Author: Robert Wringham

Legendary punk front woman Poly Styrene has cancer and is reportedly too weak for chemotherapy. Three months after diagnosis, however, she is promoting her new studio album, Generation Indigo, from a hospital bed while nurses administer a miracle drug called Herceptin. It is from this bed in a British coastal town (very near to Hastings pier, where she first saw the Sex Pistols perform and famously said, “I could do that”) that Ms. Styrene grants us a short but upbeat interview.

Alongside Laura Logic, Poly Styrene came to popular consciousness while fronting the iconic punk rock band X-Ray Spex. The only criticism that can be leveled upon this amazing group (important in the history of New Wave as well as pure punk) is that they didn’t produce enough work. Two archetypal studio albums and two live recordings have left fans desperate for more. Parallel to her work with the Spex, Poly has enjoyed a solo career, starting in 1980 with her album Translucence. Putting aside the heavy and grubby punk guitar of the Spex, her solo work tends to be gentler, jazzy, and inspired by her spiritual outlook — Poly was initiated into the Hare Krishna movement in 1983 and lived as a devotee in their temple for several years.

The latest installment to the Styrene canon is Generation Indigo and its first single, “Virtual Boyfriend.” “I just wanted to do something that was very current and that was about modern relationships,” Poly tells me in regards to the single. “There wasn’t a lot of thought. It channeled through me and just happened.” The narrative of the new single concerns technology and our relationship to it: “Human contact is necessary, and we need to be careful we don’t lose this and its importance.”

The new album is produced by Martin Glover, perhaps most famous as “Youth” from post-punk kings, Killing Joke. “It was a pleasant experience [working with him] and we got on. He works pretty fast and so do I, so the pace was familiar.” Poly Styrene is often cited as the original feminist punk icon. What are the challenges for feminism today?

“I don’t think there are any challenges anymore. Just the over-sexualization of women, but that’s quite small in reality. I’m in a hospital at the moment and all the nurses are women and they’re lovely. In the media they’re portrayed in a different way, but just like the nurses I’m talking about, the majority of women are out there being themselves. Women are quite caring and nurturing and that’s good. If that’s feminism then there should be more of it.”

I ask the question to which we’re all nonchalantly hoping for an affirmative. Will there be a future excursion for the X-Ray Spex or perhaps a release of older, unheard material? “I’m not sure at the moment, as I’m concentrating on this album and also on getting better. There are some early recordings that haven’t been out there yet… maybe one day in the future it will be released.”

I think Verbicide speaks on behalf of all the fans when we wish Poly a speedy recovery.

Employment often seems at odds with the happiness and internal values of the individual. Must it always be this way?

There are broadly speaking two philosophies of work out there. The first you could call the working-class view of work, which sees the point of work as being primarily financial. You work to feed yourself and your loved ones. You don’t live for your work. You work for the sake of the weekend and spare time – and your colleagues are not your friends necessarily. The other view of work, very different, is the middle class view, which sees work as absolutely essential to a fulfilled life and lying at the heart of our self-creation and self-fulfilment. These two philosophies always co-exist but in a recession, the working class view is getting a new lease of life. More and more one hears the refrain, ‘it’s not perfect, but at least it’s a job…’

The strangest thing about the world of work isn’t the long hours we put in or the fancy machines we use to get it done; take a step back and perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the work scene is in the end psychological rather than economic or industrial. It has to do with our attitudes to work, more specifically the widespread expectation that our work should make us happy, that it should be at the centre of our lives and our expectations of fulfilment. The first question we tend to ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents were, but what they do. Here is the key to someone’s identity and esteem. It seems hard to imagine being able to feel good about yourself or knowing who you were without having work to get on with.

It wasn’t always like this. For thousands of years, work was viewed as an unavoidable drudge and nothing more, something to be done with as rapidly as possible and escaped in the imagination through alcohol or religious intoxication. Aristotle was only the first of many philosophers to state that no one could be both free and obliged to earn a living. Holding down a job, any job, was akin to slavery and denied one any chance of greatness. Christianity added to this analysis the yet grimmer conclusion that the misery of work was an unavoidable consequence of the sins of Adam and Eve. The idea that work could be fun, as opposed to simply useful and necessary, had to wait until the Renaissance to get any traction. It was then, in contemporary biographies of geniuses like Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci, that one gets the first glimmers of the idea that doing extraordinary work might be better than lying around as an idle aristocrat, indeed, that work might be the highest of blessings. A more optimistic assessment of work as a whole had to wait until the eighteenth century, the age of the great bourgeois philosophers, men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, who for the first time argued that one’s working life could be at the centre of any ambition for happiness. It was during this century that our modern ideas about work were formed – incidentally, at the very same time as our modern ideas about love and marriage took shape.

In fact, there were remarkable similarities between the two realms of love and work. In the pre-modern age, it had widely been assumed that no one could try to be in love and married: marriage was something one did for purely commercial reasons, to hand down the family farm or ensure a dynastic continuity. Things were going well if you maintained a tepid friendship with your spouse. Meanwhile, love was something you did with your mistress, on the side, with pleasure untied to the responsibilities of child-rearing. Yet the new philosophers of love now argued that one might actually aim to marry the person one was in love with rather than just have an affair. To this unusual idea was added the even more peculiar notion that one might work both for money and to realise one’s dreams, an idea that replaced the previous assumption that the day job took care of the rent and anything more ambitious had to happen in one’s spare time, once the money had been hauled in.

We are the heirs of these two very ambitious beliefs: that you can be in love and married ­- and in a job and having a good time. It has become as impossible for us to think that you could be out of work and happy as it had once seemed impossible for Aristotle to think that you could be employed and human.

This is a very short excerpt from our on-stage conversation with Tom Hodgkinson.

The interview can be read in its entirety in Issue Three of New Escapologist.

Tom: I’ll go back to when I started the Idler magazine, which was in 1993. The reason I started was because I left university and I was beginning a career. I had had one year working in a record shop called Rough Trade in London. I’d met a whole different crowd of people; these people were skateboarders. It impressed me as a very creative scene, full of autonomously functioning individuals. There were people running their own club nights and tprinting T-shirts and running fanzines and magazines and playing in bands and there were DJs. No one actually had any money, but no one seemed to have a job. And it was great to meet such people here, who were coming from a completely different and a less academic background, but who seemed to be much more free and more spirited and were grabbing their life with both hands — much more than I was — because I was sitting in the shop all day.

So that was one thing that began to open out: the fact there might be work outside of the conventional. I think I had the idea for the magazine a couple of years later, when I was working on the Sunday Mirror magazine. I had got the job kind of by accident — fifty pounds a day as a researcher for three days a week. I thought this would be good; I could do my own stuff at the same time. I found myself being made thoroughly miserable by the culture of the office, which was later well portrayed in The Office. I was too young and new to get involved in the politics, but there was something about these offices: the boss was made into a petty tyrant and we were humiliated daily and one day I’d be asked to, sort of, write a short article, which, itself, was actually rubbish, as it was a terrible magazine. One of the editors would come by and go “coffee run, coffee run, coffee run, Tom, Tom, coffee”. So, we had to go and get the editors their different kinds of coffees. I didn’t have any money. I couldn’t stand the commute every day.

I was always late; I was probably a very bad employee. And I was also very bored for long periods of the day. I had been bored at the shop, but it was a little different, because people came in and we were able to hang out. But if you started, sort of, chatting to your neighbor in this office, then the editor would tell you, “I want to see heads down, heads down,” and just enjoy, sort of, putting people down. It’s really very humiliating; I felt so depressed.

Neil: Okay, Rob. The latest issue of your magazine is about the practicalities of escape. I was wondering if you could tell us how you got to be producing this magazine and to be expressing these ideas and what you think are the practical ways that people here tonight can take to get to where they want to be.

Robert: Well, the practicalities edition is not actually released yet. The War Against Cliché Issues is on sale tonight. The practicalities one will be a little bit different, but, yeah, we can talk about that for a bit. I think, as Tom was saying, the 9-5 work system does not work. It doesn’t make anybody happy and it also fails in terms of production as well. I mean, do a lot of people here have officy kinds of jobs?

The audience responds with an unenthusiastic ‘Yeah’.

Robert: (Laughs). See, you cannot muster the energy to be enthusiastic – even ironically – at working in an office 9-5. The bottom line is: if you work in the office, probably about 80% of your time is spent doing not very much. So, even from the employer’s or the bureaucrat’s perspective, it’s probably a very inefficient system. It fails on both sides. It doesn’t make the worker happy, we don’t make enough money, we are not respected, and, frankly, it doesn’t work. We produce inferior products and inferior services that probably don’t really matter, especially if you work in something like marketing.

I worked as a librarian for a long time, but I ended up working in an office again. Librarianship is one of those careers that was, perhaps, a trade, once upon a time, but it is becoming kind of deskilled. They outsource a lot of the skilled work, so now librarians end up in offices, either at the back of an actual library or there is no physical library at all and they offer electronic services. And that’s basically where I ended up: it was somewhat dissatisfying, not because I fetishise books or the ideas of a library to a huge degree, but I just felt that the cornerstone principles of librarianship aren’t being met anymore.

So, to answer the question about the project’s history, it came about when I was reading two books simultaneously: one about the life of Houdini and also one about the rise of Bohemianism around the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Buy New Escapologist Issue Three for the complete conversation (and other issues) here.

Leo Babauta is the founder of the Zen Habits website and books and (more pertinently to this post) the website, Mnmlist. His sites have thousands of readers. I caught up with Leo by email and asked him a few questions for the advanced minimalist:

Q: After minimalism, do you find yourself treasuring the things still in your possession or do they weigh upon you as stubborn things that wouldn’t wash away?

Leo: I don’t think about them much. The things in my possessions are just things. They are there because I need them, not because I love them. I have a T-shirt because otherwise I’d be cold, not because it’s beautiful and gives me joy. Going outside and playing with my kids gives me joy. Minimalism is a way for me to let go of thinking about things so much.

Q: Do you feel that digital entities (mp3s, eBooks etc) constitute clutter in the same way that physical objects do? Should we try to save virtual real estate as well as physical space?

Leo: A few years ago I moved from organizing all my files into folders, to forgetting about them and using search to find what I need — this includes mp3s, documents, emails. Search eliminates the need to organize, though you can purge if you’re using up too much space.

More important than worrying about digital files is being aware of digital buying. If you buy things mindlessly because it’s easy — apps, music, movies, ebooks — that’s mindless consumerism. That’s something you should become aware of.

Q: I converted to minimalism as a personal preference but I find myself thinking more and more about the green benefits of reduction. How relevant is the environmental issue to you?

Leo: It’s at the heart of minimalism. Environmental problems have become so overpowering because we have let corporate consumerism become more important than how we treat each other, how we live with nature … than living in general. Minimalism is striking back against that. When you let go of corporate consumerism, you let go of the need to overconsume, to buy horrible amounts of things and waste so many natural resources.