about a bicycle

AAB

And I Didnt Even Call the Police!

Coast Salish Territory | issue 2 | spring 2013

To overcome this crisis without questioning the meaning of consumption, production, and investment is to reproduce the preconditions of financial capitalism, the violence of its ups and downs, the philosophy according to which time is everything, man is nothing. For man to be everything, we need to reclaim the time of his existence. From Christian Marazzis The Violence of Financial Capitalism

AAB issue 2, And I Didnt Even Call the Police! Edited by Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad This book was set in Garamond Pro and Helvetica Neue Coast Salish Territory, Spring 2013

Contents
Preface nikki reimer follow the plot to the ideal candidate danielle lafrance Get Fucked anahita jamali rad Money Knows danielle lafrance Capital: A Short-Lived Lie OR MY NAME IS HELENE DEMUTH kaylin pearce from the boardroom table nikki reimer materality 2 milena varzonovtseva Circle of places, life, and futurisms penelope hetherington Key Concepts Exercise Unsigned Contributions by: Megan Hepburn, Andrea Demers, and Jeunesse LaFrance

Preface
Round Two, Fight! About a Bicycle hosted a series on economics this winter 2012-13 entitled Capital Labour/Capital Life, with a focus on how Capitalism functions (or doesnt) now. We explored texts that address capitals transmutation during the 2008 (and on-going) global economic crisis, the precarious conditions of labour and life, economic principles that situate capitalisms avant-gardes and the avant-gardes of its opposition, and the current state of financialization and its obscene superego that floods public and cognitive values, and how (beginning with the introduction of standardized time) the machinery of Capital becomes internalized as a moral imperative. Like a line from Waiting for Godot, there is no outside from Empire, from a world system that is a totalizing and affective reality, and often debilitates social subjects from pushing beyond postmodern impasse (capitalism breeds impassiveness), a space in which the social is fluid (anything goes!), while the economic beats the subject in line to the rhythm of surplus-value production. Keeping in mind the relevance of Marxian economics (and the factories that still operate in those conditions), we began this session with an intensive 3-week reading of Christian Marazzis The Violence of Financial Capitalism, which has acted as a departure from what we know and a necessary blueprint for interpreting the financial crisis as a fluctuating, yet stable vortex of capital accumulation. In order to confront cultural predispositions to success and failure within the Market, we thought about the procedural creation of scarcity and how it dictates the Markets preference for rarity. A few questions that percolated from the outset and still has relevance to this issue: How do we avert our attentions from an idealized future while still imagining a post-utopian social reality? When so much of our relationships are based upon competition and the desire for more, how do we (emotionally) educate ourselves out of this paradox? Can we cannibalize the esoteric neolanguage of finance and ideology and transfigure it into a more recognizable beast? How do
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we reconcile precarious privilege with the exploitation of precarious labour? How do we theorize precarity not only as a form of labour, but also as a new form of being: an all-encompassing anxiety resulting from the instability of the free markets and how it affects what we eat, where we live, and if we are paid. From Gill, How might we make links between macro-organization and institutional practices on the one hand, and experience and affective states on the other, and open up an exploration of the ways in which these may be gendered, racialized and classed? AAB Issue 2, And I Didnt Even Call the Police! is a response to these questions and quandaries, it raises new ones, and calls our attention to the omnipresence of fictitious money flows, postmodern panopticons, and internal and external policing. These fleshed out apparatuses of control also herald the scrutiny of what is affectively valorized in the aftermath of this irreversible global crisis. We maintain that AAB, as a collective, is a meeting place between women who offer not just critical and argumentative prowess, but insight into how capital affects our daily routine, perspectives, and identities. We maintain a critical attitude about all co-constitutive aspects of our lives: our jobs, our consumption, our unpaid labour, and our personal relationships, recognising ourselves as a part of the aforementioned beast. In connection with a passage from Silvia Fredercis interview Feminism, Finance and the Future of #Occupy:
Finance capitalism is not different in nature from capitalism in general. The idea that there is something more wholesome about production-based capitalism is an illusion we must abandon. It ignores the fact that finance capitalism is also based on production and unequal and exploitative class relations, although in a more circuitous way. A feminist critique of financial capitalism, then, cannot be substantially different from a critique of capitalism in every other form. Nevertheless, looking at finance capitalism from the viewpoint of women, we can gain an insight into some of the ways in which our everyday reproduction and the relation between women and capital have changed.

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In part, this issue brings into consideration the threats to daily life, to affective social and domesticated bonds, in an age of heightened alienation, and how to navigate our bonds so as to meet together and interfere with the logic of co-production and self-control. D&A

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ficti tio us mon ey flo ws

Dear AAB, im still working on my submission to issue 2. its kind of hilarious timing, just as my employer commits blatant fraud, bouncing 80% of my total pay for the 4 months of working for this non-profit organization, putting my colleagues and I into credit hell. At the same time, my rent goes directly to my employer because my living arrangement here has been organized by them. the house is heated with oil, which has run out as of 2 days ago, putting me in -10 temperatures - indoors, without access to any method of transportation to the nearest village or town, should my pile of blankets prove not enough. as per the rent agreement with my employer, the fuel is paid for by the non-profit (minus my rent), so I am instructed not to hire the fuel company to come in this emergency, as my employer will not pay the $70 emergency fillup fee. it would make a pertinent anecdote.

nikki reimer

follow the plot to the ideal candidate

physical demands: pine needles, blood in the snow wolves drag the body managing continuous, repetitive arm, hand, and finger movements reaching, bending, carrying the father home extensive walking and stair climbing but the boy is already dead in his bed dust, fumes, gases, odor, animal dander and changes in the actors own life expose liam neesons characters wife to occasional lifting, pushing, and pulling the heart still beating in the cavity adequate visual acuity is required a six inch cut the little girls parents hire thugs to terrorize and kidnap someone who strives to obtain the correct information the doctor whom they hold responsible for her death has the ability to influence direction the sister dies of a cocaine overdose in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment the parents are devastated on a part-time, volunteer basis all positions originate from the thought that he died fighting for freedom
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accountable the brother tries to take down the drug lord the loyalist makes up the email address he enters below a story of a son tragically killed by a bomb will allow our staff to correspond with him in a bid for sympathy concerning his interest in employment in order to update the resistance fighters who have him captive he will need to provide no children he also needs to define the brothers loyalty to each other to broker deals with demons at a later date or submit the same profile the womans mental illness will only become active after entering a valid email address provide monthly statistics triggered by her babys crib death the siblings are linked via a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 30 characters please adhere to the following in order to gain custody of their baby when creating a new password keep the dead babys room undisturbed in order to save humanity from her evil brother in the email address field, click the password form box

password does not match the mad-scientist father the defined login kills her neighbours passwords length must have a magical bond the sister commits at least one upper case character drags an effective office horticulture program highly organized with excellent suicide the alternate-reality son into successful onboarding and timely offboarding of staff a lightbulb is screwed into his open chest accordingly, only serious applicants need apply

danielle lafrance

Get Fucked

what we eat, where we live, and if we are paid

I hear this phrase all the time: work to live, and live to work. Which one means Im a slave to my job? Having been raised on the North Shore, I wore a backpack of opportunity. It felt like possibilities were reachable. With high housing rates and the current state of the economy, Ive come to realize that I cant afford to live in this city. I hear the headline: Vancouver is the most liveable city in the world. But for whom? We have been forced to cohabitate with others to save on rent. I wonder if its forcing us to fall in love over and over again. This can be both a positive and negative way of living we learn how to share and deal with people, make long lasting relationships, but it also constrains them. I always dreamt the American dream of owning a house, and now I struggle for the bare essentials: food, water, and shelter. Where did this dream come from and where can I get a refund?

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anahita jamali rad

Money Knows

The medieval proverb nulle terre sans seigneur [there is no land without its lord] is thereby replaced by that other proverb, largent na pas de matre [money knows no master], wherein is expressed the complete domination of dead matter over mankind. From Karl Marxs Rent of Land

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Money Knows No Master

It is necessary to invent the bodies of toxic assets. made easy

A reproduction of living-making (available on the market)

in order to infect the limbs of global capital

into easy-money

into these . . . affective embodied experiences. with little or no liquidity.

Assets with anxiety, shame, aggression

Assets with desires, assets conditioned with the American Dream, assets that would do anything, conceal their poor upbringing and shoddy precarious conditions, just to get a foot in the game.

Well make

a living out of you.

No futures, no futures, no futures for me ...

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The Categorical Imperative of Profit at Any Cost

Capital consumes the possible. Invent strategies to reduce risk. Or the mathematical equivalent of ethical conduct.

This toxicity will infect all of your securities. This toxicity will infect . . . We can do better than this. What we need is better, faster, cheaper medicine. Or to rely on the old adage, feed the banks, starve the rest. What feeds coffins makes profits.

You

can have

it all . . .

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You Will Be Subject to Fare Inspection at Any Time

Nothing is untouched. The crisis continues deteriorating bodies of populations scarred by the Neoliberal Oath. No need to worry, though. The post-industrial wasteland is filled with discarded bodies.

The body is obsolete.

Whereas the pre-industrial severed limbs as punishment for resistance, the post-industrial produces a mode of life severed from limbs, precluding resistance. The work that embodies the worker makes labour without limbs.

There are no mouths to feed in the virtual. Here, work is immaterial, a labour whose main purpose is to consume to no end, to consume itself into negative existence (positive debt), to consume in the face of nothing left to consume, naturalized. Here, one needs nothing beyond the nurturing touch of mother austerity.

No futures, no futures, no futures for you . . .

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The System that Suppresses Noise thereby Amplifies Noise

This is a definition of a biological organism. The blood and toil of machines of finance

transmit into market dreams. In order to support the energy consumption of tenement blocks built for rapid market response cut the energy consumption of the working bodies.

Here, we swim in the primordial soup of that other developing life form: the zeros and ones that formulate numbers on a screen that formulate dollars left to autonomously reproduce on the market.

This is life after crisis.

No futures, no futures, no futures for us . . .

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Removed from Time

Hedge the transmit of monetary post-monetary futures funds. Give it all youve unsecured floating money bags . . . The circulatory flows, pumping blood and toil of the machines, breathing life into the trans-atlantic monetary system floating free.

You can have it, you can have it, have it all, have it all . . .

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danielle lafrance

Capital: A Short-Lived Lie OR MY NAME IS

HELENE DEMUTH
Work is never really present and life has no gravity in advertising: objects have no weight, the link between the cause and effect of gestures is governed by pure fantasy. The dreams engendered by Capitalism are the most disquieting of its products, their specific visual language is also the source of the misunderstanding between the inhabitants of the poorly developed countries and the Westerners. These dreams are conceived as devices of subjectivization, scenes from the life of the toxic community of human beings and things. Where the commodity is absent, bodies are tragically different From Claire Fontaines Human strike within the field of libidinal economy

PM: Would you tell me about that dream you had last night? DL: What was the dream you think I had? PM: The one about blisters on your legs upon coming home from work. DL: Yes, I look at them with utter disregard. Im not concerned with oozing pus or the fervent itch. Its merely there on the surface of someones skin . . . sometimes depressed people think everyone is watching them or know something about them that they dont already know. I always think about times of vanity that hide hysterical scars. Is this a body defeated by capital or defeating capital? I think thats why I like going sans make-up these days or without my hair blown dry. Im tired of making myself up for myself or finding myself thinking or advising you deserve it. PM: Yeah, maybe you should stop asking me to get a hair cut on top of that. DL: I wonder if I dream more when Im grinding my teeth, like to a click track or a metronome. It creates a melodious rhythm to accustom rapid eye movement and reveals a mysterious spell for deranged reoccurrences in my sleeping mind. Sleep is an important component to anyones quality of life. Some choose not to sleep and some have no choice.
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PM: I said last night over dinner that your contribution to work, your personal significance, is not intrinsic to the place of work itself. Work allows for security for yourself and theres some financial reward at the end of endless nights . . . I dont like any type of labour where I have authority over someone else or, more so, where I am only put in this authoritative position because I am designated as the one capable of minding the shop. Bookkeeping is done in a particular order. Its law, like the good book. DL: Resist the more negative constrictions on thought; beware of identity monikers, especially those that say they are changing the world, like the Beats. We bring up the Great Male Minds of the post-war only because their visibility works contra to the marginal bodies who make appearances due to their street entrenchment. Those who do not have access to the page or the canvas, the computer, that do not refer to their work as my work is about . . . Blank nothing stares, chains equipt for fortitude, gregarious fleeting moments to arrest time from liberated time. If capital is appropriating and driving time . . . its immeasurable and you can go tell your friends down South I said so. PM: And where do limitations come from? There are logistical turns that take place when youre high off the ground, when the mind knows the body will plummet to its death, yet you keep on lifting and carrying your unruly weight. The face of the mountain has several problems, they are called, where the climber sacrifices the logic of self-defeat in order to cross the line. Even when sliding scale of rocks procede to be mythic tricks played on the climber, the movement to correct the problem is not chance or slight of hand. Your fingers belong in that crack at that given time, and when they feel like they dont (like when your muscles went slack a few weekends ago) they still fit. Rocks are only rocks and I believe in their realism. DL: Still juggling whether my fear of falling is actually about the desire to fall, risky foundering in the wake of the underlying dynamic of Western culture. You looked so happy this morning before you left for the climb in Squamish. Meanwhile, back at base camp, Im so fucking tired of
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sentiment and sincerity. I want to fucking hit someone or something. I fucking hate the amount of energy and time spent on free floating before a consecrated experience at work. I wonder if the neurosis concerning time is in fact a response to a possible rupture of dilatory exchanges (we have a privileged amount of time to concede the problem of capital) or the debilitation of introducing yourself over and over again to some dimwitted fuck. Yesterday, I went through my track record with you the vertiginous experience of excusing myself from work in order to feel life (forms-oflife). In order to write the page that breaks the camels back. PM: I only looked happy because I was going climbing. You should want me to go. Its when I not only sense haecceity but embody it. It brings me closer to dying in the most reverent way it could be experienced. Insofar as adventure sports offer perspective, I wrote (quoted) once to you: Ive been sea kayaking on and off for a few years (kayaking Cape Wrath was my Eiger north face), and find the sea the closest thing to going on a big climb. The only difference is that often I find a tussle with the sea feels like an expedition in itself, a single day like a whole trip to Patagonia condensed down. Out on the water in the big swell, in your wobbly boat, you experience the full gamut of climbing highs and lows - the prime ones being utter terror (Im going to fucking die!), utter boredom (I wish I was dead) and utter commitment (I hope my partner dies - not me!). In the sea Ive never been so aware of my place in nature (I have no place), my ability to ask my body to give (50km day in a boat is like running a marathon on your arms) or so cold (when youre swimming in the North Sea its colder than Alaska in March). As I said the sea is a great way to sooth a restless soul, a way to re-balance that selfish immature western adventurous streak in us, were we stamp our feet and demand some base excitement and one-ness with nature a blow job for the spirit. Twenty minutes in the sea is like a whack to the head and all such thoughts are washed away (Andy Kirkpatrick). Its you who feels this fortitude with great bodies of water why cant you realize this is something I truly enjoy.
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DL: Theres a certain comfort people find in all-encompassing depression. Its an ironic thing to say, but I struggle with the sinking flood and maintaining vigilant attentiveness, like a Young Girl. Saying everyone is so unhappy these days is an understatement. Its a gentle massage through real madness. Just as the blue pearl planet from Lars Van Triers Melancholia is misunderstood as a fly-by but is indeed targeting our blue pearl planet Earth, so to are the pounding fists of totalizing capital, in all its formations. The scientist-husband, John, is the first to commit suicide when he realizes the end is near, while the depressed sisters, one clinical one getting by, remain calm. Its not a comfort, like I mentioned, its the insight that depressed people can remain calm in apocalyptic situations. Perhaps, a temporal strategy is to seize anxiety as a weapon rather than an agoraphobic blanket to hide under . . . I find myself absorbing others characteristics and compensating for the missing link in their psychosis. The same way this discursive I of conversational theory is a way to breathe theory through osmosis . . . at Banff I used this term, osmosis (theoretical extraction through living life), during a conflict of whether to read primary texts or not. I found myself saying, theres not enough time to read if youre working all night and crazy in the morning. Meanwhile, I read and eat primary texts all the time. I find myself compensating . . . is the new devils advocate. On the opposite end, she recalled the history of Riot Grrrls, where they read primary sources for breakfast. I wanted to shout out an iteration of a new name we frequent that cultivates rage. I couldnt quite understand why there was a conflictual tone between us. I didnt know what we were trying to accomplish, as communication ease was confused with niceties. *** PM: Remember Tofino? You kept on asking me, demanding of me, for something new. DL: Dont you ever get tired of habit? Like my nail biting or a network of tendencies towards a nostalgic situation? The brigade of capital that keeps me from lusciously advertised gel nails . . The psycho-social-cognitive afflictions are in all ways related to capitalistic accumulation and not distinctively contained in either a control or discipline state of society. A discipline society is
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a rock-skipping receptacle with similar outcomes: a place for us to pay attention to authority and to our failures. A control society is a non-phasing landscape. With the advent of yous popularity (TIME magazine, 2006), the reign of personal authority over autonomy is not a mute point. The problem is the co-existing states, dominant and control. I can imagine the public solace of such grandiose institutions if only for tangibility and impossible missives. Its for the safety of societyfor public safetythat we contain disobedient bodies in private prisons. I read that new parole conditions, under Harpers vision of law and order, will have prisoners having to explain why they deserve to be released at the two-thirds point. The U.S. prison boom was the result of a major crack down on drug offenders. In 2004, of all drug arrests, almost half were imprisoned for marijuana possession. We can put a price on oil spills and contaminated water tables. PM: You really do look like Marc Emerys wife. DL: The electric shock would be better; it calls for an immediate solution to an immediate threat. (PAUSES) Drinking the Kool-Aid is the allegorical form of frontal lobe lobotomies. And how the Master disciplines his followers . . . Sorry I gave you such a hard time while you were unemployed and sorry I tricked you concerning a non-existent drug habit . . . *** PM: I hope your day is going all right. DL: Its going shitty, thanks for asking . . . Just read this: according to Macleans there are 45% of library, archival and information positions unfilled. But to answer your question about Tofino, it was November and we walked along the beach at dusk and talked about how our utopic ideal was to have control over the means of production. Seemed so radical again, even though its nothing new. PM: Can we apply it to the growing neurosis of living in Vancouver. I think were both on the same page when it comes to a discontent for certain cultural makers in the city who brand
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themselves with a capital C. (Neo-cunts.) This is why I have less of a problem with cultureless living; living in the middle of nowhere, far away from the West Coast urban corridor, is not a concern. Not that we should neglect the city, but there are impediments, like the privilege of exiting and entering the square, non-profits quelling the rage in order to made proper citizens. We can choose to implement the language of Marxism as a way to talk about conditions, or we can not. Capitals affects can go unnoticed, but the disavowal is a short-lived lie. A Bay Area poet-anarchist-scholar-white-male calls this liberal pacifism; those who have notions of labour, or materiality, going in one ear and out the other care that no one hits them . . . All of these cultural markers, the desire to make cultural spaces, are co-optations of the means of production. Its always a matter of hot real estate. In the previous issue of About a Bicycle, you referenced temporal organization as playing the game of the state, a recognition of time frequency and keeping up with time (to infrastructural changes, to non-consumable objects, to non-signatures, to not wage equaling money over time) that makes it impossible to stop for a moment and recuperate lost opportunity cost. Its strategic up until the point the Neo-cunts look themselves in the mirror, and catch a glimpse of Bob Rennies neon installed face, not their own. everything is not going to be alright. DL: Maybe they just shouldnt be invited to the party. Theres nothing worse than a boring cunt than a boring cunt who cant answer questions directly related to their copout, like a Young Girl. These days, Im really drawn by lines and breaks that sum up the problem with the cultural class. Andrew OHerirs critique of Harmony Korines Spring Breakers says it all: Is making something that is pointless and incoherent as an aesthetic choice somehow superior to doing so because you dont know better? And Chris Krauss in an essay from Video Green pissed in the mouths of selfaffirmationists by calling them out on their propensity for masking banality with choice. The new age dream believer is up there with the artist who cant answer the question: what if youre not born into it? If you want money you only need to dream harder.

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PM: If you grind your teeth in your dreams anymore you wont have any left. precious commodities, those pearls of wisdom. DL: But Ill have so much economic capital . . . Ive mentioned the state of control-and-disciplinesocieties are not transitory, from one to the next, but are rather sentimental towards the other, resonant, in tune. There exists in tandem analog and digital languages, only the digital acts as semblance to analog (small slices). There is an affective turning in control societies, where theres sympathy for the banker, for the police officer, for the schizophrenic sycophantwell deserved for their services rendered (beyond the call, even). All in the name of a sense of community or a brutal conceit towards working in immanence . . . Im drained. *** PM: Today, personal time has been taken advantage by the spirit of the coproduction model of business. Our vehement retort against cultural production is that it has become free labour that motivates the cycle of capital to continue on, with no mind. The vanguard on the streets adorning an original Vito Acconci umbrella encasement that has found an Out and an In? The burka is her balaclava and every Western womans nightmare. I get by on my looks first and my marks second. The more personal time we have is only allotted to us because the working week says so. Today you are producing work for a journal that is of your own making. Youre your own boss. DL: So wheres the mark? Control societies are not the new monster and capital-life is not a new Attila (Species Branding 2010). The precaritization of work is nothing new but the conceptualization of it in the last decade is something else. The old is not a new remaking nor a new original . . . I was asked multiple times at the Banff Centre by the literary programmer: What does it [an anarchist world] look like? It was a debased way of asking, but it was much like your question to David Harvey: How do avant-garde modes of valuation serve to produce use-values necessary in and for a future, decapitalized society? You were asking him what something looks like. You were asking him to use his imagination.
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*** PM: A techno-poetic metaphor of conceit: In order for struggles to form a cycle there must be a spatial proximity of the bodies of labour and an existential temporal continuity. Without this proximate and this continuity. No wave can be created, because the workers do not share their existence in time, and behaviours can only become a wave when there is a continuous proximity in time that info-labour no longer allows (Franco Berardi). Rhizomes, cycles, choices in capital. So what does that say about visible precarious bodies who do share their existence in time but are axiomatized by state control perpetuated, and abhorred at times, by social workers and front line health workers. The cycle is a linguistic trapping like commons, community, free culture . . . DL: In Fearless Speech, Foucault developed the concept of parrahesia, a type of speech act that does not rely on rhetorical logic or manipulation (without political ventriloquism) but speaks the truth through frankness that runs the risk of life. If everyone can be a physicist, as you mention in your thesis, and only some of them run with it, what does this say about the type of personality and body valorized by a capitalist society? Who chooses to run with it? And how can we start at solidarity when partisanship runs amok in the private house of broken bread. The reason why I am sympathetic is because of the flat plane of possibility its a means to circumlocute our experiences with the knowledge there is some shared language. This is why social media platforms really gets my goat, your signature stands for multiple interpretations but its an isolated exchange between free floating signifiers. There are people I trust who know me, and there are people who can assign what they will. Its the glory of capitalism, we can fill so many roles and people can fill them for us. The democratic idea behind the social network was that you could invent yourself. I demand the soapbox only be thought of as a viral weapon in social war. It should never stand for a dialogue amongst comrades. Is situational significance exorcized from language when the commodity is
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made present? Your habits will no longer be habits . . . a speech-act is filtered even at its most penetrative. I find this notion of parrahesia powerful and conflating, as it becomes a product of paranoia in a capitalist society. Is a natural way to booster depleting serotonin levels to click like, like, like? Nothing is of our own (do we own the property of ideas when things are spaced and justified?) and nothing should be of our own. To think for oneself is not something I never want to do. A voice that transforms life is more of interest. *** PM: On the verge of action and inaction we sit across feet to feet and wait for our cat to get better DL: You always said he was our property . . . PM: And Id say, hes just a cat. (PAUSES) Dont you get tired of the delirium induced by thinking about the same thing? Its about capital-labour, its about capital-life. Or is it about the right concepts that fit the madness of capital-life? If you say anxiety, I say delirium, if you say I owe you, I say lets make dinner. Married couples fight about money rather than having sex all the time (Louis C.K.). Lets make a baby and keep it under cover. DL: The mystical rite of being accepted at my former place of employment looked like this: cocky cocks, sexualized innuendos (with no fucking as a reward for playing!), gestures of security and profiling, keep that bevel on an angel, contempt for the loudest womans voice, getting to know you all over again every single shift . . . PM: Isolated as a condition of the mode of production, precarious labour is a continuation of domestication and total control of the labouring reproductive body. It is the problematic that arises when time is mobilized but the insecurity and constraints on the social subject are that much more prenounced. The worker has the possibility of joining a union . . . the mothers are isolated, locked in their houses (Adrienne Rich). Angela Wesselman-Pierce was the true protagonist of Catfish, because she lacked the disengagement from her real life in real life and
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therefore sought the comfort of neighbouring avatars to ease the difficulty of her class-based domestic existence (struggle). She painted pictures of herself as a glorious goddess, but called them her daughters making, in order to establish a relationship with a young man she met on Facebook. Poor cultural class fooled by this woman from Ishpeming, Michigan; and then ABC news runs wild and picks up the byline of deceit and trickery. This is what I mean by there being real affective bonds produced online, they are just that much more susceptible to surveillance technologies that monitor and moralize upon the interactions. This is about a right-to-speak that biopower conditions (Claire Fontaine) and allocates a pseudo-freedom outside of the market and circulation of capital. At the end of the day and at the end of the film, Nev returns to photographing ballerinas and she returns to economic and social deprivation. DL: You know this business is a business of relationships. And as it stands, America isnt a country its just a business. Now fucking pay me . . . If there is no business tomorrow, I want to be there. *** DL: The sound of breaking croissants and strawberry jam smeared and chewing sitting next to me is enough for me to fucking flip. The sign says no loud noises, and your insistent knife scraping and picking up loose crumbs with your aging thumb makes me want to hurt you. Can I beat the odds and not grow into you? Woman: I love your shoes! DL: Fuck, Im such a cunt. PM: The stratification of identity allows for capital to hide and attempts to strike against it means striking against ourselves. It often looks like blows against friends and lovers. What is at stake is the current incarnate and production of the human subject and its relationship to others, the inexpressiveness of unknowing what moves to make and how to make them known.

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She said she was ambitious so she accepts the process

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kaylin pearce

from the boardroom table

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nikki reimer

materiality 2

my monthly rent is 27% of my monthly household income my monthly phone bill is 5% of my monthly household income my monthly life insurance is 0.3% of my monthly household income my monthly household transportation costs are 5% of my monthly household income my monthly household medical bills are 12% of monthly household income my monthly household food expenses are 20% of my monthly household income my monthly household clothing expenditures are 5% of my monthly household income monthly care, food and health insurance for my animal companions is 3% of my monthly household income my average household monthly expenditure on books is 4% of my monthly household income monthly fitness expenditures for my household is 2% of my monthly household income monthly bank fees are 1% of my monthly household income my monthly debt repayment is 10% of my monthly household income my monthly savings are 6% of my monthly household income my total monthly household expenditures are 100.3% of my monthly household income The rental affordability indicator is a gauge of how affordable a rental market is for renter households in that market. A generally accepted rule of thumb for affordability is that a household should spend less than 30 per cent of its gross income on housing.

the average monthly rent for an apartment in all of Vancouver in 2010 was 36% of my monthly household income the average monthly rent for an apartment in downtown Vancouver in 2010 was 39% of my monthly household income the average monthly rent for an apartment in Vancouver in a building built in 2000 or later is 49% of my monthly household income the average monthly rent of a rental condo in Vancouver is 50% of my monthly household income

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The regions stable, diversified economy and international gateway to AsiaPacific immigrants will continue to draw more than 40,000 new residents annually contributing to rental demand. Rental supply will be mainly in the form of secondary rental market stock as rising land and material costs make purpose built rental less feasible.

i live 8 steps below grade Vancouver generally has 166 days, or 45% of the year, with measurable precipitation on average in order to look outside, i have to tilt my head upwards at an angle of 30-45% the downpayment price of an average house in Metro Vancouver as at October 2011 is 6,363% of my monthly household income the mayor of Vancouvers monthly taxable salary is 410% of my monthly household income Vancouver city councillors earn 180% of my monthly household income the Vancouver deputy mayor earns 90% of my monthly household income per month served

Only a moron would think that a housing market crash means no one is buying and everyone loses their job. Someones always buying, They just dont always pay the same price.

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to be heard and not scenery

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Why, in a household of feminists (two men, one woman) is the woman the only one who cleans? Is it because the image of a woman, whose only role is to keep house, is such a joke to us? We all agree that women are intelligent creatures and should feel free to pursue whatever interests and work they like, without a societal expectation of their being tied to the domestic. Do we, as feminists, think that to laugh off housework is to show solidarity with women who have for years wished there was something else they could do besides that? We think of the liberated woman, She is tidying in the context of her social and political freedom to also work outside the home, and housework does not enter into that equation of freedom. In my lived environment, objects are left on the counter when they need to be put away or cleaned. Garbage is left out. That mess disrupts my ability to move through this space with clarity, and robs me of the chance to use it like they did. Our lives are still separate, because they feel free to serve themselves, whereas before I can do so, I must tidy up the leftovers of their leisure.
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milena varzonovtseva

circle of places, life and futurism

I come from a post-socialist, or post-communist, or transitional, or whatever they choose to call the countries of contemporary Eastern Europe. Socialism was twenty years ago and was when everyone had jobs and everyone got paid the same. A jobless existence was not a possibility and even if you were not able to find one, the Party would find one for you. Today, where I come from, it doesnt matter much if you are employed full-time or if you are part-time, self-employed, free-lanced, etc. None of these forms of employment will make a huge difference, per se, in that insecure part of the world where even if you are enrolled in a pension plan and have been committed to a full-time position for thirty years, there is no guarantee, whatsoever, you will be able to pay your bills when you are old, tired, lonely and helpless. Regardless, I perceived the desire for a permanent job as a dinosaur type of anachronism and the whole thing about working 9 to 5 as a retrograde and offensive leftover from darker times. This was the general mood among my free minded and free spirited friends too. We are people of arts and words - poets, writers, artists, translators, musicians and so on. We dont care about becoming permanent slaves. But that was back then . . . In Vancouver during the course of my studies and immigrant tribulations (with a quickly disappearing savings and without a job), I realized that without a permanent job, especially in my situation as a single breadwinner (for the most part) and with a little kid, I was going nowhere, or rather, I was staying nowhere. I wouldnt be able to pay the rent in the area that would be desirable considering my daycare choices, I wouldnt be able to buy healthy food and I wouldnt have the security and peace of mind needed to raise a kid. Therefore all my job seeking efforts focused on finding the so-desirable full-time ongoing position, unionized, with a package of good benefits, a good pension plan, etc. Honestly, I had no idea of all these highly desirable job aspects when I was still living in Sofia and was working part-time as an administrative assistant (for the firmer part of my income) and as a free-lanced translator (for the funnier part). I had a good life, I could afford a
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savings and travel Europe a couple of times a year and the paranoiac notion of perpetual security was not even a thought for me. When I analyze my Bulgarian self in comparison to my Canadian self, I realize that perpetual security was never a dream for me not because I was so free-minded and cool, but because I had the constant psychological security of being home, in the safe network of family and friends. Plus being a homeowner, I never had to worry about paying such an enormous part of my income towards rent. Of course, all these factors contributed to my happier kind of life in Sofia. I was far more optimistic about the general future of humanity, but I am pretty sure it was due to my postcommunist naivety and ignorance for the global economic state of affairs or anything global for that matter. Living in Vancouver, in Canada, in the West, is a sort of an eye-opener for me I lost my naivety, partly due to my personal circumstances, and partly because I gradually got more and more familiar with a different kind of world, a different pace of things, a different past of things. This made me see the general future of humanity differently, in more apocalyptic nuances. I have reached the edge of the world. After all, this is one of the most livable cities in the world, this is the best you can get in this world, isnt it? So logically if you dont feel good here, you wont feel good anywhere . . . though who looks for logic, arent we all looking for happiness? (A curious detail in Bulgaria, the poorest country of the EU, the home ownership rate (the ratio of owner-occupied units to total residential units in a specified area) is the highest in the world 97% as of 2011; Canada was 15th with 68.4% in 2006, still ahead most of the Western world.) But then . . . about six months ago I got my permanent job. Slowly, with the perpetual character of job-related things (like paycheques every two weeks and all sorts of benefits), I find myself smiling again. I feel much better in terms of security, I am able to pay my rent in a place in close proximity to work and daycare, in a nice neighbourhood, I can afford buying healthy food, I can even afford travelling and vacations again. In short, I am a new person with a new life and a new optimistic vision of the future a future in which I become a happy Canado-Bulgarian or Bulgaro-Canadian, a richer person in all senses.
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penelope hetherington

Key Concepts Exercise

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Strolling the consumer metropolis The atomized subject Imagines the post-utopian social reality. Precarity is the new black. But the future is open.

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Acknowledgements
About a Bicycle would like to thank the women who contributed their time and energy to the creation of this issue as well as to those who biked, walked, and bussed this dreary winter to our reading group sessions: Gaye Bissett, Andrea Demers, Mercedes Eng, Megan Hepburn, Penelope Hetherington, Fiona Jeffries, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Danna Vajda, Milena Varzonovtseva, and our drunk therapists at the Narrow. For more information about our projects check us out at aboutabicycle.wordpress.com or send us an email at aboutabicycle@gmail.com.

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