I’m a totally-middle class guy, petite bourgeoisie all the way through. Fortunately I saw myself as a bohemian—thank God!—and that put me outside any given class. Being a bohemian satisfies a lot of desires: you can do lots of drugs, you can drink heavily, you don’t have to drive somewhere to work, or to work at all, and you don’t need to get married to have sex. The music you like is cool, the best, so are the books on your cinder-block bookshelf back in the loft.

Then you get old and you can’t do that anymore. You withdraw into yourself; you replay memories. You watch out for falls and lose your hearing, your vision, sex, and you leak piss. You’re out of balance. You know more, sure, but more than you wanted.

Bourgeoisie I was born but I still have some East Village grime under my fingernails: I hate landlords. We were paying $2700 a month and the guy was raising it to near $3000. Sorry, no negotiation possible. This was the guy who gave us mold on the walls, leaks in the ceiling, and no gas for a good part of the year. He lent us a space heater. We finally moved out over fifty dollars.

Some of my best friends (at least till now) are landlords. They own where they live and they’re not trying to gouge anybody. It’s like owning your own taxi cab, a respectable business. I don’t like it, though, when a doctor and a couple lawyers invest in a taxi medallion. I mean, they’re not going to drive the cab. They’re going to collect the money.

Just like other investing professionals, landlords put together companies that buy things, big things that sometimes have lots of apartments in them. They make their living on a return from their cash, and this degree of abstraction (cash vs. the real world) forces tenants into situations that are antithetical to what human beings want to do with themselves. I don’t want to work sixty-hours a week to pay for my home. In my anthropology textbook I read the pygmies of the Ituri Forest work (or used to work) about sixteen hours a week; that sounds about right.

There are other ways. Let's discuss the way Berlin handles it. I like the Dutch, the Scandinavians. The rent can’t be raised until people have to move.

We had room for it in a house in Putnam County and room for it in a loft in the Bronx, but Manhattan was another matter entirely. Our Seeburg SX100 Marauder, the smallest juke Seeburg ever made, was suddenly homeless. Though referred to as "the shaver" by aficionados due to its shape and small size there was still room for fifty of my 45s, one-hundred songs counting the B-sides. This was why those seven-inch disks were created. The razor found a new home at Brooklyn's New York Jukebox where they promised to love and honor the thing and, more importantly, fix it.

We had two framed Sholay posters; this one was my favorite but Carolyn thought the picture of Amitabh had been added from another, later, film. Our daughter has a new apartment so we took the poster down to her on the bus. Sholay (1975) remains one of the best Bollywood films ever made.

Remember that law
When you have to put your shades on to feel cool?
Well it's still a law,
you gotta put your shades on so you can feel cool
You know what I'm sayin'?

The above from Schooly D's Signifying Rapper, found on the LP Smoke Some Kill from 1988. I first heard it at the movies during the end credits of Able Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant when I turned to Carolyn and said Who the fuck is that?! Later when I rented a VHS hoping to hear it again the track was gone! It was an early case of a hip-hop copyright problem, as the track is set on top of the main riff from Led Zeppelin's Kashmir. Like Disney, Zeppelin always sued. It's not even a sample, it's just some guys in a studio somewhere playing the riff, years after the album had been released. In what way did it diminish the value of the original copyright? They not only had to withdraw the original version of the VHS, they had to destroy any existing copies.

The lyrics are tough and street-wise, arguably homophobic, misogynistic, and racist, but mostly anti-pimp. It is a retelling of a much older African folk tale about a signifying monkey. I bet Schooly heard it on a Dolemite LP.