Server: ” A person whose responsibility it is to provide assistance to another person.”
T
ypically artists have had day jobs in order to support themselves. Making art, though personally rewarding can also be financially challenging. The actor, writer, painter, poet has worked in cafés, bars, restaurants, shops, bookstores, in order to support himself. To survive one must often work in menial, boring, tedious, and often ego punishing jobs, serving the public, in order to pay the bills, and attend to the basic life necessities, while also pursuing ones artistic endeavors.
Not easy on the surface, but if truth were to be told, having been on the other side, the server, is not as simple and mundane as he or she appears to be. The perception to the “others”, A.K.A. the public is something quite different. It’s an interesting dichotomy. The server, be it waiter, salesperson, bartender, can be perceived as a fixture, a robotic tool of said establishment, whose sole function is to provide the customer with what he wants. If job is well done, meaning a gracious abundance of subservient ass kissing, the one who “waits” may be shown favor with a tip, a commission, a pat on the head by the boss, a compliment hopefully catapulting him to a step up the ladder in whatever his place of employment happens to be. The extraordinary over the top customer service applied the greater the tip. And vice versa. All of this manipulation and theatrics can be stressful and create animosity not shown but felt by servers to the served. It encourages and amplifies the “we against them” attitude.
Every great and not so great artist has been in the service business at some time. It’s inevitable considering the unreliable world of artistic self expression you
chose. Joseph Cornell, creator of those magical boxes, worked as a door – to – door appliance salesman, and a plant attendant at a local nursery in Queens NY. Sylvia Plath babysat to help pay her college expenses, while she poured out her tormented angst in prose, Brad Pitt wore a chicken costume to promote a Mexican restaurant before he hit the big time, poet Frank O’Hara was a clerk at the MOMA gift shop, Mariah Carey, Gwenyth Paltrow, Madonna, and Sandra Bullock all waitresses before making it..to name a few. It’ s an obligatory job qualification to have “served” prior to stardom. The proverbial paying one’s dues, BEFORE you achieve success in your chosen craft, AFTER the switch is flipped, and the dues are paid to you! BUT THAT DOESNT COME EASY and persistence is key.
Steve Pressfield hammers that point home in his epic artist Bible ” The War of Art”. He says to keep at it, do what you have to do, but don’t resist your true calling. Resistance is the killer, and the inoculation is to keep pursuing your passion. That is your true occupation, not the faux reality you endure in order to pay the bills.
Behind the scenes, the back story of the server’s work life is a completely different life than what the public sees. The public is a mass of anonymous strangers attracted to said establishment for the purpose of consumer indulgence, entertainment, escape, ego gratification, whereas the server, salesperson, shop girl, is working, and it can be a slow, tedious, laborious, unfulfilling, mechanical process. It’s a paycheck, and usually a menial one, no bells and whistles attached. Just cold cash and not a lot of it. These individuals are not your friends, or your fans. The public may not see them as human, but mere fixtures, necessary in order to provide them with What They Want! If J Q Public sees his waiter, bartender, salesperson on the street the chances of looking directly at them with NO recognition are 99.9%. Because the store “fixture” is not real. Once outside the establishment, in the outer world, the fixture is just another person, with no compatibility or link to the clerk, or waiter once serving said customer within the confines of the place of business. It’s that Matrix thing again. Are you In or are you Out?
So, servers inhabit a secret world. It’s the world of the watcher, the observer, the critique, the analyst, the smiling facade, the “service with a smile” greeting, provide entertainment, gossip, and subjects for the unwritten novel, painting, poem, or actors audition. Oh yes, servers gain a ton of information, knowledge, and crazy insights from observing JQ Public on the job. Because as invisible as the server appears to be, he is always WATCHING you. Subtle, and contained, the server sees everyone and knows faces, behaviors, attitudes, requests, of any one who he be holds in front of him and if you visit the same establishment twice you are known, a returner, and fair game for a speculative observation and eventual discussion as soon as youdepart. And not always in a positive or flattering way. Imagining that you are unseen, makes you vulnerable, the casual shopper, the drinker, the diner, being waited on by a somewhat ethereal being. Who only waits on you robotlike, when in reality they see you a bit too closely, and remember you the next time you appear, and often gossip about you with co workers, friends, your appearance, idiosychrocies, your mannerisms, you were rude, you were nice, your style or, lack of, your cheapness, your generosity, your sex appeal, it ALL is noticed, kept in reserve to be channeled out later for entertaining chatter, humor, discussion. God help you if you are a celebrity! Because fact
is, these menial jobs, minimum wage, can be very boring. The down times are slow and tedious with clock watching an ongoing mission, as very minute passes freedom gets closer and closer, so people watching, or shall I say customer watching becomes a team sport, better than a movie, real life exposed, on the down low, customers unaware, oblivious to the fact that they are being watched, and inevitably will reveal some unusual behaviors, unaware that the clerks working, surrounding them are even remotely aware of their existence, existing only in the sole fundamental capacity to answer their questions, give them what they want, show them the restroom, order another drink, flatter their dress choice, tell them what book to read, swipe their CC, bottom line….. to SERVE THEM!
BUT-
Who is serving who? There is an unspoken communication between customer and salesperson. The mere attitude either can make or break a sale. A smile can turn a 15% tip into a 20%. The artist, the actor is thinking of their off job activities, their real life, while swiping JQ’s credit card, the designer is rearranging his living room furniture while leading Miss Thing around the 4th floor at Barney’s, and the smiling greeter at BB&B is plotting the next chapter of her novel, while folding towels. The charade is profound and is all a great act. Book stores are a prime example of the charade! They have Always been a mecca for artists. A job in the literary world, flexible hours, opportunities to observe the parade of humanity, abundant food for your art, and a chance to grab new books, the minute they hit the shelves! Patty Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in her best selling novel, ” Just Kids”, talks about how they survived in NYC by working at Scribners Books on Fifth Avenue. Robert Orwell worked the line while “Down & Out in Paris & London”, every actor on the planet has bussed tables, bar – tended, and hustled, while painters are re known historically for taking on shitty day jobs to pay the rent.
Book clerks, like other clerks in service fields, as perceived by the public are invisible entities seen only when absolutely necessary. Unrecognizeable to the public, they are there to give the customer what he or she wants. But, the bookseller, sees you, in ways you will never know. He sees you by the books you buy, the books you pick up and look at, the books you ask for. These books will tell your story as you read, other people’s stories. What’s your problem? Weight, depression, loneliness, divorce, s+m, romance! games! Interests? Growing cannabis? Pop Culture? Career change? WWII? Your secrets are revealed when you step Into a bookstore! The booksellers will soon know what they are. The cashier behind the counter, who may have a zombie stare, is watching you. What book did you pick up off the display? Are you a liberal? 
Conservative? Gay? manic? single? Unhappily married? bipolar? It’s all revealed by the books you are attracted to, and the booksellers see you. To the public, booksellers are akin to pieces of furniture, who will speak if spoken to , but to the sellers you are exposed in a harsh brutal light showing your flaws and your secrets, and unaware you continue to wander the shop exposing yourself like the patient on the therapists couch. The high wattage bulb is turned on and the customer becomes unwittingly a species under the microscope, ripe for close and personal examination. The middle-aged man who sits on the same chair for hours every week, a pile of magazines his pretend friends, the lonely woman on Friday night, seeking the bookstore as her only sanctuary, the modelesque blonde student hunched On the floor, a chosen corner, pretending to read while sleeping off her heroin high, the guy who plots his days by the stars, updates his favorite astrology book, his hope for future happiness. Every Week, the crazies, the junkies, the suits, the men who escape the homeless shelters by day, the depressives, the lonely hearts club, all come together to the bookstore for escape. A retreat from the oppressive
chaos of the city, it is a welcome escape. In “Kafka was the Rage”, by Anatole Broyard, his autobiographical expose of a bookshop owner in the 1950’s, Greenwich Village. Broyard rents a shop on Cornelia Street, stocks it with books, and begins his adventure in book selling. His passion was writing, so this seemed like a perfect fit. To own and operate a Greenwich Village bookstore! But, unexpectedly, he gives it up, after experiencing the infinite parade of lonely city dwellers , who used him as their personal therapist, and used the bookshop as a retreat from life, their sudo home, reading books , not purchasing, and hanging out, in their make believe “home away from home”. This was a rude awakening for Broyard as he lost money, and became discouraged by this unexpected turn of events. Broyard was a watcher, a voyeur, who chronicled his experience in his first book, “Kafka was the Rage”, describing what he witnessed as he served the public, and simultaneously gathering material for his first novel! ‘He served and was served!
Actors, and artists, want to spend their time in their pursuit of their craft, but life gets in the way and bills have to be paid. Often very intelligent talented people have to spend hours and hours in jobs they are over qualified for intellectually, while striving for the ability to work 100% at their artistic goals. So they wait tables, tend bar, sell stuff, they SERVE! But while they serve, they watch, they get material, they develop telescopic views into people and lives they would not have been privy to any other way. They develop communication skills with the vast spectrum of society, the losers and the winners. They get street smart, while toning their diplomatic skills, becoming clever, intuitive, people savvy, and tuned in to humanity. The public is an infinite body of nameless faces, personalities, styles, shapes, and characters. The servers have to accommodate whoever walks in and presents themselves. This takes skill, tact, strategy, and intuition, because you never know who is going to show up and present themselves and you better be ready willing and able to deal with whomever that is! And it could be a deranged maniac! Keeping things calm, giving them what they want, keeping them satisfied, delivering, using that server strategy, until they go away. And the next encounter arrives.
But after work, on break, on Facebook, the servers get the chance to express how they really see you- JQ PUBLIC, creatures of shops and cafés, observations, are shared, because Servers are not invisible mutants, robots, furniture, servants, or potted plants! They are doing a job, but it’ not their REAL job! Their true identity originates elsewhere. The authentic life is outside the confines of the store, bar, cafe, hotel, restaurant, the menial paycheck, with the subservient catering to the publics whims and needs. It is about making their art, acting in the show, writing, painting, running, dancing, dreaming, expressing the passions that make life worth living, the creative juice that runs on full gear, the way they get through the day, knowing that this is NOT It…that there is so much more that identifies who they are! And that knowledge keeps them going until, they can throw in the apron, the name tag, the cap, the uniform forever, and live the life they were meant to live completely!!!!!!!
Writer, screen director, raconteur, bon vivant, a personality like no other. Let’s call him John Waters, because that’s who he is. He used to drop in the Greenwich Village bookstore I worked in, during a past life, to check on his new book, browse, and inevitably he would attract autograph hounds and fans who recognized him. He was always very gracious and happy to oblige. A very cool cat!
So I had to check out his book “Role Models”. When I saw we had it stacked up on the main Info counter in the front of the store. It is autobiographical, and he shares with us a telescopic view into his private world, the one that led him to evolve into the innovative filmmaker, director, fashionista, author, hitchhiker, and pop culture icon that he is today! WOW. I read this book, calling it a page turner is an understatement, and saw the genius in just how deep still “Waters” run. I know. But it’s true because from his chatting about coming out in his home town of Baltimore, his celebrity crushes, his journey to the present, his show biz persona, his lust for literature, the reader gets him as a real guy and not just an obscure character in a literary biographical text.
So I love his chapters – Bookworm, and Roommates. The thing Waters is super passionate about is reading. His collection of books in his personal library is awe inspiring , thousands of choices, and he makes it clear just how book crazed he is, owning this obsession with pride! Check out his 5 top books! You probably never heard of them but trust me, you will wish you had!
Let’s just say I was delightfully, gleefully surprised, and happy to see this sexy message exposed publicly in such a commercial venue, projecting that rare combo of literature and lust.
people don’t read. Not like they used to. The computer has made them lazy. Bookstores have been closing like it’s the end of time in a Sci-Fi novel, and the epic Bradbury classic Fahrenheit 451 doesn’t seem so crazy anymore. Waters talks about how to him, riches aren’t about buying houses and cars and jewelry. Being rich to Waters, the guy who thinks outside the box, means he gets to buy books with a wanton freedom, never having to look at the price and discriminate. In bookspeak that means never having to give up a favorite choice, when you really want more. No need to choose through that hateful process of elimination. An impossible task for book people who love whatever their eye is drawn to, and if you read the first page without putting it down, guess what? You’re hooked! You have to have it. Love really is blind for the book lover set loose in his favorite bookstore. So yes John Waters, it’s good that you can afford to go crazy at the bookstore choosing what you want and not what you can only afford. That does make you really rich!
But back to this poster. The one about books and sex. If it isn’t it should be your new standard, your raison d’être, your mantra. This concept of books as aphrodisiac, is off the grid, kinda like, reminiscent of whoever it was who said that the Mind is the sexiest part of the body? The “sexy librarian” mystique didn’t come from nowhere now did it?
Maybe you don’t hang on Crosby Street at the Housing Works bookstore, an old school style bookstore still going strong in the Soho, Nyc neighborhood of celebrities, tourists, and people watchers.
As is true for many writers and readers they also love art. Either as creators, or collectors. Art and books are a match made in culture heaven. In “Role Models”, his chapter called “RoomMates” gives us a look-see into his roomies, and by Roommates he is referring to his art collection, the constant companions he lives with and considers his friends. He seems to choose his “Roommates”, based on personal instincts that have nothing much to do with the going popular trend or fad. He just likes what he likes, and takes it home to live with him. He is happy he doesn’t live with human beings and happier that the artists whose work he does live with are such an adaptable match for him and above all, doesn’t take up his “mental space.” Cy Twombly has always been one of my favorites, and after reading this chapter, I discover he is also Water’s idol. His attempt to describe what it’s like to “read” a Twombly painting is excruciating, because Twombly challenges with a vigor that disrupts and disturbs. It is an exercise in mind opening, head spinning, mind altering craziness. If you want to mess with someone. Put a Twombly in front of them and watch their reaction.
Everything cool for those of us who think outside the box is in this book. If you are living in the material world you won’t get him, but if you are one of the “special” ones, who exist in their own unique and original boundless life, removed from the matrix of conformist limitations and social expectations, it’s got it all! The movies, the sex, the fashion, the culture, the books, the art, and even Johnny Mathis. An all purpose manual for unique personalities walking their own path. Sheeple need not bother. They just won’t get it!
Every time I turned on my radio in 1970 I heard The Supremes, Motown’s Darlings, With Jean Terrell, Mary Wilson, and Cindy Birdsong blasting the top bit of the day which was about climbing a ladder to the roof. Diana wasn’t around for this tune.
Roofs were the perfect escape and fun stuff happened there in the clouds way above the fray and chaos of Manhattan madness!
No Thanks. I’ ll take the roof and whether or not it’s at the Whythe, the infamous 
It’s Brooklyn, it’s Manhattan, it’s Queens, it’s Coney, it’s Bronx, where painters, musicians, poets, writers, painters, the Beats, the Hippies, The Rockers, The Punk, meet, mingle create, from corner to corner, the garbage strewn gutter, the filthy subway, the stench, the human cesspool, rats to reggae, royalty to rags, mind numbing noise, eerie silence, it’s all here in our faces and that’s why sometimes we need to climb UP and get close to the sky the stars, the lights of manhattan below watching us! Keeping us going on our Art fueled journey, where space holds no limits and the Roof is our launching pad in our unique City of the World.
While cruising Brooklyn galleries last weekend looking for information and inspiration, I notice now that spring has sprung the Fedora fetish has come to life with a frenzy! It’s everywhere and anywhere, that little straw hat with the black band perched slightly sideways on heads roaming the streets of Nyc , and particularly dominantly Brooklyn. It’s positioned on hat heads, meaning the head that’s genetically made for a hat, and unfortunately on non hat heads as well. That’s unfortunate. But it does give the hipster look to the non hipster who craves that appeal. Easy. Just put a fedora on and boom! You are a hipster, except now it’s become tired. Used to be the artsy types sporting a fedora with the cocky self assured confidence of the innovator style setter. But that was 2 years ago and now it’s still hanging on with a vengeance but lacking the nouveau allure it had in its infancy.
Some lucky people can work the fedora with swag but the ones who fail give the fedora a bad name . So why do it? In the art Soho days of the 70’s when art was dirty and kind of the way it is supposed to be, nobody would have been caught dead wearing a fedora. Waaaay too affected pretentious and downright silly. But in the Soho of past days, guys wore a lot of hair and girls did too. Remember the Broadway show 
But today it’s all about about a Fedora! That snappy down in the front and up in the back look that defines the hat is ambiguous at first glance but historically 
Hipsters have a fashion look that’s obvious. Too obvious. Trouble is that it’s all the same. The artists are copycats, paper doll cut outs where one can be exchanged for another. Patti Smith was one of a kind as were 
Brooklyn is the Foodie Mecca where Hipsters & Co. don’t just eat to live, they live to eat! Who can blame them when we see the media injecting all of us with heavy doses of food porn every single day.
Those days of my youth when food was actually used for nutrition and sustenance mixed with the occasional pleasurable dining experience are sooo over!
Playing the Crying Game. That’s what its about today. Crying and whining about everything and nothing at all. Its a joke to see grown men crying about stupid stuff – like the Michelin Food guide isn’t out yet? Or that hot chick ignored me or my hair is falling out or I hate my job……who cares? Women crying about crap nonstop – and then boring people who have to listen to their bitching. I gained weight. my boss yelled at me, my orchid died, I’m depressed, its raining again
Where do you get ideas for your paintings? How do you Turn On The Light? A commonly asked question of artists . Usually coming from people who perhaps “teach but don’t do” It seems so abstract so obscure so vague. So Dark. Why? Because it is exactly that. And more. Because an IDEA evolves spontaneously through thought evoked by everything and anything . Meaning inspiration cannot be planned. It just happens. Magically. Just Like That Like the sun shining through the clouds. The artist doesn’t LOOK for an idea . The idea LOOKS for him and thus the inspiration transcends thought – resulting in a work of art! And BooYah – LIGHT!
I agree with Anatole Broyard in “Kafka Was the Rage”. Soooo he opened a teeny tiny shop on Cornelia Street in the late 40’s at the start of the Beat Generation when Kerouac was King with the pure purpose of selling books. Being the literary affectionado that he was only to find that the “book lovers” hanging out in his shop were lonely losers looking for a life and escaping their misery by retreating into a make believe world, to be found between the covers of someone else story. Ugh. And so he sold the books and dumped his shop. Bummed out by the clear revelation he got listening to the tales of the visitors to his shop venting their life stories on him in their pursuit of something else. Now his shop is a chic Greenwich Village restaurant.
And so it goes. Nothing has changed except the year. Any bookseller knows the dark side of the “regulars” who inhabit our bookstores. They are not there to shop. Oh no no no. They are there to hide to sleep to escape to pretend to dance the heroin tango to hustle a unknowing victim to hit on someone anyone will do to stare to hide to retreat to act on their pseudo stage, to look for THE answer, to feel at home, to escape their home, to avoid the lonely city, to cry, to text, to zone out, and then sometimes to READ. But only Sometimes. Bookstores. Where the Books are Friends the Store is Home and You are not ALONE.
Streets in NYC have been turned into sitting areas. You can sit in the middle of the street, cars buzzing around you and stare at lets say the Flat Iron building, sun blazing on your head Macy’s looming , a beast behind you, people circling you in spontaneous motion clutching shopping bags of dreams and surprises. Christmas, the holiday of dreams come true before the New Year of expectations, the unknown, the Mystery. New Yorkers are used to the buzzy chaos in the streets but the tourists , the visitors, are transfixed and aroused by so much animation and frenzy as they sit in the street , hypnotized by the crowds swirling by them on the Go go go… Feeling awake for the first time ever from their sleepy town stupor they ran from, middle America, rural towns, Europe A La Serge Gainsbourg, uniformed in the ubiquitous sneaker , jeans, and tee-shirt they sit stupefied in the street. staring into the blinding sunlight at the Flat Iron in the distance plotting their next adventure in the City of All Cities! New York City!