CLOTHESLINE

HOMEOWNERS ASSOCIATIONS are fierce guardians of design morality, yard upkeep, and homogeneous property values. They've politely mentioned to a friend that her clothesline is not an approved landscaping feature. Of course they're polite. Bigotry and reminding folks that they have stepped outside accepted standards is always begun politely.

Her homeowners association is cowering before the persistence of image. When they see her clothes fluttering in the breeze, they don’t see a farm wife in the prairie wind but the stigma of the tenements, all those clotheslines hung between buildings, in air shafts, on tar roofs.

As a journalist, I should greet the association’s wet-jammie jitters as a compliment, since it stems in some part from one of the earliest and most powerful landmarks of photojournalism, Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements In New York, 1890. This photo essay made an indelible impression on middle and upper class consciousness and persists to this day. It revealed the “shame of the squalid tenements.” A few efforts were made toward improving conditions but it was clear that the shame resided with the tenement dwellers, and there was obvious pique that the poor had embarrassed the rich.

But there’s something odd in the tenement clothesline prejudice. The period in which we welcomed so many immigrants and enriched our national gene pool with so much genius and drive was one of America's golden times. Yet our central icon of America, also from that time, is the cowboy. In reality the cattle drover we celebrate as the Marlboro Man was another indigent, socially abhorrent member on the lowest rung of society. The literacy rate in the tenements was sky-high compared to the readin’ and writin’ of the cattlemen. The cowboy’s heyday was brief: the “Texas cattle for Yankee dollars” era of driving big herds from the Southwest to the railheads in Kansas and Missouri spanned only about fifteen years. In that heyday the drover was seen by most of society as a pariah, filthy and uncivilized, ignorant and rowdy. To be fair, this perception was probably spot-on.

But out of our tenements in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnatti, Pittsburgh, Albany, Hartford and other urban centers we saw invention, enterprise, social reform, striving, artistic expression, and a new national spirit of diversity and respect. Granted, it took a hundred years for that spirit to gather power and legitimacy, but our national conscience began in the tenements with all those fluttering, clean clothes strung between buildings.

What social upheavals did the cowboys offer? The spirit of independence and self-reliance? No historic evidence of that. Most cowboys were hired on as part of a local cattlemen’s associations or a big-business rancher’s outfit, often with eastern or British money behind them. They were mounted troops at the beginning of the undeclared "War of Western Consolidation" that squeezed out "small-holders" and established big-money agribusiness.

That war saw a prairie suspension of habeus corpus, death squad "regulators," lynchings and corporate terrorism. But it's not a war you found in your textbooks. Billy the Kid was one champion of the small-holders in the Lincoln County War. The Mussel Shoals War was a bloodier conflict waged in California, involving Leland Stanford and his robber baron colleagues. Mussel Shoals was followed with obsessive interest in the class struggle it represented by a writer and theorist in London, Karl Marx.

So why the cowboy and not the immigrant striver? It was probably the hat. Even today a good Stetson attracts attention. It surely wasn't the horse. In that pre-automobile era everyone knew horses, every streetcorner layabout presented himself as an expert on horseflesh. But the hat, now there was the key to romance.

So why isn’t our national romance grounded in the tenements? Bad hats? Mebbe. In large part the influx of intelligence and talent the United States received between the beginning of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War is what made this country great. Immigrants, a sound and balanced Constitution, size and fortunate geography. There you have America.

The homeowners association should bugger off and read their history books a little more closely, damnit.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself exhibits a dash of unaccustomed passion in this rant, but he makes sense. Surely we could afford more diversity in our heroes. We recall the Pecos Bill archetype in our pantheon but we seem to have largely dismissed Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, Davy Crockett and Joe Magarak. Dirty Harry should be turned away as a national model, of course, but he's the obvious product of Duke Wayne's legacy.

MINE CANARIES

CREATIVE PEOPLE have always lived in the thin ends of the bell curve, out on the fringe, scuttling about and picking at the table scraps of big money. The exhibits I've had a hand in designing, the books I've created, the articles I've written, the films with which I've worked – they've all been secondary fruits of "loose money" freed up for social projects by embarrassingly large profits. When profits dip, artists are the mine canaries of capital flow: we fall dead off our perches before the big guys can feel the pinch. Looking around me I see a lot of empty perches. And there's a bit of a rasp in my throat, as well.

What follows is part of a reply to the director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum, a lovely place for little guys. I proposed we collaborate on some exhibits and he, graciously and reluctantly, confessed that the BADM didn't have the funding to pursue anything new in this crunch. I replied:

Yes, the economy is harsh, but I can’t imagine any other result from our global adventuring. As Shackleton said, “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” We don’t seem to manufacture anything in the hardware store, now. Many of our best young men and women are scattered across the world fighting and dying for folks who don’t want us there. We’re fouling our nest but can’t seem to stop. The rolling juggernaut of corporate America more or less ignores all our objections and cries. Yet we DO live in a favored land, and our culture IS strong, has a work ethic, and has good roots. The problem could be that our leaders don’t demand much of us, or much more than merely spending. The children you and I try to encourage will reap the whirlwind, and that right soon.


My current book project is Black Bonfire, about the end of cheap oil. It’s inevitable, calamitous, and much, much closer than I imagined when I began the book. The book is directed at young adults, giving them an overview of energy as they enter adulthood, as they become citizens. When you want to do an exhibit on just how deeply oil has become the warp and woof of life, give a shout. If you’re sitting inside, everything you see – from wood paneling to steel shelves to plastic pens – is or was put together by oil. Oil that we won’t have.


So how do we, as creative workers, survive the present economy? Dunno. We’ve always been on the fringe, depending on an upstream flow from the largesse of wealthy patrons, not too far removed from Cosimo de Medici. I suppose we can hope that the wealthy will always be wealthy. I’m not sure that will be borne out in the cultural upheaval. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic but major institutions will change. The hoary dictum, “What good for USSteel is good for the country” isn’t quite so true.


Perhaps we’ll survive like that marvelous soul William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill in his yard from junk and electrified his African village. What do we need with the Incredible Hulk and Batman when we have Kamkwamba? Perhaps we’ll build our exhibits out of local junk, building from the midden pile of Marin society. Our work could come to resemble the ancient trade of the storytellers who traveled from village to village, sitting under trees and eaves to spin out tales that amazed and informed.


[Jon Steward interviews Kamkwamba at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba]

Artists. We're all canaries trying to survive this oppressive atmosphere, clinging to our wobbly little perches with our feeble claws, and still singing brightly. How many friends do you have who are paralyzed by dread and frustration? On the other side, how many artists do you know who are doing jes' fine? If it weren't for Zoloft, we'd have a mass suicide of artists (something like M. Night Shyamalian's The Happening) and the balance of the population would say, "Whatinhell have they got to complain about? All they do is sing and swing."

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS


What Himself neglects to acknowledge is that living on the fringes is a choice, not a profession. I could be demonizing the victim by bracing him thusly, but living on the fringes is inherently dangerous and unstable. The deep, strong current is where the action is, not the back eddies in the reeds. It's artistic hubris to assume the world will pull you triumphant from the edges and proclaim you its darling. Himself has a task: get into the mainstream or perish. This is harsh advice but so is the economy.