Ear Damage Magazine

June 2007 

(Alabama, USA)

eardamagezine.com

So many people who grew up poor really don’t really realize how poor they actually were until they get older and look back on it. What do you think it was that made you realize you were poor as you were coming of age?

There are so many levels and distinctions of being poor.  I remember my mother pointing out the “poorer” kids on the block as we were growing up. She would try to convince us that we were different.  Economically, I guess we were lower middle class, but mentally, we were as poor as everyone else in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately I was poor because my diet contained a high amount of sugar and fat and I didn’t even care and TV was religiously consumed even more. There were hardly any books around except maybe the Bible, and that was cherry picked to death.  My friends parents were usually laborers of some sort and my friends themselves had the same aspirations. As children we couldn’t go out at night to play.  As young adults, fights were more than two jocks fighting in a High School parking lot. We were taught to hate our neighbors because of their skin color or religion, but never make a distinction of class.  We were always under the illusion that opportunity existed equally for all.  People were getting killed, murdered, and addicted to hard core drugs and doing serious time in prison.  I looked up to gangster and street thugs and everybody was obsessed with only their primitive emotions – eating, shitting and fucking.

I marked off a quite few pages in the book you sent me, but there was one paragraph that struck me close to home in particular, about the immaculately clean dining room in your parents’ house, fine china used just on special occasions, and plastic covers on the couches. You go on to say, “This house isn’t for the living or real…in America, you are only “someone” when you have something.”  Growing up as a black kid, I seen my share of couches with plastic slip covers on them! But seriously, I couldn’t agree with that any more than I do. So often, the working classes, and many ethnic groups, have had that proverbial “carrot” dangled in front of them by the ruling class and/or majority ethnic group. They see rich people with expensive, extravagant things and want them, but might not realize these are only symbols of wealth and not actual wealth.    I don’t know if you keep up with hip-hop at all, but they’re entirely too many stories of young rappers who came from nothing and blow all they’re money on exotic cars, gold chains, and women instead of investing it. These would be classic ‘guns and butter situations, wouldn’t you say?

Absolutely, but there should be only one investment a person coming from nothing should make and that is to the total destruction of the system that keeps the rest behind. The race shouldn’t be who gets to the top, but who destroys it when they get there.  Unfortunately, in this country, lately, when someone from the working class steps into class privilege and power, getting there all along on the backs of their brothers and sisters, the repayment is either a spit in the face to those left behind or worse, charity.  We need role models that unite the working class around the world and know where they came from and aren’t attached and affected by symbols of the rich.

Before we chastise these “agents” of the wealthy class in Hollywood and the music industry, we need to wake each other up first to our shared culture that is deeply rooted in a rich man’s ideals. A culture that makes idols out of people because of trivial skills.

In your book, you state that you grew in New York’s punk and squatter scenes during the eighties.  Every youth counter-culture that has come along in the 20^th century (No.1, youth culture wasn’t really defined until the advent of ‘rock n roll’, and mo.2, there really hasn’t been any youth culture that has compared, socially or politically, to culture & genres of music that were established in the 20^th century, i.e. rock music, pop art, flower power, punk, hip-hop, disco, etc) takes some sort of flack from the establishment for “negatively engorging the youth.” Now that you’re older, do you look back on those days with some sense of fondness, or regret in regards to the drug, violence, and your brother’s eventual o.d. though access of the culture?

I do not like what, where and how I was. There was a lot of wasted potential.  It was not me, it was them.  Today I am more me.

Now for me to regret the drugs and violence I would have to admit that I consciously directed the “individual” that I am today toward those paths and this is just not true. I didn’t have the same mental capacity to analyze my environment as I do today.  My awareness back then, if you can even call it that, was simply mindless responses to my immediate environment, like any animal.  It is well documented in the hard and social sciences that most people just react to their environments as opposed to logically thinking every move through. 

A counter-culture has existed from the moment cultural artifacts popped into the heads of our deep ancestors.  This is how evolution works on culture and moves ideas through the minds of people like echoes in a valley or waves in the sea.  Specifically, this 20^th century youth counter-culture was just another way for radical ideas to challenge established ideas and its syntheses is what it is – waiting for another counter-culture. I agree that these youth movements encourage the youth, maybe negatively, but the encouragement is to go against the sheep mind, to challenge established norms and that is needed if a society is to advance to a higher state of consciousness.  The problem is not with the antithesis to the original culture, but with the direct manipulation by a few to the resulting new ideas that always seem to come back to a herd mind.  

Simple example is punk rock or hip hop. They both came from the streets talking about revolution and rebellion in the beginning and the establishment (the few) has transformed it now as another tool to pacify the masses. Every one of these counter-cultures have not been radical enough to remain radical and change what they intended to change.

I once saw a stand up show where a comic said, “New York is a real melting pot; for Bigots! That kind of popped in my mind when I read the passages in A Rebel Life relating to race and class separation. What kinds of discrimination did you experiences as a person of Greek decent, and what prejudice did you see overall in a city with so many different ethnicities and nationalities?

I never understood how New York was a melting pot.  We were not only divided among the major things like race, nationality, religion and culture, but within our little Greek, Italian or Black neighborhoods we divided ourselves even further.  We had specific blocks gathering together, styles of clothes, music, and even areas of the countries our family came from.  The best was when we were divided within our enclaves along class.  It is insane to see people who have crumbs divide themselves between the more and less crumbs.    

You were briefly in a hardcore band in your teen/young adult years? How big were you into the music aspect of the punk scene back then?

I found a home with the punk rockers when I first ran away from home.  I was an oddball back on the block, for some reason not able to conform to the wannabe gangsters or the hard working school kids.  I knew there was something wrong with it all, but I was too stupid to articulate what the problem was, so punk rock was the perfect place for me. 

As far as hardcore music goes, that heart is not with the musicians or the fans, but with the equals that make up the scene.  The actual music is a byproduct of this gathering.