Scenes from My So-Called Unemployed Life

I had a crisis this morning. Looking at my checking account, I discovered that I had accidentally paid my electric bill with the funds I had set aside for my cable bill. Since both bills simply said “Payment Express” on the back, and I had just gotten out of bed, was stressed-out and had a cold, I made what for most people would be a slight accounting error. But when you’re trying to survive on $405 a week in the most expensive city in the United States, the smallest of errors can trigger a catastrophe.

My first indication that something might be amiss came when the voice on the other end of the automated payment system said that I had a credit of $54.91 when I was done making my payment. “That’s odd,” I thought and thought nothing further of it until a few days later, when I was trying to check my email and discovered that my Internet and email weren’t working. I called Time Warner Cable and was told not only that they had no record of my payment, but that my confirmation number was wrong! I wound up having to make another payment to Time Warner Cable and it wasn’t until a few days after that, when I was attempting to pay another bill, that I noticed the error. Thankfully, my bank was able to claw back my money so I could pay my other bills that were due that day. (I never thought I’d be grateful to a bank!)

These are the kinds of situations one has to deal with in our Winner-Take-All Economy.

Which is funny, because I had just been contemplating writing another blog post, tentatively titled Obama’s Wasted First Term and Our Winner-Take-All Economy.

I did not watch President Obama’s inauguration. I was too busy looking for a job and lamenting the missed opportunities of his first term in office. Remember those? We really thought he was gonna change things, didn’t we?

First on his list of failures was healthcare, where he started compromising before the debate had even begun. Rather than instituting a single-payer system, like most of the rest of the civilized world, he caved in to the insurance industry and basically handed them 315 million new customers.

Thanks a lot, Obama! Now I have another bill I can’t pay!

And now we’re witnessing his most recent failure where, in spite of the massacre of 20 children and six adults in Connecticut, he’s prepared to cave on an assault weapons ban.

How many assault weapons-related bloodbaths have we witnessed just since his first term in office? I literally can’t keep track. And yet we haven’t managed to move the debate on this issue one hair.

But his biggest failure has to be the economy, where he renewed the Bush tax cuts for the rich and, rather than spending money to create jobs by, say, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, chose instead to bail out the big banks that got us into this mess (and then failed to prosecute a single perpetrator).

We are now witnessing the end result of this disaster, which is what I call the Winner-Take-All Economy, where the top 1% enjoys all the economic benefits of the last 30 years and the rest of us are left scrambling for crumbs.

This situation is made worse, ironically, by Obamacare. Now people are tied to their jobs because of health insurance (unless they can afford to buy their own), so they can’t afford to look for another job even assuming one exists.

The role of government is precisely to step in where the private sector can’t. Health care should not be for profit, it should be a right of every citizen. And, by that measure, Obamacare is a failure.

Well, the gloves are off now. It’s time to hold Obama’s feet to the fire. It’s time for Obama to put up or shut up.

The Joke of Unemployment Insurance in a Shrinking Economy

I got laid off from my job two weeks ago. The first thing I did, on the first day after my contract ended—right after I got out of bed, before I showered, got dressed or had breakfast—was file for unemployment insurance, because I knew that it takes two weeks to receive your first check and, like 40% of the country (according to Time magazine http://business.time.com/2012/08/22/a-huge-number-of-us-have-no-financial-safety-net/, but I still think that number is too low), I live from paycheck to paycheck.

When I didn’t receive my first check this week, I called the New York State Department of Labor and was told that there was no record of my claim. Apparently, I had made a mistake when applying for a new claim on their Web site, but since there are so many people unemployed right now, it took me two days just to get someone on the phone to ask a question.

All of this is just a tempest in a teapot, however.

The larger issue is, How is anyone in New York supposed to survive on a maximum of $405 a week?

The last time I was laid off, a former boss of mine emailed me three days later with a job offer. Due to the incompetence of that company’s HR department (and the Christmas holidays), however, it still took four weeks for me to actually be hired. Even though I found another job almost immediately, I still had to borrow $900 in order to pay my rent.

This is why I go crazy when Republicans start talking about people “living on unemployment.” As if that was even possible!

The other thing that drives me crazy is how companies define “immediately.”

When I say I’m looking to start work immediately, I mean, right now. Corporations have another idea of what that means. I just had an interview where the company told me it takes them two months to hire someone. What position am I applying for? Keeper of the Nuclear Code? Do I need a security clearance from the C.I.A. just to be a proofreader?

The system has become so rigged in favor of the top 1%, it’s reached a point of no return. Companies are now routinely rewarded for destroying jobs. These same companies then pay off politicians (in the form of campaign contributions) to create tax breaks for them so they can make even more money. And then the banks (and other, more dubious “financial institutions”) swoop in to make even more money as people left scrambling for any means of support resort to credit cards and payday loans in order to put food on the table.

They say that it takes one month for every $10,000 of salary in order to find a job. And that, I presume, is during a good economy. Right now I have two friends who have been unemployed for over a year. And neither of them were hedge fund managers.

When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, being out of work for even one week can be catastrophic.

I would even be OK with unemployment insurance providing more money for a shorter period of time. That would at least allow people to get back on their feet. The current system barely provides enough money to eat and pay a few bills. It’s not enough to also be able to pay one’s rent. (And God forbid you have a car.)

As far as I’m concerned, “living on unemployment” isn’t even an option.

On the Death of Cities, Part 2

It’s been a bad week for New Yorkers of a certain age. On Monday, Big Apple Meat Market, a Hell’s Kitchen institution for 20 years and one of the last grocery stores in New York City that isn’t part of a chain, closed its doors. On Tuesday, Mxyplyzyk, a home design store in the Village for 20 years, shuttered. And today, Suzie’s Chinese Restaurant called it quits after 39 years on Bleecker Street.

In his invaluable blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York (http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/), Jeremiah Moss has been chronicling the creeping gentrification and homogenization of New York City (and Manhattan in particular). Every day, it seems, brings news of another mom and pop business forced to close by rising rents brought upon by the dominance of national chains. Slowly but surely, New York is losing the very quality that attracted people here in the first place. If you want to see the quirky characters and unique businesses that used to populate the countless cultural depictions of New York City, whether on Seinfeld on TV, in Neil Simon’s plays or Martin Scorcese’s movies, you have to go elsewhere.

Mayor Bloomberg bought the last election and used it to remake New York in his image: greedy, rapacious, and indifferent towards the needs of others.

As the owner of Mxyplyzyk put it in Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, “It is quite clear the current city administration prefers chain stores over the 'mom and pops' with their tax abatements. This island is destined to have a very boring retail landscape.”

I’ve been talking about the disappearance of mom and pop stores in my comedy act for a while now and last night in my comedy class I made the remark that New York is now as boring as Cleveland but 10 times more expensive. My teacher pointed out—correctly, perhaps—that Cleveland is now actually more interesting than New York. And, I imagine, less expensive.

Many of my artistic friends have already fled the city and many more, including native New Yorkers like myself, are thinking of doing so.

Perhaps our mayor should have thought about that before he handed the keys of the city over to Starbucks, Duane Reade and the banks that now occupy the ground floor of every new building.

Gentrification is like global warming. Once the damage has been done, there’s no turning back. And the damage has already been done.

Poor Little Rich Girl or Why I Hate Sofia Coppola(’s Work)

Last night I watched the latest entry in Sofia Coppola’s “poor-little-rich-girl” oeuvre, “Somewhere.” Throughout the movie, we watch a presumably talented (although we are never given an example of that talent) movie star named Johnny Marco (played by Stephen Dorff) as he traipses around the world, staying at trendy hotels like the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles (or a hotel suite in Italy with its own private swimming pool), having beautiful women throw themselves at him and hotel concierges and limousine drivers accede to his every command. The only source of conflict here is that Johnny’s daughter shows up in the middle of the movie and Johnny then has to drop her off at summer camp while he goes back to the Chateau Marmont. This makes Johnny very sad. Boo fucking hoo.

At the end of the movie, Johnny is seen driving off into the desert and then he gets out of his car and starts walking along the highway. Roll credits.

What?!

What is this love affair that film critics have for movies with no script? This isn’t a movie so much as a series of seemingly improvised vignettes.

If you recall, “Lost in Translation” was another variation on this theme, this time starring Bill Murray as the movie star that people throw themselves at and Scarlett Johannson as his love interest who is married to another man with a fashionable career (a fashion photographer). There is almost no dialogue in this movie and yet it won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Has the Best Screenplay Oscar become the Best Independent Film Oscar? And, if so, why did it go to “Lost in Translation”?

“Marie Antoinette,” Coppola’s last “poor-little-rich-girl” story, actually did have some dialogue as well as some other things to recommend it: great costumes and locations (Versailles) and an anachronistic rock score. And, unlike the other two movies I mentioned, there are actually some consequences for this unsympathetic character’s behavior, although I suppose we’re supposed to feel sorry for her, too.

I suppose the die was cast when Coppola made her first movie, a segment in the omnibus “New York Stories” about a poor-little-rich-girl who lives at the Sherry Netherland hotel.

At this point you might say, “Wait a second. Wasn’t Sofia Coppola a poor-little-rich-girl herself? Wasn’t she the daughter of film director Francis Ford Coppola and didn’t she spend her childhood being chaperoned from one hotel to another and shouldn’t you write about what you know?”

Yes, but that doesn’t mean we should have to watch her home movies.

On the Death of Cities

 It’s happened again. I was forced to wolf down my breakfast while happy tourists watched.

My neighborhood, Little Italy (or, as the arrivistes call it, Nolita) has given up. What used to be a neighborhood of truck stop diners when I moved here 25 years ago has become a neighborhood of high-priced restaurants, bars and boutiques. Where hordes of shoppers descend on lower Broadway and Soho by day and hordes of drunken bridge-and-tunnel wannabes and Upper East Side yuppies descend on the cheek-by-jowel bars by night.

If you want a relaxing, decent breakfast in this neighborhood, you have to pay $50. Actually, you can’t even find breakfast in this neighborhood anymore. Breakfast has been replaced by brunch. You know what the difference between breakfast and brunch is? A sprig of parsley, a water-down cocktail and a half-hour wait for a table.

The one surviving establishment in this neighborhood that could reasonably be called a “diner” (remember those?)—which I will not name, because I don’t want it to become even more crowded--is struggling to survive, with its two harried Chinese waitresses, its Arab owner and its Mexican cooks.

The two Chinese waitresses are always screaming because the place is always packed at all hours of the day with nouveau-riche young bankers with their caterwauling babies and tourists from the nearby Holiday Inn who kid themselves that they’re still experiencing the New York City of Studio 54 and Taxi Driver.

The mild-mannered middle-aged man sitting next to me at the counter politely asks me if there’s anything interesting in the newspaper I have with me and I bark back at him. “I don’t know! I can’t read it because I have to balance it on my head! This neighborhood is fucking unlivable!” I’m immediately embarrassed by my response to this poor, unsuspecting soul, but that’s what this city has turned me into: one of those angry, old “Get off my lawn” types that I probably used to make fun of when I was younger.

They say that Hurricane Sandy has forever altered the landscape of this city, but there’s been an equally dangerous, insidious force repaving the landscape for the last 30 years: gentrification.

In her book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein talks about how we live in an era of “disaster capitalism” where natural and man-made disasters periodically alter the landscape so capitalists can swoop in and remake whatever’s left over into something more expensive and more profitable.

Republicans have been arguing for the last 30 years to “let the market” dictate what happens. “The market is always right!” They keep saying.

But what most of us are left with—those of us who aren’t rich enough to live in gated communities, those of us who moved to the city because it used to offer something different from the stultifying sameness of the suburbs—what we’re left with is a diminished quality of life.

I don’t know why people keep coming here. They could have the same experience if they stayed home and went to the shopping mall. They’ve turned this city into fucking Cleveland!

You could get better service for breakfast if you went to McDonald’s—which is what I’m sure they’ll be turning my neighborhood coffee shop into in the not too distant future.

Skyfall: A Review-lette

This 50^th-anniversary-edition Bond gets off to a good start with a great chase scene and Adele’s title song but quickly goes downhill and could be shaved by at least 30 minutes. It appears that they’ve run out of Ian Fleming novels to adapt and this Bond, which seems to be a meditation on mortality, sometimes verges on self-parody. Albert Finney’s character reminded me of Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers movies and Javier Bardem’s character was an uncomfortably homophobic cross between Hannibal Lecter and the “put the lotion in the basket” guy from “Silence of the Lambs.” It seems that the producers are trying to set up the Bond franchise for the Obama demographic: black, female (Naomie Harris as the new Moneypenny), young (Ben Whishaw, looking and sounding like a member of One Direction as the new Q) and gay (Mr. Bardem’s character). Amidst this changing of the guard, the only thing that kept my attention—apart from the exotic locations and Daniel Craig’s wardrobe—was Mr. Craig himself, the not-pretty-but-extremely-sexy star whom I’d gladly watch read a phone book.

Man Joins 21st Century, 21st Century Yawns

So, I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally joined the 21^st Century.

I’ve become a pod person, I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, I’ve become one of those people I used to make fun of.

The peer pressure was too much. I couldn’t take it anymore.

That’s right, I finally bought an iPhone.

A friend of mine who works for an Internet start-up told me that it was going to change my life, that my life was going to be completely different. And he was right. It’s kind of like having a baby.

I remember when I went to pick up my iPhone from the maternity ward, I mean Apple store. I was so nervous!

There was a young man in his twenties standing next to me and he said, “Is this your first one?”

And I said, “Yes.”

“You must be so proud,” he said.

I nodded.

“It looks just like you,” he said.

Well, it was all dressed in black.

“How do you like it?” he asked.

I said, “Well, I’m getting used to it, but I wish I had a pen and paper. I’m used to writing things down. I’m old school.”

“You sound like my father,” he said.

“I’m old enough to be your father,” I said.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said sheepishly. I guess he didn’t have the Older Person Etiquette app.

Now I’m constantly worried about it getting sick, I mean dropping it.

The other day I had to take it to the doctor, I mean Genius Bar. After waiting for about ten minutes a young man came over to me and said “The doctor will see you now.” I mean, “Can I help you?”

I told him my problem. I couldn’t transfer my iTunes collection from my computer to my iPhone because my software wasn’t up to date. He said, “Take two of these and call me in the morning.” He handed me two discs containing the latest versions of Mac OS X and iTunes.

Now I’m constantly showing people my new phone, just like a proud father. I even have some pictures of it in my wallet. Would you like to see them? Sorry.

I think the reason the iPhone is so popular is because it gives people the illusion of having control over their lives. It’s almost as if they think that if they have an iPhone, they won’t die.

But I died a different kind of death the other day. I ran into my Internet friend and he said, “Hey, I just got a new phone. You wanna see it?”

He pulled it out of his back pocket. It was a Samsung Galaxy.

“Oh, great!” I thought. “So I’ve finally decided to buy an iPhone and now they’re not cool anymore!”

But at least I have the baby pictures.