Seven Red

While I sometimes find Cenk’s commentary a little much, I will admit to loving his comment on capitalist shill Erin Burnett’s summary of the Occupy Wall Street protests. I suppose I’ve already made the utter disdain I feel for the financial and business “news” operation very clear in this post, but Burnett really is one of the worst of the worst, and she’s now been given an even bigger stage than her usual and ludicrous CEO-fawning nonsense on CNBC. It’s an amusing takedown, including the closing line, “Do your job.” As most people looking at this might note, however, Burnett is doing her job, her job being to shill nonstop for corporate thieves as they rob the treasury and suck every dime they can from any program or person they come across.

One of the funnier moments is, to my mind, the comparison of the supposedly weirdo “hippies” of Occupy Wall Street with the truly bizarre get-ups of the Tea Party nuts. I mean, really. What is weirder: the dreads and bongos and nose-rings, or people donning tri-corner hats and Colonial bonnets and carrying around muzzle-loader muskets while hanging bags of tea from their clothing? That’s not fucking weird? At least the “hippies,” for the most part, actually dress like that in their regular lives, perhaps the zombie drummer and Uncle Samta Claus excluded.

I’m coining it! I did a Google search for “contripreneur,” and got this:

Bupkiss. So it’s mine. As you know, I intensely dislike the term “prosumer,” largely because I think it obscures more than it reveals. The actual term for the activity supposedly taken up by the prosumer should be, in my view, the “contripreneur,” an admittedly tongue-in-cheek combination of the contributor and the entrepreneur. (I don’t think it’s any more etymologically senseless than “prosumer,” in any case). And I want to use it to describe a whole set of activities, ranging from micro-finance and the kind of entrepreneurial charity work described recently by Nicholas Kristoff, the more modest contripreneurial activities, like designing tee shirts for Threadless to uploading YouTube videos and the like. Put another way, I want the term to have a broader extension than the “prosumer” because I’m attempting to link prosumer activities to a series of other activities, including, I should note, the way we contribute to our retirement plans and the like, which are mostly now “defined contribution plans” as opposed to the defined benefits plans of the old economy. But for now, I’ll just be staking that information claim, and we’ll see how fast Google’s little bots find my frequent mention of the contripreneur in this blog post titled The Contripreneur. Did I mention the contripreneur?

Apart from assaying my Googlexistence, I’m going to use this term as a jumping off point for getting back into the whole discussion of contribution that I brought up in the Three Dogmas of User-Centeredness post (which has, oddly enough, become a favorite of Israeli spammers), and continued in a few other posts. And I’ll try to do that through several readings of Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy, which posits a “Contribution Economy” as an escape route from the crisis of contemporary capital. So, more on Stiegler as I get to it.

Here’s one from American Slang, which will probably have to compete for my top ten records of the year. (Isn’t December the time for Top Tens?). The Gaslight Anthem is, to my mind, this really interesting phenomenon, since their overriding theme seems to be the overt nostalgia for some working class youth, but it meshes perfectly with nostalgia for something like a collapsing industrial society. Indeed, Arcade Fire talks the talk on this, but The Gaslight Anthem really works it in formally, a kind of yearning for Springsteen’s 70′s, and their links with Springsteen are, of course, well-known by now (I think there’s probably something wrong with people who don’t like “The ’59 Sound” the first time they hear it). I guess the whole nostalgia thing is strange cuz these dudes are in their twenties.

Digression: This reminds me that I really want to pick up Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 70′s and the Last Days of the Working Class, which I was tempted to just buy and read the other day (along with Francois Dosse’s mammoth biography of Deleuze and Guattari – I really liked Dosse’s History of Structuralism). Then I thought, why buy either of these when certain blog readers might be agonizing again over what in the world to get me for Christmas, and not wanting me to look at the book they’ve presented me, only to have me say “You really have no idea what I do, right?” See? I make things easy.

Anyway, here’s “Orphans” from American Slang, followed by “Boxer” at Bonnaroo

One of the more compelling arguments for the value of social media is Clive Thompson’s Wired piece, published – stunningly – almost three years ago, titled “How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense.” I remember reading this article when it first came out, and just intuitively agreeing with his thesis. Constant updates (on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) allow a group to develop what Thompson calls “social proprioception,” a kind of feeling about what everybody’s up to that can spark “weird, fascinating feats of coordination.” Here’s Thompson:

When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

It really is a fascinating article, and worth the read. And I think Thompson’s one of the best commentators on social media – and the social effects of social media – out there today, so read his other stuff, too. So that should be enough to say that I think Thompson is quite right about this, but I want to suggest that “social proprioception” also costs us something, and I hope I can do that without sounding a nostalgic or mournful tone. I really don’t want to be the grumpy Luddite on this point, largely because I almost always disagree with grumpy Luddites, so hopefully this is a sufficient qualifier.

So, what gets lost? I think to some extent, what gets lost is the art of catching up. By catching up, I mean those times when you sit with somebody you haven’t seen in some time, and you exchange stories. There is, to my mind, an art to such occasions and performances, and they require a whole set of language and mental abilities, an everyday narratology. You can’t just tick off a list of updates; you have to blend them into a well-told and entertaining story or set of stories, you have to pick up on connections, and make the particular story you tell at any one time relevant. The negative and degraded version of the art of catching up can be seen in any airport, when people who don’t know each other start talking to each other. Almost invariably, they will hit on a topic (say, their kids’ sports participation), and will then proceed to talk exclusively about themselves, not even really listening to the other people, except to the extent that whatever is being said might furnish an entry for them to talk about themselves again. It’s conversational masturbation. But the art of catching up, though ostensibly about the self in the same way, always includes a history with the other person or people, a repertoire of shared knowledge and experience that is specific to the group, maybe even care. Together with shared knowledge and experiences, you have some absence that you need to fill – that’s the catching up. But you have to tell your story in the context of these shared experiences, and you have to make it entertaining. That’s why it’s an art.

Maybe I just grew up in a story-telling culture; most of the time I spent with friends was occupied with either story-telling or insults – and both require equal shares of creativity. People make fun of the New Yawkah version of “Howyadoin’,” but it’s really not a greeting; it’s an invitation. Tell me something funny.Tell me something new. Tell it well. And you’re judged, socially, by your skill in telling a story, the way you shape a narrative, your descriptive capacity, your skill with language. This all goes on miles, metaphorically, from any creative writing or composition classes, and it’s even possible that the best storytellers would immediately flunk in either of those settings. But you’ve all seen it – sitting around in a bar, and somebody starts in on some tale, and they’re gesticulating and assuming roles, hitting punchlines with exquisite timing, saving connections for maximum impact, and you’re hooked in and laughing and the whole thing is so perfectly constructed. Good narrative is not rare. These are the sources of value in any oral culture.

What I’ve been noticing lately is that the social proprioception thesis actually seems to hold, but what you gain in positive knowledge comes packaged with what you lose in terms of that absence to be filled, the negative space that provokes catching up. Just one example, although I could post many. A bumped into a guy I know from graduate school at a conference recently. He’s one of my Facebook friends, though, admittedly, he came in several years behind me, so we were never really that close. So we’re sitting at a table, and he starts telling me how he’s gotten really into Korean cooking, and making really complicated dishes, and etc. The problem is that I know all this already – he posts about it constantly. What could otherwise have turned into an interesting conversation about Korean cooking just ends up being a recitation of the already-known. I don’t mean to pick on him; he’s a good guy, and the example should be generalized. The more “granular” the update apparatus, the more effective the installing of social proprioception, the more tedious become these opportunities for narrative. If that’s the case, it strikes me as a serious loss indeed, not least because the skills required for telling good catching-up-stories appear to me to be generally valuable. Of course, the same updating regime may lead to better stories, and it’s probably never fine-grained enough in practice to really eliminate the art of catching up. But I’ve seen it happen again and again in the last few years, and maybe this is where I’m at my most nostalgic, but it worries me.

Some of my facebook friends and others have been posting and reposting this email exchange between an NYU Stern School of Business professor and an MBA student. To summarize the exchange, the MBA student showed up for the first day of the professor’s “Brand Strategy” class an hour late, apparently because he or she was “sampling” the first day of other courses in an effort to determine which course to take. The professor sent the student away immediately, since he has a standing policy of refusing entry to anyone who is more than 15 minutes late for class. The student, who could not have known of this policy (not having the syllabus), complains to said professor in an email, explaining the situation, even though he or she has decided against taking the class. It shall be left at that, yes? Oh, no it shan’t. For the professor suddenly feels the urge to demonstrate how much bigger he is than the student, and fires off a rousing, caustic email upbraiding the student for all sorts of shortcomings, and suggesting that he or she get his or her collective shit togevah, like, yesterday. The email finds its way on to the intertubes, whereupon a cheer erupts, and all us betrodden professor-types are meant to fist-pump vicariously through the emailing skillz of our Stern Professor friend, hereinafter, Professor Bickdick (on account of his having such a bick dick). Take that, former abusive student-types!

Now, far be it from me to choose sides between an MBA student and a business school professor (I also don’t adjudicate the relative ethical merits of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, for instance), but there is an odd irony involved in the exchange that most have failed to notice. To get to it, you have to follow the logic of Professor Bickdick’s reply, which I’ll repost here in its entirety:

Thanks for the feedback. I, too, would like to offer some feedback.

Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15-20 minutes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 minutes late), left that class (again, presumably, in the middle of the lecture), and then came to my class. At that point (walking in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “bothered” you.

Correct?

You state that, having not taken my class, it would be impossible to know our policy of not allowing people to walk in an hour late. Most risk analysis offers that in the face of substantial uncertainty, you opt for the more conservative path or hedge your bet (e.g., do not show up an hour late until you know the professor has an explicit policy for tolerating disrespectful behavior, check with the TA before class, etc.). I hope the lottery winner that is your recently crowned Monday evening Professor is teaching Judgement and Decision Making or Critical Thinking.

In addition, your logic effectively means you cannot be held accountable for any code of conduct before taking a class. For the record, we also have no stated policy against bursting into show tunes in the middle of class, urinating on desks or taking that revolutionary hair removal system for a spin. However, xxxx, there is a baseline level of decorum (i.e., manners) that we expect of grown men and women who the admissions department have deemed tomorrow’s business leaders.

xxxx, let me be more serious for a moment. I do not know you, will not know you and have no real affinity or animosity for you. You are an anonymous student who is now regretting the send button on his laptop. It’s with this context I hope you register pause…REAL pause xxxx and take to heart what I am about to tell you:

xxxx, get your shit together.

Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted to Stern, you must have in spades. It’s not too late xxxx…

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Professor [Bickdick]

Wow. That’s a big dick he swinging around, no? But we should notice a few things about this argument. Professor Bickdick first deploys the usual language of business discourse, suggesting that our hapless student should have performed a risk analysis, and probably would have been wise to hedge his bet. Well, that’s why he’s a business professor type: he can call up the most banal jargon for every situation. But the question is in fact central here: Professor Bickdick is actually quite serious (despite his protestations that he will only get “serious” later) – he’s quite serious, that is to say, that the student should have deployed precisely these decision making devices “in the face of substantial uncertainty.” What we know about Professor Bickdick is that he seeks, at least at the level of his instructions here (I won’t pretend to read his mind) to transform all aspects of life into business decisions. Can we go further? I think so. Apparently, before becoming Professor Bickdick, the good “doctor” (well, I wouldn’t go that far – ahem) made his name by starting a fun little internet site. I won’t link it here, since I’m not in the business of sending more hits to such venues, but suffice it to say that it involves envelopes that are red, and is primarily concerned with leveraging the gift relationship in the service of high priced commodities, to wit:

You give to affirm a friendship, to celebrate a new beginning, to thank a colleague, to honor family, to connect with a loved one, to commend successes, to mark passages, to give a little encouragement — or just because it’s a joy to give.

Put another way, there’s no aspect of your life or relationship in your life that can’t be translated (through the mechanism of Professor Bickdick’s brilliant web site) into a luxury item, like, for instance, a mother’s birthstone necklace ($95 USD), a silk and cashmere cardigan (when your friend or loved one is sick! – $150 USD), and etc. Everything – and especially the gift relation – can be commodified. Finally, Professor Bickdick was teaching a class on brand strategy. Now, I couldn’t find a direct description of a course called “Brand Strategy,” but what would seem like a similar course, “Brand Planning for New and Existing Products,” lists part of its goals as the following:

Creatively explores multiple ways that the branded product experience can create associations in the mind that may develop into mindshare (e.g., the immediate and preferential recalling of your brand when a need arises). Measures the knowledge effects of brand awareness, disposition, propensity, expectations, attitudes, and behavior and discovers the resulting level of brand equity.

Yummy mindshare! If I may risk a lay translation: the class that the student was sampling is concerned with hooking people affectively to a particular brand, or set of brand signifiers, at basically every level of their existence (disposition, propensity, expectation, attitude, and behavior). Or, simpler still, the guy teaches people how to create desiring consumers. So, to summarize, not only does Professor Bickdick instruct his almost student to treat decisions on attending classes as risk analyses; not only did he make his bones (and probably his substantial fortune) transforming the gift relationship – which is structurally immeasurable – into a calculable commodity relation; but the very class that the student had the gall to interrupt is directly involved in the production of a consumer subjectivity. And what is Professor Bickdick upset about?

He’s upset that this student acted like a consumer! He’s upset that this student treated his class as nothing more than another product on a store shelf, to be sampled at one’s leisure, tried out, inspected, and bought – or not. The “lucky lottery winner” that is the student’s Monday evening professor is not a lottery winner at all, but the brand that won the market share.

Oh, but wait, you say. Isn’t there all that stuff in there about “disrespectful behavior” and “decorum (i.e. manners)?” Isn’t there all that stuff in there about “respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility?” Doesn’t that count for something? Why, yes. That is where Professor Bickdick is at his most inconsistent. It is here where we see that all the blathering about risk analysis and all the background on brand building and mindshare never really cut it even for Professor Bickdick. Never mind that Judgement (sic) and Decision Making – presumably based on some derivative of rational choice theory that remains the grand fetish in our business schools – operates in direct contradiction to a notion of mindshare, which seeks to eliminate precisely such analytic calculations in the commodity’s consumption phase. You can’t square “immediate and preferential recalling” with the putative neutrality of risk analysis, however deluded both positions may be. But no matter. As we know from one of Deleuze and Guattari’s pithier aphorisms, nothing ever died of contradiction.

The real incoherence comes when Professor Bickdick tries to mix in remnants from what are essentially dead social formations (decorum, manners, respect for institutions, and the like) with his otherwise formulaic and predictable capitalist jargon. The professor is actually upset that the student treated his class like any other commodity on the market, but he’s equally upset that the sacred unity of his lecture was disturbed. Notice that Professor Bickdick never once suggests that other students themselves may be disturbed by late-comers, an easy enough argument to make, and the only real pragmatic objection to the student’s actions. Rather, the late-comers’ “behavior” is inherently “disrespectful.” It fails to pay due tribute to the eminence that is the professor, or acknowledge the size of his massive, er, congregation. In this sense, Professor Bickdick is quite right to introduce a paragraph break between his nonsense on “substantial uncertainty” and his real lance thrust on a supposed “code of conduct.” The first is the capitalist explanation of how the student erred. The second is the feudalist explanation of the same. We also know from Deleuze and Guattari, however, that the first effects a universal decoding – and indeed, it is precisely such a decoding that all Professor Bickdick’s activities actually serve to produce. It’s all the same to his “gifting” website if you’re celebrating a marriage or consoling the bereaved or honoring a colleague or whatever: it all translates into money, the universal equivalent, and all the dense cultural codes associated with these particular activities fall by the wayside. If there’s a better example of universal decoding than Professor Bickdick’s website, I’d certainly like to hear about it. What Professor Bickdick, in his dick-swinging zeal, doesn’t seem to understand is that such decoding would include his sacred “codes of conduct.” We have, then, the odd presentation of an MBA student who behaves in precisely the way Professor Bickdick teaches people to behave – in the mode of capitalist production, as a consumer, and etc. – but who Professor Bickdick must also sternly lecture (with the joke sent out to friends, no doubt) for violating in that very decoding behavior some archaic mode of feudal respect.

And we’re supposed to cheer about this? Even if we put Professor Bickdick’s incoherent email aside, we might at least say that, yes, yes indeed, we’ve all been tempted to write such emails. And we’ve all been tempted to do so precisely because we teach in this fraught context, where we’re constantly negotiating between the the decoding effects of the classroom gone commodity and the recoding or residual coding of the classroom as hierarchical institutional space. It is in that conflict that the desire to respond in these ways almost always erupts. So, why do most people I’ve taught with not write this email? Is it because we’re still mostly untenured, and such emails would look egregious to a tenure committee? Yes, certainly. Our labor interests are not spared the decoding. Is it because we generally don’t have time to compose such emails, given all our other work and interests? Yes, that too. But there may even be a simpler explanation – however complex the context in which such desires emerge and decisions are made.

Probably, unlike Professor Bickdick, most of us actually like our students.

Toward the end of last year, a somewhat extended discussion took place on one of the listservs I subscribe to. The post that started the discussion was titled “The Dark Side of the Backchannel,” and it referenced a number of recent articles and blog entries that deal with the way Twitter is affecting the conference presentation. These articles and blog entries were of interest to the list, and likely sparked the longish thread, because the group that populates the list – nominally, a Computers and Writing crowd – had seen their own Twitter/conference speaker event at the last Computers & Writing conference in Davis, which I touched on briefly in this post, turn into precisely the sort of audience revolt that these pieces describe. To be more specific than I was in that post, one of the keynote speeches at C&W touched off a fairly aggressive (and perhaps insulting) Twitter feed backchannel. Apparently, the paid speaker was thought to be condescending to the audience, in addition to performing some finger-wagging routine on points that everyone in the field has known for years. The feed itself is pretty brutal on this point, and the whole thing resulted in much rending of garments and/or self-justification, in a style only paid academics can summon up.

Over the next couple of days I want to address what happened in the listserv discussion, and, through that, the notion of a backchannel more generally. For now, I’ll just lay out a number of points. My primary concern here is the form of the critique that has tended to come up when backchannels are critically assessed at all. As I see it, what’s lacking from these discussions is any sustained attempt to situate the backchannel phenomenon. At best, those addressing the issue have discussed the way a Twitter feed shifts the rhetorical situation of the conference talk, with perhaps some cursory nod to the history of public address. McCarthy ends his blog post with a quote from Rob Cunningham, which at least draws parallels between what’s happening in public address (and really, we’re talking about a very specific genre of academic discourse) and what’s happening for newspapers and the recording industry. Fine. About forty minutes discussing contemporary social technologies would lead an undergraduate to that point, but it’s still well taken. The problem, of course, is that the ways even serious observers situate and discuss the linked phenomena are not terribly compelling. At worst, the discussions turn into rather naive anarchic sloganism (“Eliminate authority. Eliminate focus” says one poster on the listserv), or devolve into – and this is really the primary focus for many – concern for the personal feelings of the speaker – or arguments against such concern (“This might sound kinda bad, but I have a hard time trying to work up any sympathy for [insert speaker's name].”). Between these two species of points, you get all kinds of ideas about how to restructure the academic conference given the supposedly newly empowered audience, or you get various analogies to other forms of backchannels, and same-as-it-ever-was shoulder shrugging.

This is all fine, I guess, and I’m happy enough that people are talking about this stuff. What I want to suggest over the next couple of days, however, is that all this backchanelling has very little to do with the relationship between the speaker and the audience. Or rather, if the relationship between speaker and audience is changing, it is because both are being trained in novel subjective forms of contribution. In this sense, it doesn’t muych matter whether the backchannel turns into a nightmare of vicious snark, or cashes out as some paradise of collaborative knowledge building. It is the formal character of response that may hold the dangers. More on this in the coming days.

1. Series Match-Up – I like a Yankees-Phillies series. First, it’s old school. I don’t know what a Colorado Rocky is, but its only barely a baseball team. In general, I don’t trust baseball teams that purport to represent entire states. That’s right. I said it. A baseball team should represent a city, not a state. Now, before you go off all half-cocked telling me that the New York Yankees and the New York Mets represent the state of New York, let me just stop you. The Yankees were founded long before such nonsense existed – when all teams were indexed to a city. The Mets, for their part, could never be mistaken for representing, say, Watkins Glen, New York, first because they are the Metropolitans, and second because their colors very obviously refer to the colors of the City of New York, and not the state of New York (the nonsense about the Mets colors referring to the Giants and Dodgers old colors is just silly, and hardly worth a mention). So much for that. But Florida? Arizona? Texas? Colorado? This is some new and painfully corporate contrivance meant to produce wide demographic identification (the worst offender appears in another sport – the Carolina Panthers: they don’t even bother restricting themselves to a state). I like World Series when they are Philadelphia v. New York, or Chicago v. Boston, or Detroit v. Los Angeles. This Colorado v. Texas shite has got to go.

Second, these teams are pretty evenly matched. Yankee fans who think the NL team will be a push-over this year, in the style of the hapless 99 Padres, have another thing coming. Indeed, I’d say that Philly is the stronger team at this point, largely because the Yankee offense has been so uneven, especially with runners in scoring position. When the bottom of the line-up hits, and the top of the line-up do their thing, the 09 Yankees are essentially unstoppable. We saw this on display in Game 4 – with all pistons firing, the Angels looked like what they were: a pathetically outmatched team. But there have been real offensive problems, and I don’t just mean Swisher’s performance (though his defense has certainly argued for his continued inclusion in the line-up). The Yankee bats have been iffy at best, which of course can’t be said of the Phillies. NY has been saved by three factors: opponent errors, stellar pitching, and clutch A-Rod. (For just a signal of how A-Rod smacked down Mike Scioscia’s strategy, he was on base five times last night, with two singles and THREE walks, all of which involved Angel pitchers trying to keep the ball the fuck away from his wheelhouse, which itself seems massive at this point. They even walked in a run pitching around A-Rod. Compare games 1 and 2, when Scioscia tried to pitch Rodriguez with impunity, hoping to break his confidence. Bzzzt. Try again next year.) On the other side, of course, is Ryan Howard, who has been tearing up anything in his path since Game 1 of the postseason. Clutch v. clutch. Tight pitching v. tight pitching, and even the Phillies pen didn’t seem all that bad. And Jeter v. Rollins? This should be interesting.

Scene 1: me at computer, actually typing up the grocery list. she folding laundry on the sofa.

she: Hey, on the April baby boards, one person has a kid named Wolfgang.
topspun: I like that.
she: Yeah, Wolfie.
topspun (being pedantic, as per usual): Volfie.
she: Yeah, Volfie.
topspun: I once knew a guy named Helmut.
she: What’s short for Helmut?
topspun: Nothing. If a man’s name is Helmut, you best damn well call him Helmut.

Scene 2: About 2:30 Friday afternoon, me walking out on to back deck to take a writing break; three gangbanger dudes who moved in next door about two weeks ago walking down their back stairs.

topspun (making eye contact, lifts hand in greeting): What’s up, man.
gangbanger dude (looking genuinely surprised and delighted to finally be addressed by whiteboy neighbor): Hey man! (holds up a twelve pack of Modelo). You want a beer?
topspun: Nah. I’m working. Thanks, though.
gangbanger dude: Cool, man.

Scene 3: Jewel-Osco at Foster and Pulaski, check out line.

ellie: I want to press the button. Hey, I can’t reach it!
she: OK, but wait until the lady is done scanning all the groceries.
ellie: I know, but I want to press it!
cashier in next aisle (to Ellie): Do you have enough money for all those groceries?
ellie: I wasn’t talking to you.

Today we were invited over to the next door neighbors yard, where they were having a barbecue, cooking up skirt steak and chicken, and heating up corn tortillas on the grill. It was an interesting experience to say the least, largely because they don’t speak all that much English, and we don’t speak any Spanish beyond what I remember from 7th and 8th grade, and whatever I managed to pick up growing up in Queens (which, given the segregation prevalent at that time, is not all that much). My English is not so very, he kept saying. He referred to Ellie as “your son,” and each time his wife, who speaks less English than he does, would say “daughter,” and he’d say “Oh yeah! Daughter!” Hio, hia. One can see why. Nevertheless, we managed to get on reasonably well, and the carne asada was very good. We all drank beer.

The guy next door is one of those guys who drive around collecting steel and other metal that people throw out – basically a scrap metal operation. He loads up a beat up old pick-up truck that’s been rigged with some additional fencing and a few cross bars and drives the alleys (for New York people, the north side of Chicago, unlike most places in New York, has back alleys on most blocks where the garages are, and where you put your garbage). He then comes back and sections out the daily haul. It’s amazing, really: refrigerators, exercise machines, microwaves, barbells, all manner of tools and vices and scaffolding, air conditioners, fans, and humidity machines, shelving units, lamps, faucet hardware, frames, futon bases, whatever – metal piled up in big chunks, and then he spends some afternoons back there with a hammer and some tools chipping out the steel and metal bits from the smaller or more seemingly plastic trash, like the inner frame of a computer case and similar small things that you really have to work on to get some salvageable metal out of. There are hundreds of guys who do this, mostly recent immigrants from Mexico and various Central American countries. At the old place, I used to see them come on up the alley because that’s where I smoked. They’d stop, inspect various garbage areas, pull what they could sell, and move on. I have a sense of what this guy’s day is like. About a month ago, we had Work Colleague over for dinner, and my neighbor came back with his truck being towed; we helped him push it back into his driveway, no small task given the fact that the driveway opens on to a fairly narrow alley. I was glad Work Colleague could speak Spanish, or that little operation wouldn’t have run so smoothly, I suspect. And that truck’s his whole livelihood. He had it up and running again in two days. So, this guy, my neighbor, basically sweeps up shitloads of metal that people have put to trash, collects it, pulls the scrap from it, all day driving the alleys and lifting heavy shit, then coming back and banging it with hammers: the underground economy next door. Busting his hump, and probably helping the environment in the process, turning bourgeois detritus into carne asada, and then offering some to us.

Chekhov famously stated that if you introduce a gun in Act One, it must go off by Act Three. Similarly, if any non-extra woman in a sitcom or movie is seen to be preggo, she must deliver the baby before the close of the action, and preferably in some public spectacle, complete with an approving Greek chorus of onlookers, and either hissed curses or a hard squeezing of the testicles for the father. This is your fault! So, yes, a cinematic cliché. Now, you’ve all seen such scenes, maybe a hundred times. Us too. But it turns out that you can watch the proverbial taxi cab or elevator delivery a thousand times and never be quite prepared for it.

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