“The following chart tells the story. It shows inflation-adjusted GDP per capita and median family income from 1947 (the earliest year for which the income data are available) to 2007. To facilitate comparison of the over-time trends, each is indexed to its 1973 level. Since the mid-to-late 1970s, growth of income at the median has been slow — very slow — relative to growth of the economy. The current decade, with no improvement at all in median income, is especially striking.”

Slow Income Growth for Middle America, Consider the Evidence, September 3, 2008 (I wish I’d seen this sooner)

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. America making more while the general population are making less? It is truly time to Occupy America because the current management really sucks. Yes, Wall Street, Banking, Insurance Industry, Reagan Administration, Social and Neo Conservatives, I’m looking at all of you. It’s time for the Looting of America to end.

Oh, and yay, it’s an election year, so plus ça change… I think I’ll send the Occupy-iers some swim googles. It won’t stop the pepper spraying, but it will protect their eyes a little.

(via the divine Dr. K)

Crossposted from The Hackenblog

“I hear she’s comin’ back,” Cody said.

“Figures. You gonna come see me in my suffering?” she asked.

“I might fall by. Arty said he’s tired of being the only Negro at his nightclub.”

Hackenbush shrugged, but Ross thought it was funny.

“He said that? Hell, Cody, maybe I should come by, too, except lute music gives me hives,” he managed to say between guffaws.

“Laugh it up, cats, at least dinner comes with the gig and you know how good the food is there,” she said on her way out. Eddy was packed up and tapping his foot waiting for her to get with it. They went back to her place; she’d spent part of her afternoon cleaning it up and changing the sheets.

Hackenbush was going to be on a tight schedule that week. Her temp job in Glendale ended at five; she had to get home to Echo Park, warm up, change into the modest and severe black silk jersey gown she’d picked up secondhand, which she now thought of as her “recital” dress. Then she had to be in Pasadena at seven to sing art songs with the lute-playing rocket scientist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The bet she’d lost was that Lola Rae and Mark Wilson would stay together even if Lola went to dance in San Francisco for a month. Hackenbush had bet on love and lost because Mark took a gig in Japan and left town a few weeks later; Lola still wasn’t back. Hackenbush could be forgiven: she was in love herself and her judgment was a little off. But off in a good way, it was “La Vie en Rose”, something she’d never believed in, much less thought would ever happen to her.

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Dr. Hackenbush Gains Perspective
AIDS and Class Warfare

By Ginger Mayerson

ISBN 9780982581346; 176 pages

It’s 1984 and Hackenbush’s broken heart is on the mend as she assists the very roguish, but devastatingly charming theater director, Monte Vista, in his last and greatest production. Mabel Hackenbush, better known as the singer, dancer, ukulele player extraordinaire, and front woman for Dr. Hackenbush and her Orchestra, has taken a chance on love and lost. After an epic binge, she can’t sing, won’t dance, and can only get through the day by focusing on her temp secretary job. Add in all this, the band has a big show coming up that Hackenbush might not be able to do in her current state of mind. Could this be the end of Dr. Hackenbush and her Orchestra? Into this dire situation saunters Monte Vista, theater maven supreme, who says he wants Hackenbush to help him write his memoirs. But for what he really wants… well, Hackenbush will have to call in reinforcements for that. And even then the outcome isn’t a sure thing.

Ginger Mayerson lives in Los Angeles, California. She’s published in the Coe Review, Roux Magazine, The Velvet Mafia, and The Journal of the Image Warehouse. Originally trained as a composer, she now writes novels, poetry, essays, reviews, interviews, makes collages, and edits the Journal of the Lincoln Heights Literary Society and publishes books and magazines at the Wapshott Press in her spare time. You can find the Hackenbush scene at www.hackenbush.net. Or you can get the whole story at www.gingermayerson.com.

I’ll also be keeping a tally on the sidebar.

Getting books to kids who don’t have any is a wonderful thing to do and I salute First Book for doing it. Now, if there was only a way to get a ukulele to every kid…

“She grabbed my hair at Bart’s Bar and Grill to tell me she liked the way I sang ‘Moonglow’,” Hackenbush said, opening her VW Bug’s door for him. “She could have just told me, but no, she had to bend me nearly backwards to tell me.”

“Well, we are talking about Lola Rae, aren’t we?”

“Yes. Thank God Cody held me up while she did it.” Hackenbush shuddered at the memory. “I might have been snapped like a twig.”

Shorty didn’t comment on Hackenbush’s un-twig-like figure; few twigs of his acquaintance had quite so many curves as she did. He merely smiled, and said he figured Lola was in the Bay Area for good. “She’s knocking them dead up there.”

“Dancing?”

“Of course!”

She dropped him at his new place in Hollywood. It was a nice apartment in a deco building on Bronson. She wondered how he could afford it and she suspected he was being kept, but was too arrogant to ask him. Besides, if he wanted her to know what he was up to, he’d tell her; until then she’d pretend not to give a damn.

Shorty had mixed luck with the men in his life; they were either givers or takers. Hackenbush thought Shorty was a great guy and could never quite figure out why he couldn’t find a man that was a bit more balanced and settle down. “Count your blessings, Hackenbush,” she reminded herself as she merged onto the 101 Freeway south. “Not everyone is as lucky as you and Eddy.”

That night the band played a wedding reception in Marina del Rey. Hackenbush tried to put the idea that she might have one of these one day out of her head.

“You looked nice tonight, Mabel,” Cody told her when they were packing up.

Hackenbush had on her basic-black-combat-casual-job evening gown; legions of waiters had spilled drinks and food on it and it all came out in a cold water wash on delicate. “Thanks, Cody, I do try to look nice at these jobs,” she said. “How’d I sound?”

“You sounded nice, too.”

“Just nice?”

“It’s just a casual, Mabel, save it for the gigs,” Cody said, zipping his bass cover up. “I hear you lost that bet.”

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She had thought that when she found this kind of love, she’d understand all those happy songs. It was not the case. No song could capture what she felt, not even words and music could do it justice. So, she reasoned, either what she had with Eddy was unique or this kind of once-in-a-lifetime love was just bigger than thirty-two bars and a verse could express. Hackenbush now had a better understanding of the dark songs of lost and hopeless love. She felt she knew more about them from her observations of others’ emotional shipwrecks and her own varied and personal experience. She still sang those songs, they were some of the greatest songs ever written; but she now sang them with more hope than tragedy, in an effort to tell her audiences that life is sad, but it might not always be. She kept the message subtle, because she didn’t want to get bashed in the face by some heartbroken poor devil who hated her for her happiness. And Hackenbush could dig it: when she was really down, the last thing she wanted was to hear about somebody else’s joy. It was petty of her, but there it was.

“What’s Ross gonna do?” Shorty asked.

Ross shared a house with Eddy and Hackenbush hadn’t really thought about what he’d do when she moved in. “I dunno, d’you think he’d want my place?”

“Echo Park is a lot different than Mid Wilshire.”

“Well, he’s a big guy, he’ll work it out,” she said gathering up her things. “Are you coming to see me in my servitude tomorrow night?”

“No, but I’ll get there one night,” Shorty said, holding the door for her. “One doesn’t hear you sing art songs very often.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You should know better than to bet on Lola Rae,” he said.

“I was betting on love, Shorty, Lola just happened to be involved,” she said, sourly. “Although I should know better than to have anything to do with that crazy woman. Six months ago she nearly broke my neck.”

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Shorty giggled and turned the metronome back on. He worked them hard for another hour and then they had dinner at a Thai place across from the Samsara School of Oriental Medicine on Third near Rampart.

“You think I ought to let those Chinese doctors stick pins in me, Shorty?” Hackenbush asked over a plate of panang curry. “My right shoulder and thumb are killing me.”

“I think you type too much, Mabel, and should carry your purse on your left side,” Shorty said.

“Yeah, maybe,” she said. “I’ll be typing less when we start the new gig next weekend.”

Shorty’s mouth was full, so he just nodded. Eddy and Mabel had landed the band a peach of a long-term, high-paying gig in Santa Monica. A good room for music and dancing and it was a chain of hotels, so they might be in the money for quite a while. “We can all save a little money on this gig,” he said when he could.

“I’ll be saving a little money when I move in with Eddy,” she said. “You know what they say about how two can live as cheaply as one. I’m giving my fucking landlord notice next week.”

“Hey, congratulations! I would dance at your wedding, Mabel.”

“You dance at everything, Shorty, my wedding would not be exceptional. Except that it would be my wedding,” she murmured. She was distracted with toting up the check, adding 23%, and dividing it in half. “And don’t jump the gun so fast, darlin’, we’re just moving in together.”

“Well, it’s nice,” Shorty said, digging in his wallet for money. “You really love this guy, don’t you?”

“‘Deed I do, Shorty, ‘deed I do.”

They smiled across the table at each other. Shorty had seen her through some ugly, tawdry affairs, one or two married men (until she finally learned that there really is no trouble like another woman’s man), and months of snarling celibacy and borderline man-hating. He occasionally wondered why she didn’t just switch to women, but the lesbians that made the rare pass at her were politely, but firmly, rebuffed. Shorty figured Eddy Lee got in under her radar because they had a foundation of mutual musical respect to fall safely in love on.

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“I know, Shorty, I know,” she rasped at him. “How about a break? I can’t feel my feet anymore.”

He agreed and she promptly stepped outside for a cigarette. “You might last longer, dear, if you didn’t smoke,” he observed.

“I’d kill people if I didn’t smoke,” she observed back at him.

Since there was no comeback to this, Shorty left her to smoke in peace. He went back inside to look at the exhibit of photos of some landscape he didn’t recognize. Art was the last thing he thought about at the Photography Center; Hackenbush was the first. They’d met there, two years ago: Shorty was dancing two solos in a little revue set to Cole Porter songs and Hackenbush and her baritone ukulele were the majority of the music. The show was produced, directed and choreographed by Gregg Schroedingmeier, now long-gone from the LA dance scene, whose main complaint was that Hackenbush’s voice got more attention than his dancing, his lighting, and everything he could take credit for. Shorty was surprised the egomaniac didn’t take credit for the voice God gave the woman, but Hackenbush’s voice was a thing unto itself. Soft, but powerful in its softness and vulnerable in its strength. Shorty eventually figured out the ukulele, which she could play credibly, was more prop than instrument, even if it went perfectly with her smoky, sultry voice.

After the performance, he’d tracked her down and asked her to dance with him. At first she said no, she didn’t dance, don’t ask her. But he kept asking and eventually, when a paying gig came along, she agreed, and found that not only could she dance, she loved it.

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It wasn’t obvious at first, but Mabel Hackenbush, better known as Dr. Hackenbush, was a well trained and serious musician. She looked younger than her twenty-eight years, and a big pair of black horn-rim glasses took the edge off her steely gaze. Singing with Dr. Hackenbush and her Orchestra, she appeared to be just another chick singer, albeit one with a better than average voice and phrasing. However, there was more to her than that; not only could she read music, including symphony and opera scores, she could sight-sing, arrange for anything up to a big band, conduct, and even orchestrate. She was one of the finest products of the Grove School of Music, which in its bare-bones, stripped-down, no-frills way produced some of the best composers and arrangers in the industry. She’d done well at Grove in spite of the three strikes against her: she was a vocalist, she didn’t play the piano very well, and she was female. There were no women getting screen credits in film composing in 1984, and only a few in arranging (which was a dying art—Quincy Jones and the marvelous arrangements on the “Thriller” album notwithstanding). There were few female conductors, so Hackenbush was a woman in what was still essentially a man’s world. And she couldn’t have cared less; her goal had been to get the best musical education she could afford as quickly as possible and the mind-numbingly, life-crushing Composition and Arranging Program at Grove only took a year to complete. Thank God for that; after a year of poverty, sleep deprivation and driving to the valley almost every day, she was ready for a new life. After Grove, she managed the music industry by ignoring it. She and her baritone ukulele made themselves welcome in every jazz standards-loving club and lounge in the city. When she hooked up with the dancer Shorty Smith, they became the must-have act at every chic venue and upscale party in the county. Sidemen came and went, but the core act was Dr. Hackenbush and Smith.

Or had been. About a year ago, Eddy Lee, guitar player and frontman of the Eddy Lee Trio asked them to join him, Cody Cole on bass and a cat named Ross on drums, and make it a quartet or quintet, depending on one’s point of view. They’d met one night when Hackenbush was singing serious jazz (she could do that, too) and Eddy was sitting in. It was as close to love at first sight as Hackenbush ever got. Eddy was in love, too; when she joined the band, he changed the name to Dr. Hackenbush and her Orchestra. Hackenbush figured if that wasn’t love, she didn’t know what was. The drummer and bass player eventually accepted her and Shorty, mainly because Hackenbush and Shorty got them a lot more gigs than they’d been getting as a pure jazz trio. Yeah, the Hackenbush and Shorty shtick was a little goofy, but man, could she sing and, man, could they dance.

Which is what they were doing that very Sunday afternoon at the Los Angeles Photography Center. Shorty was in the money enough to afford ten bucks an hour for three hours on a good floor and plenty of room to trip the light fantastic in. A meticulous choreographer, he didn’t let Mabel get away with being lazy in rehearsals. She was a hesitant dancer until she learned her steps and then she was fine; prone to improvise, but Shorty almost had her out of that bad habit.

By Ginger Mayerson

ISBN 9780982581346; 176 pages

Ginger Mayerson lives in Los Angeles, California. She’s published in the Coe Review, Roux Magazine, The Velvet Mafia, and The Journal of the Image Warehouse. Originally trained as a composer, she now writes novels, poetry, essays, reviews, interviews, makes collages, and edits the Journal of the Lincoln Heights Literary Society and publishes books and magazines at the Wapshott Press in her spare time. You can find the Hackenbush scene at www.hackenbush.net. Or you can get the whole story at www.gingermayerson.com.