A FEW THOUGHTS AFTER READING THE LUDIC CITY

Quentin Stevens's The Ludic City adds, I think, a useful wrinkle to thinking about urbanism and city planning by adding the dimension of play to the mix. By play he means the kind of non-instrumental, not-directly-productive, funny, risky activity that people engage in. Walking to work is instrumental; taking a new, longer route out of a desire for adventure is a non-instrumental deviation from that instrumental action. Stevens implicitly argues, and I agree, that this kind of play, novelty, adventure, is a necessary aspect of human life, one that is perpetually being striven for and one that is, due to a number of factors, often challenged or even thwarted. From a design perspective, this means that planners should strive to build with that possibility for play in mind, which paradoxically sometimes means building in spaces that are less defined, less "built," more chaotic, weirder, provocative, and that allow people to inscribe them with their own meanings and subject them to their own practices. It means welcoming a certain risk and disorder to the urban scene.

This isn't a conventional approach for an urban planner, who is striving so often to make life "easier," by rationalizing cities, making them run smoother, making sure human needs like food/shelter/work are met. The non-instrumental play stuff is certainly in the mix, but it's more often seen as a kind of spicy, sexy topping to the food/shelter/work dish. But this approach also doesn't exactly jell with, well, capitalism or the state. Capitalism seeks instrumentality ad infinitum--faster turnaround, quicker movement of capital, leading to faster realization of profit. The state, too, supports this, especially through enforcement of laws and the generalized management or elimination of disorder, hiccups, and the unexpected. We're left, then, with a fundamental contradiction here--the human need for both instrumental and play activity, and the desire of capital to channel any non-instrumental activity into something that generates profit or eliminate the non-instrumental activity that can't be channeled.

This isn't groundbreaking stuff here--it's in many ways Marxist analysis 101 here, because the easy implication of this is that city residents will always have to organize to protect these non-instrumental aspects of their cities and lives as well as to balance this with maintenance of those instrumental aspects they rely on--and what kind of system that requires is obviously up for question. But what does this mean for planners? Well, there's a whole set of expertise v. democracy issues when it comes to the relationship between planners and residents that I don't want to get into, mostly because I don't have a good answer. But it does imply that if planners have the goal of making better cities that fulfill the range of human needs, then they will have to be active supporters of people fighting for play, for non-instrumental uses of space. Which has a whole host of fight-the-power implications. But it also implies that valuing play, and fighting for play to be valued, is a vital item on the progressive planner's agenda.

So what does that fight look like? What tactics can be used to support it?

LINKS TO OLDER STUFF / EGO-DUMP FOR COMPLETISTS ONLY

Talk at the 2011 Labor Day Conference.

Review of Rick Moody's On Celestial Music at Frontier Psychiatrist.

Review of Stephanie Young's Bay Poetics, originally published in Traffic (old school).

Review of Erica Kaufman's Censory Impulse in the Poetry Project Newsletter (pp. 26-27).

TALK FOR CIRQUE DU WORK

This talk was delivered on March 16, 2013, as part of a panel presentation at Cirque du Work at Mills College. Much thanks to Ava Sayaka Rosen and Stephanie Young.

I’m going to start this talk by going on a pretentious tangent and thinking a little bit about the “history” of the American poet’s relationship to 9 to 5 jobs. This may initially feel like putzing around instead of talking about the day to day realities of negotiating wage-working life with life as a writer, but it’ll help get at an idea that forms a backdrop to everything I’ll say. And that idea, to just the ending away up front, is that labor—and I’m including here both paid wage work and the unpaid work we all do to continue to exist—labor profoundly structures how we spend time and energy in our lives, and that this makes it a fundamental shaping force of our creative process and the finished work that comes out of that process. Now, this is kind of stupid-obvious, and saying it makes me feel like I’m 19 again, reading Marx for the first time and thinking I had a this awesome materialist understanding of, like, everything, but looking at the particulars of how this plays out in the lives of myself and others, and thinking about how best to respond to those particulars to ensure a continued creative existence—well, that becomes for me an endlessly fascinating discussion.

But anyway, onward to this “history.” I put “history” in quotes here because while I am talking in part about actual history I’m also talking about currently held perceptions of what it means to be, do, and live as a poet, and regardless of the actual historical accuracy of some of these images, they do tend to exert a controlling force that, full disclosure, I want to do my part to negate. I’m sticking with talking about poets here, particularly from certain avant-garde traditions in the United States, because that’s what I know about, so you may or may not find this resonates with your own experience, but that’s what I’ve got for you.

In any case, the first question I’d ask is, when we say “avant-garde poet,” what image comes to mind? At its most base and stereotypical, we get someone who’s probably a drunk or an addict, possibly has sex with a lot of people, and who isn’t particularly, how shall we say, employed or, how shall we say, employable. Maybe they teach, work some kind of part time job editing technical books, are a mooch, are an independently wealthy scion of a fallen aristocrat family, something like that. They definitely may have worked on an oil freighter or whaling vessel one summer. Overall what they have, though, is plenty of time. I’m thinking of course of your Jack Kerouac type, or your second generation New York School type, but I’m also thinking of certain Bay Area language poets in the 1970s and 80s, writing all day in their shitty apartments and then going to the talk at New Langton Arts or wherever. Now, this typology is, well, oppressive, in that it silences the actual life histories of the numerous poets whose lives were anything but this kind of idyllic avant paradise. That avant-garde poet image almost automatically calls to mind a white male, and indeed, we can be fairly certain that white males had the easiest time living out something like that image—often, we should note, with great assistance from the salaries and unpaid labor of their female partners. But the experiences of living and working poets, whether folks of color of any gender, white women, poets who had caregiving labor to perform for children or others, and yes, including some white men—well, these were also members of these poetic communities, and their lives paint a very different picture of what being a poet looked like, and furthermore, it should be noted that their ongoing engagement with those poetry communities often came with much greater strain and personal costs.

Still, despite these corrective counter-histories, which do really need to be constantly recovered and re-asserted, and despite the myriad economic and social challenges poets faced in eras earlier than ours, I’m going to contend that up until the late 1970s in this country it was broadly easier, from a monetary and work perspective at least, to live the life of this archetypal avant-garde poet than it is today. This is, I think, for all the reasons that one might usually rehearse: flat real wage rates for the middle and working classes for the past 30 years; the rise in the cost of living, including things like rent, food, and higher education; the greater availability of credit and debt-financed consumption to make up for shortfalls in wages; the dynamics of structural unemployment; the slashing of state-sponsored assistance programs starting under Reagan; and more recently the expectation in some jobs of mandatory unpaid overtime and constant availability, and the development of technology that facilitates this colonization of life by work. The net effect, I think, is that it becomes necessary for poets and people in general to have more and more of their time taken up by seeking out, thinking about, and actually doing waged work, in addition to unpaid work like cooking, housework, childcare, and so on. All of this means, despite the real persistence of poets who can, for reasons of age, income, or whatever else, live lives closer to that avant-garde image, all this means that more poets have less time to devote to writing, going to readings, and otherwise going about the business of being poets. That avant-garde archetypal ideal, never achievable for many, has become achievable for even fewer people as time has gone on.

I’m going to talk more about why this isn’t inherently a good or bad thing as far as our writing practices are concerned, but we’ve reached the end of my historical spiel, which gives me the chance to tell you, obviously, about what this history discussion has been leading up to all along, and that, of course, is me. So, about me: I work full time in Oakland at a nonprofit that authors research-based educational curricula for mostly elementary-school-aged students. It’s a fairly small organization, employing about 50 people on site, 10 or so off site, and a cadre of consultants and freelancers numbering about 60 or 70 more. We contract with independent sales representatives in most of the 50 states and do a limited amount of business in Latin America and the Middle East. Working with these reps is where I come into the picture. As Marketing Logistics Coordinator, I oversee the shipping and logistics surrounding marketing samples and collateral, ensuring these materials flow in a timely manner to sales reps and to potential customers throughout the country and internationally. That’s the cover letter version of what I do. What it means in plain English is that I put shit in boxes and send it places. Yes, there are other aspects to my job, including making sure we have enough shit in the office-slash-micro-warehouse to put in boxes and send to places, and those aspects for better or worse are taking on an expanded role in my job, but essentially, that’s what I do: put shit in boxes, send it to places.

So why would anyone want this job? One reason, of course, is that it pays better than any other job I’ve had and provides me with a health insurance plan that can cover my partner and stepson, and believe me, that’s no small reason. But the other ones basically boil down to a few things that set this job apart from what to me are the essentially interchangeable office jobs one sees when trolling through places like Craigslist. First, I actually like the people I work with—my workplace has a pretty high tolerance for weirdos in unconventional business casual, and that makes going to work every day a much more tolerable affair than it otherwise might be. Second, the work I do is fairly independent—I have a lot of control over how I structure and prioritize what goes on during my workday, and that gives me some space to breathe during the 8 or so hours of every day that I’m forced to sell to others. And most importantly, third, this independence couples with the repetitive and relatively mindless nature of the work in such a way that I can reclaim a segment of that 8 hours for my own ends, and particularly for my own education. For the two and a half years that I’ve had this job I’ve been able to listen to my iPod for long, uninterrupted stretches as I’m building samples, packing, and shipping. The audio content is basically whatever I can get my hands on. I’ve listened to BBC documentaries, experimental radio via the Third Coast Audio Festival, large portions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, David Harvey’s lectures on Marx’s Capital, an entire course on financial markets, an entire course on the history of prisons and punishment, a lot of NPR, and bits and pieces of a lot else. Essentially, built into the structure of my job is the opportunity to effectively steal time and, weirdly, still be able to work while I’m doing it.

The degree to which we can steal time has formed a key component in the job choices of many a poet. At my previous job working as a legal assistant, there was also a large amount of dead time that I could use for myself. I wrote the entirety of a collaborative chapbook at work, and a fair portion of other raw writing material was generated there as well. At a certain point with that job, the understimulation of working for a semi-present lawyer in a solo practice and doing a whole lot of dictation and filing eventually rotted my brain and left me with little energy or content to translate into writing, and so I was very happy when I left that job. Incidentally, this points to a pretty important thing to be aware of when it comes to these kinds of jobs, which is that they definitely have a limited shelf life. But still, the underlying principal of seeking out jobs where I can carve out a bit of space for myself has remained, and I think if you ask any poet with an office job whether that was a factor in their decision, you’re going to get a lot of answers in the affirmative. On a practical note, if you’re interested in getting one of those jobs, I’ve had a lot of luck in finding them through temping—both my legal assistant job and my current job started as temp assignments that were a day or two long, and while it’s not really the rule that in a down economy you can automatically turn temp assignments into permanent jobs, the advantage to it is that you can sample workplaces and find ones that distinguish themselves from those interchangeable Craigslist ones I mentioned before, whether due to their friendly environments, their opportunities for time theft, or both.

So yes, a large reason for my choice of job is the chance to reclaim a portion of that work time for myself, for intellectual development or creative work. But working a day job still exerts enormous shaping effects on your time, which brings us back to where this talk began. Where I once might’ve been able to live a life closer to that avant-garde poet image, at this point, between the 8 hours filled with interruptions, phone calls, standing up, sitting down, applying labels, moving packages, and so on, and then going home and doing household and step-parenting work, my life isn’t structured like that mythical poet, and that in turn affects the ways and things I write. It’s not as though my writing practice now no longer in any way resembles the writing practice I had when I was 23, because there’s a lot about it that does, but still, I’m not going to be sitting down to write my epic any time soon, and a four-hour writing and editing binge is a less-than-common event. And as I’ve said, my contention here is that with the ongoing changes in the contemporary realities of work, the kind of work-filled life I’m describing is a more and more common state for people writing today. When you leave school, you may, whether slowly or quickly, find that your life gets more and more work-filled too.

That might freak you out, and I don’t blame you if it does. It freaks me out. I mean, if your writing practice has up to now involved regularly staying up until 3 am or going into some intense quasi-meditative state or something, then feeling yourself being domesticated by a day job can feel pretty fucking awful. But if we can remain open and flexible in how we approach our lives as creative people, then as I said before, these kinds of life changes due to work don’t necessarily need to be so terrible. From where I stand, there are two major choices we can make in response to this kind of constriction in our time: first, we can struggle for that time, fight to carve out and reclaim it for the creative work that sustains us, or second, we can recognize that the dream of being that avant-garde poet with nothing to do but write is less and less viable, and we can accept that this is going to change the way we do writing and the kinds of writing that we produce. So obviously this is a false binary—we all have to do both. As a writer and a human, you need to struggle against forces that perpetually want to take away your time and occupy your space. But I want to emphasize a discussion of the second choice, because I think so many of us, myself included, end up quite unsettled when our writing process and product starts not to jell with our internal conceptions of what “legitimate” writing looks like. But I’d rather have us assert that all writing processes that somehow engage the mind and excite us, no matter how seemingly stupid, minor, or small, are legitimate writing processes that lead to legitimate writing. Not that all of that writing is good, of course, but there’s a difference between good and legitimate. But nonetheless, if as your life and time structures changes, as they inevitably will in some ways, and if you find a way or kind of writing that interests you and that you can manage to fit into that changing life, whatever its structure may be, then latch on to that form of writing, even if it feels weird or not even like writing or art or anything to take seriously, even if it’s not what you think you want your writing to be. The apparent limitations imposed by your life may in fact lead you to produce far more exciting work than you would’ve produced with 24 hours a day devoted to writing.

I’m going to end by quickly talking about what my version of this has been lately. Without really knowing it, I abruptly found that my writing practice had started to include work on what’s about the junkiest medium I can think of: Facebook. It still embarrasses me to claim it as a part of my actual writing practice and not just, like, a place that at best serves as a storehouse of raw material or, at worst, is merely a place to goof off and waste time. But in the process of writing “regular” status updates I more and more found myself posting weird little fragments that have come to feel like a live, ongoing language performance. Some people have wanted to publish them, and invariably, material from there will end up published on paper—I have a chapbook coming out soon that actually grew out of me doing work on Facebook. But I’m not sure that it requires publication on paper to be a legitimate part of my writing practice. Is this project interesting, artistic, good? I’m not sure. Is every status update a part of this “performance”? Probably not, but I don’t know where the border is. Is this whole idea of Facebook writing just lazy, pretentious, and awful? Entirely possible. But it is writing, and I have to accept it as a part of what I do as a writer. It’s one more point in this expanded field of poetry that I see us all continuing to map out together.

PONDERING D

           The following is an essay that aired on KChung 1630 AM radio (Los Angeles area) on August 5, 2012. Thank you to Khalil Huffman for soliciting and broadcasting it.

            Pondering D’Angelo seems never to lose its novelty for me, even in the past dozen years of the man’s conspicuous absence. And so to have him mounting a comeback invariably leads me to one more go-around, now in celebration instead of in a lament. I’m honestly not sure, though, whether it’s wise, because the act of devoting this kind of ponderous attention to him might inadvertently replicate the person-stripping gaze that Michael Eugene Archer was subjected to when his undeniably hot self beamed into cable boxes nationwide in the early 2000s. I’m talking here, of course, about the video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” which tends to overdetermine any discussion of Voodoo, the last record he bestowed upon us, or, well, discussion of anything having to do with D’Angelo. Which is why I want to say at the outset here, before I indeed recite an entire radio commentary about the video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” that were you to wipe that video and perhaps even that majestic song from the historical record, Voodoo would still be an album of such depth and density that even after you’re done listening to this D’Angelo retrospective, you’d be well served pulling the album off the proverbial shelf and putting it in your rotation again.

            But that said, we return to “Untitled,” which for better or worse is a big part of understanding why D’Angelo has been out of sight, except in momentary blips of soliciting undercover police officers or looking like Ol Dirty Bastard in mug shots. If you need a refresher on what exactly happened, you’re probably best off firing up your internet and reading Amy Wallace’s recent GQ article that’s prompted all this discussion about D’s comeback. The short version, though, goes like this: Voodoo comes out in 2000, the video for “Untitled” is released thereabouts as well, D’Angelo becomes the object of intense erotic attention, he starts to feel a little iffy about that when he plays live and has “take it off” shouted at him one too many times, and then once he’s off tour he gradually checks out, deliberately puts on weight to hide behind, and generally escapes into alcohol and coke.

            This is a standard rock star narrative, but there’s a lot about it to engage with, most of all the fact that, as a few writers have pointed out recently, D’Angelo’s experience mirrors the kind of objectification that women have to contend with every day. In her essay on D’Angelo on the site ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg writes that in the usual script, the one that got flipped on D’Angelo, “women’s bodies are dressed up for others’ use, whether it’s to bring visual pleasure or physical pleasure to the people who see them or touch them. Men’s bodies are presented as being for their own use, as sources of strength they can use to save the world, to fight injustice, to perform feats that are impressive and valuable in their own right.” And in responding and expanding on Rosenberg’s writing on Jezebel, Lindy West really drives the point home, writing that “D'Angelo was subjected to the level of physical scrutiny that's built into every woman's life and then immediately went insane” and that “it makes [her] feel proud of women in a dorky way. Somehow, we handle it without taking an 11-year hiatus from our jobs.”

There’s a cliché out there that if men could live for a day in women’s shoes, being subjected to the kind of bodily scrutiny and violence that women learn to live with, then the world would soon become very different. That hypothetical isn’t that useful in the day to day existence of anyone trying to undermine gender oppression, but there’s still a useful page to take out of that book. Pardon my momentary descent into theory here, but if our present day gender order still holds masculinity as an invisible norm, as a rational essence in utter control of male bodies that, as a result, frequently renders those bodies powerfully invisible, utilitarian, or even asexual at times, well, if that’s the state of affairs we’re dealing with, then part of how we might undermine this order is to present bold, even explicit images of men with their particular, attractive, scary, ugly, sexed, unique bodies, making eminently public the fact that anyone of any gender possesses a body, a thing that acts and can be acted upon, a thing with quirks, pains, pleasures, and vulnerabilities. There’s a part of me, then, that wants to imagine that when in the video D’Angelo offers up a full, vulnerable display of his bodily capacity to feel pleasure and be beautiful, that he also offers up a hitherto unrealized feminist media tactic of exactly the sort I’m talking about. But the aftermath of this rare display, those “take it off,” money-throwing responses, had an interesting net effect: it was as though D’Angelo had in fact also offered himself up as a sacrifice to a gender progressive future. He became a kind of male feminist Jesus, dying so that we might all have the chance to be washed clean of sin and reborn into a patriarchy-free paradise.

            Okay, so that’s a little over the top, but it actually does segue well into what I want to say next. Because in coming down from this flight of fancy, the smart analysis we see in Rosenberg’s and West’s essays—and, well, my own analysis too—comes up a tad short. That supposedly universal, unmarked, “normal” body isn’t just male, he’s a bunch of other things too—upper middle class, of moderate build, lacking physical disability, straight, and, well, white. Rosenberg’s statement that “Men’s bodies are presented as being for their own use” gets a lot dicier when you start to discuss images of black male bodies. Black bodies in the US have, of course, literally been considered the property of others, but that’s just the first in a line of controlling images so generously applied. Black men have been surveilled as one or another form of perpetual criminal suspect, whether thief, pimp, hustler, or rapist, and black women in turn have contended with a whole image series of their own, from mammy through jezebel to the welfare queen and onward. This isn’t to say that all black people are immediately categorized as one of the above images by the mass media and affixed firmly in place thereafter, that the media are entirely unable to view black people—or people of color in general—as without nuance or complexity.

But still, there are a lot of images ready to be affixed to those with black skin, and not just quote-unquote negative ones either. As Chris Rock astutely puts it in the GQ article, “I always say Tom Hanks is an amazing actor and Denzel Washington is a god to his people. If you're a black ballerina, you represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?” Lest we think this is coming only from the African-American community, earlier in that article we find mention of Robert Christgau no less, who stated in a concert review in 2000 that D’Angelo “was r&b Jesus, and I'm a believer.” My feminist Jesus has a longer lineage, apparently. Stepping back, we can see that D’Angelo became ensnared in that complicated, ambivalent position of the “Race Man,” that image of a black individual of exceptional, transcendent talent who seemingly takes up the mantle of representing, to black and white people alike, the greatness that black people as a whole are capable of, and a figure who, in an odd way, is almost expected to singlehandedly effect social change. The “Race Man,” as Hazel Carby points out in her book of the same name, is an immensely problematic idea, not in the least bit because the concept itself, down to the name, marginalizes the intellectual and cultural work of black women, whether straight or gay, as well as gay men, or, well, pretty much anyone who deviates from a hetero masculine norm. Now, as an aside, it can be debated whether we’ve seen more instances of the “Race Woman” in recent years, and with Frank Ocean’s game-changing discussion of his relationship with a man, one also wonders whether we’ll see a non-heteronormative subset of the Race Man trope being applied to him as well.

But in any case, in a move that might be even more insidious than this marginalization, what the Race Man trope does is allow for the achievements of a single person to be used to avoid addressing the structural inequalities affecting black and brown people worldwide. Instead, the black genius of a D’Angelo figure is used to imply that those inequalities are over, or at least over-ish, or to magically avoid those inequality questions altogether. From yet another angle, the Race Man is used as a figure to pin one’s own hopes to, to see his work and successes and get a vicarious boost in light of structural factors working to dash one’s own hopes of even a more modest success.

            Now, I don’t want to attempt to psychoanalyze the man of the hour here, but it seems worth noting that all of these images, all of this history—the perpetual suspect, the object of sexual suspicion, the musical wunderkind, the Race Man, the r&b Jesus—this many-headed hydra of objectification would’ve been something D’Angelo was dealing with already, as a black man and a talented musician and performer, before the business with the “Untitled” video came along. But throw into the picture another objectifying gaze—the one that dubbed him a next-level beautiful sex god—and it doesn’t seem so surprising that a sensitive, arty, introspective person might find himself massively overloaded, viewing himself through the eyes of others, and to say to himself, consciously or not, that he needs to do something drastic to reclaim his personhood. Which is why I find myself strangely admiring D’Angelo’s dozen year absence—it was, in a sense, a form of resistance. The doubling of his weight, the obliteration of drugs and drink, the avoidance of the public eye when, like it or not, it’s your bread and butter—all of this can be seen as an unhealthy, unadvisable, and entirely understandable way that D’Angelo negated attempts to be controlled. Like so many coping mechanisms and ways of apparently shoring oneself up against the outside world, the consequences were immense, and I’m overjoyed that instead of hearing news of D’Angelo’s death in that car accident or an overdose or another similarly painful-to-hear story of wayward genius, we have instead an apparently healthy and focused D, who’s found new ways to face the world but who can still slay everyone with “Untitled” at the BET Awards this year. This is the kind of tentatively happy ending I can get behind, and yet there’s still a desire to draw out, if you’ll pardon the pun, an object lesson from all this. But what is that lesson? Has what I’ve said here just been a long-winded way of saying “Leave D’Angelo Alone,” or is there something more to be gleaned from this that might save someone somewhere, whether artist or civilian, from some of the pain of unexpected objecthood? Perhaps if there’s anything to be learned from this, it’s about what can happen when layer upon layer of objectification is applied to a particularly sensitive soul, and to see in that a magnified version of what might happen to anyone, of any race or gender, when faced with this kind of scrutiny of both body and mind. D’Angelo becomes a case study of what we do to each other and what, for everyone’s health, we could stand to do less of. It’d seem, then, that the best thing I can do here after this immense focus on the body and mind of one man is to, well, shut up, to let D’Angelo sing, and let the results speak for themselves as they unfold. But if it’s not clear enough already, I’ve still got to say it: welcome back, D’Angelo. We missed you.