I haven’t seenLost in Translation and it’s already out in video. Today the brochure came in the mail for next month’s Rendezvous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, which I’ll miss along with the New Directors series and who knows what else. The cinema is reeling past me unseen, fashion is reeling past me unworn. The new, the now, it’s all getting away.
A girl walks by carrying a cello case. She is wearing cat-shaped glasses, red tights, and Keds. Her hair is cropped shorter on one side. She is cool but geeky, sexy but bookish. I feel I know her. In fact, I feel Iam her, or was her, or would be her if I were her age. I smile.
The girl looks at me cautiously, returns my smile politely, but without warmth. She doesn’t recognize me, doesn’t see the girl I was, the girl I think still shines out. But how could she? I am dressed in faded black Gap Easy Fit jeans, a black ski parka, and J. Crew red-and-orange-striped gloves with the left index finger poking through. I look like a Carroll Gardens soccer mom whose husband was laid off from his Wall Street job. Or worse, an ex-hippie soccer mom who thinks she’s still hip.
Maybe one of those bright silk pocketbooks from Chinatown would have helped my fading look. I stare at Bill Murray. He stares back, like me, bereft, bedraggled, and bare. Bill shakes his head in defeated wisdom.It’s not a silk purse you want, Jude, I hear him say.It’s hope for the sow’s ear of your sorry, aging self.
MARCH 23
I dream I am defining a portion of text on a computer screen and deleting it, over and over.
MARCH 26
Out for my daily walk, I stroll to Fulton Street, the down-market shoppers’ mall in downtown Brooklyn, and find myself inside one of the two dozen shoe shops on the strip. The colors draw me in: Bazooka pink, Creamsicle orange, sour-lime-candy green. The shapes of the shoes are cartoonlike, toe boxes balloon-fat or turned up like elfin slippers; some are cloven like the hooves of mythical creatures. The companies have animal names suggesting bounce and bite: KangaRoo, Puma. One brand called Irregular Choice offers pairs in which the two shoes are different.
“Can I help you?” asks the salesman.
I put my hands into my pockets and notice I have left the house without money—a first since returning to New York. “No, thank you,” I say. “Just looking.”
The historian Rosalind Williams, writing about Paris at the turn of the last century, describes the new “environments of mass consumption”—the department store, the exposition, the movie palace—as “Versailles open to all, at least during business hours.” There, consumers could touch and try on clothes, “gaze on luxurious goods, travel in style, and otherwise taste pleasures normally reserved for the fortunate few,” all “without having to buy.” I could eat these lime-green shoes. Not for nothing do the French call window-shoppingla lêche-vitrine— licking shop windows.
“Perhaps the consumer revolution intensified the pain of envy by bringing within the realm of possibility the acquisition of a degree of wealth that had formerly been considered out of reach,” writes Williams. But it “also brought an anodyne in the form of environments…where envy is transformed into pleasure by producing a temporary but highly intense satisfaction of the dream of wealth.” The young women around me are giggling and cooing, complimenting each other and admiring their own slim ankles. One of them is dancing across the floor in a pair of green spike heels so high that they almost pitch her forward, into an imaginary partner’s arms.
Dreams of wealth? Nothing like it. These shoes conjure dreams of dancing and kissing, of hobbling over the curbstones as the dawn comes up.
I find myself debating internally. “Flimsy,” scoffs Soccer Mom as she picks up a pair that will be shot after four hours on the dance floor. “Crippling!” Even if the shoes survive, the feet wouldn’t.
“That’s the point,” says Sexual Revolutionary Flower Child. Fashion is about flirtation, not marriage. A pair of lime-green stiletto heels is never meant to be more than a one-night stand.
As I leave the store, I look back through the window. Piles of boxes surround the shoppers. Discards are tossed aside, tangled in their tissue sheets. It’s a scene of debauchery. I feel envious, but not of wealth or luxury. What I long for is the cheap thrill of the ephemeral, the instantly consumed and discarded mini-relationship with person or thing, the “quickie” that is urban commerce.
I walk home along Smith Street, pockets empty, licking the shop windows with my eyes.
April
In/Voluntary Simplicity
Damned if I do shop, damned if I don’t. If compulsive acquisition disorder doesn’t get me, the deprivation blues will. Same goes for America. Either we keep on shopping until the earth collapses under the weight of our trash, or we stop shopping and the economy collapses under its own stagnation.
Fortunately, for every disease real or invented, America creates a self-help movement. So I go online to seek out the Simple Living Network, a loose conglomeration of recovering compulsive shoppers, anonymous debtors, back-to-the-landers, New Agers, Buddhist meditators, and skinflints. The way of life recommended by the network is called Voluntary Simplicity (VS), a name coined in 1981 in the book of the same name by Duane Elgin. Its tenets, according to Elgin, are “frugal consumption, ecological awareness, and personal growth.”
Just as there are levels of medicine from herbal tea to antibiotics to surgery, the anticonsumption lifestyle can be undertaken at various levels of seriousness or, you might say, severity. At one end, there are the people Juliet Schor calls “downshifters.” These ordinary middle-class folk get fed up with overwork, stress, debt, and isolation from their families, friends, and communities. So they take it down a notch: they switch from a full-time to a part-time job, sell the house and move into an apartment, or institute minor economies such as twice-monthly instead of twice-weekly dinners out. From 1990 to 1996 Schor put the number of voluntary downshifters at nearly a fifth of American adults.
Somewhat more serious VSers adopt the methodology of Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’sYour Money or Your Life, which at its most elementary is a way to calculate the labor hours required to purchase any given good, service, or experience, then decide if it’s worth the personal, financial, or ecological cost. For instance, “Is this Miele Touchtronic dishwasher worth a half a month’s toil in the cubicle?” Yeah, sure. “How about another hundred bucks a year for the electricity to run it?” Maybe. “Is it and all its sister dishwashers worth drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness—plus an eternity of fighting with my spouse over the correct way to load the thing?” Hmm. Pass me that sponge. You can go as far as you want with this, including eschewal of the sponge for a rag—or your hand.
While much of the VS literature consists of practical methodologies, at heart it is a philosophy, which is linked to a promise. Shopping “saps your energy,” it “reduces ingenuity,” “harms your health,” and generally “makes you unhappy,” says Cecile Andrews, author ofThe Circle of Simplicity. Far worse, by supplying a purchasable identity, she claims, consuming makes you false, a traitor to the person you really are. Toss out those old clothes and broken tennis rackets at the back of your closet and you will discover your “authentic self” crushed under the debris. After that, Heaven’s the limit: VS, writes Andrews, “is a life that allows the individual’s soul to awaken.”
In short order I locate a VS organizer I’ll call Beryl,*who is forming a new group just blocks from our apartment. By way of résumé, Beryl recites an abbreviated life story. Twenty miserable years at a twelve-hour-a-day corporate job, salary of $25,000, “wise investments” (in similarly soul-crushing corporations?), then, starting at forty, with “fully funded retirement accounts,” the good life. Today she lives on $12,000 a year, $11,000 of which goes to mortgage, utilities, and health insurance. While I’m tapping these numbers into my mental calculator ($11,000 divided by 12…) she moves on to the sell. Registration for the meetings is just $10, including start-up visit from hers truly and Xeroxed study guide. I set aside my hesitation (is ten bucks
for a course on not spending money a necessary expenditure?) and sign up.
But the second I put down the phone I am full of apprehension. What if my soul awakens in a room full of women wearing gingham smocks and men with self-inflicted haircuts and twine for shoelaces? What if I discover my authentic self, and my authentic self is a shopper?
APRIL FOOL’S DAY
Paul and I are seated in a circle of a dozen people in a tidy apartment facing Prospect Park. Our hostess, Elisa, is friendly and welcoming. But appropriate to the abstemious intent of the meeting, no refreshment, even water, is served. One optimistic sign: I see no gingham and no twine, even if the guest of honor, Beryl, has an apparently self-inflicted haircut.
Ensconced in an easy chair, Beryl begins the meeting by retelling the Parable of the Twenty Years, the wise investments, the retirement accounts. Tonight she details her expenses more fully. Basic costs absorb all but $100 a month, of which $80 goes to food (“three nutritious and delicious meals at home for an average cost of $1 a meal”). But Beryl isn’t sitting home scrimping. At a length defying the movement’s less-is-more philosophy, she describes days chockablock with reading, working out, theater (free as a volunteer usher), even foreign travel. It is during the cheery account of digging people out after the Turkish earthquake (disaster relief as vacation travel!) that I begin to reconsider the leisure of the twelve-hour workday.
Somewhat stunned, the rest of us introduce ourselves.
Sal is putting in six days a week at the office; she feels under-appreciated and underpaid. So does Nobuko, a junior architect in a large firm. Marlene’s days are fourteen hours long. Dana, a recently widowed mother of two, is stretched not only emotionally but financially: three-quarters of her take-home pay goes to rent, but a cheaper neighborhood would mean inferior public schools, so she stays put. All four women say their workplaces have “downsized” over the last few years.
Jessica, a boyish computer programmer, is not as lucky as these four. She was laid off two years ago and is stringing together the rent with occasional “consulting.” Laura, at twenty-five the youngest among us, lost her job in information technology six months ago and has since been searching for “something where I make a difference every day.” Gail, out of work for two years, is an experienced VSer, writing down every penny she dispenses; she announces that she has eaten out fewer than ten times in the past six months. Elisa, a corporate librarian, suspects her job is about to be outsourced to India.
Besides Paul there are two men in the group, and they are the only members who can contemplate retirement. Not incidentally, both are union members, both have pensions. Lionel, a city bureaucrat, has retired at forty-eight and is casting around for something to do. Irwin, an unskilled laborer, is about to quit at fifty-five. His has not been a satisfying career: “I’ve been planning for retirement since I was a teenager.” Now he is taking eighty-eight accrued sick days to figure out the next steps.
I mark hatches in my notepad. Of twelve people, at least half say they are underpaid, and even those who don’t talk about their salaries lament the difficulty of keeping up with expenses. A fourth of the group have been laid off or fear they are about to be. And the rest are laboring like serfs because half their co-workers have been laid off.
When it’s our turn, Paul and I give the basic outline of our lives. I am already feeling smug. We have completed most of what’s on Beryl’s syllabus: Finding the Work We Love, Managing Our Lives as an Integrated Whole, Setting Priorities for Personal Action, Building Community. We should take the advanced placement exam and test out of the course altogether! I describe our project: “So, essentially, we’re not buying anything but plain groceries.” Do I hear gasps of admiration?
And while I often feel sorry for myself, a low-paid freelance writer never sure where the next check is coming from, in this room I see how fortunate I am. I recognize one advantage to being self-employed (besides being able to work in your pajamas): you can’t get fired. On the roiling sea of the economy, while the rest of the group grasps the handrails of the Titanic, Paul and I paddle our agile kayaks, adept at staying afloat.
I probably don’t earn as much as most of the others, but I know my simplicity is voluntary. Can the same be said of Jessica’s or Laura’s? These people are not downshiftingso much as being downsized.As the group moves on to comparing penny-pinching tactics and applauding one another’s sacrifices, I wonder: has a movement founded in reaction to the greed-is-good ethos of the Reagan era become a survival strategy for its victims, a tacit capitulation to the greed-is-God ethos of the Bush era? Is Voluntary Simplicity the opiate of the masses?
APRIL 4
Travel is out this year, but we have a months-old obligation (and desire) to fly to Montana in June to celebrate the graduation of my niece, Sarah. We’re getting our tickets with frequent-flier miles, so we’re not spending money on that. Still, if we were serious about our ecological footprint, we’d keep our feet on the ground. The “footprint factor” of an hour of jet travel—let’s say 500 miles—is 5,216, whereas an hour of train travel, 80 to 100 miles, is 17, about half the FF per mile (the FF numbers are abstractions derived from a formula, used to compare expenditures of “nature”).
Still, I’m looking forward to the trip. In New York, it’s a cinch to think globally simply by walking locally. But if you don’t also consume locally, your window on the world shrinks. Chained to my armchair, even my armchair travel is limited. We are seeing and renting no movies, buying no CDs. I am tossing the theater ticket offers when they arrive in the mail. My magazine reading list consists of a staid collection of last year’s leftover subscriptions—theNation, theNew Yorker, and several nonprofit newsletters. I am informed, edified, and sufficiently politically riled at all times. But I’m starved of food for fantasy.
I walk up the street. A stack ofCondé Nast Traveller s set out for recycling beckons me like a chorus of Sirens. How about a drive along the Caprivi Strip in Namibia, a weekend in Helsinki, or a retreat at a mountaintop monastery in Bulgaria? Now,Traveller can make Minneapolis look like Marrakech. But having eliminated cultural gratifications closer to home, all enticements feel equally desirable, and equally exotic. Dinner at Alain Ducasse in Paris?Tu rigole. Dinner at Taco Bell? Who ya kiddin’? In the middle of the greatest city in the world, I feel like I am nowhere.
APRIL 7
I reach into the box for a Kleenex to blow my nose. Empty. I fish a roll of toilet paper from under the bathroom sink to put on my night table. Now that I’m freeing up so much time, perhaps I’ll crochet a toilet paper cozy.
APRIL 11
In the city as in the country, Paul and I are finding that free entertainment is about a century behind the stuff you pay for. I’m keeping track of the cherry and daffodil blooms in the botanic gardens the way I used to pore over movie schedules. We’re getting intimate with the back stacks of the public library and the Italian Renaissance paintings in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Like most of the museums, it is free one evening per week.) We go to free concerts, open studios, and poetry readings.
Sunday afternoon, Jonathan, a historian, accompanies me to a chamber concert organized by a cellist friend and held at the local Quaker meetinghouse. It’s not a perfect space. The acoustics are somewhat dead, and occasionally during fermatas the sound of metal chairs clatters up from the AA meeting below. But the performance—of a rarely played Bach cycle involving tricks like playing the score upside down and backwards—is crisp and witty and far more musical than the pieces’ academic game-playing would augur. Afterward, the audience lingers in the foyer drinking apple cider out of paper cups and chatting with the musicians. As I send Jonathan off to the subway and unlock my bike, I am left feeling as live as the music.
On our lopsided quest for free fun, Paul and I are exposing ourselves to the very surprises that our usually meticulous cultural consumption is supposed to deliver, and often does not. I don’t want to wax romantic; some of what we see (o
pen mike at a Lower East Side anarchist bookstore) is godawful. But in dogs per dollar, the money we’re expending (zero) is by definition lower than that at any commercial movie house. And if the aesthetic satisfaction of these small-space live performances is not always higher than that of electronic entertainment or more formal (and paid) live theater or music, the social satisfaction almost always is. That’s because the vitality emanates not just from the players, but from the bodies moving, moved, intimately, in the audience.
As I pedal down Court Street through the early-spring cold, the numbness in my fingers takes me back to a thousand childhood bike rides home from after-school activities or friends’ houses. Those memories awaken others, of returning home late, also on my bike, during the Vietnam War and early feminist movement. I am remembering another kind of live event: the political meeting of the 1960s and ’70s. Back then, activism meant sitting in living rooms for many hours with other people planning (and then executing) actions to change things that you wanted ferociously to improve. Commitments were not just to ideas, they were to people. When you took on a task, you made a promise to women and men whom you liked and respected. The “movement” was a network of thousands of such relationships, thousands of living rooms. Community was smaller, and also larger, than an e-mail box.
Culture unites people of like tastes, passions, and politics, and mass culture unites us in an even larger kind of community. This year, I’m acutely aware that not having seen the latest “important” movie or play cuts me out of the contemporary conversation; it isolates me. But the marketplace, where we consume culture, is not the same as the forum, where we create it. It’s the distinction that Hannah Arendt drew between theagora, which brings people together in work and commerce, and thepolis, oroikos, where speech becomes “deeds.” The community of theagora is mobilized by “the desire for products, not people,” Arendt said. By contrast, the living roomoikos, hot with strategizing, arguing, laughing, and flirting, was a place of desire for people. There I connected with lovers, collaborated with comrades, and forged many friendships (and—again, not getting overly romantic—enmities) that endure to this day.
Not Buying It Page 7
