Out on a limb

Well, this is a tough one.

Class.

Sounds like glass. Breaks like glass as well, along clearly defined fault lines, and under predictable conditions; the ‘energy of fracture’ revealed along economic, social, cultural, ethnic/racial, educational, and other markers of human social worth.

Francis, a Malaysian acquaintance <http://fh2o.blogspot.com/> has written quite interesting and pointed posts on people who fit in entirely different places in Malaysian society than himself. He writes about people he encounters with respect, integrity, and a certain humility. And those qualities make his writing special.

When putting pen to paper, or typing furiously on a computer keyboard, Francis is aware of the economic and social gulf that exists between himself, and the people he writes about. He realizes that these people will probably never have the opportunity to read the words written about them, they may not be able to read English, they may have no idea how to connect to the internet, and they may not even know they have been the subject of public attention. And that separates Francis from those he writes about.

But I’m interested in what separates his readers from the people he writes about. I’m interested in the people that Mike Davis (Planet of Slums, City of Quartz, and several others) writes about. I’m quite often interested in the ’subjects’ of writer’s work. But I’m far more interested in the relationships between the readers of the work, and the ’subjects.’

In ‘Planet of Slums’ Mike Davis’s focus is on the unbelievable degradation in which several tens of millions of people, predominantly though not solely in the equatorial or sub-equatorial world, live in – often over generations. In a world a century and a half further on, we are seeing, again, and again, the recreation of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England,’ by Friedrich Engels (1845).

But one could argue that Engels’ was a world different than ours. We argue that we are more technically advanced, more concerned with ‘efficiency,’ more aware of the health dangers of urban overcrowding, deprivation, and degradation than any society before our time. You could argue that, I can’t.

Engels’ world existed about 161 years ago. It was the most technically advanced ‘world’ of its time. A very few years before Engels’ book, Darwin publishes ‘The Voyage of the HMS Beagle.’ In 1841 Edgar Allan Poe publishes ‘Murder in the Rue Morgue,’ the first modern detective story, and in 1843 writes the first mystery story – ‘The Gold Bug’ – as we know them now. The first ‘fax’ machine was demonstrated in England by Alexander Bain. And these are mere snippets of a world undergoing, perhaps, an unprecedented acceleration in the production of knowledge, technical, scientific, and social.

This was not, as some of my student acquaintances believed, a period only dimly removed from the caves at Lascaux.

Engels was simultaneously drawn to the plight of the urban misery of the working class, and revolted by it, and his work may still be the best descriptions of unbelievable filth, working, and living conditions written. Though I’ll entertain suggestions on that statement.

Now, one hundred and sixty-one years later, Mike Davis is trying to draw our attention from the fate of today’s urban underclasses in the developed world (of which he has written well and often) to the plight of those tens of millions of people outside of London, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, New York, Vancouver. And that is where I get interested again.

Mike Davis, like any writer, has to engage his audience. The ‘writer’ needs to tease, to cajole, to interest, inform, and to illuminate a world that is uncomfortably different from the world his readers actually inhabit. Not one single resident of a shanty town in South Africa is likely to read this blog, let alone Davis’ ‘Planet of Slums.’ Nor are residents of slums in Manila, China, India, Malaysia, or any other nation likely to read, or to have even heard of, Mike Davis.

So the target audience is comfortably middle-class, well-educated, literate, socially-engaged, and isolated from the bloody grim realities of life on well under US $1/daily.

Hell, in Vancouver, even the poorest on welfare get more than US $1 a day! Actually, they get an astounding US $5 (after the ‘rental allowance’ of Cdn $325 is subtracted from the initial Cdn $510/month), to live in some of the most expensive places (particularly when compared by the square foot) in Canada. But, I digress.

How do people who have probably never gone hungry imagine digging through garbage for something to eat? How do people, living in houses with several bathrooms, conjure up an image of literally walking through shit in the street? And, apart from those who insist on living in ‘Hurricane Alley,’ or the tornado belt in the US, or riverine flood plains anywhere, think about the odds of having your house disappear in flood, fire, or earthquake?

My guess is that the vast majority of readers, whether of Engels, or Davis, or hundreds of others,  are spectators in a consumer society. While comfortable in their condo, or sitting on beach, or reading in the bath they are removed, viscerally, from the grinding realities that the authors work to portray.

These readers are the people on whose behalf downtown business associations hire private security, to protect the Disneyfied presentation of retail consumer goods. The people reading about the slum dwellers are engaged in a form of pornography: only slightly removed from the televised disaster-porn of the last tsunami, or the cover of ‘The National Enquirer,’ these people are protected by class from the realities of those they read about.

Like my post regarding the ‘World Urban Forum, and why I’m not there,’ http://citylover.wordpress.com/tag/urban/ these people are functionally, socially, and culturally insulated from the actual, lived, reality that is the subject at hand.

But Engels and Davis are engaged on another project as well. Both authors are offering an indictment not only of a ‘foreign’ middle class, but of an extremely powerful ‘local’ middle class as well. One of the discussions I overheard while the WUF was on in Vancouver was concerned with the local (in this case Ghanaian) middle class gaining access to housing intended for the poor; through political connections, ‘business as usual,’ graft, corruption, and human venality class won the day. Again and again Davis offers criticism of the ‘usual suspects,’ The World Bank, powerful foreign-aid lobbies, neo-conservative forces. But, every time he accuses the ‘rich and powerful’ foreign interests, he also shines a light on the local middle and upper classes as being guilty parties in the continuation and worsening of the conditions of slum dwellers around the world.

And our local middle-class readers?

I suspect that they will read the books, think thoughts, and then with every available grace, engage that which is theirs by right. They won’t think of not flying to Hawaii, Florida, the Mexican Riviera, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo. They won’t think of not buying a holiday/retirement property that not long ago was unsecured land, squatted on by a generation or more of local inhabitants. They won’t take the time to inquire exactly how our foreign aid money is spent, nor will they ask the Swiss (for instance, I’m sure there are others equally blind to the source(s) of wealth) just how did all that money get stripped out of a country whose annual GDP is equal to the bank deposit of some newly-retired klepto-politico. They won’t do these things because it is difficult. And may reveal awkward, and difficult, truths.

Some of those truths are revealed in the class perogitives that are truly cross-cultural. The well-heeled, the well-educated, know that they are worth more than others. That’s just the way it is. And the well-heeled ‘over there’ share much in common with the ‘well heeled’ over here. The handbags, the cars, the watches, the medical treatment that one flies somewhere to obtain, the airline tickets to the same destinations all reveal the commonality of class expectation, nearly world wide.

Our middle class has many of the same class-interests as their middle class. And, as long as that is the truth, well, one can observe, but taste dictates a modesty and delicacy that proscribes such untoward behaviour. I mean, one mustn’t interfere.

Class has its prerogatives, and its obligations, remember.

And that’s where I go out on a limb.

My thinking, my keep

I was a machinist, once. Then a bicycle builder, mechanic, rider. There were other loves to be sure; kayaking, then rowing. Once in a while running seemed to be the thing to do. Jobs, most of which I didn’t like, and even if I did like them, I certainly didn’t want to keep doing them.

Humanities 101, at UBC. A great thing. I did an undergraduate degree, in four years, finishing when I was 48.

I started a Masters, which I’ll continue, so degree in hand (and a couple dollars) I’ll be able to get a coffee.

Right now I have a great job. I fix stuff, primarily gross building systems, that other people in their madness, destroy. I build, and rebuild, walls, doors, locks, plumbing, electrical, security, and a vast array of other systems. The hours are great. The money is not too bad.

And then I start thinking about machinery, machine tools in particular, again.

Ever meet a real addict? The person who can rationalize whatever their addiction is, to whoever is around, at any time or place? They make jumping off of bridges, with a parachute, sound almost reasonable. To the real addict it doesn’t matter if you understand, they just want you to agree.

A lathe, and a milling machine, would be useful. I could make widgets. Or heat-treat some stuff. Or use the DRO (digital read-out) for laying out bolt circles. But I’d have to get some CAD (computer assisted drawing (or design)) software, and learn to use that as well. And it would have to be three-phase, because 3 phase machinery vibrates less, which makes accurate work more readily practical. And I’d need some space. Grade level, you know, makes getting the stuff inside easier.

But I’d need some extra stuff to, you know, to make stuff. This machine, that machine, and at the end of the day, you know, I’d have something tangible in my hand, to show for my labours.

Nuts.

Almost certainly a formula for frustration, anxiety, collapse.

I kid myself that this stuff would ‘only have to pay for itself,’ I try to rationalize. That lightens the load a bit. But there is so much of it to get. And there is so much of it to store, to care for, to keep warm, and dry, and safe.

A blog I read regularly http://duncanmargetts.com/blog/ shares some of my views on life, though certainly not all; nor do I share all Duncan’s views, but he is almost always an interesting read. He thinks about stuff, primarily ‘more’ stuff, and makes reference to Epicurus. Philosophy, from the ancient Greeks, to blogs about cities and stuff.

But Epicurus wanted to be satisfied, not sated, and in my particular case I’m headed not even for ’sated,’ but, ultimately, dissatisfaction. Because the promise held out in machinery is false; the dreams of realization through multiple-start threads, bearing fits, and accurate work are phantasms.

Oh, I can do the work. I can even do the work on machinery less accurate than the end result. But the promise held out is one of tangible, physical, ‘real’ work at the end of the day.

And in these types of dreams, the end of that day never comes. It’s always tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, but never now.

But, fixing stuff, as it comes, fulfills a dream. There is a tangible result at the end of the day; the building still stands, the security cameras still see, the staff have one more room in which to bed down some lost and lonely soul, and I know that I have done the best I can with what is at hand.

And the making of something from scratch?

I do that here. I sit down, with only the vaguest notion of what I’m going to say, and if at the end you’re still reading, I must have created something.

So, tomorrow, I’ll fix stuff. And, I’ll enjoy fixing it as well as I can, under the circumstances. And I’ll continue to write, here, and once in a while, in search of money.

And I know I can make my pen pay its keep.

A bit more colour

Memory is a wonderful place; like the past, a country where they do things differently – the difference being that in memory, you are the past, yet enabled to change the subtlest details to suit a present agenda. I can’t say that we all do it, I can’t prove that statistic, but my suspicion is that most of us edit, embellish, and alter the past. This on-going change to the past is not necessarily a bad thing, if it allows us to tell a story in such a way that the reader can discern our intent, without being actively lied to. Presenting a story, re-presenting the past, either path may suffice.

When I write of the cities I know, or the cities I think I know, I draw on an unimaginably small data set, my own experience. No proper scientist could possibly create a position out of such scanty cloth. Well, Freud did it, but he was writing about women. And men don’t know anything about women, so the size of his data set didn’t matter, nor did the fact that all of his female patients were ‘middle class’ when that meant a lot more than it does today. But, I’m afraid, I digress.

Back to writing of cities. I bring my own experience, logics, taste to the areas I write about. My own individual ideological stance is revealed not only by what I write about, but by the things I neglect, and it is the reader’s opportunity to tease apart the arguments I present. Such an examination may reveal flaws in my argument, or they may reveal ideas that the reader had yet to articulate, and that is where I’m headed next.

My last post, ‘Fade, to grey’ suggested (I hope) my views on the loss of individuality in the urban landscape, primarly for the purposes of that post, the loss of economic, visual, and cultural diversity within the urban streetscape.

Now I want to explore another cultural loss, intimately tied to that loss of individuality amongst streetfront businesses. And, again, this is a reflection of my own experience. Your results may vary, may include nuts.

High school is a horrible time for most kids. Hormones kick in, mice cry in anguish when you squeak – I mean speak, every guy in the class can shave. Except you, loser. And a couple guys actually got a date. And an even smaller number got decent grades.

I hid from as much of the high school angst as possible, by working, for so many of those now-vanished businesses.

Drive, you want? I had drive. I wanted money, not much, certainly not enough to work anything resembling a permanent part-time job. But I always had work.

Legion Taxi, out in suburban Burnaby, needed a dispatcher. At least that was the answer the guy came up with when I pounded on his door for the umpteenth time. Desk. Radio, mike, PTT. That’s ‘push to talk.’ Telephone, single line. Phone book. Map. Chair.

5 PM – 9 PM school nights, two a week, so Wednesday and Thursday. 6 – 10 PM Friday night.

My qualifications for the job? A recommendation from the guy at Cougar Electronics, two doors up the street.

So, at 16, I was a taxi dispatcher.

For a one-car cab company.

But the job at Cougar Electronics was cool, at least to me. The guy did something with electronics. There were a number of radioactive samples in a box under the workbench, and he made things (electronic things) that detected radioactive thingys (I was a bit rusty on all this then, and that’s a while ago) that emanated from the samples, under the bench. But I got to sweep the place, once a week, for about an hour, every week, probably for $5. Hey, it was about $1.50 over the ‘adult’ minimum wage. And I got to take one of the detector thingys on a school filed trip, to see if I could find anything that made it evidentt that there was radioactive bits about.

Too bad it didn’t get me a date.

But my diligent, hard-working, money-grubbing nature was giving me a reputation. At least on that block.

Andrew’s Customline Upholstery needed someone to dismember, oops, dismantle, furniture for reupholstering. And you couldn’t just rip the fabric off, rending it to shreds. Out came the tack lifter, off came the welting. The felting and horsehair just went in the garbage, but the welting, and the fabric, all went ‘upstairs’ to the sewers. And did they have it in for me.

Four or five women, all skilled at what they did, worked wonders with the material I dragged up to them. And they hounded my can. All of them, at least as old as my mother, and each and every one of them ready to tease, torment, tantalize, and toss the teder ego of the shop boy. I knew then that it was done in fun, but any kid suffering the same treatment today would be advised to seek punitive damages for sexual harassment. God, I hated going up there.

But the guys in the shop, a couple of journeyman upholsterers, didn’t know or care about my private travails with the cutters and sewers. The Boss, and his thirty-something son, probably had an idea. But the son survived, and probably so would I. And I was damned fast on the button machine.

Machine is a stretch. We normally think of motorized, nominally self-guided, mechanical contraptions when we think of machines. The button machine was none of these things. I powered it. I guided. I cut little, tiny discs of fabric with a die. I assembled thousands of buttons, each one lovingly handcrafted by a skilled tradeesperson. No. I cut and assembled thousands of them alright, and, yes, one at a time. But it was boring, repetive, unskilled, unfullfilling, numbing, work. But I was fast. I got paid piece work for the buttons, with a penalty for faulty ones.

I paid that penalty once.

All these shops were situated ‘in’ the community where they were located. They hired a local kid, mostly because I kept pounding on the door until I got a job, but they contributed not only to my pocketbook, but to the cash register of other businesses in the community. I spent my money at Bob’s Sporting Goods (irrascible SOB), I spent at the ‘67 Shop,’ at the hardware store, and, most memorably, at the Millionaire Coffee Shop. I spent at Jon’s Pizza, when pizza was a new-fangled foodstuff, and long before there were any local franchise pizza joints.

The money flowed from customers of Legion Taxi, named after the Canadian Legion, outside of which he parked most nights from 5 until closing. I was an alarm clock for the odd night he wanted to grab some shut-eye before delivering a few slightly inebriated sods to their respective homes. Their tips may have helped pay for the dispatcher.

I’m sure there weren’t many customers of Cougar Electronics in the local area, but the guy who owned it lived not far away, and his money went into his community. Even if his money went through my pockets first.

The upholstery shop was my first career mistake. I got terminal macho, decided I wanted to be a heavy duty mechanic (which in British Columbia’s ‘wild west’ resource economy meant big wages, big wrenches, and if you were really lucky I suppose, big wenches), and headed off to the College of New Caledonia, a Provincially operated trade school in the centre of the province. First frost in September was a harbinger of things to come) rather than some barely credible opportunity as an apprentice upholsterer. I mean, try saying ‘apprentice upholsterer’ several times without just curling up on the floor, laughing.

I should have stayed in upholstery. but I don’t know if I could have survived the machinations of the women, upstairs. Even if they did live not far from work.

But all this is about the opportunities, the interconnections, that can occur when we work, live, shop, think in local terms. And it is not about not thinking outside our immediate community, for ours is only one of millions of local communities. But it is about thinking about our goals, our ideals, our hopes.

Why should McDonalds, or Burger King, or Sesco, or Wal-Mart, or any other business of their ilk care about the kids in the local community? Why should they be expected to care where your kids spend their money, other than encouraging them to spend it where they work, through employee pricing plans? Does Burger King management even consider where their employees might spend their money? Not likely.

Whether these companies are privately held, or accountable to their shareholders (hehehehehe), they are worrying about one thing. The financials for the next quarter. They are not worrying about the health of the community you live in. It’s not their job. It’s not what they were hired to do, it is not their area of expertise, and they don’t know anyone with a Masters in Community Development and Social Engagement. And, they just don’t care.

So, if there is a local coffee house where you live, ask if they hire high school kids. If they don’t, ask why. And suggest, if necessary, that there might be a long term payoff. Not only for the business at hand, and the coffee in your hand, but for the community.

For why should kids give a damn about the local business, if the local business doesn’t give a damn about them? While the ‘cynicism’ of the current young generation is over-hyped in my view, they are aware of the consideration that they can expect from locally situated branches of the “Really, Really, Huge Company.” And they don’t expect very much.

And they don’t get much. They know they are getting abused with ‘training wage’ schemes, whatever their local name. They are supposed to work as hard as ‘adults,’ show up on time – like adults, and pay taxes, again like adults. But they work under a set of rules that if applied to a racial, sexual, ethnic, or religous minority, any Court in virtually any land where this will be read, would toss the legislation. Well, perhaps one or two places, just north of the Equator, and about 15 time zones from my seat, would toss the complaint. But that is another blog entry all together.

And those kids will have ever less to tie them to a community that does not offer its youth some hope of a job, a real actual job, at home. And, yes, lots of those jobs will be part-time. There are some of those jobs that will be ugly, dirty, demeaning, foul, smelly, hard bloody work. Just like being a machinist. Or a civil engineer. Or any one of thousands of real jobs. They will also be jobs that help move money through the local economy – rather than jobs that exist only to strip mine the community of all the available funds, and then, having no ties whatever to the people, or place, the doors close.

And everything goes dark.

But I remember that those local jobs added something. They added colour, to the community, the colour of money, of a future, of hope. Just a bit more colour.

Fade, to grey

I remember, succinctly, wandering through a city where there were a vast array of delights – to appeal to a vast audience, or, indeed, multiple differentiated and inter-woven audiences. Store fronts in a cornucopia of colour, texture, and allure, all different. Even the ones that never did do the ’seasonally appropriate display.’

There were high-end goods, in the boutique stores located within hotels, and in the commercial areas often nearby. There were, I understand, a wide variety of retailers who catered to the needs, and tastes, of Vancouver’s creme de la creme.

There were, as well, run-down thrift stores for those whose budget might not quite stretch beyond hamburger. And, in a time before the American ‘Value Village’ chain of thrift stores entered the Vancouver (and, eventually, most of its suburbs), thrift store shopping was a vile, dusty, and often demeaning experience. The staff was often volunteer, often not well treated, and prone to dismissing the clientele as below their own economic and social status. Hrrumph indeed.

Car lots, department stores, a seemingly infinite variety of odd stores – often staffed by equally odd proprietors. But each was different; the car lots, mostly flogging used iron, seemed to settle in to their own, individual, specialty – leaving room for the competition next door. The Woolworth’s, Woodwards, Army and Navy, Eaton’s, Hudson’s Bay, Hamilton Harvey, and Sears each carved out their own niche – not entirely unique, but differentiated sufficiently to serve those who felt ‘at home’ in the store.

The little retailers, as well as commercial and wholesale suppliers, were much the same. Harkley and Haywood sold to one set of sportsmen, their competition across the street, to a slightly different set. And both stores felt completely different inside, even when they stocked the same items. Wholesale suppliers in many ways harkened back to an earlier version of retail, before ’self serve’ became the norm in retail shops, and the staff could display any variety of interest in your particular problem.

What many of these firms shared was their scale. Most, though certainly not all, were ’small business.’ Yes, there were a few chains, and the wholesalers tended to have multiple branches, but in many businesses a long-time customer could hope to know most of the staff they might ever encounter.

Some of the most interesting places that I remember had a staff of one.

The owner. The proprietor. The boss. Department head. Shipper/receiver. Mail boy/girl Friday. Chief cook and bottle washer.

Max, at a tool store on Powell St., whose business I never knew under any other name but ‘bum boat’s,’ and even that was probable wrong. He sold an amazing array of small mechanic and machinist’s tools; layout, measuring, cutting tools kind of poured out of miscellaneous boxes, buckets, and shelves. And he had the most extensive assortment of files I have ever seen. And each file remained protected by heavy wax paper until you bought it.

Frank at the Eagle Grill, two doors down from Bumboat’s, was the local greasy spoon cafe. A early morning coffee, two eggs, over easy, bacon. Then off to work in the shipyard. Also locally owned. Which was fortunate, becasue that way the owners were right there watching it go deeper and deeper into the hole.

(An aside. Anyone have any idea why wordpress once in a while placed ‘a early’ where it is right now, and, equally strangely, fails to wrap a sentence?)

There was the little luggage repair shop on Broadway. In fifteen years of walking past every couple months I never once saw anyone in the store; no staff, no customers. And, equally mysteriously, was the little shop next door. It had some obscure, and not very descriptive name, shared the lack of visible sources of cash flow, and had a small lathe and milling machine essentially front and centre. No idea what went on there. Ever.

But the city seemd to have many of those businesses, scattered hither and yon, one assumes providing at least a subsistence level existence to the owner. The second-hand shop on E Hastings, owned and operated seemingly forever, by Mr. Price. I often thought I was the only customer, ever.

Now we seem not to have room for those businesses.

None of them would ever have seemed ‘up to date,’ and today when ‘current’ means something less than 15 minutes ago, they would be relics. But they wouldn’t have the currency of relics, rather they would seem musty, a tad old-fashioned as though they smelled of old ladies.

Walk along any thouroughfare in Vancouver, or Los Angeles, or perhaps even in Kuching and those stores are virtually gone. In their spaces now stand newer, hipper, more up-to-date shops that can attract younger, cool-hunter, consumers.

The old places, in their old spaces, are gone.

‘I’m sorry, the manager isn’t in today; she is in the suburban store, and I’m very terribly concerned about your problem, but I’m not qualified, certified, enabled, password-bearing, old, or intelligent enough to attend to any difficulty such as you have presented here today. And thank you for asking.’

We have turned our retailers, and ourselves, effectively into breeders of humanoid Golden Retrievers; they (we) never grow up. Obsequious is their middle name, confusing service with servile, and most consumers are lapping it up, while simultaneously attempting to decode the answer to their question.

And it is so difficult to fight. Only the biggest of bookstores has the economic clout to tell magazine distributors that they ARE sending back the non-current issues, and they DO expect a credit. That ability allows the Chapters.ca and Amazon.ca/com to actually stock special-interest magazines that small retailers can’t afford to have languish on the shelves for months, growing ever more dust-laden. So how do you buy that magazine without going to the big-box version of bookstores?

Your corner, independent, hardware store (if such a thing even exists in Canada anymore) can’t buy a container load of socket sets, or lawn furniture, or whatever other fool thing is in the hundreds and hudreds of 40′ shipping containers that flow through the Port of Vancouver with Canadian Tire’s logo emblazoned on them. But I’d rather do without than deal with the sub-par staff that collect lousy paycheques at Canadian Tire. Not only helpless, but hopeless. So where do I go to buy a 3/8 drive, 17 mm socket? And will the service be any better?

And ‘North American’ names are certainly no assurance that the product, staff, or service will be either locally produced, or any better quality than that stuff supposedly made out of recycled cars…

So, can we, or indeed, are we interested, in restoring an earlier urban fabric in ‘Western’ cities; and I must note that I have actually witnessed an accelerated version of this shift in Kuching, Sarawak. In two years the changes to the intimate street structure in many parts of Kuching has changed, and it is changing in ways familiar to, if not identical to, North American urban centres.

Are we actually prepared to spend more, get less (at least in sheer physical quantities), slow down, talk to people, walk?

I’d like to say ‘Well, by golly, now that you ask, why yes, I think we will slow down, engage, chill a bit.’ But I’d be lying.

The current animated movie, ‘Cars,’ challenges this very ideal. I won’t say anymore, other than ‘go watch the movie,’ and then watch where you buy your groceries, your tools, your clothes. And I think you’ll leave the little village behind, even if the movie did bring the odd shine to your eyes.

But, if we actually want that vast array of delights, for multiple and varied audiences, we have to change. And we have to accept that the ’seasonally appropriate display’ is, perhaps, unnecessary. The cornucopia is complete, without it, the colours true and vibrant on their own.

Just a friendly reminder…

I just thought I mention a couple things before I go on to the next post, the next idea, the next adventure in urban life.

These posts are written and published in a hurry. And the hurry is intentional. I want the immediacy of the written word to be evident, the concerns, foibles, and strengths of the writer to out front and visible.

These pieces are not written ‘for sale,’ to a magazine perhaps, nor are they written in response to some academic demand for the production of yet another work of no import to anyone but the marker. I assume they are important to whoever marks them, otherwise why would they request that I invest hours of effort in them?

That immediacy is, perhaps unfortunately, evident (at least to me) when I re-read them. I notice spelling mistakes (not many), I notice grammatical slips that could be polished out, and once in while (notice the missing ‘a’ there) I drop a word in my haste.

But what is published is what is on my mind. There is little or no equivocation. The reader does not have to parse every line of text to discern the ’real’ message. It is, pretty much, WYSISYG.

But I am open to suggestion. I’m open to requests for clarification, elucidation, expansion, and detail.

Just a friendly reminder.

And, another thing…

There was a time when skilled tradespeople held a social position that reflected their economic value to society. This can be seen, often, in the marketing of suburban developments – particularly in North America, though I suspect that diligent research would turn up evidence of similar practices in Australia and New Zealand as well.

An example, in Vancouver’s case, is the Dunbar area. Originally the area was promoted as a streetcar suburb (and there was a bag of money exchanged, privately, o have the existing streetcar line extended long before there was a viable customer base for it) for ’skilled tradesmen and office workers.’

Well, a ’skilled tradesman’ at that point in Vancouver’s development would have been  a journeyman machinist, a first-rate millwright, perhaps a ships engineer first-class. And an ‘office worker’ would have been the manager of a downtown branch of one of the major banks of the day, or perhaps a successful insurance or real estate salesman. On either side of the class divide, economic relations were expressed in the value, and location, of real property – the home.

The merchants of fear, insurance agents, are ‘professionals,’ wear a suit and tie, and wouldn’t know what a machinist does if she was doing in front of them. And bank managers seem to have virtually disappeared, along with many of the small-branch locations that once dotted the landscape, much the same as gasoline service stations have disappeared. But, in an inflated real-estate market, everyone wants to be an agent – and aims for their chunk of the commission – and while I wouldn’t want to slander the crowd, I’m still looking for an honest, up-front, reliable real-estate agent.

Machinists have largely become invisible. First-rate millwrights are hard to find. And ships engineers don’t much exist here anymore, because there aren’t many ships here, anymore.

But when you find that millwright, and her 3/4″ drive, 80mm socket, you can rest assured she doesn’t live in the same part of town that the members of the degree-bearing service industry live in. She has been priced out, kicked out, down-sized, degraded, and ignominiously denied her place.

How did all this happen?

I don’t know, but here are a few clues.

WW II. That’s World War Two. North American was essentially unscathed by the war. None of our physical plant was damaged. Nothing was bombed. Nothing was flattened. Indeed, rather than the adversity of war-inflicted damage, there was a perverse prosperity. This prosperity built, not only the literal tools of war – guns, bombers, ships, airplanes, engines, electrical doo-dads, – but it built the infrastructure to produce the tools of war as well.

And after the war, daddy?

North America, generally, experienced a long economic boom that lasted, arguably, until the oil-price shocks of the early 1970s. Granted, there was a period of post-war economic stagnation while the re-tooling, re-marketing, and re-formation of a civilian, consumer economy got under way. And North American industry had nearly endless numbers of machine to produce the goods – and the US military had enough tooling literally mothballed to fight at least one whole war on its own – for that emerging consumer-driven society.

What it needed was people to buy, and people to make, stuff.

And the people, many thousands of them, came from Europe. They knew how to make stuff, they had the skills, the experience, the ideas. What they did not have were the machines, the money, the markets.  And, ‘after the war’ is not the very narrow range of years, lets say late 1945 to 1950, but rather two, or perhaps three, decades after the war. All those years that North Americans were buying new houses, new cars, new appliances (remember the Amana RadarRange?, the height of post-war consumer culture, in your own kitchen), and new kids…

North America, and I should say I am really only writing about the United States and Canada here, has a long history of importing people. Need cheap labour for your Ford plant? Import them. Need cheap labour for the Canadian Pacific Railway? Chinese in the West, Irish further east, all imported, and all cast off when no longer needed. But industry needs another kind of labour – it needs skilled tradespeople. People who can make jigs and fixtures. People who can repair the assembly line, fast, when something breaks down. And those skills were on fire-sale from Europe.

Like it or not, Canada and the United States offered a better standard of material life than most, if not all, places in Europe. Want a big car? Want the prestige of driving a 1958 Buick? You’re not getting it in 1958 Germany (and that’s West Germany for those born after 1989), and only the really wealthy were going to get it anywhere in Europe. But you could buy a 1958 Buick for a couple thousand dollars, when a good toolmaker was earning $2.50 or more an hour. Makes that Buick attainable.

So, North American business learned that they could import ’skill,’ rather than having to invest in the creation of ‘native-born’ skill. That, in one move, devalued skilled labour. And the process went on. I worked with several men over the years who, having learned their trade in Europe, couldn’t believe that companies in North America were shirking their responsibilities.

With the post-war expansion of universities came a concomitant expansion of the university-educated social elites, and their necessary devaluation of not only manual skills, but of ‘practical’ education; university graduates would not deign to such lowly levels, unless perhaps, they had a civil engineering degree. And, indeed, I once heard several engineering professors at UBC (in ‘The Barn,’ no less) discuss ways to differentiate their ‘product,’ from that of BCIT. Practical applications, and real-world skills, were on their way out of the neighbourhood.

And the social devaluation of ‘manual’ skills was reproduced in the public schools system. A friend of my father’s was assigned to ‘manual training,’ not because his language and mathematical skills were not up to par, but because his last name ended in ‘ko,’ literally branding him as sub-par, both intellectually and socially.

In the very early 1970s, when I had to choose between ‘academic’ and ’shop’ streams in the educational system, I could not take both ’shop’ courses, and ‘academic’ math and language. Could not. Full stop. And never the twain shall meet.

Kids in ’shop’ were consigned to the dunce chair, figuratively, if not absolutely literally. But, you know, I had way more fun making zip guns, hash pipes, silencers (didn’t work all that well, I hadn’t learned the value of sub-sonic rounds at that point), and backyard bombs than I ever would have had parsing a sentence.

But the social, and physical, divides were growing. That streetcar suburb slowly marginalized its lower-earning residents. The taxi driver who bought a house on 25th Ave was literally ostracized by his neighbours. If he parked his taxi on the street, after his 12 or 14 hour shift, they called the City bylaw enforcement. He stuck it out, and one day related this story, and more. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that one of his class-warrior neighbours may have been my Uncle Ed.

But that class war goes on, it separates people who make (for a living) from those who consume. Evidence of this divide is easily at hand, and obvious. Ask the woman who has a corner office, on the 48th floor, if their daughter could marry a plumber? Odds are the answer is an outright ‘No!,’ although she might hedge and say ‘whatever makes her happy.’ Just ask Mom if she is going to pay for her daughter’s wedding to the guy who drives the old van, ‘Fred’s Plumbing and Heating’ plastered on the side. ‘Fred’s’ is only in the area to fix our plumbing, not to get his pipes cleaned.

And the class divide grows.

Further notes on an urban condition

Sprawl. It rolls off your tongue, that long ‘essss’ sound leads into a pouty ‘rawl,’ rhymes with ‘all,’ and being a soft weasly sound obviously can’t be taken any too seriously.

Yet the university bookstore shelves are filled with books about sprawl. There are books about American sprawl, books about Canadian sprawl, and I understand from a source in Oz, that there are books on Australian sprawl as well.

By and large the books are written and presented as well considered, culturally appropriate, studies of the causes, effects, and future(s) of automobile-oriented, low-density, single-family-dwelling development. You know, the two or three thousand square foot (200 or 300 square metres (really roughly)) houses now common in most areas of North America, and seemingly in Oz as well.

These are the houses we all love to hate.

We decry their boxy stature – and the all-too-often calls to cultural values expressed in Jeffersonian and Italianate gingerbread ornamentation – all supplied by Wal-Mart. We bemoan their footprint on the ground; houses that occupy every last inch of the available property, as if we were wanted to mow the lawn. The kitsch chandeliers, the combination tub/sauna/whirlpool/breadmaker, and the endless variety of rooms all make us weep with their trailer park expressions of class and grandeur.

We wouldn’t think of living in anything quite so tacky.

Rather, we point to the tree-lined streets of the city. Taking pains to sound inclusive, we demonstrate the ease of city living; things are not only ‘happening’ here, but you can get ‘there from here.’TM Urbanites like ourselves are always positive in our representations of the urban environment in which we live, and try to expand the mental, social, and cultural habitations of those unfortunates who live in ‘the suburbs.’

Is it just me, or is there an unspoken aura of Marxist class relations embedded in all this? And, don’t get me wrong, I accept the notion that capitalism does a pretty good job, most of the time, except when capitalists run unfettered through the streets.

(Oh, for some of you, the ones who think ‘hoi polloi‘ are the creme de le creme, fetters are leg-irons, like those ones they clamp around the ankles of the condemned as they are lead to their execution.)

The problem with this presentation of sprawl, and this opinion is based on my own false consciousness I’m sure, is that it suggests an unimaginable work-life for the suburbanites.

The critics, whether they are popular press like Kunstler, or any of a wide variety of academic models, want to assume that everyone who lives in an obviously wastrel habitation, can earn their living in the same way as the critic.

Doesn’t everyone sit at a computer, putting great thoughts on paper, sending an e-mail with attachments at the end of the day? I know, some work with video! And some, a select few, work with numbers, or letters, or drawings in .dxf format. So couldn’t they all live ’in town,’ just like us?

But, you know, some people actually make something. Something physical, tangible, real. They make something that has heft. Or something that is special because of its lack of heft.

They weld. Or they sew. Or they assemble tiny little bits of unidentifiable origin into something bigger. Like a circular saw. Or an airframe. Or, God fucking forbid, a gun. These people, some of them at least, see things in three dimensions. Male or female, young, old, or somewhere in-between, ‘retired’ even, they actually imagine something tangible, and then make it.

Some avoid the initial problems of visualization, leaving those difficulties to a designer, an engineer, a draftperson (daft person, I still prefer draughtsman, with the Old English ‘man’ as in ‘hu man) and engage with the real difficulties of making what someone else has imagined. And, having made enough of the things that other people ‘imagined,’ I’m very cognizent of the difficulties encountered in the realization process.

And, in addition to the people who make things, there are people who supply the people who make things with things to make things with so that people who have no idea how to make things can have things made by people who can make things.

But most people who decry the ticky-tacky stucco McMansions think all things come from China, or if the thing is really expensive (and unimaginably overpriced) and bears the brand of LV, TAG, or their social equivalents, perhaps Europe.

And when you actually poke the anti-suburbanites, asking if they would permit a zoning change in THEIR community that would allow, perhaps, someone to make things, the answer far more often than not, is not on your life.

So, the suburbanites, in addition to moving their domiciles into the hinterland, have moved their jobs. Don’t kid yourself, they don’t commute to ‘the’ city, they commute from one suburb to another. Occassionally they traipse through the dominant urban agglomeration to actually get where they’re going, but as often as not, they don’t.

You won’t find a major warehouse facility in a city like Vancouver. With a population of about 602,000, in an urban area of approximately 2.2 million, there is no automotive warehouse; ie Ford, Honda, General Motors. But, perhaps, we should expect that absence.

But try to find affordable ’shop’ space; a few hundred, or a couple thousand, square feet where you can make things.

You know, the kind of ‘things’ that require people to do things to other things, to make things, that may or may not resemble the raw material things. And you might need employees, those people who live in tacky suburban boxes because they can afford to. They might need parking, because they tried transit, but three transfers in the rain, with a loaded bus zooming past, is not quite the way they want to start the day. And, their employer, who pays them reasonably well to actually make tangible stuff, wants them at work, and on time. And skip the double-tall, dry, skinny, extra-foam, caramel coffee.

Make mine black.

My hands used to be black at the end of the day. My coffee was invariably cold by the time I finished it, a thin film of cutting oil on top, and metal chips blued by the heat of machining added an interesting aftertaste from the bottom of the cup.

But the shipyard is gone; more a victim of short-sightedness than of off-shore competition. And the residents in the area, who work from ‘home offices,’ would try to take the head of any politician who thought a new shipyard would conform to the waterfront’s identity.

The bicycle-parts manufacturer moved most of their work off-shore, it would have cost the whinging urbanite a couple dollars more to have the parts made here. And even the suburbs couldn’t shave those few pennies in location cost.

And, with the jobs that have survived the suburb shift, go their employees. Being human, and considering themselves equal to home-office pencil-pushers, those employees want the same amenities as the squeaky clean urbanites.

They want a McDonalds, they want a Wendy’s, they want a half-dozen big-box retailers so they can save money buying the same schlock that their urbane cousins can get in the underground malls. And the retailers are only to happy to provide. And they, too, want to keep their up-front costs down – so they build single story, slab-wall, pull-up, instant commercial buildings. And slap on some utterly inappropriate architectural frippery, essentially downtown trailer park.

And the city-dwellers bemoan the suburbs. And the suburbs thumb their noses at the elitists (as they see it at least) in the city.

The city won’t, or can’t, find ways of providing jobs (other than the so-called ’service sector’ jobs that are either crap, or a very few that are ‘corner office’ with a view) that are actually in the city. The suburbs are filled with people, and politicians, who all want their piece of the pie, and they all want someone else to pay for it, and no one wants anyone who makes things, out of other things, on their block.

So the people who make things, for people who have no idea how to make things, buy the newly-paved lot – the one with the building on it, in which they can make things. And, they get lines painted on the new aspalt, so their employees can park their cars, paid for by making things, on a lot, paid for by things made, for people who order coffees, and waste ink. And the sprawl goes on.

Up and running, again

This is a short post – more to keep my typing skills fresh, than to elucidate, illuminate, or critique.

My new iMac is now up and running, after a couple days of sorting various system bits, tossing redundant software, downloading stuff I want, and getting the ‘look and feel’ about where I want it.

Sounds simple, particularly in advertising-speak, one of the sub-sets of Orwell’s ‘Newspeak.’ Plug it in, and use it. Well, sort of.

Housekeeping, the chores that one had to do in the days of 500 meg hard drives are near useless now. This machine has a 160 gigabyte hard drive, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out how, even after much tossing, the system still uses nearly 20 gigabytes. I started with 132.91 Gig of free space, added the programs I wanted, and tossed enough stuff that I now have about 139.69 Gig of free space…

But, needless or not, I heave junk into the garbage. And one day (ho ho ho) I might learn enough ‘Unix’ to use the command line interface, and trash even more stuff.

And, as one might guess, as soon as this machine is finally ‘up and running,’ the repair shop calls to tell me my laptop is functional again. So I’ll have to re-load stuff there as well, and set that machine up as back-up storage, what with a new hard drive and all.

I feel connected again, and some of you will have noticed my presence on your blogs, especially those people in Malaysia and Australia.

Now, time to de-stress after work. Then, over the next few days, a bit of writing. Classes start in September, so I’ll be back at the Master’s grind. And some happy news; a new Director has been hired for Humanities 101, and it is someone intimately familiar with the program, and someone that I can say I have the utmost faith in. And, maybe I can get another two-night teaching slot, though the next time I’ll teach Witold Rybczynski rather than Jane Jacobs.