The first and only time I voted was in the 1988 presidential election. I clearly remember walking in that little private wank booth and looking at this strange paper on which I was to mark my selection for this or that candidate. I remember feeling so small, so irrelevant, the process so dehumanizing.I was a nick on a prepopulated page, the same as every other: a nick in a series of identical nicks.

In an effort to overcome my reduction to a number, to reclaim my sense of humanity, I wrote in my choice for president: my grandfather, Isidore Englander. It was reassuring to see my handwritten scrawl on this institutional document and to see a name so close to me, so absolutely idiosyncratic. I was confident that this would be Gramps’ sole vote. This paper would not be one among many; it would be singular.

I never voted again. More than the irrelevance of the act, it’s the demand for anonymity that turns me off. Give me a chance to stand up and voice my opinion, declare my decisions before the masses, and I’d consider voting. But walking into a beaded room bereft of the should-be carnal candy? Eeesh.

I have the same experience when buying things. The exchange of money for goods is prescribed in such a way that seller and consumer need not exchange anything else. This coldness, this reduction of ourselves to mere function, freaks me out. I just can’t do it. I need to have some kind of personal contact — a quick joke, a non-consumer query, a smile,something that acknowledges our respective selves.

Mind you, this is not noble of me. On the contrary, it’s often obnoxious and certainly narcissistic. Some checkout dude at Walgreens shouldn’t have to suffer through my idiotic banter just to help me alleviate my angst.

Breaking personal boundaries is more difficult in the anonymous super stores. These places breed anonymity. Once inside, we become consumers, shopping to some prescribed algorithm. And the employees have no investment whatsoever; they barely acknowledge you. Their only desire is to get out of there as quickly as possible. What do they need, not to mention want, with my anxious interpersonal invasion?

Perhaps there is a freedom to such anonymity. By agreeing that we’re just numbers to each other, we are left alone to do as we will — no need to pass moral, religious, or aesthetic judgement on others. You do your thing; I do my thing. And so it goes. There’s no need for things to get personal.

This is one thing I enjoy about politeness — it allows strangers to be strangers with the least amount of friction. Sometimes, we need things from each other or, in this crowded world, we bump into one another — a simple “excuse me,” “thanks,” or “please” makes the interaction run smoothly.

Still, I have this deep seated desire to break through these barriers, to risk judgement in order to enjoy a whiff of intimacy, however slight. In that moment, there is the possibility of wonder, of the heartfelt and the hilarious, the witty and the surprising.

But that’s not why I do it. My need cannot be justified by anything other than itself: anonymity freaks me out. It’s as though I need the world to recognize me, not just this body, but me. Perhaps if those around me see me as an individual — not as just another customer, consumer, or constituent — then I’ll be better tethered to the earth, less likely to slip into the ether unnoticed.

Ah, yes, this is it: anonymity smacks of death. And, egomaniac narcissist that I am, I believe my individuality will be enough to keep me alive. But only if everyone notices.

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In a run-down bungalow in Los Angeles in 1969, an obscure alcoholic writer sat in a kitchen full of old newspapers and tins of bacon grease, working out his daily living expenses with a pen he borrowed from the manager of a Californian office supply company. Rent, booze, child support, food, cigarettes — about $100 a month, the writer figured.

“OK” said the manager of the office supply company, “if I promise you $100 a month, for life, will you quit your job and focus on writing?”

John Martin paid Charles Bukowski $100 a month, initially out of his own salary at the office supply store, in order to give the writer time to work on the waist-high stack of papers in his closet. It was the foundation of Black Sparrow Press, and the start of Charles Bukowski’s career as a full-time writer.

There’s always been middlemen, ever since someone painted their hand on the wall of a cave in France and someone else (presumably) put a rope around it and started charging for admission. They get between artist and audience, handling the day-to-day realities while the sensitive artist gets to focus on their art. But there’s a Faustian aspect to this model. Artists — successful artists, the chosen few who landed a record deal or a publishing contract — were looked after by the companies that profited from their work, but it wasn’t the interests of the artist that were really being served. Hold a séance and ask Elvis’ ghost what happens when you become successful enough that you never have to hear the word “no.” Or take a look at the insurance policy Albert Grossman took out on Janis Joplin’s life. Big corporations will behave as big corporations always have — that is, psychopathically. And over the years and decades of the 20th century, the corporations got bigger and more psychopathic with every book or record or movie sold. Art is big business, and maybe always was. Whether it’s the moneyed nobility who sponsored Mozart or the record companies that kept Led Zeppelin in hotel rooms and heroin, artists have always needed sponsors. Making art requires money, and promoting it takes even more money, and money is something that artists, especially early in their careers, are not known for having a lot of.

But it’s not the sixties anymore. The times, they have a-changed. We live in a shrunken world, a noisy cell bound in copper wire where anyone can talk to anyone else, no matter where they happen to live. What the old gatekeepers of culture — the publishers, the agents, the record labels — used to offer was exposure. Big deal. In a world where a video of a baby biting his older brother’s finger can get over 400 million views, exposure is not the impossible dream it once was. The barbarians have stormed the gate, and those who made a career out of getting between an artist and their audience are struggling, like all agents, to justify a position that suddenly doesn’t seem so necessary anymore.

For the artist, this is a mixed blessing. The days in which an artist got to focus on their art exclusively are, for the most part, over. Those happy accidents of cultural history — a teenaged Elvis walking into Sam Phillips’ studio to record some songs for his mother; Harrison Ford working as a carpenter on George Lucas’ kitchen — may give us all hope in the power of luck, but they were always the exception, never the rule. The reality, especially now, with record labels and publishing companies trying to squeeze every penny out of a collapsing business model, is that no one’s going to come along out of nowhere and pay you to do what you love.

Few people will shed a tear for the demise of the giant corporations who have been foisted one millionaire mediocrity after another on the public (Ke$ha, anyone?) but there’s more to this than a David/ Goliath dichotomy. It’s no secret that great art is often produced by people utterly incapable of having a normal life. Think of poor earless Vincent or haunted Fyodor; true genius tends to struggle in the world, and it’s hard to imagine the old masters setting up Twitter accounts and providing links to their work on Smashwords or Flickr. The middlemen were supposed to nurture talent like this, handling the details artistic genius skips over on its way to the next big idea. Now that we’re all just one hyperlink away from superstardom, the madmen and sinners who used to create the very best art may be left behind.

If you want to be an artist now, being creative isn’t enough. You have to have a web presence, become a social media expert and sell yourself like some pink-shirted corporate slimeball. You need to somehow combine Kurt Cobain with Donald Trump, and this is probably not why you became an artist in the first place. You wanted to write, to sing, to make beautiful music and images, not sit up late in the night grappling with coding and commenting on other people’s blog posts in the hope they’ll comment on yours. You’ll learn skills you never wanted to have, and the time you used to spend making art will now be swallowed up by the endless task of marketing yourself in a world of seven billion voices, all shouting at once.

It seems daunting. Instead of trying to appeal to a publisher or editor or record label and letting them worry about finding an audience, now you have to go out and build your own audience, one person at a time. You worry that your muse is too delicate, that the pressures of day to day life and the rough winds of capitalism will destroy your art. But if that’s true, yours is a sickly art that deserves to die in any case. The pressures of marketing will crush your creativity from coal to diamond, something rare, hard and beautiful. On a level playing field, quality wins out. An independent artist with a borrowed laptop, making a small coffee last all day while they help themselves to free wi-fi can compete head-to-head with the marketing juggernaut of the big corporations. It’s still not a fair fight, but it’s getting fairer.

Many of my favorite musicians — Astronautalis, Rodney DeCroo, Ceschi –  are people I would never have heard on the radio, or through any traditional media. These are people who might not even have got record deals once upon a time, but they’ve been able to build up a fan base by themselves. More importantly, they’ve been able to do exactly what they wanted, without some chart-brandishing executive spouting gibberish about demographics as though there are no people, only targets. This brave new world of artist-as-promoter is the blank spaces on medieval maps, scary but full of promise. And when you start to see people as well-known as Louis CK or Radiohead abandoning the traditional publishing model they have mastered in favor of a DIY approach, you know something big is happening. The technology-driven democratisation of culture we have witnessed in the past decade has ushered in an era of unparalleled freedom for the creative artist. It may mean pursuing money in a direct way many people feel is at odds with the artistic temperament; but as Gilbert K. Chesterton noted, “Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.” Who would choose to go back to the shackles of corporate control over your art and fifteen percent royalties when there’s a whole wide world out there that you can reach from your couch?

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Dear Doug,

What I find immediately interesting reading your three letters is this: there is enjoyment here. It is at once the reader’s enjoyment, the writer’s enjoyment, and the enjoyment of the texts themselves.

Of course, this “themselves” is an amalgamation of others things, a network of traces and allusions from Lacan and Zizek to Woody Allen and Doctor Who. What binds these diverse elements? What holds this network together? Your writing: your essays are little engines that assemble and stitch sense together.

Why do I find this interesting?  Well, we are discussing the possibility of enjoyment in this here life of ours, what we might call late stage capitalism but in any case can definitely call 21^st Century America.

As you suggest, we live in overwhelming times, a time of anxiety, without a collective narrative to orient us. We search for a semblance of certainty in the nostalgia of Instagram, something to protect us from the “bewildering strangeness of this improbable world.” You conclude: “We don’t need to enjoy ourselves or to make sure that our predetermined projects come off just right, but rather we need to get a sense of how our world is uncanny and unreal. We need to find or manufacture a new kind of space, a new gaze, a new normative principle, that will allow us to live with our anxiety.”

I want to suggest, however, that it is indeed enjoyment we need. Enjoyment is not the same as pleasure. To enjoy something is to live through an event whether it’s good or bad — it is a thorough way of moving through time. Pleasure is an effect; enjoyment is an action. And this is the task at hand: to live through this life without being subsumed by the spectacle or overwhelmed by the vertigo of it all.

So how do I find enjoyment in your writing? Your writing is — as all good writing is — a movement through disparate spaces — I might say “improbable” spaces — that makes sense as it goes. Your writing is a living through the network as you make connections here and there, across time and media and culture, across a network that by definition is not linear and hence is not strictly speaking historical: everything is all at once, a seething simultaneity. Where you find in Instagram a craving for nostalgia to help ground anxiety, I find a liberating vertigo in which the real of yesterday becomes an effect of today, another gesture in the endless proliferation of affects and effects that defines our lives.

The orienting narratives have indeed collapsed and given way to the delirium of the network. The way through the network, the way of the network, is the operation of writing and the proliferation of new kinds of sense. To write the network is to enjoy this life.

This remains cryptic. I will expand in my next letter.

L’chaim,

Daniel

____

Part 5: Politics From the Inside Out

Dear Doug,

Politics, at some point, necessarily entails a “we”: What is it we are to do? And how shall we go about this?

This “we” leads to a certain abstraction as the individual falls away, slips out of the equation. But “we” is always a group of individuals; “we” is not one but is many. And yet the tendency of this “we,” as with any categorical abstraction, is to erase the many, ignore the differences.

So much of what we think of as the political is premised on such abstractions — what is justice, what is the right economic system, what are the collective narratives, how will we rid our fossil fuel dependency.

My fear of such a tendency stems from two related effects. One is that any thinking that erases the individual tends toward violence, toward erasure of the difference that is you or I. The “I” has a difficult time fitting in the “we” and the “we” can be downright nasty in its response. I think of the Seinfeld episode (not to mention the Chinese Cultural Revolution) in which Kramer, marching in the AIDS walk, refuses to wear a ribbon and is pummeled.

And, two, thinking of the political as abstraction makes people believe that politics is elsewhere instead of right here in what he or she does and thinks day in and day out. And this is what matters — not what we do but what you and I and he and she do and think.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the self is a life unto itself, that it’s not created by the collective, by culture (whatever that is). Of course it is: the limits of my thought are defined by a collective discourse. So I am not suggesting that we just focus on the individual and ignore the structural and discursive issues. But I am suggesting that rather than beginning with the abstraction, beginning with “we,” we begin with I. I’m suggesting a kind of inductive politics.

Let’s think about it this way. There is a great mobilization around oil and the exhaustion of the world’s resources — all these people spending money and personal energy trying to rid our dependence on fossil fuels, looking for alternative sources, etc.

Meanwhile, the fuel of human existence is being extinguished right before our very eyes.  Americans are dying — or, better, they’re dead: we are zombies. We work 70-hour weeks and barely make enough to pay the debt on their house, car, 98-inch TV. We are, literally, an impotent society — we need a pill to f-ck.

But still some moron from Greenpeace wants me to give money to save some seal — which will mean I have to work more, further draining the resource that is me.

Our deductive politics keep us at the corporate level, thinking about things in these abstract, dehumanizing ways. But inductive politics, politics that begin with me, what I do every day, what I can do every day, the limits and possibilities of my time, my freedom to think and act and f-ck, then we get the seeds of a truly radical, transformative politics.

Capitalism demands so much of our time — all our time, in fact. We have become indentured servants to the Citis and Chases and Googles of the world.  And none of that will change as long as people think politics is over there, in Iraq or Washington or Wall Street.

If each person considers his or her life, what they are obliged to do just to survive day in and day out, then the shape and functioning of our political structures will emerge. They’ll begin to see what McLuhan calls the environment, the invisible conditions of life.

Being political is not knowing the issues and voting for some creep. Being political is demanding the time to lead a healthy, beautiful life. Being political is demanding basic dignity and civility. Being political is demanding the right, and the time, to enjoy this life.

This is politics from the inside out.

L’chaim,

Daniel

 ____

Part 6: A Politics of Experience, or Cassavetes vs. Ron Howard

Hello Doug,

I wrote to you last time about an inductive politics, a politics from the inside out.  I’d like to flesh that out, as it were, by talking about this very strange thing I will call “experience.” (I’ve been rereading Georges Bataille recently and in particular, “Inner Experience.”)

What’s so strange about experience is that, in many ways, it’s invisible. It’s what an individual lives through. It’s not what happens to someone because the same thing, more or less, can happen to different people. For instance, all of our parents die eventually. But to say that we all experience the death of our parents doesn’t say enough in that that experience will necessarily be different for each of us.

There is this radical particularity to experience: is that how this distinct body happens in the world. It is irreducible and at the same time multiple: I experience many things all at once but it is this particular configuration of multiplicity.

I want to say experience is interior but I don’t want that to mean it is “deep.” And if I say it’s private, I don’t want that privacy juxtaposed with what’s public. Which is to say, I don’t want to create a public/ private or inside/ outside dichotomy. What I do want is to reserve this special space, this special category, for what an individual lives through.

Experience ruptures. It tears at categories and cliché. It will never fit neatly into a bucket and it can never be known beforehand. The problem with Hollywood films is that they present experience as a common event — as a cliché. This is why I come back to Cassevetes again and again. In his films, people experience things in absolutely distinct, unique, and strange ways. This is as true of his viewers as it is of his characters.

Cassavetes doesn’t unite us in a common wave of good feeling or nostalgia the way Ron Howard does. Cassavetes gives us a vision, and an experience, of difference: we don’t walk out feeling elated and sharing a common experience. We walk out of the theater feeling as we feel, each of us distinct.

And here, in Cassavetes and Ron Howard, I see a fundamentally different politics. On the one hand, there’s Howard’s desire to create a grand American narrative: We all lived through the hopes, fears, and dreams of Apollo 11!  On the other, is Cassevetes, who honors experience over collective narrative, difference over sameness.

I see Cassavetes as a great politician, trying to change the way Americans live and interact with each other. And it’s not by isolating us through experience — because experience, while happening alone, does not isolate per se: it merely happens. No, Cassavetes gives us a different kind of politics: a common viewing of difference. It’s not every man for himself. Rather, it’s: every experience is valuable. Live through it!

I suppose my point is this: By focusing on enjoyment, I want to create such a politics of experience.

L’chaim,

Daniel

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The smiling woman who never ages stands there clapping in front of large white boxes with mystery letters inside them, so pleasant and engaged, like an odd mix of “stoned delirium,” she cannot seem to stop clapping. Her jaw muscles are tired, so tired from smiling, her mascara dark rivers down her cheeks that she never cries but wants to. She used to flip the boxes over to expose the letters, when she was younger, but now just pushes a button to make the letter appear from within. She could have been replaced by a remote, but needed a job. So grateful, she claps. Her resume is one single line typed in 72 pt. comic sans. Can clap, nice attitude. Her handprints in front of Disney’s Hollywood studios are the cement version of many unspoken concessions.

The sort of funny looking host, his eyes slowly stretched to his temples, asks three strangers about their respective residencies, vocations, and significant others,  and other attachments, to which a partial list of answers are “my beautiful wife,” “Philly cheese steak,” “programming analyst,” “my loving husband,” “Denver,” “dolphins,” “South Carolina,” “stay-at-home mom,” “senior auditor,” “our aging dog Spence,” etc.  They stand at attention along a wide arc whose fulcrum is a large colorful fiscally bountiful wheel that spins clockwise as if fast forwarding time toward a grand mutual death. Each 360° rotation is capitalism reincarnated, the entropy of “free market” as the roulette of chance. Each click of the spinning wheel is a nanosecond toward hope, a lesson of losing a turn, of glitter, of bankruptcy.

The three strangers each move their mouths incorrectly, daftly buying implicit vowels, buying time with “um,” saying the wrong thing in a surrealist sub-game of exquisite corpse, each offering a line of some disjointed haiku, until one of them, finally, says the right thing and is awarded the aggregate of obtained dollar amounts once segmented into thin shards of ratio pie. The smiling woman will break two capillaries clapping. The stranger with the longest set of numbers at the end is deemed the winner; is the recipient of both signified dollar amounts (before taxes) and looks of indignation cast by the other two second- and third-place strangers, the latter who shall receive a box of long grain rice from which a sad future dinner will be rendered.

A smaller satellite wheel is now spun. The sort of funny looking host removes a card in which the grand prize is hidden. The winning stranger chooses some letters to add to the ones they are entitled to, all of which are exposed in correlation to the letters within the mystery puzzle, words and phrases devised by pale analysts with soft skin whose entire vocation is this. What may be seen now is this incomplete word, or phrase, a provocation of notions of meaning. The smiling woman who never ages, her jaw muscles so sour, knows the sound of two hands clapping, and two high heels clicking — out of the cab and into her massive empty condominium, where she must watch reruns of herself inside bulky televisions from each respective era dangerously balanced next to the bubble bath in which she lies.

The beep as a noun will beep as a verb, breaking the silence after a set of tic-tocs understood and lamented as the negation of time, for the stranger could not gather from the paltry set of letters the right thing to say. This represents a relationship, in that one is often left to guess what to say from a rhetorically vague set of clues. The sort of funny looking man, his temples beginning to rip open, will placate sadness with an “ouch,” or “ew… so close,” then open the card that reads $35,000 in bold sans serif font, at which the succumbed stranger will stare with disappointment and growing self-hatred. The announcer will now announce the hotel where the strangers had been staying at, as the hotel provided a subsidized rate per room in exchange for this exact measure. This subtle ad will be embodied in a photo of one of the rooms, its bed perfectly made and empty, an emptiness felt that night by the disappointed stranger who could not gather the correct words, in fetal position and a room-service chocolate mint melting at the roof of their mouth, before the fist a.m. flight home.

It is late November and soon large inflatable Christmas decorations will rise from the frozen suburban earth like mushrooms after heavy rain. I don’t know their story, I don’t want to Google the history of contemporary holiday kitsch. That kind of research should be categorized as unethical. The FBI should track interest in this subject as part of a broader national security effort, an undercover sting operation seeking out those responsible for disseminating the trade secrets that make the construction of these offending items possible. That’s a Law and Order I would watch, in marathon form, while I nod off into a lovely first-world food coma.

I would imagine these criminal masterminds also have something to do with the incessant rotation of Christmas pop music over retail store sound systems, and are, by way of Hammurabi’s code, entitled to having their ears ripped off for every time I am forced to endure “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”

I have often been accused of being a “humbug” which makes absolutely no sense. A humbug isn’t someone who hates Christmas, it’s just a word that means, more or less, “bullsh-t” that was said frequently by a fictional character who happened to really hate Christmas. Who the hell hates Christmas? I just hate how everyone else celebrates it, and every time I open my mouth I’m accused of being behind some kind of Grinch-like terrorist communist plot against the holidays.

I like Christmas. I love my family, my friends, exchanging thoughtful gifts with the people I care about the most. I love home-cooked holiday meals and the warm familiarity of tradition. Setting up the tree, reclining into piles of wrapping paper, watching an endless loop of A Christmas Story, the delicate understanding established between myself and my parents when I joined the ranks of those who knew what was up with Santa Claus while my younger siblings still did not — these things matter to me, very deeply. They are mine, my own ways of remembering and celebrating what is important in my life.

But what it is about this annual rediscovery of sentiment and appreciation for the things we love that leads people to divert their energies into constructing elaborate light displays and transforming their lawns into a cartoonish nightmare landscapes? What could compel a house, such as the one down the street from me, with peeling paint and rusted-out frames of ancient automobiles littering the property, to spend hundreds of dollars on lights and inflatable Christmas decorations and the electricity bills to support them? What drives a society to line up outside malls in the bitter cold of an early morning, chasing sales, in the vain hope of saving $100 on a TV?

Maybe it’s just what Christmas is, to a lot of people, lights and awful music, spending money on things they don’t need, getting stuffed with enough good food and material possessions to grease the wheels for another year and make life bearable. Sometimes, I think that as Americans, we have found the holiday spirit we deserve, a glorification of excess in every form. That’s what it means to be one of us — if you’re going to to do it, do it big. The founding fathers worried that it would be impossible to make democracy work over such a huge place, but with a few compromises here and there and some questionable legal maneuvers, things have more or less worked out. We sacrifice our principles for a greater purpose, maybe the greatest — our own satisfaction. Nothing stands in our way, even ourselves.

However hard I may grimace at the consumerism and demoralizing lack of taste that are inseparable from the Christmas season, my cynical urges melt away in the face of what’s underneath them. Honestly, what the hell do I know? I’m not those people, and I can’t say what it is that inspires others, let alone judge them for it. There could be just as much warmth and tradition in those god-awful, gaudy decoration displays. Maybe you waiting in line on Black Friday is not a parable for the parasitic, dehumanizing nature of capitalism and its destruction of our most hallowed institutions. Maybe your radio station is set to one of those all-day, all-night Christmas music loops, and you look forward to the feeling that comes along with it every year, to connect you with some distant memory.

It could be that you think of the others who used to help set up the lights, or taught you how to as a child, the ones who you used to sing along with to those songs. You think of the people who are no longer with you, and suddenly these mundane things that appear to others as frivolous or superficial are beyond criticism, because they are you, the rituals that made you, what keeps you whole when thinking of what you’ve lost. That would really shut up a cynical humbug bastard like me. In fact, it already has.

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What I often saw in New York were the Stranded. Those who wanted life, energy, and culture and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else to get what they needed. Those who believed in city culture and that the only way to have a rich life was to be around a lot of people.

I sometimes think about what I would have become had I stayed in the country and not lived in cities throughout my 20s. If you had stayed where you were raised what strength would you have retained? You wouldn’t know as much about the outer world, but you also wouldn’t have lost connections to both your land and your people. I try not to torture myself over this, though. Life is a river, right? It goes where it must. The only control you really have is deciding who gets on your boat.

A few years ago I found myself walking down a street in Tver, Russia with a new friend. She was studying linguistics at Moscow State University and we were talking about her life there.

“Everyone in Russia believe Moscow is city of opportunity,” she said.

“Do you think it’s true?”

“Yes,” she said. “Is true.”

There are people who still believe that about New York City. I’m not one of them. New York made me feel naïve in a lot of other ways, but I was never naïve enough to believe this city wanted me, had room for one more, or would open a single door. Most of the doors there require a password.

When asked I told people that I was moving here because it was the place to get a job in media. People seemed to think that was a reasonable, practical idea, and then we could talk about something else. I was never foolish enough to believe this writing business would yield success based on merit of work alone.

Aside from the thespians who need stages and live audiences, artists don’t need to move to New York. Sure, there is a bit of camaraderie between you and all your struggling friends who work at your restaurant, but if you need to be around other creative people to feel like an artist then maybe you aren’t one.

Disregarding the chances at nepotism (what people like to call networking), I don’t understand why anyone who hasn’t made it yet and is serious about getting work done would want to stay there. The rent is too damn high. Your time is rarely your own. The city spreads its anxieties and its cutthroat attitude, and they’re both contagious. It’s a great city for a young professional in advertising, or journalism, or publishing, or any other career where you go to work, make your money, and leave your work at work.

For the artist working a day job there is the constant battle between life and work and there is not enough time for both. You’re never going to conquer that city, but there is a very real chance of it conquering you.

Once New York has you in its jaws you’re not getting away without losing at least a little blood. I met a lot of people who seemed stuck. People who had traveled, were cultured, who wanted to live in America and repeated, in one form or another, “how do you live anywhere else in America once you’ve lived here?” It’s true, New York is as culturally significant as any other city in the world, maybe the most significant. I understand that people want community, want to feel like they’re part of something historically significant, to be able to say “I lived there during that time.” It’s a romantic notion. Ah, to be young in Paris in the 1920s. But Brooklyn isn’t ever going to be Paris. For one thing, it’s too expensive.

If you actually want to work, to create, to get things done, leave New York. If you do move and you like city life you won’t like where you live as much. New York does city life to perfection. Another place won’t be as exciting. You’ll have less opportunities to experience city culture. But what you will have is more space to live and more time to work.

You have to fight too hard to get work done in New York. And the city wants to beat you. There is no shame in wanting to leave the pitfalls and distractions to go get things done. I’m not saying you need to go hole up in the woods and write “For Emma, Forever Ago.” I’m just saying leave the empire city to the culture obsessed, to the consumers, the 24-hour party people, the proud-to-be-New-Yorkers. It doesn’t really matter if you don’t know how to find the new vegan meatball shop in Williamsburg. New York doesn’t care if you fail. People come to town and do it all the time. Working at a coffeeshop and living in Bed-Stuy or Crown Heights, where you are too poor to really live how you want to anyway, is nothing you should fall in love with.

While it may be true that the amount of “creative types” in a city affects the general quality of life of the city’s residents, what about the quality of life of those creative types in those cities? Alicia Keys can sing all she wants about how the bright lights of New York will inspire you. People love to overstate the quality of “energy” there, but all the inspiration a metropolis can offer is valueless if you don’t have the time or discipline to render it into art. Inspiration, if you even believe it exists, is fleeting. It comes unbidden and leaves the same way. Without routine and time set aside to create, inspiration is a submarine screen door, windshield wipers on the ass of a duck.

Try it if you must. Move to New York if you want to get drunk in the best bars in the world, eat at incredible restaurants, have a lot of meaningless sex, see great live music, and feel like you live in a culturally relevant place. It’s all there. New York’s safe now. It’s economically a little better off than most of America. With a little luck and some people skills you’ll find a job and a decent place to live. But be careful when you’re making the decision. You might get caught up in all of that. You might get stranded. You might give up on what you went there to be.

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I never spent much time at those big, glistening department stores growing up. They were always a bit out of my family’s price range, in some upper echelon of consumerism that we could never quite reach. Even now, into my adulthood, I’ve managed to avoid spending more than a few minutes in one – because, really? $40 for a shirt? – and I’ve never felt myself lesser for it.

Today, however, my roommate came home with a well-fitting, reasonably priced sport coat from a particular department store — let’s call it a Mid-Level Department Store, or MLDS for short. Granted, my roommate is a normal-sized person, one for whom clothiers actually manufacture their goods (by the way, can us little guys get our own version of a “Big & Tall” section? “Tiny & Diminutive,” perhaps?). Nevertheless, my curiosity got the best of me: what if I had been missing out for all these years? What if MLDS was a big secret that I had never been let in on? What if everything there was cheap, and well made, and the hangers were made of candy, and they handed you a puppy on your way in?

And so, at my roommate’s behest, I decided to give it a shot. I checked my bank account, wept accordingly, and threw on my backpack before heading out the door. Because, you know, when you’re a baby-faced twenty-something, nothing says high fashion like wearing a go-ahead-security-I-dare-you-to-search-me backpack into an MLDS.

Unfortunately, when I got there, what I found was not the castle made of ice cream from my fantasies – rather, what I found was a bleak, desolate complex of American capitalism; a stoic testament to the crumbling financial state of the nation and the companies’ struggle to fight it all off. Rows and rows of fully stocked racks, as far as the eye could see, littered with brightly colored signs imploring me to figure out what $275 minus 35% is.

And just when you think it’s over, right when you’re thinking, “Well, I’ve seen all there is to see here,” you turn a corner, walk down some hallway-wormhole-portal, and find yourself in a completely new wing of the store whose existence, looking at the building from the outside, you’d swear is architecturally impossible. This happens three or four more times, and you begin to question whether this is all a dream, and somewhere out in the real world, your body is asleep between an M.C. Escher painting and a Ralph Lauren catalog. And that’s just for the boys. The men’s section of the store, mind you, occupies a floor and a half. This building has seven floors.

The labyrinth isn’t even inherently all that bad. I read Hansel & Gretel; I know how to walk backwards. No, the worst part is that the mythical Minotaur isn’t waiting for you in the heart of the maze. It’s occupying every inch of it, in the hopeless, glazed-over eyes of the store employees.

Sometimes you’ll find them in packs – standing by the shoes, talking about how well Michigan State is doing this year. Other times, they’ll be alone, banished to some obscure corner of the store, relegated to folding and re-folding pants or polishing off a shelf in anticipation of a crazy horde of shoppers that will never, ever come. But no matter where they are, they all have the same depressingly hopeful look in their eyes, like today’s gonna be the day they finally make that big sale.

So God forbid you happen upon eye contact with one of them – not so much for their sake as for yours. I don’t mind being asked if I need any help. I am a customer, after all. But please, please don’t give me those puppy dog eyes when I tell you that I’m just looking around. You make me feel like I’m breaking up with you. “But baby, I can change! We can get you measured if you’re not sure what size you need! You can’t leave, you complete me! Okay, but if you change your mind about needing anything, I’m Tim. That’s T-I-M. Like Jim, but with a T. Here’s my card. Call me!”

It’s not you, MLDS. It’s me. Maybe we’ll meet again in the future; I’ll be married, you’ll be financially restructured. We’ll both have relocated. And we’ll grab coffee, and laugh about the first time we met. It took me 40 minutes to find the v-neck sweaters, and when I got there, they were $80 outside of my budget.

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1. On my way out of the interview I accidentally locked the supervisor’s door. I went out after him, and as we were leaving I decided to close it, out of courtesy. As it was about to click shut he yelled “Nooooooo!” like he’d been possessed by a husky demon. Then it shut. He said something about having to go upstairs and get another key and gave me a handshake that more or less defined perfunctory.
2. He asked me what I knew about working in advertising and I said “I watch a lot of Mad Men!”
3. My e-mail address has the word “extreme” in it but I refuse to get a more professional one out of a misguided certainty that my true boss/mentor will embrace my idiosyncratic defiance of common sense.
4. He named their biggest client and I said, “Oh, they make (brand name product)! I love that stuff!” To which he replied, “No. That’s our biggest rival.”
5. He asked “Have you seen our website?” and I said “I perused it.” Nervous Me may or may not equal needlessly verbose Me.
6. I am assuming the supervisor had some sort of clairvoyant power and brain-searched me to discover that I have literally never used Excel in my life. Which is true. BUT HOW DOES HE KNOW?
7. They were looking for math-proficient, detail-oriented, highly organized people who define themselves as type A. I am an English major who has misplaced five pairs of glasses in the past 8 months. I wish that was an exaggeration.
8. My nylons had cream cheese on them. Long, bagel-related story.
9. It was raining, and I brought an umbrella, and on the way out I said “Oh, good, I think it stopped raining.” He peered out the window for a moment and said “No, it’s definitely still raining.” I’m assuming that he believes accurately discerning precipitation to be of utmost importance in a suitable candidate. F-ck.

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A bracingly original thinker about the Brazilian cultural psyche, Gunter Axt—university professor, cultural historian, public intellectual—is the sort of Big Thinker who accessorizes his blazer-and-blue jeans costume with an ’80s-ironic necktie studded with Swarovski crystals; who thrills to the sharp-elbowed debates inspired by his appearances on Brazilian TV and his columns for magazines such as Cult and Voto; who exults in conversational hyperlinking, segueing from masculinity and homophobia in Brazil to the role of Afro-Brazilian syncretic religions in the Brazilian cultural unconscious to the myth of Brazil as a post-racial heterotopia versus the racial realities of Brazilian society, with detours—pass the cachaça, will you?—down discursive byways leading to District 9, The Hurt Locker, and Avatar.

Gunter Axt

At the same time, Axt thrives in his roles as visiting professor at the Université Denis Diderot in Paris; consultant on cultural heritage to the Legislative Assembly of Rio Grande do Sul, to that state’s public prosecutor, and to the Brazilian supreme court; and as curator of the international lecture series Boundaries of Contemporary Thought in Porto Alegre (where—full disclosure—he hosted me as a featured speaker).

Yet he’s no less in his element as a carnival reveler, shaking it to the boombastic sounds of a live band and earthquaking sound system on a float several stories high, as he did at the 2009 mega-party in Salvador da Bahia alongside Camille Paglia, improbably enough. (That was Axt on Daniela Mercury’s trio elétrico, a kind of motorized bandstand, gyrating as the Brazilian pop star sang “Oyá Tê Tê,” a frenzied paean to Iansä, the goddess of wind and storm sacred to the Afro-Brazilian religion of candomblé.)

Axt is the sort of thinker who tosses off aperçus like “any concern with the image that others may have of us [as Brazilians] is far from being the hegemonic lever of our becoming” and, a few paragraphs later, compares the Mexican social theorist José Vasconcelos Calderón’s unclassifiable book Raça Cósmica to “a metaphysical hallucination, as if it were written over the Andes, under the hypnotic and psychedelic influence of an enormous joint!”

In the epic interview that follows, Axt walks U.S. readers through Brazil’s storied history and foundational myths—mash-ups of sacred and secular, high and low culture, European and African and indigenous elements.

Ever wondered about Calderón’s “unexpected assertion that Native Americans are descendants of the inhabitants of the mythical Lemuria”? So has Axt. Curious to know about the racial roots of the straight male obsession, in Brazil, with the female booty, and its relation to the mythical moura encantada, or “Enchanted Moor,” of Portuguese fairy tales and folklore? Axt has it down cold. Given much thought to “carnival as an escape valve for social pressure in rigidly hierarchical societies,” and its special relevance to our age of anti-terrorist paranoia, when surveillance is ubiquitous, public space is militarized, and crowds, no matter how law-abiding, are kettled and maced? Axt has, and he’s got the Bakhtinian op cits and ibids to prove it.

In the pages that follow, Axt interprets the historical narratives and contemporary dreams of a country whose economic and geopolitical shadow stretches longer and longer across global affairs; a country that, to America’s snooze-alarm surprise, sees the 21^st century, increasingly, as the Brazilian Century, at least in the context of the Americas.

Brazilian intellectuals are fond of quoting Stefan Zweig, who in 1941 called Brazil “the country of the future.” Axt likes to quote the French economist Guy Sorman, who said that the future was already in Brazil.

That was in 2008.

At St. Mark’s bookshop the other night, after skimming through “the sex issue” of Time Out: New York, I picked up the “American Autumn” issue of Ad Busters. I was so moved by it, the beautiful images, the elegant words, and its overall extremist/fanatical take on the world. Then one piece more than any other stood out and shot through me so intensely: a visual essay in tribute to the great John Berger. Its headline – “THE BEST WAY TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD IS TO SEE IT NOT AS A METAPHORICAL PRISION, BUT A LITERAL ONE.” The copy was complemented by a vast, macro image of a city illustrating the way urban landscapes look from afar like concentration camps. On the next page, there was an image of a ‘human’ squashed miserably ‘like a sardine’ into an overpacked subway car.

What moved me so deeply was how relatable this way of seeing was to me, how it gave a visual language to my own worldview. I’ve felt this hopelessness for a long time now. In high school, I recall the oppression dawning on me. First, I felt imprisoned in my genetic code and the borders of my body. My genes (XY) controlled me like binary (01) controlled a computer. As far as my body, it was literally a biological cell. And naturally I took this sentiment even further, making it pervasive and concluding my home was a prison, my school was a prison, my state was a prison, this country was a prison, this stratosphere was a prison, and this entire universe was a prison. This feeling eventually solidified into a philosophy, an ethics with the premise that the “good life” was not about being happy but simply withstanding suffering with fortitude.

What confuses me about certain segments of the #OCCUPYWALLSTREET insurgence, particularly the 99% Tumblr page is the way they operate under the assumption they are entitled to a good life or even decent life. My confusion stems more from curiosity than criticism. How did this worldview of entitlement emerge? What history books did they read?  What romantic movies brainwashed into thinking life would be OK? Who told them life was fair? Who said things were supposed to work out? And why did they believe them?

This vision of the world as a good place is so foreign to me. It never occurred to me that I might be happy or alright someday. I dropped out of high school at seventeen and started working. I’ve been toiling endlessly everyday since as a slave to this system. It sucks. But this is life. Misery, heartache, death — this is all I ever expected from the world.

I know this makes me out to sound a bit psychopathic, or sociopathic. But I like to think it stems a bit deeper than mental illness, I like to think it stems ironically from a sense of empathy and historical awareness. After the Holocaust, the philosopher and Jewish refuge of Nazi Germany, Theodor Adorno, famously declared: “THERE CAN BE NO POETRY AFTER AUSCHWITZ” (noten zur literature). You can take this quote a lot of different ways. But one of the more popularized interpretations is that after the catastrophe of World War II, humanity must operate in a constant state of mourning. That is, there can be no music, no poetry, no joy in the wake of the suffering of the past. I sympathize with this sentiment and this claim of entitlement to anything at all does in a historical context seem a bit crass to me.

Perhaps I’m jealous of so many people’s bright-eyed approach to life: this ability to dream of a better life, which I’ve sadly never been capable of. Or perhaps I’m furious at their naïve complacency.  Whatever it is, I’m not judging. I’m just articulating my interpretation.

To end on a more positive note, this philosopher, Theodor Adorno, he belonged to the Frankfurt School, a group of thinkers and activists essentially made up of Marxists –– people who believed in utopia on earth. They clamored for this perfect world, but ultimately became disillusioned. Yet, they still continued to imagine or hold out for this world despite its impossibility. For even if it was impossible, they still had to dream the impossible. And with that, I’ll confess there is and always will be, a residue of hope in me, a belief that the deus ex machina is not just a stupid plot device in bad romantic movies, but the means of the ultimate redemption of history and humanity.

In sum, it’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).

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