But first, let me wonk out for a minute. The arts market is experiencing a sort of crisis around the divide between concert art and concept art. Concert art sells, and concept art largely doesn’t. Concert art drives sales, but concept art drives the evolution of the discipline.

This performance bridges that gap. While Calle 13’s singer Residente is a premier poet (definitely click here to read the song’s Dylan-status lyrics) and Dudamel is a premier conductor, they are also pop stars, and for good reason – their music is just really, really good.

Is this the future of music? Ojalá que sí – we hope so!

The post The Latin Grammys Go Experimental with Puerto Rican Rap and a Full Orchestra appeared first on HyperVocal.

It came seemingly out of nowhere, and in less than one month, brought about the following results: 1) It created an unexpected coalition between liberal whites and activists of color; 2) It changed Americans’ understanding of history and class; 3) It illuminated the failures of the Professional Left; and 4) It showed the shortcomings of traditional political strategy.

For those that still doubt Occupy Wall Street, take a deeper look at what they’ve done — they’ve accomplished a lot, and in some pretty unexpected ways.

Created an unexpected coalition between white activists and activists of color

Occupy Wall Street has accomplished what civic NGOs have been trying to do for the last 40 years: create a coalition of the willing amongst different interest groups. Occupy Wall Street did that by going from issue-based organizing to systems-based organizing, and it did so by using class as the messaging frame. As a result, Occupy Wall Street has shown that most Americans are (and have always been, for that matter) part of the 99%. Shortly after the “We Are the 99%” tagline came out, Chicano, Native American, and other activists creatively tied in the ‘occupy’ theme with their historical struggles for recognition and inclusion. They have produced posters like these:

And although there was concern at first that the ranks of Occupy Wall Street were mostly white, it was the first time in a while that we had seen middle class white kids identifying with the struggles of people of color, because they had started experiencing them. It is refreshing to see structural unemployment, structural inequality and housing discrimination become mainstream concerns, and to see class serve as the bridge between issues that had split white activists and activists of color for decades, such as carbon emissions vs. childcare, and organic food vs. food security. As The Nation magazine noted, hippies stood next to hard hats. With the demographics of its base, Occupy Wall Street has had the accidental affect of changing the national perception that social “issues” only affect people of color, and shown that what affects some of us, affects all of us.

Changed American’s understanding of history and class

In asking for an America that is fair, equal, and within which everyone has an opportunity, Occupy Wall Street is bringing more of the American public to the interpretation that America’s “best” years were the years in which that was a reality: the brief 30-year period from 1945-1975.

Those years witnessed the government-sponsored creation of the middle class through the GI Bill. Those thirty years — and not the other 370 in which America didn’t have a middle class – made America the envy of the world. The post-World War II Pax Americana is really what qualified us as the ‘new’ world, a world in which anybody could succeed, in which the everyday guy seemed to have a piece of the pie. America wasn’t a beacon of hope because it copied the classist structure of old Europe; it was a beacon of hope because it offered an alternative to that. Today, America has gone back to its old tendencies, and Occupy Wall Street helps us admit that those tendencies are bad ones.

Illuminated the failures of the Professional Left:

Occupy Wall Street’s success — IN SPITE of its messaging ambiguity — forces us be crystal clear about what the failings of the mainstream activist movement are. For all of our heated e-mails, and marches, and lobbying, and rallying the base, we weren’t able to create the substantive, sustained dialogue about inequality and power in this country that the Occupy movement has. The fact that even the liberal public has a hard time understanding the political vocabulary of the occupiers speaks to the degree to which the left has failed to frame the political debate, and the fact that the liberal left is largely absent at Occupy Wall Street speaks to its archaic structure and its measure of disconnect. That disconnect is not so much ideological as it is economic: much of the top leadership of the Professional Left is part of the 1%.

Showed the shortcomings of traditional political strategy

Occupy Wall Street has more of a social media strategy than a legislative strategy. Its language is cultural (its logo is a tiny dancer suspended on a large bronze bull), and it’s also kind of cloudy. But that’s okay: Progressives had a ton of political strategy surrounding the 2010 mid-term elections, and we all know how those went.

Besides, what we call “lifestyle” movements here in America (liberal lifestyles, gay lifestyles, organic and vegan lifestyles) have their roots in cloudy, cultural things like poet Allen Ginsberg dressing up in his underwear, blowing on a seashell, and announcing himself a “Yippie.” That transformed into the hippie movement, which founded the notion of a counter-culture, and years later, a man named Steve Jobs made a personal technology revolution around the theme of ‘Think Different.’

So there you have it. What can come of Occupy Wall Street? Who knows. Let’s abandon expectations. The old tricks don’t work anymore, so let’s try something new.

This has been an unexpected occupation, and so far, it’s been delightful. Let’s let people get confused, and try to figure out why class matters. Let’s let people get mad about 99% of this country being structurally excluded. Let Occupy Wall Street kids “convert the middle” and have the hard conversations.

We might not get the results we expect, but we might get the ones we need.

Emily Goulding is a Washington, DC based writer and activist. Tweet her @emilygoulding1.

(Poster by Ernesto Yerena)

PREVIOUSLY IN OUR COVERAGE:

• Marine to NYPD: “Why Y’all Gearing Up Like This is War?”
• Close Your Citibank Account, Go Directly to Jail
• NYPD and OWS Protesters Clash After Cleanup Postponed
• Here’s Why “Occupy” Protesters Picked Specific Fight with Wall St. Bankers
• Gee, Wonder Why Fox News Declined to Air This Interview with Occupy Wall St. Protester
• 11 Occupy Wall St. Spin-offs You May Have Missed
• Wicked Cold: Riot Police Clash with Occupy Boston Camp
• Puppet Interview Crews and More Kanye West News From Occupy Wall Street
• Nightstickin’: NYPD Officer to Start “Occupy Hospitals”
• What Would George Carlin Think of Occupy Wall Street?
• CAPTION IT: Kanye West Occupies Wall Street…for Minutes
• Police Tackle Peaceful Cafe Worker at “Occupy Wall Street”
• NYPD Officer in Hot Bologna After Second Pepper Spray Video Surfaces
• Jon Stewart Finally Breaks Down Occupy Wall Street
• Geraldo Meets Occupy Wall Street Protesters Amid Chants of “Fox News Lies!”
• Inconceivable! Princess Bride Bossman Checks in with Occupy Wall Street Protests
• Radiohead Hoaxster Comes Clean, Wanted to Raise Awareness for Occupy Wall Street

The post Unexpected Occupations, Unexpected Successes appeared first on HyperVocal.

I went to Cuba for the 2009 Juanes Concert for Peace and found the arts scene there to look almost exactly like the community arts scene here. The Fringe, like Cuba, is not air-conditioned, and is a bit dusty. Chipping paint is an issue, as is the vague risk of electrocution from exposed wires.

The scene is homemade, and high-minded. It’s presented with a proudly regional twist under red, white, and blue flags with stars, and people aren’t there to make money — the artists at Fringe aren’t in it for the money, and in Cuba, you can’t actually make money, so that’s that.

At the Fringe, as in much of Havana, art can be made anywhere – any slab of concrete can serve as a stage. Both Cuban and Fringe artists are more likely to form collectives or ensembles instead of businesses, and they even dress the same – I’d never seen as many pairs of Chuck Taylors as I did at the Bohemian Park, Parque de los Bohemios in Downtown Havana.

By political accident, the type of work created in the capital of the Free World and the capital of the Commie World is also similar. Great Recession-era Americans are no entirely longer sold on capitalism, and Cuban artists are no longer entirely sold on communism.

Both are creating some new in-between where old ideas are transformed. This year, I went to go see Seth Lepore’s hilarious Losing My Religion: Confessions of a New Age Refugee, whose narrative slogan would be, in Cuban terms, “Que se vayan todos” – kick ‘em all out. He pokes fun at both Catholic priests and the often cheeky leaders of the Self Growth industry. Last year, I went to go see my friend Shameka Cunningham’s show I Lost My Laugh in the Revolution, about an activist girl who tries to find herself through Leftist ideology but ends up finding herself outside of it.

Cubans haven’t lost their laugh in their revolution, but they might laugh a little less than most people. When four people come to your show at the Fringe Festival, you perform anyway because you want to. In Cuba, however, four people might come to your show but the government is paying you to perform, so you have to.

In many ways, Cubans have what American Fringe Festival artists wish they had: a National Endowment for the Arts, on steroids. The Cuban government pours a lot of resources into the persuasive professions – media, communications, art. They have a whole government agency dedicated to Hip Hop, and a whole media and arts academy for young adults (what the party calls their juventud rebelde, their rebellious youth). The academy is called the Asociacion de Hermanos Saíz, and inside, youth make digital art and eat in cafeterias that serve mostly plant-based meals in biodegradable containers. Meat is rarely served not because people don’t want it but because there’s a scarcity of meat in Cuba.

To be a full-time (government-sponsored) artist in Cuba is to be in the golden handcuffs of Hegel and a low-calorie diet. In Cuba, you can live off of your art, but that life is limited…to pretty much living in your parents’ basement. Doing things U.S. artists do, like renting single apartments, is financially out of reach for Cuban artists, who often live three generations in one household.

I remember once asking where the (33-year old) Literature Director was, and receiving the matter of fact response of, “I don’t know, call his mom.”

Once we found him, I overheard a conversation between him, the Visual Arts director, and a resident conceptual artist. The conceptual artist wanted to do an art project out in the cornfields. “A dialectic about production, consumption, ritual, that type of thing,” he described. His purpose of growing the corn wasn’t to eat it, but to make an ironic statement about food scarcity in Raul Castro’s Cuba. Either the land was there, but unused, or as was more often the case, the food was there but inedible because people couldn’t afford it.

The Visual Arts Director smiled at the idea. “Invite Raul to your opening,” he smirked.

Despite the uncomfortable chairs and exposed wires, this cohort – what I’ll call the Cuban Fringe – is doing a lot for art and politics. Critical art about the government, just like critical art about the wellness industry and yoga consumerism, is important. It might be developed on the fringe, but soon it’ll be front and center at normal venues that have temperature control.

So, viva el arte – but with air conditioning.

Emily Goulding is an arts activist and cultural critic living in Washington, DC. Read her HV archive here.

(photos via Amanda Miralrio)

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Although Cotillard’s character actually lives in the 1920s, she, like Wilson’s character, finds herself there through an act of magical midnight time travel. She is giddy with excitement to be in her favorite era of all Parisian history: Paris’ “beautiful era” of Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gaugin, and the Moulin Rouge.

Wilson’s favorite era of Parisian history happens to be Cotillard’s -– the 1920’s. As an aspiring novelist, Wilson worships Cotillard’s friends, which include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and other brilliant members of the modernist movement.

When Wilson tries to explain to Cotillard that she’s using her nostalgia as a way of avoiding her boredom with her life and surroundings, she at first confused, then crestfallen.

The realization that you think everything was better in the past instead of the present is a hard thing to come to terms with.

That message hit home for Allen film fanatics and nostalgia-philes like me, who might at first find Midnight in Paris reminiscent of but not as good as the belle epoque of Woody Allen’s own filmmaking. Midnight in Paris has all the trappings of a great Allen film — artistic soul-searching, nutty humor, and an end embrace of the perfect imperfections of life itself –- but the trappings come in blond hair dye and fluffy dialogue. However, when the clock strikes midnight, the medium becomes the message: like Woody Allen’s reflections on life itself, Midnight in Paris is flawed but is well worth the while.

Wacky casting is the main thing off about Midnight in Paris. Allen tries to graft his intellectual New Yorker archetype onto an LA couple, and it doesn’t work. You really can’t make New Yorkers out of Angelenos, even at midnight in Paris.

Despite demographic inconsistencies like the fact that a monied, literary, and Westside film girl wouldn’t have Tea Party parents, there is the irreducible fact that Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams are blond, outdoorsy, and unfettered people. It’s hard to picture them questioning whether to get regular or decaf coffee, let alone the meaning of their lives. Allen throws in all of his accoutrements of clucking mothers (refraining “Cheap is cheap!”) and literary shop-talk, but you just don’t believe them in neurotic Allen roles. You also don’t believe them as a couple, which makes the film feel flimsy.

The midnight time travel sequences are also a bit too literal and causal for a director as sophisticated as Allen. (Protagonist is stuck in the past…let’s take him there! In a car! Routinely!) They’re fun and well-written, though. In the travels, we meet colorful characters like Salvador Dalí (mustached, and obsessed with rhinoceroses) and Ernest Hemingway (unable to talk about anything but arduous love-making and brave deaths).

These artists from the past help Wilson see that modern life isn’t so bad. At the end of the film, Gertrude Stein tells Wilson to stop griping about his present-day reality, and get some hope. The artist’s job, she tells him, is to help people dream and imagine new things. Wilson realizes that it’s fun to visit the past as an exercise, but not as a habit, and comes to the conclusion that the belle epoque of his own life is now.

In that scene, Allen calls both Wilson’s and his hipster-retro audience’s bluffs.

These thematic full circles remind us that Allen is still the best storyteller of our epoque. Midnight in Paris does what movies are supposed to do – tell a beautiful, entertaining story – and it does it well. Midnight in Paris is the best movie out in theaters right now, and I, must admit, highly recommend it.

Emily Goulding is an arts activist and cultural critic living in Washington, DC. Read her HV archive here.

The post Midnight in the Parisian Belle Epoque appeared first on HyperVocal.

When you swing open the doors of a boho closet, you’ll see clothing that falls into one of usually three categories: thrift store, American Apparel, and Forever 21. Together, these three elements – vintage, hip, and slutty – make up the sacred trinity of the boho look.

Although we might think we look great, the salience of these fashion choices is – you guessed it! – ironic.

When you shop at a thrift store, you might stun people with your Banana Republic knit dress that cost $6, but you’ll shock them when you wave Hello and reveal a large hole over the armpit.

When you wear an American Apparel–style, oversized vintage sweater like this one…

…you might think it screams ‘new,’ but most people think you just raided your Dad’s closet.

When you wear a Forever 21-type tee like this one…

…you might think you’re solid, but everyone else thinks you’re see-thru.

Other than always being slightly inappropriate, boho clothing also raises some hard questions about class, and consent, because cheap has a hidden cost.

Two of the three pillars of the boho closet – Forever 21 and American Apparel – have been sued dozens of times by their employees. Both companies screw their workers; they just do so in very different ways.

Forever 21 routinely withholds wages and pulls other pre-labor movement tricks on its largely undocumented workforce which toils in classic sweatshop conditions. The irony here is that Forever 21 is immigrant-owned (the Chang family, to be exact), yet it perpetuates a cycle of misery for immigrants. While first-generation immigrants work on the production side, second-generation immigrants work on the retail side, and they sell Forever 21 clothes to their friends who, since their parents also work in sweatshops, can’t afford to shop elsewhere. Throw in a few unpaid ACLU interns who, due to the fact that they are interning for free, have been – to their horror – relegated to buying clothing made in sweatshops, and you’ve got a typical Saturday afternoon of all-around sadness at Forever 21.

American Apparel doesn’t screw its workers over when it comes to paychecks; just when it comes to actually screwing. American Apparel President and CEO Dov Charney’s sexual teeter totter with what seems like his entire payroll makes a mockery of the large “Legalize LA” banner hanging from its Downtown LA highrise. As a woman, it’s offensive to think that the women who work and model there are purportedly chosen based on looks, size, and sexual personae. Instead of living wages and healthcare, it seems all Charney really wants to legalize is the right to hit on his employees and make money off of clichéd 1970s sex fetishes about young bohemian women.

At least at Forever 21, when you buy a $12 sweater, you know you’re buying into a bad company. But when you shop at American Apparel, you think you’re doing the right thing, but all you’re doing is making a snarky Canadian pervert $36 richer.

Given the dirty politics of these two options, thrift stores seem ever more appealing. They’re sustainable and chic.

Re-used!

Re-purposed!

But when you get a beautiful new skirt like this…

…you might find that there’s a coffee stain on the upper right side, one that others like you have been trying (unsuccessfully) to remove since 1982.

So what’s a feminist young boho to do? Until that big raise clocks in and you can afford to buy new clothes that aren’t really old, just made to look old, you can:

–Toss out your clothes that have holes in them
–Window shop at Anthropologie, or
–Embrace the chaos, and scream, bitch, this is fashion!

The post Clothing in the Boho Nation (Part 2 of 3) appeared first on HyperVocal.

Despite the lowest public trust in the government since Watergate, young people everywhere have blossomed into ’70s-style flowery tanks and slim-legged pants.

Unless millennials have been closet hippies their whole lives, I have some questions. What are the political implications –- and limitations –- of boho chic clothing?

This is the first article in a three-part series about the politics of fashion. In it, we’ll analyze lifestyle politics, what people want to look like, and why.

Let’s start by asking whether or not millennials dress in (Jimmy) Carter Chic.

The New Republic published an article stating that, “[Obama’s] comparison to Carter died in Pakistan along with bin Laden.” That’s a powerful answer to the question that Foreign Policy first raised in its January 2010 issue, which compared Obama to Carter with a disclaimer of, “Well, maybe.”

But the Boho Nation dresses like Obama equals Carter, because it sure feels like Obama is Carter. If fashion is the subconscious of a culture, then this is what we’re feeling:

The spring selections at major retailers are markedly boho. For the first time, Giselle Bundschen is an H & M model, and lo and behold, a hippie:

We don outfits a la Diane Keaton in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall:

And a la Jade Jagger.

This nostalgia might have real roots. Obama and Carter share striking similarities: both are center-left presidents who inherited weak economies and had to deal with crises surrounding oil, energy, and the Middle East. Both are men from humble origins whose bookishness is mistaken for snobbery.

The two presidents also suffer from burdens of expectation. Being who they are and leading in the times they led, people expected Carter and Obama to carry forward the cultural transformations kickstarted in the ’60s (such as advocating for marginalized communities and advancing the politics of fairness). Instead, Jimmy Carter tried to do right but failed to break before an abyss of disaster capitalism that created the Material Girl of the early ’80s. And today, we have a culture in which a president of color is pressured to produce a long-form birth certificate by a gaudy TV host with a combover.

Maybe boho chic is Generation O’s way of showing emotional solidarity with its president…some sort of theatrical attempt to take us back to the starting point and try all over again.

The one exception in the flower brigade is the occasional preference of leather over lace, which is more early eighties than it is late seventies. Today’s material girl is Lady Gaga (and to a certain extent, Rihanna), whose looks hearken back to Madonna’s black-leather vogue. This look sets free an S&M angst that lies mostly under the surface of the American imagination, but sells platinum albums when it pierces through (in very high stilettos).

So are times better than they were in the 1970s? Yes. Is progress as fast as we’d want it? No.

And there you have it: Do bohos dress in Carter chic? Well, maybe.

Emily Goulding is an arts activist and cultural critic living in Washington, DC. Read her HV archive here.

The post Carter Chic: Clothing in the Boho Nation (Part 1 of 3) appeared first on HyperVocal.

In Brazil, people drink avocado milkshakes; unlike Americans, they have small waists and large government surpluses. Brazil’s leading political party, the Worker’s Party (hear that, Wisconsin?), has made Brazil the seventh largest economy in the world through smart investments and tough decisions. 

And their incredible development wasn’t done using the IMF’s “best practices” model (which actually contains some bad practices), but rather was done using homegrown, innovative policy solutions that finally established the ordem e progreso advertised so squarely on the Brazilian flag.

While in Latin America, the Obamas also went to Chile and El Salvador, but skipped the United States’ closest neighbor and arguably most important trade partner: Mexico.

Mexico, unlike Brazil, isn’t toying with new policy paradigms. Or at least isn’t doing so successfully. Drugs and poverty have rendered the National Action Party all but incapable of governing, and in 2012, it’s predicted that Mexico’s citizens will vote to go back to their old ways and vote the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) back into power for the first time since 2000.

In Mexico, as in the US, the old is in. It’s hard to change, as comfort food – call it pancakes or panqueques – never goes out of style. Similar to how the stomach can get addicted to bad bacteria, can countries get addicted to bad politics?

At the risk of sounding obnoxious, I wonder, do we really want what’s bad for us?

The psychology of hunger, and the psychology of scarcity, thinks there’s never enough to go around. The body tells us, “Now is not the time to try new things,” even though a recession is really the perfect time to try new things.

The allure of the familiar is strong, and the last two years of Democratic rule might have been, for many Republicans, the emotional equivalent of a meat-free diet. Maybe the GOP take-over of the House last fall was their way of saying that they, politically speaking, don’t like seitan hamburgers.

Or gluten-free cupcakes.

And despite the mental recognition that the government needs to “tighten its belt” and cut back on spending programs, people, at the end of the day, don’t emotionally want that to happen.

Mexico is also trying unsuccessfully to live without its political comfort food, the PRI. The Partido Revolucionario Institutional, or the Institutional Revolution Party, is back on the ascent, and in a major way. Like the Grand Old Party, the PRI is neither grand nor revolutionary. It is a looming behemoth of grandfather deals and bought votes, but it is also a complex socio-economic system that held Mexico together for seventy years.

The PRIistas say that Mexican society needs the PRI to work; their opposition says that the PRI’s dysfunctionality prevents Mexico from working in healthier and more efficient ways. Both arguments aside, Mexico’s life has visibly worsened without the PRI: in the eleven years without its leadership (and in the seventeen years of NAFTA, which I will get to in another article), Mexico is now more violent than Iraq, and its civil society is on life support.

Unlike the U.S. and Mexico, Brazil is not addicted to what’s bad for them; they’ve acclimated to what’s good for them. As a country, they have taken up a habit of being very deliberate about what they do, and it has worked. They eat acai in the morning, and despite the abundance of buffets in that country, eat small portions.

Here in this part of the hemisphere, though, we pick up a churro on the corner, and dine at Denny’s. We’re big on diabetes, and debt. I don’t know why, but for better or for worse, Americans and Mexicans like pancakes, the PRI, and the GOP.

Emily Goulding is an arts activist and cultural critic living in Washington, DC. Read her HV archive here.

The post Addicted to What’s Bad for Us: Pancakes, the PRI, and the GOP appeared first on HyperVocal.

For all of your anti-Latino rhetoric, something about you is vaguely Latino to me. Maybe it’s how you throw down. Or your thin eyebrows. Or the taint of lipliner?

I mean, I know you lean right wing, but I always thought you leaned…kind of like a chola.

But with the broad daylight shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and nineteen other Arizonans, I’m going to ask you seriously: ¿ahora quien? Now, who?

Whose state looks just like Mexico? Who has state officials shot at the hands of everyday citizens, and struggles with their economy and the rule of law?

And were Mexicans responsible for this– was the shooter a vaquero?

Nope. Was just a local buckaroo!

To be exact, one crazy white dude.

Well, I’ll be hot damned. You insulted a lot of people, and you got it all wrong.

You better smile now and cry later, Jan. Cuz I’ll tell you one thing that’s not cute – the tears of a clown.

Emily Goulding works in social justice communications in Washington, D.C.

The post ¿Ahora Quien? An Open Letter to AZ Governor Jan Brewer appeared first on HyperVocal.

With a dark sky and nothing but a donkey for a guide, what can we hope for? What can we aspire to?

The answer is up to us.

Yes, the economy is weak and young people are hard-pressed. Basic standard of living questions like health care, and unemployment benefits, became shockingly nasty debates. As much as we didn’t want to look at the train wreck that was this year’s United States Congress, it was hard not to.

Kind of like the Kardashians, the 111th Congress had a fascinating dysfunction to it. It voted to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but killed the dreams of the DREAM Act kids right before Christmas. Big business got bail out checks, while average citizens scurried after any sort of check.

This season, young politicos can have Christmas visions of Congressmen coming to their constituents bearing frankincense and myrrh. We might dream that next year, our political system will redeem itself, and that when the clock strikes midnight on December 24th, a new Washington will be born.

That might or might not happen. I’ll tell you what can happen, though: we can internalize what those in the Great Depression knew, and know that, politics be damned, it’s still a wonderful life.

The post-war classic It’s a Wonderful Life features a despondent George Bailey who, fed up with his perceived lack of success and the trivialities of his life, decides his life is worth keeping for one reason – the people in it. When the Depression hit, George gave everything he had for other people, and to his shock and awe, they remembered. And when his hour of need struck, they were there for him.

The Greatest Generation was great because of the qualities of the people in it.  And ours promises to be following in its footsteps. The Great Recession has turned the millennial generation into one of the most entrepreneurial generations in America. In the absence of solutions and opportunities from elsewhere, our generation is making them ourselves.

There’s something special there. Maybe it’s God. Or maybe it’s each other.

Either way, redemption is possible. And it’s right in front of us.

The post Our Christmas Story: Is Redemption Possible? appeared first on HyperVocal.

What ruined it? The recession, of all things. The recession has exacerbated class differences, but what it has done for Millennials is make a whole new class altogether: It’s the New Working Class.

And you’re a part of it.

Think about it: Everybody you know works. And they work a lot.

Maybe they’re in graduate school full-time, and work part-time. Maybe they have a full-time job, but are taking on more tasks due to budget cutbacks. Even if they were born into money, they might work a ton of hours in a high-performance field such as law or finance.

In today’s economy, high-powered jobs require a lot of time and investment, and not being poor takes a lot of time and investment. For the first time in decades, white-collar workers and blue-collar workers are both scrambling to get jobs, stay in them, and keep their heads above water. College grads, like mechanics, are working two, three part-time jobs because one job just isn’t enough. In some sort of weird limbo under time itself, Americans of all stripes are hustling shoulder-to-shoulder for security, stability, and a good salary.

And although all generations of Americans have worked hard, there’s something a bit different about this scenario. The recession has made a high cost of low price, and today’s New Working Class doesn’t have the bargaining power the Old Working Class did. And it might not even be able to enjoy their standards of living.

This is in part due to an inability to quantify our work. While many members of our generation –- from red-eyed young professionals determined to get ahead to carpenters starting work at dawn and ending at dusk — work way more than 40 hours a week, the Department of Labor doesn’t even have that on record.

According to their books, the average number of hours Americans work per week during the recession has remained what it was prior to the recession. The extra hours salaried workers are working to keep their jobs aren’t compensated for in salaried environments and thus are not tracked, and part-time work actually drives down the average number of hours people work in a certain field, even if this work is performed in addition to other full-time work.

Given that hours are tracked per field, and not per person, the Department of Labor has only a vague sense of the true number of hours worked per person. If a new grad does a 30 hour-a-week unpaid internship at a legal clinic, works 20 hours a week at the Body Shop, and spends 10 hours a week babysitting, she goes on the Department of Labor’s books as a 20-hour (read = underemployed) worker, even though she performs 60 hours of work per week.

Just like the young grad’s babysitting and internship hours are not recorded (as they are not paid via paycheck), the hours worked by a young carpenter who was raised here but born elsewhere, and undocumented, go unaccounted for on the Department of Labor’s books. They might have some idea of his work habits, because he might pay payroll taxes into a fake Social Security account. But he himself will be not be able to claim those funds in his golden years.

Today, both the young carpenter and young grad need the things that the old labor movement fought for, such as regulated hours, benefits, and work-life balance. But the institutions that are supposed to bargain for them don’t see themselves as serving these two sets of people.

And those paid to administer the labor movement’s legacy could use a good dose of it themselves.

The demands put on today’s white-collar employees — especially by, irony of ironies, non-profit organizations that claim to work for social justice –- would make our grandparents’ peers turn over in their graves. Threatened, if not gone, in many of these environments are evenings, weekends, and the possibility of a family life. And one of the hallmark industries of the old labor movement, construction, literally builds America up, but is unregulated and prone to abuse.

Try telling your boss at a civil rights shop that things in your workplace aren’t fair. And try telling your boss on a construction gig that your leg is hurting you, and you need a day off. Different fields, same answer: Cry me a river.

In some ways, the work lives of the New Working class would shock the old Leisure Class AND the old Working Class. Many of us don’t have the time to sit down and eat dinner, or do real recreational activities other than playing with iPhone apps.

But here’s the (possibly) good side to Millennials’ New Working Class life: generational solidarity, of the experiential kind.

For the first time, a whole generation of Americans will have something truly in common, even if debt serves as the common denominator.

Within the New Working Class, the “We’re going to the Cape this weekend” vs. “We’re going to the lake this weekend” divide might be gone. In its place might be a new camaraderie called “Oh, Lucy and I are just going to, uh…stick around here this weekend. You know, finish some stuff up.”

At some point, the senior class valedictorian might realize they have something in common with the senior class drop out: working at 10pm on a weeknight.

After all, finishing documents at 10pm doesn’t feel all that different from flipping burgers at 10pm.

Because doing either of those things at 10pm sucks.

High-income Millenials will need babysitters because they’re working 60 hours a week, and low-income Millenials will need babysitters because they’re also working 60 hours a week. Now, the former might be able to afford it and the latter might need it subsidized, but the situation is basically the same. (And let’s not even think about the situation we’ll all be in if Social Security isn’t there for us in 50 years.)

So is life in the New Working Class liberating? Maybe. Is it a little scary? Yes.

But it’s the future.

So meet and greet the members of this New Working Class.

Smile and nod to the one to your left, and the one to your right.

And the one in the mirror.

Emily Goulding works like 125 hours a week in social justice communications in Washington, D.C. You can read her budding HyperVocal archive here.

The post Meet the New Working Class (Oh, and You’re In it) appeared first on HyperVocal.

Rap, neon, and big speakers are back. At the Rally for Sanity and/or Fear, velvet was back in fashion. The Dems who, like Christine O’Donnell, had also dabbled into witchcraft brought back their best Renaissance Fair attire, and even brought out some angst.

On the Mall that day, something still smelled like teen spirit.

And in the Capitol Building, it’s the mid-’90s all over again. Republicans took over the House of Representatives under a sitting Democratic president. This time, they picked up at least 60 seats as opposed to 1994’s 52 seats. That’s the biggest mid-term gain since World War II.

So if we’re so old-school, what’s really different between now and 1994?

Fear, as opposed to abandon, runs our politics.

There’s a little bit of sanity, but mostly, there’s fear.

The policies of the ’90s failed. Alan Greenspan even said he got them wrong. As such, the balls-out attitude that characterized that decade –- the decade that created NAFTA, that created the housing boom –- is gone forever.

Today’s politicos are keeping their clothes on, and their cigars in their mouths.

And for good reason.

The maquiladoras built along the Mexican border didn’t stabilize the region, out-of-control spending did not boost the economy, and we can’t just pretend that China doesn’t have the U.S. by the gonads. (Sorry, but they do.)

This insecurity makes for angst, and this midterm upset expressed social frustration of Big Mac proportions. Yes, incumbent inertia let some of the 60 Republicans slip into office, but angst propelled the rest.

If Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins were to ask the Rally for Sanity and/or Fear folks if they thought, as “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” begins, that ‘the world is a vampire’, they would answer: Yes.

This election showed us that you can work as hard as Nancy Pelosi only to lose your gavel to a person whose last name can be easily mispronounced as….well.

And although there’s something more juvenile about this 2010 takeover, it’s just as angry. Let’s face it, Boehner is no Newt Gingrich. He’s not a cunning political operative, he’s a spray-tan king. He’s still going to take a lot of joy out of doing nothing but pumping congressional brakes over the next two years, though.

For a generation that has been rocking the vote for a decade, voters saw that even if they do, as is the mantra of that sector, make their voices heard, they will not necessarily be listened to.

And that hurts.

Progressives, women, people of color, and young people elected the most progressive, and eloquent, president this country has ever had, yet could do nothing more than stand by and watch as business got the better end of the deal. Dems opened their morning Firefox only to watch Obama be eaten for breakfast for passing health care reform, for holding BP accountable, for improving student loan rates, and ending the Iraq War, all the while answering to donors.

The rallyers’ favorite politician got shellacked for being… a politician.

All this despair makes for ire. After all, the Republicans have God, but the Democrats only have séances.

And Wiccanism just doesn’t work all the time.

The rallyers feel that despite all their rage, they are still just a rat in a cage. They, like Billy, still believe that they can’t understand.

While we know that the policies of the ’90s don’t work, no one knows what does work.

Emily Goulding works in social justice communications in Washington, D.C.

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