A Glorious Non-bullshit Time

Waking Up in the 1930s

by Howie Stier

http://www.truthdig.com

Sept. 3, 2010

"The ’30s was a time when people had very little and there was nothing to hide behind … it was a glorious non-bullshit time,” wroteCharles Bukowski, the poet and author who grew up in Los Angeles during the Depression, and who was moved by the image of the unemployed men, the fathers of classmates, killing the day sitting on the porches of east Hollywood.

Today, in his old neighborhood, he’d find the unemployed, mostly young creative types who came to L.A. to work in TV and film, filling the cafes, the ubiquitous shops emblematic of L.A. culture. Noon and you can’t find an open table in any of them. But the coffee shop-goers don’t come here to socialize, to discuss politics or movies, or even to have coffee. These are offices for those without a reason to be in an office, where they sit silently, staring at laptop screens, poring over Craigslist job offerings, firing off résumés into cyberspace, pecking away at pipe-dream projects. And they are filled with hope and unable to share the poet’s sensibility and embrace of a non-bullshit time."