LUDIC LIVE

Welcome to 2012, Ludic legions!

Whoa, I was channeling Stan Lee for a minute there, he must have gotten bottle service and nodded off.  Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to usher in the new year and let you know what’s up for this site and for me in general, because if you’re reading this, you’ve expressed an unexplainable interest in my activities.

First of all, as you may have heard, thanks to our dynamic American economy, I have recently become what is known as a “victim of reduced circumstance”, or, to put it in more Objectivist terms, a poverty-stricken loser.  Thanks to the good fortune of having a Southern family, I’ve avoided homelessness (or, to be precise, houselessness), and things will surely be looking up, but if any of you are inclined to donate to FailureThon 2012, I can be PayPalled via leonard dot pierce at gmail dot com.  As a great political leader once said, “I’ll take any motherfucker’s money if he givin’ it away.”

But, thanks to a series of birth defects and the entirely unsupportable vestiges of a Protestant work ethic, I’d rather earn money than just take it!  I’m happy to say that there will be a number of exciting projects coming your way this year that I hope will pique your interest and earn your dimes.  This blog will be updated at least three times a week in the coming year with the usual vaguely referential pseudo-humor, politely bitchy political opinionizing, and reviews of things you will never read, watch, or listen to, and it will continue to be free as always.  But I have a major endeavor, launching (hopefully) in the spring, that will feature new and original writings — by myself and, eventually, other creative and talented folks — to which you can subscribe or buy a la carte at exceptionally reasonable prices.  It’ll be a micro-pay set-up, with no administrative or production fees built in, and all the money will go directly to the creators.  After a Kickstarter start-up, I hope to get it going as soon as possible, and while I want to keep the details mum until the official announcement, I think it’s something all of you will find compelling and worth your couple-of-bucks.  But you’ll get new fiction each month, delivered in the format of your choice, and a full book at the end of the year of new material.  It’ll be an exciting new experiment that gives you well-written and exciting short and long-form fiction from talented writers, with a large degree of participation from you, the reader.  I’ll give the specifics here once the Kickstarter campaign begins, but if you’re interested, please feel free to e-mail me for details at leonard at ludic live dot com.

There will also be some merchandise for sale, because everyone has merchandise, and why shouldn’t I have merchandise?  There is no reason why not, so within a month or so, you can purchase Ludic Lessons apparel from the already overstuffed pantry of American t-shirtery.  Stay tuned for more on that later this month.  I also hope, by spring or early summer, to have a new print-on-demand book — made from actual flayed tree corpses —  for sale, comprising a collection of my best blog posts from the last decade of internet tomfoolery.  This book, entitled Moods from Marbletown, will feature the ‘greatest hits’ of my previous web-work, as well as some new material just for purchasers of the book — and if you never read it before, it’s all new to you, wot wot.  Of course, my latest released-through-an-actual-publisher book, If You Like The Sopranos, is still available for purchase, and I encourage you to pick up a reasonably priced edition at the outlet of your choosing.  I hope to have another new book out this year or early next, but more on that later.

2011 was a rough year, and there’s no guarantees that 2012 will be better.  But if the job market isn’t going to provide, I’m going to do my best to make my own opportunities by providing you with the chance to support quality fiction and non-fiction writing at low prices, and feel like you’re involving yourself in a creative enterprise that’s filtered only by you, and not by endless layers of editors, publishers, agents and middlemen.  Louis C.K. proved last year that the internet really does offer new and exciting ways of bringing your art directly to your fans and still making money.  I don’t have that level of ambition (or talent, or audience, let’s not fucking kid ourselves), and I don’t know if these projects will succeed or fail.  But I want to test the theory that it’s possible for a single creator, working with a small audience, can still make a living, even in a highly mediated economy, instead of, as another great political leader once said, having to “just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket“.  That’s up to you, up to me, and up to a whole lot of luck.  But I don’t want to spend any more time not trying.  Maybe this is the year the world ends; maybe it’s a new beginning.  But either way, now’s the time for trying things.  I hope you’ll try them with me.

Tomorrow:  back to our regularly scheduled.

1.  EVASIVE:  Do you think you’re a nasty girl?

2.  DEMOCRATIC:  All right, everybody, let’s get a show of hands.  If you think she’s a nasty girl, raise your hand and say ‘aye’.

3.  PSYCHOLOGICAL:  It’s not really important whether or not I think you’re a nasty girl.

4.  SOCIOLOGICAL:  Just because society thinks you’re a nasty girl doesn’t mean that you have to accept that you’re a nasty girl.

5.  FEMINIST:  For God’s sake, you’re not a girl.  You’re a grown woman who can make her own decisions about whether or not she’s nasty.

6.  PRINCE:  I don’t think you’re a nasty girl.  I know you’re a nasty girl.

7.  PSYCHIATRIC:  People who have been diagnosed as being nasty girls have frequently gone on to lead rich, productive lives.

8.  NIETZSCHEAN:  It is not enough merely to think one’s self a nasty girl.  One must become a nasty girl through a terrifying effort of sheer will.

9.  DIPLOMATIC:  Thinking that you’re a nasty girl in no way reflects on other nasty girls and what I might think of them.

10.  POLITE:  I wouldn’t go as far as to say “nasty”.  Slightly naughty, maybe.

11.  PARANOID:  Regardless of whether or not you are a nasty girl, that does little to explain who has been stealing my shoes, and why.

12.  REALISTIC:  Yes.

Also country, dance, and, well, everything that isn’t metal or rap.  There’s a lot of ladies on this list, and a lot of stuff from foreign countries, and two records by Texas-based singer-songwriters on MCA’s phonus-bolognus country subsidiary.  I realize that my picks this year read like those of a crazy person, and I’m not sure what to do about that.  Also, before you yell at me for the presence of all the lady-pop, maybe when you’re home at Christmas you can ask your mom why you grew up to hate fun.

THE BEST ROCK & POP ALBUMS OF 2011

1.  P.J. Harvey, Let England Shake [Island]

Polly Jean Harvey has been so good for so long that she deserves to get mentioned in the same breath as people who don’t have vaginas, but that’s genetics for you.  After some rough and tumble years in the 2000s, she’s finally delivered a flat-out masterpiece; it turns out she can make a Grand Statement without embarrassing herself, and her playing and songwriting is as good as it ever was.  I’d say she deserves some kind of medal, but she already got one.  This is just a flat-out great record, is all.

2.  Hella, Tripper [Sargent House]

Hella, too, spent some time wandering in the wilderness, tinkering with their signature sound by adding vocals, bringing in extra musicians, and spreading themselves thin with innumerable side projects (Zach Hill will surely drop dead from exhaustion any day now).  But they’ve returned to the two-piece configuration they began with, and the result is their most powerful album since their debut.  Stripping down to the bare essentials reveals the breakneck frenzy and electrifying changes that made them.

3.  Lykke Li, Wounded Rhymes [LL]

Only a slight lack of unifying focus, not present on Let England Shake, keeps this from my #1 spot.  The 25-year-old Swede’s sophomore effort couldn’t be more different from her debut, Youth Novels, but everywhere it’s different, it’s also improved.  Her ability to use a panoply of instruments to create a single, scary sound is greater than ever, and she’s better than ever as both a vocalist and a lyricist, bringing a nasty sense of humor and a brand-new immediacy to her singing.  A terrific second album.

4.  Adele,  21 [XL]

2011 is one of those years where it’s possible to complain about how shitty the music in the top 40 is and to gasp at how great the music in the top 40 is at the same time.  Adele is one of the reasons for the latter reaction; her voice and poise are downright unbelievable for someone of her age, and with the wall-to-wall excellent 21, she’s shown both an improvement in her songwriting and an improved taste in collaborators.  And “Rolling in the Deep” is a Godzilla of a single, and that’s a fact.

5.  Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, Scandalous [Lost Highway]

The Black Keys are getting plenty of hype for their interpretation of the blues-rock idiom, and they should.  But for my ten bucks, nobody’s doing it better right now than Joe Lewis and his Honeybears.  Swimming in revivalist waters without drowning in blind nostalgia, they take a natural affinity for blues and R&B and funk it up, get it dirty, and kick it all over the street before delivering it in a calamitous, clattering mess to your doorstep.  There’s nothing sweet happening here, and that’s a blessing.

6.  Florence + the Machine, Ceremonials [Island]

If you’d told me a few years ago that one of my favorite releases of the years would be from a band I first heard on the soundtrack to an NBC sitcom, I wouldn’t have believed you.  (Okay, it was on Community.  Maybe I’d have believed you.)  But Florence Welch’s voice has turned into one of pop’s most stunning instruments, and she’s greatly improved on Lungs by leaving the production duties in the hands of one man (Paul Epworth), which brings a new tightness, greater focus, and a seductive mood.

7.  Telekinesis, 12 Desperate Straight Lines [Merge]

Indie rock has turned into such a morass of preciousness and self-obsession, a place where (as my friend Phil Freeman put it) the “guitars stay quiet enough that the baby won’t wake up”, that I’ve largely lost my taste for it.  That said, you can’t escape your raisin’, and Michael Lerner (no, not the one from Barton Fink) is so good at conjuring great mid-’90s alt-rock from Rivers Cuomo to Matthew Sweet, while adding his own guitar theatrics and goofball lyrics, that he’s pretty irresistible, even to me.

8.  Crystal Stilts, In Love with Oblivion [Slumberland]

I probably never would have even heard of this Brooklyn post-punk five-piece if it hadn’t been homework for a freelance assignment, but I’m glad I did.  What makes them stand out from the rest of the revivalist crowd du jour is their essential competence — well-crafted songs enhanced by unexpected guitar stabs, psychedelic keyboard swirls and frosty basslines — and the diversity of their influences, with everything from Gun Club to Mission of Burma crowding into their fine original songs.

9.  Zola Jesus, Conatus [Sacred Bones]

Goth rock, especially at this late stage of the game, has to have total commitment and an oversupply of talent behind it merely to clear the hurdle of not being openly laughed at.  Luckily, Zola Jesus has all that and more.  You can’t doubt that she believes in the material — she’s almost scary, another requirement for making goth work — and her voice is fantastic.  Conatus answers the question of whether she can bring pop shadings to her material without losing its spooky intensity with a resounding yes.

10.  Hayes Carll, KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories) [Lost Highway]

Anyone who’s paid attention to Texas music charmer Hayes Carll over the last few years knows he’s got talent to spare; at his best, he can be a down-and-dirty country ass-kicker and a bright, poetic singer-songwriter in the space of a single song.  But this awkwardly titled but beautifully executed album proves that he can do all that and more, channelling Dylan in the humblest and funniest way possible in service of what may be the best album ever made about the Iraq War.  Carll keeps on surprising.

Tomorrow:  my overall top ten.

People are still making rap music!  Can you imagine?  Maybe it’s not a trend after all.  Foxy grandma even noticed some beats being jacked when she was watching Glee last week.  Thank goodness for the internet, where we can keep on arguing about ‘relevance’ and ‘credibility’ until the return of cows.  Meanwhile, here’s my ten favorite hip-hop albums of 2011, which I have compiled with a saddening lack of empathy for the feelings of Tyler the Creator.  Your comments, they are ever welcome.

THE BEST HIP-HOP ALBUMS OF 2011

1.  Big K.R.I.T., Return of 4eva [Def Jam]

2011 was an unusually rich year for the art of the mixtape — Action Bronson, Burn One, and Delo all delivered terrific examples — but no one came close to K.R.I.T.  His combination of old-school sensibilities and contemporary styles elevates his approach to Southern rap miles above what most of his peers are doing, and he’s unafraid to express emotionally vulnerable consciousness without forsaking a sense of fun.  Simultaneously thoughtful and bumpin’, Return to 4eva is a slow roll to Heaven.

2.  Kendrick Lamar, Section.80 [Top Dawg Entertainment]

Born and raised in Compton, weaned on 2Pac, and working under the tutelage of Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar could have ended up another gangsta-bullshit retread.  He turned out anything but, absorbing all those influences but feeding them into his own jazzy flow and raw lyrical honesty.  Section.80 is a wall-to-wall stunner, bookended with two perfect tracks:  the snarling, energetic “Fuck Your Ethnicity” opens the album and the glorious statement of purpose “HiiiPoWeR” closes it.  Essential listening.

3.  Raekwon, Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang [EMI]

In an older world, Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang would have ended up the great Wu-Tang album that never was, the rugged and raw street-beef 21st-century version of hip-hop’s greatest collective that got thrown over in favor of the RZA’s increasingly fuzzy pop experiments.  But luckily, in the Digital Age, nothing is lost forever, and lucky us:  we get to enjoy the group in genius-meltdown mode with 8 Diagrams, and we also get Rae absolutely tearing it up ’90s-style with this hatchet-in-the-face production.

4.  Kool G Rap,  Riches, Royalty, Respect [Fat Beats]

If 2011 had a secondary unifying theme after the dominance of mixtape culture, it was the triumphant — and often unexpected — return of hip-hop icons of the old school.  Kool G Rap hasn’t exactly been invisible all these years, but nobody expected the 43-year-old to come out swinging so hard over twenty years after his debut.  Solid but not intrusive production — and the canny choice to let his roughneck style do the heavy lifting instead of an over-reliance on guest stars — make this a terrific surprise.

5.  Das Racist, Relax [Greedhead]

Haters, as we are often reminded, are gonna hate.  Das Racist’s goofy braggadocio is tainted with self-reflection, and their willingness to dabble in stylistic quick-changes stinks of post-modernism instead of ‘authentic’ eclecticism, so there’s always people who are going to denigrate them as hipsters and poseurs.  But they’ve been creating unforgettable, funny, accomplished songs for three years now, and every time they try something new, they’re pretty reliably great at it.  What more do you want?

6.  Royce da 5’9″, Success is Certain [Gracie Productions]

To address the white elephant in the room, yes, “Writer’s Block” is a mess, and while you can argue Royce owes Eminem his career, the sooner he gets out from under Marshall Mathers’ thumb, the better off he’ll be.  That said, Success is Certain is dynamite whenever Royce lets himself go:  he’s learned to control his flow and tighten his focus, and the result is a swell combination of flash and substance.  Working with a handful of sympathetic producers, he’s made the best album of his career.

7.  Shabazz Palaces, Black Up [Sub Pop]

It’s hard to know what’s more baffling about Black Up:  the fact that it marks the mysterious return of the artist formerly known as Butterfly from Digable Planets, or the fact that one of the best rap albums of the year is on Sub Pop.  But one listen to the slick, sinister flow he displays, which stand out against the jagged, fractured, staggering beats, makes it clear that whatever its pedigree, Black Up belongs here.  Where Kool G Rap scores by sticking to his guns, Butterfly reinvents himself to dazzling effect.

8.  Jay-Z & Kanye West, Watch the Throne [Roc-A-Fella]

One of the most anticipated hip-hop albums of the last decade didn’t turn out to be the world-beating juggernaut it was predicted to be.  It’s a bit unfocused, occasionally incoherent, and not the dead-certain success you’d expect from two huge talents at the peak of their fame.  But who cares?  It’s still a fine album, and it demands the kind of attention it’s gotten just by virtue of the talents involved.  And while the rest of the album can’t measure up to “Niggas in Paris”, there’s no denying its monster hit status.

9.  People Under the Stairs, Highlighter [Piecelock 70]

In the internet age, bands as big as Radiohead and as small as, well, anyone other than Radiohead have learned that once you build your audience, you can keep things on lock by going directly to your fans instead of trying to please everyone with the meddling of record company marketers.  Such is the case with talented revivalists People Under the Stairs, whose latest album is a self-released love letter to the folks who have been supporting their old-school approach for over a decade.  A delight.

10.  Random Axe, Random Axe [Duck Down]

The shabby history of rock ‘n’ roll supergroups proves that getting a bunch of talented people together to create something new isn’t always a recipe for success.  Random Axe doesn’t escape that rule; it’s often shambolic, disorganized and unsure of what it wants to be.  But it’s got three tremendous talents (Sean Price, Black Milk and Guilty Simpson) running roughshod all over it, and they’re clearly having the time of their lives, so when the album clicks — as on “The Hex” and “Understand This” — it’s gold.

Tomorrow:  rock & pop.

If you get paid to write about music, you have to make top ten lists at the end of the year.  If you fail to do this Dave Marsh comes to your house and reads you Bruce Springsteen on Tour:  1968-2005 in its entirety.  So, here goes, first with my metal picks, then hip-hop, rock/pop, and finally, on Christmas Eve, my favorite albums of the year.  These reflect nothing but my personal preference, so please calm down.

THE BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2011

1.  Blut Aus Nord, 777:  Sect(s) [Debemur Morti]

Even with a band as convincingly eclectic and constantly inventive as French black metal conjurors Blut Aus Nord, “three-album conceptual project” is a pretty gassy notion.  Amazingly, though, the first two installments rank among the best work they’ve ever done; The Desanctification is trippy, phantasmal washes of mystical mayhem, and Sect(s) is as powerful and heavy an album as has ever graced their catalog.  In America, people argue about black metal, but in France, they simply master it.  Here’s proof.

2.  Wormrot, Dirge [Earache]

A couple of guys from Singapore (and their drummer, who is apparently some kind of nuclear monster from outer space judging from the way he plays) come out of nowhere and deliver the most staggering, crushing, and enjoyable grindcore in ages.  The hyper-velocity of grind isn’t there to show off technical flash, the way it is in thrash metal; it’s there for you to strap in and try to resist.  The tracks on Dirge recall the best work of other grind legends, but it’s not derivative; it’s just flat-out light-speed fun.

3.  Ulcerate, The Destroyers of All [Willowtip]

The most common knock against death metal — especially of the highly technical variety practiced by New Zealand’s Ulcerate — is that it’s an aesthetic dead end which, once mastered, can only one-up itself in terms of playing prowess.  For three albums now, culminating with this fantastically deep slab of tech-death, Ulcerate has been proving that notion wrong, expanding the language of the genre and exploring its emotional power while never once letting up on the intensity that’s the form’s lifeblood.

4.  Drugs of Faith,  Corroded [Selfmadegod]

As with Wormrot’s Dirge, most of the material on Drugs of Faith’s Corroded was actually recorded and released last year overseas, and has just now been cleaned up and bestowed on U.S. metalheads.  It was worth the wait.  Drugs of Faith practice a kind of pop grind, with the grungy gut-punch power of Agoraphobic Nosebleed (Richard Johnson’s previous band) constantly in the fore but braced by a canny structural sensibility and some furiously hooky songwriting chops.  Shockingly good at times.

5.  Skeletonwitch, Forever Abomination (Prosthetic]

I’m not sure if they’d be pleased or dismayed at the comparison, but Skeletonwitch has more or less become to the 2000s what Iron Maiden was to the 1970s — not stylistically, though the two-guitar attack and the terrific blend of chops and hooks make the  analogy a bit more robust — but in the sense that they put out one good album after another.  It’s not that there’s something special that sets Forever Abomination apart; it’s just that it’s another great record from a band that seems to sweat them out.

6.  Indian, Guiltless [Relapse]

There may be better records on this list, but there’s nothing heavier.  Sporting an impeccable pedigree (frontman Will Lindsay is a veteran of both Nachtmystium and Wolves in the Throne Room) and a dedication to the hefty side of the heavy metal equation, Indian cranks out a psychedelic doom attack so weighty that the O’s feel like manacles.  It doesn’t have the instantly memorable quality of some of the Birmingham revivalists, but it’s just so crushingly hard and heavy that you won’t be able to blink.

7.  Wolves in the Throne Room, Celestial Lineage [Southern Lord]

Speaking of the Wolves, eventually they’re just going to fade away into a haze of ethereal wooziness, leaving behind a tangy-smelling cloud of incense, until Blood of the Black Owl figures a way to summon them back to our plane.  In the meantime, though, they leave us with this marvelous piece of work — I can’t really say it’s the best thing they’ve ever done, as that’s a dizzyingly high bar to hurdle, but it’s another supremely well-crafted and profoundly involving album, just as you’d expect.

8.  Hammers of Misfortune, 17^th Street [Metal Blade]

There will always be a John Cobbett.  Metal trends and microgenres will come and go, but he will always be there, blending the best lick-heavy hardness of the past with the disjointed progressivism of the present, making sharp observations on urban alienation and doing it all with a wry sense of humor.  17th Street is marked by his usual intelligence and experimental tendencies, but it’s also catchy as hell, as if he’s been spending the last few months splicing the genes of ’70s metal into his own.

9.  Mastodon, The Hunter [Warner Bros.]

A lot of critics seem to approach Mastodon as inherently untouchable, and are disappointed when their albums don’t achieve perfection.  Me, I’m just the opposite — I always think of them as overachievers and keep figuring they’re going to settle back to a less glorified position, only to have them pull something amazing out of their skunky denim pockets at the last minutes.  This time, it’s a ton of ferocious heavy riffs of the sort they haven’t fully unleashed since Remission – and, damn it, it works.

10.  Today is the Day, Pain is a Warning [Black Market Activities]

Today is the Day has been one of my favorite bands for ages, and while I’d like to think I’m immune to the nostalgia-hound proclivities of so many other critics, I know I’m not.  So take this with a grain of salt, but take it:  Steve Austin’s first album in four years is a tremendous achievement, and very possibly the best thing he’s done since the Amphetamine Reptile years.  With a new group of players sympathetic to his intentions and the same twisted, violent sense of musical unease, it’s a real stunner.

Tomorrow:  hip-hop.

Gotham’s Crown Point Currency Exchange is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  That is why Julian Gregory Day is there.

“I don’t sleep much anymore,” he explains to the man in line behind him, an army-coated Croatian with a bandage on his ear through which fresh blood can be seen.  The next time the Croatian sleeps, he will not wake up.  An elderly Latino woman at the front of the line is buying fifteen lottery tickets, each one with a different set of numbers based on an arcane calculus derived from the ages of all of her grandchildren.

“Hey,” Julian Gregory Day says to the bleeding Croatian, who seems to be struggling to remain upright.  ”Do you know what’s worse than having parents who really love puns?”

“Moja glava boli,” the Croatian responds.  ”Želim sve bi prestati kretati.”

“It’s having academic parents who really love puns that nobody gets,” says Julian Gregory Day, answering a question he has asked himself since high school.  It is cold in Gotham tonight, so his cape, a patchwork agglomeration of numbers and names in perfect squares, is wrapped tightly around him.  He tells himself that it reinforces his brand identity.  It also covers up the mustard stains on his belt.

Julian Gregory Day is next and steps up to the bullet-proofed window.  He rustles around in the pocket of his bright red shorts, which many years ago started getting too tight for him to wear; the visual effect is unedifying.  ”I would like one stamp,” he tells the clerk.

“One book of stamps, nine dollars,” the clerk replies, sliding a small packet of adhesive stamps bearing the likeness of the American flag out of her cash drawer.

“No, just one stamp,” corrects Julian Gregory Day.

“You want just one stamp?” the clerk, a beleaguered mother of six, asks.

“And a free calendar.  It says ‘free calendar with purchase’,” remarks Julian Gregory Day, pointing at a notice on the moist and tobacco-stained walls of  the Crown Point Currency Exchange.  The clerk reluctantly tears a single stamp from an ancient and dusty roll, and Julian Gregory Day pays for it, leaving him with two dollars and seventeen cents left in his pocket and to his name.  He didn’t really need the stamp — for in all of this world, who is demanding or expecting a letter from Julian Gregory Day? — but he greedily snatches up the dull-looking 2012 calendar, with its advertisements for local businesses and patriotic banalities in three-color process print.

He pores greedily over the calendar, hoping that Congress has passed a new holiday in the last year, and that it occurs hopefully sometime in early January.  Julian Gregory Day needs to pull a new caper immediately; its success will mean wealth and comfort, and its failure will at least net him three hots and a cot at Blackgate.  On his way out, he claps the Croatian on the shoulder, and says “Keep the faith, buddy.”  The Croatian falls heavily to the cheap tile floor.

***

Julian Gregory Day sits on the front stoop of an abandoned row house in one of Crown Point’s worst areas.  He pores over the free calendar, his eyes attempting to focus despite hunger pangs, exhaustion, and the constant pressure he feels on the sides of his head.  He can’t remember much about his super-villainous career, but he is well aware that most of the other crooks don’t take him very seriously.  The last time he was in Arkham, he got yelled at by a guy whose gimmick was that he wore a bunch of different types of hats.  That’s how low Julian Gregory Day is on the Gotham criminal totem pole.  But the funny thing about this city is, even if he doesn’t take you seriously, Batman still beats you up.  Julian Gregory Day vows that someday he will save enough for a bus ticket to Metropolis, but he has made that vow before.

“Hey,” comes an unexpected voice.  It is coming from near an alley that Julian Gregory Day has been contemplating sleeping in.  The voice belongs to a heavy-set African-American kid, maybe seven years old, in a comically overlarge parka.  ”You Santa Claus?”

“No,” responds Julian Gregory Day.  ”Beat it, kid, I’m planning a heist.”

“Bullshit,” insists the kid in the parka.  ”Fat white dude in a red suit with white trim, this time of year?  You Santa.  I seen TV.  Lemme sit on your lap, man.”

Julian Gregory Day looks around nervously.  He was low in the prison hierarchy, but not that low.  If a cop sees this he is done for.  ”What…why do you wanna do that for?”, he asks the kid, with twitching, wet eyes.  He considers trying to bribe the kid to go away, but he needs that two dollars to take the bus to see his parole officer, and besides, he isn’t sure two dollars is enough to bribe anyone, even in this neighborhood.

“So I can tell you what I want for Christmas and you can bring it to me,” the kid informs him, clambering onto his lap.  Julian Gregory Day desperately wants to run, but he seems rooted to the spot, like the time Batman threw those little metal darts dipped in curare into his neck.

The kid sinks weightily onto his lap, exhaling a gout of frosty breath.  Julian Gregory Day can feel the chill of the concrete steps through his thin costume.  The kid looks blankly into his eyes.  Julian Gregory Day has never been more terrified.  He struggles to speak, but his throat is clutching and constricting and robbing him of breath, like the time Batman kicked him off of a two-story building and he’d landed on his back.  Eventually he chokes out the words:  ”What, what’s your name, little boy?”

“Ashante,” the kid answers.

“And what is…what do you want for Christmas this year, Ashante?”, Julian Gregory Day asked.

“I want a Nintendo 3DS, and a new pair of Tims, and, uh, the new Young Jeezy album,” says Ashante.  After a moment’s thought, he adds, “And I want the Wildcats to win the Super Bowl, and for me to get a hoodie that says how the Wildcats won the Super Bowl.”

“And have you been a good little boy this year?”, inquires Julian Gregory Day, who seems to recall this as part of the process.

“Huh?  The fuck that got to do with it?”, asks Ashante, clambering down from his lap and waddling off into the crystal-cold darkness.

***

Julian Gregory Day walks the streets of Gotham for hours.  Late night turns into early morning as he walks.  Maybe it was fate; maybe it was God.  Maybe it was just low blood sugar, since the last thing he’d eaten was a discarded Sugar Daddy he’d found in an ashtray at the plasma donation center on Tuesday.  But he feels alert, taut, energized.  He feels more alive than at any time since he’d run away from Batman before he could run him over with the Batmobile.  Ashante represented a second chance, a great hope.  If he can just bring joy to the life of one impoverished inner-city kid, instead of plotting one more ridiculous, doomed heist based on the days of the week, maybe he can turn his life around.  Maybe he can stop being a laughing-stock and become a real human being again.  Maybe he can put an end to that desperate, neurotic fantasy called “Calendar Man”, and go back to what he was all those years ago, what he always calls himself in his mind:  a man named Julian Gregory Day.

He spends the two dollars in his pocket on bus fare, and two transfers later, he finds himself before the grand glass doors of the biggest toy store in Gotham.  Inside is a warm, inviting wonderland of toys and games, the stuff of golden childhood memories:  he knows he could find a way to convince them to help him give Ashante a merry Christmas.  He fumbles around in his tight pockets, not quite sure how to proceed, when he hears the booming and confident voice from above.

“Hello!  Whoop!  Hello, here!” shouts the voice, coming from what might be Heaven itself through a crackly electrical ether.  ”What’s today?”

“Eh?” returns Julian Gregory Day, with all his might and wonder.

“What’s today, you crazy freak?” asks the voice from the divine.

“Today?” replies Julian Gregory Day, thumbing flakes of dried mustard off of his belt to reveal the names and numbers beneath.  They unveil themselves as if lit by the fires of prophecy.  ”Why, it’s Christmas day!”

“And we’re closed,” comes the response.  ”Don’t move, genius, I just called the cops.”

Julian Gregory Day does as the voice commands, and does not move, like the time that Batman hit him so hard in the face that his head couldn’t turn for three days.  He does not even hear the police cars as they arrive; he is too busy remembering how they serve the turkey at the Gotham city jail.

George Orwell was right about a great number of things, and he was right about them in an extremely eloquent and insightful way.  Never was he righter, and never more insightful, than in Chapter III of Down and Out in Paris and London, where he describes the stroke of bad luck that reduced him from working for a subsistence wage to actual poverty.  Though times and circumstances have changed, the essential existential qualities of poverty have not, and Orwell pins down everything about the experience — the fear, the boredom, the secrecy and falsehood, the despair and desperation, and, yes, even the liberation of being poor — with a timeless precision.

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty.  You have thought so much about poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different.  You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated.  You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring.  It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness.

I do not think I have ever been rich, but I have been poor, and I am about to be poor again.  Of course, this statement is extremely contentious.  At my last job, my salary was low enough to place me in the lower echelons of the tax brackets, but high enough to allow me to do more or less anything I wanted; I saved for my retirement (until the vagaries of the stock market wiped those savings away in a flash), I traveled to Europe, and I maintained good credit and made major purchases when I needed to do so.  Certainly by the standards of most of the world, I was then a very rich man; and being poor in America, as conservatives are forever pointing out, means something very different from being poor in Africa.  But, of course, one measures one’s circumstance not against a worst-case abstraction, but against what one sees around him every day, and being without a home, an income, or prospects for the future is a burden in any world, regardless of number.

When you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others.   You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty:  the fact that it annihilates the future.  Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.  When you have a hundred francs in the worth, you are liable to the most craven panics; when you have only three francs you are quite indifferent, for three francs will feed you until tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that.  You are bored, but you are not afraid.

Defining “rich” is a notoriously thorny proposition; a million dollars, we who will never see such an amount are often told, isn’t what it used to be, and if the state is defined by those who admit to living in it, you’d think there was not a rich man on Earth.  “Poor” is a bit easier, despite the efforts of the party of wealth to muddle the term by denying it to anyone who sleeps in a building with electricity, or who ever enjoys life for five seconds.  But many people mistake being broke for being poor.  Having been both, I can tell you that the distinction is a simple one:   when you have no money until the arrival of your next paycheck, your next benefit payment, or the fulfillment of your most recent invoice or contract, you are broke.  You have no money, but money is there, and it is meant for you.  Being poor, on the other hand, means that there is no more money coming.  Like Pemberton at the seige of Vicksburg, you have come to understand that there is no help on the way from anywhere.

There is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty.  I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it.  It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out.  You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and, well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.  It takes off a lot of anxiety.

The liberation that Orwell describes at being down and out — at sliding from mere working-class destitution to what Paul Fussell, in his magnificent book Class, describes as the ‘bottom out-of-sight’ class — is real.  Its clearing of (indeed, annihilation of) the calendar brings with it an freedom that is both curious and unprecedented.  One finally has the time and lack of commitment to do whatever one likes, a giddy sense of complete liberty that is usually associated with the very rich.  (It is for this reason that one finds the truly destitute in the most glorious of locations, from the parks of Manhattan to the beaches of California, because it is as easy to be impoverished in a beautiful place as it is in a horrible one — at least, until the police gently shunt you from view.)  Of course, that liberty finds itself restricted at every turn:  free to pursue any artistic inclination, one lacks the energy to do so thanks to stress, hunger, ill health, and jangled sleep patterns, and the avenues to profit from them if they are completed.  Free to travel anywhere and see anything, one lacks the money to move in any direction and becomes a prisoner to whatever shelter is available.  Made of time, one’s social pleasures are nonetheless scuttled by lack of funds, an indecent appearance, and the shame that goes along with these factors.  And, of course, even the small triumphs of an utter lack of responsibility are only available to the single and childless; for those who have care of a spouse or, especially, a child, all joy is replaced with terror and self-hatred, as an innocent must suffer for your inability to provide. It is for these people, though, that most social aid is made available; for the solitary man or childless woman, especially, the liberation of poverty is accompanied by a complete lack of help.

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty, the times when you have nothing to do, and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing.  For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune squelette in Baudelaire’s poem.  Only food could rouse you.  You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

Also contrary to the claims of conservative scolds, who portray the poor as smiling leeches who gain all the benefits of social welfare while risking nothing, being poor is terribly, crushingly expensive.  (It is telling that food insecurity — the increasingly common problem of not knowing how or when you will pay for your next meal — is a problem that virtually none of our political leadership has ever had to face.  If I were the radical sort, I might suggest that if you have never been in the position of needing to pay for something and finding yourself unable to do so, you are not qualified to dictate the way the country is governed.)  While the straight life takes the edge off of life’s varied misfortunes at the cost of self-determination, the low life grants a tricky liberty at the cost of every bad roll bearing devastating consequences.  One forsakes the punitive cost of health care for the equally destructive cost of no care at all; banks and their crippling fees are abandoned for currency exchanges that exact a similar degree of usury; every expenditure of money seems like a matter of life or death.  Something as simple as an unpaid bill or a flat tire can have repercussions too enormous to be borne.  A decent job, the only thing that can halt the downward spiral, becomes harder to get the longer as one hasn’t got one, and the minimal requirements for getting it — a set of clean clothes, reliable transportation, a telephone or internet connection — aren’t always available. Everyday aspects of living become reasons why not.

You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day.  Mean disasters happen and rob you of food.  You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a liter of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp.  While it boils, a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop!  Straight into the milk.  There is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.  You go to the baker’s to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the girl cuts a pound for another customer.  She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound.  ‘Pardon, monsieur,’ she says, ‘I suppose you don’t mind paying two sous extra?’  Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc.  When you think that you too might be asked to pay two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic.  It is hours before you dare venture into a baker’s shop again.  You go to the greengrocer’s to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes.  But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the shop man refuses it.  You slink out of the shop, and can never go there again.  You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous friend coming.  To avoid him, you dodge into the nearest café.  Once in the café, you must buy something, so you spend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it.  One could multiply these disasters by the hundred.  They are part of the process of being hard up.

Friendship is always strained by a fall to the bottom tier, in ways both real and imaginary.  It is true that one really learns the strength of any relationship, be it with family or friends, when one hits bottom, but often this perception is colored by any number of factors.  With empty days and an impending sense of isolation, you need your friends more than ever; but you fear becoming a burden.  Your circumstances are an elephant in the room which everyone thinks about all the time, but no one speaks about.  Worried that you bore or depress your friends, frustrated that everything they want to do costs money, and consumed with self-loathing, you begin to avoid them at a time when you need them most.  Your sense of worth — not only financial, but on a simple human level — plummets, and hatred of self always radiates outward to hatred of others.  At your best, you are moved by the grace and kindness shown to you by relatives and friends; at your worst, you realize the depths of your dependence upon them and that realization curdles into resentment.

You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty.  At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day.  But of course you dare not admit it — you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual.  From the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it.  You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life.  The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down on your smoking.  There are letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive.  Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food.  Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor blades.  Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalent of a day’s food.  All day you are telling lies, and expensive lies.

It is not impossible to get back amongst the living; sometimes, it is not even hard.  America has fallen into a depressingly cruel period of withholding aid from its unfortunate stumblers at a time that there are more of them than ever, but it is still a country of unprecedented wealth (though increasingly concentrated in only a small and grasping number of hands) and unparalleled opportunity.  It is quite possible to be down and out in a way that seems unconquerable, and to be back in the game within a month’s time.  It is even possible to go through this cycle of boom and bust over and over again — indeed, aside from the generationally wealthy, this is more or less the way we live now.  But the worst thing about poverty is that its edges are so sharp, they leave scars that never heal.  The desperation and paralysis that accompanies being at your wit’s end is so terrible that even when one is comfortable, one lives in fear of ever being in that position again.  And, as Hannah Arendt eloquently put it, the more society degrades its small men with poverty and humiliation, the more it trains them to accept any job rather than return to the bottom — even the job of an executioner.

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyère cheeses like grindstones. A sniveling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.

I have been here before, and I know how to live in this world.  Hopefully I won’t be here long, and hopefully, if I rise, I won’t fall again.  But every day I am here, I am striving to get out.  The voices that hiss and seethe from the comfort of newspapers, computer desks, and television studios that tell me I arrived here by my own faults, and that I stay here because it affords me a largesse of taxpayer fat:  these are the voices of class warfare.  Anyone who has been here is not eager to return, and not happy to stay:  those who tell you differently pour poison in your ears, and when you’re relying on your own sharpness to survive, you need to be able to hear clearly.