Karen used to be an art historian studying the indigenous art of South Africa. Now she sells it. But her choices are historically shaped, not just personal. I tell her today about Robert, an artist and revolutionary turned entrepreneur of my acquaintance, who has set up shop as a custom housepainter serving the gentry who displaced him and his friends from their lofts in Soho. Robert doesn’t make art (or, needless to say, revolution) any more. What he makes is a mint transforming the former artists’ garrets into small versions of Versailles. His clients like to think they are living in an artists’ neighborhood, and the housepainter does not disabuse them. Appropriately, he specializes intromp l’oeil. Robert is philosophical about the last decades’ cultural-political changes. “What’s left of the counterculture,” he likes to say, “is the counter.”
OCTOBER 5
Prudence is taking off to Prague for a week on a previously delayed trip, but she tells me she’d rather not leave the country right now. “I feel I can affect the election more by staying home and obsessively reading about it,” she explains.
You can buy Obsession in perfume form, but the most obsessive things in life—love, religion, dieting—are free. I’m trying Prudence’s tactic, but reading more than a few paragraphs at a time requires concentration beyond what I can muster. So instead, I’ve been devoting six to eight hours a day—preferably in ten- to fifteen-minute periods separated by ten- to fifteen-minute intervals of nonspecific woolgathering and carbohydrate loading—to toggling among the polling sites that track the vacillating sentiments of those sixteen undecided voters who will determine the outcome of the election. Because I’m not getting out of the house to exercise (how can I? An e-mail petition might arrive), I put my heart through its paces by alternately raising and lowering my blood pressure with good and bad news for each candidate. Using the Rasmussen Report’s frequently updated state-by-state polls and two pocket calculators, I keep a perpetual tally of the Electoral College votes, hoping to hit at random all 933,120 permutations by November 2. As the weeks progress, my own data become more reliable than the off-the-cuff prognostications of the TV pundits. At this point, I am about 95 percent certain that Kerry will prevail, so long as he pulls down Ohio, the Ukraine, and Uranus.
OCTOBER 7
Intoxicants, including vodka, Oreos, and OxyContin, are off-limits. I wanna be sedated!
Thankfully, Paul’s cottage industry in alcoholic beverages is showing healthy signs of expansion. The first batch of homebrew has turned out well. It’s rich tasting with a fine head, almost as good as Sam Adams. Paul has already mixed up another, trying out a slightly different formula for a lighter ale. And this morning, he joined Flavio and his friend Oratio, experienced backyard vintners, in crushing 1,200 pounds of Cabernet and Merlot grapes, the first step in a half-year process of making wine. After a pleasant several hours of work, Oratio put out a lunch of homemade pasta, bread, salad, and, of course, last year’s wine. When I arrive at three to see how they’re doing, espresso is being poured.
Oratio invites me to sit at the long wooden table and brings out a little cup. I sip the bittersweet coffee and look around at his frescoed walls, listening to the men talk. Flavio recounts stopping into Smith & Vine, the new wine boutique on Smith Street: “The guy in there says, ‘Oh yes, I have heard of your wine. Bring it here, I’ll sell it. Label it—you can get a very high price for that.’ ” Flavio laughs loudly. “Here I am because I don’t want to go out and spend money for this grape juice I can’t live without. I know how much it costs me—$2.20, $2.30 a bottle. Now I learn I’m drinking a $50 bottle of wine!”
For my own minor intoxication, I ride my bike to Fulton Street to the shoe store whose pink and green Popsicle toes had me salivating last spring. Needless to say, the neon-colored cloven and curly-tipped cuties are now shopworn, marked down, and available only in sizes 2 and 14. Predictably, they have ceded pride of place to the new round-toed pumps in brown and oxblood, along with a fair number of boots in black, which (since nine-tenths of my shoes are this color) I am hoping is the new black.
Fashion depends as much on repulsion as attraction. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England, France, and Italy, notes the historian Chandra Mukerji, “the fashion-conscious…were beginning to be ashamed of wearing outdated clothing.” At the turn of the twentieth century, Veblen described the way in which “the best of our fashions strike us as grotesque” a few months past their prime. He called the phenomenon “aesthetic nausea.”
So, surely as summer follows spring and autumn follows summer, the lusciousness of last spring’s shoes has turned to a dusty aftertaste and a gummy feel in my mouth. After five months of fasting, though, something else has happened: I have lost my appetite for the fresh new offerings. I look down at my red Giraudon shoes, bought for a trip to Paris last year, where wearing flats on the street can get a woman deported. My Giraudons turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong: too sensible, too thick, still too American (no Giraudon store in Paris carried them), and of course, flat. Also, no one was wearing red shoes that spring. I decided I had two choices: buy a pair of skinny French or Italian high heels and hobble over the cobblestones, or wear my red shoes as badges ofrésistance in fashion-fascist Paris. I did the former and felt good for it.
Surveying my clothes from the feet up, I note that the right pant leg of my black jeans is still folded into my sock to keep it out of the bike chain. The sock is striped in an off-kilter variety of off-center colors, which refer to but do not match the faded stripe of the boat-neck shirt with no elbows (though you can’t see this) that I’ve got on beneath a black fleece vest flecked with orange cat hair. Over the vest I’m wearing a short green leather jacket that I bought in a flea market. Its pewter buttons are dangling and its skin is so distressed it should be on Prozac.
Let’s face it, Month 10 of the Year Without Shopping and my wardrobe is worse for the constant wear. I rarely bother with makeup any more; my mascara is nearly dried out and my eye pencil sharpened down to a stub.
But my dishabille is not altogether unintentional. “It’s a look,” Paul says when he can’t understand one of my outfits. Yes, it’s a look, my look, the look that has stayed with me, varying slightly from year to year, since I was old enough to select my own clothes. Having dug out my favorite things and worn them every day this year, almost unwittingly I have reassembled the fashion identity of the girl in the Beethoven sweatshirt, the flower child in the stinky coat gazing at the Lower East Side through rose-colored granny glasses. I am reclaiming my bohemian identity, in its latest incarnation: counterculturalist to the culture of the counter.
OCTOBER 9
I’m thinking about the disjointed body of anti-Bush political activism, nothing like the movement Howard Dean claims it is, when I get an e-mail from the Simple Living Network informing me that October 24 is Take Back Your Time Day.
Take Back Your Time is trying to be a movement, too, not just a Web site and PayPal portal. And unlike Voluntary Simplicity, which is a cluster of persons each making a personal change, TBYT advances collective political demands. I endorse the lot of them: universal paid vacations, family leave, and sick leave; higher minimum wages, affordable child care, and guaranteed adequate retirement income. Still, any political movement worth its salt sets realistic goals. Knowing that in America at the moment, its demands are utopian, TBYT hopes at least to change the culture one harried American at a time.
I call Peter Fraenkel, a psychologist and director of the Center for Time, Work, and the Family at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, and New York City’s premier take-back activist. Among other things, Peter studies the effects of time strain on family life. I ask him if we might spend TBYT Day together.
Peter offers his regrets. Alas, he won’t be in New York that weekend; he is giving a talk at an out-of-town conference. But he will pass my name along to his colleague Mary Kim Brewster, who will be running an event at her house in Brooklyn Heights.
So how about another time to t
alk? I ask.
Peter consults his calendar, mumbling to himself, “Next week, no. Not the next…Next…doesn’t…look…” Finally, he tells me he has a couple of hours to meet with me the week before Thanksgiving. He’s a little sheepish, neither of us mentioning the obvious. He apologizes: he’s just, well, so damn busy.
I commiserate, but disingenuously. I don’t tell him that these days I have plenty of time on my hands, having given up movies, theater, restaurants, and recently, every activity except worrying about the elections. When I have a little extra free time, I use it productively, doing research that inspires me to worry more.
“Industry and utility are the angels of death who, with fiery swords, prevent man’s return to Paradise, and in all parts of the world it is the right to idleness that distinguishes the superior from the inferior classes,” wrote Friedrich Schlegel, a German Romantic ironist. Schlegel condemned the predominant lifestyle of his time (circa 1800) as one of “empty, restless striving,” which he dismissed as “nothing but a Nordic bad habit [that] produces nothing but boredom.”
By mid-century, Marx had turned the Romantic yearning for idleness into political manifesto. “A nation is really rich if the work day is six hours rather than twelve,” he wrote. Legend has it that as its first order of business, the workers’ government of the Paris Commune of 1870–71 (of which Marx wrote admiringly) burned the money and smashed the clocks. Nowthat’s taking back your time.
Today, idleness belongs not to the superior classes but to the “underclass,” who, being underemployed, undereducated (and, conservatives charge, undermotivated), have nothing better to do than hang out. The “superior” classes—the executives, surgeons, and frequent-flyer inspirational speakers—are paid well enough to while away half the year at the beach, but they do not. Their status depends in part on being busy. They don’t even while away the hours between 4 and 6A.M. , when, speaking of Nordic bad habits, they are all on their Nordic Tracks, making cell phone calls and watching CNN. To be superior, you have to be industrious, even if what you do (say, manipulate your company’s earnings reports to artificially raise stock values) is not useful.
Peter asks if I would like to make an appointment to get together in November. If I don’t shoehorn myself into his schedule now, I know I’ll lose him for another two months. But I demur; I’ll call him soon, I say. The fact is, I feel embarrassed. Here I am, rich in what this man is devoting his life’s work to gaining, and do I feel superior? Ha. I feel like a dust bunny swept away in the tempest of his busy-ness.
OCTOBER 10
Mary Kim Brewster calls to invite me to her house on Take Back Your Time Day. She’s asking a dozen guests to “talk about two of your biggest time-management problems and also some solutions.” Although I had hoped for something more subversive—say, a Paris Commune memorial alarm-clock sacrifice—I accept.
The good news is that TBYT Day falls on a Sunday this year, so sympathizers are more likely to observe it. The bad news is that since it’s on a Sunday, no one else is likely to notice. And I’m not sure how many people will give up their one day of leisure to talk about making more time for what they want to do.
OCTOBER 12
On NPR’sMorning Edition I hear that one quarter of America’s working families are living in poverty. In another story, it is reported that since 2000 the use of food pantries has increased 67 percent. Executing a Texas chainsaw massacre of America’s working poor while shoveling money to its friends, the Bush administration and its adman Karl Rove have managed to brand dynastic scion George W. Bush as a reg’ler feller on his ranch, cuttin’ the overgrown brush of the U.S. budget.
But in this election, Rove and GWB Inc. are not leaving brand loyalty to chance, or even to advertising. They certainly are not counting on the quality of the product to sell itself. Rather, they have engineered an unprecedented strategy for identifying potential Republican voters, “mining” consumer data and dividing the electorate into demographic “buckets” (also known as market niches) by the beer they drink, the car they drive, or the guns they shoot. Looking at the election this way, I see that John Kerry has the same problem as the Volvo with the yellow-ribbon bumper sticker. Windsurfing gunboat captain, Ivy League union supporter, pro-choice Catholic, the man’s not a flip-flopper, not even a moderate consensus-builder. He’s a brand drowning in a bucket of confounded consumer demographics.
OCTOBER 14
Well, I’m finally doing more than clicking the Submit button at the bottom of the petitions and promiscuously handing over my credit card to any half-decent candidate I meet on the Internet. I am making voter calls and, on weekends until the election, traveling with America Coming Together to Pennsylvania to canvass for Kerry.
I arrive tonight at the office of the New York Public Interest Research Group, a large loft in a shabby industrial building on the edge of downtown Brooklyn. A vague smell of rotting fruit wafts from a trash can overdue for emptying. At the end of a row of cubicles stands a leatherette couch that has seen some unsavory reveling, on which is installed a large, friendly, disorganized organizer and stacks of call sheets and instructions. The woman doesn’t quite know the calling drill, but she has been effective in assembling a raft of chips, cookies, and soda for our sustenance. I decline, now that I’m in the habit of packing my own supper. I’ve brought some whole-wheat bread, cheddar cheese, and a crunchy Winesap apple.
About a half-dozen volunteers drift in and find cubicles. Many of the phone dial pads stick, more than a few of the secretary chairs are missing casters. The printouts supplied by the Ohio Democratic Party are a mess of disconnected phone numbers and moved or deceased occupants. We’ve been given no polling place addresses or local elections board phone numbers to which we can refer voters with questions, and these wouldn’t help anyway, since the sheets don’t indicate what counties we are calling. A guy who has been volunteering several times a week tells me a joke:
“What party do you belong to?”
“Oh, I’m not a member of any organized party. I’m a Democrat.”
All this might be cause for demoralization (I’ve been to the offices of Focus on the Family, and I can tell you, their chairs have casters), but as we huddle to figure out a system, I’m encouraged by the humor and intelligence of our side. We disagree on a strategy for a minute, then sort it out. One woman calls 411 and guides us toward the main state election board number. We collectively revise the script to fit current, post–voter registration deadline conditions.
I experience a moment of hope. Maybe we won’t lose for our lack of slickness or money, but win because of our ingenuity in spite of poverty. Maybe we’ll win because our arguments are unique and homemade, like the posters carried by protesters outside the Republican convention, rather than mass-produced and artificially homemade, like those inside. Maybe America, smart shopper, won’t be fooled by false advertising!
OCTOBER 17
I take the ACT bus to the Philadelphia suburbs. Joining me is my friend Leonore, a therapist and indefatigable activist, and on the bus we run into Eunice, an American writer who lives most of the time in Paris but has returned to the States to spend two months working on the election. Eunice is also the consummate shopper, a connoisseur of things culinary and sartorial (who else would choose Paris as her home? There’s a reason the wordsconnoisseur andbourgeois are French). At the moment, though, Eunice isn’t buying either—she’s a writer and her husband is an artist, and they are in a broke phase. She tells me that oranges are so expensive on the Upper West Side that she slices one in half to share with him for breakfast. I suggest she not buy oranges. From her laugh I can tell she considers that going to absurd lengths.
We are en route to well-educated, well-heeled Bryn Mawr, a swing county in a swing state, and a bellwether in past elections. We drive on quaint streets lined with gourmet food and designer clothing shops. It’s a beautiful day and people are out on their Saturday morning rounds. On many street corners, union members and other volunteers
are passing out Kerry literature. We see no Republicans, unless they are disguised as shoppers.
Leonore and I are assigned to a subdivision of immense new houses, in whose driveways stand immense new vehicles, several per home. Landscaping is going on at a torrid pace. Every blade of grass appears to have been trimmed with a nail clipper to match the one beside it. No plant is allowed to touch another plant. The mulch between them is black, another fashion trend I must have missed this year.
Our goal is to recruit volunteers, so we are canvassing Democrats. One of the categories on the walk sheets is Lazy Dem—people who lean Democratic but don’t always vote. None of these people looks lazy to me (all that landscaping! Such clean cars!), but I am spectacularly unsuccessful in persuading any of them to donate even an hour of their time. They are “crushingly busy,” “unbelievably busy,” they plead. The superior classes.
“Okay, then,” I say to one woman whom I have caught climbing out of a late-model Lexus. I glance at her car, perhaps too meaningfully. “I hope you send money.”
Her smile is tight; her gaze tells me she is slightly appalled. The fate of the world may depend on campaign contributions, but, she communicates with this look, what she buys is her own private affair.
OCTOBER 20
I get an e-mail from Mary Brewster. In it is a list of depressing statistics: Of 168 countries in a recent international study, 163 guarantee paid leave for mothers in connection with childbirth; 45 offer it to fathers, too. Paid sick leave is guaranteed by 139 countries, and 37 guarantee paid time off for parents caring for sick children. Ninety-six guarantee paid annual vacations; 84 legally limit the workweek. The U.S. does none of the above. Almost a third of American women workers get no paid vacation at all.
The main message of the e-mail is this: “Our planned event for TAKE BACK YOUR TIME has been canceled so that you can Take Back Your Time.” When I call Mary, she explains that no one except me could come.
Not Buying It Page 19
