Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Ignorance
IGNORANCE
non chalantly
Im pissing on your favorite ghandi quotes
watching hope get lost
and get caught between
the calm breeze and chaos
without structure
Im out to play
blind sighted
like ray charles
messing with fake broads
who break hearts
plus more
harassed by laws
I react with an "up yours" (of course)
there is no god
just me the self centered
ill tempered young dirty bastid
feeling no guilt like demastas
it all thrust kill destory the stress
in that badboyish manner
sick as the cancer sticks
I puff for no reason
Im shit out of luck
gassed up
with heavy breathing
but demons in my lungs
are fiending for more
I try to leave them
but they always seem
to reach me when Im bored
so on with another
numb experience
having fun playing dumb
way too far from being serious
chilling with
the silliest affiliates
known for doing risky biz
in some of the busy zones
and Even though
the deeper
part me objects
eye trek on like a star
pretending it aint hard
to cover up
struggling to
flex the brain muscles cause
nowadays nobody want to dig
for that "others" stuff
that undercover love
and oh what a bummer it is
but who gives
when dignity no longer exists
ignorance is bliss
No more mister nice guy
say goodbye to Mr. righteous!!
I know youll miss him dearly
but he needs to get a vice grip
light a spliff get loose
and just do what dummies do
live in a world with no rules
and no second guessing
just charging through
maze walls
with the loose cannon
as the top choice of weapons
bringing more destruction
and less building
throwing curves and spitballs
to avoid any catchy feelings
Theyd rather root for the villain
so I might as well
give em what they want
live by the words of Dogo
and "only see once"
so openly blunt
I abandon anything strategic
shun all procedures
like its death to the chess pieces
then wrap my suffer ring
around my middle finger
and like a poor righteous teacher
pay no attention
to the big picture
with no time to wait
Im shooting from the hip
scoring short term goals
while the long ones fade
Fuck a budget
I put my piggie bank
on a weight-loss program
and like rocky
I just roll with the punches
on the edge
talking like every things'
off the head
with no concept of stop when red
so so def with no stress
I step with finesse
call me hunter s
thomspon stomping on your
best dressed suit
under arrest
still ploughing through
your barricades
ner 2 dares to stare
fear in the face
with no apologies
it be the smooth criminal
nothing could stop me
cause hell..
I'm invincible!!!!!!!!!
Its ignorance because Ive seen the other side
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Rough Draft 1 Word Count: 1845
Wrong or Write
It was hesitation and fear that kept me locked in mom’s basement, driving myself crazy, over analyzing the world around me, so afraid to take leaps and bounds and step on new territory. I was beginning to settle down, slowly growing into the 25 year old man that I was ‘supposed’ to be; mature, responsible, and independent, but in a flash of...I decided to buy the ticket and enjoy the ride. I was keeping a budget holding in my money, playing the safe side, and swearing not to repeat history by becoming my father, a gambler, and a bad budgeter.
I came home feeling invincible again. I took a wheelchair for a spin, started smoking, drinking, and getting back to the reckless habits that I had when I was a teen. I was on the edge and it felt amazing. I understood the psychology of it, or at least had a grasp on the idea of why I was so drawn to the edge of my existence, and why I felt so compelled to do such outrages things. Though despite knowing this all, I still continued to feed my ignorance.
...
Two weeks after i came home from Montreal, my mother came home from her month long trip from the Philippines. She brought back the usual; boxes full of desserts that I will probably never consume, clothes that i will never wear, and other handmade goods that we can’t get here in Canada. Of course, she also came home with a stack load of Photos. Of this large stack of photos, there were only three that spoke to me, so I pulled it out of the deck and kept it with me.
One of the photos was of my god daughter, who had the cutest devilish grin known to man, the second was my mother in a ”you are under arrest, hands on the head”-pose underneath a waterfall, beside a topless mermaid. The third photograph was of a large mama pig, and her babies drinking her milk.
Talk about irony. I look at the photo of my God daughter and think, oh wouldn’t be nice to be that young again? So innocent, where the worst thing that could ever happen to a child spray painting a cop car, is a spank on the bum, and a lecture about what is right and wrong. The pigs in the picture to me, reflected family struggle. Here they all where, these little pigs feeding off their mother. That was a “real” pig. Here in Canada, the culture that I surround myself in, will consider the term pig as a term used to describe an officer in a navy blue uniform who drives around town dunking donuts into a coffee mug from robins while so much is going on. They give the term to the corrupt ones, who aren’t doing their jobs, or making stupid mistakes like barging into an apartment with a false warrant, and realizing that they’ve got the wrong people. The last photo of my mom doing the pose, was very strange to me. She had a gigantic smile on her face, in her speedos. It I guess it’s because im so used to seeing her in more classy shots. In any case, I still things its strange how these photos tie into my encounter with the police or as counter culture members would say, pigs.
Our worlds are so different. In the Philippines, the pigs stink. They wreak. The pigs here are in navy blue uniforms with guns and handcuffs, and a mouthful of rights ready to be recited to the next offender.
The small talk between Gumshoe and I was interrupted by the fresh smell of a Spanish omelette served right to my table. While enjoying my dry tasting meal, I continued on reading the biography of Hunter s Thompson, who upon reading the first fifty pages of his book, became an instant hero. He was an admirable writer, with a wild edge who was beginning to inspire the beast in me to be comfortable about showing itself to the world. By the time that I was finished with my meal, 4 police officers had come into the Nook. They sat at the table directly across from me. Every now and then I would observe their mannerisms while redirecting myself back to Hunter’s biography. I thought nothing of it really. They were talking amongst themselves waiting for their food. I thought nothing of it until of course I made my way to the parking lot, and that’s where it all fell down.
I stepped inside my vehicle, put the book down beside me, and upon doing so, I noticed a pink spray can that been sitting in the passenger seat. Instantly an idea popped into my head. Directly to my left (evil ) hand side was a police cruiser with no one inside, and all I could picture in my head at the point were the facial expressions those officers would make when they came back to their vehicle only to realize that their car had been decorated in pretty pink. Initially, I wanted to paint the whole vehicle pink, but I realized that I didn’t have the time. It was also broad daylight, and the chances of getting spotted were pretty not as slim as I, so I settled for words, and bolted out of there.
No matter how you flip the coin, in this society, painting the words “oink oink!” in pretty pink along the sides of a Police cruiser is deemed as “wrong”. It was the first time I felt that cold steel wrapped around my wrists. They don’t give you much leg room in there. Room number four. Nothing to look at but white walls and a sprinkler, and yourself from the neck down. Ou noticed the simple things, like the little specs on your sin, or how long your toe nails are. I sang and recited poetry, and freestyled about how stupid it was, hoping that they if for some reason they had hidden cameras and a microphone propped inside there somewhere that they would hear me, and scratch their heads wondering what the hell on earth possessed this kid to do such a thing. I noticed that there were some carvings along the door. The worlds “hel me” were carved into it, along with some other words like native killa, and others I couldn’t quite make out.
I admitted to my wrongs. If there wasn’t enough evidence to support the case I would have fought or played mindgames with them, but I was no where close to having enough. I was not prepared to go to war. It was pretty obvious who the vandal was.. Red Honda civic with matching license plate numbers, a toolshed painted from top to bottom, a pink can in the passenger seat... I was caught pink handed. Apparently there was a surveillance camera, and someone had taken down the license plate. I’ve head about scare tactics before, and part of me was sensing this coming on to me. We’re going to take you to remand, we’re going to hold you in custody for as long as get that information. We want you to cough up your story, and we’l leave you alone. I was being threatened to be taken to remand. I don’t know why, but It didn’t phase me. Not until things happen, does it really strike me. I just wanted to go home so I could finish my painting.
They showed me the photos, and so I went against the words of the legal aid, because I felt it was necessary to take responsibility for my actions. Even if it was a lapse in judgement, it was my doing, and playing games wasn’t going to help. You caught me!! I wasn’t proud of getting caught, but it happens. They listened to what I had to say when asked “what compelled you to do such a thing”. I wanted to tell them that it was Hunter’s fault for being so damn inspiring but I had the hint that they wouldn’t view that as a rational answer.
They gave me an opportunity to share anything else.They said to me do you have anything to say for yourself? because “now is your chance”. Those words only influenced one thing, and that was to rap! So I did!...
I used to say fuck money with a passion
Back when there was nothing but drinking, smoking and rapping
Laughing life away like there was no price to pay
For staying out late writing my name out on the train
Never played the game instead I went against it
Raised fist and all splashing war paint on walls
Breaking laws with a smile, mamas lost child
Who used to run wild with a low profile
Playing at my own risk paying no mind to the mileage
Living like I was next on Gods’s soon to die list
But oh how it changes how shit rearranges
How clear and present dangers suddenly seem safer
Forced into a corner
Taking orders chasing paper
Thinking to myself how much I really hate to
Go to school getting so confused about what to do
Its like go to class kiss ass or say fuck the rules
But son, its easier said than done
When we live within a system that runs on funds
Its the reason why those stuck up kids deal drugs
And the reasons why sometimes we have to leave the ones we love
Work hard, get rewarded thats just the way jobs are kid
You can’t be an artist if you don’t know how to market
Pardon me for telling you all this shit
But you can’t discard the facts because that’s just the way it is.
It goes eat, sleep, work stress, go to school go into debt
Pay it off until your dead.
He asked me if I just came up with that right now? Or did you write that before. I said I wrote it before. He said that’s intelligence! I don’t know what the hell you call what you just did, but take my advice son, and stick to doing that, not spray painting cop cars. You’ve got a better chance of doing something with your life if you stick to that. He said were going to do some paper work, and then you’ll be out of here as soon as possible. I think the fact that I made their job easy, by knowing what I did wrong, and coming in there giving them something they’ve heard of in their life changed their perceptions of who was locked in their cell. “ Do you need anything, would you like some water, would you like to use the washroom? Instantly, i could feel this sense of respect.
Before I left, I shook his hand, thanked him. Went home, sat on my wheelchair, inserted a blank paper in to my typewriter and followed his advice, sticking to what I was good at, writing.
It was hesitation and fear that kept me locked in mom’s basement, driving myself crazy, over analyzing the world around me, so afraid to take leaps and bounds and step on new territory. I was beginning to settle down, slowly growing into the 25 year old man that I was ‘supposed’ to be; mature, responsible, and independent, but in a flash of...I decided to buy the ticket and enjoy the ride. I was keeping a budget holding in my money, playing the safe side, and swearing not to repeat history by becoming my father, a gambler, and a bad budgeter.
I came home feeling invincible again. I took a wheelchair for a spin, started smoking, drinking, and getting back to the reckless habits that I had when I was a teen. I was on the edge and it felt amazing. I understood the psychology of it, or at least had a grasp on the idea of why I was so drawn to the edge of my existence, and why I felt so compelled to do such outrages things. Though despite knowing this all, I still continued to feed my ignorance.
...
Two weeks after i came home from Montreal, my mother came home from her month long trip from the Philippines. She brought back the usual; boxes full of desserts that I will probably never consume, clothes that i will never wear, and other handmade goods that we can’t get here in Canada. Of course, she also came home with a stack load of Photos. Of this large stack of photos, there were only three that spoke to me, so I pulled it out of the deck and kept it with me.
One of the photos was of my god daughter, who had the cutest devilish grin known to man, the second was my mother in a ”you are under arrest, hands on the head”-pose underneath a waterfall, beside a topless mermaid. The third photograph was of a large mama pig, and her babies drinking her milk.
Talk about irony. I look at the photo of my God daughter and think, oh wouldn’t be nice to be that young again? So innocent, where the worst thing that could ever happen to a child spray painting a cop car, is a spank on the bum, and a lecture about what is right and wrong. The pigs in the picture to me, reflected family struggle. Here they all where, these little pigs feeding off their mother. That was a “real” pig. Here in Canada, the culture that I surround myself in, will consider the term pig as a term used to describe an officer in a navy blue uniform who drives around town dunking donuts into a coffee mug from robins while so much is going on. They give the term to the corrupt ones, who aren’t doing their jobs, or making stupid mistakes like barging into an apartment with a false warrant, and realizing that they’ve got the wrong people. The last photo of my mom doing the pose, was very strange to me. She had a gigantic smile on her face, in her speedos. It I guess it’s because im so used to seeing her in more classy shots. In any case, I still things its strange how these photos tie into my encounter with the police or as counter culture members would say, pigs.
Our worlds are so different. In the Philippines, the pigs stink. They wreak. The pigs here are in navy blue uniforms with guns and handcuffs, and a mouthful of rights ready to be recited to the next offender.
The small talk between Gumshoe and I was interrupted by the fresh smell of a Spanish omelette served right to my table. While enjoying my dry tasting meal, I continued on reading the biography of Hunter s Thompson, who upon reading the first fifty pages of his book, became an instant hero. He was an admirable writer, with a wild edge who was beginning to inspire the beast in me to be comfortable about showing itself to the world. By the time that I was finished with my meal, 4 police officers had come into the Nook. They sat at the table directly across from me. Every now and then I would observe their mannerisms while redirecting myself back to Hunter’s biography. I thought nothing of it really. They were talking amongst themselves waiting for their food. I thought nothing of it until of course I made my way to the parking lot, and that’s where it all fell down.
I stepped inside my vehicle, put the book down beside me, and upon doing so, I noticed a pink spray can that been sitting in the passenger seat. Instantly an idea popped into my head. Directly to my left (evil ) hand side was a police cruiser with no one inside, and all I could picture in my head at the point were the facial expressions those officers would make when they came back to their vehicle only to realize that their car had been decorated in pretty pink. Initially, I wanted to paint the whole vehicle pink, but I realized that I didn’t have the time. It was also broad daylight, and the chances of getting spotted were pretty not as slim as I, so I settled for words, and bolted out of there.
No matter how you flip the coin, in this society, painting the words “oink oink!” in pretty pink along the sides of a Police cruiser is deemed as “wrong”. It was the first time I felt that cold steel wrapped around my wrists. They don’t give you much leg room in there. Room number four. Nothing to look at but white walls and a sprinkler, and yourself from the neck down. Ou noticed the simple things, like the little specs on your sin, or how long your toe nails are. I sang and recited poetry, and freestyled about how stupid it was, hoping that they if for some reason they had hidden cameras and a microphone propped inside there somewhere that they would hear me, and scratch their heads wondering what the hell on earth possessed this kid to do such a thing. I noticed that there were some carvings along the door. The worlds “hel me” were carved into it, along with some other words like native killa, and others I couldn’t quite make out.
I admitted to my wrongs. If there wasn’t enough evidence to support the case I would have fought or played mindgames with them, but I was no where close to having enough. I was not prepared to go to war. It was pretty obvious who the vandal was.. Red Honda civic with matching license plate numbers, a toolshed painted from top to bottom, a pink can in the passenger seat... I was caught pink handed. Apparently there was a surveillance camera, and someone had taken down the license plate. I’ve head about scare tactics before, and part of me was sensing this coming on to me. We’re going to take you to remand, we’re going to hold you in custody for as long as get that information. We want you to cough up your story, and we’l leave you alone. I was being threatened to be taken to remand. I don’t know why, but It didn’t phase me. Not until things happen, does it really strike me. I just wanted to go home so I could finish my painting.
They showed me the photos, and so I went against the words of the legal aid, because I felt it was necessary to take responsibility for my actions. Even if it was a lapse in judgement, it was my doing, and playing games wasn’t going to help. You caught me!! I wasn’t proud of getting caught, but it happens. They listened to what I had to say when asked “what compelled you to do such a thing”. I wanted to tell them that it was Hunter’s fault for being so damn inspiring but I had the hint that they wouldn’t view that as a rational answer.
They gave me an opportunity to share anything else.They said to me do you have anything to say for yourself? because “now is your chance”. Those words only influenced one thing, and that was to rap! So I did!...
I used to say fuck money with a passion
Back when there was nothing but drinking, smoking and rapping
Laughing life away like there was no price to pay
For staying out late writing my name out on the train
Never played the game instead I went against it
Raised fist and all splashing war paint on walls
Breaking laws with a smile, mamas lost child
Who used to run wild with a low profile
Playing at my own risk paying no mind to the mileage
Living like I was next on Gods’s soon to die list
But oh how it changes how shit rearranges
How clear and present dangers suddenly seem safer
Forced into a corner
Taking orders chasing paper
Thinking to myself how much I really hate to
Go to school getting so confused about what to do
Its like go to class kiss ass or say fuck the rules
But son, its easier said than done
When we live within a system that runs on funds
Its the reason why those stuck up kids deal drugs
And the reasons why sometimes we have to leave the ones we love
Work hard, get rewarded thats just the way jobs are kid
You can’t be an artist if you don’t know how to market
Pardon me for telling you all this shit
But you can’t discard the facts because that’s just the way it is.
It goes eat, sleep, work stress, go to school go into debt
Pay it off until your dead.
He asked me if I just came up with that right now? Or did you write that before. I said I wrote it before. He said that’s intelligence! I don’t know what the hell you call what you just did, but take my advice son, and stick to doing that, not spray painting cop cars. You’ve got a better chance of doing something with your life if you stick to that. He said were going to do some paper work, and then you’ll be out of here as soon as possible. I think the fact that I made their job easy, by knowing what I did wrong, and coming in there giving them something they’ve heard of in their life changed their perceptions of who was locked in their cell. “ Do you need anything, would you like some water, would you like to use the washroom? Instantly, i could feel this sense of respect.
Before I left, I shook his hand, thanked him. Went home, sat on my wheelchair, inserted a blank paper in to my typewriter and followed his advice, sticking to what I was good at, writing.
Friday, July 31, 2009
historee
the elements of hip hop go beyond the dance
to the streets where artists take a chance
in the bronx where young men on the go
paint trains and walls like picasso
graffiti is what they call their art
and its here where they get their start
now we are today in order to induct to the rappers hall of fame
its just a few of the rappers who ever made rap the life and fame
it didnt start with the sugar hill gang
it didnt start with kurtis blow
it didnt start with flash or the furious five
you could take it from I know
were going back to the roots where it all began
at radio stations all over the land
with jocko hot rod and monteyhue
djs who rap like djs do
with names like hatter and dr. jive
in the 50's and 60's keeping rap alive
just a step for our tradition
where rap will take on a social mission
rap gives kids a whole new way
to express themselves and sometimes pabe
you might have told that you were no good
but with rap you were the king of the neighborhood
that person who use to see on tv
was the worlds greatest rapper muhammaed ali
in the days when he was cassius clay
was the first national rapper in the u.s.a
he's goiing around saying hes the championship fighter
but we meets me he'll fall twenty pounds lighter
he thinks hes the real heavyweight champ
but after im finished hell just be a tramp
now im not saying this jsut to be funny
but im fightying earny cause he needs the money
I decided to let him make a little bread
but the catch is i must whoop his ass
now i understand he wants to stand toe to toe
and whip me trade blow for blow
but if hes hip hell take a dip
because I plan to bust his lip
bambataa was always a music man
a record colelctor who as a dj jammed
now he saw a new idea
so use stand and prowl in his career
to put the bronx in a music trance
and move from violence to zulu dance
and so it became hip to hop
in the land known planet rock
where gangs use to fight in the street everyday
now they began to compete in a different way
as the djs music make the house shake
the dancers would begin to break
some electric boogie to move like toys
others would spin! and became b-boys
i think hip hpo is being in control of your body
thats the whole art of it
to the streets where artists take a chance
in the bronx where young men on the go
paint trains and walls like picasso
graffiti is what they call their art
and its here where they get their start
now we are today in order to induct to the rappers hall of fame
its just a few of the rappers who ever made rap the life and fame
it didnt start with the sugar hill gang
it didnt start with kurtis blow
it didnt start with flash or the furious five
you could take it from I know
were going back to the roots where it all began
at radio stations all over the land
with jocko hot rod and monteyhue
djs who rap like djs do
with names like hatter and dr. jive
in the 50's and 60's keeping rap alive
just a step for our tradition
where rap will take on a social mission
rap gives kids a whole new way
to express themselves and sometimes pabe
you might have told that you were no good
but with rap you were the king of the neighborhood
that person who use to see on tv
was the worlds greatest rapper muhammaed ali
in the days when he was cassius clay
was the first national rapper in the u.s.a
he's goiing around saying hes the championship fighter
but we meets me he'll fall twenty pounds lighter
he thinks hes the real heavyweight champ
but after im finished hell just be a tramp
now im not saying this jsut to be funny
but im fightying earny cause he needs the money
I decided to let him make a little bread
but the catch is i must whoop his ass
now i understand he wants to stand toe to toe
and whip me trade blow for blow
but if hes hip hell take a dip
because I plan to bust his lip
bambataa was always a music man
a record colelctor who as a dj jammed
now he saw a new idea
so use stand and prowl in his career
to put the bronx in a music trance
and move from violence to zulu dance
and so it became hip to hop
in the land known planet rock
where gangs use to fight in the street everyday
now they began to compete in a different way
as the djs music make the house shake
the dancers would begin to break
some electric boogie to move like toys
others would spin! and became b-boys
i think hip hpo is being in control of your body
thats the whole art of it
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Rest Well Lola
Bill Withers - Grandma's Hands
=================================================
(Verse)
Em
Grandma's hands
Em
Clapped in church on Sunday morning
Em
Grandma's hands
Em A
Played a tambourine so well
Em
Grandma's hands
Used to issue out a warning
Em A G
She'd say, "Billy don't you run so fast
A G
Might fall on a piece of glass
A G
"Might be snakes there in that grass"
Em
Grandma's hands
(Verse)
Grandma's hands
Soothed a local unwed mother
Grandma's hands
Used to ache sometimes and swell
Grandma's hands
Used to lift her face and tell her,
"Baby, Grandma understands
That you really love that man
Put yourself in Jesus hands"
Grandma's hands
(Verse)
Grandma's hands
Used to hand me piece of candy
Grandma's hands
Picked me up each time I fell
Grandma's hands
Boy, they really came in handy
She'd say, "Matty don' you whip that boy
What you want to spank him for?
He didn' drop no apple core"
But I don't have Grandma anymore
A G
If I get to Heaven I'll look for
Em
Grandma's hands
=================================================
(Verse)
Em
Grandma's hands
Em
Clapped in church on Sunday morning
Em
Grandma's hands
Em A
Played a tambourine so well
Em
Grandma's hands
Used to issue out a warning
Em A G
She'd say, "Billy don't you run so fast
A G
Might fall on a piece of glass
A G
"Might be snakes there in that grass"
Em
Grandma's hands
(Verse)
Grandma's hands
Soothed a local unwed mother
Grandma's hands
Used to ache sometimes and swell
Grandma's hands
Used to lift her face and tell her,
"Baby, Grandma understands
That you really love that man
Put yourself in Jesus hands"
Grandma's hands
(Verse)
Grandma's hands
Used to hand me piece of candy
Grandma's hands
Picked me up each time I fell
Grandma's hands
Boy, they really came in handy
She'd say, "Matty don' you whip that boy
What you want to spank him for?
He didn' drop no apple core"
But I don't have Grandma anymore
A G
If I get to Heaven I'll look for
Em
Grandma's hands
Friday, July 17, 2009
Don't Let me Be Misunderstood, I'm feeling good because of Nina (No biters Please)
its just begun
its just begun
Im having sextets with jazz
horny for the brass
getting my woodwinds blown
while taking drags from the sax
tapping on toms
same time Im strumming strings
shooting bullets over drums
call me the bb gun king
I give a so what to what you think
get this through your system
different heads do different things
and me I ride the coltrane of thought
to many places and spaces
racking in more miles than davis
having daydreams
of being on the mainstream playlist
as the average joe poster boy
for mindful entertainment
fly as donald byrd
I'll take you higher than ripperton
no moanin' like mingus did
Im live sidekicking it
with me and my messengers
manifest viz, embodying that 4 letterword
d.o.p.e
dont believe me?
well check the cd
even steely dan fans
will clap their hands to these three emcees
deeper than my dads love for beegees
something that the blind eye cannot see (like stevie)
try to read me like the eisleys between sheets
and if you get it
my hi hats going off to ya
or anyone down in the lounge
digging doo wop
naa dont let the truth stop
dont let the truth stop
gotta let em know
(yo you gotta let em know)
that theres so much more to hip hop
than just biggie and tupac
yes you got so much you need to learn
but first things first
lets boogiedowndown to the groundwork
scratch the dirt off the surface
and sound the red alert for all the fools
who dont seem to know who kool herc is
no past equals no purpose
so if youre not willing to dig
well then sorry kids you dont deserve this
give it up, learn to groove
pay your dues, or turn it loose
to a generation of more murda mooks? (naaaaa)
iF i WAS YOU Id walk on by like isaac hayes
kick kick back relax
on some billie holiday
fine and mellow
like kirby on the cello
break it down then bring it up with a crescendo
then watch the spot get blown
like the cheeks on gillespie
when I get more animated
than bebop and rocksteady
and funkier mosquitos tweeters (but)
dont let me be misunderstood
im feeling good because of nina
so all praise due to the original
reasons of how we came about
before the digital-age
turned crates to graves
and one takes to one too many
on the ball? yes ya'll
eye keeps rolling mike jelly
morton with more in store
for the foreign listeners
so little kids listen up
get in line and ill be sure
sign a copy of your favorite cd
with a time signature
that goes:
1 for is the boom
2 for the bip
3 for the bap
and four/for something like this
.....
its just begun
Im having sextets with jazz
horny for the brass
getting my woodwinds blown
while taking drags from the sax
tapping on toms
same time Im strumming strings
shooting bullets over drums
call me the bb gun king
I give a so what to what you think
get this through your system
different heads do different things
and me I ride the coltrane of thought
to many places and spaces
racking in more miles than davis
having daydreams
of being on the mainstream playlist
as the average joe poster boy
for mindful entertainment
fly as donald byrd
I'll take you higher than ripperton
no moanin' like mingus did
Im live sidekicking it
with me and my messengers
manifest viz, embodying that 4 letterword
d.o.p.e
dont believe me?
well check the cd
even steely dan fans
will clap their hands to these three emcees
deeper than my dads love for beegees
something that the blind eye cannot see (like stevie)
try to read me like the eisleys between sheets
and if you get it
my hi hats going off to ya
or anyone down in the lounge
digging doo wop
naa dont let the truth stop
dont let the truth stop
gotta let em know
(yo you gotta let em know)
that theres so much more to hip hop
than just biggie and tupac
yes you got so much you need to learn
but first things first
lets boogiedowndown to the groundwork
scratch the dirt off the surface
and sound the red alert for all the fools
who dont seem to know who kool herc is
no past equals no purpose
so if youre not willing to dig
well then sorry kids you dont deserve this
give it up, learn to groove
pay your dues, or turn it loose
to a generation of more murda mooks? (naaaaa)
iF i WAS YOU Id walk on by like isaac hayes
kick kick back relax
on some billie holiday
fine and mellow
like kirby on the cello
break it down then bring it up with a crescendo
then watch the spot get blown
like the cheeks on gillespie
when I get more animated
than bebop and rocksteady
and funkier mosquitos tweeters (but)
dont let me be misunderstood
im feeling good because of nina
so all praise due to the original
reasons of how we came about
before the digital-age
turned crates to graves
and one takes to one too many
on the ball? yes ya'll
eye keeps rolling mike jelly
morton with more in store
for the foreign listeners
so little kids listen up
get in line and ill be sure
sign a copy of your favorite cd
with a time signature
that goes:
1 for is the boom
2 for the bip
3 for the bap
and four/for something like this
.....
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Dream
I had a dream that I went to vancouver to perform to a sold out show with my comrades, but was restricted in what songs to perform. I had a dream that my old graphic design students were there too, and they were all in to see beyonce? unfortunately their show was happening at the same time my performance was.. those graphic design students weren't all that welcoming either, I felt at home on the other side, but I still felt like I was restricted..
the night before I was running around the city not sure where to go. My indecisions led to closed doors, unecessary drinking, and more ill thoughts..i stopped at cafe 22 to write about my night, and honestly It was the best thing ever..it was peaceful..
it seems that ive lost directoin in life..and maybe thats the influence this free-range "relationship" (if thats what you want to call it).has on me. Freedom is a scary thing as I am coming to realize. but it can be more enjoyable at times.
I relate it to fine arts vs graphic design, where in fine arts, we can splash paint around and make a mess, and be able to say "thats art!", whereas in design, theres a plan, theres structure, theres do's and donts, theres direction.. With this 'relationships' (i dont know what to call it, because she doesn't want a label, which I totally understand),
maybe its me? wanting to hold something forever, and why wouldnt I want that...it seems like it would be the nicest thing ever, but thats not reality either..we are long passed the days of fixed courting...we can choose to come and go as we please..which in a way is an easy way out, it shoes lack of commitment.. its like..well if this doesn't work, I'll just go the next one, and the next one, and the next one...it just aint worth it to jump from one to the next..
it would be nice to have someone in the same circle too, so then I dont feel like I have to go out of myself to please someone..it cant be love if im leaving my circle..
I must stay within the boundaries of my own self love in order to rightfully share..thats how I'll know if they're right for me.
So for now, Im taking back some eggs, and holding them..Im going to stick around and try to enjoy this one day at a time, but if theres more downs than ups...im out, and sharing my eggs with someone who will appreciate it far more..
but im there yet, she deserves a fair chance. but if she plays with me...she gets cut off completely..I hate players, but I wont fight.. karma will get them back.. I only hope for the best.
one day a time..
learning to love
the night before I was running around the city not sure where to go. My indecisions led to closed doors, unecessary drinking, and more ill thoughts..i stopped at cafe 22 to write about my night, and honestly It was the best thing ever..it was peaceful..
it seems that ive lost directoin in life..and maybe thats the influence this free-range "relationship" (if thats what you want to call it).has on me. Freedom is a scary thing as I am coming to realize. but it can be more enjoyable at times.
I relate it to fine arts vs graphic design, where in fine arts, we can splash paint around and make a mess, and be able to say "thats art!", whereas in design, theres a plan, theres structure, theres do's and donts, theres direction.. With this 'relationships' (i dont know what to call it, because she doesn't want a label, which I totally understand),
maybe its me? wanting to hold something forever, and why wouldnt I want that...it seems like it would be the nicest thing ever, but thats not reality either..we are long passed the days of fixed courting...we can choose to come and go as we please..which in a way is an easy way out, it shoes lack of commitment.. its like..well if this doesn't work, I'll just go the next one, and the next one, and the next one...it just aint worth it to jump from one to the next..
it would be nice to have someone in the same circle too, so then I dont feel like I have to go out of myself to please someone..it cant be love if im leaving my circle..
I must stay within the boundaries of my own self love in order to rightfully share..thats how I'll know if they're right for me.
So for now, Im taking back some eggs, and holding them..Im going to stick around and try to enjoy this one day at a time, but if theres more downs than ups...im out, and sharing my eggs with someone who will appreciate it far more..
but im there yet, she deserves a fair chance. but if she plays with me...she gets cut off completely..I hate players, but I wont fight.. karma will get them back.. I only hope for the best.
one day a time..
learning to love
Monday, June 29, 2009
Eating Healthy
A French epicurean once said, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." But can eating certain foods make you smarter, happier, or more able to constructively respond to stress? Could junk food lead to a junk attitude? Connections are being made all the time between the foods we eat and the way we feel, think, and act.
Did you know, for instance, that depression and aggression have been linked to diets that are high in harmful fats and low in beneficial fruits and veggies? Or that eating fish and seafood may reduce the risks of developing dementia and Alzheimer's disease? Or that tea may bring on a calm yet alert state of mind?
Memory, alertness, and mood can all be impacted by your nutritional choices. And while intelligence and mental functions are complex and involve many bodily systems and processes, there are a few key nutrients that could help to boost your cerebral stamina.
Foods to boost your brain power
Antioxidants: Foods and supplements containing antioxidants (e.g., phytochemicals, catechins) could boost your brain health and longevity. Darkly coloured vegetables and fruits contain phytochemicals (blueberries, in particular), and green tea is packed with catechins.
Omega-3 fatty acids: Omega-3 fatty acids found in many kinds of seafood, including salmon, halibut, and scallops, have been linked to nerve cell regeneration and reduced brain inflammation.
B vitamins: B is for brain, that's for sure. The B family of vitamins is a rich source of food for the nervous system. The messages our brain sends back and forth between our nerves depend on B-complex vitamins, especially folic acid, vitamin B6, and choline. Finding foods full of B-complex vitamins isn't too hard. Folic acid can be found in dark greens, including spinach, asparagus, romaine lettuce, and turnip or mustard greens. Loads of beans contain folic acid, too. Try black, garbanzo, or pinto for a folic acid feast. Crack an egg for choline: egg yolks contain this B-vitamin in abundance. Other sources include soybeans, peanut butter, potatoes, and whole-wheat bread.
Iron: Iron helps our blood to supply oxygen to our body. Deficiencies in iron have been associated with ADHD, learning disabilities, and lowered IQ. It stands to reason, then, that our reasoning skills could benefit from foods that contain iron. Find iron in foods like spinach, blackstrap molasses, lentils, tofu, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts.
Vitamin E: Some stave off mental decline with a daily crossword or Sudoku puzzle. Foods with vitamin E could keep you sharp, too! Vitamin E, especially taken along with vitamin C, has been linked to reduced cognitive decline with aging. Take note of vitamin-E-rich foods: mustard and turnip greens, spinach, and broccoli. And if green is not your colour, you can pop sunflower seeds, almonds, or olives for a dose of vitamin E.
Amy Toffelmire
Did you know, for instance, that depression and aggression have been linked to diets that are high in harmful fats and low in beneficial fruits and veggies? Or that eating fish and seafood may reduce the risks of developing dementia and Alzheimer's disease? Or that tea may bring on a calm yet alert state of mind?
Memory, alertness, and mood can all be impacted by your nutritional choices. And while intelligence and mental functions are complex and involve many bodily systems and processes, there are a few key nutrients that could help to boost your cerebral stamina.
Foods to boost your brain power
Antioxidants: Foods and supplements containing antioxidants (e.g., phytochemicals, catechins) could boost your brain health and longevity. Darkly coloured vegetables and fruits contain phytochemicals (blueberries, in particular), and green tea is packed with catechins.
Omega-3 fatty acids: Omega-3 fatty acids found in many kinds of seafood, including salmon, halibut, and scallops, have been linked to nerve cell regeneration and reduced brain inflammation.
B vitamins: B is for brain, that's for sure. The B family of vitamins is a rich source of food for the nervous system. The messages our brain sends back and forth between our nerves depend on B-complex vitamins, especially folic acid, vitamin B6, and choline. Finding foods full of B-complex vitamins isn't too hard. Folic acid can be found in dark greens, including spinach, asparagus, romaine lettuce, and turnip or mustard greens. Loads of beans contain folic acid, too. Try black, garbanzo, or pinto for a folic acid feast. Crack an egg for choline: egg yolks contain this B-vitamin in abundance. Other sources include soybeans, peanut butter, potatoes, and whole-wheat bread.
Iron: Iron helps our blood to supply oxygen to our body. Deficiencies in iron have been associated with ADHD, learning disabilities, and lowered IQ. It stands to reason, then, that our reasoning skills could benefit from foods that contain iron. Find iron in foods like spinach, blackstrap molasses, lentils, tofu, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts.
Vitamin E: Some stave off mental decline with a daily crossword or Sudoku puzzle. Foods with vitamin E could keep you sharp, too! Vitamin E, especially taken along with vitamin C, has been linked to reduced cognitive decline with aging. Take note of vitamin-E-rich foods: mustard and turnip greens, spinach, and broccoli. And if green is not your colour, you can pop sunflower seeds, almonds, or olives for a dose of vitamin E.
Amy Toffelmire
Sunday, June 28, 2009
FOREIGN MYNDSTATE
Foreign MYNDSTATE
like third to first
on foreign turf
I search for work
within the dirtpile
early bird style wide awake
with no time to wait
on the move
with no excuses
going through hell
to find paradise
knowing that sacrifice is crucial
MYNDSTATE stays neutreal
playing it smart
trying not be fooled
by the illusion
of those loopholes where
attention draws away
from moves that must be made
fat joints got my fresh brain off point
like a rusty blade
now televisions telling me to sit calm
catering to only what my dick wants
oh and its hard
rolling on the side
that society spits on
as a pawn in the game
trying to maintain his aim
strange one becomes the change
that Ghandi would love to see
keeping fit
excercising thee abililty to be
deeply immersed in this curse slash gift
losing touch with friends
just to add some more gems onto the tracklist
nereo is not your average
labrat on the run in the labryinth
like dad always gambling
losing cash quick
eFF that shit
I can handle things
with self managment
when Ill be asking that
man in the mirror
what is craftmanship?!?
if you cant set aside time
to practice it
the fact is
you might have all the tools
to make the music
but its useless
if you dont how to use it
so MOVE (lets do this!)
MYNDSTATE
MYNDSTATE
lets brush the dust away
get that hard earn meal
and heal these hunger pains
MYNDSTATE
MYNDSTATE
yo there aint no time to waste
lets get it right
get it done
just dont be late now
MYNDSTATE
MYNSTTATE
practice till perfected
push hard with that
third world work ethic
gotta get it
before its gone
wordbond
master self
to master all
like garry kasperov
MYNDSTATE
stays strong
MYNDSTATE
STAY STRONG
with no thought
of backing down
I just do my job like pacquio
assuming each round
could be the last round ever
with my best efforts forward
I'll be sharpening my swords up
but never for no shortcut
I just respect whats more tough
experiencing what no textbook could teach me
life lessons that
precede the power of the pc
my mind be far from being
one with those weaklings
who need cheat sheets
to acheive deeper meaning
meanining what?
meaning In theory
only through real live application
will I really see things clearly
still not every closed door
is worth a sneak preview
so I practice foresight
to know when and where to refuse
like neo with the red and blue pill
only I could choose
whhich life more real for me
but time is precious so
I got use it well you see
I got big plans for my fam
but if my fam fails
screw plan B
Ill go back to helping myself
by setting myself free
from pressures that bind
like the dity devils who lie in aims
of robbing me blind of precious time
when disconnected
answer might seem too hard to find
but the anwers to all problems
are always deep within my mind
MYNDSTATE
MYNDSTATE
lets brush the dust away
get that hard earn meal
and heal these hunger pains
MYNDSTATE
MYNDSTATE
yo there aint no time to waste
lets get it right
get it done
just dont be late now
MYNDSTATE
MYNSTTATE
practice till perfected
push hard with that
third world work ethic
gotta get it
before its gone
wordbond
master self
to master all
like garry kasperov
MYNDSTATE
stays strong
MYNDSTATE
STAY STRONG
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
ART SMARTS
Chapter 1. Introduction
Published by the Society for Disability Arts and Culture
As we began working on this book, one of the artists we interviewed told us, “What I wish I’d had when I started out was an instruction manual, something that told me all about the art world and what to expect. I want somebody who’s going to start feeding me information about how all this really works, because it’s not written down anywhere. There are lots of books on the business of being an artist, and there are courses and different entrepreneur kinds of things you can do to establish yourself, but that doesn’t really tell you the ins and outs of how the art world works.”
This book is our attempt to “feed” some information to you, as emerging artists with disabilities, and to your network of friends and supporters. Twelve artists with disabilities share what they’ve learned and are still learning on their journeys as artists. They struggle with the barriers that face all artists (like lack of financial support), as well as the ones that are particular to artists with disabilities, including lack of physical access to art institutions, lack of opportunities for less formal learning modes such as mentoring, and lack of skills and opportunities for marketing their art. If you are pursuing a career as an artist, or just want to explore your creative side and could use some pointers to help you along, then we made this manual for you.
We are the Society for Disability Arts and Culture (S4DAC), established in 1998. S4DAC was originally created to produce an international festival of disability arts, which came to be known as the kickstART! Celebration of Disability Arts and Culture, held in Vancouver in August 2001. (See Appendix A for more details about S4DAC and the kickstART! Celebration.)
With that very inspiring celebration behind us, this handbook is a next step in developing a network of Canadian artists with disabilities. We urge both individual artists with disabilities and arts groups that involve people with disabilities to use the contact sheet at the back of this handbook to help us to build a database of creative Canadians with disabilities and their allies.
S4DAC was very grateful to receive funding for this step from Human Resources Development Canada’s Social Development Partnerships Program. We’ve tried to make the information accessible and “real” by presenting it in the words of people who have been there. You don’t need to read this book in any particular order, but we recommend that you start with the artist profiles in Chapter Two before reading any other chapter, since we identify the artists throughout the rest of the handbook only by their first names. You can also request an audio tape or a paper copy of the handbook by contacting the S4DAC office.
We wanted to represent a broad range of disabilities and geographic locations, although we realized we couldn’t possibly include everything. This handbook is not intended to be comprehensive, nor to include the details of all artistic disciplines and all disabilities. Because much of what an aspiring artist needs to know will vary from region to region, we have provided a resource list to point you toward organizations that can provide information specific to your province or municipality. These resources, listed in Appendix B, provide you with information on arts organizations, funding sources and opportunities for learning. We encourage you to do further research, to use telephone listings to contact local arts organizations and to check out the World Wide Web for more resources if you have access to a computer.
Each artist will be unique in their disability, in how they identify themselves, and in how their disability affects their art-making. As you read this manual, you will see both commonalities and differences. The material draws from the life experiences of artists at different places and different levels of “success”; each has a different definition of what success is. You’ll find lots to think about here in relation to your own form of art.
Artistic expression is a personal thing and as the authors of this handbook we wanted to reflect that with a personal style of writing. Most of the text is derived from interviews with artists, and we’ve done our best to introduce topics and weave together the artists’ statements in an informal way. Because of that, we thought a word about who we are would be appropriate.
Chapter 7. The Business of Being an Artist
If you want to have a career as an artist – or even if you’re just working on a single project – there may be some business that you’ll need to take care of, or make sure someone else is taking care of for you.
Business doesn’t fit with the romantic notion of being an artist, and many artists don’t like this aspect of their careers. However, it’s rare that an artist’s work is seen by the public without some paperwork and organizing beforehand. Success as an artist is a mixture of talent, luck, connections and, for many, skill at writing grant applications. It’s often a case of preparation meeting opportunity.
Given the many erroneous assumptions about people with disabilities, it may take a lot more persistence for you to get an “in” to the art world. You might need extra help, and you might also find yourself having to educate agents or curators.
A complete description of the business related to all the artistic disciplines would take volumes, so we’ve let our twelve artists suggest some general areas for you to consider. In addition, there may be short business courses you can take at community arts councils, community centres or art schools in your area.
First of all, if you want to be hired as a performer, or to sell your art, or to communicate an idea to the public through your artwork, then you have to let people know what you’re doing. This is called “networking” or “promotion.” If promoting, or “selling,” yourself is hard for you to do, then you may eventually find someone to do that for you. Musicians and other performers often have “agents” who promote them and find them jobs, or “gigs.” Until you’re getting enough work to pay an agent a fee, though, you’ll probably have to do the promotion yourself. A good media kit, with photos of you, a description of who you are and what you do, and a list of things you’ve done in the past, along with articles about you or reviews by critics if you have any, will do much of the talking for you.
Finding a gallery to represent you is a good route to follow if you’re a visual artist but the gallery will, of course, take a “commission” (a percentage of the price) for any sales they make of your work. Like a media kit for the performer, a portfolio that has photos of your work is essential for the visual artist.
it’s rare that an artist’s work is seen by the public without some paperwork and organizing beforehand. success as an artist is a mixture of talent, luck, connections and, for many, skill at writing grant applications.
One of the things we can impart to people is that music is not a very glamorous business. There are a lot of people who are working away and they’re not millionaires. Don’t have any illusions; it’s hard work without a lot of money.
In the first part of things you’ve got to have talent. You’ve got to have your business chops together, too, to be successful. Making sure you’re ready to go. One of the things I see amongst people with disabilities is a lack of self-confidence. You can’t have that in this business and succeed. You’ve got to know that you’re good and not be ashamed of telling people that you’re good; without being arrogant. You’ve got to work hard and practice.
As long as you know what you’re doing, you can play with anybody. Surround yourself with talent. Network: find other people who can help you, who you can bounce ideas off. Get together and do some writing. Put an ad in the paper saying, “I need a song-writing partner.” There are thousands of people out there who want to do that kind of stuff.
I will be doing an application for a grant from PromoFACT [a source of funds, sponsored by the MuchMoreMusic television station,to stimulate the production of electronic press kits (EPKs) and websites for Canadian independent artists and record labels; see resources in Appendix B] to get my website together and my electronic media kit, because that seems to be where it’s going. No one sends press kits in the mail anymore. I don’t have a website, and it’s becoming evident to me that I need one. I’ve applied for grants before and gotten turned down. You get turned down more than you get them, but you have to keep plugging away, especially in my line of work.
joe
I have a press kit and resum̩ Рnot very long, but professional. You send twenty and get maybe three replies. I go on a mission to find the right person to ask for money. I call everywhere and I knock on every door, just to find money.
I found a sponsor to give me money to go to England to work with CandoCo – someone with a big business who actually wanted to support an athlete. I take care of the sponsors who give me money. I send them emails, and I keep in contact – that’s very, very important.
france
When I first started on with Yuk Yuk’s, they were reluctant to send me out to do shows, because they were locked into that thinking, “How will he get there, shouldn’t somebody travel with him?” It took quite a few months for me to finally get to where I was able to say, “Look, you give me the gig, and I’ll get there!” It was important to do that, to prove to them that I could do it, I would do it, all I needed was the opportunity. That goes for everybody, you know, disabled or otherwise. You’re looking for opportunities to get ahead and get things going.
Promotion never ends. You promote yourself every time you step out on stage. You’re only as good as your last show. To tell the truth, every time I step out there I say to myself , “You’ve got to be focused on the show and you’ve got to do the best job possible.” You start doing a bad job, and people forget you pretty quickly. You have to keep asking yourself what you can do to sell yourself to someone else, to a bigger market, how can you win – what can you do to win more people, another show, another group.
I have a media kit with an 8x10 glossy photo, pamphlets, etc., but the best thing is doing a good show, and then it’s word of mouth from there.
Early in my comedy career, I’d arrive in Calgary or in Winnipeg or Halifax, and I would call local radio stations, newspapers, television stations, and I would say, “Hi, my name is Gord Paynter. I’m a stand-up comic, I’m blind, and I was coming out here to Halifax and some of my friends suggested I give you a call.” Well, none of my friends may have suggested that, but it was self-promotion. And if you call ten stations, maybe one says, “Yeah we’d like to do an interview.” That was crucial, that was essential, because it helps you build up your resumé and your bio and your references and things like that, and it helps promote you across the country. Now more often the media calls me.
If events are going on in your community it’s good to be involved – to show up or to offer your assistance as MC or whatever. The visibility factor is very positive.
gord
the important thing is to be clear on what you want to get across and who your audience is
I’m learning to get really good at effective “pitching,” to knock cold on someone’s door and give them my stuff.
Ironically, though my wheels have nothing to do with my voice, my wheels can prevent me from getting auditions for mainstream acting roles in television and film. That’s why I need to concentrate on voiceover work. Even though they can’t see my wheelchair, I’m hoping it will become part of the people connection, so people will remember me: “Oh, that’s interesting – a voice artist, he’s in a wheelchair, blah blah blah.” I want to use my physicality as my selling point, as part of my uniqueness to try and appeal to someone’s perhaps “politically correct” sensitivity. To me, it’s whatever I can use! With voice, it’s all about what it sounds like, but if there are three or four voice actors that sound the same, they’ll go with the guy who’s the friendliest to work with, or the fastest; there’s all different ways of hiring. So I don’t just want to drop things off with someone else, I want the person who’s going to be the one to hire me for the job to be able to meet me. If I can meet someone and be friendly and demonstrate that I’m able to do the job quickly and efficiently, and perhaps they want to be socially responsible and employ diversity, I want to have that opportunity as well.
As an actor, there are some very important tools, the first being the voice and the body – you have to keep those two in shape and then the promotion and media tools come into play.The “head shot” is really important. The key thing in a resumé is to list everything you’ve done related to the work and be proud of it and be able to speak about everything. It doesn’t matter how big or small it is. A big resumé isn’t a better resumé. And a resumé is not going to get you work; it shows that you’ve done work. Your talents will get you work.
When an actor has enough of a body of work, in television and film, at least, the next step is a video reel. For that you take all the work you’ve done on TV, and you cut and paste it together on a videotape to demonstrate how you look and how you sound. So I’ve got that, and all the casting directors have that, and if somebody were to say, “Well, what have you done?”, I can just give them that. As a voice artist I also have a demo CD. On that I have commercials – there are four different styles of commercial and they’re back to back. These are mock-up ads, and they have four different voice styles. Then I have four narration slots, with four different voice styles: nature narration; training (like what you’d hear on a corporate training tape); history; and public service announcement.
I talked to other voice artists and found out what they did and then I took a workshop on voiceover. I’ve learned there is no one way to do all this stuff. You can take two different workshops on two different weekends and get two very different ways to do it. It’s all individual and the important thing is to be clear on what you want to get across and who your audience is.
Another promotion thing I’ve done is send out postcards; on one side of the card it has my photo and the name of my agent, and my resumé is on the other side. I sent it out when I switched agents.
I’m resigned to the fact that the world of television does not want people with disabilities playing their roles. So my focus becomes just, go out there, do plays, do shows, create my own work and be so damn good that people cannot help but hire me!
james
I have my flyer, and this is how I promote myself. And also by doing performances. That’s another way. That’s the major way. And a comments book. So far word of mouth has provided enough work.
rasika
I’m not able to promote myself in the same way that other people can, because I can’t get out there in the same way. I make sure I meet lots of people. Probably the number one thing in self-promotion is networking and talking to people, so they know what you’re doing. So to that end I took a SEARCH course here in Vancouver, through the Vancouver Alliance for Arts and Culture. It’s not just for visual artists; it’s for photographers and dancers and musicians and everybody. One of the components in the Alliance is networking, so they network with each other and other people and have seminars. It’s a great cultural group of people, which is nice.
I try to involve myself in community things that are going on, to allow me access to other people who are artists. I’m putting together a promotional package. I have my paintings on slides. I have a scanner, so I can put them in digital format. I have taken black-and-white photos of myself, and I have them on file. I have my resumé and my artist’s statements ready. I make sure, any time I put up paintings, that they’ve been professionally hung so that they look good, and they look professionally done, and they have proper tags on them that say who I am. I submit proposals to exhibitions as they come up and if I feel they’re appropriate. And I volunteer where I feel the event that’s happening is important to art and therefore to me.
Networking is such that you never know who’s going to introduce you to somebody who’s goong to introduce you to somebody who’s going to make a difference. So it’s everybody. It’s other artists, and not just other visual artists, it’s musicians and people who are writers. It’s a wide variety of people.
Published by the Society for Disability Arts and Culture
As we began working on this book, one of the artists we interviewed told us, “What I wish I’d had when I started out was an instruction manual, something that told me all about the art world and what to expect. I want somebody who’s going to start feeding me information about how all this really works, because it’s not written down anywhere. There are lots of books on the business of being an artist, and there are courses and different entrepreneur kinds of things you can do to establish yourself, but that doesn’t really tell you the ins and outs of how the art world works.”
This book is our attempt to “feed” some information to you, as emerging artists with disabilities, and to your network of friends and supporters. Twelve artists with disabilities share what they’ve learned and are still learning on their journeys as artists. They struggle with the barriers that face all artists (like lack of financial support), as well as the ones that are particular to artists with disabilities, including lack of physical access to art institutions, lack of opportunities for less formal learning modes such as mentoring, and lack of skills and opportunities for marketing their art. If you are pursuing a career as an artist, or just want to explore your creative side and could use some pointers to help you along, then we made this manual for you.
We are the Society for Disability Arts and Culture (S4DAC), established in 1998. S4DAC was originally created to produce an international festival of disability arts, which came to be known as the kickstART! Celebration of Disability Arts and Culture, held in Vancouver in August 2001. (See Appendix A for more details about S4DAC and the kickstART! Celebration.)
With that very inspiring celebration behind us, this handbook is a next step in developing a network of Canadian artists with disabilities. We urge both individual artists with disabilities and arts groups that involve people with disabilities to use the contact sheet at the back of this handbook to help us to build a database of creative Canadians with disabilities and their allies.
S4DAC was very grateful to receive funding for this step from Human Resources Development Canada’s Social Development Partnerships Program. We’ve tried to make the information accessible and “real” by presenting it in the words of people who have been there. You don’t need to read this book in any particular order, but we recommend that you start with the artist profiles in Chapter Two before reading any other chapter, since we identify the artists throughout the rest of the handbook only by their first names. You can also request an audio tape or a paper copy of the handbook by contacting the S4DAC office.
We wanted to represent a broad range of disabilities and geographic locations, although we realized we couldn’t possibly include everything. This handbook is not intended to be comprehensive, nor to include the details of all artistic disciplines and all disabilities. Because much of what an aspiring artist needs to know will vary from region to region, we have provided a resource list to point you toward organizations that can provide information specific to your province or municipality. These resources, listed in Appendix B, provide you with information on arts organizations, funding sources and opportunities for learning. We encourage you to do further research, to use telephone listings to contact local arts organizations and to check out the World Wide Web for more resources if you have access to a computer.
Each artist will be unique in their disability, in how they identify themselves, and in how their disability affects their art-making. As you read this manual, you will see both commonalities and differences. The material draws from the life experiences of artists at different places and different levels of “success”; each has a different definition of what success is. You’ll find lots to think about here in relation to your own form of art.
Artistic expression is a personal thing and as the authors of this handbook we wanted to reflect that with a personal style of writing. Most of the text is derived from interviews with artists, and we’ve done our best to introduce topics and weave together the artists’ statements in an informal way. Because of that, we thought a word about who we are would be appropriate.
Chapter 7. The Business of Being an Artist
If you want to have a career as an artist – or even if you’re just working on a single project – there may be some business that you’ll need to take care of, or make sure someone else is taking care of for you.
Business doesn’t fit with the romantic notion of being an artist, and many artists don’t like this aspect of their careers. However, it’s rare that an artist’s work is seen by the public without some paperwork and organizing beforehand. Success as an artist is a mixture of talent, luck, connections and, for many, skill at writing grant applications. It’s often a case of preparation meeting opportunity.
Given the many erroneous assumptions about people with disabilities, it may take a lot more persistence for you to get an “in” to the art world. You might need extra help, and you might also find yourself having to educate agents or curators.
A complete description of the business related to all the artistic disciplines would take volumes, so we’ve let our twelve artists suggest some general areas for you to consider. In addition, there may be short business courses you can take at community arts councils, community centres or art schools in your area.
First of all, if you want to be hired as a performer, or to sell your art, or to communicate an idea to the public through your artwork, then you have to let people know what you’re doing. This is called “networking” or “promotion.” If promoting, or “selling,” yourself is hard for you to do, then you may eventually find someone to do that for you. Musicians and other performers often have “agents” who promote them and find them jobs, or “gigs.” Until you’re getting enough work to pay an agent a fee, though, you’ll probably have to do the promotion yourself. A good media kit, with photos of you, a description of who you are and what you do, and a list of things you’ve done in the past, along with articles about you or reviews by critics if you have any, will do much of the talking for you.
Finding a gallery to represent you is a good route to follow if you’re a visual artist but the gallery will, of course, take a “commission” (a percentage of the price) for any sales they make of your work. Like a media kit for the performer, a portfolio that has photos of your work is essential for the visual artist.
it’s rare that an artist’s work is seen by the public without some paperwork and organizing beforehand. success as an artist is a mixture of talent, luck, connections and, for many, skill at writing grant applications.
One of the things we can impart to people is that music is not a very glamorous business. There are a lot of people who are working away and they’re not millionaires. Don’t have any illusions; it’s hard work without a lot of money.
In the first part of things you’ve got to have talent. You’ve got to have your business chops together, too, to be successful. Making sure you’re ready to go. One of the things I see amongst people with disabilities is a lack of self-confidence. You can’t have that in this business and succeed. You’ve got to know that you’re good and not be ashamed of telling people that you’re good; without being arrogant. You’ve got to work hard and practice.
As long as you know what you’re doing, you can play with anybody. Surround yourself with talent. Network: find other people who can help you, who you can bounce ideas off. Get together and do some writing. Put an ad in the paper saying, “I need a song-writing partner.” There are thousands of people out there who want to do that kind of stuff.
I will be doing an application for a grant from PromoFACT [a source of funds, sponsored by the MuchMoreMusic television station,to stimulate the production of electronic press kits (EPKs) and websites for Canadian independent artists and record labels; see resources in Appendix B] to get my website together and my electronic media kit, because that seems to be where it’s going. No one sends press kits in the mail anymore. I don’t have a website, and it’s becoming evident to me that I need one. I’ve applied for grants before and gotten turned down. You get turned down more than you get them, but you have to keep plugging away, especially in my line of work.
joe
I have a press kit and resum̩ Рnot very long, but professional. You send twenty and get maybe three replies. I go on a mission to find the right person to ask for money. I call everywhere and I knock on every door, just to find money.
I found a sponsor to give me money to go to England to work with CandoCo – someone with a big business who actually wanted to support an athlete. I take care of the sponsors who give me money. I send them emails, and I keep in contact – that’s very, very important.
france
When I first started on with Yuk Yuk’s, they were reluctant to send me out to do shows, because they were locked into that thinking, “How will he get there, shouldn’t somebody travel with him?” It took quite a few months for me to finally get to where I was able to say, “Look, you give me the gig, and I’ll get there!” It was important to do that, to prove to them that I could do it, I would do it, all I needed was the opportunity. That goes for everybody, you know, disabled or otherwise. You’re looking for opportunities to get ahead and get things going.
Promotion never ends. You promote yourself every time you step out on stage. You’re only as good as your last show. To tell the truth, every time I step out there I say to myself , “You’ve got to be focused on the show and you’ve got to do the best job possible.” You start doing a bad job, and people forget you pretty quickly. You have to keep asking yourself what you can do to sell yourself to someone else, to a bigger market, how can you win – what can you do to win more people, another show, another group.
I have a media kit with an 8x10 glossy photo, pamphlets, etc., but the best thing is doing a good show, and then it’s word of mouth from there.
Early in my comedy career, I’d arrive in Calgary or in Winnipeg or Halifax, and I would call local radio stations, newspapers, television stations, and I would say, “Hi, my name is Gord Paynter. I’m a stand-up comic, I’m blind, and I was coming out here to Halifax and some of my friends suggested I give you a call.” Well, none of my friends may have suggested that, but it was self-promotion. And if you call ten stations, maybe one says, “Yeah we’d like to do an interview.” That was crucial, that was essential, because it helps you build up your resumé and your bio and your references and things like that, and it helps promote you across the country. Now more often the media calls me.
If events are going on in your community it’s good to be involved – to show up or to offer your assistance as MC or whatever. The visibility factor is very positive.
gord
the important thing is to be clear on what you want to get across and who your audience is
I’m learning to get really good at effective “pitching,” to knock cold on someone’s door and give them my stuff.
Ironically, though my wheels have nothing to do with my voice, my wheels can prevent me from getting auditions for mainstream acting roles in television and film. That’s why I need to concentrate on voiceover work. Even though they can’t see my wheelchair, I’m hoping it will become part of the people connection, so people will remember me: “Oh, that’s interesting – a voice artist, he’s in a wheelchair, blah blah blah.” I want to use my physicality as my selling point, as part of my uniqueness to try and appeal to someone’s perhaps “politically correct” sensitivity. To me, it’s whatever I can use! With voice, it’s all about what it sounds like, but if there are three or four voice actors that sound the same, they’ll go with the guy who’s the friendliest to work with, or the fastest; there’s all different ways of hiring. So I don’t just want to drop things off with someone else, I want the person who’s going to be the one to hire me for the job to be able to meet me. If I can meet someone and be friendly and demonstrate that I’m able to do the job quickly and efficiently, and perhaps they want to be socially responsible and employ diversity, I want to have that opportunity as well.
As an actor, there are some very important tools, the first being the voice and the body – you have to keep those two in shape and then the promotion and media tools come into play.The “head shot” is really important. The key thing in a resumé is to list everything you’ve done related to the work and be proud of it and be able to speak about everything. It doesn’t matter how big or small it is. A big resumé isn’t a better resumé. And a resumé is not going to get you work; it shows that you’ve done work. Your talents will get you work.
When an actor has enough of a body of work, in television and film, at least, the next step is a video reel. For that you take all the work you’ve done on TV, and you cut and paste it together on a videotape to demonstrate how you look and how you sound. So I’ve got that, and all the casting directors have that, and if somebody were to say, “Well, what have you done?”, I can just give them that. As a voice artist I also have a demo CD. On that I have commercials – there are four different styles of commercial and they’re back to back. These are mock-up ads, and they have four different voice styles. Then I have four narration slots, with four different voice styles: nature narration; training (like what you’d hear on a corporate training tape); history; and public service announcement.
I talked to other voice artists and found out what they did and then I took a workshop on voiceover. I’ve learned there is no one way to do all this stuff. You can take two different workshops on two different weekends and get two very different ways to do it. It’s all individual and the important thing is to be clear on what you want to get across and who your audience is.
Another promotion thing I’ve done is send out postcards; on one side of the card it has my photo and the name of my agent, and my resumé is on the other side. I sent it out when I switched agents.
I’m resigned to the fact that the world of television does not want people with disabilities playing their roles. So my focus becomes just, go out there, do plays, do shows, create my own work and be so damn good that people cannot help but hire me!
james
I have my flyer, and this is how I promote myself. And also by doing performances. That’s another way. That’s the major way. And a comments book. So far word of mouth has provided enough work.
rasika
I’m not able to promote myself in the same way that other people can, because I can’t get out there in the same way. I make sure I meet lots of people. Probably the number one thing in self-promotion is networking and talking to people, so they know what you’re doing. So to that end I took a SEARCH course here in Vancouver, through the Vancouver Alliance for Arts and Culture. It’s not just for visual artists; it’s for photographers and dancers and musicians and everybody. One of the components in the Alliance is networking, so they network with each other and other people and have seminars. It’s a great cultural group of people, which is nice.
I try to involve myself in community things that are going on, to allow me access to other people who are artists. I’m putting together a promotional package. I have my paintings on slides. I have a scanner, so I can put them in digital format. I have taken black-and-white photos of myself, and I have them on file. I have my resumé and my artist’s statements ready. I make sure, any time I put up paintings, that they’ve been professionally hung so that they look good, and they look professionally done, and they have proper tags on them that say who I am. I submit proposals to exhibitions as they come up and if I feel they’re appropriate. And I volunteer where I feel the event that’s happening is important to art and therefore to me.
Networking is such that you never know who’s going to introduce you to somebody who’s goong to introduce you to somebody who’s going to make a difference. So it’s everybody. It’s other artists, and not just other visual artists, it’s musicians and people who are writers. It’s a wide variety of people.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
big box vs. independent
The Case Against Sprawl
(from the book "Slam-Dunking Wal-Mart")
by Al Norman
© 1999; Sprawl-Busters.
"Becoming the world's largest retailer was never
considered. And being big has never been the goal."--Wal-Mart, 1996 Annual Report
America is drowning in retail glut--and we wouldn't have it any other way. As the Discount Store News proclaimed in 1994: "Welcome to the United States of Wal-Mart." Despite what they say, being big has always been the goal at Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart claims that more than 93 million Americans shop at Wal-Mart every week. Sales at Wal-Mart for the year ending February, 1999 totalled $137 billion. According to economist Tom Muller, the average American household spends around $1,100 a year at a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart says in 1996 that the average American spent $360 at their stores.
Wal-Mart is the largest seller of cheap underwear in the world. The company boasts that in 1996, it sold 1.13 pairs of underwear for every man, woman and child in America. My family of five did not shop at Wal-Mart in 1996, so I figure that some family out there bought an extra 5.65 pairs of underwear, and my guess is that those underwear are sitting unwrapped in someone's drawer--because they are too embarrassed to admit that they purchased more than their fair share.
As of February, 1999 Wal-Mart operated more than 3,562 "units" in seven countries. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in America, having surpassed General Motors. The company had 910,000 employees as of the start of 1999. Last year, a new Wal-Mart discount store opened every three days, and another 200 stores are planned for this year. It took Home Depot 20 years to open 500 stores, but they plan to open another 500 stores over the next 3 years.
All across America, consumers are making decisions every day that impact the environment they care the most about: that 10 or 15 mile radius that circumscribes most of our daily living. This is our "personal environment". It has more immediacy and relevance to most of us than any other environmental movement today. The personal environment is, after all, where we spend 90% or more of our time. It is the well-worn path to and from work, back and forth from the grocery store, or the shops downtown. Home to mall--and back again. We are acutely sensitive to changes in this environment, and to its degradation. It has more meaning for us than any "checkbook" environmental cause. we can "think globally" about ozone depletion, but there are few causes in our own hometown that allow us to "act locally".
Yes, we want to save the whales. Yes, we want to save old growth forests. But attack our "personal environment"--and watch out! We are the most defensive when it comes to defending our home territory. The construction of land-devouring, windowless hulks of dead architecture in our hometown is like insulting our Mother! How else can you explain hundreds of citizens showing up to testify at a Zoning Board hearing? From Kanawha City, WV to Tijeras, NM, we sit through hour after hour of dry testimony from traffic enginners and hydrologists--all because our home is being attacked, our personal environment is on the line. In many cases, citizen activists have derailed big corporations, or held them at bay for years. The key factor in these confrontations is that we sense that the future of our personal environment, and that of our children, depends on us. It's a matter of home rule. This is one battle where we make a difference.
The massive invasion of overstuffed retail stores is a hands-on environmental, economic and social issue, which has provoked a widespread citizen response. Retail redundancy, which accelerated in the 1980s, but became grotesque in the 1990s, has created thousands of accidental activists--people who never planned on fighting off a multinational corporation--determined to stop a problem too swollen to hide anymore. We can hear the sound of land being chewed up by the yellow corporate caterpillars. There, squatting on the edge of our community, we can see the problem. We pass it on our way to and from work. This is not the distantly understood destruction of a remote rainforest--this hits where we live. As one woman from Ohio told me: "The first thing we smelled was the burning of trees."
Environmental and land use issues have moved to the forefront of this debate, as citizens pour through zoning by-laws and wetland commission regulations looking for obscure tripwires that could bring down a project. In 1998, Home Depot and Wal-Mart alone built more than 250 stores, or more than 33 million new square feet of retail space in a nation that is already saturated to the bone with plazas and malls. Assuming that each store represents a trade area of at least 40,000 people, more than 10 million Americans will find themselves reading headlines about Home Depot or Wal-Mart in their local newspaper. The massive glut of capricious construction raises serious environmental and economic issues such as:
* the impact of traffic on air quality standards
* the threat to water quality and acquifers
* the mismanagement of stormwater and sewage
* the reduction of wildlife habitat
* the loss of open space and unique natural areas
* the homogenization of rural landscapes
* the expense of costly new infrastructure
* the deterioration of historic commerical centers
* the overdependence on the automobile and superhighways
"Sprawl" is defined by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as "poorly planned, low-density, auto-oriented development that spreads out from the center of communities." It creates that doughnut effect in some cities where acrylic and asphalt suburban shopping malls form a ring around the dead center, where the old downtown sits decaying. Between 1960 and 1975, the state of Pennsylvania lost a total of 3,600,000 acres of farmland. That's like losing a geographic area the size of Pittsburg every six months. At the opening of the Wal-Mart store in Rutland, VT, a man dressed in a neat suit carried a doomsday sign that simply read: THIS IS STUPID!
Here is how the Bank of America, California's largest financial institution, described the impact of sprawl in that state:
Urban job centers have decentralized to the suburbs. New housing tracts have moved even deeper into agricultural and environmentally sensitive areas. Private auto use continues to rise. This acceleration of sprawl has surfaced enormous social, environmental and economic costs, which until now have been hidden, ignored, or quietly borne by society. The burden of these costs is becoming very clear. Businesses suffer from higher costs, a loss in worker productivity, and underutilized investments in older communities.
California's business climate becomes less attractive than surrounding states. Suburban residents pay a heavy price in taxation and automobile expenses, while residents of older cities and suburbs lose access to jobs, social stability, and political power. Agriculture and ecosystems also suffer....We can no longer afford the luxury of sprawl.
Part of the mythology about Sam Walton is that he located stores in smaller towns because his wife Helen did not like the big cities. But I believe that Walton did not want to wrestle with big city developers and saturated markets. Besides, land was cheap in rural America. There were less zoning restrictions--sometimes no zoning at all. Walton sensed that Americans were moving out of the urban core and heading to suburbia. "Our key strategy," Walton wrote, "was simply to put good-sized discount stores into little one-horse towns which everybody else was ignoring...It turned out that the first big lesson we learned was that there was much, much more business out there in small town America than anybody, including me, had ever dreamed of."
But small town America started learning a "big lesson" also--one that took years to sink in: saturated retail markets bring deterioration and decay. With retail sprawl development comes a series of economic and social problems for host communities. Sprawl is often mistaken for economic development, and the people it affects the most are least likely to understand it.
The 10 sins of retail sprawl
* It destroys the economic and environmental value of land
* It encourages an inefficient land-use pattern that is very expensive to serve.
* It fosters redundant competition between local governments, an economic war of tax incentives.
* It forces costly infrastructure development at the edge of towns.
* It causes disinvestment from established core commercial areas.
* It requires the use of public tax support for revitalizing rundown core areas.
* It degrades the visual, aesthetic character of local communities.
* It lowers the value of other commercial and residential property, reducing public revenues.
* It weakens the sense of place and community cohesiveness.
* It masquerades as a form of economic development.
The violation of our personal environment by sprawling retail development leads to an alienation from community, a sense of isolation and disconnectedness. When mall developers created interior spaces to shop, they gave them names like "Village Square", or "The Main Street Shops", hoping to console us for the loss of the real commercial centers they were destroying. In Disneyworld artisans have created an acrylic Main Street facade, where they hand out pins that celebrate "Main Street, USA". These pins have a picture of Mickey Mouse on the front, riding an old-fashioned big-wheel bicycle, tipping his straw boater hat. But stamped on the back of the pin it says: "©Disney Taiwan".
The sprawl corporations are waging a war of indoctrination. They need us as accomplices in the destruction of our own hometowns. In 1997 Home Depot was able to spend $178 million on self-congratulatory advertising. What we ultimately have to do is convince our friends and neighbors that there is a politics of shopping. That is does matter to your hometown where you shop.
The big box corporations lay the blame at our feet. First, Wal-Mart says it needs bigger stores because its customers demand wider aisles. Then it says it needs smaller stores because its supercenters are "too busy and not convenient". Most of what we buy at Wal-Mart are unplanned purchases, and most of these items end up in the landfill anyway. A psychologist might argue that as our lives become emptier, our shelves become fuller. This 'shop till your community drops' mentality is imploding our own hometowns. We see the results, but apparently are not moved by them--even when the evidence is all around us, as 60 Minutes noted:
In Iowa, ten years after Wal-Mart came to the state, nearly half of the men's' and boy's clothing stores, and grocery stores...closed. That's an enormous impact on a state in only ten years.
When Iowa State University Professor Ken Stone examined the sales changes in Iowa small towns from 1983 to 1993, he discovered "a huge shift of sales to larger towns and cities, with substantial amounts captured by mass merchandise stores." Stone estimates that the total number of businesses lost in small towns and rural areas was 7,326 in the decade studied. Iowans spent $425 million more at discount stores, but $153 million less at variety stores, $129 million less at grocery stores, $94 million less at hardware stores, $47 million less at men's and boys apparel stores, and so on. In the 11 store types studied, businesses lost more than $603 million in sales. In this ten year period, Iowa lost:
555 Grocery stores
298 Hardware stores
293 Building Supply Stores
161 Variety Stores
158 Women's Apparel stores
153 Shoe Stores
116 Drug Stores
111 Men's and Boys Apparel store
People have said to me: "When Wal-Mart arrives, they hit the town with the force of 100 new businesses opening at once". The demise of smaller, independent businesses in Iowa suggests that the "retail hurricane" theory is true. Stone reaches a similar conclusion:
The shopping habits of consumers fundamentally change after the introduction of discount mass merchandisers. They purchase much more of their merchandise at mass merchandisers and less at local merchants. The result is the loss of many stores across the state.
According to the International Council of Shopping Centers:
* Discount department stores, conventional department stores, and toy stores are store types where three or fewer companies capture 50% or more of sales.
* The top three building materials and supply stores now control 31% of the market ($32 billion in sales).
* The same with the top three drug stores: 33% of the market ($30 billion in sales).
* Between 1987 and 1992, the number of discount department stores increased annually by an average of +3%, while men's and women's shoes stores dropped an average of -6%, household appliance fell by -3%, and grocery stores, Radio & TV stores, drugstores, building materials stores, apparel stores--all were in the negative column.
The impact of big stores has also been felt in the manufacturing sector. For example, in the apparel industry, America has literally lost its shirt. Between 1973 and 1996, America lost nearly half of its apparel manufacturing jobs. A total of 597,000 jobs were lost during the 23 year period. The same can be said for the shoe industry, or for the pharmacy industry. 90% of the shoes sold in America today are imported. During this same period, discount superstores rose dramatically.
Wal-Mart likes to underplay its market share by using the nation as its trade area. Here's what David Glass, Wal-Mart's President said in the company's 1997 Annual Report:
In the United States, Wal-Mart only holds 7% of a $1.4 trillion retail market. That leaves a tremendous opportunity for future growth. The supermarket industry, amounting to $425 billion a year, is a great opportunity for continued growth. It's almost three times the size of the discount store industry, where Wal-Mart is one of the three retailers that, combined, hold almost 85% of the market. Yet in the grocery segment, the top five players constitute less than 25%.
When Glass says Wal-Mart has a 7% share of the retail pie in America, he's talking about ALL retail sales of any kind, from gasoline to tomatoes, from paperclips to lip-balm. But in the discount store wars, three companies own the field. At the local level, however, where a retail trade area might span only a 20 square mile radius, the impact of one or two big box stores can be devastating to the rest of the retailers. Consider the study done by the San Diego Union-Tribune of the home improvement market in San Diego County. The survey asked consumers where they made their most recent purchase of common items. The results showed Home Depot has an astonishing hold over the county marketplace:
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Home Depot's Share of the Market
Product Most
Recently Purchased Jan-June, '94 Jan-June, '95 Jan- June '96
Garden Care Products 41.5% 46% 51.1%
Hand/Power Tools 42.4% 49.6% 45%
Building Materials 72.2% 70.9% 75%
Interior Paint 43.1% 50% 48%
Exterior Paint 41.8% 43.6% 50%
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Economist Tom Muller estimates that in 1994 Wal-Mart in Arkansas had captured $1.2 billion out of a $4 billion market in department store merchandise sales. "Thus, Wal-Mart had captured 30% of all department store sales." In Mississippi, Wal-Mart sales in 1992 were 23% of all department store sales in the state.
When Wal-Mart says "one stop shopping", you should read that statement very literally. These big corporations want to be the ONLY place you and I shop. It's the Tennessee Ernie Ford theory of retailing: You will owe your soul to the Company store. In 1994, a retail analyst at Management Horizons made this tongue-in-cheek prediction about Wal-Mart:
If Wal-Mart grows in the next eight years as it has in the previous eight,it will control 100% of general merchandise sales in the United States; if it grows in the next 16 years as it has in the previous 16 years, it will control all of the non-auto retailing volume in the United States; if the same growth pattern for the next 24 years is like the previous 24 years, Wal-Mart will control all of the county's Gross Domestic Product.
That may have seemed like a joke in 1994, but Wal-Mart now has more sales than the Gross Domestic Product of Israel, Greece, Ireland and Egypt. A Price Waterhouse report says that by the year 2005 just 10 companies, including Wal-Mart, will control 50% of food store sales.
What's happening here? More money is passing through fewer hands. This suggests that stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot are not the beginning of competition--but the end of competition. According to an International Council of Shopping Centers report in 1998:
Numerous store types that are key elements in U.S. shopping centers are dominated by a small group of retailers in each category that register a third or more of their respective category's total U.S. sales....as fewer firms exercise increasing sales dominance within their respective store types...the pricing power that will accrue to the largest retailers will likely make it difficult for large numbers of new, small operators to take root and thrive...
The fact remains, we are over-built and over-stored. The attitude among the development community is that land is superabundant, and the municipal officials who make the key decisions are all Village Idiots. One of the most prolific Wal-Mart developers in New England calls his limited partnerships "Infinity Properties". Every time these developers come before a Planning or Zoning Board, they make their projects sound like they were written in Lake Wobegon, where all the site plans are good looking, and the economic impacts above average.
The symptoms of retail saturation are everywhere:
* We have more than 4,000 abandoned shopping malls in America.
* We have more shopping centers than high schools.
* We have 20 square feet of retail space for every man, woman and child in America, up from 14.7 s.f. per person in 1986, compared with 2 s.f. per person in Britain.
If you phone City Hall in Toledo, Ohio, they answer by saying: "Toledo, Ohio, An All-American City." The effects of suburban sprawl in Toledo are certainly all-American. When I went for a walk in downtown Toledo, I passed the old Lamson dry goods store: 9 stories of empty retail space. Each floor is the size of a football field. The building served as the home of a Macy's Department store from 1924 to 1984. For the past fourteen years, the store has been empty. The City now owns it, which means the taxpayers of Toledo are paying the freight for its upkeep. Meanwhile, on the edge of the city, Home Depot is building its second huge warehouse store, each only five miles apart. The city actually let Home Depot demolish dozens of apartments to make way for the second Home Depot. A stone's throw away from the Home Depot construction site sits an empty Builder's Square, and across the road, an empty Handy Andy. These are all monuments to the inefficiency of retail sprawl. The strip malls of Toledo have literally stripped downtown Toledo of its people, and its character--at the expense of the all-American taxpayers.
Even the people who produce all this sprawl admit that we have more retail stores than our disposable income can absorb. Here's Wal-Mart's confession in 1996 taken from a court deposition in North Carolina of Tom Seay, at the time Wal-Mart's Vice President for Real Estate:
"We have more shopping center space in the U.S. than is needed. We're in an over-built situation."
It's not as if we haven't been warned about the impacts of sprawl. Nearly 80 years ago, Sinclair Lewis in Main Street warned us about the homogenization of our culture:
Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that is it the completest boredom to wander from one to another....The shops show the same standardized, nationally advertised wares; the newspapers of sections three thousand miles apart have the same 'syndicated features'; the boy in Arkansas displays just such a flamboyant ready-made suit as is found on just such a boy in Delaware, both of them iterate the same slang phrases from the same sporting-pages, and if one of them is in college, and the other is a barber, no one may surmise which is which.
In her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote:
"Everyplace becomes more like every other place, all adding up to Noplace."
Big box retailers are turning America into a continuous landscape of one-story, pre-engineered, windowless metal frame buildings sitting on concrete slab foundations. Such buildings can simply be described as "dead architecture".
The Portable Wal-Mart
As quietly as Wal-Mart tries to slip into a town, sometimes they try to leave just as noiselessly.
"Quite frankly," said Tom Seay, Wal-Mart's former Executive Vice President for Real Estate Construction, "I think the fact that we relocate stores--and we relocate a lot of them--is a well-known fact in the development community..." Just how portable Wal-Mart is, however, is not well known by the shopping public. In their 1998 Annual Report, Wal-Mart featured a short profile of their Real Estate division, under the title: "The Wal-Mart nobody knows." According to the company, Wal-Mart is the "largest owner and manager of retail space in the country."
Like a reptile crawling out of its skin, Wal-Mart has shed hundreds of stores to move onto bigger facilities. Most of these relocations have been in towns where Wal-Mart shuts down a discount store to open up a larger supercenter a few miles, or even blocks, away. "As (Wal-Mart) rolls out new supercenter prototypes," the company explains, "it must also find uses for existing relocated stores after they are closed."
Although the company claims that in 1998 it sold or leased 10 million square feet of what it calls "once-occupied" stores, the February, 1999 list of "available buildings" from Wal-Mart Realty reveals that the amount of buildings on the market at that time was closer to 20 million square feet of empty stores. Based on Wal-Mart's own list, here are some statistics on these empty stores that might surprise you:
* Wal-Mart listed 333 empty buildings as of February, 1999.
* These buildings are spread across 31 states.
* A total of 20.66 million s.f. of empty stores were on the market
* Only 17% (58) of these stores are owned by Wal-Mart, 83% (275) are leased
* Estimating that Wal-Mart has roughly 2,850 U.S. stores open, these additional 333 empty stores meant that 10.5% of the units Wal-Mart owns or leases were "available".
* 15 states had 10 or more empty Wal-Mart stores: Texas - 40 Kentucky - 16 Illinois - 11
Tennessee - 30 Louisiana - 16 New Mexico - 10
Florida - 30 Mississippi - 15 No. Carolina - 10
Georgia - 26 So. Carolina 13 Alabama - 22
Missouri 13 Arkansas - 17 Oklahoma - 12
* The average size of empty Wal-Marts was 62,057s.f.--larger than most other retail buildings in a small community.
* 52 of the empty stores (16%) were larger than 100,000 s.f, with some as large as 134,000 s.f.
* 54 stores (16%) on the February list were marked "new".
This is the portable Wal-Mart company. This is Wal-Mart's moveable feast. Although the company says very few of its stores have failed, many are unprofitable, and dozens of others are simply shut down to make way for supercenters with wider aisles. This makes Wal-Mart the largest producer of empty retail stores in America, if not the world.
Don't expect a long-term relationship with any superstore in your town. Wal-Mart arrives with its bags already packed.
Citizens opposed to sprawl generally cite two major reasons for fighting companies like Wal-Mart or Kmart:
1. Negative impact on the local economy
2. Negative impact on their quality of life
Voodoo Economics: The Wal-Mart Dust Machine
Sam Walton liked to claim that Wal-Mart was the savior of small town America, that his company was creating jobs every place it touched. Here's how he described it in his autobiography:
"Wal-Mart has actually kept quite a number of small towns from becoming practically extinct by offering low prices and saving literally billions of dollars for the people who live there, as well as creating hundreds of thousand of jobs in our stores."
But such claims are a form of voodoo economics. Former developer Townsend Anderson of Vermont, has been quoted as saying:
Sprawl rarely brings about a net increase in economic growth. If there is not real growth, there is simply displacement of economic activity. This triggers a whole cycle of deterioration in older communities...
Companies like Wal-Mart and Home Depot utilize a form of "sprawl-math", which only looks at gross impacts on a community--never of the net effect of their stores. Sprawl-Math is not taught in local school systems. It's a form of developer's calculator that had no minus pad to subtract out jobs lost, or revenues diverted. The real truth about Wal-Mart and Home Depot, and the rest of the sprawl-mathematicians, is that they represent a form of economic displacement, not economic development. I know that Wal-Mart understands their fiscal impact claims are one-dimensional. The best proof I have of that I found in a most unlikely place: Volume 26, Issue 10 of Wal-Mart Today, from October of 1996. This is an internal "associate" newsletter that Wal-Mart says is "your window into our Wal-Mart world". There, in a column called "Wal-Mart Culture", is a quote that should be written on the side of every Wal-Mart superstore in the nation:
"At Wal-Mart, we make dust. Our competitors eat dust."
--Tom Coughlin
Executive Vice President, Operations
Wal-Mart Stores Division
Since 1962, the Wal-Mart Dust Machine has done damage in every state in the country. Companies like Wal-Mart have cannibalized the retail food chain from the Mom and Pops on the bottom, to the mid-level regional chains, to the very top national chains. A recent illustration:
In February of 1998, New England lost another major regional retail chain store. Caldors, the company founded by Cal and Dorothy Bennett in 1951, turned into dust. This was the end of the sales pitch for the 4th. largest retail chain in America. 22,000 workers took home pink slips for their trouble. 145 stores in nine states were put up for lease. After 48 years, and annual sales of $2.49 billion, the going out of business sales at Caldors began. Bargain hunters who long ago moved to other venues, returned one more time to pick over the bones, looking for that last 3-pack of cheap underwear.
The lesson in sprawl-math is inevitable. When you oversupply an area with retail glut, you don't create jobs, you destroy them. Consider the example of the regional chain store Caldor's, which imploded in 1999. Industry analysts say it was expected: Caldor's was losing money to Wal-Mart, had fallen into Chapter 11 territory since 1995, and never recovered. As one news story said: "Wal-Mart and other rivals had choked off Caldor's ability to open stores outside its traditional Northeast territory." The next time some Mayor or Town Councilor starts talking about the jobs that a Wal-Mart or Home Depot will bring to town, remember the jobs lost at Caldor's and Rich's, or the building supply stores Grossmans and Payless Cashways. It would take more than 100 Wal-Mart Supercenters just to break even with the 22,000 jobs that went down with Caldors.
Or consider the case of the small town of Nowata, Oklahoma, (pop. 3,900) is described as hobbled by the closing of a large retail store. The store closed down to move to a larger supercenter 30 miles away. "They were not playing fair," said the President of the local First National Bank. "They came in and ravaged all the small businesses. And when it came to the point where they were not satisfied, they left." The Mayor of Nowata who welcomed the megastore to town, now says: "Wal-Mart has proven this: They're big and they're greedy. They have no compassion for the community or the individual."
[To order "Slam Dunking Wal-Mart" call toll free 1-877-DUNK WAL]
Shop Locally: Independent Businesses vs. Big-Box Stores
Posted by Nina on March 25, 2008
Rhea Becker is a Boston-based journalist and blogs at The Boomer Chronicles, a fantastic site for baby boomers. She employs humor (e.g. “Does this blog make me look fat?”) and other commentary about life on the verge of fifty (check out her five-part series on Aging and Our Senses). She’s written a guest post for Queercents about the demise of the mom and pop shop in America and why we should support local businesses. These are her words…
I’m lucky. Independent businesses are plentiful in my neighborhood of Boston (Jamaica Plain). This enables me to spend my money at a shop owned by an individual rather than continue to stuff the belly of the corporate beast. So instead of shopping at Home Depot or Lowe’s, I shop at the locally owned hardware store. One Saturday morning a few years ago I was out doing my errands when I stopped at the hardware store for a few things. When I got to the register, I realized I had meant to go to my bank first. I didn’t have a cent (nor a credit card) on me. I told the man behind the counter that I would be back to buy my things later. Without missing a beat, he began to ring up my purchases. “You’re in here all the time. Just come back and pay later.” Try that at Home Depot.
I bought my television at the local TV and radio repair shop. I bought my refrigerator at the local appliance shop. Instead of shopping at the chain store KaBloom, I shop at the locally owned flower shop. I eat at one-of –a-kind, local restaurants instead of chains. In fact, my neighborhood is so consciously opposed to chains that we have no Starbucks and no McDonald’s. Imagine that! We are a real anachronism.
It’s true that it’s not easy for some people to patronize local businesses. The prices are almost always higher at independent stores than at big-box competitors, but the experience is worth it to me. I don’t have to drive and use precious fossil fuel to get to these stores, the interaction is more real and humane, and these kinds of shops keep our business district lively and interesting, whereas chains are cold, plastic and predictable. I will continue to shop locally for as long as I can. And I have many friends and neighbors who have made the same pledge.
I am such a big believer in independent businesses that I was quoted in the local paper opposing a sub-shop chain that was going to take a storefront on our main drag. We already had several locally owned sub shops. Why make life hard for these business owners? My independent-business evangelism has even taken the form of a screenplay I’ve written called “Drawing the Line,” which tells the tale of a young man who fights the All-Mart Corporation when it decides to establish a superstore in his little town. Guess what? He wins. I hope the screenplay will one day be made into a film, as its message is timely for the communities across this country (and, now, the world) that are fighting the incursion of giant stores.
I realize that independent businesses and their fans are swimming against a powerful tide of Wal-Marts and Targets. But there’s hope. There are lots of resources online these days that help citizens to organize against Wal-mart and the other big-box stores. There are numerous documentary films on the subject, and books, too. A woman named Stacy Mitchell recently came to my ‘hood to give a talk on the subject of big-box stores vs. independent stores. Her book, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, details the way that these gigantic stores get a foothold in our communities — and it is not by playing fair. Here are a few sites that will help you educate yourself and take action.
WakeUpWalmart.com
BigBoxSwindle.com
Sprawl-Busters.com
WalmartWatch.com
More about Rhea Becker
Rhea Becker is a longtime journalist (People magazine, The Boston Globe and The Boston Phoenix) and was also managing editor of Harvard University’s newspaper. She is the author and creator of The Boomer Chronicles, an irreverent blog for baby boomers, which has been written up in The Boston Globe. She is also an aspiring screenwriter seeking new representation.
In the muckraking tradition of Fast Food Nation, this is a searing indictment of the impact of behemoth retailers. It illuminates a stunning collection of business outrages, government favoritism, environmental damages, hidden economic and societal costs, debunked myths and a rising swell of consumer activism against big-box blight . . . Big-Box Swindle takes mega-retailers to task in convincing fashion. But Mitchell also provides inspiring lessons from places that are turning the tide.”
—John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who included Big-Box Swindle in his Top Ten 2006 list
"This is the ultimate account of the single most important economic trend in our country—the replacement of local businesses, and all they represent, with the big boxes. What Nickel and Dimed did for the Wal-Mart worker, Stacy Mitchell does for the community threatened by mega-retailers."
— Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
(from the book "Slam-Dunking Wal-Mart")
by Al Norman
© 1999; Sprawl-Busters.
"Becoming the world's largest retailer was never
considered. And being big has never been the goal."--Wal-Mart, 1996 Annual Report
America is drowning in retail glut--and we wouldn't have it any other way. As the Discount Store News proclaimed in 1994: "Welcome to the United States of Wal-Mart." Despite what they say, being big has always been the goal at Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart claims that more than 93 million Americans shop at Wal-Mart every week. Sales at Wal-Mart for the year ending February, 1999 totalled $137 billion. According to economist Tom Muller, the average American household spends around $1,100 a year at a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart says in 1996 that the average American spent $360 at their stores.
Wal-Mart is the largest seller of cheap underwear in the world. The company boasts that in 1996, it sold 1.13 pairs of underwear for every man, woman and child in America. My family of five did not shop at Wal-Mart in 1996, so I figure that some family out there bought an extra 5.65 pairs of underwear, and my guess is that those underwear are sitting unwrapped in someone's drawer--because they are too embarrassed to admit that they purchased more than their fair share.
As of February, 1999 Wal-Mart operated more than 3,562 "units" in seven countries. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in America, having surpassed General Motors. The company had 910,000 employees as of the start of 1999. Last year, a new Wal-Mart discount store opened every three days, and another 200 stores are planned for this year. It took Home Depot 20 years to open 500 stores, but they plan to open another 500 stores over the next 3 years.
All across America, consumers are making decisions every day that impact the environment they care the most about: that 10 or 15 mile radius that circumscribes most of our daily living. This is our "personal environment". It has more immediacy and relevance to most of us than any other environmental movement today. The personal environment is, after all, where we spend 90% or more of our time. It is the well-worn path to and from work, back and forth from the grocery store, or the shops downtown. Home to mall--and back again. We are acutely sensitive to changes in this environment, and to its degradation. It has more meaning for us than any "checkbook" environmental cause. we can "think globally" about ozone depletion, but there are few causes in our own hometown that allow us to "act locally".
Yes, we want to save the whales. Yes, we want to save old growth forests. But attack our "personal environment"--and watch out! We are the most defensive when it comes to defending our home territory. The construction of land-devouring, windowless hulks of dead architecture in our hometown is like insulting our Mother! How else can you explain hundreds of citizens showing up to testify at a Zoning Board hearing? From Kanawha City, WV to Tijeras, NM, we sit through hour after hour of dry testimony from traffic enginners and hydrologists--all because our home is being attacked, our personal environment is on the line. In many cases, citizen activists have derailed big corporations, or held them at bay for years. The key factor in these confrontations is that we sense that the future of our personal environment, and that of our children, depends on us. It's a matter of home rule. This is one battle where we make a difference.
The massive invasion of overstuffed retail stores is a hands-on environmental, economic and social issue, which has provoked a widespread citizen response. Retail redundancy, which accelerated in the 1980s, but became grotesque in the 1990s, has created thousands of accidental activists--people who never planned on fighting off a multinational corporation--determined to stop a problem too swollen to hide anymore. We can hear the sound of land being chewed up by the yellow corporate caterpillars. There, squatting on the edge of our community, we can see the problem. We pass it on our way to and from work. This is not the distantly understood destruction of a remote rainforest--this hits where we live. As one woman from Ohio told me: "The first thing we smelled was the burning of trees."
Environmental and land use issues have moved to the forefront of this debate, as citizens pour through zoning by-laws and wetland commission regulations looking for obscure tripwires that could bring down a project. In 1998, Home Depot and Wal-Mart alone built more than 250 stores, or more than 33 million new square feet of retail space in a nation that is already saturated to the bone with plazas and malls. Assuming that each store represents a trade area of at least 40,000 people, more than 10 million Americans will find themselves reading headlines about Home Depot or Wal-Mart in their local newspaper. The massive glut of capricious construction raises serious environmental and economic issues such as:
* the impact of traffic on air quality standards
* the threat to water quality and acquifers
* the mismanagement of stormwater and sewage
* the reduction of wildlife habitat
* the loss of open space and unique natural areas
* the homogenization of rural landscapes
* the expense of costly new infrastructure
* the deterioration of historic commerical centers
* the overdependence on the automobile and superhighways
"Sprawl" is defined by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as "poorly planned, low-density, auto-oriented development that spreads out from the center of communities." It creates that doughnut effect in some cities where acrylic and asphalt suburban shopping malls form a ring around the dead center, where the old downtown sits decaying. Between 1960 and 1975, the state of Pennsylvania lost a total of 3,600,000 acres of farmland. That's like losing a geographic area the size of Pittsburg every six months. At the opening of the Wal-Mart store in Rutland, VT, a man dressed in a neat suit carried a doomsday sign that simply read: THIS IS STUPID!
Here is how the Bank of America, California's largest financial institution, described the impact of sprawl in that state:
Urban job centers have decentralized to the suburbs. New housing tracts have moved even deeper into agricultural and environmentally sensitive areas. Private auto use continues to rise. This acceleration of sprawl has surfaced enormous social, environmental and economic costs, which until now have been hidden, ignored, or quietly borne by society. The burden of these costs is becoming very clear. Businesses suffer from higher costs, a loss in worker productivity, and underutilized investments in older communities.
California's business climate becomes less attractive than surrounding states. Suburban residents pay a heavy price in taxation and automobile expenses, while residents of older cities and suburbs lose access to jobs, social stability, and political power. Agriculture and ecosystems also suffer....We can no longer afford the luxury of sprawl.
Part of the mythology about Sam Walton is that he located stores in smaller towns because his wife Helen did not like the big cities. But I believe that Walton did not want to wrestle with big city developers and saturated markets. Besides, land was cheap in rural America. There were less zoning restrictions--sometimes no zoning at all. Walton sensed that Americans were moving out of the urban core and heading to suburbia. "Our key strategy," Walton wrote, "was simply to put good-sized discount stores into little one-horse towns which everybody else was ignoring...It turned out that the first big lesson we learned was that there was much, much more business out there in small town America than anybody, including me, had ever dreamed of."
But small town America started learning a "big lesson" also--one that took years to sink in: saturated retail markets bring deterioration and decay. With retail sprawl development comes a series of economic and social problems for host communities. Sprawl is often mistaken for economic development, and the people it affects the most are least likely to understand it.
The 10 sins of retail sprawl
* It destroys the economic and environmental value of land
* It encourages an inefficient land-use pattern that is very expensive to serve.
* It fosters redundant competition between local governments, an economic war of tax incentives.
* It forces costly infrastructure development at the edge of towns.
* It causes disinvestment from established core commercial areas.
* It requires the use of public tax support for revitalizing rundown core areas.
* It degrades the visual, aesthetic character of local communities.
* It lowers the value of other commercial and residential property, reducing public revenues.
* It weakens the sense of place and community cohesiveness.
* It masquerades as a form of economic development.
The violation of our personal environment by sprawling retail development leads to an alienation from community, a sense of isolation and disconnectedness. When mall developers created interior spaces to shop, they gave them names like "Village Square", or "The Main Street Shops", hoping to console us for the loss of the real commercial centers they were destroying. In Disneyworld artisans have created an acrylic Main Street facade, where they hand out pins that celebrate "Main Street, USA". These pins have a picture of Mickey Mouse on the front, riding an old-fashioned big-wheel bicycle, tipping his straw boater hat. But stamped on the back of the pin it says: "©Disney Taiwan".
The sprawl corporations are waging a war of indoctrination. They need us as accomplices in the destruction of our own hometowns. In 1997 Home Depot was able to spend $178 million on self-congratulatory advertising. What we ultimately have to do is convince our friends and neighbors that there is a politics of shopping. That is does matter to your hometown where you shop.
The big box corporations lay the blame at our feet. First, Wal-Mart says it needs bigger stores because its customers demand wider aisles. Then it says it needs smaller stores because its supercenters are "too busy and not convenient". Most of what we buy at Wal-Mart are unplanned purchases, and most of these items end up in the landfill anyway. A psychologist might argue that as our lives become emptier, our shelves become fuller. This 'shop till your community drops' mentality is imploding our own hometowns. We see the results, but apparently are not moved by them--even when the evidence is all around us, as 60 Minutes noted:
In Iowa, ten years after Wal-Mart came to the state, nearly half of the men's' and boy's clothing stores, and grocery stores...closed. That's an enormous impact on a state in only ten years.
When Iowa State University Professor Ken Stone examined the sales changes in Iowa small towns from 1983 to 1993, he discovered "a huge shift of sales to larger towns and cities, with substantial amounts captured by mass merchandise stores." Stone estimates that the total number of businesses lost in small towns and rural areas was 7,326 in the decade studied. Iowans spent $425 million more at discount stores, but $153 million less at variety stores, $129 million less at grocery stores, $94 million less at hardware stores, $47 million less at men's and boys apparel stores, and so on. In the 11 store types studied, businesses lost more than $603 million in sales. In this ten year period, Iowa lost:
555 Grocery stores
298 Hardware stores
293 Building Supply Stores
161 Variety Stores
158 Women's Apparel stores
153 Shoe Stores
116 Drug Stores
111 Men's and Boys Apparel store
People have said to me: "When Wal-Mart arrives, they hit the town with the force of 100 new businesses opening at once". The demise of smaller, independent businesses in Iowa suggests that the "retail hurricane" theory is true. Stone reaches a similar conclusion:
The shopping habits of consumers fundamentally change after the introduction of discount mass merchandisers. They purchase much more of their merchandise at mass merchandisers and less at local merchants. The result is the loss of many stores across the state.
According to the International Council of Shopping Centers:
* Discount department stores, conventional department stores, and toy stores are store types where three or fewer companies capture 50% or more of sales.
* The top three building materials and supply stores now control 31% of the market ($32 billion in sales).
* The same with the top three drug stores: 33% of the market ($30 billion in sales).
* Between 1987 and 1992, the number of discount department stores increased annually by an average of +3%, while men's and women's shoes stores dropped an average of -6%, household appliance fell by -3%, and grocery stores, Radio & TV stores, drugstores, building materials stores, apparel stores--all were in the negative column.
The impact of big stores has also been felt in the manufacturing sector. For example, in the apparel industry, America has literally lost its shirt. Between 1973 and 1996, America lost nearly half of its apparel manufacturing jobs. A total of 597,000 jobs were lost during the 23 year period. The same can be said for the shoe industry, or for the pharmacy industry. 90% of the shoes sold in America today are imported. During this same period, discount superstores rose dramatically.
Wal-Mart likes to underplay its market share by using the nation as its trade area. Here's what David Glass, Wal-Mart's President said in the company's 1997 Annual Report:
In the United States, Wal-Mart only holds 7% of a $1.4 trillion retail market. That leaves a tremendous opportunity for future growth. The supermarket industry, amounting to $425 billion a year, is a great opportunity for continued growth. It's almost three times the size of the discount store industry, where Wal-Mart is one of the three retailers that, combined, hold almost 85% of the market. Yet in the grocery segment, the top five players constitute less than 25%.
When Glass says Wal-Mart has a 7% share of the retail pie in America, he's talking about ALL retail sales of any kind, from gasoline to tomatoes, from paperclips to lip-balm. But in the discount store wars, three companies own the field. At the local level, however, where a retail trade area might span only a 20 square mile radius, the impact of one or two big box stores can be devastating to the rest of the retailers. Consider the study done by the San Diego Union-Tribune of the home improvement market in San Diego County. The survey asked consumers where they made their most recent purchase of common items. The results showed Home Depot has an astonishing hold over the county marketplace:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Home Depot's Share of the Market
Product Most
Recently Purchased Jan-June, '94 Jan-June, '95 Jan- June '96
Garden Care Products 41.5% 46% 51.1%
Hand/Power Tools 42.4% 49.6% 45%
Building Materials 72.2% 70.9% 75%
Interior Paint 43.1% 50% 48%
Exterior Paint 41.8% 43.6% 50%
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Economist Tom Muller estimates that in 1994 Wal-Mart in Arkansas had captured $1.2 billion out of a $4 billion market in department store merchandise sales. "Thus, Wal-Mart had captured 30% of all department store sales." In Mississippi, Wal-Mart sales in 1992 were 23% of all department store sales in the state.
When Wal-Mart says "one stop shopping", you should read that statement very literally. These big corporations want to be the ONLY place you and I shop. It's the Tennessee Ernie Ford theory of retailing: You will owe your soul to the Company store. In 1994, a retail analyst at Management Horizons made this tongue-in-cheek prediction about Wal-Mart:
If Wal-Mart grows in the next eight years as it has in the previous eight,it will control 100% of general merchandise sales in the United States; if it grows in the next 16 years as it has in the previous 16 years, it will control all of the non-auto retailing volume in the United States; if the same growth pattern for the next 24 years is like the previous 24 years, Wal-Mart will control all of the county's Gross Domestic Product.
That may have seemed like a joke in 1994, but Wal-Mart now has more sales than the Gross Domestic Product of Israel, Greece, Ireland and Egypt. A Price Waterhouse report says that by the year 2005 just 10 companies, including Wal-Mart, will control 50% of food store sales.
What's happening here? More money is passing through fewer hands. This suggests that stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot are not the beginning of competition--but the end of competition. According to an International Council of Shopping Centers report in 1998:
Numerous store types that are key elements in U.S. shopping centers are dominated by a small group of retailers in each category that register a third or more of their respective category's total U.S. sales....as fewer firms exercise increasing sales dominance within their respective store types...the pricing power that will accrue to the largest retailers will likely make it difficult for large numbers of new, small operators to take root and thrive...
The fact remains, we are over-built and over-stored. The attitude among the development community is that land is superabundant, and the municipal officials who make the key decisions are all Village Idiots. One of the most prolific Wal-Mart developers in New England calls his limited partnerships "Infinity Properties". Every time these developers come before a Planning or Zoning Board, they make their projects sound like they were written in Lake Wobegon, where all the site plans are good looking, and the economic impacts above average.
The symptoms of retail saturation are everywhere:
* We have more than 4,000 abandoned shopping malls in America.
* We have more shopping centers than high schools.
* We have 20 square feet of retail space for every man, woman and child in America, up from 14.7 s.f. per person in 1986, compared with 2 s.f. per person in Britain.
If you phone City Hall in Toledo, Ohio, they answer by saying: "Toledo, Ohio, An All-American City." The effects of suburban sprawl in Toledo are certainly all-American. When I went for a walk in downtown Toledo, I passed the old Lamson dry goods store: 9 stories of empty retail space. Each floor is the size of a football field. The building served as the home of a Macy's Department store from 1924 to 1984. For the past fourteen years, the store has been empty. The City now owns it, which means the taxpayers of Toledo are paying the freight for its upkeep. Meanwhile, on the edge of the city, Home Depot is building its second huge warehouse store, each only five miles apart. The city actually let Home Depot demolish dozens of apartments to make way for the second Home Depot. A stone's throw away from the Home Depot construction site sits an empty Builder's Square, and across the road, an empty Handy Andy. These are all monuments to the inefficiency of retail sprawl. The strip malls of Toledo have literally stripped downtown Toledo of its people, and its character--at the expense of the all-American taxpayers.
Even the people who produce all this sprawl admit that we have more retail stores than our disposable income can absorb. Here's Wal-Mart's confession in 1996 taken from a court deposition in North Carolina of Tom Seay, at the time Wal-Mart's Vice President for Real Estate:
"We have more shopping center space in the U.S. than is needed. We're in an over-built situation."
It's not as if we haven't been warned about the impacts of sprawl. Nearly 80 years ago, Sinclair Lewis in Main Street warned us about the homogenization of our culture:
Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that is it the completest boredom to wander from one to another....The shops show the same standardized, nationally advertised wares; the newspapers of sections three thousand miles apart have the same 'syndicated features'; the boy in Arkansas displays just such a flamboyant ready-made suit as is found on just such a boy in Delaware, both of them iterate the same slang phrases from the same sporting-pages, and if one of them is in college, and the other is a barber, no one may surmise which is which.
In her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote:
"Everyplace becomes more like every other place, all adding up to Noplace."
Big box retailers are turning America into a continuous landscape of one-story, pre-engineered, windowless metal frame buildings sitting on concrete slab foundations. Such buildings can simply be described as "dead architecture".
The Portable Wal-Mart
As quietly as Wal-Mart tries to slip into a town, sometimes they try to leave just as noiselessly.
"Quite frankly," said Tom Seay, Wal-Mart's former Executive Vice President for Real Estate Construction, "I think the fact that we relocate stores--and we relocate a lot of them--is a well-known fact in the development community..." Just how portable Wal-Mart is, however, is not well known by the shopping public. In their 1998 Annual Report, Wal-Mart featured a short profile of their Real Estate division, under the title: "The Wal-Mart nobody knows." According to the company, Wal-Mart is the "largest owner and manager of retail space in the country."
Like a reptile crawling out of its skin, Wal-Mart has shed hundreds of stores to move onto bigger facilities. Most of these relocations have been in towns where Wal-Mart shuts down a discount store to open up a larger supercenter a few miles, or even blocks, away. "As (Wal-Mart) rolls out new supercenter prototypes," the company explains, "it must also find uses for existing relocated stores after they are closed."
Although the company claims that in 1998 it sold or leased 10 million square feet of what it calls "once-occupied" stores, the February, 1999 list of "available buildings" from Wal-Mart Realty reveals that the amount of buildings on the market at that time was closer to 20 million square feet of empty stores. Based on Wal-Mart's own list, here are some statistics on these empty stores that might surprise you:
* Wal-Mart listed 333 empty buildings as of February, 1999.
* These buildings are spread across 31 states.
* A total of 20.66 million s.f. of empty stores were on the market
* Only 17% (58) of these stores are owned by Wal-Mart, 83% (275) are leased
* Estimating that Wal-Mart has roughly 2,850 U.S. stores open, these additional 333 empty stores meant that 10.5% of the units Wal-Mart owns or leases were "available".
* 15 states had 10 or more empty Wal-Mart stores: Texas - 40 Kentucky - 16 Illinois - 11
Tennessee - 30 Louisiana - 16 New Mexico - 10
Florida - 30 Mississippi - 15 No. Carolina - 10
Georgia - 26 So. Carolina 13 Alabama - 22
Missouri 13 Arkansas - 17 Oklahoma - 12
* The average size of empty Wal-Marts was 62,057s.f.--larger than most other retail buildings in a small community.
* 52 of the empty stores (16%) were larger than 100,000 s.f, with some as large as 134,000 s.f.
* 54 stores (16%) on the February list were marked "new".
This is the portable Wal-Mart company. This is Wal-Mart's moveable feast. Although the company says very few of its stores have failed, many are unprofitable, and dozens of others are simply shut down to make way for supercenters with wider aisles. This makes Wal-Mart the largest producer of empty retail stores in America, if not the world.
Don't expect a long-term relationship with any superstore in your town. Wal-Mart arrives with its bags already packed.
Citizens opposed to sprawl generally cite two major reasons for fighting companies like Wal-Mart or Kmart:
1. Negative impact on the local economy
2. Negative impact on their quality of life
Voodoo Economics: The Wal-Mart Dust Machine
Sam Walton liked to claim that Wal-Mart was the savior of small town America, that his company was creating jobs every place it touched. Here's how he described it in his autobiography:
"Wal-Mart has actually kept quite a number of small towns from becoming practically extinct by offering low prices and saving literally billions of dollars for the people who live there, as well as creating hundreds of thousand of jobs in our stores."
But such claims are a form of voodoo economics. Former developer Townsend Anderson of Vermont, has been quoted as saying:
Sprawl rarely brings about a net increase in economic growth. If there is not real growth, there is simply displacement of economic activity. This triggers a whole cycle of deterioration in older communities...
Companies like Wal-Mart and Home Depot utilize a form of "sprawl-math", which only looks at gross impacts on a community--never of the net effect of their stores. Sprawl-Math is not taught in local school systems. It's a form of developer's calculator that had no minus pad to subtract out jobs lost, or revenues diverted. The real truth about Wal-Mart and Home Depot, and the rest of the sprawl-mathematicians, is that they represent a form of economic displacement, not economic development. I know that Wal-Mart understands their fiscal impact claims are one-dimensional. The best proof I have of that I found in a most unlikely place: Volume 26, Issue 10 of Wal-Mart Today, from October of 1996. This is an internal "associate" newsletter that Wal-Mart says is "your window into our Wal-Mart world". There, in a column called "Wal-Mart Culture", is a quote that should be written on the side of every Wal-Mart superstore in the nation:
"At Wal-Mart, we make dust. Our competitors eat dust."
--Tom Coughlin
Executive Vice President, Operations
Wal-Mart Stores Division
Since 1962, the Wal-Mart Dust Machine has done damage in every state in the country. Companies like Wal-Mart have cannibalized the retail food chain from the Mom and Pops on the bottom, to the mid-level regional chains, to the very top national chains. A recent illustration:
In February of 1998, New England lost another major regional retail chain store. Caldors, the company founded by Cal and Dorothy Bennett in 1951, turned into dust. This was the end of the sales pitch for the 4th. largest retail chain in America. 22,000 workers took home pink slips for their trouble. 145 stores in nine states were put up for lease. After 48 years, and annual sales of $2.49 billion, the going out of business sales at Caldors began. Bargain hunters who long ago moved to other venues, returned one more time to pick over the bones, looking for that last 3-pack of cheap underwear.
The lesson in sprawl-math is inevitable. When you oversupply an area with retail glut, you don't create jobs, you destroy them. Consider the example of the regional chain store Caldor's, which imploded in 1999. Industry analysts say it was expected: Caldor's was losing money to Wal-Mart, had fallen into Chapter 11 territory since 1995, and never recovered. As one news story said: "Wal-Mart and other rivals had choked off Caldor's ability to open stores outside its traditional Northeast territory." The next time some Mayor or Town Councilor starts talking about the jobs that a Wal-Mart or Home Depot will bring to town, remember the jobs lost at Caldor's and Rich's, or the building supply stores Grossmans and Payless Cashways. It would take more than 100 Wal-Mart Supercenters just to break even with the 22,000 jobs that went down with Caldors.
Or consider the case of the small town of Nowata, Oklahoma, (pop. 3,900) is described as hobbled by the closing of a large retail store. The store closed down to move to a larger supercenter 30 miles away. "They were not playing fair," said the President of the local First National Bank. "They came in and ravaged all the small businesses. And when it came to the point where they were not satisfied, they left." The Mayor of Nowata who welcomed the megastore to town, now says: "Wal-Mart has proven this: They're big and they're greedy. They have no compassion for the community or the individual."
[To order "Slam Dunking Wal-Mart" call toll free 1-877-DUNK WAL]
Shop Locally: Independent Businesses vs. Big-Box Stores
Posted by Nina on March 25, 2008
Rhea Becker is a Boston-based journalist and blogs at The Boomer Chronicles, a fantastic site for baby boomers. She employs humor (e.g. “Does this blog make me look fat?”) and other commentary about life on the verge of fifty (check out her five-part series on Aging and Our Senses). She’s written a guest post for Queercents about the demise of the mom and pop shop in America and why we should support local businesses. These are her words…
I’m lucky. Independent businesses are plentiful in my neighborhood of Boston (Jamaica Plain). This enables me to spend my money at a shop owned by an individual rather than continue to stuff the belly of the corporate beast. So instead of shopping at Home Depot or Lowe’s, I shop at the locally owned hardware store. One Saturday morning a few years ago I was out doing my errands when I stopped at the hardware store for a few things. When I got to the register, I realized I had meant to go to my bank first. I didn’t have a cent (nor a credit card) on me. I told the man behind the counter that I would be back to buy my things later. Without missing a beat, he began to ring up my purchases. “You’re in here all the time. Just come back and pay later.” Try that at Home Depot.
I bought my television at the local TV and radio repair shop. I bought my refrigerator at the local appliance shop. Instead of shopping at the chain store KaBloom, I shop at the locally owned flower shop. I eat at one-of –a-kind, local restaurants instead of chains. In fact, my neighborhood is so consciously opposed to chains that we have no Starbucks and no McDonald’s. Imagine that! We are a real anachronism.
It’s true that it’s not easy for some people to patronize local businesses. The prices are almost always higher at independent stores than at big-box competitors, but the experience is worth it to me. I don’t have to drive and use precious fossil fuel to get to these stores, the interaction is more real and humane, and these kinds of shops keep our business district lively and interesting, whereas chains are cold, plastic and predictable. I will continue to shop locally for as long as I can. And I have many friends and neighbors who have made the same pledge.
I am such a big believer in independent businesses that I was quoted in the local paper opposing a sub-shop chain that was going to take a storefront on our main drag. We already had several locally owned sub shops. Why make life hard for these business owners? My independent-business evangelism has even taken the form of a screenplay I’ve written called “Drawing the Line,” which tells the tale of a young man who fights the All-Mart Corporation when it decides to establish a superstore in his little town. Guess what? He wins. I hope the screenplay will one day be made into a film, as its message is timely for the communities across this country (and, now, the world) that are fighting the incursion of giant stores.
I realize that independent businesses and their fans are swimming against a powerful tide of Wal-Marts and Targets. But there’s hope. There are lots of resources online these days that help citizens to organize against Wal-mart and the other big-box stores. There are numerous documentary films on the subject, and books, too. A woman named Stacy Mitchell recently came to my ‘hood to give a talk on the subject of big-box stores vs. independent stores. Her book, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, details the way that these gigantic stores get a foothold in our communities — and it is not by playing fair. Here are a few sites that will help you educate yourself and take action.
WakeUpWalmart.com
BigBoxSwindle.com
Sprawl-Busters.com
WalmartWatch.com
More about Rhea Becker
Rhea Becker is a longtime journalist (People magazine, The Boston Globe and The Boston Phoenix) and was also managing editor of Harvard University’s newspaper. She is the author and creator of The Boomer Chronicles, an irreverent blog for baby boomers, which has been written up in The Boston Globe. She is also an aspiring screenwriter seeking new representation.
In the muckraking tradition of Fast Food Nation, this is a searing indictment of the impact of behemoth retailers. It illuminates a stunning collection of business outrages, government favoritism, environmental damages, hidden economic and societal costs, debunked myths and a rising swell of consumer activism against big-box blight . . . Big-Box Swindle takes mega-retailers to task in convincing fashion. But Mitchell also provides inspiring lessons from places that are turning the tide.”
—John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who included Big-Box Swindle in his Top Ten 2006 list
"This is the ultimate account of the single most important economic trend in our country—the replacement of local businesses, and all they represent, with the big boxes. What Nickel and Dimed did for the Wal-Mart worker, Stacy Mitchell does for the community threatened by mega-retailers."
— Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
At last the warm weather is here, but don't let your fun in the sun put you at risk. Here are some top summer health dangers and how you can avoid them.
Skin cancer. According to the Canadian Cancer Society, it is the most commonly diagnosed form of cancer in this country. But if caught early, skin cancer is usually treated easily. Exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun (or from artificial UV light such as tanning beds) increases the risk for developing skin cancer. Other risk factors include:
-- Light skin, eyes or hair
-- Skin that burns or freckles easily
-- Unusual moles that are irregular in shape or larger or darker than normal moles
-- A family history of melanoma
Protect yourself by having regular skin screenings and wearing the appropriate sunscreen. For extra protection, wear a sunhat if you plan to be outdoors for an extended period of time, and keep in mind the sun's peak hours are between 10:00 am and 4:00pm.
While some experts advocate for short periods of unprotected sunlight to help with Vitamin D deficiency, the key here is moderation: most experts agree you should not be unprotected for more than 10 or 15 minutes. (For more see, Get your Vitamin D.) Not sure which sunscreen is best for you? For some great tips, click here.
Eye damage. Sunlight can damage not only skin, but also your eyes. Long-term exposure to UV rays can contribute to eye disease such as cataracts and age-related macular degeneration. Bright light can damage your retina and even cause your eyes to become sunburned, a temporary but often painful condition known as photokeratitis. To protect your eyes, be sure to wear sunglasses that filter out 100 per cent of UV light, especially around water, which can reflect a tremendous amount of light to your eyes.
For more information on how to get the best protection for your eyes, see Sunglasses: more than a fashion statement.
Skin cancer. According to the Canadian Cancer Society, it is the most commonly diagnosed form of cancer in this country. But if caught early, skin cancer is usually treated easily. Exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun (or from artificial UV light such as tanning beds) increases the risk for developing skin cancer. Other risk factors include:
-- Light skin, eyes or hair
-- Skin that burns or freckles easily
-- Unusual moles that are irregular in shape or larger or darker than normal moles
-- A family history of melanoma
Protect yourself by having regular skin screenings and wearing the appropriate sunscreen. For extra protection, wear a sunhat if you plan to be outdoors for an extended period of time, and keep in mind the sun's peak hours are between 10:00 am and 4:00pm.
While some experts advocate for short periods of unprotected sunlight to help with Vitamin D deficiency, the key here is moderation: most experts agree you should not be unprotected for more than 10 or 15 minutes. (For more see, Get your Vitamin D.) Not sure which sunscreen is best for you? For some great tips, click here.
Eye damage. Sunlight can damage not only skin, but also your eyes. Long-term exposure to UV rays can contribute to eye disease such as cataracts and age-related macular degeneration. Bright light can damage your retina and even cause your eyes to become sunburned, a temporary but often painful condition known as photokeratitis. To protect your eyes, be sure to wear sunglasses that filter out 100 per cent of UV light, especially around water, which can reflect a tremendous amount of light to your eyes.
For more information on how to get the best protection for your eyes, see Sunglasses: more than a fashion statement.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Amen Brother
I'm on the go like company flow
taking six steps to perfection
working the clock
while the world keeps turning
like a boom headspin
in freestyle sessions
I wage war on the concrete floor
using my body as a weapon
hitting hard on every 4 like machine
building energy up like lego blocks
when I toprock then freeze
rocking steadily
staying in key with the melody
free like the circle of fire
its the verbal messiah
slash bbooy inspired by the music
moving swift like ken
posing again like a nudist?
fluid with my movements
I just do it like nike
while you hide behind the sidelines
trying hard to bite me
well for the record
eye highly recommend you get your own..
need I REMIND YOU
originality stands alone
naturally BORN to break
I brainSTORM and formulate many plans
on how make these brickheads understand
tmind 180 body rock project sal seoul
fused together creates one of the freshest kids combo
still I take the lead and never follow
hip hop afficonado blessed with words
and the thirst to KILL THAT BONGO
you know my motto
dance like no tommorow and take it
like theres no point in playing SPIN THE BOTTLE
WHO'S HUNGRY?? who's got enough stamina to finish it
you got a problem
well Ive got a way to settle our CREATIVE DIFFERENCES
without swinging fists
hit or miss eye persist passed
all self- proclaimed tough tests
and why because in me is the undisputable spy
undeniable drive to be forever fresh
you know the format for the floormaster
in the flesh no strings attached no special effects
heck eye could care LESS if you bust a couple of flips
and so what got more gear got more kicks
more windmills than old dutch chips
this crazy commander comes equipped with
dangerous goods and big bag full of supernatual triks
paranormal and as out of this world
as alien ness rocking the jean jacket vest
stylewise im high above and beyond sick
kids call me CLOUD RAINEN down with the truth
in the game of show and prove
and now you may think that Im spooked
but u luz like qwell flipping zulu
talking about how you wanna do me
run your mouth and Ill take you out
free delivery like some meiji sushi
the realdeal is that you vs me no comparison
you'll neverwin to dare compare
is like redbull to freshly squeezed juice
better yet its like jamie kennedy
"breakdancing" in high heeled boots
trying to outdo james brown
getting down in a pair dirty puma suede shoes
with or without the crew
you know EGG-sactly how I ROLL fools
nastic and nothing cute
I breakbread, breakbeats, break records, break loose
originally rude with a thousand plus moves
meaning that whatever you do eyem guaranteed do differently
just me and my filthee feet
killing it to some the quickest beats known
seven times fresher applying pressure the dome
pushing limits with maximum efficiency
from uptown to boogie down i bring it
for the wookies who know noting about the history
with one hand alone eye spin back to 1990's
the OMIGHTY foundations that fully explains
when what who where how and why we
do what we do till this day
so screw what you heard
out with the old in with the new brigade?
we all use to be lost toys
until we found our rightful place
buts seperate real from the fake
and know that this is not a race
we run the battle trac 2 know
when to put goodfoot on the breaks
get on your kneespins
pay respects ,and pray...
in the name of
hip hop funk and soul
in the name of
the pioneers,descenents, and the unborn
in the name of world down under
in the name of the real b-boys and b-girls
and all hip hop lovers
in the name of the real
amen brother
Monday, May 4, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Peace
The goal of the Festival is to promote the use of storytelling for peacebuilding and community-building, to promote student voice as a critical skill for global citizenship and for protecting human rights, and to nurture the art of storytelling in Winnipeg.
The Festival is free to the public.
More than 40 storytellers from the region, as well as storytellers from across Canada and other parts of the world are featured. This is the largest festival of its kind in Canada, and the only annual Storytelling Festival in the world dedicated to storytelling and peacebuilding.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Speak Up
we came back battered and bruised
mad confused with the brand new
rules set by the puppet masters
who didn't warn us of the changes
while we were away waging war with the world
they were giving away our wages
makeshift patriots taking it up the ass
must I even ask what do we say to something like this
they refused to negotitate
so we said lets raise our fist
build and exchange for a fair trade
so they dont get away with it again
for if they do we'll be screwed
and so will our childrens childrens
dot dot dot. no single periods
the future is now and now is serious..
so pass me the speakerphone and hear me out
to be paid 2 cents per day is a really good amount
but im afraid its just not enough
we need more than a couple bronze coins
to fill up the beggars cup
more than funds to built up each others trust
more than just angry radicals who do not give a fuck
and promote the wrong idea because life does not suck
life would be alot more better with a little bit more love
and I know they wanted me to keep my big mouth shut
but Im sorry I cant stay in this box
Ive got to speak up
I said I know they wanted this box to stay closed shut
but my spirit can't fit inside this box
I said Ive got to speak up
Monday, April 27, 2009
Study time
Strike 1919!
For six weeks in the summer of 1919 the eyes of the world were turned on Winnipeg. What started as a simple conflict between the city’s building trade and metal shop workers and their employers had turned into the biggest strike in Canadian history. At least 30,000 people were off the job; half of them were not even union members. The event is referred to as a general strike because so many of the workers on strike were not involved the direct dispute between the building and metal trades workers and their employers.
Many observers wondered if the city were on the verge of a revolution, such as the one that had taken place in Russia in 1917. It was no secret that many of the strike leaders were associated with the radical Socialist Party and the One Big Union, the ominous sounding name of the union that the socialists hoped to create. Others felt that the strike was simply a conflict between employers and employees that had grown particularly bitter in light of the changes that Canadian society had undergone during the First World War. Prices had risen dramatically, while wages had not always kept pace. During the war there had been a rapid increase in the number of unions and unionized workers in Canada—but Winnipeg employers were particularly reluctant to negotiate with these unions. This unwillingness to even negotiate with unions was what turned a conflict between a few unions and their employers into a national crisis.
No one was prepared for the degree of support that the unions received from workingpeople across the city. It was surprising that only one union voted not to support the strike, but it was an even greater shock to discover that there were thousands of non-union workers prepared to put their jobs at risk in support of other workers. The city ground to a halt; eventually the strike leaders had to become involved in determining which services were to continue and which would be halted for the duration of the strike. If the strike committee had not stopped them, even the police officers would have gone out on strike.
The strike spurred an equally dramatic response from the city’s business community, which formed itself into the Citizen’s Committee of One Thousand. The Committee leaders viewed the strike as a potential revolt and worked with the federal government to crush it. Committee members replaced the police force with volunteers that they had recruited. At their urging amendments to the Criminal Code were rushed through parliament creating new crimes and making it easier to deport labour activists. When the time was right, Committee members oversaw the arrest and eventual prosecution of the strike leaders.
This ensured that the strike would not end with a contract, but with a show of force. In late June North-West Mounted Police officers on horse back charged a crowd protesting the arrest of the strike leaders. Shots were fired and two strikers were left dead. The strike itself was followed by a series of trials – a number of strike leaders were sent to jail, but they retained considerable public support. Several of them were elected to the provincial legislature and parliament, including three who were still in jail on voting day. The general strike was the outcome of 20 years of growing conflict in Winnipeg and Canada. It was the largest and most dramatic of a series of post-war labour conflicts that rocked Canada in 1919. It demonstrated both the bonds of solidarity that many Winnipeg workers felt towards one another, the divisions that had been created by industrialization in Winnipeg, and divisions within the labour movement itself. Its impact on the city’s development would last for decades.
The roots of the strike
The Canadian Pacific Railway did more than bring immigrants and industry to Manitoba, it also brought trade unionism to the province. The huge CPR yards in central Winnipeg employed over 2,000 men by the late 1880s. Many of these skilled trades workers had come from England and Scotland where they been active in a revived British labour movement. Not long after their arrival in Manitoba they formed unions of their own. Soon there were unions for machinists, conductors, brakemen, and engineers. The Canadian National Railway’s decision to build a rail yard in Transcona ensured that that community would have a strong trade-union tradition. A boomtown such as Winnipeg attracted carpenters, plumbers, painters and other construction workers , each of whom soon set up their own unions.
There were no labour laws requiring employers to negotiate with unions – or to prevent an employer from firing someone simply for belonging to a union. Most unions simply posted their rates and working conditions—if an employer refused to meet them, the union would go on strike. In other cases, workers did not form a union until after an employer had cut wages and benefits. Many employers took a very hard line with unions. (Ref1, Ref2) The owners of the Vulcan Iron Works, for example, vowed they would never meet or negotiate with a union committee. In 1906 streetcar employees went on strike when two union officers were fired—a move that sparked a violent and bitter strike.
Some union leaders did not believe women workers could be unionized, but working women in Winnipeg began forming their own unions in the late nineteenth century. Winnipeg’s competitive garment trade was hit with numerous labour disputes. In 1893, 75 male and female tailors, all members of the Journeyman Tailors’ Union, struck to protest a pay cut. The strike was defeated when their employers brought in new workers from Toronto. Winnipeg’s first union solely for working women was created in 1899 when, to protest a 20 per cent pay cut, 50 women working for the Emerson and Hague tent and overall company joined the United Garment Workers. After some initial negotiations, the company sparked a strike by firing the union leaders. The strike was lost but the women found work at a new garment factory, which agreed to the union contract. In the summer of 1902, 40 women working at the Paulin-Chambers bakery struck to protest a wage cut. When the women joined the Bakers’ Union, their employer threatened to fire them and hired replacement workers. Most union women worked at jobs that were extensions of women’s traditional domestic roles—cooking, sewing, and cleaning— but some began to show up in less traditional workplaces such a printshops, where they might be accepted into the union. In other cases the wives of male union members might form a ladies auxiliary. A Women’s Labor League had been founded in 1917 to bring together women who were active in the local labour movement. The league raised funds for women on strike, helped in organizing campaigns, and supported women when they were on strike. The League played a leading role in a strike of clerks at the Winnipeg Woolworth’s store in 1917.
Winnipeg’s unionists met regularly at the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council on James Street. Here R.B. Russell, the fiery Scottish-born champion of the machinists union and the Socialist Party would debate the more moderate carpenter Fred Tipping of the Social Democratic Party and the still more moderate James Winning. Increased economic activity during the war led to a twenty per cent increase in the number of union members in the city, but the unions were having trouble translating those numbers into results. When strikes took place, the courts quickly issued orders that prohibited striking workers from picketing their place of employment. Under these conditions, employers found new workers and strikes were broken. Many unionists began to search for a new strategy. They were opposed to the existing craft union model that dictated that there should be a separate union for each craft. Under this model, machinists belonged to one union, boilermakers to another, and carpenters a third, even if they all worked in the same plant. They would have different contracts and would cross each other’s picket line. According to this model of unionization, it was not possible to organize unskilled workers who had no specific craft. Almost all of these craft unions were based in the United States and belonged to the American Federation of Labor. The Canadian craft unions were also affiliated with the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada, which was founded in 1883. Many unionists in Winnipeg and elsewhere were beginning to conclude that the time had come to organize on what was termed an industrial basis—this meant organizing all the workers in a single industry into a single union, no matter what their job or skill level. This belief would put them in conflict with the leaders of the Trades and Labor Congress and the American Federation of Labor.
A series of lost strike in 1917 also led Winnipeg unions to consider the use of general or sympathetic strikes. These strikes would see workers who were not directly involved in a dispute walk off the job in support of workers in a specific workplace. In 1918 Winnipeg city council voted to strip civic workers of the right to strike: in response 17,000 workers from a wide range of Winnipeg unions walked off the job. This strike forced the city to back down. The labour council nearly called another mass strike that year to support a metal workers strike—but the strike ended, in defeat, before the general strike vote was held. In the spring of 1919 workers in Brandon staged a successful six-hour general strike to back city workers in their demand for the right to negotiate. Manitoba trade unionists were not alone in their search for new approaches to trade unionism—in the spring of 1919 they met with similar-minded radicals in Calgary to lay the groundwork for what would become the One Big Union.
The One Big Union
The One Big Union did not organize or lead the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, yet its history is closely intertwined with that of the General Strike. Both grew out of the growing radicalization of western Canadian workers and reflected their interest in new ways of organizing unions and society. Radical ideas were receiving a warm welcome from many trade unionists during the closing years of the First World War. Workers had turned out in large numbers to hear local union leaders speak glowingly of the 1917 Russian Revolution and to criticize the federal government for its recent decision to ban socialist newspapers and political parties. At one such meeting a speaker predicted a tremendous social conflict once the soldiers returned from overseas: “They will say ‘We have fought for this country, and by God, we are going to own it.’” At a meeting of the Winnipeg labour council one delegate said, “In Winnipeg tonight we are fighting with ideas, but soon we will be fighting with rifles.”
In the fall of 1918 Western Canadian unionists placed a number of radical resolutions before the delegates at that year’s Trades and Labor Congress Convention. In particular, they wanted the Congress to abandon craft unionism for industrial unionism, but their criticism extended to such difficult questions as conscription, censorship and the war effort. Every one of the westerners’ proposals was defeated. Before returning home, the western delegates agreed to hold a special western Canadian labour conference in 1919 to discuss ways that they could have more impact on the TLC.
By the time the delegates from western Canadian unions arrived in Calgary for this meeting in the spring of 1919 they were no longer interested in fixing the TLC. Instead, they believed the time had come to create a new industrial union that would use the general strike as a central weapon. The new union was to be called the One Big Union — as its name suggested it would attempt to organize all workers into a single labour body. Unlike the TLC it would not divide them up by skills, nor would it concentrate solely on unskilled labour.
Their plan was to hold a vote in the summer of 1919 in which union members could determine whether they would join the OBU or stick with their craft unions. One vote would be held in western Canada and one in the East. If the easterners turned down the idea, the westerners would strike out on their own. The delegates also called on the government to bring in the six-hour workday. They argued the shorter workday would create more jobs for soldiers when they left the army. To back this campaign for a shortened workday, they threatened to launch a nation-wide general strike on June 1.
By moving to create the One Big Union, western Canadian unionists had created many enemies for themselves: business, government and the craft unions all felt threatened by the OBU. Their main source of strength was the growing conviction among western Canadian workers that they had to pursue their common interests through united unions and united political action. The organizers’ plans for the union would become entangled in the Winnipeg General Strike, which started in mid-May 1919. The fledgling OBU would never be able to recover from the defeat of the Winnipeg strike.
The start of the strike
In the spring of 1919 the newly formed Winnipeg Building Trades Council, which represented the city’s building trade unions, opened negotiations with their employer the Winnipeg Builders Exchange. The Building Trades Council was an example of the way in which Winnipeg unions were working to overcome the barriers created by craft unionism by bringing workers from different craft unions together in a single bargaining committee. The workers were looking for a pay increase that would allow them to regain what they had lost to wartime inflation. The builders said that without an increase in construction they could not afford to increase wages. The employers then adopted a take-it-or-leave-it approach, saying that if the unions did not accept their pay offer, negotiations were over. In the face of this ultimatum, the construction workers walked off the job on May 1. It was the first step in a series of developments that would bring the city to a stand still.
A day after the building trades workers went on strike, the city’s metal trade workers walked off the job. They had been defeated in strikes in 1906, 1917 and 1918. In April 19191, the metal trades council, which represented the different unions in the metal trades, presented their contract proposals to the owners of the metal shops. While some of the smaller shops were willing to negotiate, the larger shops never bothered to respond to the unions. The builders and the metal shop owners had taken provocative positions—it was not simply that they were taking a hard line in negotiations—they were refusing to negotiate. The Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council took this as an affront to the entire labour movement. At its May 6 meeting the council decided to organize a vote on whether or not to hold a civic-wide general strike in support of the construction workers and the metal shop workers.
When they met a week later it was quite clear that unionized workers were prepared to support them. Over 11,000 workers had voted in favour of a general strike, with only 500 in opposition. The strike was set to start at 11 a.m. on May 15.
By noon of that day the city was at a standstill. Ninety-four unions were on strike, and over 20,000 people were off the job. In the end, it is estimated that nearly 30,000 people participated in the strike, half of whom did not even belong to unions. They were also very loyal—again and again employer threats to fire workers who did not return to the job met with limited or no success. The Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council established a General Strike Committee and a smaller Central Strike Committee: while radicals such as R.B. Russell were on the Central Strike Committee, it was dominated by moderates, including J.L. McBride of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, labour council president James Winning, typographer Harry Veitch—whose union had not even endorsed the strike, and labour council secretary Ernest Robinson.
The Central Strike Committee soon found itself having to determine which services were going to be offered to the public. As it did not wish to be accused of attempting to starve the city, the Committee continued delivery of milk and bread. When the bakeries and dairies worried that people might attack their delivery wagons if they thought they were being operated in opposition to the strike, the strikers, after meeting with representatives of city hall and the dairies, agreed to issue signs that read “Permitted by Authority of Strike Committee,” which were to be displayed on delivery wagons. The measure made sure that the milk and bread got through, but also raised questions about who was in charge. The strikers always maintained that they were not trying to take over the government of the city, but by its very nature a general strike challenges a community’s existing power relations.
The Toronto Globe estimated that 2,000 of the strikers were women. Indeed, the strike got off to an early start on May 15, 1919, when 500 female telephone operators walked off the job. Before they left work they pulled the switches, leaving much of the city without phone service. Aside from the telephone operators, retail clerk, garment workers, waitresses, bookbinders, and confectionery workers, almost all of whom were women, voted in favour of the strike. In fact, the bakery and confectionery workers went on strike the day before the strike began to protest the fact that their employer would not negotiate with their union.
Women also played an important role in making sure that businesses that were struck stayed closed. They showed up at the rail yards to stop people from going to work, and on occasion they attacked trucks that were making deliveries for businesses that were being struck. Under the leadership of Helen Armstrong, the Women’s Labor League played a central role in organizing women’s activities throughout the strike. Armstrong established a dining hall where meals were free for women strikers, while men were expected to pay or make a donation. During the strike Armstrong continued to organize working women into unions and was arrested several times.
Throughout the strike, one of the strike committee’s main concerns was ensuring that the strikers did not provide the government with an excuse (Ref1, Ref2) to use force to end the strike. For the most part, they urged people to stay off the streets or attend the large open air meetings that were held at Victoria Park near the Red River. There, speakers from the unions and the Labor Church, which had been established by William Ivens when he lost his position with the Methodist Church, spoke to the strikers on issues of the day. While the strike leaders kept their troops in line, the business community took the initiative.
The Committee of One Thousand
Shortly after the start of the General Strike, the leaders of the Winnipeg business community established the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand. (Ref1, Ref2) It had far fewer than a thousand members, but it had access to the corridors of power both in Manitoba and Ottawa. Among its leading figures were such prominent businessmen and lawyers as A.J. Andrews, J.C. Coyne, Travis Sweatman, and Isaac Pitblado. It organized volunteers to replace strikers (Ref1, Ref2) and worked to ensure that the strike ended in a defeat for the unions. In its own newspaper, The Citizen, it attacked the strikers and their supporters as Bolshevik revolutionaries and implied that the strike was largely the work of Eastern European immigrants. (Ref1, Ref2) These charges were echoed by the leaders of Catholic Church in St. Boniface.
Shortly after the strike started, two leading members of the Committee met with federal cabinet ministers and told them the strike was a revolution in the making. The government was convinced, and A.J. Andrews, a lawyer and Committee member, was appointed as the government’s special agent in Winnipeg. Worried that an attempt to end the strike by force could end disastrously, Andrews believed the government had to proceed cautiously. He was, however, intent on crushing the strike: to that end he advised the government to pass a series of laws that would make it possible to quickly arrest and deport the strike leaders without trial. One of the Committee’s first moves was to force the city council to fire the entire Winnipeg police force for refusing to take an oath promising not to participate in general strikes. The dismissed officers were replaced by 1,800 special police officers recruited by the Committee. On the next day, June 10, the Specials, as they were called, clashed with strikers at the corner of Portage and Main in the first major violent confrontation (Ref1, Ref2) of the strike.
Andrews supported the employers’ decision not to negotiate, but he realized that he had to bring the strike to speedy end since workers in other cities across the country were showing support for the Winnipeg strikes. General strikes in support of the Winnipeg strike broke out in Brandon, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Vancouver and Victoria, and in towns as small as Dauphin and Minnedosa. The big fear was that the rail workers would join the strike, bringing the country to a standstill.
Andrews’ opportunity came when the owners of the metal shops made a small concession, announcing that they would negotiate with individual craft unions, but not the metal trades council as whole. This was a proposal that the workers would not accept, since they had gone out on strike to asset their right to choose who would represent them. When the unions turned the proposal down the Mounted Police took action. On the night of June 16, ten strike leaders were arrested in their homes and taken to Stony Mountain Penitentiary. Union offices across the city were raided and their contents seized. Andrews acted quickly, and on his own: federal officials in Ottawa were surprised to hear him announce that the strikers were to be prosecuted for sedition.
Returned soldiers had held parades both in opposition (Ref1, Ref2, Ref3) to, and in support (Ref1, Ref2) of, the strike. On June 21 the veterans who backed the strike gathered in downtown Winnipeg to protest the arrests. When the mayor banned their demonstration, the Mounted Police were called out. Charging into the crowd on horseback, the police fired on the strikers—one man died instantly, another a few days later from gunshot wounds. The special police that had been recruited by the Committee of One Thousand then moved in on the demonstrators: by the end of the day at least thirty of demonstrators were seriously injured. (Ref1, Ref2, Ref3, Ref4)
The arrests and the attack on the parade, which the unions referred to as Bloody Saturday, marked the defeat of the strike. The workers returned to work without contracts. Hundreds, possibly thousands of workers were fired for their participation in the strike. Others only got their jobs back if they signed agreements promising not to join unions in the future.
The General Strike as an historical controversy
The Winnipeg General Strike is a good example of how our ideas of the past keep changing. During the strike the workers argued that they were simply striking for a living wage and the right to negotiate. The Citizens’ Committee and the federal government said the strike was a revolution in the making. For this reason they arrested the strike leaders and broke the strike. A Manitoba government commission of inquiry concluded that the General Strike was essentially a labour dispute, not a revolution. The federal government and the Citizens’ Committee refused to accept this conclusion. In 1920, they put the strike leaders on trial for criminal sedition and conspiracy. Sedition is the crime of attempting to overthrow the government. A number of strike leaders were acquitted, but most of them were convicted and sentenced to prison.
Many aspects of the trials have since come into question. The Mounted Police interviewed the jurors in advance: Anyone who was likely to acquit the strikers was not allowed onto the juries. The judge stretched the definition of conspiracy beyond its usual meaning. A ‘conspiracy’ means that people have to plan an action together before they can be charged with conspiracy. There was no evidence that the strike leaders who were charged with conspiracy ever planned to overthrow the government. The judge, however, instructed jurors that if the actions of the accused might overthrow the government, even if that was not part of a stated plan, they could convict them.
As early as 1920 it was apparent that not all Manitobans agreed with the judge or the jury. In that year’s provincial election a number of the jailed strike leaders ran for office. Even though they could not leave their prison cells during the campaign, three of them won election to the legislature. Voters in Winnipeg’s North End believed that the strike had been legitimate and they were prepared to stand behind the strike leaders. In later years, John Queen, one of the men who had been sent to jail, was elected mayor of Winnipeg. In 1921 J.S. Woodsworth, who had been arrested but never tried for his support of the strike, was elected to the House of Commons. Winnipeg workers also voted to join the One Big Union. With many of its leaders in jail or fired from their jobs and facing the opposition of employers, government, the Catholic Church, (Ref1, Ref2, Ref3) and the craft unions, the OBU remained a small regional union that was led by R.B. Russell until 1956.
Historians have continued to disagree over the strike’s meaning. Today’s debate is between historians who believe the strike was simply a local conflict and those who believe that the strike was a part of an international response on the part of working people to the social crisis created by industrialism and the First World War. Those who say it was a local conflict over simple collective bargaining issues are critical of the strike leaders, saying that they failed to recognize that a general strike would bring them into conflict with the government and lead to likely defeat. To these historians, the strike sapped the vitality of the movement.
Those historians who see it as part of a larger national and even international movement agree there was no revolutionary conspiracy afoot in 1919. Workers had however, they say, come to see themselves as belonging to a class that stood in opposition to employers. To them, the strike was not simply about the right to negotiate, but workers’ right to have a greater say in the way the post-war world would run. The fact that they lost the strike just underlined just how strong the forces were that they were up against. These historians suggest that the strike and the trials served to inspire unionists during the coming years of political and economic hardship.
For six weeks in the summer of 1919 the eyes of the world were turned on Winnipeg. What started as a simple conflict between the city’s building trade and metal shop workers and their employers had turned into the biggest strike in Canadian history. At least 30,000 people were off the job; half of them were not even union members. The event is referred to as a general strike because so many of the workers on strike were not involved the direct dispute between the building and metal trades workers and their employers.
Many observers wondered if the city were on the verge of a revolution, such as the one that had taken place in Russia in 1917. It was no secret that many of the strike leaders were associated with the radical Socialist Party and the One Big Union, the ominous sounding name of the union that the socialists hoped to create. Others felt that the strike was simply a conflict between employers and employees that had grown particularly bitter in light of the changes that Canadian society had undergone during the First World War. Prices had risen dramatically, while wages had not always kept pace. During the war there had been a rapid increase in the number of unions and unionized workers in Canada—but Winnipeg employers were particularly reluctant to negotiate with these unions. This unwillingness to even negotiate with unions was what turned a conflict between a few unions and their employers into a national crisis.
No one was prepared for the degree of support that the unions received from workingpeople across the city. It was surprising that only one union voted not to support the strike, but it was an even greater shock to discover that there were thousands of non-union workers prepared to put their jobs at risk in support of other workers. The city ground to a halt; eventually the strike leaders had to become involved in determining which services were to continue and which would be halted for the duration of the strike. If the strike committee had not stopped them, even the police officers would have gone out on strike.
The strike spurred an equally dramatic response from the city’s business community, which formed itself into the Citizen’s Committee of One Thousand. The Committee leaders viewed the strike as a potential revolt and worked with the federal government to crush it. Committee members replaced the police force with volunteers that they had recruited. At their urging amendments to the Criminal Code were rushed through parliament creating new crimes and making it easier to deport labour activists. When the time was right, Committee members oversaw the arrest and eventual prosecution of the strike leaders.
This ensured that the strike would not end with a contract, but with a show of force. In late June North-West Mounted Police officers on horse back charged a crowd protesting the arrest of the strike leaders. Shots were fired and two strikers were left dead. The strike itself was followed by a series of trials – a number of strike leaders were sent to jail, but they retained considerable public support. Several of them were elected to the provincial legislature and parliament, including three who were still in jail on voting day. The general strike was the outcome of 20 years of growing conflict in Winnipeg and Canada. It was the largest and most dramatic of a series of post-war labour conflicts that rocked Canada in 1919. It demonstrated both the bonds of solidarity that many Winnipeg workers felt towards one another, the divisions that had been created by industrialization in Winnipeg, and divisions within the labour movement itself. Its impact on the city’s development would last for decades.
The roots of the strike
The Canadian Pacific Railway did more than bring immigrants and industry to Manitoba, it also brought trade unionism to the province. The huge CPR yards in central Winnipeg employed over 2,000 men by the late 1880s. Many of these skilled trades workers had come from England and Scotland where they been active in a revived British labour movement. Not long after their arrival in Manitoba they formed unions of their own. Soon there were unions for machinists, conductors, brakemen, and engineers. The Canadian National Railway’s decision to build a rail yard in Transcona ensured that that community would have a strong trade-union tradition. A boomtown such as Winnipeg attracted carpenters, plumbers, painters and other construction workers , each of whom soon set up their own unions.
There were no labour laws requiring employers to negotiate with unions – or to prevent an employer from firing someone simply for belonging to a union. Most unions simply posted their rates and working conditions—if an employer refused to meet them, the union would go on strike. In other cases, workers did not form a union until after an employer had cut wages and benefits. Many employers took a very hard line with unions. (Ref1, Ref2) The owners of the Vulcan Iron Works, for example, vowed they would never meet or negotiate with a union committee. In 1906 streetcar employees went on strike when two union officers were fired—a move that sparked a violent and bitter strike.
Some union leaders did not believe women workers could be unionized, but working women in Winnipeg began forming their own unions in the late nineteenth century. Winnipeg’s competitive garment trade was hit with numerous labour disputes. In 1893, 75 male and female tailors, all members of the Journeyman Tailors’ Union, struck to protest a pay cut. The strike was defeated when their employers brought in new workers from Toronto. Winnipeg’s first union solely for working women was created in 1899 when, to protest a 20 per cent pay cut, 50 women working for the Emerson and Hague tent and overall company joined the United Garment Workers. After some initial negotiations, the company sparked a strike by firing the union leaders. The strike was lost but the women found work at a new garment factory, which agreed to the union contract. In the summer of 1902, 40 women working at the Paulin-Chambers bakery struck to protest a wage cut. When the women joined the Bakers’ Union, their employer threatened to fire them and hired replacement workers. Most union women worked at jobs that were extensions of women’s traditional domestic roles—cooking, sewing, and cleaning— but some began to show up in less traditional workplaces such a printshops, where they might be accepted into the union. In other cases the wives of male union members might form a ladies auxiliary. A Women’s Labor League had been founded in 1917 to bring together women who were active in the local labour movement. The league raised funds for women on strike, helped in organizing campaigns, and supported women when they were on strike. The League played a leading role in a strike of clerks at the Winnipeg Woolworth’s store in 1917.
Winnipeg’s unionists met regularly at the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council on James Street. Here R.B. Russell, the fiery Scottish-born champion of the machinists union and the Socialist Party would debate the more moderate carpenter Fred Tipping of the Social Democratic Party and the still more moderate James Winning. Increased economic activity during the war led to a twenty per cent increase in the number of union members in the city, but the unions were having trouble translating those numbers into results. When strikes took place, the courts quickly issued orders that prohibited striking workers from picketing their place of employment. Under these conditions, employers found new workers and strikes were broken. Many unionists began to search for a new strategy. They were opposed to the existing craft union model that dictated that there should be a separate union for each craft. Under this model, machinists belonged to one union, boilermakers to another, and carpenters a third, even if they all worked in the same plant. They would have different contracts and would cross each other’s picket line. According to this model of unionization, it was not possible to organize unskilled workers who had no specific craft. Almost all of these craft unions were based in the United States and belonged to the American Federation of Labor. The Canadian craft unions were also affiliated with the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada, which was founded in 1883. Many unionists in Winnipeg and elsewhere were beginning to conclude that the time had come to organize on what was termed an industrial basis—this meant organizing all the workers in a single industry into a single union, no matter what their job or skill level. This belief would put them in conflict with the leaders of the Trades and Labor Congress and the American Federation of Labor.
A series of lost strike in 1917 also led Winnipeg unions to consider the use of general or sympathetic strikes. These strikes would see workers who were not directly involved in a dispute walk off the job in support of workers in a specific workplace. In 1918 Winnipeg city council voted to strip civic workers of the right to strike: in response 17,000 workers from a wide range of Winnipeg unions walked off the job. This strike forced the city to back down. The labour council nearly called another mass strike that year to support a metal workers strike—but the strike ended, in defeat, before the general strike vote was held. In the spring of 1919 workers in Brandon staged a successful six-hour general strike to back city workers in their demand for the right to negotiate. Manitoba trade unionists were not alone in their search for new approaches to trade unionism—in the spring of 1919 they met with similar-minded radicals in Calgary to lay the groundwork for what would become the One Big Union.
The One Big Union
The One Big Union did not organize or lead the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, yet its history is closely intertwined with that of the General Strike. Both grew out of the growing radicalization of western Canadian workers and reflected their interest in new ways of organizing unions and society. Radical ideas were receiving a warm welcome from many trade unionists during the closing years of the First World War. Workers had turned out in large numbers to hear local union leaders speak glowingly of the 1917 Russian Revolution and to criticize the federal government for its recent decision to ban socialist newspapers and political parties. At one such meeting a speaker predicted a tremendous social conflict once the soldiers returned from overseas: “They will say ‘We have fought for this country, and by God, we are going to own it.’” At a meeting of the Winnipeg labour council one delegate said, “In Winnipeg tonight we are fighting with ideas, but soon we will be fighting with rifles.”
In the fall of 1918 Western Canadian unionists placed a number of radical resolutions before the delegates at that year’s Trades and Labor Congress Convention. In particular, they wanted the Congress to abandon craft unionism for industrial unionism, but their criticism extended to such difficult questions as conscription, censorship and the war effort. Every one of the westerners’ proposals was defeated. Before returning home, the western delegates agreed to hold a special western Canadian labour conference in 1919 to discuss ways that they could have more impact on the TLC.
By the time the delegates from western Canadian unions arrived in Calgary for this meeting in the spring of 1919 they were no longer interested in fixing the TLC. Instead, they believed the time had come to create a new industrial union that would use the general strike as a central weapon. The new union was to be called the One Big Union — as its name suggested it would attempt to organize all workers into a single labour body. Unlike the TLC it would not divide them up by skills, nor would it concentrate solely on unskilled labour.
Their plan was to hold a vote in the summer of 1919 in which union members could determine whether they would join the OBU or stick with their craft unions. One vote would be held in western Canada and one in the East. If the easterners turned down the idea, the westerners would strike out on their own. The delegates also called on the government to bring in the six-hour workday. They argued the shorter workday would create more jobs for soldiers when they left the army. To back this campaign for a shortened workday, they threatened to launch a nation-wide general strike on June 1.
By moving to create the One Big Union, western Canadian unionists had created many enemies for themselves: business, government and the craft unions all felt threatened by the OBU. Their main source of strength was the growing conviction among western Canadian workers that they had to pursue their common interests through united unions and united political action. The organizers’ plans for the union would become entangled in the Winnipeg General Strike, which started in mid-May 1919. The fledgling OBU would never be able to recover from the defeat of the Winnipeg strike.
The start of the strike
In the spring of 1919 the newly formed Winnipeg Building Trades Council, which represented the city’s building trade unions, opened negotiations with their employer the Winnipeg Builders Exchange. The Building Trades Council was an example of the way in which Winnipeg unions were working to overcome the barriers created by craft unionism by bringing workers from different craft unions together in a single bargaining committee. The workers were looking for a pay increase that would allow them to regain what they had lost to wartime inflation. The builders said that without an increase in construction they could not afford to increase wages. The employers then adopted a take-it-or-leave-it approach, saying that if the unions did not accept their pay offer, negotiations were over. In the face of this ultimatum, the construction workers walked off the job on May 1. It was the first step in a series of developments that would bring the city to a stand still.
A day after the building trades workers went on strike, the city’s metal trade workers walked off the job. They had been defeated in strikes in 1906, 1917 and 1918. In April 19191, the metal trades council, which represented the different unions in the metal trades, presented their contract proposals to the owners of the metal shops. While some of the smaller shops were willing to negotiate, the larger shops never bothered to respond to the unions. The builders and the metal shop owners had taken provocative positions—it was not simply that they were taking a hard line in negotiations—they were refusing to negotiate. The Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council took this as an affront to the entire labour movement. At its May 6 meeting the council decided to organize a vote on whether or not to hold a civic-wide general strike in support of the construction workers and the metal shop workers.
When they met a week later it was quite clear that unionized workers were prepared to support them. Over 11,000 workers had voted in favour of a general strike, with only 500 in opposition. The strike was set to start at 11 a.m. on May 15.
By noon of that day the city was at a standstill. Ninety-four unions were on strike, and over 20,000 people were off the job. In the end, it is estimated that nearly 30,000 people participated in the strike, half of whom did not even belong to unions. They were also very loyal—again and again employer threats to fire workers who did not return to the job met with limited or no success. The Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council established a General Strike Committee and a smaller Central Strike Committee: while radicals such as R.B. Russell were on the Central Strike Committee, it was dominated by moderates, including J.L. McBride of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, labour council president James Winning, typographer Harry Veitch—whose union had not even endorsed the strike, and labour council secretary Ernest Robinson.
The Central Strike Committee soon found itself having to determine which services were going to be offered to the public. As it did not wish to be accused of attempting to starve the city, the Committee continued delivery of milk and bread. When the bakeries and dairies worried that people might attack their delivery wagons if they thought they were being operated in opposition to the strike, the strikers, after meeting with representatives of city hall and the dairies, agreed to issue signs that read “Permitted by Authority of Strike Committee,” which were to be displayed on delivery wagons. The measure made sure that the milk and bread got through, but also raised questions about who was in charge. The strikers always maintained that they were not trying to take over the government of the city, but by its very nature a general strike challenges a community’s existing power relations.
The Toronto Globe estimated that 2,000 of the strikers were women. Indeed, the strike got off to an early start on May 15, 1919, when 500 female telephone operators walked off the job. Before they left work they pulled the switches, leaving much of the city without phone service. Aside from the telephone operators, retail clerk, garment workers, waitresses, bookbinders, and confectionery workers, almost all of whom were women, voted in favour of the strike. In fact, the bakery and confectionery workers went on strike the day before the strike began to protest the fact that their employer would not negotiate with their union.
Women also played an important role in making sure that businesses that were struck stayed closed. They showed up at the rail yards to stop people from going to work, and on occasion they attacked trucks that were making deliveries for businesses that were being struck. Under the leadership of Helen Armstrong, the Women’s Labor League played a central role in organizing women’s activities throughout the strike. Armstrong established a dining hall where meals were free for women strikers, while men were expected to pay or make a donation. During the strike Armstrong continued to organize working women into unions and was arrested several times.
Throughout the strike, one of the strike committee’s main concerns was ensuring that the strikers did not provide the government with an excuse (Ref1, Ref2) to use force to end the strike. For the most part, they urged people to stay off the streets or attend the large open air meetings that were held at Victoria Park near the Red River. There, speakers from the unions and the Labor Church, which had been established by William Ivens when he lost his position with the Methodist Church, spoke to the strikers on issues of the day. While the strike leaders kept their troops in line, the business community took the initiative.
The Committee of One Thousand
Shortly after the start of the General Strike, the leaders of the Winnipeg business community established the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand. (Ref1, Ref2) It had far fewer than a thousand members, but it had access to the corridors of power both in Manitoba and Ottawa. Among its leading figures were such prominent businessmen and lawyers as A.J. Andrews, J.C. Coyne, Travis Sweatman, and Isaac Pitblado. It organized volunteers to replace strikers (Ref1, Ref2) and worked to ensure that the strike ended in a defeat for the unions. In its own newspaper, The Citizen, it attacked the strikers and their supporters as Bolshevik revolutionaries and implied that the strike was largely the work of Eastern European immigrants. (Ref1, Ref2) These charges were echoed by the leaders of Catholic Church in St. Boniface.
Shortly after the strike started, two leading members of the Committee met with federal cabinet ministers and told them the strike was a revolution in the making. The government was convinced, and A.J. Andrews, a lawyer and Committee member, was appointed as the government’s special agent in Winnipeg. Worried that an attempt to end the strike by force could end disastrously, Andrews believed the government had to proceed cautiously. He was, however, intent on crushing the strike: to that end he advised the government to pass a series of laws that would make it possible to quickly arrest and deport the strike leaders without trial. One of the Committee’s first moves was to force the city council to fire the entire Winnipeg police force for refusing to take an oath promising not to participate in general strikes. The dismissed officers were replaced by 1,800 special police officers recruited by the Committee. On the next day, June 10, the Specials, as they were called, clashed with strikers at the corner of Portage and Main in the first major violent confrontation (Ref1, Ref2) of the strike.
Andrews supported the employers’ decision not to negotiate, but he realized that he had to bring the strike to speedy end since workers in other cities across the country were showing support for the Winnipeg strikes. General strikes in support of the Winnipeg strike broke out in Brandon, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Vancouver and Victoria, and in towns as small as Dauphin and Minnedosa. The big fear was that the rail workers would join the strike, bringing the country to a standstill.
Andrews’ opportunity came when the owners of the metal shops made a small concession, announcing that they would negotiate with individual craft unions, but not the metal trades council as whole. This was a proposal that the workers would not accept, since they had gone out on strike to asset their right to choose who would represent them. When the unions turned the proposal down the Mounted Police took action. On the night of June 16, ten strike leaders were arrested in their homes and taken to Stony Mountain Penitentiary. Union offices across the city were raided and their contents seized. Andrews acted quickly, and on his own: federal officials in Ottawa were surprised to hear him announce that the strikers were to be prosecuted for sedition.
Returned soldiers had held parades both in opposition (Ref1, Ref2, Ref3) to, and in support (Ref1, Ref2) of, the strike. On June 21 the veterans who backed the strike gathered in downtown Winnipeg to protest the arrests. When the mayor banned their demonstration, the Mounted Police were called out. Charging into the crowd on horseback, the police fired on the strikers—one man died instantly, another a few days later from gunshot wounds. The special police that had been recruited by the Committee of One Thousand then moved in on the demonstrators: by the end of the day at least thirty of demonstrators were seriously injured. (Ref1, Ref2, Ref3, Ref4)
The arrests and the attack on the parade, which the unions referred to as Bloody Saturday, marked the defeat of the strike. The workers returned to work without contracts. Hundreds, possibly thousands of workers were fired for their participation in the strike. Others only got their jobs back if they signed agreements promising not to join unions in the future.
The General Strike as an historical controversy
The Winnipeg General Strike is a good example of how our ideas of the past keep changing. During the strike the workers argued that they were simply striking for a living wage and the right to negotiate. The Citizens’ Committee and the federal government said the strike was a revolution in the making. For this reason they arrested the strike leaders and broke the strike. A Manitoba government commission of inquiry concluded that the General Strike was essentially a labour dispute, not a revolution. The federal government and the Citizens’ Committee refused to accept this conclusion. In 1920, they put the strike leaders on trial for criminal sedition and conspiracy. Sedition is the crime of attempting to overthrow the government. A number of strike leaders were acquitted, but most of them were convicted and sentenced to prison.
Many aspects of the trials have since come into question. The Mounted Police interviewed the jurors in advance: Anyone who was likely to acquit the strikers was not allowed onto the juries. The judge stretched the definition of conspiracy beyond its usual meaning. A ‘conspiracy’ means that people have to plan an action together before they can be charged with conspiracy. There was no evidence that the strike leaders who were charged with conspiracy ever planned to overthrow the government. The judge, however, instructed jurors that if the actions of the accused might overthrow the government, even if that was not part of a stated plan, they could convict them.
As early as 1920 it was apparent that not all Manitobans agreed with the judge or the jury. In that year’s provincial election a number of the jailed strike leaders ran for office. Even though they could not leave their prison cells during the campaign, three of them won election to the legislature. Voters in Winnipeg’s North End believed that the strike had been legitimate and they were prepared to stand behind the strike leaders. In later years, John Queen, one of the men who had been sent to jail, was elected mayor of Winnipeg. In 1921 J.S. Woodsworth, who had been arrested but never tried for his support of the strike, was elected to the House of Commons. Winnipeg workers also voted to join the One Big Union. With many of its leaders in jail or fired from their jobs and facing the opposition of employers, government, the Catholic Church, (Ref1, Ref2, Ref3) and the craft unions, the OBU remained a small regional union that was led by R.B. Russell until 1956.
Historians have continued to disagree over the strike’s meaning. Today’s debate is between historians who believe the strike was simply a local conflict and those who believe that the strike was a part of an international response on the part of working people to the social crisis created by industrialism and the First World War. Those who say it was a local conflict over simple collective bargaining issues are critical of the strike leaders, saying that they failed to recognize that a general strike would bring them into conflict with the government and lead to likely defeat. To these historians, the strike sapped the vitality of the movement.
Those historians who see it as part of a larger national and even international movement agree there was no revolutionary conspiracy afoot in 1919. Workers had however, they say, come to see themselves as belonging to a class that stood in opposition to employers. To them, the strike was not simply about the right to negotiate, but workers’ right to have a greater say in the way the post-war world would run. The fact that they lost the strike just underlined just how strong the forces were that they were up against. These historians suggest that the strike and the trials served to inspire unionists during the coming years of political and economic hardship.
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