Despite spending 35 hours a week sitting in a bookstore, a good deal of which time I do spend reading, I haven't done an extensive survey of everything released this year that I should. HOWEVER, these 10 are recommended, and if you want one or two to be your holiday present and I know you that well, email me.
Also, if you follow these links and buy anything I get a little money from Amazon Associates so help a sister out.
(technically released last year, but got much wider print this year due to the Hugo nomination and win)
I make a long and a short version of the Best Songs of the Year playlist every year. The long version is in 3 parts, roughly by genre. Songs in bold are on the short version. Description / commentary in italics. Sometimes with a quote from the song there's a link to either info about the band or a video if it's good. Talk to me about music! I've probably missed things and will still be editing the playlists a bit.
1. Moonface (a.k.a. Spencer Krug) - Dreamland EP : marimba and shit-drums . It's worth listening to the whole thing. It's the Inception of songs, constructed from Krug's dream journals with minimal accompaniment that kicks in just right."I'll prove how much I love you with this handstand."
3. Sufjan Stevens - Vesuvius . Sufjan's introspective "Age of Adz" sounds like him deciding to remove the limits he's given himself before, like seperating electronics and orchestras or pretending he can write like a non-Christian. It's hard to decide which is the best track - that may be the 25 minute "Impossible Soul". "In life as in death, I'd rather be burned than be living in debt"
4. The Knife - The Height of Summer . Experimental Darwin Art Opera "Tomorrow, In A Year" is all about sonic diversity and evolution, so naturally one outcome makes a flitting pop song of Mrs. Darwin's letters. "A thousand years seem to pass so quickly".
8. Black Mountain - Old Fangs . Solidly retro (to the point of weird misogyny in the video, despite the band's core being a married couple) prog-rock, more accessible than "In the Future".Is it foolish to know what you want before you've begun?
9. MGMT - Flash Delirium . Look, you guys. We do a lot of drugs, and we've been touring and getting way too much attention. We really only have okay songs in us right now, plus this freakout. Hope you understand.
15. Holy Fuck - P.I.G.S. Analog electronica like the unholy union of Jam Band and House DJ.
16. Zach Hill - House of Hits . So I've liked the math-rocker's drumming with Marnie Stern for three albums and it turns out he writes good songs. I could not get that pow-pow-pow powPOW! out of my head for ages. What time signature IS this? His last.fm is super geeky.
18. Sleigh Bells - Kids . Carries with the childlike vocals (and story, as only a 5th grade teacher can tell it) and high-decibel shreds."Everything was just perfect. I got a nice sunburn, though."
19. Crystal Castles - Doe Deer . It sure does sound like Alice yells "STEP OFF THE TRAIN, SAY HI TO MY DADDY" but officially the lyrics are 8 deathrays
20. Draculatron - Artmouth
21. Xiu Xiu - Dear God, I Hate Myself. "Don't ask if this line is about you."
34. Marina and the Diamonds - Mowgli's Road . Like most of the Greek-Welsh siren's songs, it's about Girl Defies The Man in the most Manufactured way, but I really don't know what metaphor exactly Kipling and utensils provide for career decisions."You say Y-E-S to everything. Do you think that will guarantee a win?"
37. Goldfrapp - Rocket . This song, and album, made me nostalgic (which is always for something never actually experienced). Video is a goofy sadistic fantasy matching the song's double entendre revenge threat / lesbian subtext: "You're never coming back"
44. Das Racist - hahahaha jk? Those brown hipster stoners from Queens who did Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell did a mix tape. It's pretty funny.
45. Die Antwoord - Enter the Ninja . The South African rap-ravers are a complicated, filthy joke. They are the sonic Aristocrats."I need your production"?
Whenever someone asks who my favorite artist is, from now on I might go with Shane Hope. I get the feeling this guy could be personally difficult, which I love in people, especially when they turn it into this kind of immersive post-humanism. The point is, just because I think he's brilliant and I love his work doesn't mean I want him to sign my boob, or even that I want to make this kind of work. There's no way. Anyone writing about his work will describe it as "mind-blowing" because that's what people say about hyper-intellectual, involved weirdness. It's not necessarily, though - he's the fine art tendril, and critic, of speculative programming and Singularity fetishism. I like that he's managed to THINK in gibberish, or at least always respond in interviews that way.
You have no idea what this is just from looking at it. It's a print of an open source 3-d modeling program that visualizes molecules. Lots and lots on nonexistent molecules. Nobody writing about this can figure it out, either, and the way Hope describes the process is not exactly transparent. But they sure are pretty. h_bond_from_proton, 2010, lenticular 3D pigment print, 24″x24″
I found out about him through Edward Winkleman, who probably has the best taste of any gallerist and seems to pick artists on cerebral-ness : he shows Jennifer Dalton, as well.
The "compile-a-child" series may be the best lay introduction to Shane Hope, since fake children's drawings often serve as simplified versions of inconceivably different cultures. It also highlights what hard SF is really talking about, with the singularity: if it's about machines being able to make machines smarter than themselves, that's just children outdoing their parents. To be Imortel, 2081, pencil and crayon on paper, 9″x12″
These were all in a show in 2009 titled "Your Mom Is Open Source" (<3!). Winkleman's showing the latest hijinx at SEVEN in Miami, your typical 3-D printer printed on a 3-D printer (also known as an objectum-sexy Von Neumann Machine)
I don't think I want to see the movie of the latter. Ishiguro does something brilliantly interior with the dystopian genre that either the reviewers are missing or the filmmakers did. My post-humanism is showing in that it never occured to me that anyone would have to prove the existence of their "soul", since nobody has one, yet my moral outrage still stands at having to prove one suffers when one's purpose in life is dying of other peoples' diseases. Arguably it's a book about the ethical treatment of animals, although I don't think Ishiguro meant it that way.
A shared theme of human's inhumanity to human, or when there is not enough labor in society for its majority to is too trite when what a historical outlook on ethical trends reveals is that there have always been subhumans among humans. These connections are still too broad. Is it also offensive to you when anyone says "just a copy"? It just shows how far behind normal people are on this whole science ethics thing. Speaking of post-humanism -
Pynchon's family anarchist steampunk western focuses post-historically on the end of the enlightenment project, during the build-up to World War One. Plus, something about relativity. It's like watching anachronistic cartoons stoned for a year.
Here is my illustration for everything Pynchon wrote:
I do need something better than a facebook app to log my reading, but I need to be able to export from the app I'm using. Anyone know of one already?
Oil on canvas, 32 inches square. Added a Na'vi. I'm keeping a lot of artifacts from doing studies in Photoshop, including color changes with simple hue shifts.
2 Cow Garage
Blast Off!!!
The Chaotic Good
The Class Machine
CurT@!N$
Dances With White Girls
Death Before Dishonor
decibel.
Dominant Legs
Down With Webster
Everything Everything
Everything Is Terrible
Ex Humans
Food Will Win The War
Free Moral Agents
The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger
Good Kids Sprouting Horns
Hammer No More The Fingers
Hatesphere
Hoodie Allen
I Love Monsters
Jenny & the Holzers (this is Dorothy and I missed them again last night)
Meek is Murder
Mantyhose
Me You Us Them
Morning Teleportation
OFF!
Oh Snap!
Paper Thick Walls
The Poison Control Center
Popo
The Problemaddicts
PS I Love You
quiet Loudly
Room Full of Strangers
SAD and FRENCH
Viva l'American Death Ray Music
Vonnegutt
Yuck
"The Unpronouncable" would be a great band name. Other Godelist names I want for the band I will never have because I do not practice:
What (quoi, que, nani, etc.)
TBA (answering differently every time as to what it stands for)
Special Guest
There Isn't One
Dunno
Artist Unknown
Compilation
I can't believe I forgot to write about this here, but I'm running a Tuesday night Drink & Draw.
7-10 at Tribes Gallery at 285 E 3rd St, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10009.
Because I am a bit fail at planning, we may be taking a break next week and will resume on October 26.
The space is occupied and owned by a retired blind professor, and can get mildly rowdy and smokey at times. We’ll use the big living room, where there are ongoing art shows, a couch, a piano, chairs, and a P.A. system. All media are allowed, although I’d avoid flammable materials like varnishes and enamels and mineral spirits. Bring your own media and clean up after yourself. We’ll have one nude or costumed model a week.
$10 for 3 hours, running from shorter to longer poses, with the option to pick poses, costumes, and models you might need. We appreciate if you bring snacks and drinks, and usually have wine or beer for an extra $3 contribution.
This is for artists and illustrators at all skill levels who need practice and regular reference, and have at least some figure drawing experience. You are expected to be respectful of the models and in control of your drinking. If you’re here, you’re paying, and if you’re paying, you’re drawing or painting. Photography only allowed with special permission from the model.
RSVP to Janet at Bruesselbach dot com / join here. I'm working towards a high enough attendance to subscribe to Meetup, or maybe we won't need it if you pass this on and bring friends.
Hi. My birthday is October 12.
I barely ever buy anything for myself, but if I did, it would be some of these things: Wish List
Better, you could make an offer on a painting.
Sometimes people give you a favorite charity. I don't have one right now. A cancer research fund I have never heard of gave me (and probably all my neighbors) a lot of kitschy address labels I will never use, instead of, say, finding a student to put through med school, so I'm leery of how much money charities put towards further fundraising over shopping for places to put that money. But that's irrelevent, and more a way of me saying that giving me a birthday boost actually kind of is charity because I'm pretty sure most panhandlers make more than I do.
Paypal goes to jupitre@gmail.com ; you have to make sure to say it's a family/friend loan so they don't take a cut.
I haven't been openly bitter and cynical for a while. It feels a little weird.
2010, oils on canvas, 54"x42".
This took a year to complete, mostly because I've been taking a bit of a break from painting to curate a lot.
I was thinking about constructed causality, consequence, and how easily we mystify. Post Hoc is the "correlation implies causation" logical fallacy underlying much of religion and a great deal of bad science and rhetoric. I like to extremely remove it - to live in truth is to live in doubt. Although even drawing that connection is a causal relationship subject to methods of disambiguation. What does this have to do with insecty elf robots? Nothing, basically.
I did start with another astrophysics metaphor: the binary recurring nova system as a feedback loop. As in Veritas Odium Parit, a painting preceding and arguably causing Post Hoc, personal communication represents mass gravitational interaction. I kept going with redefining paint as figure until almost nothing was only itself any more. The scale has been reduced somewhat, and the interaction is asymmetrical. There are distinctly different regions with expanded rules for visual improvisation. There are fewer illusions of depth or animism and more archetypality and cartooniness to forms. The evasive mosaics are solid pixels rather than mimicking compression artifacts. What do you see here?
Crossposted to these lovely people: Kittysneezes and A Gathering of the Tribes
Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge one had. I eagerly anticipated this release after reading Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel. He sold shares in this novel to publish it and not have to work at a vegan restaurant while he was writing it.
I feel not conscious enough of how I’m mimicking Tao Lin’s Style. Tao Lin’s Style is infectious and hypnotic. Writing about Tao Lin in Tao Lin’s style, as The Observer, or rather Christian Lorentzen, did, is hard to resist. I think the Observer was lazy. I approve of that laziness. Of course, as with Hemingway, another “bad” writer whose parody comes easy, and whom Tao Lin namechecks as much as Yates, and includes in the index, the style slips in anyway. While reading Tao Lin I find myself becoming much drier and flatter. I lose my obligation to feel strongly about anything, especially about how I feel about anything.
Tao Lin is indeed kind of a hipster writer. He’s easy to hate. I think when people say something is “polarizing” that thing often itself has an intense focus on neutrality. Tao Lin is one of the best examples of conveying flat affect and anhedonia as currently endemic and kind of pleasant. Some of the key phrases to use in a Tao Lin parody are “neutral facial expression” and “I feel neutral” and “said in Gmail Chat”. If you use these phrases you will be immediately parodying Tao Lin, and you don’t need anything else. Everything he writes is autobiography, or so it seems. Everything is exactly as it seems. It's just one damn thing after another but there are some interesting elisions and refillings of previous story that are perhaps occuring more in Richard Yates.
There are more changes in Richard Yates from his previous style. Someone must have commented on the names of his characters, like how obvious it is that the main character is always Tao Lin but named like Sam or something. So he named the Tao Lin character Haley Joel Osment and the teenage Jersey girl he met on the internet Dakota Fanning. The ages are about right but the great thing about it is you still can’t actually picture the actors as the characters. I now see “Haley Joel Osment” and that represents a Taiwanese-American hipster writer to me. I wonder whether any kind of defamation charges could be brought but it’s too obviously a stunt. I am willing to honestly believe Haley Joel Osment crossed state borders to statutory rape Dakota Fanning, who is variously self-destructive. I do because those are the characters. There’s really a lot of name-dropping in this, which brings up that issue of how much writers have to be literary historians, or just more culturally aware, or whatever.
I’m afraid that it’s almost a homage to the novel’s namesake that Richard Yates has a pretty clear structure and plot, and particularly that it’s about someone simultaneously epitomizing and feeling alienated from contemporary American society. The story is most of the arc of a codependent relationship. In case you don't know what that is, it's when someone stays romantically involved because they feel the other person needs them and the other person (who often has some compulsion or addiction the first person enables) does more of that to get more from the first person. Neither person involved is very good and both are very depressed. What I like about depression in Tao Lin is that it’s not necessarily pathological. Halfway through the book I totally thought he’d impregnated her.
At first it seems like he just emotional abuses her and then it turns out Dakota Fanning’s been secretly binging and purging. I don't think the "spoiler" concept is relevant here. “Haley Joel Osment” comes across as a total dick even though he does sort of know what to do. I like that Tao Lin does that with not-himself. I like the realism about this couple creating their own little world. I want to use the terms “party girl” and “cheese beast” and have someone understand them. I think Tao Lin is a party girl. I am a party girl. I think the worst party girls got into really intense relationships based on mutual social anxiety when they were 22. It’s easy to say the attitude is immature and neurotic, and I want to shrug that off as harmless and ubiquitous, but the impact on “Dakota Fanning” makes it actually more morally conscious than a parody of Tao Lin. But “Shoplifting” already kind of had that underlying moral message. I think a lot of the couple’s professions of need actually sound kind of weird to me because I feel like every time I’ve said anything like that it was very very self-aware.
I don’t know. A lot of what they, and Tao Lin, do say is self-aware, but so dry that there’s no difference. I always feel like the manuscript was written with a lot less capitalization and punctuation, so it’s gone through that transformation already. Tao Lin definitely is being about neutrality in representation as a direction with an impossible goal. That’s too figurative for a Tao Lin parody. I don’t want to tell you what to do with these books but I do think Tao Lin is important to be able to parody.
I wanted to include some quotes from the book but it lost all the highlights I put in before about 2/3 of the way through and I didn’t want to be biased.
Anyway, I guess I like him because he’s familiar. He steals from places near the place where I work, but doesn’t mention stealing from us, which I appreciate. We have a similar social anxiety and detachment, and have our most emotionally intense experiences through internet chatting. He makes me think “I could do that” but this review was my chance to and I don’t think I could, or want to, and neither could that Observer guy.
September 4-30
Opening Reception September 4 8-10 pm
285 E 3rd St. #2
New York, NY 10009
Curatorial statement by Janet Bruesselbach
“A free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular.” –Adlai Stevenson
Unpop has a variety of playful reactions to both art as commodity and the legacy of pop art. Art is a commodity so oversupplied that it may be the testing grounds for a post-scarcity economy. Its economy of attention is particularly independent from its capital economy. No artist avoids status anxiety from the judgments of polymarkets, and it often seems the only ideology defining art remains anti-Capitalism, despite pop art’s ubiquitous ironic recombination of fine and commercial art.
The “problem” of existing in a market, one particularly labor-saturated, occupies context-conscious artists worldwide. While we often acknowledge that good art is not necessarily sold art, some of the best commercially-overlooked work is anything but anti- or a- commercial. Duplicating the structures, and becoming part of, the system one is critiquing, is conspicuous, but not the only means of critique. Nor is critique ever a simple argumentative stance.
I would not be surprised if there were not already consumption artists: individuals who self-consciously defined a particular pattern and choice of spending as an art form. We could easily say that any consumer is an artist, ironically or not. While defining art has become entertainingly open-ended, fitting some unpop work into the context of gallery exhibition was unexpected - particularly Chavez and Pocker. Chavez's videos were byproducts of his struggle to market other artwork, while Pocker's photos document hyper-attentive shopping (consumption artistry) and are more jokes or marketing tools themselves. Sam Pocker, "Fashion Freeze"
Everything in the marketplace is simultaneously buyer and seller. Sam Pocker, Jenny Bhatt, and Lauren Hoffen deal most directly with consumer identity. The freedom a consumer has is to defy neoliberal economics with their irrationality, and not necessarily succumb to the cultural pressure to not be a sucker. Art buyers most intend to defy homo economicus as a type. At the same time, considering art buying as a form of charity, done more because the artist needs money than because the artist did work, enables neoliberalism, as this essay by Yasmin Nair explains.
The peculiar irony of UnPop is that A Gathering of the Tribes, its natal location, as of September 2010, is a nearly broke non-profit, non-commercial, arts organization run out of an old blind guy’s apartment. Traditionally, this is an opportunity to exhibit the kind of work that fronts at freedom from the constraints of marketability. But the competition for grant money in this part-socialized, part-privatized alternative to a capitalist-style marketplace for art, has tightened in the recession. As of the dispossessed among nonprofits, the venue avoids insipid "art for arts sake" and leans toward the dangers of demanding free labor for political reasons that Nair takes apart so well.
Contemporary pop art rules the market because it is self-consciously and self-righteously a commodity. They are artists who refuse to pretend the very obliviousness to their worth that collectors value. In Unpop, we show that spaces peripheral to the art market are all the more market-obsessed. The more money one has the more one can afford not to think about it, so to display reticence toward naming or discussing prices of art objects, or arguments for "pricelessness" (that is, worthlessness) can conventionally be interpreted as anti-radical, siding with the owners. Naturally the politics are more complex than that, and stigma shouldn't be placed either way, but to avoid discussing money out of anxiety or enmity may as well be reverence, especially when one is, reasons aside, unpopular. Jenny Bhatt, "Reverence Mandala"
Status anxiety extends to the transitional attention economy. Too easily can we both say and hear the myths connecting fame to money and vice versa: that success is just who you know, that art and politics and business and so on are all popularity contests, that self-promotion is most if not all that matters. Such simplifications are both true and devalue the complex interplay of measures of value. Ubiquitous cynicism generates its own measures of worth as art entertainingly becomes social - or a-, or anti-social. Run through your supply of prefixes.
There is as much conceptual beauty to be found in examining our resistance to the pressure to socialize as there is in flattening the dynamic and generating the image of popularity. And popularity is just that: not an actual measure of who knows whom or what, but a self-perpetuating infectious meme, a variable assigned but not necessarily related to anything else. In a cultural turn perhaps not inherently recent, popularity can be a label more detrimental than not. Unpopularity, while feared in acknowledgement of a society that will likely never be perfectly free, can be beneficial as a label – if only in the modern, very NYC phenomenon of Indie Cred.
Many visual styles have come to be called pop, or post-pop, or pop surreal, and so on, all functioning with a specific kind of irony that differentiates between commerciality and anti-commerciality by fulfilling both simultaneously. Unpop involves artists who either use pop tropes or engage commodification in non-dialectical ways. The advertising-inspired aesthetic of high-saturation solid colors, forms simplified to communicate, and assumed exuberant optimism, still pervade. But they are always tempered by something that undermines pop art historically, or doesn't necessarily shape itself to the demands of as many people as possible.
Jenny Bhatt has sent paintings from India that fuse cartoon Western popism with the well-established philosophical conversation of Hindu Buddhist mythology, featuring a cast of conceptual deities in consumerist narratives. She makes interactive work and comic strips at her site Washington Chavez went to every gallery in New York City asking them to look at his paintings, and filmed all of it. The result is a queasy litany of rejection, the dying profession of door-to-door salesman multiplied by the eternal buyer’s market of art, emotional sadomasochism intensified by raw documentary recording. Rita Alves’s anamorphic installation paintings are more engaged with the national politics of U.S. human rights violations than directly with consumer politics. The use of funhouse optics to undistort image evidence of atrocities questions the tension artists feel between the obligations to be both sensitizing activists and entertainers. It makes the whole commodity issue look selfish. Lauren Hoffen paints commercial parodies that literalize ironic double-speak through blacklight-sensitive paint. James Mercer assembles ephemeral cardboard and paint installations (as well as digital and ink drawings) resembling video game levels. They are idiosyncratic, generative rewarders of attention from Millenial observers trained by extremely creative-labor-intensive products.
Apparently every five years PS1, MoMA's converted-school extension in Long Island City, has a huge group show featuring local artists. Third time, as they say, makes it tradition. One of the biggest contradictions of having a "local artists" show in this city is that most of the artists will be either immigrants or part-time residents. Perhaps the joke is that the entire world is really Greater New York.
PS1 is disorienting. It's nice to have another context besides Art to see art in, but the elementary school vibes throw things weirdly and I always feel like I'm missing something. But hey, it's one of those "pay what you want" places, so the only thing you have to lose is your time and maybe a buck.
Okay, so the worst thing is that there's too much video in this show. Video is by nature a selfish medium, not only because it demands time but because it requires technological support. I thought I would feel more envy of the artists included and wonder why I wasn't included, or wonder why I wasn't curating. I felt a twinge when I saw that one of the videos included someone I knew in college, but I didn't feel any of that envy at the show, because I wouldn't want to be the person who had made or chosen these things. I hate cool people.
This is the retrospective room.
It became one of those "find a redeeming thing" games. Individually most of the pieces had something going for them, or, at least, those that weren't goofy videos. If there isn't something funny about art, if there isn't a joke to "get" or "buy" about it, I tend to skim over it, maybe just because I'm biased against romanticism and transcendence. Then again, maybe this show could use some transcendence. Artists are perverts. The walls were full of glory holes. At all levels, for all sizes and shapes of perverts! The whole thing is a dirty joke and the biggest influence on my entire generation has been internet porn. But maybe that's just me?
DETEXT was an installation that shaped the show. I only later found out that DETEXT had removed the "con" from what it was doing, intentionally, and that all the phrases in giant letters in hallways were excerpted from spam messages. The museum has 4 levels (0, 1, 2, 3) and it seemed like the level of innuendo in the phrases corresponded with the levels.
Here are some things I liked:
Tommy Hartung is good conceptually but I get the feeling he outsources the craft. Some drawings a friend did for him weren't very crafty, either.
Michele Abeles's photography
Ishmael Randall Weeks had a very scientific feel.
Nearby on the second floor, and whose label I couldn't find (making them all the more confusing) were a couple of museum-style stands with bits of archaeological-looking artifacts in them, but all pretty obviously made out of contemporary cheap materials. The artifacts were mostly fimo clay.
Everything by the Atlas of Radical Cartography in a third floor hallway also had a research feel that fit very well in the school building. I particularly remember copies of maps with "latino" and "america" labeling two general (and reversed) areas of the Americas which had been given to people crossing the Mexico-U.S. border and undergone evident wear. There were "maps" there with significant research behind them that remind me of how awesome Jen Dalton is.
Ashley Hunt: "The rich can be rich because they got tired of being poor." That reminds me. If you haven't been listening to David Byrne's Here Lies Love you should.
This is going to look really dated in 5 years, Debo Eilers. There's nothing wrong with that.
Brody Condon's video of a smurf tribe finally makes that wooden sculpture outside the Hamburger Banhof make sense.
An artist with the hip-as-dick name Liz Magic Laser displayed her purse taken apart by a surgery and dissection robot, the "Da Vinci System".
Hank Willis Thomas's isolation of depictions of blacks in mainstream magazine ads filled a room and held our attention for way longer than anything else. If nothing else it showed that progress is never continuous and always double-edged at least.
David Brooks is a rainforest conservationist.
Some of the only painting featured included Dave Miko and Leidy Churchman, whose "Three Beards" reassures me that there is nothing more macho than two cocks in your ass.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation can always be relied upon to be sickeningly hip, filling one room with artists' genitals and another with a pedestal exchange program, "Perpetual Monument to Students of Art", in which clean sculpture pedestals are substituted for used ones from local schools throughout the show. It sort of looks like the holocaust memorial in Berlin. Anyone who's done gallery installation will like stuff like that. All the jack-off-in-a-box glory hole installation elements, not so much.
Aki Sakamoto's "skewed lies / Central Governor" had a great steampunk, participatory mood and kept the basement feeling like a paranoid secret center of operations we children had illicitly discovered. Also there was goldleaf.
And uniforms:
My date said "I feel like my time has been raped".
Well, I'm being asked for my badge back, so I'm officially no longer a federal employee. Of course, I don't really trust some random guy texting me asking for my badge, and will probably ignore whoever tries next. How impossible does it seem for anyone to abuse the badge? They're meant to just sit around doing nothing after they've served their purpose. That's how it would work.
Let's pick back up with the narrative. I tried to build up a reputation of near-superhuman efficiency. I estimated it would be possible to actually complete two forms an hour, if it took 10 minutes for an interview and 5 minutes to fill out an NV (Notice of Visit) form. We were told that the main thing they were able to note about our performance was the number of completions per hour, but naturally we could tweak this based on what hours we reported.
The absolute rule was No Overtime: if we filed for more than 40 hours we would be immediately fired. This was never a problem because it was so unlikely we would find anyone at home and answering the door at anything other than the evening that it was pointless working entire days. Of course, we were encouraged to vary our hours, so that we weren't always visiting a particular home at the same time every time and wasting our three in-person visits. Especially once I came back from Europe and was essentially mopping up complete non-responders, we often had to work weekdays in order to interview superintendents and building managers during their working hours.
I had a binder with a list of addresses and the EQs (Enumerator Questionnaires) for two buildings still waiting to be finished when I got back. I'd done most of one building and none of the other. While I'd been gone, extra paperwork (a list of submitted cases for each day) had been added on to try and improve the way EQs were being sort of lost between enumerator and area supervisor and prevent overworking crew leaders. Naturally, we would forget to mark the status of cases in the binder before turning these in and then wouldn't remember what to write in there. I'm not sure how the address lists were used, but they were the source of the most sensitive bulk name/address information.
The mop-up we were doing at the end of May was mostly EQs without binders, anyway. I became the person sent out to clean up after census takers who had already quit or been fired, usually quietly. I am quite proud of being good at this job, and do wish there were something similar I could do permanently. Being retained may have just meant they didn't want to waste my training, or that I'd had less time to fuck up already, but I it may also have meant I was more persistent or could take rejection better or maybe was just less likely to be rejected - or wasted less time. Which is not to say I didn't have many, many reasons to question what I was doing and how I appeared.
Whatever the reason, most of what I did this point involved some real problem-solving, a little sleuthing, and a lot of dealing with doormen, supers, and building managers who only knew their non-disclosure policies and financially-motivated private ownership loyalties. Sometimes I felt that all they were trying to conceal with indignant hostility was simply ignorance. The most memorable instance was when a building super refused to even read the confidentiality agreement. When I slipped it under his door, he opened the door, crumpled it up, threw it at me, and said "make yourself a meatball". Then threatened to call the cops. We just talked to management instead.
I've been asked for more jokes, but unfortunately I have a New Yorker cartoon instead. Christ, what an asshole.
Naturally, I have some nitpicks with census humor. The big problem is that it always seems to be about nonconformity. But also: why does the census taker know his name already? That's what he's there to find out. Yes, even the association of a name with an address needs recording. This may be why our neighborhood ended up with a lot of doorman proxies. Also, the question is not "What is your sex?" It is "are you male or female?" I kept hoping I'd run into anyone who'd say yes to both or neither, but it was always that question we had to sort of apologize for asking. The point is, it's gender (social information) rather than sex (biological information). Although apparently the census really makes a point of reminding people that their babies are people. Especially when it's not their baby.
There's always that question that's more of just a thing we had to remember to fill out than something we always asked: was there anyone else who may have been staying with you on April 1? And a list of options including foster children, relatives, and transients "without a permanent place to stay".
How do you really know cats aren't homeless guys in fur coats?
I think my favorite part of training was when someone started making assumptions within an example, and our instructor said, "you're making sense. Stop it." Fighting the superstitious qualities of assumption is one of my favorite issues: stop making sense stop making sense. It actually was a bad idea to fill in gaps, because there really is a wide variety of living arrangements. In NYC especially there are a lot of the very fun-to-say WHUHE (woo-hee) situations: Whole Household Usual Home Elsewhere. Families keep their Queens toehold and have relatives staying there while they live in another country entirely, or travel for work, etc. In practice, if we made too much sense, and it was wrong, we actually would get less information, sometimes because it alienated our enumeratee. But again, we had to apply sense as to when to make sense. Sense is sensual, logic embodied.
I don't know whether it was because the objective of the census triggered my pre-existing scientific fundamentalism, or I was just really happy to have a job that required brains, but I got annoyingly passionate about justifying counting people. A friend admitted that he lived in a non-residential building and would likely not be counted, and it drove me nuts, especially when it appeared that, like many hip kids these days, he'd rather not officially exist. Often in these cases a reluctance to reveal the illicitness of one's living conditions is cited as the justification for reluctance, and I've become severely frustrated that I lack the rhetoric to explain the isolation of the census from any authority who would care.
I know that my emotional and intellectual involvement in my tiny uninformed corner of the information-constructor makes me exceptional, and is the attitude most likely to prevent exactly the desultory functioning for which I advocate. The high-functioning stupidity required is a role all of us had to play, and I suspect it doesn't matter how thoroughly one obervational tool observes when it can't observe another part of the machine. If I used body metaphors here I think that would really defeat the purpose - the more mixed the metaphor the better, when we know that what we're talking about is a complicated social interaction of humans, paper, and computers (and a few others).
The enumerator handbook writers certainly don't know how to put it. Their dialogue of escalating refusal ends with a history lesson. Of course, saying the U.S. census started in 1790 only cements its status as symptom of the modern state. My plan was to appeal to peoples' natural curiosity, but it turns out curiosity is anything but natural or even common. "How do you imagine we know how many people exist at all?" I want to ask. Democracy itself is a minority, and people just don't see themselves as makers of the information they need. I grew up with Sim City, in which the headcount was just a computer calculation. My mind wants there to be a stable truth, not one generated by and even contingent upon the very cultural attitudes and fluctuations it records.
"When you read a statistic, do you consider yourself to be included in it?" I want to ask. Are those who don't think anyone needs to know how old they are or where they live the same people who lament that statistics they hear don't seem to represent their everyday reality, or seem too fuzzy? The census advertising focused on "the community", which automatically doesn't make people recognize how defined they are by their geographical location, but implies something they already feel separate from.
It should be less difficult to make the connection between micro and macro, but the way that connection is made - pulled through the bureaucratic medium toward the center of the katamari ball - stymies our social minds because not even the starseed can see the big picture. It is always hard to understand how a series of individual decisions add up to government. Conspiracy theorists feed on this kind of psychological gap, because this is how evil is done without anyone to blame - and how individual lives are improved without any particular hero. I do wonder if the moral reliability of census workers plays a significant part in how well the count improves local services. The causal relationships are extremely shakey, and it's best to keep causality out of things like this. I actually feel that the system works based on indifference to the values of its cogs. It is, in fact, the indifference of the cogs to what they are doing that contains the minimal information, keeping them from either getting it from anywhere else or giving it to anyone but their immediate superiors. The most critical part is that the information actually isn't useful except on the wider "general statistics" scale for which it is intended.
I think I've covered everything from my perspective but if you think there's something missing or are less than reassured by my approach let's get into that. Thanks for reading, and please add anything else you know. I'd like to touch these posts up and republish them, if there's somewhere I can do that. I mostly hope my census discussion inspires you to hire me.
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with something 
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