If you are a frequent reader of this blog and my work elsewhere, chances are pretty good that you are personally acquainted with someone who makes their living in the creative sector: writers, painters, commercial and graphic artists, actors, dancers, musicians of all stripe, architects, sculptors; in short, anyone who earns a living from cultural, artistic, and design goods and services.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that one in every four creative arts jobs are located in the Los Angeles or New York area, according to data collected in 2006, the last time the Bureau crunched the numbers.
The 2010 Otis Report on the Creative Economy of the Los Angeles Region, commissioned by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, describes the creative sector as “consisting of professionals and enterprises that take powerful, original ideas and transform them into practical and often beautiful goods, or inspire us with their artistry.”
Despite the ravages of the Great Recession, the 2010 Otis Report summarizes that “in 2009 the creative sector remained robust in Southern California … continuing to support one in six jobs in the region, generating an estimated $127 billion in sales revenues and $4.6 in state and local tax revenues. It held its place as the one of the largest business sectors, and was, in fact, the second largest in Los Angeles County.”
As a significant economic driver, the creative sector ranks second behind tourism and hospitality in Southern California … is it any wonder then that I am trying to put this “carny town”, as novelist Ross MacDonald called Las Vegas, behind me and get back to L.A. where I belong and where I have spent the vast majority of my time as thriving creative artist?
The aim of the Otis Report was to “put real numbers to the contributions of arts and creative professionals … and (to) debunk the myth of the starving artist.”
On the last point, the so-called myth of the starving artist, I beg to differ with the authors of the report.
Since my New Homeless series began running in the Las Vegas Sun in September I have received literally dozens of e-mails, letters, and private messages on social networks (Facebook, Twitter) from colleagues in the creative sector – many of them complete strangers – who are all drifting in the same leaky boat, writing to thank me for my “courage” in telling my story as a writer whose income and sheer survival has been challenged by these hard economic times. These letters are coming from your friends and neighbors who wish to remain anonymous, for the most part.
“I’m encouraged by your bravery in being ‘out’ as a homeless person,” an east coast political columnist wrote me in October. “I am not out — I get enough hate mail for writing op-eds in the local paper. I haven’t been willing to deal with the kind of responses you received after your first piece in the LV Sun. I’ve made bad decisions along the way, but does that mean I should get put out on an ice floe?”
Citing the media attention that I have received from TV4 Sweden, Belgian Public Television, and La Presse in Montreal, she goes on to say: “It’s interesting that European and Canadian media aren’t afraid of your story, but U.S. media are avoiding it like the plague. I know from listening to NPR that Wall Street is good, therefore the economy is recovering. Very little of real life is reflected anywhere in the U.S. media. It’s disheartening, to say the least.”
The story that this talented writer is afraid to go public with is one that I am reading more and more often in my e-mail inbox:
“I’m having my own homeless experience here in —,” she explains. “It’s a long story that includes me spending 2009 as a caregiver to my husband who was dying of cancer. I’ve been out of full time work for almost three years. I recently moved to a trailer on a friend’s property, but I don’t get cell phone reception there, and it’s taking a while to get an internet hookup. It’s in the middle of nowhere.”
Only two days ago I received a message on Facebook from a mutual friend of a colleague that strikes a similar tone:
“I just read the (Las Vegas Sun) articles and saw the three videos. We aren’t living in a $200 week hotel but I understand how you feel about judgments that have been made about you. My husband is 49 and was freelancing for the past 2 years because the family graphic art business went under. During this time we lost our health insurance and we were attempting to find him a job so that we could get it back.
“During the 6 short months that we were without insurance my husband was diagnosed with acute leukemia. We had to go on Medicaid and the judgments and comments started. He was diagnosed on December 24, 09 and he is currently in a wheel chair because of complications from a bone marrow transplant. We live on social security and food stamps and we both have college degrees. We also are taking care of our four children. Our financial status isn’t as severe but we live on very little right now. Just to let you know that I understand I am in your corner.”
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Karl Paniczny, a freelance illustrator and artist, came across this blog after reading my profiles of my friend, novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, for Pop Matters.
“I just wanted to tell you that there are other people out here, people like me, and other ‘artists/writers’ that I know of at least; and we are hurting. I think we can totally and completely relate to what you’re going through,” Karl wrote in a 1,000-word e-mail, infuriated at and moved to write by the scornful comments I received at the online version of the Sun.
“It’s not a good time, economically,” Karl continues. “It doesn’t seem to be getting better either, unfortunately. In addition, your article really frightened me; as I could see my own future, easily becoming exactly what you’re undergoing right now. I feel for you, and I understand just how hard it is when you work for yourself and when you work in a field that doesn’t ‘advertise’ in newspapers or ‘help wanted’ columns. I really think most people don’t understand that ‘working’ in the arts isn’t like working in other fields; it just doesn’t happen that way. I’m reminded of a quote from William S. Burroughs, I forget the actual quote but it basically stated how there is a certain amount of ‘assurance’ with (commonplace professional) jobs … like being a doctor or a lawyer but being a creative artist doesn’t afford that same day to day assurance — it’s sort of the price that is paid by having a job in a ‘creative’ or ‘artistic’ field.”
One commenter at the Sun observed that “a writer, poet, photographer, etc., needs a day job, some skill or trade”, without believing, apparently, that the ability to write effectively, create moving poetry, or take a photograph that can move one to tears or laughter requires “skill”. This is a typical attitude.
“There are a lot of freelancers who claim they work hard but the reality is that most of them never put in a 40 hour week,” a commenter on part two of the New Homeless offered. “It’s a nice gig. You can make your own hours, dress as you please. So what if lunch lasts longer than 45 minutes? Need to pick up dry cleaning? You can go mid-afternoon. Feel like waking up a little later? No problem … most freelancers do what they do because they like the idea of working from home. No real boss breathing down your neck. No 9-5. No dress code. The problem is that most can barely get by.”
Feeding off of the above field observation of the life of the freelance creative artist, another reader opined that “being a professional writer makes the assumption that you think that what you have to say is of such tremendous worth to others that you should be well compensated for your efforts and exempt from such menial tasks as manual labor.”
And now we get to the heart of the hatred. In Down and Out in Paris and London, social critic (and author of the classic novels Animal Farm and 1984) George Orwell observed that in Western thinking we calculate that labor, in order to be considered “honest”, has to be “hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work.” Orwell made that observation in 1933.
“I am trying to go beyond the immediate economic cause,” Orwell writes. “and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes (in a restaurant kitchen) for life. For there is no doubt that people – comfortably situated people – do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping … I believe that the instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at the bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.”
An extraordinary number of readers at the Sun believed that I would be better off “swabbing dishes” or even being a greeter at Wal-Mart; others were harsher in their directives:
“Get your entitled ass back to California or some other welfare state. I refuse to subsidize your self-destructive way of life here and will gladly watch you and your evolutionary backwards behavior die on the side of the road.”
Regarding such hate-filled screeds, Karl Paniczny concluded his long e-mail with the following:
“Well, I wanted you to know that not everyone who read your piece derived the idea that your article was merely some whining and complaining from someone who has ‘made their own bed’ and is now ‘reaping what they have sown.’ I understood immediately, the intent of the article, unfortunately it appeared that people didn’t; in fact, most of them didn’t even seem to ACTUALLY read the article at all. What an awful, judgmental and callous group of people we have in our country-all claim to be ‘just telling the truth’. What does that even mean? Whose truth? Their own particular truth’? What they’ve been told by 24 hour News Media (which rarely if ever gives more than a cursory and superficial understanding of ‘current events’ and news anyway)? What ‘truth’ are they, supposedly, telling you? Personally, I don’t think it’s ‘truth’ they are trying to impart at all. Nor do I feel they are ‘just trying to help’ you out either — as I read one of them say. I think it’s merely a way for these people to ‘feel’, that they are, somehow above and ‘better than’ those who may be struggling, or less fortunate.”
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On December 5 the Las Vegas Sun will run part three of my New Homeless series; the original plan was to run the piece on Thanksgiving or the weekend thereafter. The decision to withhold publication for another week has already begun to wreak a negative economic impact.
As of this evening we have less than $20 $0 to our name, most of those funds on Pay Pal; tomorrow morning Lela has to take the bus to the welfare office on Rancho to sign paperwork to complete her application for SNAP benefits (this proactive move instigated by her superiors at the Threesquare food bank where she volunteers once a week in an effort to “pay it forward” to the Vegas Valley residents who have assisted us this far); after that trip to the welfare office there will be no funds left for her monthly bus pass so we have no idea how she will get to Threesquare on Friday or how I will pick up my prescription from my doctor’s office on Tuesday.
“If we don’t have $208 for rent on Wednesday,” I snapped at Lela this evening in a mild explosion of repressed stress, “it won’t matter about the goddamn bus pass because we will be locked out of our room and sleeping on the sidewalk.”
We are flat broke. We are the proverbial “starving artists” that the Otis Report hoped to debunk. We’re out there and there are thousands and thousands more like us in the night.
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At least twice a week people like the talented writer whom I cited at the beginning of this piece continue to write and thank me for being a face and voice for them. Even though many of them have a public venue to do so, they are too ashamed or afraid of slings and arrows to step forward and tell their stories. I cannot fault them, as I did initially. The hundreds of painful comments have scarred my psyche permanently and I would not wish the experience on anyone. My example has frightened them into silence – sort of the opposite of my original intent.
There is preliminary interest, as I have noted previously, from a significant publisher for a book based on my experiences, a modern retelling, if you will, of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London – the stories at the Sun, after all, only render a small slice of a larger story that goes back three years ago to my days among the floating population of the neo-Beats in contemporary North Beach, San Francisco, a time of my life I had always intended to write about (and I have explored the subject briefly in Depression 2.0: Sunday in Kerouac Alley for Pop Matters).
I will write the book. And we will somehow make it back to L.A., hopefully sooner than later – the Otis Report and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics bear out the truth that I need to be in Los Angeles or New York, not in the icy, frigid, wind-blown territory that is Southern Nevada in the winter.
The WPA Writer’s Project employed 6,600 writers. It did not launch until the Great Depression was already six years old. There is no WPA Writer’s Project on the horizon today, only EBT and Kafka medicine. And I doubt there will be on in 2013.
I think the immediate future will only offer more shakeouts before it offers better times. Right now the world of bookchat, litchat, and commentary is so meretricious and publicity-driven that everybody “knows better” than to support anyone’s cause but their own. Furiously-flapping fruit bats flitting about a cave at dusk is the image that comes to mind. But that was true for writers in the early 1930s too, when newspapers, for instance, were mostly edited by publicists beholden to the wealthy, as today.
Advertisers jumped to radio in that 1930′s climate, a key decision. When advertisers jump to the Internet to escape the stigma of print, that will help writers, I think, especially if they’re allied with other writers.
To scapegoat the powerless Democrats, the dead-ender Republicans, or anybody at all is futile to the cause of finding sustained support. Writers may need to huddle to stay solvent and instead most of them are feigning more and more privilege to distinguish themselves from the needy. That, to my mind, is a losing long-term strategy. Writers need to form sturdy bands with other writers, even if it is against their nature, as they did in the 1930′s. They need to belong to groups, to movements, to group blogs; they need to share readers and advertisers; they need to share money and effort. Nobody else is going to do it for them, for a long time, anyway; that’s obvious.