Wait...when was slavery?"


And the revolution is supposed to come from...below?!! God help us all...

A View From The Place Where Blog Month 7 Went To Die

This post is a protest against Operational Need; as in, "applicant must be able to work a flexible schedule depending on operational need, including evenings, weekends, and holidays." Those of you reading this who know me personally know that holidays in particular and weekends to some degree as well don't mean all that much in my world. Evenings don't have to either, except of course when I've already spent all day, week, morning, and afternoon in the unique state of imposed intellectual deprivation mandated by the private security industry and, to varying degrees, its clients.

Though I've had some long days and weeks of teaching and touring, and though I'm no stranger to the Day Job scene, I'm always a bit embarrassed to admit that until 15 months ago I had worked 40 or more Day Job hours in a week only a handful of times. What I now know is that while 40 hours in five days can in fact be made to coexist with my musical life, 46 hours in five days definitely cannot, and 54 hours in six days sure as hell cannot. And the kicker is that the line I quoted above didn't actually appear when I applied for this particular job. It was a pretty decent scheduling situation for a while. Then I tempted fate, wrote a bunch of stuff about privilege and non-privilege, and vowed to keep doing so for an entire month. Me and my big ideas. What about my operational needs you guys?

Security is the most un-zenlike profession on the entire planet, one where you are not allowed to trust anyone unknown to you for any reason, and even those known to you only incrementally and symbolically over time. Security itself is an abstraction, not something you can simply install in your building or hold in your hands. The industry is, contrary to everything you might be lead to believe by the severe overrepresentation of men in its front lines, a soft-skills, people-skills, customer-is-always-right driven one. It is ornamental masculinity at its most purely symbolic and, in most cases right up through the Secret Service, dysfunctional as well. The facilities department "runs" the school; the security department merely holds red-faced conferences on how to look busy when you're really not.

And so this post would be remiss if it did not address what the phrase "operational need" really means. This is what it really means, and this injustice has no place in our country or our world. Fortunately for me there is no child relying on me for support, just a lonely weblog project which is already fully accustomed to not getting much action. I am not tied down by breadwinning duties or institutionalized prejudice against my kind, but merely by adolescent hubris and recreational verbosity. It could be worse. Even so, I take exception to being asked to work on 24 hours notice when officially, if not always practically, getting a day off requires two weeks advance notice; and I chastise the very notion of contracting out services, understanding as I now do that this creates a buffer zone of responsibility between a client that never has its shit together vis-a-vis The Schedule and the front line employees who are held hostage by said incompetence but have no direct recourse against an entity that does not legally employ them.

Once upon a time, a certain newly minted MFA spewed the following venom all over the internet:

In many ways, the day jobs I have held have engaged, challenged and utilized my entire physical and intellectual capacities to a much greater extent than many of the paying tuba gigs I have played. Those prone to hawking music as the ultimate multi-disciplinary task for the developing brain will of course accuse me of exaggerating, but I'm not so sure I am. In fairness, it is true that I have invested quite a bit more time and effort in improving my tuba playing than I have in becoming a better security guard, and that this has made certain kinds of tuba gigs much easier than they would otherwise be. That being what it may, in facing the transition from academic to civilian life for the second time, I find myself far less fearful of the indignities associated with low-wage jobs than of those which inhere in the musical cultures I inhabit.

I stand by those words. Indeed, the problem with the current situation is that once again, after a long and frustrating several months of job hunting and a dozen interviews with HR neanderthals who saw in me only an overqualified, distracted artist type destined to play by my own rules and bail in short order to go on tour, I have predictably outlasted scads of less qualified, less educated, less competent people who have managed to get themselves fired in every conceivable way, from urinating in public to smoking on campus to having their dad pick a fight with a homeless guy on their behalf. And now, somehow, some way, the one that's leftover after all of this, that long-haired hippie with a graduate degree and gaping chasms in his employment history, is too important to the operation to be scheduled for a mere 40 hour week. No, instead we must extend two of his shifts from 8 to 11.5 hours, netting him several hours of time-and-a-half and a few precious hours of double-time by the end of the week. If anyone else doubts that there is dignity in this in some circles, simply witness my co-workers bickering over who is chosen for overtime scheduling and who isn't. And then there's long-haired, distracted, ungrateful, overqualified me trying to give mine away and having a hell of a time. Color me privileged on payday and exhausted the rest of the time.

Reports of My Demise (vii)

I'm a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.

(Man's Prayer, The Red Green Show)

Why pay such heed to Hanna Rosin and a years-old trope that's already been picked apart by a variety of smart people? It certainly has been a useful prompt for me to verbalize quite a few thoughts that had remained abstract and unarticulated for quite some time. It inspired me to read up on a subject other than music, probably in more depth than I ever have before. It was also a great excuse to get excited for Blog Month. Above all, though, these sorts of public mastheads for issues of great social importance and interest seldom represent the private thoughts of isolated individuals. It certainly caught everyone's attention when in the immediate wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures the right promptly dispatched David Brooks to smear The Solitary Leaker as "the ultimate unmediated man," pinning responsibility for his treasonous actions on

the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

Sound like anyone we know?

Brooks continues:

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

True enough in a vacuum. But you know, Dave, I have to imagine it's easier to live such a mediated life under the watchful eye of our "gigantic and menacing state" when you've made a nice chunk of change publicly defending that state's imperial wars. Then they only spy on you for fun, or maybe for practice. The rest of us, meanwhile, can't help but be thankful that there are a few people unmediated, unpropagandized, and unafraid enough to sound the alarm on wholesale violations of the law that threaten to upend the foundations of Western civilization far more thoroughly and violently than the scourge of atomized "technological existences" among a few malcontent kids ever could.

All of that being as it is, the real tragedy here, obviously, is that no quick-witted political cartoonist seized on the opportunity to render Unmediated Man as an overweight, unshaven comic strip superhero who goes around repelling bad guys with his body odor and infiltrating government spy agencies by striking up conversations about fantasy football. Cartooning in fact was an early artistic interest of mine, long before music. At my youthful behest mom even shuttled me off to a few Saturday morning cartooning classes in middle school; I however found representational drawing, then as now, intensely difficult, and quickly gave up. And so the Unmediated Man franchise may be licensed free of charge by any more skilled cartoonist who cares to do so. You're welcome.

In the end, about all I can say for David Brooks is that at least he has the good sense to focus his laser beam of mediated male ire on issues of pressing importance, misguided though he seems almost exclusively be. The military, the police, the private security industry, and the New York Yankees meanwhile all fixate publicly and overbearingly on the minutiae of grooming as expressions of mediated masculine discipline. Is finding the time and willpower to shave every single day really such a harrowing accomplishment? Perhaps I could forgive the casual observer for thinking that some of us indeed find it to be an impossible challenge. The reality, though, is not that it is too hard but rather too easy, too insubstantial, too ornamental. The unshaven are not the class clowns; we are the kids whose schoolwork isn't challenging us. For a real, unmediated challenge, we might just decide to piss our lives away in isolation pursuing mastery of esoteric bodies of knowledge and their attendant technical skills with virtually no worldly social or material incentive beyond our own self-fulfillment and, perhaps if we're lucky, occasional small validations of our irrational faith in the greater social utility of such seemingly decadent pursuits. You want a challenge? Put down your fucking safety razor and try that shit on for size. Do any of you in these industries realize that you're not only committing the Fallacy of the Beard, but in fact committing it about beards? And in the name of "discipline?" How fucking pathetic is that?

I'm not above ruthlessly questioning the "social utility" of any artist's work, of course, nor am I prepared to crown each and every "whistleblower" a national hero on the spot without a frank assessment of the particulars. Once again, as with Plastic Woman and Cardboard Man, our galling collective predisposition toward black-and-white analyses rears its head: Mediated or unmediated? Hero or traitor? Seldom are things so simple, and seldom can relationships to "family, neighborhood, religious group," and especially not to something as baldly trivial as grooming tell us everything we need to know about someone. More importantly, it likely tells us nothing at all about whether the release of a secret government document is a matter of urgent civic necessity or how it impacts the personal safety of Americans overseas. Crummy people occasionally do heroic things, and vice versa.

There's nothing noble in achieving discipline over something trivial or something loathed. A task is not too easy simply because you love it; indeed, the pursuit of mastery often entails summarily eradicating the honeymoon phase, discovering all manner of unseemly corners of one's metier and oneself, and inevitably falling, at least partially, out of love. There's no surer way to become unenamored of a jazz solo than to transcribe it down to its smallest details, no surer way to dethrone a lines-and-dots composer than close examination of a score to reveal, often enough, frighteningly simplistic approaches. To uninhibitedly love a music is to keep it at arm's length; getting closer more or less mandates making an often uncomfortable peace with its shortcomings as they become increasingly perceptible. Some of us so inclined were damaged goods from the start, never destined to excel at the Americanist meritrocracy; others were impeccably qualified and simply couldn't be bothered to do both things at once. But make no mistake that the true artist is, by definition, the furthest from an unmediated man or woman, no matter their metier, and especially not because or in spite of the aesthetics of their appearance.

Reports of My Demise (i)

...throughout my reporting, a certain imaginary comic book duo kept presenting themselves to me: Plastic Woman and Cardboard Man. Plastic woman has during the last century performed superhuman feats of flexibility. She has gone from barely working at all to working only until she got married to working while married and then working with children, even babies. If space opens up for her to make more money than her husband, she grabs it. If she is no longer required by ladylike standards to restrain her temper, she starts a brawl at the bar. If she can get away with staying unmarried and living as she pleases deep into her thirties, she will do that too...

Cardboard Man, meanwhile, hardly changes at all. A century can go by and his lifestyle and ambitions remain largely the same. There are many professions that have gone from all-male to female, and almost none that have gone the other way. For most of the century men derived their sense of manliness from their work, or their role as head of the family. ...Some decades into the twentieth century, those obvious forms of social utility started to fade. Most men were no longer doing physically demanding labor of the traditional kind, and if they were, it was not a job for life. They were working in offices or not working at all... And as fewer people got married, men were no longer acting as domestic providers, either. They lost the old architecture of manliness, but they have not replaced it with any obvious new one. What's left now are the accessories, maybe the "mancessories"–jeans and pickup trucks and designer switchblades, superheroes and thugs who rant and rave on TV and, at the end of the season, fade back into obscurity.

Hanna Rosin, The End of Men, pp. 7-9

First and foremost, allow me to take credit for my contribution, however small, to any statistical case that women have "pulled decisively ahead" of men, to quote the publisher's blurb for Rosin's faux-provocative screed. I can't claim that pursuing a music career has been either a graceful or a constructive way to disavow my white male privilege, but it certainly has been an effective one: I am 32 years old working for $11 an hour; I hold an entry-level position in an industry where I previously worked for over 5 years; I have never held a job that required more than a high school diploma; I rent a room under the table in a shabby shared apartment close enough to spit on the Hollywood Freeway; I have been single for longer than I care to admit; and of course, like so many of Rosin's Cardboard Men, I have spent most of my life trying to make play look as much like work as possible.

Admittedly, to implicate myself in this way requires strategically omitting a few incongruous details, such as my enviable academic track record, a graduate degree from an expensive private college, a stellar professional resume in a field wholly unrelated to the aforementioned day job, and a life that on the whole has been more frequently over- than under-privileged. Call it my Plastic side if you will; it has nonetheless proven entirely ineffectual in delivering even a whiff of the self-made material or domestic respectability by which polite bourgeois society measures its charges. And while any grand pronouncement on the contemporary economics of gender is well-suited to attract attention, that Ms. Rosin's appears through and through to have been issued from the perspective of just this sort of contended, materialistic non-culture is, as many have already pointed out, the real lead story here. This much, at least, is obvious to anyone who has lived concurrent Cardboard and Plastic lives, and who thus inhabits part of the vast grey area unaccounted for by her imaginary comic book duo.

In my case, the highway from academic all-star to broken manhood runs squarely through territory most commonly (if unwieldily) referred to as The Arts, ironically thought by so many unliberated men to be the exclusive domain of sissies and faggots, but which, as even its seasonal inhabitants quickly learn, in fact harbors its own litany of gender terrorists, macho men, misogynists, and homophobes, some of whom would undoubtedly get on just fine with their more politically conservative brethren in fields like finance, law, and politics. A more substantive defining characteristic of The Arts, rather, is the inevitable disparity between intrinsic and popular valuation arising under advanced capitalism and fragmented postmodern culture, a disparity which, as intensely uncomfortable as it is for many artists to verbalize, itself has an unmistakably gendered component. The Arts in fact present a more extreme case of material incentive lying almost entirely on the side of compromise, accommodation, and malleability than most any economic sector Rosin endeavors to chronicle. If those have become, as she argues, highly gendered characteristics, then the valuation discussion indeed takes on a highly gendered character.

Such it is that for a field of endeavor so often and so loudly criticized for representing, literally or figuratively, the interests of male aristocrats and colonists, it is today difficult to locate which upper class privileges, exactly, are being enjoyed by any but the most conventionally successful artists; that is to say, by those exhibiting the ostensibly feminine "willingness to adapt and bend to a fast-changing economic landscape." (TEOM, 270) The true men and women of leisure one encounters in artists' circles are far more likely to have simply inherited a fortune than to be collecting royalties from a hard-won mainstream breakthrough. And yet the rest of us white men do not simply divest ourselves of privilege in one fell swoop by choosing to become workaday professional artists; privilege, or the lack thereof, reproduces itself as long as one continues to exhibit the trait(s) with which it is associated. Such it is that as far out of my lane as I might seem to be these days, I am nonetheless reminded frequently and vividly that white male privilege is powerful enough to moderate even the extreme indignities and vicissitudes of the service sector in ways that most of my co-workers will never enjoy. This makes it hard for me to take seriously any argument that a service economy could ever serve as the backdrop to real feminist progress.

There is more than one reason for the underrepresentation of historically oppressed groups in so many Western artistic disciplines. It starts with good-old-boy politics but it does not end there. Becoming an artist of almost any kind worthy of the name in a world where cultural consensus and common practice have gone extinct is one humongous risk. All artists sign up for certain challenges, but only some see these challenges magnified immeasurably by intersecting oppressions. An arts career is thus a more manageable proposition for someone of my background who can count on relatively fair job interviews and loan approvals and an emergency familial safety net; it is less so for people truly on their own whose lives are already defined by underground discrimination and the daily risk of police brutality and/or sexual assault. Much as health care reform will do more for artists than a hundred NEAs, winning the ability for everyone to count on basic human dignities from their employers and governments is infinitely more central to the task of diversifying perspectives in The Arts than identity-based curating or grantsmanship ever could be.

And so, while I do wonder if my high school teachers, for example, might not be horrified at what has become of me, I can also accept this as a First World Problem. I have a steady job, a roof over my head, and just enough "spare" time to maintain the semblance of a music career working with some very talented people. Make no mistake that the ability to be an uncompromising artist at all and still attain even this basic degree of human dignity has everything to do with having had untold advantages from the outset. As such, I do not and never have considered holding a service sector day job to be in and of itself an affront to my dignity. To conclude from this that I have not been "successful" in life is, on the other hand, beyond an insult.

Indeed, there are always just enough artists of various stripes succeeding in polite bourgeois terms to make the more uncompromising elements look like failures. Just as surely, there will always be a few bourgie busybodies observing all of this from a safe distance and jumping to questionable conclusions; sometimes we meet them after a show, other times in print. Such it is that while the ostensibly cherrypicked, anecdotal nature of Rosin's case studies and her alleged statistical misstatements have proven fertile territory for critics wishing to engage her on her own turf, for me it is the turf she neglects to cover which opens up a far more revealing line of inquiry. Indeed, The Arts had to be more or less ignored to maintain Rosin's central conceits; the life of a modern-day Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Bix Beiderbecke, or Herbie Nichols would blow the roof off of such clean and clear distinctions between success and failure. These men, like virtually everybody else, male or female, artist or not, were both successes and failures, compromising and uncompromised, part Plastic and part Cardboard. The "old architecture of manliness" has seldom been more than an undue burden on The Arts, but nor does consigning The Arts wholesale to the playpen of "mancessories" and "ornamental masculinity" do them justice. Literally, this is not what The End of Men does; by proxy and the occasional odd whiff of hostility, it comes closer.