We reach the end of week 2! After a very successful day writing at the Frogtown Artwalk, RENT Poet's progress stands at $636 in cash/Paypal RECEIVED, with a fair bit written and outstanding. Two weeks, 14 days in, this is a little over 2/3 of my rent, with a significant chunk, theoretically, still incoming from Patreon when the poems I upload are matched by supporters (interested? become one here!). Of course my pipe dream for the month would be to cover ALL expenses with poetry, which would roughly double my goal. With everything I've learned in these last two week, I'm going to try to shoot for that. Which means I am 1/3 of my way to my new goal - $1,800.
I have a few great stories to share. First, I'm excited to announce my second corporate gig Tuesday, writing for finance folks at a fancy schmancy hotel. The other entertainment is a cigar roller and a women's synchronized swimming team. So there. Does anyone feel like helping me put together a back-able business plan in the next two days to present to the 1%? Hah. I actually expect to make less tips with this crowd, since I imagine they will expect the entertainment to be free, but time will tell. If I come up short, the organizer said he will cover the gap. Cash cows aside, the most amazing thing happened at the Frogtown ArtWalk. I was graciously invited to by my friend Helen of LA Mas, an experimental urban design firm. At my Poetry Store, whenever there is a lull in customers and kids come up to the typewriter, I try not to hound them to BUY like the grubby little consumers they must become. Instead, I like to show them how the typewriter works and offer them a go on it. Well, as I was getting ready to pack up, the most adorable toothless 9-year-old girl came up and wanted to write. She got really into it, and as she was banging away folks started coming up and wanting poems from her! If a 9-year-old ever decides to set up as competition, I'm hosed. There's no way I can compete with that cuteness factor. She wrote two poems in about 30 minutes, got really proficient at using the typewriter, and made $8. A little way through, her mother, who didn't speak any English, came up to ensure her daughter was in good hands and left her to it when she saw her typing away. I imagine it will be an interesting conversation in what I (presumptuously, I know) imagine to be a low-income family when the girl shows her earnings from a few minutes of writing. I hope it will be a loving, 'yes, do well in school and go to college please' conversation. What was particularly interesting was the way the kids, always intrigued when I write, became totally enraptured when it was one of their peers behind the typewriter. Suddenly they all wanted a go, and I actually had to close shop on a little army of would-be child poets. Dreams of becoming an Oliver Twist Fagan figure with a crew of urchin-y street poets flitted through my head. But there was also something more exciting going on here. Something about the potential of democratized, accessible writing creating new generations of literacy. In a sense, it's already happening. As much as we'd like to bemoan the rise of Snapchat and Twitter as the death of literacy, the fact remains that MORE people are writing regularly now than at any point previously in human history. The typewriter on the street is a drop in the bucket, but speaks volumes to the ability of the arts to engage people not in stuffy formalized education but in real, skills-based, interactive learning. Stolen from my buddy's urban planning thinktank LURN, here's the Stanford Innovation Review saying this, and Steve Powers making democratically-sourced street art, and The National Endowment for the Arts starting to invest in creative placemaking. I am so happy to be part of this movement and this tradition. Whenever people bemoan the obsolescence of the arts I laugh and laugh and ask, "Whose arts? And where?" On my mind muchly as we approach the halfway point of this project is, "Oh snap, what next?" It has been a glorious experiment that is set to successfully run its course. But I'm not sure what to turn the momentum I've built into. The community support has been outstanding - does that mean keep doing it? Grow it somehow, formalize it into a business? Move on to the next art project with the people I've met doing this? Face the reality that, no, I don't want to be doing this on the street when I'm 50 and get a real job again already? What do you think? Whaaaaat? A real estate firm's company bocce ball tournament. Right? Jonathon Rios, this dude I met at First Fridays on Abbot Kinney was drunk and friendly and gave me his number, saying I should come write for his company and that people there would dig it. He was a writer himself, he said. When I called, he invited me to the bocce ball tournament. It's a big annual HR exercise for new hires, mostly, and everyone has teams with ridiculous names and costumes. So silliness. But also the winning team gets $1,000 a person. Free food and liquor abound, an effort at mandated fun. All on a Tuesday afternoon, instead of work. I arrived at the stadium in Carson a little before the games started at 2pm to set up. I'd been asked to costume up, so I had on my best Dead Poet's Society loose skinny tie and paperboy hat. Jonathon ushered people over - "Look! He's writing custom poems! Isn't that cool?" It wasn't an art event, and that meant people were primed for drinks, sports, and socializing rather than poetry. But having an advocate there made all the difference. I quickly realized: my friend obviously had some clout at the company, and I was really there as HIS offering, his gift, a little piece of something weird and special that he had brought to share with people. In that way, I represented him. And so people patronizing my store was a way of them showing respect to him. The poems were a whole range, on the whole more banal than most people on the street. Again, because people weren't primed for poetry, the standard response was setting a challenging or strange topic to enjoy the 'improv poetry' aspect of this project. This aspect is enjoyable just because it's impressive to take anything and write about it on the spot. It's like doing a trick. In more artsy places, people are often more introspective and ask for a poem they 'need' - something that performs the same function as a fortune or a spell, something that speaks to where they are in life and can be an artifact of personal importance to them. These are the most fun to write. But I had some good reactions. My favorite was one of the HR ladies, who asked for a poem about 'family'. I wrote about talking on the phone, fighting on the phone, being taken back to childhood fights, still united as a family, and omnipresent because of the omnipresence of phones. She regarded me suspiciously after I read to her and asked, "who told you about me?" I had to re-assure her that no one had told me details of her life and that I was writing about personal experiences and universal themes. That I was glad that they spoke to her and that wasn't it accidental - part of my role is to read people and give them what I think they need to hear - but that it wasn't based on any other prior knowledge. In the end, I wrote about 25 poems and made around $80 in tips. As I was leaving I gave another PR lady her poem as she was packing stuff up, and she handed me another $50. As a thank you for coming, she said, and for the people who didn't tip. Good haul. I also got free food and drink - it was nice working for an event that was about the company taking care of its people, and so they took care of me by extension. Jonathon knows the founder of a clothing/lifestyle brand company out in Venice that he wants to introduce me to next week, and I'm looking forward to that. I like the idea of having a synergistic relationship with a company. I'm still a little iffy on what this writing means ("ahhh corporate=selling out!"), but I have to say, it seems to fit in with my focus on specific theatre that goes TO communities rather than expecting them to come to me. This idea that everyone can appreciate art, that everyone needs a poem and so 'selling' art is just an issue of putting it in front of people. More than putting it in front of people, making it FOR and WITH them. Giving them ownership. Everyone wants ownership. And I don't think suddenly all corporate bocce ball games will have poetry, that would actually spoil it. The point was something different, something surprising, a little poke to wake people from from their everyday routine, and a gift from my friend to his colleagues. We approach the end of Week 1. Whew. How do the figures add up? I have made a little over $200 cash, which should come out to about $300 once I upload what I've written on Patreon. 1/3 of the way to my goal, not to shabby. And I'm heading to another event in a couple hours. My best night this week was First Fridays on Abbot Kinney. Young, slightly intoxicated people with disposable incomes who are there for art are a great market. There are a few ArtWalk type events coming up that I am optimistic about. From Abbot Kinney I also got invitations to a two private corporate parties, tech and real estate, that I am hoping will be big. I feel good about the work, though it became evident pretty quickly that I really need to be at events rather than just hanging out on the street writing, so that people are in a mindset for engagement. Once one person stops for a poem a line quickly forms, but that first one always takes a brave soul. Of people who stop, those who ask about the 'Pay me what you think it's worth' part of the sign often don't get a poem. That trips people up way more than having to come up with a subject, which most really enjoy. Asking people to evaluate (value-ate) what I'm doing on the spot is definitely a sort of violence, making the reduction of a service to a price tag really explicit. But I wouldn't change that, and I feel like the people who write "$5 poems" are really limiting themselves by not allowing people to pay more if they want to. A lot want to. A few related thoughts that I have come across recently: Yesterday, there was a great NPR piece yesterday about how people selling products, from the little girl selling lollipops to tech entrepreneurs wooing venture capitalists, are selling themselves. I can't find the link, if anyone can send it to me and I'll upload it. This is something I am really aware of with my poetry practice - the fact that I'm a young, blond-haired, blue-eyed white guy greatly increases people's chances of stopping and of supporting me. If I looked like a typical busker or street vendor, it would be much tougher. I had an interesting interaction with an old street guitar player on Abbot Kinney who set up shop right next to me and wanted to talk. He was cordial, but you could tell he was bitter that people were engaging with me and giving me money and not him. He said, 'you've got a new thing going on there'. Finally, a quick LA Times article on the growth of street vending - nothing new, but still true and good to look at. Until next week! I'm off to write at the Schkapf party! Excited to announce the official initial tour dates for RENT Poet in the coming weeks:
Tues Sept 2: Performance @ Da Poetry Lounge (9-11pm, $5) Thurs Sept 4: Writing @ Silverlake Picture Show (6-9pm, free) Sun Sept 7: Writing @ Schkapf's Voting Party for LA2050 (2-8pm, free) Mon Sept 8: Performance (premiere 7-minute poem and performance piece about 'Wrong') and writing with Melrose Poetry Bureau @ WRITE CLUB Los Angelesat the Bootleg Theater (7-11pm, free) Tues Sept 9: Writing @ Haus Bausch III: SAUND (8-11pm, free) Thurs Sept 11: Performance @ The Poetry Brothel of Los Angeles (8pm, $ per poem) Sat Sept 27: Writing WeHo Reads (1-7pm, free) Today is day one, officially, of my RENT Poet project! It is also the 120th national Labor Day in the United States. Totally unplanned, but the coincidence seems serendipitous. According to that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, Labor day is, "a celebration of the American Labor Movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of their country." RENT Poet is a project about labor, fundamentally. About the value and meaning of artistic labor, how we quantify it, and who gets to be its patron and judge. Screenslaver said some interesting things when I told him about the project. He asked: "Can people in a city snap out of their usual mode of consumer capitalism, where the logic is IF PRICE, THEREFORE VALUE? Can YOU snap people out of that? Challenge them to recognize the RISK you're taking on, the courage you're showing, and decide, alone, how much the piece of art is worth, with no MARKET to verify? Another interesting question [about busking generally], why should people be less willing to compensate you knowing it's going to sustenance only, rather than to PROFIT a big company?" Amanda Palmer, formerly of the Dresden Dolls and, before that, a busker, has an excellent TED Talk on crowdfunding freely available music in which she compares it to street busking. She talks about it as stopping for a moment to really connect with people and hold space for them. She talks about providing your art for free and trusting that the people receiving that art will catch you financially. The equivalent of a stage dive. Trusting that THIS, this trust itself, has a value. It goes back, in my mind, to ideas I first read about in David Graeber's Debt. The idea that commerce, as it exists now, exists to facilitate us NOT having relationships - we exchange things for money and never have to let people get in the way. He argues that debt, in its original sense, was about creating relationships - it's not an exchange, its a deliberate unbalancing of the equation that means that both parties have a vested interest in continuing to interact and exchange in mutually beneficial ways. Back to labor day. In a sense, the relationship of workers to employers is always one of unbalanced exchange - debt. But not in a good way. Nick Hanauer, a self-proclaimed '1%er', has a great article calling for the American top 1% to pull a Ford and pay workers a living wage. His suggestion is born of self-interest in having a consumer class free from debt slavery that can afford to consume the products they themselves create without fear of default and burst bubbles. It's a good argument, very in vogue in that it's 100% about markets. But absent in it is the idea that workers contribute to the "strength, prosperity, and well-being" of anything through their hours of concerted effort. This is especially troubling for artists, whose very product, I'd argue, is in the vein of the whole "strength, prosperity, and well-being" shebang. Like Amanda Palmer, the cultural world is trying to re-invent the wheel of what artistic labor and its products look like, and how we pay for them. The internet has led to the sudden availability of everything, everywhere, for free. We can't fight that. It's up to us to embrace it as artists, our new status as 'buskers' whose product is freely available and on display to be judged by the masses. As the gatekeepers of art shift from institutions (who, in the bygone era, 'collected the rent' from arts patrons) to the patrons themselves, we have to shift our relationships and way of working accordingly. Not to be a kitsch factory, but to enter into meaning relationships and conversations - and, yes, indebtedness - with our patrons. Shameless Patreon plug, come be my patron. So I have spent this Labor Day sitting with my buddy Bobby Gordon of the Melrose Poetry Bureau typing up my first commissions to mail out to Berkeley and London, type-writing my address on envelopes, and coordinating making an appearance at The Last Bookstore's open mic tonight at 8pm in Downtown LA (you're invited!). It's been a labor of love. Having a week out of town visiting family in Missouri. So, of course, taking this time to work on the launch of the RENT Poet project. Lining up events and creating language...have a few fun things! I will be at:
The Silverlake Picture show on September 4th: http://silverlakepictureshow.com/events/event/chinatown/ LA2050's Celebrate LA on September 9th: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/celebrate-la2050-turning-ideas-into-action-tickets-6107865791 The LA Poetry Society's Poetry Brothel on September 11th: https://www.facebook.com/PoetryBrothelLosAngeles?ref=ts&fref=ts And many, many |
CategoriesRENT PoetReflections on a month of poetry through rent Archives
July 2018
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