Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - New York After Rent (III of III)

Episode Date: April 30, 2015

Our series concludes with an attempt to examine the suburbanized commodified inner cityscape of New York. Author and activist Sarah Schulman tells us about the Gentrified Mind, plus we hear from one of the first Airbnbers of New York. PLUS  a sneak preview of a new rock musical everyone will soon be talking about. *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called New York After Rent, Part 3. I had my first big break in 2008 and I had a really, I had, there was a crash and all, but I mean, I had the year that I always kind of wanted and had imagined in New York. And commissions were pouring in and I was getting a lot of attention. And I really felt like, okay, okay, I'm here. I'm a New Yorker now. David X is a New York playwright. Well, he's sort of a New York playwright.

But then something funny happened with the economic downturn and all that, which is I started getting much more commissions from out of town. Obviously, you know, I Airbnb'd my flat when I was gone, but I really felt like I was just, you know, floating. Like I'd lost my connection to New York, but I still had a connection to New York because all my bios always said

this playwright is in New York. For the past couple of months, David's been ensconced at a writer's colony in Boston, Massachusetts. But a few weeks ago, he got a call from his agent, who ordered him to get on a bus and go to New York immediately. A Broadway producer wanted to meet with him about a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity. So, David went to New York. The meeting takes place at DBGB's,

which is this Daniel Bouloud restaurant down on the Bowery. And I go in, and it's me and this producer, who shall remain nameless, and this is the weird part, the artistic director of this major non-profit theater in New York and like a downtown one and the long and short of it is they wanted to commission me to do an update of Rent. I kind of prevent my jaw from dropping and I look over at the artistic director

and the artistic director, who's been looking at me, he kind of puts his hand on my knee, very paternally. He's a paternal kind of guy. And he says, here's the scenario. We're moving it from the East Village to Bushwick. That's kind of what we're thinking right now. I mean, obviously we're really open to your input, but the basic layout is that we're moving it from the East Village to Bushwick. That's kind of what we're thinking right now. I mean, obviously we're really open to your input, but the basic layout is that we're moving it

from the East Village to Bushwick. The way he's got this worked out is that the characters are all app developers, but they're all app developers, like who recently graduated from MFA programs. So they make kind of disruptive apps. One of them is a filmmaker who's, and this is the Mark character from the original,

who's trying to do something totally new with Snapchat. The Mimi character is kind of one of those artisanal burlesque types, rather than like a stripper, you know, like one of these people who's been like studying the whole form and stuff like that. And there's one mixologist who's really struggling to remake the whole thing. Most of them are addicted to Adderall.

Then the producer guy jumps in and he says, somebody has actually bought a big warehouse in Bushwick, and they've subdivided half of it as workspaces, and then the other half of it as living spaces. And then they Airbnb out a couple of the other rooms, which lets you bring in more colorful characters, at which point, and I'm really kind of dreading the answer to this, I'm like,

where's the Life Cafe? And the artistic director, without breaking a beat, says, screens. And I'm like, I'm sorry, what? And he's like, screens. Because,'m like, I'm sorry, what? And he's like, screens. Because, you know, like, we're all living online now. That's really where we're connecting, whether we like it or not. And we feel like this is really, also in addition

to sort of bringing Jonathan's message back, this is really a chance to make this theater piece using, like, new tech that will almost be nothing but screens. Like, we can have IMing live live and we can have Venmo. So finally, finally these guys stopped talking and they're just kind of looking at me like waiting for my opinion and I'm like guys, um, AIDS? So then the artistic director hand on my knee again he's like you know I'm just concerned about the relatability

of AIDS to millennials right now and the producer is like how about Ebola so the dinner's over and I say, look, guys, I really appreciate this, and I really appreciate you thinking of me.

It's a lot to take in. So I'm going to have to think about it for a little bit. And they're like, oh, no problem, no problem, no problem. Take your time, take your time, take your time. Just get back to us soon. So we leave, and we shake hands, and I'll tell them I'll get back to them in a week or so. And then I just take this long, lonely walk up Bowery,

and it's about 10 at night on a Sunday, and the city's kind of empty, except for a bunch of NYU kids running here and there. And I walk up to the L, and I'm trying to imagine what the L must have been like in the 80s, and was there counterculture on that L and I get into the L and I'm like is there counterculture on the L now is this counterculture and then it just stops it has just stopped underground and everybody's bitching and moaning and everyone's really annoyed

and there's a lot of sighing and everyone's acting like 80 year olds even though no one on this train is older than like 25 except maybe me and i'm just like fuck fuck fuck i just want to get home i have to get up really early tomorrow morning get back on a bus to go back up to this colony or else you know and like i've got a commission to work on i can't do anything in this fucking train. And I'm thinking to myself, why the fuck didn't I just Uber my way home? And then I'm like, that's it. Our guy, our Mark, the Snapchat guy, right? He's taking the L all the time.

And one day he just can't take it anymore. So he decides to Uber it. And he gets Ebola from the driver of his Uber, who is like patient zero. And that's how the plague comes to Bushwick. It's not about the gentrification of a neighborhood. It's about life in a post-gentrified world. My steps they'll try to retrace And speak to loved ones

I fear I touched my face Now I'll be shunned They'll keep me quarantined I can't go where I choose It's fall I thought it was the flu Uber, I Uber and I Regret, regret

I didn't take the L. Uber, I'm Uber and I regret, regret, he people have died of AIDS in New York City. But when you look at the statistics about the neighborhoods that had the highest AIDS rates, those were the neighborhoods that gentrified the fastest. The West Village, the East Village, Harlem, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, completely gentrified. Sarah Schulman is one of the founders of the Act Up Oral History Project,

a collection of interviews with the survivors of the AIDS coalition to unleash power. It turns out you actually can't decouple the story of AIDS from the story of gentrification in New York. Sarah Schulman witnessed this firsthand in her neighborhood, the East Village. In my building, there was a guy named John Hetwer who died of AIDS. And his apartment went, I don't remember the exact figure, but it was somewhere from $200 to like $800 to $1,200. So somebody would die, and then the next person who moved in would be paying five, six times what that person had been paying.

In New York, AIDS killed thousands of artists and thinkers and creators. And even though gentrification is over, this loss continues to define the city. These were people who came to New York because most of them were refugees from America. They couldn't be gay in their little small towns. Their families did not want them, or they were international refugees,

people who came to New York to have sex, to get away from religion, to make art, to be themselves. And these were oppositional, high-risk personalities. And they created global art ideas, they created political ideas that went around the world. When they died, they were replaced by an entirely different kind of person. Because to be the person who's going to pay the $1,200, replacing the dead person who

paid $200, you have to be a lot more economically functional, which meant you had to be able to participate and cooperate better with the economic system. You would be more likely to have a wealthier family and to be on better terms with that family. You'd be more likely to have relationships with institutions, like to have gone through an MFA program instead of just being an artist. It was a person who was more assimilated

into the power structure with more resources and more allegiances to the power structure. And that's who came in. And a certain kind of social ethic accompanies that. So for example, if you have a neighborhood that's being gentrified, we get told that that means the neighborhood is getting safer. But for the people who live there, it's more dangerous because their homes are now endangered.

So we have this complete flip of point of view where the experiences of the people who live in the neighborhoods are completely erased, and only the experiences of the gentrifiers and their perspectives dominate. It's like people looking in the mirror and thinking it's a window. The other people no longer exist. In many ways, gentrification is simply the latest chapter in the story of New York City immigration. New York City was built by

immigrants and shaped by immigrant experiences and values. But this recent crop of immigrants, the ones who hail from the suburbs, their values, Sarah Schulman believes, are antithetical to cities, especially New York. These people have been raised in suburbanization. So they grew up in really racially stratified, class stratified, privatized living, conventional gender roles, homogenized aesthetics, car culture, all that kind of stuff. And they come to New York City and they don't want to become New Yorkers. They want to interact with other people who are from the same racial and class background. They don't want the urban mix. They don't want urbanity.

That's the basis of the gentrified mind. In her 2012 book, The Gentrification of the Mind, Sarah Schulman argues that the rampant suburbanization and commodification is destroying both New York's physical and spiritual infrastructure. One of the things that I've learned about life by being a New Yorker is that people have contradictions and people make mistakes and there's nuances in behavior. You know, if you grow up in an apartment building, you hear people fucking, you hear people crying, you see people go through drug problems,

you see that people have problems, right? If you walk down the street in New York City, you see that people cry, you see that people are broke. You learn that having problems is part of being a person. You don't have to hide the fact that you're having problems. You don't have to hide the fact that you're having problems. You don't have to hide the fact that you're upset, because all around you are people who are upset. Right? There's like knowledge.

Riding that subway gives you knowledge about the variation of emotionality in human beings. Urbanity teaches us every single second of every single day that other people are different. And that knowledge is crucial for creating new ideas for the future. Okay, so I have one last question. I'm kind of hoping you can maybe describe the kind of art that the gentrified mind makes today.

Yeah, how would you describe it? Well, there's a higher production of banality, and there's a lot of corporate support for banality and there's a corporate investment in the confusion between quality and familiarity. So now those of us who are making work that's actually true, we have to compete with the fake and that's quite difficult. It's not like I had any illusions that making this series about New York and how it's changed since 2008, since Airbnb showed up, would be easy. But I did get kind of nervous, though, when it looked like I actually might have to end this

thing without talking to one of New York's first Airbnbers. Because while I do know a lot of early adopters, artists, writers, creators, who used Airbnb back during the financial crisis. As I said at the beginning of this series, I wanted to find one of the very first Airbnbers. So it was kind of a relief when last week I got an email from TOE listener Olivia Hayes. It was around September 2008. Olivia Hayes found her way to airbedandbreakfast.com via a Craigslist ad that she had posted, looking for an emergency roommate for her way-too-expensive Williamsburg apartment. So this posting is up on Craigslist for the room, and I get an email, and the email is from Airbnb.

And they said, hey, we see that you have a room listed. And they said, you know, we have this new site where you can actually list this space and people can rent it out by like the day or the week or whatever. You should check it out. And so I did. Do you remember what it was about the site that made you decide to sign up? The thing about the site that made me want to invest a little bit of time in was the design of their site. Because you go from Craigslist, which is basically just like a crazy list of links, to this site that actually has some design around it. You know, it seemed like a worthwhile investment. Like, it seemed like a place that people might want to go.

Yeah. Sometimes I do wonder if there is something to the fact that the guys who founded Airbnb have such a serious art school background. But do you recall, Olivia, what people said when you told them about this new, well-designed site back in 2008? I do have memories of telling people about my Airbnb experience, and I got two very distinct reactions. Anybody outside of New York I told thought I was completely insane and definitely thought I was going to get murdered. And then from New Yorkers, I got the reaction that was like, oh, that's rad. You know, yeah, everybody was like, oh, that's a great idea. you have been listening to ben Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called New York After Rent, Part 3. This episode was produced by myself with Celeste Lai,

and it featured Sarah Schulman and Olivia Hayes. David Levine and the musical genius Takstar gave us a peek of that new version of Rent. Let's hope the whole thing gets made one day. Takstar had help from Garrick Neal, Aaron Jayner, and Stephanie Rocio. Special thanks to all of my friends who've been letting me go on and on about this stuff for the past few months, including Rob Walker, who let me use his amazing brain last night as I was finishing this up. And a special, extra special thanks to Sam Greenspan, who was the official rent guru for the series.

Look, man, I'm not ashamed that I know, like, every word to rent. But I think you should be ashamed for having done this whole series and not actually having ever seen Rent. Yeah, but Sam, the title of this thing is New York After Rent. So I think I'm absolved here. And plus, you know, missing out on the original didn't keep me from making my own version. But do you even realize that it's a parody? Really?

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