Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-11-22- 5:39 a.m.

Quibbles & Bits

#1 – Why Girl Punk is going to save rock & roll.
Rock and roll has always been the province of the anthem. It is the song that carries the central tenant of rock: the blend of angry defiance and exuberant joy. From “Johnny B. Goode” to “Satisfaction”, from “Sweet Home Alabama” to “God Save The Queen”, “Born in the U.S.A.” through “Fight The Power”, it is the soul of rock.
This is exactly why rock is on life support right now. The last great rock anthem was “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, and that was a decade ago. Since then we’ve seen the heirs to the rock kingdom denigrate into overindulgent self-pity (Smashing Pumpkins) and self-aggrandizing outsider posturing (Marilyn Manson), and later into the morass of rap-metal and even evangelical Christian prog-rock (P.O.D.). Even hip-hop, electronica, and jam-bands have been converted into entertainment industries of cool.
Which is why girl punk is poised to reclaim the throne of rock. For what is probably a whole host of reasons (mostly psychosexual and tied up with gender roles in nature), girl bands have never really been invited to the rock & roll party. And I’m not talking about bands of men that are fronted by women, like No Doubt or Garbage. The door to pop music has been open to women for ages, but rock & roll, with its defiance and its almost irresistible call to movement has been kept largely shut.
How few bands driven by women have even left a mark on the radar of rock and roll? The Go-Gos, The Bangles. Joan Jett, maybe. Hole seemed poised to do it, but someone gave Courtney Love a Versace dress and told her should could live her dream of being prom queen. Even that most proletarian of rock genres, punk, has as its most famous female Nancy Spungeon, a girlfriend of Sid Vicious and not a musician.
The rise of bands like The White Stripes, The Strokes, and The Hives shows that people’s love affair with true rock is hardly over. But the real bands waiting in the wings with the anthems of tomorrow are the girl bands. From the three-chord Ramones punk of The Donnas to the rockabilly dykecore of The Gossip to the pure direct energy of Bratmobile, these are the bands poised to be blared off car stereos at drive-ins. Sleater-Kinney has already written the next great rock anthem (I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone), they are just waiting for enough fans to rock an arena with it.
I just hope there are enough people out there who think rock is important enough to save.
#2 – Why the Teamsters are good for the movie business.
I can’t remember many times in my life when I was more surprised than when the Teamsters let Jimmy Hoffa’s son run for union president a couple years ago. The Teamsters are, after all, the most famously corrupt union in history, and Jimmy Hoffa the most corrupt union leader. In an age where unions are being marginalized in every industry, and the blowback against the Teamsters is higher than ever, I was shocked that the Teamsters would be willing to hang posters emblazoned with the name Hoffa. It just didn’t strike me as good P.R.
The Teamsters have a presence in many industries, but the one I am most familiar with, and the one they get the most blowback for, is the movie business. The famous director Sydney Lumet badmouthed them in his book, they earn a punch line in every movie about making movies, and even outdid Homer Simpson in a surly-and-lazy contest.
For those of you who don’t know, the Teamsters on a movie set are the drivers. They drive the trucks and cars. This is all they do, mind you. They don’t load the trucks, or unload them. They just bring them to where they are supposed to go. For that, each Teamster earns between $1,800 and $3,500 a week. This doesn’t count their benefits, some of which are spectacular. Teamster Local 761, which services the film industry in New York City, pays for the entire cost of their member’s children's college education, up to a B.A. Pretty nice, huh?
To give you some perspective on just how princely a Teamster’s salary is, IATSE Local 52 grips and electricians in New York earn about $1,100 a week, not counting overtime and meal penalties, and the grips and electricians are pretty much the hardest working guys on a film crew. If that disparity isn’t enough of a reason for why the Teamsters are often reviled, they also make it nearly impossible for independent films over a certain size from filming in New York. How? Well, by having arranged that the major rental houses in New York, like Panavision or Camera Service Center, have union loading docks, so that a non-Teamster trying to pull in a truck to load up a camera package won’t even be able to.
In spite of all this, the Teamsters are a great benefit to the film business. The first and most obvious reason is the easiest to overlook: it is damn hard to drive those trucks in New York City. In this country, where nearly everyone drives, it is easy to think that driving around in a city shouldn't be a high-paying job. But negotiating a five-ton grip truck or a pickup pulling a massive star camper around in the East Village or Tribeca is awful tough. I’ve been in this business for about four and a half years now, and I’ve worked on union and non-union jobs. I’ve never, not once, been on a job where a Teamster got into an accident. On non-union jobs, I can count over twenty vehicle accidents. And that goes beyond simply the damage from an accident. The camera truck, for example, is usually loaded with about two million dollars of very fragile equipment. It helps not to let it get banged around.
The second reason is because the Teamsters don’t just drive the vehicles, they also help maintain them. These equipment trucks and campers and hair/makeup trailers don’t belong to the studios, they belong to rental houses. They are in use nearly every day of the year. Your personal Honda may be able to go years without anything breaking, but that is because you use it for a couple hours a day at most. Something as basic as the door to a camper is opened and closed no less than forty times a day. Think it is going to hold up long under that? What about something like the lift gate on a grip truck, which loads and unloads three tons of equipment every day?
But the most important reason is because the Teamsters are one of the only strong unions the movie business has left. Even a powerful juggernaught like the Screen Actors Guild was recently bested by the advertising industry. The trade unions, like Local 52, are even weaker. And this is the direction that the whole industry is moving. As the technology advances, things like desktop editors and digital video reduce the need for highly skilled and specialized people. The leaps forward in special effects allow errors in the original image to be repaired. And massive numbers of film school graduates gives the industry an eager and inexpensive hiring pool to replace expensive union workers. But hiring the Teamsters makes it nearly impossible to not hire a union crew as well.
In the film industry, where the actual production costs are due to time more than any other factor (the costs of equipment and location rentals add up to much more per day than the total crew salary combined), workplace abuses are the norm. Film crews often work sixteen hour days, sometimes with up to fourteen hours without a break for a meal. Production assistants, who are non-union and paid by the day or week instead of hourly, can see their salaries drop below the minimum wage per hour. No film set I have ever been on would pass OSHA standards for worker safety. Film crew workers are entitled to no benefits such as health insurance (although at least one studio that I have worked for offers it after three months), and even though I have been working on my current project for over a year, not only do I not get any paid vacation, but I don’t get paid for sick days. In fact, I am not entitled to sick days at all, and if by chance I took very ill and had to miss several days in a row, I could and probably would lose my job.
This is how it works on a union job. I won’t even begin to recount what happens on non-union productions. But in the film industry, it is the unions alone which hold back the studios from even more drastic abuses. There is no shortage of willing labor; nearly everyone wants to work on movies, at least until they do it for a while. There is no real chance that any film employee is going to sue; even if you were victorious, you’d be finished in the industry, and film productions are set up so that the individual movie is a limited liability corporation which would limit your ability to get money from the studios anyway. So the only limits on the studios are the ones that the unions can place on them, by negotiating contracts that force the production to pay penalties to the crew for missed meals and forced turnarounds (this is when crew members get less than ten hours between when they are dismissed at night and when they are back in the next morning).
I work between eighty and one hundred hours a week, and I earn an average of less than ten dollars an hour. I have to pay for my own health insurance. I get no paid vacation or sick days, and I am offered no 401(k) or other pension options. If I am fired, I am entitled to no severance package at all, and I can be fired at any time for any reason. I am paid on a flat daily rate, and I don’t earn overtime until I have worked longer than sixteen hours in a single day. In the course of the day, I don’t receive a single mandated break, not even for lunch. I eat when I can find the time, which sometimes means that I don’t have a meal for sixteen hours. I have the Teamsters to thank that my situation is not worse, and that of the other hundred members of our crew along with me.
#3 – Why I have finally given in and learned to love Pamie.com.
When I first discovered online journals, Pamie was more myth than reality. The days of Squishy were over, and even her archives were gone. So there wasn’t any way that I could go and check out what it was all about for myself. Sure, she was still writing recaps for TwoP, but never for any shows that I had the slightest interest in. So everything that I heard about her and about Squishy was from the people who had loved it and missed it, and boy did they all think she was the bee’s knees.
I seem to have this thing going that I can’t really explain, where I find the notion that a whole bunch of people love something to be something of a turn-off. Perhaps it is why I have never gotten interested in Harry Potter; the idea that anything could appeal to that many people convinces me that they are being suckered somehow. And the glowing things I hear about the Harry Potter books is nothing compared to the hagiography I was given about Pamie. And seeing as there was no way to find out for myself if she was as good as everyone said, it was easy to form the opinion that she couldn’t possibly be.
When Pamie decided to start journaling again, people were excited like I’d expect would happen if Notre Dame made it back to the top of the BCS. And I read the first couple entries and just didn’t get it. I suppose I was resisting it too. In my high school, and I’d imagine at most others, there was an unwritten rule: if you weren’t friends with the Prom Queen, you had to talk about how she really wasn’t all that pretty. But even though I read online journals a lot less than I used to, I still found myself reading Pamie, if only because the description paragraphs on DHAK were so intriguing.
And now I have to admit: she has won me over. I get it now. Maybe it is the fact that her latest entry is so spot-on in every way. Or maybe I’m just wavering from my usual stance and will start being a Yankees fan soon. Either way, I’m in. I’m sure that this isn’t news to any of you, but if you are the one person on earth who reads my journal and not Pamie’s, go check her out. You won’t be disappointed.
A Parting Shot
Talking with a friend last night, we drifted to a conversation about a former friend of ours. She has spent time in the last year in rehab, followed by a complete cessation of ties with her family. Since, she has lived in four cites and been engaged twice. She’s from a wealthy family, and is both bright and beautiful. Thinking about her, we found ourselves with an unanswerable question.
If here in America, with our strong economy and infrastructure, with all our social services and charities, not to mention everything else we have going for us, so many people struggle and fail to get by, what happens in the rest of the world? How do people in Mozambique make their lives work? How do they manage it in Qatar, in Kazakhstan, in Sudan, in Thailand? If we as a society with so much cannot manage to provide for two hundred sixty-five million, how do they provide for one billion in India? I want to just take a moment, now, and try to get my mind around that.

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
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