A: Ya know we went down to Skid Row to pick up a lot of second unit stuff, and skid row in LA has got to be the worst 20 square blocks in America, surreal, like it’s been firebombed, a war zone, nothing but 20 square blocks of tents, filth, stolen bikes and piss. It’s desolate, abandon hope all ye who enter here, and it’s 3 blocks from ivory tower corporate America, the big six banks, some of the biggest law firms in the world, high towers of shiny glass. On the other side is the Arts District, where they don’t allow artists to live because you can’t get a loft for less than 2K a month.
I went in there a lot looking for my stolen bike, even at night I’ve been in there, absolutely surreal, you can taste the violence in the air, electric –
Q: You searched Skid Row for a stolen bike? Were you armed?
A: I’m more dangerous and crazier than anyone in Skid Row, even without a gun, that’s the only reason my DP agreed to go in there and shoot with me, he even told me, “You’re scarier than anyone we’re going to meet.” Even so, you bring that camera out, and it’s a magnifying glass, it’s a prism, it amplifies and intensifies anything it looks at, it’s a gateway to power, we couldn’t shoot anywhere for long without an angry crowd gathering . . . it's disturbing. When I went in in attack mode, rather than artistic mode, I was safe. But the aggression wears off, you leave and you're so dispirited, you want to bathe, or just take a flamethrower to the whole place it's so hopeless.
Saw a news story that all the state and federal money allotted to fix the problem in LA, all got ripped off, it all went to "consultants", "architects" and other big thinkers, who didn't do a f'ing thing, they don't even bother building crap, it all gets spent on emails, and they bill by the hour. Or what little they're building is for $800,000 a unit. Welcome to the new shape of corruption, it's from the educated class, not gangsters or union thugs any more. It's hard to tell if the people who spent the money got kickbacks or they're just so stupid they wasted all of it, either is believable to me. You wonder if they want to keep homelessness a problem in the hopes even more money will be spent and they can rip that off too., they're as bad as the universities or the drug companies. It could be things have just completely bogged down because of COVID, the police force has been slashed because of all this defund the police fury, and if you were a cop, even if you had the manpower, would you want to go bust down a tent and wade into that little petrie dish of hell to put your hands on people who've been living outside for God knows how long? There's like medieval levels of disease on the streets in LA now. Take them off the street and put them where? In prison? They're letting the real criminals out of prison because the prisons are breeding grounds for disease.
I don’t have any direct solution to that. One aspect people ignore is that speculation is driving rents through the roof, that's not all of it but its definitely feeding it. Nobody wants to attack that because these are the people who fund elections, if you own property in LA County you want rents and housing prices to go up, up, up. A lot of the homeless, not all, but a lot, they have jobs, they just can't afford rent.
Another aspect people point out is, “Well, American cities funnel all the homeless to one place, just to keep them contained, and out of sight.” I don’t see how a place like Skid Row could exist in LA if this weren’t at least partially true, but there are tents and homeless all over the city now, in every neighborhood. They say the solution is to split them up in different neighborhoods, give them help --- that might help. No one will say it openly, but nobody wants them in their neighborhood, they depress property values, since I moved downtown, you can’t open your window, even if you’re high up, without hearing some whacked out person raging on the street below and pissing everywhere. What can you do with somebody like that? And there are armies of them now. And let’s not forget: one of these motherfuckers stole my bike, when I catch that son-of-a-bitch, they’re dead, I don’t care how hard they’ve had it.
It’s just so hopeless, just step foot in Skid Row and you’re overwhelmed with the hopelessness and desolation --- I believe some can make it out of there, all the tools anyone needs to turn it around are always right there, anyone who’s willing to learn, to try, but these people have given up. It's built into our system as well, our system is not designed to achieve full employment, a certain amount of unemployment is built into it, "ideally", and it's a pathetic ideal, a real failure of economics, unemployment is like a game of musical chairs, when the music stops someone's always left without a chair, maybe it's the worst workers, the most vulnerable, maybe it's just bad luck, wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong field. The wishful thinking is it's not always the same people and everybody takes turns taking their lumps for the system. It's not always the same people, a certain percentage of it is, but people struggle their way back in for a chair and kick somebody else out on the street. Still that's a lame ass system and unnecessary.
God bless them, there are people in Skid Row trying to help. I don’t know what to do with the great mass of people building up on the bottom, right and left. What I’m proposing macroeconomically would help everyone, it opens room at the top and everyone moves up, without displacing anyone, it’s a bigger pie with less time and effort for all, that’s what technology is supposed to do, so it lifts everyone, it’s a bootstrapping up, a bigger, more powerful engine --- but there’s nothing you can do for somebody once they’ve given up. Maybe they never had a chance to begin with. I do think a lot more people give up, are born unwanted and abandoned, or are just eaten up unnecessarily under this system because it sucks, it’s 20 times more stressful, brutal, dishonest and difficult than it needs to be, like a city where the traffic isn’t managed right, it’s all jammed up. Regardless of any political or economic system that’s just a side effect of technology as well, it alienates us, cuts us off from nature and anything bigger than man. And it's confusing too. I mean, if you put any of us out in the woods we'd be dead in 3 days, but put a very intelligent hunter/gatherer, someone who could live off the land anywhere in the world (where there was still land) and their f'ing brain would short out just trying to process all the things we take for granted to survive.
The anger of our times, anger is a reaction to depression, there's two ways you could look at it, and it's a combination of both giving rise to it. Number one, there's just more and more people whom the country is not a good deal for, or who could get a better deal than what they're getting, that might be the majority by now, it's difficult to measure, there are a lot of variables. They might not be homeless yet, but the threat of homelessness is certainly imaginable to them. Go outside Skid Row, Skid Row is the absolute bottom, but this is a common sight in LA now: you see a woman, in her twenties, emerge from her tent, put on make-up, and head off for work. She looks like anyone you’d meet in a bar or at work, she just can’t afford rent in LA county.
That was actually me in my twenties.
Q: You were a homeless young woman in your twenties?
A: I was homeless by choice for a total of about a year, hitchhiking around the country, thought I was Jack Kerouac or Castaneda or something, totaling about a year, not continuously. I was doing it out of adventure and was on some vision quest, I was spiritually desperate but not down to my last penny yet (that would come later -- total non-event), but you do meet a lot of homeless and everyone else on the outskirts of society, criminals, crazies, perverts, rapists, murderers, free spirits, wanderers, adventurers, pilgrims, everyone.
I did hit the streets involuntarily for about six weeks in New York City, I actually did run out of money, not to live, but to pay rent, plus school debt wiped me out. I was sort of operating without a net at that point in my life, there was no way I was going into further debt to anyone, personal or institutional, after that debacle. I mean, it's kind of a weird set up and we're the first generation's that's been really tagged for it at this price: you have to pay, more and more, exponentially more than past generations, just to be able to work, or get access to most jobs, you'd be better off just doing an unpaid internship or lower level job, to learn the higher job, if that were a gateway to a good job any more, which it's not, but that's how it used to be done. Fuck the baby boomers, they are so completely clueless, they're the ones who sold us down the river to the banks and schools like this, they got college and grad school for relative pennies compared to us, they whored us out to Milton Friedman, that disgusting little lying mealy mouthed pimp.
The schools don't really teach you anything, they're charging more and more just because they can, taking advantage of the information gap/lag, and the people they were skinning were naive students and parents who didn't realize they'd been skinned right away, often for jobs that didn't exist, the market for popular or management level jobs is oversaturated, by definition you don't have 10 managers and one employee, you have 1 manager and ten employees, but some dumb student's going to know that with zero business experience going in? And their parents, even if they're educated, which many aren't, these fucking baby boomers have a 1960's idea of college, when it was dirt cheap. Especially when the schools go to great lengths to cover it up and often lie about it outright? The firms are just using the schools to skim off the cream, the smartest, most institutionalized, but also the ones that are most housebroken/malleable/obedient.
Q: That's what happened to you?
A: Not exactly. I'm doing what I always set out to do, except for like a 10 year gap where I forgot who I was, events got on top of me when I was a kid, but I just figured that shit would be like a day job or a way to raise money along the way, and it wasn't, they skinned me like that when I was still a rookie in business, misrepresenting what the degree was worth, lying about the employment/salary stats in their admissions materials, I never needed any more than a high school degree for any way I've survived or made money. I was already ruined too, in a way, I'd already been forced by life to think for myself, and that's not what they want, they want to shape you to their ends. So they just cost me a lot of time and money, robbed right out of the gate, to the point of non-dischargeable bankruptcy and homelessness, lesson #1 in American business, but they didn't destroy me, I've fought my way back and am on the attack now. But that's any business, you know, if somebody tries to rip you off you see it coming and shut that down, or if they do manage to rip you off you make them pay, that's part of being a good businessman, though really good businessmen usually never let it get that far, they see it coming and don't get in bad situations. If you scope each other out and work with good people you don't have to worry about this, but how is a twenty something kid with no business experience going to know how to do this? They're prey. And it's not just me, generally the schools are an anchor and a bunch of crooks and frauds around my entire generation and younger, it's a terrible unnecessary expense and deal for everyone, if you made money or you got wiped out by it, either way, you didn't need to pay that expense for the most part, it's a generational con from people who paid comparative pennies for college, and huge drag on the economy, just parasitical. I guess it could be worse, I could've signed up for the army and lost my testicles somewhere overseas for no good reason, that's a bigger and worse generational con, so, ya know, put it in perspective.
But the schools, all the way from Trump University to the trades for the working class to the Ivy League, absolutely misrepresent it and profit by it, to the point of consumer fraud, which they are completely insulated from prosecution for, they have no incentive to tell the truth and a multitrillion dollar incentive to lie, as do the banks, because all the loans are government insured for them, but not for the students, unlike almost every other form of debt that debt is nondischargeable in bankruptcy so there's no incentive to make a win/win deal, quite the opposite. 100% of the risk falls on the student, without knowing anything more you already know it's a crooked, rigged deal just from that fact alone. The weaker, inexperienced party gets skinned, it's not just me saying this, Governor Cuomo says it, even my favorite paper, The New York Times says it, the system's been rigged that way, the firms just use the schools as a means to identify people by intelligence, subservience and malleability, but for all but a few jobs you're going to learn what you need to know on the job, not at school, 90% anyway. I didn't really have any respect for anything I'd seen in society either at that point, I guess I blamed society for destroying my father and brother, I got over that, but at the time it was like, "I'll take my chances on the street, anything's better than this." Not that I had a choice at that point.
Even without Covid, assuming we bounce back, even if you can’t conceive of ever being homeless, even if things were OK for most people, which I don't think they are, we've been doing the same thing economically, there hasn't been a real advance, in close to a hundred years. You can’t tell me most people are happy in their jobs. I’ve worked every day, like a slave, since I came back from the wild, I’ve seen everything, high and low, this is not voluntary behavior, this is necessary behavior because we can’t conceive of anything better, or are just too sucked in and downtrodden to try for it any more. At least until now. That's actually something good and something dangerous about us, that we have a creative demon in us, and just sitting still, without improvement or a challenge, that's a form of torture to us, it's not what we were born for, we'll act out, out of pure boredom. So, for both of these reasons, we’re economically depressed/pent up right now and they’re trying to cover that up, deny it, and that’s a terrible thing, you don’t conquer depression until you realize you’re depressed, when you deny it you just make it worse and provoke a violent reaction. Either that or lay down and die from depression, denial is not the answer. This is what the movie's about and my non-fiction too.
Q: You’re speaking metaphorically, saying economic and psychological depression are the same?
A: Not at all. Economic and psychological depression are two sides of a coin. What we’re depressed about is a real thing, which we won’t conquer or cure, until we rouse ourselves from depression.
Q: But the economy recovered before Covid, it was surging -
A: That is willfully ignorant unmitigated bullshit and as whopping a lie as the Iraq War. Built on a house of sand and lies and Covid has just exposed that.
Q: Unemployment was down to pre-crash levels -
A: That is an incredibly misleading statistic even before Covid, the government kept touting and they knew it, there was a massive exodus from the workforce before Covid after the crash, tens of millions of people, those jobs have not come back, and they're trying to say that's completely voluntary/coincidental, because it looks bad politically if the government is clueless to a solution, Trump rode into office on that, he was very much aware of the drop in the participation rate and read it for what it was, played it right, unlike the fucking Dems with their head in the sand in a state of pure denial. You just watch, all of these jobs we've lost to Covid, a lot of them will not come back either. What's happening is a quantum shift in our economy and if we don't adjust to it we're gonna get clobbered, we are being clobbered already actually, Covid and the crash are just exposing the fault lines and instability, they're not the cause. If we do adjust to it, not only will we solve the problem, we'll have a 21st century economy that's a quantum leap better than the one we had before all this crap landed on us.
Right now we're replacing one high paying job, with two part time low paying jobs without benefits, which statistically counts as a rise in employment, but you can see it’s a step back and fudging the numbers. There's also been a massive rise in disability fraud, people who would be counted as unemployed, putting in for false disability, which the government grants, because they know they've got no answer to unemployment. Massive rise in homelessness since the crash, also not counted in unemployment statistics. So the problem is bad, denying it makes it worse, and all these angry crowds on the right and left aren't coming from nowhere, they're only going to get worse unless the underlying problem's solved. This is one of the main reasons Hillary lost, because the real info was not making it through the propaganda mill, even to the policy makers.
Beyond the crash or Covid, if you look at real economic terms, how much an average person makes versus how much it takes to buy a house, a car, get an education, have kids, it’s clear the baby boomers will hand off a worse economy to the future than the one they inherited, no serious person disputes that. It's bad theory producing and enabling bad behavior and a bad result, our entire idea of the way the economy works and is supposed to work, has been corrupted and degraded.
Q: So you're trying to vent that anger with King Saud?
A: Vent? I'd be more likely to put a match to it.
Q: What would that accomplish, except major property damage?
A: Hah, I just saw film of Baltimore, which received almost no national attention, the mini-riot they had there, they were going up and down the street kicking in windshields, in full view of the police, the police didn't do anything, they didn't want to use any force to stop them because the crowd was largely black and they'd just killed a black guy in custody. Put it this way, we ought to stir things up, there's a point to it, but anybody, black or white, touches my car, I will blow them off the hood of it and ask questions later. I love that car. But things could get a lot worse than Baltimore and it won't be black people angry over the latest shooting, it'll be black and white angry because they're unemployed. I say that even after the Floyd riots, racial tension is a spark, but I don't think it would have been anywhere near as bad without all these people, black and white, sitting around unemployed and hopeless, that's like making a dry forest, full of tinderwood, all it needs is a match.
Q: So why stir things up further?
A: If there were no solution, if we had economically maxed out and there was no hope for something better, then you could rightfully put me in jail as just a troublemaker, or somebody up to no good. But there is a solution, and this is what Americans always do, no American worthy of the name is worried when we start getting rowdy in the streets, it’s always the precursor to dramatic and important change, we’re the only country in the world whose revolutions bring something better.
Q: So blood in the streets, so everyone can make more money?
A: How much more money are we talking about?
Q: You tell me.
A: A lot. And it’s not just the money, when you have a dead or congested economy, that means real human suffering and lost opportunity, lost freedom, material suffering and limitation, soul crushing depression, unnecessary drudgery and servitude, so people should be stirred up, we should light a match to us. I actually don't like fighting with people, especially women, but we're suffering from inertia and we've built a certain momentum in the wrong direction, so to get us moving in the right direction you have to light a fire and attack.
Q: What’s the solution, what's the right direction?
A: As I say I can't prove this or answer all the objections without a full length book, but suffice it to say if our system worked to its optimal power we could work half the time for twice the money, rid ourselves of unemployment, and this healthcare question would be a thing of the past, like debating the merits of human sacrifice to make the crops grow. Capitalism can put itself out of business by its very success, its successful conclusion.
Q: You’re a science writer?
A: On the level of perception there's no difference between artistic and scientific perception. There's no trick to anything I'm doing, if you claim to have right vision, there's no trick to either of these, you just see it and write it down. The trick is clearing out your head so you can see, and then being strong enough so that whatever you see doesn't cause you to void yourself or lose it. Or maybe you can lose it too because it's so attractive and beautiful, you get drawn to the flame.
I’m a writer, I can write in either mode, I never thought being merely artistic would be enough, I mean look at that movie The Big Short, my hat is off to those guys because they took a complex subject and didn’t dumb it down. But what difference does it make, it’s just a movie? And that movie is actually optimistic, because most of the people it depicts are smart, those are the smartest people in the country about money and they think we’re doomed. But we’re not, they just can’t conceive of anything else because at the end of the day they’re all about money and nothing else. And Wall Street is actually not even as smart as most of the people in that movie, not even about money, it’s really just blind greed more than anything else feeding on itself. Just this national masturbation we’re having before the golden calf, just utterly for lack of anything better to do, this is how you end up with both a Trump and the Clintons. Media is responsible for that as much as anyone else, making money seem sexy or mysterious, when it’s about as sexy as doing your goddamn taxes or going to an ATM, and it should be about as mysterious, even less so, just absurd, pathetic, we’re still putting up with this shit in the 21st century. We could replace those sons-of-bitches with a well programmed computer and everyone would be better off, safer, more secure, more prosperous, working less for more money, trust me, the economy would not miss a beat, it would leap forward -
Q: Who are those sons-of-bitches?
A: Wall Street, we could replace Wall Street, the finance sector, almost all of it, with a computer, we could reduce them to a bunch of clerks and technicians, with no political power, rather than all of it, almost everything they do can be automated and insulated from human folly and corruption, it’s like having police out there at every red light, and crooked police for that matter, instead of an automated traffic system, what we have now, markets would be safer and more prosperous --
Q: Vive la Revolution –
A: Wait, I want to amend that, blaming Wall Street or the government, or even an ignorant population. Ya’ know who you can really blame, and I’ll accept my full part in it for the failure?
Q: Who?
A: Us. Media. The Intelligentsia. Who is it that really leads change in this country? It’s the writers, it’s the scientists, and this has just been a huge failure of media and the intelligentsia, of our generation, to both perceive, articulate and inspire the American people to anything better. You don’t see me appealing to government, you don’t see me asking for money either really, other than the small amount I need, I appeal to media to get this done, and it can only be done through media. Ya’ know I don’t get too excited or bent out of shape about the Presidency, we haven't had a great, worldchanging President since the last Roosevelt. Look at the people who have most changed our world in that time, I’d say there are five –
Q: Who?
A: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Gloria Steinem, John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. None of them were President, none even held office, you don’t have to in this country, maybe a President can’t have that sort of power any more, we won’t allow it. The 2016 election did not completely surprise me though I didn’t think he’d win, I knew how out of touch the Hillary camp was. Anybody who saw my first movie, Prince of Swine, except maybe the New York Times, could not be surprised by this, if you understood that movie, which most liberal elites did not, any more than they understood the 2016 election, they would have known Hillary was incredibly vulnerable as a candidate, and they wouldn't have played their cards the way they did. The politicians are not the creatives, we're the creatives. And absolutely revolutionary change like that can be created, stirred and brought to fruition by media, we’re more powerful than any President like that.
Q: What revolution is that?
A: The fulfillment of the Keynesian revolution, just as Keynes wrote would happen in our time, and everything else he’s said has come true, he articulated the cure to the Great Depression and he was right, he predicted the rise of the Nazis after the Treaty of Versailles and he was right, and he's right in what he predicted for our time, though we still have to make it come true. Your average person in the street, right or left, would not be able to articulate it, solve it or possibly even know what it's about, beyond an intuitive level, but that's exactly what this is about: the fulfillment of the Keynesian revolution.
Q: Yeah, most people have no idea what that means or who Keynes is.
A: Well, you think maybe they might want to familiarize themselves with it, seeing as how he’s the one who designed our economy, so maybe, given that it’s the overriding issue of our time, and of great national and global importance for the future of the human race, perhaps know who John Maynard Keynes is, so everytime you open your mouth, complete shit does not issue forth from it?
Q: That’s a good argument, why don’t you tell them that, I’m sure that will go over well.
A: You know what I’ve learned performing? People don’t really have to understand it, they feed on your belief, if you believe it’s true that’s what they key on, and they’ll test you, so it would be better for you if it actually is true.
Q: And is it?
A: Fuckin' A right it is. Economics is half art, it's the dismal science -- I mean is psychiatry a science? No, not really. But is it useless or untrue because of that? Some of it is, but I would beware of a person who was psychologically or psychiatrically ignorant. Even if it's not completely a science, 32 million people starved to death in China as a result of stupid ideas in economics, so we have to get it right. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, you tell a story about human nature, and then you make it come true, but the script has to be true in the first place or you can't make it happen. Science always goes haywire when we turn it on ourselves because when we do human emotions come into play, as they do in economics, and then all hell breaks loose. Also, economic theories tend to lie more in what they leave out rather than what they say. You need to be able to perceive the whole all at once to perceive what's important and act on it. That's why you need to be an artist too. I would be very goddamn careful if I were them, I know what lies ahead in this script -
Q: I would be careful if I were you, you know where the leaders of the little party in France ended up?
A: I’ve become a much better director, I think I can direct it.
Q: You think?
A: Well that’s coming for everyone anyway, no amount of wishing it away will make it go away, you either act, rightly, do it before someone holds a gun to your head, take the initiative, or it takes you. They think they can just patronize the growing anger, that it’s ignorant, misdirected and will dissipate. Most of it is, but some of it isn’t, and it won’t dissipate because something very real is giving rise to it, left and right, rich and poor, which they don’t have the answer for, another eight years of nothing and they’ll be cranking up Mr. Sharpie in this country, we’re not there yet, but it has that potential. Hillary is lucky in a way, if she’d won, the level of rage which would have come down on her and Chelsea would have reached Marie Antoinette proportions, but it all landed on Trump instead. I wouldn't be surprised if we rip Joe apart in four years too.