Starving Artists Live in the Ghetto

There is something kind of amazing about this photo of our cat, Sheba. It was taken from the large gap under the front door to our apartment. Being a very affectionate and sometimes needy cat, Sheba waits by the door when we are not home, listening for the jingling of keys or the sound of approaching foot traffic. As soon as the door is opened she attaches herself to your leg demanding attention. I guess her time as an alley cat without close human contact has made her a bit of an affection junky. Aren't we all though really? Sometimes she will literally climb my back and stand on my shoulder, rubbing her face against mine. I've never known a cat so gentle and loving. She sleeps in bed curled at my feet or around K's head.

I've been fighting off a bit of a cold and as though she could sense that I was not feeling well, she slept curled at my chest.
I think there is a fear with having a cat that it might lead to having two cats, three cats, thirty cats. Hello crazy cat lady. They find you dead after a week with an overturned cup of herbal tea surrounded by cats and filth, stacked newspapers dating back to 1953 reaching towards the ceiling like stalagmites.

I've been thinking a lot about our neighborhood lately. It's been changing. When I moved here over a year ago, it felt like an act of bravery. I had lived on people's sofas for over a year, traveling by bus, train, plane and car to shows on the weekends. The main thing that drew me in was the very low rent, very low. Artists, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers are often poor. We put a lot of our money and the money we make back into what drives us, the need to create. Many of us die poor. Some of us get acclaim or respect, but that really doesn't feed you. We find ourselves lost in this battle between the need to make money, to literally put bread on the table and the desire to create something we believe in, unaltered by the need to make money. Often though, the commercial side takes over and taints the art. The music that was once just an acoustic guitar or piano and a voice becomes electronic techno beats and diminished lyrical content, provocative for the sake of drawing attention and unaware of what once made it special. It is the trap of art as a career, one of which I am all too conscious.

I did a show out of state one really cold winter evening at this little bar in a really cute neighborhood, opening for a Canadian musician named Erika who I'd met at an open Mic. After the show, I was approached by someone who came to see me perform and told me how much my music meant to him. I was deeply touched. He then told me of how he was so excited that he burned copies of my cd for friends so that they would listen. I just smiled but inside I found myself torn. On one hand I wanted as many people to hear my music as possible, but on the other I wanted to be compensated for all the work I had put into the album. It got me thinking down this course of a grocery store. Most people would not go into a grocery store and shove cans of beans in their pockets, nor would they go to a music store for that matter and shove cds in their pockets.

It is an unfortunate and fortunate reality, this digital age that we live in. We find our music, our art traveling to places we never imagined, Japan, Russia, Argentina....how amazing is that? Often though, the music finds its way to those far reaches through illegal downloads and the burning of cd's among friends. So, essentially it is shoved into pockets or ears in this case without a trip to the register. Is illegal downloading the modern shoplifting or is it a free mode of promotion and publicity? I think it is a bit of both. Many musicians have resolved themselves to the fact that a lot of their money must be made through doing shows and yet venues that were once plentiful and open to an array of art have been drying up. I wonder if they are also victims of the digital age. People are attached to their devices and connected in a million ways and yet it seems to have led to less people leaving their homes. They can have their groceries, their clothing, their music, movies and just about anything delivered right to their door. Some people telecommute, working at home on their laptops....Is there a reason to leave their homes at all?

So back to our neighborhood.... When I moved to the neighborhood it was a predominantly caribbean neighborhood and in many aspects still is. There is a cycle that happens with urban gentrification. The poor artist move into a neighborhood along with the lesbians and homos. Yes, homos. They take an otherwise "undesirable" area and seeing the potential, move in. Landlords see the potential for asking more money for rent, so they fix things up a bit....next, the friends of the artists see the cheap rent and feel ok about moving into the area since their homo artist friends are living there and haven't been stabbed in the eye yet. The only problem is that once you get a bunch of white people in a neighborhood, they want their Starbucks and the GAP and an assortment of little stores and restuarants. Yes, White people are spoiled and a little needy. I'm white so I can say that. They want everything to be cute. Little boutiques open catering to the new crowd. Soon, however the neighborhood becomes "desirable" and the floodgates open. Luxury condos pop up everywhere along with Starbucks, the Gap, and and assortment of banks and sushi restaurants. Rents go through the roof and the poor artists are forced to move away from the neighborhood. BTW, they demolished the building behind our apartment and are turning it into a 20 story luxury condo building with the first two floors being used for commercial purposes. It is a glass and steel structure that will block out the sunlight. It will be architecturally out of place for the neighborhood and about 15 stories taller than almost all the surrounding buildings. The end is nigh.

This is the cycle as I've seen it happen before. It is starting in our neighborhood. I fear it. I like the caribbean flavor, the interesting spices at the vegetable market across the street. The one thing I don't like is the gap under our door, but there is some give and take one must accept when pioneering a neighborhood where the buildings border on or were previously slums.
I don't shop at starbucks. I prefer the local coffee shop with its slow lines and inconsistent service. I shop at salvation army and used clothing stores most of the time. I have never purchased anything from the gap. Ironically though, I being a white homo artist am both the cause and the victim of this gentrification. A part of me feels guilty. I love my neighbors. It truly is a neighborhood. I miss my cracked out neighbor James who used to blast his stereo into the street and sit on the stoop shirtless drinking beer out of a paper bag. I'd much rather have the flavor of my neighborhood than a crummy overroasted starbucks coffee...any day.