XXXIX. pay no attention

a peek behind the curtain

If you are returning to New York after a long sojourn, I suggest timing your arrival for that dark golden hour of sunset in the triumphant stinger of May. That’s when I returned, bobbing up and down in a well of travel unconsciousness, snatching glimpses of the skyline. I have left New York for an extended period every year since I moved here. Once for work, twice for panic. This is the first time I have stepped out of a functioning life—vacation not escape!—and stepping back in feels very sweet. There are people I want to see, there is work I want to do, there are routines I do not have to create just pick up again. Of course, this robust feeling is largely due to the glory of Spring and a fortuitous jet lag sleep schedule of 10pm-7am, but still how lovely to return to a life that works. I have an actual foundation on which to build, instead of the shifting sands I was dropping dominos on before.

forests! ruins! ghana! sicily!

My friend Anna and I were recently discussing the sordid business of living. She has wondered aloud to me many times how I get by. I work one part-time job at 20hrs a week and sometimes pull a shift at the bookstore where I make minimum wage and spend it all on lunch. And yet I love to eat out and purchase things, and generally feel unrestricted even if that’s not the case. The short answer to Anna’s question: I don’t really know how I get by and neither does anyone else in this field it seems. There is an incredible (depressing) archive of financial diaries from theater workers around the country from the substack Nothing For The Group. I read one of these entries about a year ago (probably linked from artist, unpaid) and when trying to recall it today only remembered the editor’s note at the beginning:

We recently received a subscriber email expressing that last month’s column was “off-putting” to read because of the diarist’s family support.  The reader wrote that this kind of financial privilege was not the norm in their professional circles and they did not think it was representative of the vast majority of the theater community. While that may be true (I am not a statistician nor a detective), editing these BBB columns has shown me that monetary support (either from a parent or from a live-in partner who takes on a larger portion of expenses) is so common that it's become an unseen and unspoken force in theater workers’ lives…

This month’s two columnists illustrate this stance: neither diarist included certain forms of monetary support in the first draft of their columns. This has become somewhat of a recurrent theme in editing BBB: it can take some gentle prodding to uncover the full extent of one’s finances. Moreover,  the concept of “family support” can defy neat description. Privilege exists on a spectrum, from trust fund beneficiaries to having a partner who pays for the full cost of your Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime.

I have scoffed many times at the struggles of those I know in the city who are receiving hefty family support—we’re all slumming it together until the first of the month comes—there’s a seductive pull to having a chip on your shoulder, professing your rugged individualism with bootstraps proudly on display. But then privilege exists on a spectrum. I do not pay for any streaming platform: Hulu from my stepmom, Netflix from Anna, Amazon Prime from Quentin (or my grandma when I was in a feral state trying to watch the next episode of The Tudors and Quentin wasn’t answering), HBO Max somehow still from Yale (no one tell on me). I don’t pay my phone bill. I often eat at Quentin’s for dinner and today stole the leftovers for lunch. This is not the same as having rent covered, but it is true that people are helping me, and their support, be it financial or emotional, is the only reason I can continue.

Almost everyone I know in this industry is a cobbler. A thousand here, twenty-five there, a free lunch and the bills are somehow paid. To those outside, it is difficult to explain the fluctuating tides of priority and payoff. Each day I am plotting, scheming, briefly achieving the ultimate goal of only making art for a living. Sometimes it feels like everything else is a nuisance, an invisible mite buzzing by the ear. At best, the necessary business of living dulls to a neutral background hum. How do you allocate those slippery, priceless resources: time and attention.

On the plane ride home from Sicily (paid for with the remainder of the “fun times” saving account that has been steadily dwindling without replenishment in favor of paying AEA dues and rebuilding an emergency savings account) I devoured Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. At first I thought ha! see! I should not be made to work! I am a woman, I am creating, I need only passive income and a room with a lock! My initial takeaway was that anything less than someone handing me a blank check was a hindrance on my artistic spirit. There are many nuanced and brilliant insights in the book, but I have returned again and again to this sentence:

By hook or by crook, I hope you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

By hook or by crook, I have. It’s not the ultimate, but it’s closer. I have spent a month seeing and eating and reading, and there have been emails and self-tapes and ill-timed Zooms along the way, but I was able to cobble enough, and others were generous enough to allow me to idle, to loiter, to dream.

that is a girl filled with creative spirit (arancini). this is breakfast btw

Yesterday, I took some initiative at work, something I named as my goal for the year in a mandatory workplace wellness check-in. Initiative might not be the right word. Though I am always saying I’m on the verge of being fired, I’m pretty good at my job. It is helpful that I function more as an executor than a strategist. I should say I expressed the goal to engage more at work, rather than completing tasks as a means of early escape. To that end, I was noodling through the artist folder for one of our upcoming publications and I came across a trove of recently digitized recordings.

The fuzzy voices of a group of women burst through. It is 1978. They are in an apartment. A home phone rings intermittently: corded, we hear the host repeatedly exit the room to answer it. One of the members has been waylaid at work, asks again for directions which we can hear patiently described. A buzzer bleats, admitting a different latecomer. “We just started.” The agenda for this meeting seems to be compiling a list of galleries and collectives that are accepting new artists. Each woman reports to the rest of the group their findings: name, part of town, entry fees, monthly dues, guaranteed frequency of showing, commission percentages, number of members, portfolio requirements, etc. They laugh at jokes I couldn’t catch either due to audio quality or our forty-six-year gulf. There are names I recognize—art institutions that have stood the test of time though even in 1978 things seem to be shifting, moving uptown, perhaps closing some open-door policies. The meeting is more focused than any artists’ strategy meeting I’ve been part of; though scandalized by outrageous dues or disappointed in scant benefits, the tone is optimistic. These are women who are prepared to forge ahead in the messy business of sustaining a working artistic life. One woman jokes, “no days off when you’re a teacher.” They are hustling, but clearly not alone.

I’ve been back for almost a week but I am still living out of my suitcase until my subletter leaves on the 1st. As comfortable as Anna’s couch is I am looking forward to getting back to the room of my own and hopefully dedicating some focused time to, as Maggie Nelson aptly describes it, “self-directed, time-consuming solitary labor…with few to no hard deadlines or guaranteed financial profit.” But before that back to grant-writing; it’s been a very long lunch break.

xx

Mia