From my non-philsophical based diaries, many of you might have come in contact with that anti-middle class side of me. That I have that side does not in any way mean that I judge the many among this community who share middle class values. I do myself. I live them myself. I come from them.
But I am also greatly challenged by them. I have struggled in my life, in almost every way, against them. In fact almost every choice I've made in my life has been to divorce myself from those values... despite the material connection of making a middle class living, which would seem to render any protestation against said values mute.
See my last diary...
I just wanted to share tonight the lyrics of a song that much more fully elcuidate my take on the tension between idealism and middle class values, along with some feminist pinache. As they're from the '70's I hope I'm not violating any copyright laws. These are the lyrics from Joni Mitchell's Suite of "The Boho Dance" into "Harry's House". It may be my favorite song in the history of rock 'n roll. And it is very pertinent to the day, what with the divide we all feel between our means and our reality...
Down in the cellar in the boho zone
I went looking for some sweet inspiration, oh well
Just another hard-time band
With negro affectations
I was a hopeful in rooms like this
When I was working cheap
It's an old romance-the boho dance
It hasn't gone to sleep
But even on the scuffle
The cleaner's press was in my jeans
And any eye for detail
Caught a little lace along the seams
And you were in the parking lot
Subterranean by your own design
The virtue of your style inscribed
On your contempt for mine
Jesus was a beggar, he was rich in grace
And solomon kept his head in all his glory
It's just that some steps outside the boho dance
Have a fascination for me
A camera pans the cocktail hour
Behind a blind of potted palms
And finds a lady in a paris dress
With runs in her nylons
You read those books where luxury
Comes as a guest to take a slave
Books where artists in noble poverty
Go like virgins to the grave
Don't you get sensitive on me
'cause I know you're just too proud
You couldn't step outside the boho dance now
Even if good fortune allowed
Like a priest with a pornographic watch
Looking and longing on the sly
Sure it's stricken from your uniform
But you can't get it out of your eyes
Nothing is capsulized in me
On either side of town
The streets were never really mine
Not mine these glamour gowns
transistion into a song about the middle class abandonment of the idealism of youth
Heatwaves on the runway
As the wheels set down
He takes his baggage off the carousel
He takes a taxi into town
Yellow schools of taxi fishes
Jonah in a ticking whale
Caught up at the light in the fishnet windows
Of Bloomingdale's
Watching those high fashion girls
Skinny black models with raven curls
Beauty parlor blondes with credit card eyes
Looking for the chic and the fancy to buy
He opens up his suitcase
In the continental suite
And people twenty stories down
Colored currents in the street
A helicopter lands on the Pan Am roof
Like a dragonfly on a tomb
And business men in button downs
Press into conference rooms
Battalions of paper minded males
Talking commodities and sales
While at home their paper wives
And paper kids
Paper the walls to keep their gut reactions hid
Yellow checkers for the kitchen
Climbing ivy for the bath
She is lost in House and Gardens
He's caught up in Chief of Staff
He drifts off into the memory
Of the way she looked in school
With her body oiled and shining
At the public swimming pool ...
... Shining hair and shining skin
Shining as she reeled him in
To tell him like she did today
Just what he could do with Harry's House
And Harry's take home pay
transition into dream sequence, and kick ass blues/jazz portion of the song, in which the idea of feminization is taken to the extreme and rejected resolutely
The more I'm with you, pretty baby
The more I feel my love increase
I'm building all my dreams around you
Our happiness will never cease
'cause nothing's any good without you
Baby you're my centerpiece
We'll find a house and garden somewhere
Along a country road a piece
A little cottage on the outskirts
Where we can really find release
'cause nothing's any good without you
Baby you're my centerpiece
...shining hair and shining skin
Shining as she reeled him in
To tell him like she did today
Just what he could do with harry's house
And harry's take home pay.
And that is what I would like to say to "harry's take home pay". Fuck you and this world that you rode in on. Fuck this tension between the 'cool' that you market and the 'normal' that you envision for your domestic life.
Fuck our slumbering world and the 'ambien' we imbibe to keep it that way.
We all need to do better. It starts with ourselves. It starts with us standing on Father's day, with Meteor Blades, calling out the names of the dead. It starts with each of us standing up to any sort of discrimination in our jobs, or rather, holding those companies that employ us responsible for he fact that real wages have fallen since the freakin' '70's...
or it starts as humbly as convincing someone that corporate rule is not just rule...
Are we paper wives and paper kids?
Or will we tell Harry where to stick his take home pay?