When I first started collecting music the medium of choice was tape. My older sister had a grand collection of cassingles -all the greatest pop and rock hits from the late eighties and early nineties on short cassettes. She could buy one at a time, at a cheaper price, than paying for a tape of the whole album. She did get whole albums on tape -for some of her favorite groups, but often a cassingle would suffice. One to three or four tracks, sometimes with an instrumental on the B side, so you could sing it yourself. When I started buying my own music, tapes were the medium I (my parents) could afford. Allowances could be saved up for a tape, or they’d get me one as a special treat, along the lines of the paperback books and comics they bought for me too. Thanks mom and dad. I know you worked hard for stuff you didn’t like yourself and even found quite questionable.           

​At the time CD’s were still expensive, and we didn’t have a CD player in the house, probably until sometime in the nineties. It was just boomboxes with a tape player, or my sisters non-component stereo system. I still remember my first tape, the one I bought at what is now a dead mall, Forest Fair Mall. We went there to celebrate my eleventh birthday with a few friends from the street. I grabbed Anthrax’s, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath tape, that had their “I’m the Man” track on it, which I’d heard from an older metalhead down the street. My mom wanted to take it back after she found it out what it was on the tape, but somehow I got her to let me keep it. There are advantages to being the youngest of three, as my older sisters never forget to tell me. 

​​I’m not quite sure what my first CD was, but I do know that when I got into punk a few years later, so much of it was on cassette. Taped by my older friend Andy Gable, who turned me on to so much good music, and then by other people. All of us made mix tapes and traded them with each other all the time. Some were for courting. Some were for tripping. Some were for rocking out.
            When I really started buying CDs I was drifting more and more into electronic music and industrial material. One of the first ones I bought was the Future Sounds of London, Lifeforms. I remember my friend Erik criticized it saying it was just a bunch of sound effects, but for me it was a doorway into my ambient listening habit which has continued to this day.
            Recently, while reorganizing the home multimedia library, I went through my entire CD collection and weeded it out. Periodic weeding is necessary in any collection if you want it to remain a collection, and not slip into the realm of the hoarder. It might be a fine line, and I realize I might get some flak for the idea of weeding the collection all, especially from my hoarder friends. Sometimes I’ve weeded and regretted what I got rid of… but most of the time, I haven’t missed the things I let go of. Hopefully they are making someone else happy now instead of just sitting on my shelves.

​​For awhile I stopped buying CDs, around the time when I stopped being a regular programmer on WAIF. Between 2001 and 2014 when I was on the air very regularly, towards the end, I got burned out and even got sick of listening to music. I got over that sickness after about a two-year break. Then I got into it again.
            Well, I never really totally stopped buying CDs or ever stopped listening. But a break from the way I had been doing it was necessary. When doing the two-hour radio show every other week or every week, I needed to have a constant supply of new stuff to play. Or I felt like I did anyway.
During the pandemic and when I’d gotten my musical mojo back, I started getting into building a Bandcamp and adding to my cache of files on the hard drive. Another collection built around things I ripped from the library and from friends.
Yet I still love a CD. I love reading the liner notes. I love the way it is easy to rip them to use in a DAW when making mixes for Imaginary Stations. And though I’m not on WAIF every week anymore, I do go up a few times a year to fill in for Ken Katkin’s Trash Flow Radio, and I still think the best way to do the show is to make two fully loaded mixed CD’s that I can then select from while on the air.
And I never stopped scouring the thrift store for CD’s or going through the bins of used CDs at the record store. It’s interesting because my local shop, Shake It!, doesn’t really even have a new CD section anymore. I spent a lot of money there on CD’s before the vinyl boom took off again. Now the store is very different than it was in terms of all the new music that is out on vinyl and all the used music is on CD. The trend has flip-flopped. I do buy vinyl, but not in huge quantities.
             Getting used CD’s has really come into its own again. It’s a great time for CD collectors to go out on the hunt again, because people are ditching their physical collections in favor of streaming. I think that’s a mistake, because unless you are your own streaming platform, ISP, or have your own internet radio station, someone else will always have control over your ability to access, download, or get to the music you want to hear and listen to.
            Sure, someone can rob or steal your physical stuff, or it could disappear without you knowing what happened, as if often the case when small little things get stolen by elves and pixies. Sure, physical media can be destroyed. Certainly, you can’t take your CD collection with you when the body is set aside at physical death. But perhaps some collectors will want to be buried with their media. None-the-less, if you want to listen to music offline, now is a good time to start raking through the used bins at your favorite record store, at yard and garage sales, at the thrift and charity shops. Vinyl is in demand, and even cassettes are in demand, but CDs are being turned back into the wilds of the secondhand market by those who believe a digital singularity is just around the corner.
            In combing the secondhand market I have been able to get a lot of good music that I couldn’t either afford back in the earlier heyday of my collecting, or that I I couldn’t find or obtain. Now it is out there, waiting to be found. I like looking at used CDs the same way I like looking at used books: there is serendipity at work in what you will find, synchronicity at play in the thing you want and need finding its way to you. I’ve also heard reports of people finding really amazing things: $1 dollar Steve Roach CD’s (his music is timeless and priceless), Sun Ra boxed sets at the thrift store. Other friends are reporting rare underground records from The Hafler Trio, Current and the album Le Mystere De Voix Bulgares, an influence on the vocal techinques of Lisa Gerard and Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance.

​This past fall I was tipped off by a coworker that the local NPR affiliate WVXU/WGUC was giving away boxes and boxes of CDs from their radio library. I went by and picked up several. The only rule there was you had to take everything in a box even if you only wanted one disc. But I managed to find some great recordings from the Hearts of Space label and a Hildegard Von Bingen box set.
            WVXU should know that keeping a collection is an archival commitment. It takes up space and time. They were in the process of moving to their new location, and so they had to free up some space to deliver more airtime. Some people don’t want to commit to the physical space CDs take, but too much streaming ends up cheapening the listening experience because it doesn’t take up space you have to commit too, and it fills time in such a way that almost anything will do (cue joke about the ubiquity of lo-fi beats for experiencing boredom). For them, I suggest the solid nineties option of a binder to put their CD’s and liner notes in. This doesn’t work as well as digipaks, but is still worth doing. It’s also good for burned CDs and very good for information gathered on hacking exploits as we learned from Mr. Robot.               

​There is another reason to build a physical music collection of your own. Streaming platforms may be fickle, and they aren’t great to artists either, but the energy they consume from the natures storehouse of ancient sunlight has very real limits. The amount of power it takes to keep the so-called “cloud” running is enormous. A little boombox could run on power from a generator or some off-grid solar panels in case of an energy disruption. The rolling brown outs and weather disruptions that have become more common with global weirding may mean a loss of internet connectivity for extended durations, especially as our ability to cope with these happenings is thwarted by the law of limits. Having some music on hand while you weather the literal storms can go a long way to making the psychological aspect of a long emergency much more manageable.
            It also makes economic sense to build a physical collection of music you enjoy. Many people cut the cord of cable for their television viewing habits and saved money by having a Netflix or Hulu subscription. That was when these first got going, but now people want to have every show from every platform available with a click, plus a Spotify subscription to have access to a world of music. Plus some Substack subscriptions to read some of their favorite independent journalists and writers (these are probably the best choice). I have done all this myself. Yet as stagflation sets in, it now may time to dam up the streams, collect physical media, and put up antennas for over-the-air reception of media. I’ve canceled several streaming subscriptions or memberships to certain services or platforms so that our household can save a bit of dough. My wages may have gone up over the years, but so have the prices for everything, and the standard of living has been going down ever since the 1970s. Being frugal and thrifty when it comes to entertainment, and having something physical listening on hand is a way to cut back on streaming services.
            It’s also a way to slow down, to really listen to entire albums, and to be more selective in how you feed your imagination and mind.
            The library is another option if you want to save even more money. Many have CD collections that are worth mining, and even a modest collection will have gems. My own work in writing about avantgarde music would have been impossible if I hadn’t been turned on to a world of music with “no commercial value,” but of immense cultural value. Libraries, community radio stations, and local PBS affiliates all have a role to play in preserving and transmitting things of cultural value, that may not have much mass appeal as commodified music in the capitalist system, but create the wealth that can be enjoyed by living a life of the mind. I hope families and individuals who are strapped can continue to turn to these resources for their education, entertainment, and edification.
            Beyond all that it is simply fun to pick through the detritus of the age and find your own listening treasure. Let us resuscitate the compact disc. Keep on digging!

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack is a beautiful book. It is not a book for the faint of heart, but it might be good to read anyway for those who’d rather bury their heads in the sand, or medicate themselves into a false rosiness (just as the mother in this story does). Cozy this is not. Tragedy it is. The kind of happenings it raps on could well be heading to a future near you, even though some of the elements of this near future tale date it to the time it was written, 1991. Kids connecting over payphones and landlines are part of my own fond memories so I was happy to read about them talking on the house phone anyway. These tech anomalies don’t matter too much in the end, because they aren’t the focus of the tale. This is science fiction of the social variety.

This was also my first time reading anything by Jack Womack. I’m glad I did because his command of the language in service to story is one of the things that made this book so beautiful. It is diary fiction. Specifically, the diary of a twelve-year old girl. I don’t imagine it is all that easy getting into the head of a twelve-year old girl myself. Writing from that first person perspective, in an extremely believable and absorbing voice was itself a major literary feat. The way he encoded her language with sprinklings of slang and the jargon of her day in the beginning, and the way her voice changed over the course of her violent awakening from sequestered private school girl, to open-eyed reveler in the harsh realities of economic survival and the ways of street, makes for a poetic breathtaking page turner.

“The whole West Side updown sounded livewired with gunshots and sirens and shouts and all the effects you get up here but now they played down the length.”

She writes to the diary as if it were a person named Anne. “Holidays pain your soul so Anne you always think where you’ve been and who with every year counting back and when they’re gone like this year the ache won’t stop. Even when weren’t moneyed here everything safed long as…”

The way Womack handles dialogue is a joy too, as Lola recreates her conversations in her diary. He might be writing about hard things, but he does so in an artful way. So what are those things he is writing about? There are so many themes to touch on in this book, and I want to encourage others to read this underappreciated speculative gem, so I won’t go into every detail. What follows are parts of the story that captivated my mind.

Lola is the daughter of a TV and movie writer, and an intellectual mother in New York City. They are starting to experience the nasty effects of economic downturn. Yet they still have enough at the beginning of the book to send Lola and her younger sister to private school. Things aren’t right in the United States of this book. Riots and crazy people are doing violent things to others on a regular basis. It’s become so common the violence is normalized. The kids see these things in Central Park one day when Lola goes out with her school friends after class. Along the way they see a homeless man get set on fire, but they continue on as if nothing big has happened. Meanwhile they can see the smoke rising from other parts of the city where the riots are in full swing.

One of her friends gets in trouble doing some stuff with a guy, some minor drugs, having a little party. She gets sent to a place the other classmates have already been talking about: Kure A Kid. As a late Gen Xer I remember full well the nightmare of the “troubled teen industry.” I had first hand experience of a place known as Kids Helping Kids, which operated in southwestern Ohio and Northern Kentucky. I wasn’t sent to this place myself, but two family members I am close to were sent there, and I attended some of the meetings they had for family as a grade school kid, among other things. To say it was culty is perhaps the least of the issues surrounding these programs. Yet the culty aspect is hardwired into them. Many of these programs can be traced in the way they operate directly back to the Synanon sobriety cult.

When I was in junior high there was a girl from a suburban school I became friends with at a weekend writing workshop aimed at encouraging kids who were deemed to have some literary talent. We bonded over zines and she was into the Riot Grrrl stuff coming out at the time. That was right around the time this book was written actually, or just after it came out. I lived in the city and introduced her to the punks and zinesters I knew, many of whom were older than me. After she came into town, and hung out with one of the older girls, something must have happened, because this girl was sent into a “treatment program” and I never heard from her again. Another close friend of mine, when his behavior was “out of control” was sent to a militaryesque Baptist boarding school.​

​Back then I was a big fan of the pop-punkers Screeching Weasel. I didn’t know it until recently, but it turns out Ben Weasel, the founder and singer in the band had been sent to the very troubled Élan School. Knowing people who got sent away on a regular basis, it was no wonder so many of us rebelled so hard. Yet the institutional adults who decide what goes into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders made rebellion a psychiatric disease as well: Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Call me defiant, but I could tell some more stories on this topic, but for those interested I recommend the book, Help At Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids by Maia Szalavitz. You could also check out the newer The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia by Samantha Leach. 

The fact that this novel had an element of the troubled teen industry as part of its plotline only engrossed me further. Though there were many other places like Kids Helping Kids around the country at the time, Womack was originally from Lexington, Kentucky, just over an hour south of where I live. I wonder if Kure A Kid was modeled at all on Kids Helping Kids? It was certainly modeled on the many abusive behavioral modification programs happening around the country. The main characters friend Lori is out of luck when she gets sent to Kure A Kid, and when she comes back, she won’t even talk to Lola, or their other friend Katherine. She doesn’t talk much at all. Appears to be zonked out on heavy drugs that give her a blank faraway look. Yet, supposedly these places were supposed to help troubled youth get away from drugs. All too often, like in this book, they just prescribed them something to keep their vital energies sedated, while doing nothing to actually help them.

As the story progresses daddies writing gigs dry up and the bills start mounting, as do creepy calls from some money collector. The family has to move from their posh multiroom apartment close to the private school, to a place closer to Harlem where the rioting is really underway. They now live in a neighborhood where gangs walk the streets, and where they just manage to scrape by with her fathers meager paycheck from his new job as a clerk at a bookstore, where he works long hours for an abusive manager. He is hardly ever home anymore to see his wife and kids. Mom is editing manuscripts for a small bit of dough, and she was already taking lots of medicine for her anxiety, but it now seems to have gotten dialed up and up. She is checked out, numbed, medicated, hopeful in a way that is not practical.

Meanwhile Lola’s little sister is afraid of her older sister now, because of rumors that started about her being queer after it was let out that she kissed her friend Katherine. Too bad that information got out only by Katherine’s father talking to another parent at the private school about seeing his daughter kissing Lola. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been spying on them. When Lola gets branded as a dyke, it is what starts Lola’s dissociation with her friends at the private school. Soon she starts making new friends in her new neighborhood. Friends who have street smarts and get up to petty crime, who hang out and sometimes squat in abandoned buildings. Squatting in an abandoned building is better than living with abusive parents after all. She starts hanging with girls who might be queer too. Girls, who, though just a few years older, have a lot more experience with the gritty side of life.

Meanwhile, it seems as if every other week the president is getting assassinated and a new one has to be installed. New York City is under martial law, and the “greenasses” or army is in the street trying to keep order where the police failed. Further tragedies descend upon her parents, who do little to protect her. They are trying to keep their kids fed and housed, but it seems like they could have been doing more. In the end, the little sister is farmed out to the mother’s sister Chrissie who lives in some kind of Christian fundamentalist gated community. The younger sister is fine with that. She wants to go out there, where it is safe, and be a breeder.

The interpersonal dynamics of the girl gang Lola falls in with, the Death Angels, have their own troubled reality. Trouble finds trouble for these really troubled teens. Kure A Kid won’t help them, even if their broke ass parents could afford it. The society around them is crumbling and violent. The only thing left for them is to fend for themselves as another economic crash unfolds and civil unrest multiplies.
Told in blistering and beautiful bursts of pain bubbles, and the joyful excitement of youth, Random Acts of Senseless Violence may be a book over thirty years old. It’s really just now entering adulthood. Like all great SF, it speaks not only to the time it was written, but to the readers of today. It’s not really the teens who are troubled, it is the world that is troubled.
​
“Everything downcame today Anne the world’s spinning out and I spec we finally all going to ride raw.” 

This night in Dayton times goes slow
as the hot night before labored ever on.
Today was so long the broken clock did crawl
but not as long as yesterday’s labored draw.

This day it makes me so lonesome and tired
it wasn’t like this, oh those long summers ago.
These days bore with no fighting, no crossing the wires
into hostile lands, to take back what they stole.

No games this night, no festivals are flowing
with music and drink and gambling for gold
no long days floating on the tepid canal
or laughter from jokes the trickster has told.
 
The scrapping goes lean, the loving goes leaner
the towers all scavenged, the skyscrapers gone
the tubes on the teevee no longer flicker
the line on the tele connects to no phone.
 
The streets of the city are busted like rubbers
tires from the cars melted down for the tar.
The steel it was shined for the weapons of robbers
but in that old melee I was too young to spar.
 
No football gear ever again to be worn
no basketball dribbles on the court to be played
the horn of old plenty from the root it is torn
by the government, corporate, the people betrayed.
 
My plight is all somber like this thick Dayton heat
I’m wretched as an airplane with its last tank of fuel
gathering plastic bottles in the ruined streets
this night in old Dayton is as long as its cruel.
 
The last famous star men are long in their grave
and with them their toybox of endless supply,
and this night in old Dayton, cannot be saved,
the cracked concrete is ruined, I’m no longer spry.
 
Where in this dead city did the rest flee?
O where, in the world did my countrymen go?
I’m alone in the desolate streets of old Dayton
until the pit opens up and I go far below.

​I was born up in Cleveland, a city you may know,
my parents hard workers, to the factory did go;
my folks were pious, sent me to Sunday school
didn’t raise me up to add to the human cesspool.

​Then I got in with girls, guns, drugs and gangs
skateboarding, tags, graffiti, talking heavy slang
when my words hit the wall from the spray paint can
the cops were right there waiting to throw me in the van.

What I had in my pocket, it really made them scream
a semiautomatic with a loaded magazine
I was taken to the station, and then I went to jail
by iron bars surrounded, my poor folks refused to bail.

They held me in the juvey, for what seemed like forty nights
I learned how to do more crimes, & started picking fights.
I drank the jailers moonshine whenever I got a batch
it tasted like cough syrup, but I shoved it down my hatch.

It wasn’t the only thing that got shoved when time came to push
from behind, ambush, someone sliced my ruddy throat with a shiv
spraying blood all over the linoleum, I almost didn’t live.
Nobody said the living was easy or this was going to be cush.

The next day I plotted back on how best to get revenge
so in the play yard I got a rock, clobbered him like stonehenge
busted up his skull so good he was surely going to die
the jury found me guilty, electric I was sentenced, in the chair to fry.

​So they had to move on, sent me down to Mansfield town
I’d moved up to the big time, with my hangman’s head swinging down.
They put me on a southbound bus on a cold December day
I could hear my mom and dad crying, I had surely lost my way.

My dad he turned to drinking, and started going to the bar
my mom with spirits sinking lost sight of her guiding star.
She would come to visit me once, every couple moons
we’d between the glass, her heart had been harpooned.

I once had a girl in Cleveland town, a girl now I know I loved,
If ever I get my freedom back, I’ll act as simple as a dove.
If ever I get my liberty, this thug life I’ll surely shun
sipping drink and slinging drugs, fighting and shooting guns.

To you who have your freedom, pray keep it while you can,
Don't run around like a stupid clown and flaunt the laws of man;
for if you do, you’ll find yourself in a sorry state  like me,
rotting away behind bars, in the state penitentiary.

​CompleXities eXplained away by Boomers
             with no sense of guilt for eXcess
    becomes an eXcuse to do an end run nose dive
      leading by eXample straight to siX feet under.
 
One foot in the grave & still trying to hold on
        to the dyskinesia of gerontoXicity
        clutching the pill boX of the gerontocracy.
 
We are graphic designers inspired by FluXus
     who skip the eXamination to go on to the neXt McJob,
           feeling a sense that the future has been eXploited



sarcastic irony is a way of life when all things feel caustic
                     to the eXtent (of eXistenz)
that even I don’t need to put on my They Live X-ray speX
to see through the feigned fog of their neuropathic compleX.
 
       psychiatry industrial
 
Go back to your suburban dupleX
and your Viagra dreams of oral cyberseX
as we contend with fixing broken hyperteXt
collecting tchotchkes and Ikea objects
playing in basement bands and ministudio side projects.


Contend with too many Comet burritos
craft beer, now acid refleX, slow down reflects
try not to worry about making rent
or when its going to bounce, that check
or about lung cancer when smoking after seX cigarettes.

Let’s look each other up in the rolodeX.

This is a leXicon for the unorthodoX
follow the path of the bright eyed foX
into our own escape-from-reality sandboX.

​We eXult in all things auXillary
even as you ignore us in economic pillory.

We put it down all right there, in the miX tape we made
While Boomers with boners gallivant and escapade.
Sometimes I really do want to sink the blade,
but then I kneel down at the pew to reconcile my hate
that I need to eXplicate; while the tech barrons


                     dope blood rejuvenate
 
prepare to upload minds to a Silicon slice of heaven
while their cryogenic brain freeze farts
slurping bone broth health slushees from the 7-Eleven
in a stockyard bid to hold onto youth and power
    but the flower of your hour has passed
as have the hippies and the grass they pass
as even the youngest of X pass into midlife crisis

                 this too shall pass
 
but that doesn’t make us any less strapped for cash
while the big boom booms hold onto real estate
at least its only notional wealth, I seek a higher template


& so look to the eXemplars & so look to the templars.

The new culture in the crack of the old takes time to gestate
     germinate the wild dandelion weeds spreading seeds
    
          adaptable and invasive
 
in the face of mothers & fathers eating their young like cannibals.

Yet we brought you hip hop and trip hop and punk, it was so delectable
         but time zoomers right over us, so feral and ephemeral.
         This age pivots on its axial so radiant. Slipping into decline
                             at an ever tilting gradient.
It’s time to fleX, so don’t jinX us with your aXioms
though latch key, skipped over, we take our lot to the maXimum.


Dropping mail art in the post boX like we did before the Internet
when it crashes look to us and we will find the alternet
routes through communication space
 hosting shows that are all ages
straight edge X on hands again
while the machine burns
and our hate against it rages.

Did you ever hear about the hobo, Boxcar Clayton Jones?
He lied, cheated, and stole his way, across the interzones.
Once he was a stockbroker, or so the old stories say,
hated life on Wall Street and threw it all, shirt and tie, away.

He met his wife while hunting snipes on the streets of Chicago,
they shared a smoke and a toke, as she strummed her old banjo;
she’d just escaped the psych ward, wore a jacket that was straight,
said, “psychiatry is a racket, man. Me, they never will sedate.”

They hopped a train to the far out west, to live life in the sun,
and since that day have never strayed, have lived their life as one.
They made love in the orange groves, and picked Humboldt County weed,
sleeping underneath the burning stars in that far off land of the free.

One day he went to the pawn shop, to swipe her a ring of silver,
and when he slipped it on her finger, she broke out in goose bump shivers.
They were wed by a drunken preacher, one they met on a spellbound train,
who said that he was hellbound—preaching had only caused him pain.

In Chattanooga they got off the rails, to see what fortune had in store,
and there they met the Buddha of the south, in a shack on a dirt floor.
He was a sadhu from the holler, who found enlightenment on moonshine,
and folks came from all around to seek white lightning at his shrine.

Boxcar Clayton took a swig when the communion jug was passed around,
and felt the senses of his spirit tug when he heard the whistle sound;
outside the long iron horse was gathering up its coal black steam:
it was time to ditch this two-bit town and see if they could hitch a dream.

Now Clatyon Jones, he was not a rich man, he left all his money behind,
but he loved his wife and the clack of the track, and despised the daily grind,
so they road along the interzones from Kalamazoo to Poughkeepsie,
from the North to the South, to the West from the East, up and down the Mason Dixie.

​And when their bones got too tired to travel any further, or very far,
they settled themselves down on the Ohio river in a rusted out boxcar.

On the other side of the mountain, in a spot so desperate and wild,
there lived a lady with long black hair, who was kindling a child.
There was nothing in the cold dark shack except a bed she’d made of leaves,
and she cried herself to sleep at night wiping tears upon her sleeve.

The man who’d filled her up with seed, he’d left her there alone,
and went back out into the old cruel world to try and make his bones.
He would love to see her dressed up, in pretty clothes oh so fine,
but he couldn’t even afford a rose, nor a bottle of drugstore wine.

His only job had been as a garbage man who made the morning rounds,
his only friend in the world a lonesome braying hound.
He scraped a few dollars for the bar, to try and forget his plight,
it warmed his belly from the chill outside but gave his mind no respite.

Back in the shack with a panic attack his lady was going wiggedy-wack,
afraid the dream of her life was a train slamming into a dead end track.
So she crept down off the mountain and she made her way into town,
looking for her man, and when she found him, he was dressed like a flipping clown.

He had seen the circus poster scabbing off the timber of the telegraph pole,
thought he might as well join, if only to fulfill the terms of his parole:
for he had once robbed a man just for kicks, outside the five and dime,
and she had a thing for bad boys, it made her hot to know he’d done time.

People say the road is no place for having kids and growing a family tree,
and people say if you fall in love with a rambling rover you will never be free,
but the tattooed ladies took her in, and the gypsy queen read her sweaty palm,
and in the chaos of the freakshow life, she found her center of calm.

​So they traveled inside a trailer and heard people call them carnie trash,
and made due with what the world gave them, never quite flush with cash.
Their baby girl was born under the big top, under the great plains open sky,
and they were a freaky folk family, until they met their sweet bye and bye.

            In the past few months, I’ve noticed the term “knowledge worker” more and more, though I had come across it well before. Every time I would see the word “knowledge worker” in an article I’d get this little prick of irritation, hence this rant. Why the prick of irritation? It started sounding ever more and more dishonest to me, that’s why. Not dishonest in that there is a difference between the work of our hands, of making things in the real world, as opposed to the world of words, scribes, bits and bytes. It has struck me as dishonest, intellectually, because we already have a word for people whose work is in the more abstract realm of thoughts as opposed to things: that is, the intellectual.

            How could intellectuals themselves allow the word that describes them to be swapped out with the bland term “knowledge worker” in the first place? I think it has something to do with ensuring they have a place in the limited positions available for brainiacs in an economic system that has been reduced to service industry wage slavery.  In thinking about this so-called “knowledge work” I wondered about where the term came from in the first place. The least I could do would be an internet search to see what the Artificial Idiocy of our ever-weaker search engines came up with for an answer.  

According to the patterns spat up by the machine learning on tap, it seems we have the infinite wisdom of Peter Drucker to lay the blame on for this blunder of a term. As a key architect of so-called management education, it looks like Drucker can be a useful scapegoat for much of the crumbling edifice of the professional managerial caste at large. I guess if they are the knowledge workers, their work has left a lot to be desired.

            It incenses me because mere management requires doesn’t require extensive knowledge beyond making a schedule and being a middleman between the admin and the peons below. Nor do most managers seem to really work that much either. If they did, they wouldn’t be managing other workers, but working alongside them.

            The term itself came from Drucker’s 1959 book, The Landmarks of Tomorrow. As such, it seems to belong to a hauntological past, a Disneyworld that will soon become a ruined wonderland beneath a swamp full of gators in our not-too-distant futures. The ghosts of J.G. Ballard’s Drowned World will be kayaking above fighting off the anacondas and pythons that people have released into Florida’s humid wilderness. The real Landmarks of Tomorrow will be Epcot center golf ball floating in a mire of turpitude. The carousel of progress is rusted and there is a lot of gunk in its gears.

            Drucker thought of his word coinage as a descriptor for a new white-collar class of citizen, seated in an office, engaged in deep thought, providing his expertise for the greater good of the company. In 1959 it was for the most part, his expertise, after all. These ideations weren’t in service to ideas so much as they were to the corporate boardroom, because the principle objective of the knowledge worker was to bring “value” to the organization.

            This kind of corporate bullspeak has now trickled down into collective consciousness, much to our own detriment. It has colonized our mindscapes with the kind of coldly calculated minimalism as seen on television shows like Severance. Part of the reason why that show is such a hit, I think, is because corporate work really is actually so dulling to the mind that you have to get some kind of cybernetic lobotomy to be able to go in every day. That, and you have to cut off the part of your brain that thinks about the effects corporate work is having on the world and its many beings. Perhaps, rather than sever ourselves into two parts, corporate American’s could adopt the same kind of drinking culture as Japan. After a hard day grinding on some dumb widget designed to collect data from cell phone users, or something worse, they go get absolutely sloshed together after the long day in order to tolerate the stress. Americans just tend to binge drink at the bar in an empty bowling alley. 

Peter Drucker was a smart guy himself though and the consequences of his vision might not have been malicious. He was born Vienna in 1909 when the Austrian-Hungarian empire was still a thing. Having grown up as a Jewish intellectual during the rise of the Third Reich, and leaving for England once the Nazis were in power, his main drive came to be the creation of a “functioning society.” He knew what a nonfunctional society looked like, and it wasn’t all that great.

While in England, Drucker became something of a disciple of economist John Maynard Keynes, a regular attendee of his lectures at Cambridge. It would be no mistake to consider Drucker a Keynesian. Keynes taught his students to look at the behavior of commodities as part of his economic theory. But Drucker was a people person and his interest was to look at the behavior of individuals. This led his work to becoming a cornerstone of management theory in the twentieth century. As such, the professional managerial caste can be seen as part of his legacy.

Towards the end of the 1930s Drucker had moved to the United States. In 1939 his first book was published, The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism which traced the rise of fascism in his time. In 1942 he followed it up with The Future of Industrial Man: A Conservative Approach. This garnered him attention from the bigwigs of business. His obsession with how authority and control were used in Europe led him to a friendship with Donaldson Brown, who was vice chairman of the board of General Motors between 1937 to 1946. Brown was able to give Drucker access to the inner workings of GM for his next study which resulted in the Concept of the Corporation. This was followed in turn by The Practice of Management. After all, a corporation has to extract as much as it can from its “human resources.” Now might be a good time in this essay to cue up your copy of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report.  

It might not have been Drucker’s direct goal to help elevate corporations to new levels of power. He was well aware of their power, and he thought, that if they were managed correctly by intellectuals, er, I mine, knowledge workers, there would be less of a chance of them going down the path of fascism he had seen overshadow Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

With his influence spreading this Fordist capitalism version of knowledge-workers would soon spread its dark wings over an increasingly corporatized landscape. It might be useful to think that the process was completed when Bill Gates turned people into what author Douglas Coupland has called, “microserfs.” In Coupland’s book the characters work on a variety of projects at Microsoft where it feels like they are the serfs in a feudalistic society, with Bill Gates as the kingly technolord.

If the “knowledge worker” is the manage than the microserf in the cubicle is really just that, a serf, a peasant, someone given a pittance, while all the resources they produce are extracted. Such strategies have made the platforms promoted by Silicon Valley rich. We provide the content, the harvest the capital. They also spit what we make back at out at us, through the simulacra, flattening imagination and creativity. One things Drucker did correctly predict how the incoming information economy would erase many blue-collar jobs. In reality, it just off shored them, so the producers of American consumption were no longer visible.

            The stuffy stuffed shirts at Forbes magazine define a knowledge worker as “someone who generates value through their knowledge” and the more reliable Oxford English Dictionary defines an intellectual as a person “possessing a high degree of understanding or intelligence; given to pursuits that exercise the intellect; spec. devoted to academic or cultural interests.” Is that what the people in these office jobs are doing? I’m not convinced.

It seems to me a knowledge worker is just a defanged intellectual with a severed head. An intellectual was a person who thought long, deep and hard on a certain set of subjects. A knowledge worker is just another kind of pusher of bytes, to a person whose job it is to just shuffle bits around, whether that is information (itself not actually knowledge) or people.
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            I’d see these kinds of people have the potential to “generate value” from their activities if they were given a space for them. But the place of the intellectual has been brushed aside by these workers who supposedly “think for a living.” What is it that they think about, I wish to know? If it is branding, marketing, management, then count me out.

I may work at a library, surrounded by all kinds of knowledge and art, but please don't call me a knowledge worker.
           ​

My name is Freddy Fiver and I live all alone
kicked back, chilled out, hurried as a stone.
You’ll find me up north, in the city of Detroit
living by my wits in a squat quite adroit.

My house it was empty for many a year
except for the rats who moved in without fear
the roof it has holes, that lets in the cold rain
but I tacked up a tarp and try not to complain.

Hurrah for Detroit city, land of the freest of free
it’s a gem in America for a squatter like me.
Don’t let out a tear, there is really no need
I’ve lived here for years without title or deed.

My jacket is all ragged and my language is foul
my life rock hardened, in the School of Knock POW!
My stuff is all scattered across the whole fucking floor
and I covered the hole with a broken down door.

What dishes I have are encrusted with grime
with the water turned off I just skip washing time
but I have cans of sardines and old cans of spam
and when I run out of them I have potted ham.

Hurrah for Detroit city land of the last hurrah
the factories moved out, folks got lost in the sprawl
when you’ve got nothing to do and nowhere to turn
come up to the city where it is a pleasure to burn.

How happy I am when I crawl into my patchwork sack
and the voices start spinning cuz my heads outta whack
and the big cockroaches who are devoid of all shame
crawl up to my fire bucket to get close to the flame.

The tiny little bed bugs have covered me with pores
so when I scratch and I itch pus out of me pours.
A large spider in the corner stares and spins its crazy web
but its not a bad life for poor me, not at all for a pleb.

So hurrah for Detroit city when the polar vortex descends
may the good times return, we can always pretend.
How happy I am in this suburb deserted
for the freaks on the streets with who I have flirted.
There is no job, no money, no police I do swear.
I make friends with coyotes, await the return of the bear.

Here I am happy and here I must stay
ain’t nothing else for me, so I won’t go away.

So come up to Detroit where there’s a home for you all
it’s a safe place to be amid the Empire’s fall.
No need to go elsewhere when you can squat here for free
and make a life in the rubble of Detroit city.

Please don’t let troubles brew in your mind
you can come do your thing and let it unwind
just stick to your squat and guard it ‘gainst scrappers
hang out on the block with the MC’s and rappers.

It will be a city of music to Detroit’s dying day
so come rave in the streets til your toothless and gray.

A lot of intellectuals get riled up about the looming specter of anti-intellectualism. I can understand the fear. Perhaps they were picked on for being brainy and artsy instead of being brawny, athletic and good at working with their hands. Gym class was a living hell for me in high school. I had already denounced the flailing jocks, conventional sports, and the clueless philistines I perceived to be all around me when I embraced punk rock, poetry and skateboarding. When punk made its mid-nineties comeback, I called all the newly minted fans poseurs even though they had gotten there just a few years later than me. Then again, they liked shitty bands like Green Day and Offspring, where I listened to Crass and Conflict. My denunciations were just as reactionary as the censure and bullying I’d experienced for dressing funny and writing in a journal. Now I see the same thing happening again with the fear intellectuals have for the anti-intellectual forces stalking America.

I will confess that I love theory. It excites. But the excitement and amusement and joy that comes from setting my brain abuzz with abstract music and heady papers diminish with ferocity when I see how much contempt intellectuals have for those who work with their hands, for those who dare not to pay attention to those theories and what they have to say. It’s no wonder that people don’t pay attention, when so much hatred has been spent on deriding those deemed dumb and uneducated.

In the United States this dual animosity, of intellectuals on the one hand, and so called uneducated on the other, has now settled into a holding pattern of locked horns, a real duel. The differences in taste on the part of each binary group contributes to this failed state. Each group looks down on what the other likes and dislikes.

            The echo chamber silo of higher education creates a self-reinforcing world view and such a similarity of aesthetics that it has become impossible to read a literary novel from one of the big publishing cartels. So many of the writers pushed by the mob boss editors, only got into print by way of an MFA program. It feels like they only love literature because of the perceived prestige. They don’t want a genuine life of letters if it leaves them for poorer, only for richer. Where is the rapture for reading and life in letters? Not in MFA programs. (Nor is it in StoryGrid but that’s another matter.) These folks themselves can’t seem to understand the appeal of pro wrestling, reality television shows about people with a duck call business, or country pop music. The self-appointed highbrow have made deep cuts of separation with any association they might have once had with what they deem low brow. This current cadre of big uni graduated thinkers don’t understand why their extremely disconnected, abstract, theoretical pronunciations don’t relate to how large portions of the population experience reality, and then continue to lambast those who they believe inferior for what they call stupidity.

            This isn’t a good way to win friends and influence people.

Instead of denouncing the supposed anti-intellectual we should be asking ourselves what we do we intellectuals really have against the uneducated?  As much derision and venom flies against those deemed ignorant and unschooled on the part of the intellectual as does the hatred of intellectual from those who are suspicious of the life of the mind. What is this really but a superiority complex painted over the top of thinly disguised class hatred? Otherwise, why the judgment on those who have dropped out of high school, who have not gone to college, who do not have what is considered to be good taste, who do not hold the same opinions and values, in other words the opinions and the values of the educated?

Here we see again the ages-old divisions between those who would manage society from the safety of their lofty perch, and those ready to get their hands dirty. In times past it was the ruler who had access to books, to teachers, to the learned. It was the peasants and the underclass who served the upper class, and had to make do with the wisdom of their hands and the oral knowledge passed down between generations. Another way to look at this simmering animosity, is as the division between the literate and the illiterate, between the written word and the spoken word, each representing a different way of knowing and transmitting that knowing, each giving rise to different types of culture and ways of relating.

As literacy began to flourish it became possible for those who would have formerly had little access to the canon of printed thought, to become self-educated. Yet the self-educated are dangerous to a ruling class, because with access to knowledge, they can read what the Bible actually says, as happened during the Reformation, and they can start forming their own notions about its meaning. They can take what they have learned, the revelation of their own thought on what they have read from the books of the Bible, and start making up their own minds about what has been preached. They can decide if the priesthood is in service to the word, or just giving an interpretation of that word allowing them to hold on to the reins of power. For the priesthood, who were a large swathe of the intellectuals of the time, having all and sundry read and make up their own minds about theological doctrine must have been scary as the basis of their power was pulled away.

Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution and its economic aftermaths.  As Fossil Capitalism ramped up, on the one hand, and Bureaucratic Communism, on the other, it was those who worked with their hands who caught the brunt of the downsides of both of these systems. The intellectuals who set up and gamed these systems in the first place got to reap the rewards of underclass obedience. A few bones get thrown to the working class from time to time and some plucky bootstrappers are allowed to rise in the ranks here and there. But only a little bit. The brains always will be in need of brawn to get things done, and since the brains rarely like to give up the creature comforts they’ve accumulated, it is better for them isolate and keep as many resources to themselves as possible, while simultaneously sowing division so as to better stay on top as conquerors.

Our corporate managers and corporate landlords are now the would-be keepers of the intellectual keys. What might those who have been wage slaved in the service industry by systems of debt do with the knowledge and access to information the Internet promises to give them? In this situation it becomes better to feed people a steady drip of drugs and entertainment to keep their boredom with life at bay. In boredom, stray thoughts might arise. They might begin to distrust those on whose behalf they have been working and toiling their whole lives with the power of their hands and the sweat of their bodies.

Those who try to rule with the power of their minds alone have reason to be afraid of the unwashed mob who might any day show up their doorstep.

If intellectuals are harvesting a bad rep just now, it might just be because they have been the ones working to shape public discourse and policy for the last few generations following World War II. This was when the dream of a managed society really got its wings. That society has been managed straight to the point of multiple crises and escalating collapse. So now, when the populist uprising happens in this century as it has happened in past centuries, it gets seen by many as having strong anti-intellectual characteristics. The intellectuals however, wish to retain their clout, and once again, instead of listening to the criticisms laid against them, deem others as anti-intellectual populists. One thing that seems to get missed by the professional managers is that the flip side to populism is elitism. Unfortunately it seems they’d rather see what they’ve accumulated die on the vine rather than to share their hoarded resources.

            The PMC also seems to be missing the fact that their very denunciations of the rural, of hillbillies and rednecks, of the bitter young adults who see no future for themselves outside an entrenched service industry catering to the needs of the very managers they despise, has robbed them of potential allies. As often as not, the anti-intellectual is very smart indeed, and the working classes have historically had just as much appreciation of music, literature and art as the richly educated. More often than not, they have been continually priced out of sharing in the fruits of high culture. I love classical music, but a single ticket to the symphony now costs about eighty to a hundred dollars, and I’m only talking about a middling seat. Participation is thus kept out of the hands of those who need that money for milk and bread, but who otherwise share the love of these productions of time. With these economic separations in place, the cultural distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow then become a matter of what class a person belongs to, what they can afford. To keep class identity in tact they may tune to into the pop music they can hear rather than checking out the rich world available to them for free from public libraries.
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            If the PMC thinks America has become too anti-intellectual, at least one prong of bringing the humanities back into greater circulation among everyone should be to bring down their affordability. The members of the intellectual class should also probably go to at least a few WWE matches and rodeos too, though, to get a taste of the friendliness of the people who they so dismissively assault.

All of this begs to question of what the role of the intellectual should actually play in society.      

Since the time of Pythagoras and Plato the Western imagination has been plagued with the idea that the intellectual should be the ruler of the people. The teachers at the universities, the educated heads of corporations, the Ivy League and blue-blooded politicians who have been running the show in the West, and their various lackeys, haven’t really made a good go of that inherited assumption. Something has to give.
A mere reversal of roles won’t foot the bill either. Casting doubt on the work of the mind, dismissing all science, dismissing all book learning and scholarship as suspect, is just as bad as calling all people who live in the rural parts of America rednecks and hillbillies, as if their interests and desires don’t matter.

 Rather than being dictators of taste (a hard thing for a music writer like me to say out loud), the intellectual should start to see themselves more as artists of the mind. A contributor to culture, whose creations swirl and play amid the ideas and imagination, rather than an enlightened ruler who gets to tell everyone else what to like and how to act. If intellectuals would like to see their ideas adopted more widely, we should do as Robert Anton Wilson has suggested, and seduce people into the reality tunnels forged by our imaginations. People are tired of being forcibly dominated by ideas and theory so abstract the practical value of them are like building paper airplanes for a humanity that is trying to travel back and forth between continents.

The intellectual as artist of the mind gives a new freedom to our own ideas. A thinker is someone who can excel at creating concepts. By working with concepts and getting them into circulation, the intellectual becomes a concept artist. Those concepts could be in the form of philosophy, written for the everyday readers who need philosophy to live, as well as the specialists who make a life pursuing the wisdom they purport to love.

I don’t see anything wrong with playing games of art and thought inside our heads. These games can none-the-less change the world as many intellectuals would like to do. But it would only be because other people feel drawn to and aligned with those ideas, not because they have been bludgeoned by them. In this respect the intellectual is better suited to have a role outside of professional manager, decision maker, politician. The world could use a few less politicians anyway, a few less executives, a few less bureaucrats and professors who get lost inside of the bloated systems of what the Left used to criticize and call the Establishment.

​            Whatever is left of the Left must now find a different way forward. When the life of the mind is not lived for the life of the mind, but for the sake of position in a priesthood of prestige, a lack of true presence of mind becomes a certainty. Those with presence of mind must allow their ideas to flourish or fail in practical freedom, and not seek to chain others inside cages of theory they too were once keen to escape.