LOFT-LIVING 1960'S STYLE

9. LOFT-LIVING 1960'S STYLE:

I sat around far too long reading 'The Day of the Locust' one too many times and that old 1939 hoary story had by now grown a beard for me like 'It Can't Happen Here' and 'Only Yesterday' did too - but actually my favorite of that early era's works are all that Dos Passos stuff which I really like and Sister Carrie too which I can't really get enough of An American Tragedy and what follows - it's like all that other-era stuff still holds a lot of weight for me because you can see in it a'borning much of what was to come later - endless screeds of personal guilts and betrayals and realizations and those unique early-twentieth-century forms of self-development we've come to see as passe already - irony and self-awareness and everything since the war(s) having displaced the more staid points-of-view from those days : everything's a mess now of winks and sex and irony and humor all meshed into some puree'd bullshit of fake gravitas and abnormal abstraction so that in the end the quality of fiction is somehow supposed to match the abstraction of everyday life - or perhaps at least that's the premise - but it never works because everyday life is made up of subconscious motivations and dreams and memories and some little twit-faced grad-school novelist coming straight out of Accepted Writing 101 is never going to know any of that and put together with all the rest it's but a glum picture of what we all must live today : hyacinths around the throat spikes in the heart torn remnants of high-minded ideas : but there's no place for putting these ideas into action - no percentage as it is - and that's pretty much the only thing people seek today - all that high-minded corporate parochialism scratching out profit and eking out growth and lucre from the simplest supposed motivations USA Trilogy notwithstanding Dos Passos had it right when he portrayed the old and lethal metal culture being put together and all his vignettes and profiles and newsreel stuff seems just right to me all these years later - but why should I look back at anything and even more than that why should I care ? forever and a day isn't long enough to erase the crap that's unfolded and all these myriads of people stumbling around completely enamored of nothing and insane over it within and amongst themselves - negativity rules the world and all things are running backwards and it doesn't include me thank you please : outside the third-floor window the icicles are mounting at the broken drain and whenever that happens we all know the water backs up and starts coming in through the corner of the ceiling along the edge of the big window-gratings there - industrial lofts from 75 years ago or more have a tendency to leak and malfunction in numerous ways - which is part of their charm and the reason that people used to flock to them outside of the expansiveness of the space when no longer used for industry - all those mushroom pedestals holding up ceilings and half-floors with the little glassed-in boxes from which management used to peer down at production or something like that - rows and rows of sewing machines or lathes or workbenches and chain-driven assembly lines running steadily through the plant with rows of people aligned methodically while doing their tasks and the little flame-pots at each station providing some early-days powering for torch or tool or heater or whatever - the noise was grueling and the temperature levels extreme but it all went on like a huge era which eventually - spent out - just sputtered and died just like all those people now dead and gone as well and all that's left are these great loft-spaces and the 1960's artists and performers and all the rest are trying to take them over in their vacancies - I like that and I can see the point of it all too but somehow landlords and property-holders balk and municipal codes forbid residency and you can't stay there you can't work there blah blah it's all a bunch of crap and we did it anyway allover and wherever we chose and that was half the artistry and half the fun back then BUT as with everything else now it's a totally different world and everything's been taken.