Can a Rich Man (Springsteen) sing about hard times?

Intellectually we want to say that a rich man can sing about hard times. A man who is as rich as The  Boss should still be able to reach back and touch his old hard scrabble New Jersey roots, but the reality is no. He can't. You forfeit something with fame and success and money. You still have your talent and that is a constant but you have changed. You are simply rich and you know other peoples struggles by proxy, by looking over a fence that now keeps your mansion on one side and the rest of the world on the other. It is a sad fact but even The Boss loses his ability to empathize with the plight of the working man.

And he did have it at one time. Just go back and listen to Born To Run (meeting across, the river, jungle land, backstreets) but these were songs of a hungry Springsteen with nothing to lose who was literally Born to Run and who had to keep running. Or The River with it's title track..."but lately there aint been much work on account of the economy..." These songs nailed what it was like to struggle and Bruce was struggling and....he was young and struggling. It makes a difference.

Wrecking Ball is a rich man looking at struggle through the prism of a hell of a lot of money. The songs are uninspired, not much Bruce but a lot of production value. And you cant really blame him for trying. What does a man do who has built his career on being the voice of the outsider when he is one of the insiders simply because of the economics of fame and fortune? To become that voice again Bruce would have to become poor and starting running again..

Not so sure he is up for that. Not now.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The old cars of the middle class

Old cars are making a come back. Or maybe it's just because I drive old cars. Used to have really nice cars with really nice payments. Five hundred. Four hundred. Big thirty thousand dollar monsters that broke down pretty quickly just the same. Amazing how that new car smell went away so quickly. I guess there is a spray out there you can get so you can keep it going. And those first dings. Rough man. And then that first time you don't get by the wash and your thirty five thousand dollar ripoff looks old.

That sucks.

So then you get rid of it or you pay it off and it becomes your old car. Ten years old with a one hundred and fifty thousand miles. You quit washing it years ago.  You just keep it going. You don't have any payments and you don't want any. Now you have two old cars and the air goes out or a window doesn't close or a door doesn't open and the upholstery smells like a junkyard with that sun baked smell of old clothes in a trunk. And the floor is covered in leaves and dirt and old junk food wrappers.

But it still runs.

And so you cruise around with your loud muffler and then some dude pulls up next to you in a Beamer. You look over and you feel the pang. Man I want that car. I want to get into a car that smells good and looks good and I want that new feeling man. Because if your car is new then you are new. You just feel better about everything. And that lasts about... a month. And then you are staring down those payments and you start thinking about the fact you are paying up to five hundred bucks a month just to get from point A to point B.

No thanks.

And so the Beamer dude pulls ahead and you get your jalopy up to speed. Throw in a CD of old songs you dig. And look for a McDonald's. Life aint so bad.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...losing a house should not be this funny

President Obama should go to Foreclosure Court

You do get the feeling the President just doesn't get it. There is a Herbert Hoover quality to his pronouncements that the economy should be doing better with the stimulus packages his administration has passed and that many jobs have been created and people really are doing better. The President should go sit in foreclosure court. That might just jump start his awareness.

In foreclosure court you sit in the back and wait while the attorneys for the banks march up to the judge. The attorneys sit on the other side of the low wainscoted divider in high backed leather chairs. They are there for the banks. The people getting foreclosed sit in wooden benches next to each other like criminals waiting trial. There is no talking in court. Many of the defendants need a interpreter who gets up and speaks loudly in Spanish so everyone in the court will hear. On this particular day the judge makes the announcement that there will be no more interpreters after today because of cutbacks.

So then you wait and watch. One by one people go up before the judge and plead for time. That is the best you can do. The banks lawyers have foreclosure orders in hand and they want to foreclose...now! The judge gives some people twenty eight days, but others he grants the order of foreclosure. The people shuffled out glumly knowing they have to leave their home or the sheriff will evict them.

The President doesn't seem to understand this reality. The people in the courtroom are from all walks of life. Some people come as husband and wife, many times only one spouse shows up to get the bad news. Foreclosure court never ends. The court fills up as fast as the judge gavels the cases along. The lawyers troop in and out. The banks have at least five attorneys present. It is always the bank versus the individual. It is an assembly line in reverse. This is not production, but destruction. Destruction of an American Dream gone horribly wrong.

So I think President Obama should stop in just for a little while. You sit there for an hour and you get it. Sometimes there is a tearful woman and everyone feels really bad for a moment. Everyone remembers these are peoples homes and not just judgements of default on loans. The lawyers pause, the cops look away. The judge waits for the woman to compose herself, then everything gets rolling again. The sad assembly line of our bleeding nation.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. The story of a man trying to hold onto his home. http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Writer in Hard Times

These are hard times. On this we can agree. The writer in hard times is actually better equipped for the deprivation that comes when the coins stop clinking. Apologies to all writers who laugh to the bank for the next sentence...Because writers are always having hard times. When someone decides to become a scribbler of literary fiction or any type of fiction then you make peace with the fact you will probably be broke a lot of your life. It comes with the territory, in fact hard times informs the work.

The obvious reference to Hemingway on the left bank stating hunger made his stories better is probably a little over the top, especially since he had his wife's trust fund to fall back on. But certainly the struggling writer (is there any other kind) produces his work out of a pressure that is exerted by his situation. If fiction is produced by incongruities in a persons psychological makeup then it is certainly ratcheted up by the tectonics of being unable to make a living. The struggling artist is not really a stereotype, artists do struggle, they struggle every damn day to produce their work and survive.

So when hard times hit then the struggling writer usually is fully armed. He or she may fall further down the economic totem pole, but the psychological armor is there. Writers never define themselves by bourgeois standards or at least they shouldn't. Writers define themselves by their work and most are happy to have the basics covered so the work can be accomplished. Whenever I took a job I always evaluated it not on how much I made, but how much I could write! This is not a normal evaluation and one thing writers find out before most people is that being broke is a state of mind and if you let it get you then it will.

So maybe art is for a man with a full belly, as EM. Forester said in Howards End, but  the artist writer survives through good times and bad and yes it is probably true you write better with your back against the wall. In that way, we should see a literary flowering any day now as the Great Recession drags on and on and on.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. www.billhazelgrove.com

A Grande Venti Double Shot Extra Dry Skim Whipped

So Starbucks is laying off people. The sky is truly falling. Maybe all our trouble began when we couldn't' even order a cup of coffee without tuning up our windpipes and speaking French. I have to admit I have been a holdout. Oh, I go to Starbucks, but I still use words like small or large. Women pucker their brows and men mutter heathen when they hear me go, "yeah I'll take a small cup of coffee." Cretin. And of course then I paid my ten bucks like everyone else for my coffee and roll and went happily on my way. Americans have always prided ourselves on cutting through the BS and getting down to the grit of things. Let the Europeans take on aires, we are a people who speak plainly without pretension. Then came Starbucks. Shuffling into Dunkin Donuts or 7/11 for a cup of coffee became strutting into Starbucks and declaring, "Yes, I want a grandee skim white chocolate peppermint mocha whipped with a double shot and a slice of your nonfat coffee cake..." Phew. That'll be fifty bucks. Probably about here we should have sniffed a sea change. When ordering a cup of coffee becomes a novel that costs as much as a novel then something has gone weird on the good ship middle class. We had a coffee bubble going and now it has burst and the men in the green smocks are going to be joining us on the other side of the counter. Will the ubiquitous image of well shod people walking down the street holding white cups with curved lids leave the diorama of our cultural landscape? Probably not. Lets face it that has become the image of people who are doing well. People who can afford to pay that kind of money for a cup of coffee and illiterate their way thorough the nomenclature of coffeeology surely have their &^%$ together. But maybe in these harder times, there might be another image, some guy walking down the street with a big 7/11 on his cup and a cold donut, sloshing along, muttering the patois of the boom years like a deranged caffeinated moron...ah, grandee...no....latteee, no venti...uh cappacino espresso extra shot blastoh. Somehow that seems more real.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com