I don't' think I ever spent time with one of those 70s poetic explorers of Civilization's id. I had a brief time in college with one of their 'high-brow' cousins, who was a Marxist an antheist, a radical 2nd-wave feminist, a Shakespeare scholar, and a critical theorist some years before there was "critical theory." He said his grandparents came to Ellis Island from a Stalinist pogrom and had been assigned the random surname of a northern English industrial city because it began with 'B' like th…
My problem with that video is that Vance set it up. He did that without thinking of what to say, without scouting in advance to make sure salespeople were willing to be videoed, and that shows arrogance. When I give a poetry reading, I practice because I am shy and awkward and while I used to think of this as my great affliction, now I realize it's not respectful to the audience to not try very hard to do better. Vance didn't try.
"Non-homeowners. They would like to buy houses, but they can’t, because houses are too expensive. Since they can’t buy houses, they stay in the rental market, which is also restricted by the lack of new housing construction, and rents skyrocket as well. "
No credit to the cartel that seems to have jacked rents across the nation via price-fixing apps? See ProPublica's recent article...
The bit about getting your sofa without having a plan to bring it home, and easily texting a friend who came to help-- you paint Fairbanks as so communal it strangely made me cry.
I relate to the feeling of "the couch" signifying something. When I moved back in with my parents, I had to be talked out of paying $100+ a month to store my first adult couch, which I paid something insane for. The couch felt like a symbol of my adulthood, and selling it felt like a nail in a coffin of my independence.
here's a subscribe link subscribe.acast.com/htt… I'm fighting with Apple currently.