Dowie on Art and School
John Dowie’s new book, Before I Go, is out today.
I’ve already quoted from him here and here, but there are two more Escapological (and, to me, relatable) Dowie nuggets in my notebook:
The only people who advise people not to be artists are people who have never been artists. It is as if they are so deep in a rut of their own choosing that they can’t see over the sides.
It’s true. When you’re a child everyone seems to say, “you can be anything you want to be.” But then, in my case, there was trouble when my best school subjects turned out to be English and Drama. Becoming an actor or a writer was of the question, the stuff of fantasy.
The school careers advisor and every other adult I asked was dead against it. “Actors spend a lot of time resting,” my dad said, inadvertently making it sound brilliant. “Drama is a hobby,” said my deputy head teacher when I bumped into him coming out of the dentist one day. But that was life in the Midlands in the 1990s for you. It’s probably different today. Right?
There’s no reason not to become an artist if that’s what you’re good at and if it’s what you enjoy. There are perfectly legitimate career paths in the arts. And even when there aren’t, just find a way to do it anyway.
The purpose of school is not to teach children kindness, or the love of animals or how to play together nicely. The purpose of school is to teach children how to make money (almost always for somebody else).
It doesn’t matter what interests the child may have. If they don’t lead to making money then they have no value.
And that was the rub. My school and the other adults in the Midlands of the ’90s just couldn’t see how money could be made for other people — that is, the employment model, perhaps inspired by the mythical trickle-down economics — using art. You had to become a factory worker or get a job in a bank or the council or something.
Even when I accepted the reserve fate of librarianship, it was met with scepticism. Books, you know. Books. Books look suspiciously unprofitable for other people.
Anyway, Dowie’s book is marvellous and it’s out now. Go get it, you first-class scamps. In print. In digital.
Jeremy Gross (1970-2024)
What if the global economy were structured, not to send wealth into the hands of a tiny group of oligarchs, but rather to ensure the best possible lives for everyone, ensuring that people lived fulfilling lives free from want, engaged in activities that interested them and engaged them, enabling them to pursue their own interests alongside working for the common good?
Spiritual Contamination
From After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (2023) by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek:
In the early 1900s, sociologist Thorstein Veblen delineated the existence of a ‘leisure class’ whose class status was, in no small part, expressed by their ability to withdraw from work.
Sounds nice. That’s what I’d do.
The aristocrats from the feudal era had also been able to separate themselves from the daily grind, and many from the new capitalist classes followed in this tradition. Whereas the lower classes — quite literally the working classes — were forced to work in order to survive, the upper classes were able to extract themselves from the ‘spiritual contamination’ of work. Instead they signified their social status through expressions of idleness, frivolity, and consumption.
In other words, it used to be fashionable to be “idle rich.” Maybe some people even aspired to it.
It’s bizarre how today’s rich do everything they can to avoid being seen as idle. They launch “brands,” lie to magazines about their impossible daily schedules, monopolise public discourse, claim to have the answers, run for president. Yawn. What a bunch of strivers.
Maybe liberal guilt or survivor guilt is at the bottom of it: “I know you have to bust your hump to stay alive; I’m sorry for that but even here at the top of the tree, we work hard too.”
Or perhaps it’s indicative of the total dominance of the work ethic.
Either way: fuck ’em. Stay at the bottom of the tree and work less anyway. Don’t aspire to riches, especially if it means hard work when you get there.
Don’t get your hands or spirits dirty if you don’t have to. Idleness and frivolity are the order of the moment.
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To All You Workers Out There…
This line from Slacker (1990) cracks me up:
“To all you workers out there, every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death.”
He’s supposed to be crazy but I sort-of know what he means.
Interestingly, this character is a recently-freed prisoner. One of the first things he does with his freedom (after issuing this statement to some student filmmakers) is play a videogame in an amusement arcade. I found that charming somehow.
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Walkabout
From Vagabonding by Rolf Potts:
Culturally, the walkabout ritual is when Aborigines leave their work for a time and return to their native lifestyle in the outback.
On a broader and more mythical level, however, walkabout acts as a kind of remedy when the duties and obligations of life cause one to lose track of his or her true self.
To correct this, one merely leaves behind all possessions (except for survival essentials) and starts walking.
What’s intriguing about walkabout is that there’s no physical goal: It simply continues until one becomes whole again.
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New Escapologist Issue 16, “Footloose and Fancy-Free,” is out now.
Contains Swearing
Are you satisfied by your job? Do you leap out of bed each morning with a song in your heart, eager to travel swiftly and painlessly to a fabulous workplace where the layout and technology are perfectly adapted to your goals and needs?
What of home life? Do you return from work each evening with time and energy to get stuck into your rewarding, creative projects? Do you have a good grasp of the sort of āhome economicsā mastered by your parentsā and grandparentsā generations?
If so, this book is not for you. If, on the other hand, your experience of the worker-consumer lifestyle is a screaming Hell of clueless, unsatisfying, underpaid, carcinogenic, insecure shambling that you never signed up for and is an affront to your years of difficult and expensive study, The Good Life for Wage Slaves might be the helpful volumeāor at least the shoulder to cry onāyouāve been waiting for. It contains swearing. Also cats.
My 2020 book, The Good Life for Wage Slaves is enjoying a bit of a renaissance. Or at least a resurgence.
As well as an unexpected uptick in online sales, it seems to be a bestseller at Aye-Aye Books, my local bookshop. They’re flying out the door. Is there something afoot?
Why not get in on the inaction? Here’s where to grab a copy. (Or here if you’re a digimon).
Automated Roasting Jacks
Aw, who’s this little fella?
It’s the turnspit dog. Hiya, boy!
The turnspit dog used to help cook our dinners back in the pig-on-a-spit days of the over-an-open-flame times.
He helped by running in a wheel that kept the spit turning. Like this.
The turnspit dog went extinct when he was replaced by the arguably less cute automated roasting jack.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Look, I’m not saying that humans won’t or even shouldn’t be automated out of existence. But maybe we could start to think about building a world where our permission to live is no longer dependent on being useful.
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Do something useless today and get yourself a copy of the all-new New Escapologist.
And That Is What I Did
I’ve been helping to edit and publish Before I Go, a new memoir by renegade comedian John Dowie.
He’s an Escapologist, tried and true. Early in the book he writes:
After nine months I decided that working for a living was not for me. Apart from the intolerable repetition of getting up at the same time every day, catching the same bus, arriving at the same building, seeing the same people, doing the same thing all day and then doing it all again tomorrow, I also had to endure having a boss ā someone who told me what to do, where to be and when. As if my life was not my own. There had to be something better than this, but what?
Later, he writes this, which gives me goose pimples:
[In the late 1970s] there were three recognized routes into performing comedy. All were beyond me. I was not going to don a frilly shirt and perform in Northern nightclubs. I was not going to be a jolly Red or Bluecoat in a holiday camp. I was not going to go to Oxbridge, be in a revue and storm the Edinburgh Festival before conquering Broadway and/or the BBC. The only realistic choice I had was to follow the example set by the theatre groups I admired: to write, perform and tour a one-man show in venues similar to Birmingham Arts Lab. And that is what I did.
“And that is what I did…”
We’re used to hearing “and that is what I’ll do” inside our own heads. But here’s a man at the end of that journey, looking back on the decision and a life well lived.
“And that is what I did…”
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Before I Go is due for release on August 25th, though a little bird tells me that pre-orders will be satisfied earlier than that. Here’s where to go for print and digital editions. You can also get his earlier memoir about a life on the road here (e-book only).
Woes Wanted
We have a column in New Escapologist called Workplace Woes. It’s an opportunity for readers to anonymously blow off steam about their jobs, past or present.
In Issue 14 there was the story of an office Halloween Party that went from embarrassing to worse. In Issue 16 there was the story of the boss who stalked his assistant so as to add an extra space after their full stops.
If you’d like to vent your spleen about this sort of workplace shit, please send me your Workplace Woes by email. All stories will be treated with utmost confidence. That’s the whole point.
Please keep them under 200 words (no need for elaborate scene setting: just cut right to the chase). Stories can be funny or anger-inducing or a little of both. It’s all good.
It’s always particularly nice to receive Woes from the worlds of retail or hospitality and also outdoorsy Woes (e.g. from farming or the construction industry), but if your story is simply office-based then that’s good too!
The deadline for Issue 17 is the end of August but any latecomers can be saved for future editions.
Thanks everyone. Over to you.
Letter to the Editor: We Don’t Need Amplification
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Friend R writes:
Hi Rob,
I thought you might be interested in what I’ve seen happening to abandoned offices in the last couple of years. Loads of them in Glasgow city centre are being used for the arts, which is great but it feels and looks very strange!
The brass band I’m in rehearses on the second floor of an office. We don’t need amplification, just space and nobody to complain about the noise, so it works really well for us. The same office hosts loads of other bands, some pottery people, some actual artists with clay and oils etc, crafty types and there’s something to do with protesting and foodbanks as we can see their tinned goods and flags neatly organised into piles in their bit.
It’s a weird atmosphere though, as we still have the strip lighting, the lanyard-operated entry gates, the grubby turquoise carpets, the unopenable windows with cream-coloured blinds and piles of adjustable office chairs and bits of desk stacked up in every corner.
Anyway, [the newsletter was a] great read as always, and hopefully catch up soon!
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New Escapologist Issue 16 is now available in our online shop, in print and digital formats.
