Great letter in this weekend's NYT Magazine, responding to James Traub's atrocious bohemianism-and-gentrification article. Don't have the letter handy, but the gist of it was that Traub, and the Times in its depiction of New York arts culture, had defined bohemianism and avant-garde culture as a variety of hipsterism that is fairly mainstream and commercialized, or at the very least not 'outsider' or 'oppositional'. Not that, for example, I'm a big fan of freegans; but if you want to find outsiders, they're out there . . . and pretending that makers of limited-edition t-shirts are the last remaining rebels disservices the public sphere. It's a journalistic betrayal.

Thinking about this reminded me of the original question about Le Tigre and commercial sponsorship of emerging indie/outsider artists, and helped crystallize my feelings about that: i/o artists, especially new ones, don't have to exist in opposition to the status quo -- though they often do, and it's a good thing -- but we like to imagine they are, in some way, outsiders, and not just because nobody's yet opened the door to the vault, but because it's who they are. And perhaps it's inevitable that they'll be embraced, join the club, support a new status quo that they've helped to create -- and that's not a bad thing -- but it's necessary that they start out somewhere else, a mental and cultural space that doesn't accept the fundamental assumptions of mainstream social reality. Which isn't to say we want art made by aliens or raving madmen -- just that Picasso would not have become Picasso if he'd been painting Absolut ads and wearing couture shirts at twenty-three.

Answer to the original question, written in response to a friend's question:

So the question about Le Tigre and fashion and artists got lost in the heat of the web updating, and I wanted to try and answer it, because it seems important. It's okay to have a strongly held belief and not understand completely why, but I feel obligated to try and understand it. If this ends up being a bit confused, it's because I'm a bit confused, and there's lots of reasons, all mixed up with each other . . . and if I come of sounding like a fundamentalist, a secular Bible-thumper, *tell me*, cause that's not what I want to be. . . .

To me, it relies very much on association being an active thing -- if a band is attached to Le Tigre, the band is in some way promoting Le Tigre, and supporting their actions and what they stand for.

There's the obvious question of whether Le Tigre uses sustainable materials put together by well-treated workers. But there's more to it than this. If American Apparel sponsors a band, I'll feel the same way. Why is this?

In part, I guess, because American Apparel sells itself in a way that I disapprove of. Not precisely by objectifying teenagers -- I don't like that, but it's not necessarily an evil thing. American Apparel -- through the language of its images, its promotions -- buys into, or tacitly accepts, a warped system of human relationships. Despite its better labor practices, AA still feels like a socially conscious incarnation of Abercrombie & Fitch . . . part of a culture of aquisition, of treating people as means to ends rather ends, of being fundamentally unreflective. A world of reality TV.

In terms of clothing, the necessary corollary is fashion, as opposed to style: our 'second skin' being turned into a uniform, assembled under the coercion of companies and authorities, instead of personal taste. Fashion Week ought to be called Style Week; by fashion I mean the clothes that different groups of people wear . . . and it's hard to say exactly why this bugs me. Part of it is an instinctive distrust of all herd mentalities. I also don't like the underlying premise that identity is something that can be purchased -- that, indeed, *ought* to be purchased, and regularly updated, in order to fit in.

It's also about the loss of the individual. Having a brand on your chest, even a small tasteful logo, does this, if only by a little bit. (Again, it's not like this is some horrible evil thing -- I mean, my shorts have a Champion logo, but I don't leave part of my soul at the YMCA.) But a person on the stage, wearing something given as a commercial promotion, *branded*, is in some way less an individual, making his or her own choices, than a fusion of person and corporation.

An artist, and indeed every person, expresses themselves in many ways, clothing being one of them. Artists we expect to express themselves more purely and fully; I want their clothing, and my own, to mean something -- even nothing, so long as it's *them*, and not a commercial. Of course, what if the artist *likes* a Le Tigre shirt? The cut and the color? That's trickier. Perhaps it's not such a bad thing. But it still bothers me that Le Tigre is pushing it . . .

. . . and that has to do with the scene itself. Fine, hipsterism is mainstream, or at least a main current. I still like to think that scenes and subcultures embody something spontaneous, something that can grow without being packaged and sold back to us, that they can take root and grow in a space that isn't commercial. Not a space that isn't economic -- people buy and sell things, we try to make a living, that's fine. But not in a disembodied way. And Le Tigre -- Diesel and D&G and all the companies that sponsor new artists -- are by their presence proscribing the space itself, the mental space in which it all takes place. It limits what is conceptually possible; it's the cultural end of a colonization of consciousness, arriving on new shores to plant the flag of 21st century consumer life and all the habits of thought (and politics and power) that go with it.

Not that people at a Diesel-sponsored show aren't going to go out and have fun and fall in love and get in fights and do all the transcendent things that people do, wherever we are . . . but it just bugs me. Somehow, if I was living in London in 1966, when Syd Barrett was at his creative peak, when he was going places with his guitar that nobody had ever been, it would have meant less had he been pimped out in Pierre Cardin. If the beam of dawn's light at his last great show had hit a silver Adidas logo rather than his mirrored strat, he would have been diminished.

Raccoon Speech

(Begins w/ patter appropriate to circumstances, i.e., baby talk and cooing noises, words and sounds I'd feel funny writing down. Lullabies half-remembered from childhood:

Dun-dun soi
I must leave you today
For Paiyau
Is far, far away.
If you look for me, son,
You come to Paiyau
Where you'll find me at home.

And so on. Rock-a-bye raccoon, on a railing top. . . .) Hello? Raccoons? Listen. Is it okay if I call you Paddy? And you, Pedro, and Penny and Paella? Okay. Now, I know we don't have much in common. (It's okay, it's okay, don't move. . . .) Most of the raccoons I've known have been country raccoons. It probably wouldn't help if I talked about forests and ponds. Like, how peaceful it is when the moon is full, and I can hear the breeze as it rises through the trees, it sounds like the trees are speaking to each other, back and forth, and the breeze never makes it to the water, whose surface is a perfect reflection of the night sky, and when my eyes adjust I see a raccoon, a patch of black darker than the rest, come down to the edge of the water, wash his paws, and he probably sees the mirror stars more clearly than the real ones; teh mirrored stars are more real to him; maybe he looks up at the blurry sky and says, 'What an imperfect reflection of this world!

I ramble a lot with people, too.

Anyways. I can tell that didn't exactly soothe you. You're city raccoons, I know -- don't move, don't move, be a good city raccoon, just sit still a little while -- you don't know about forests and ponds, you're all about rooftops, and ancient oasis groves in the middle of apartment blocks, fire escapes and storm drains, pigeon eggs and leftover pizza -- I bet you love anchovies -- the thrill of garbage day, stealing keys from the pockets of passed-out drunks and hiding them in their shoes. Yeah yeah yeah. You're tricksters, through and through. Got the masks, the long clever humorous fingers like a tailor or pickpocket. And you thought that tonight you'd trick your mom and dad, pretend to be asleep, sneak out and see the city, the real city, you're big enough and old enough and nobody tells you when to go to bed. And now the night just sucks. Not what you wanted at all. You're frightened, you're scared, you don't know what's going to happen to you, what kind of trouble you're going to be in, you think you might even die. Don't worry, okay? You're going to be all right. Just hold still.

And in a couple years, you'll be proud, trust me. You'll yell at your own cubs nd be waiting just outside the hole when they least expect it, but deep down you'll be proud of them, and you'll brag about all this when you're hanging out with the other adults, drinking Budweiser floaters that you've dragged up the tree and into the den. But first -- just stay still, okay? People are coming to get you, with ladders and nets and flashing lights. It's kind of weird, that. I mean, here our society is, the richest in the history of man, we can send a truck and trained rescuers to four raccoons stuck on a ledge. But we can't even keep some poor woman's newborn child in the hospital for a couple more days. Like I said, weird. Makes your head hurt a bit. But then, you spend all night scraping people off the pavement, responding to women hit their men, turning on sirens when you hear gunshots, you figure, rescuing a raccoon's probably a break. A treat. The kind of thing that makes little kids smile, and that matters, cause so long as little kids smile there's a chance for us. For the little kid in us.

And so long as you're here, we come out of our apartments, out of our own dens. Turn off the TVs and our loneliness and our routines. Call our friends. We talk to each other and get excited and mill about on the street, inside our roles, outside our roles, connecting to each other, this night a little different and a little special. Because of you. Because we might not be able to save the world, but we sure as hell can help a few adorable little punk-assed raccoons to safety. Yeah, it doesn't hurt that you're so damn cute. Especially you, Pedro. (And you, Paella, and Paddy and Penny! You're all special!) It's life, all of this. And it's gonna work for you. Just don't move, okay?

The moment when the music picks you up and delivers you from everything.

Went to see a friend's play tonight -- a sharp little relationship dialogue between four neurotic people. (Pretty sure I heard one or two things I've said before, which was a little disturbing.) Asked if I'd been writing -- a question I imagine some people are comfortable answering . . . but they probably write more than I.

On Monday begin work in Jersey City; put on the corporate uniform, do my job. Supposed to be eighty and sunny. Salt in the wound. But good to have a taste of routine for a little while, see how other people do their thing, enter the belly of the whale, all that. Feel reassured that I can, when necessary, do a decent job on something that requires some skill. And test my resolve: do I love journalism enough to do it at the end of a long day, at the expense of my leisure?

A friend suggested I write poetry. Or perhaps a poem, which is not at all the same thing. A perplexing thought. Partly because everything written is a poem; the 'poem' is one particular pose from which to begin, and not one I find comfortable. It wasn't once like that. But I was not a very good 'poet'. I do, though, like to think I'm an acceptable poet, in the words I put on pages and screens, the pictures I take, the gifts I make and give.

Not that the 'poem' isn't a wonderful thing; indeed it's lines of poetry, not literature, that remain in my head:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

or

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicèan barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.

or

So I must give back your beautiful pearls,
With two tears to match them.

And that last! So beautiful, so sad, so perfectly said.

And what better to write poems of than love?

"There is Silence in the Streets; Where Have All the Protesters Gone?" asks New York Times editor Andrew Rosenthal. Perhaps they're all in the big space where his brain used to be. . . .

Rosenthal writes from a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert at Madison Square Garden, which is pretty much the perfect symbol of his narrowly institutional perspective. The New York Times did its best to ignore and downplay the anti-globalism movement before September 11, and the antiwar movement afterwards. If times have, indeed, quieted politically -- an arguable proposition -- then Rosenthal and the Times editorial team ought to examine the part it played.

"When you hear Young and Company sing of “four dead in Ohio,” their Kent State anthem, it’s hard to imagine anyone on today’s campuses willing to face armed troops. Is there anything they care about that much?" whines Rosenthal. But where was the Times during the Republican National Convention in 2000? Or, for that matter, after the day of officially sanctioned protest in New York City four years later? By then, of course, the street protests had largely become an act of hollow theater, valuable more for preserving the possibility of street action than street action itself.

This point is, perhaps, part of why the streets seem so quiet to Rosenthal; a few hundred thousand people marching on the White House or central Manhattan don't seem to carry the weight they once did. Maybe this is just a trick of history. Maybe, hopefully, a progressive people will look back twenty years from now and perceive a time when dissidents planted the seeds of a more sensible political system.

But if not, maybe scholars will see the New York Times reduction of antiwar and antiglobalism protests to a few pictures, ignoring the substance of the critiques and the conflicts -- the wrongful arrests and incarcerations, the sheer scale of public authority mobilized against protesters, particularly the anti-globalists -- as part of why protests stopped meaning anything. Maybe if Andrew Rosenthal had spent less time on nostalgia trips at Madison Square Garden and more time in the streets when it mattered, he wouldn't be so worried now about this country's fate.

The best part of taking a short trip by bus or train is the preparation -- picking up the tickets with half an hour to spare, and then feeling, within that half-hour, an odd and oddly enjoyable freedom, presaging the ride itself. The primary responsibility accomplished, all other pursuits prior to boarding are whimsical, self-gratifying, and indulged without haste. And so: to the newsstand to browse the magazines, the pretzel joint for two whole wheats to eat when the ride starts, the smoothie stand for a sickly sweet blueberry concoction, and back outside for a few minutes of people watching. These activities are more satisfying than if undertaken as a matter of routine and give pleasure, depending on one's circumstance, to the degree they match a lazy day's pace or halt a frantic one.

Trying to look out the window at the nighttime landscapes, but finding them inevitably obscured by an overlay of my own translucent reflection.

Summer clothing is footloose gear -- t-shirt, jeans, beat old kicks, rolling out of my house in the morning and soaking in the world and knowing the day is going to be long in a good way, the possibilities as light as the t-shirt . . . but then the days shorten, the temperature falls, just enough to remind me of autumn coming . . . walking down Canal street at eight o'clock on a windy night, wanting a jacket to guard against a chill, a pair of boots to challenge the darkness. There is something confrontational about autumn and winter, something that in other years I've relished, but this year anticipate with unease and reluctance.