“The day is short and the night is long
Why do you work so hard to get what you don’t even want”
Jearlyn Steele: The Day is Short (from A Prairie Home Companion)
The wealthy elite have never contributed to the cause of the working classes in any meaningful way. When they do it is token gestures designed to look good, but in reality, these gestures, come nowhere near to rewarding what was extracted from society in the first place to make them their wealth. After all how do you adequately compensate years of, in many cases dangerous, back breaking and/or soul crushing work that often bring about shortened lives and poor health in old age. The main thing of course is to pay people properly; the kind of pay that allows people to live with dignity; without the aid of in-work benefits and the capacity at the end of the work day to be be able to participate in some form of pursuit that facilitates personal health or mental stimulation (or ideally both). This is how we progress both as individuals and a a society.
“You don’t make a million you take a million”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)
As a young person with no responsibilities for a family this was possible; I loved a weekly session of badminton and/or swimming, running three nights a week and a couple of nights at the local gym. The older I have got, and the fact that my financial circumstances have declined in line with the cost of raising a family in the twenty-first century and longer working hours, the less energy and money I have to put towards such things. The inclination to do so often raises its head but is regularly beaten back down, even with the addition of daily medication since 2020, in an attempt to bat away the anxiety and depression gnawing at my soul.
Average life expectancy in Hunslet (6th poorest ward in Leeds) is 76 for men and 71 for women
Average life expectancy in the wider Leeds area is 78 for men and 82 for women
The economy was getting so badI had to lay myself offWell, working was a habit I hadSo I kept showin’ up anywayThen one day things turned aroundI got my back payOld ways comin’ through again.
Neil Young: Old Ways
Nearly three years ago I gave up the job that I had held for the best part of nineteen years in an attempt to find another way. My job had been as the receptionist of the Henry Moore Institute, the sculpture galleries in Leeds City Centre. During this time I had been running the house that I live in with my family as an art space; fourteen years of artists from South Leeds, wider Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Italy, France, Germany, the USA, Iran, Spain and more. Established and early career artists working side-by-side in, quite literally, an underground venue; collaborating, making new friendships with members of the community and forming new working partnerships and alliances with others also engaged in artistic practice. Individuals they may never have encountered had they not met through our programme.
Despite having given up working for someone else in May 2023, I have never the less continued to work every day since then. The crucial point here is that I gave up paid employment in order to do what I consider to be the real work within my community.
“After I had been studying with him for two years, [Arnold] Schoenberg said, “In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.” I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.”
John Cage
With only one successful funding application under my belt in two years, Arts Council England (ACE) in May 2024, the money from which had to do a lot of heavy lifting and lasted far longer than it was supposed to, I find myself once again in the position of working for someone else in order to keep going.
Each of the funding applications that I have made to organisations over the last three years can take take days or weeks to fill in -in many cases highly complex questioning that can amount to the length of an average novella- of which success is no guarantee. In fact the ACE application success rate for 2024-25 is between 10 and 20%; not great odds I’m sure you would agree. Their DYCP (Developing Your Creative Practice) funding stream -one month, Nov-Dec24- received 2600 applications. With a success rate of 20% this means at most 56 projects got funding whilst 2544 got nothing, not just bad odds but a hell of a lot of work as well.
Whilst I once again have to scale back my activities as BasementArtsProject in order to accommodate my new two day a week schedule for another employer I will however continue bashing my head against that wall, at least it will not be like the Basement programmes temporary hiatus whilst I did xmas temp work in 2023. Hopefully we can one day change the narrative and prove that everyone has a place in this world regardless of their monetary influence or lack thereof.
“Can you feel the disconnection of us all?
Trying to cling to those who are richer than us all
Told me who to be, never had no choice at all”Cleo Reed: I Been Out Here Hustlin’
