A Week in the Life of a Gig Economy Worker

 The tour is on...  The tour is off...  The tour is on again!

Today is January 15th.  Always a notable day because it's Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday, but today it's also the first 15th of the month in half a year that millions of parents around the US awoke to find their bank accounts had not gotten another pandemic-inspired infusion of cash from the IRS, including this one.  (MLK would not be impressed by this development.)

But on a Reuters article I find online, and soon thereafter from various other news sources, a couple days earlier I had gotten the word that Denmark was going to ease the restrictions that went into force a few weeks ago, when Omicron hit.  Friends who have a bigger touring operation and have to plan everything far more in advance than I do already started canceling their plans for February a month ago.  I had given myself a deadline of January 18th before I canceled any plans, which I reasoned would be one month before I would be flying to Denmark, enough advance time to get a good price on a plane ticket and rental car, if I didn't cancel.

The Danish government has a webpage where current Covid restrictions are enumerated, including the one most relevant to me, the music venues being closed.  But since the recent announcement from the Danish health minister that was reported on in Reuters, the government website features a banner up top telling us that things are going to be updated on January 18th.  At which point, presumably, the notification about music venues being closed will change, reflecting the updated pandemic battle plan/balancing act, where venues are open, as long as audiences are all seated, and not singing along with me.

It's a strange pandemic roller-coaster to be on, hearing in the news about the desperate shortages of doctors, nurses, janitors, blood, and so many other things, in the hospitals where the latest wave of the pandemic is hitting now.  Even as the Danish hospitals are also very crowded, they've had enough experience with this pandemic to see that this wave appears set to subside, so they can afford to open up a bit.

Although there are differences of opinion on best practices within Danish society as well, it's pretty obvious when you compare the way Denmark has navigated the pandemic to the way England or Texas has navigated it, that Covid-related restrictions imposed in Denmark are done with the physical and mental health of society, especially children, being at least as important as the economy.  So while I as a touring artist feel very conflicted about the idea of setting up a tour in England or Texas -- both in terms of my personal responsibilities in such a situation as well as in terms of who's going to show up under the circumstances -- when it comes to doing a tour in Denmark, I can at least be comparatively much more confident that if they're allowing gigs to happen again, it probably means there's a bit of hospital capacity at the time, at least.  From prior experience doing a tour in Denmark last August, during another relative lull in the pandemic waves, the health ministry saying venues can be open again also tends to mean most people feel comfortable going into them again -- unlike in places where the government is far less trusted, such as England or Texas.

So, whereas for the past several weeks I have often been wondering what I might do with myself for the months of February and March -- what we could call the imminent future from a professional DIY touring standpoint -- as suddenly as the Danish health minister made an announcement, my tour plans were back on again.  At this stage there are no gigs confirmed, but from the chatter on social media this seems likely to change soon.  I had been just about to make concrete plans with various folks before the Omicron wave had the Danish government shutting everything down again.

Of course there are other things that could easily affect my February-March travel plans in Denmark and Iceland -- another volcanic eruption, a war between Russia and Ukraine, a new Covid variant, and who knows what else.  But as things stand now, I've got my booster shot scheduled, and I'll be making travel arrangements, and hopefully confirming some gigs, over the next few days.  The plan is to be in Denmark from February 18-28 and Iceland from March 1-6.

Stumbling Into 2022

Looking back on a year in a life, from the vantage point of January 6th.

The concept of the anniversary can be pretty random. Things don't generally wrap themselves up neatly after 365 days, with some kind of beginning and end. Other times there are reasons why an anniversary might seem familiar -- like when it's winter and there's a highly infectious respiratory virus circulating.

In the case of the anniversary of the siege of the Capitol building, the anniversary takes on special relevance because of the blanket news coverage, and the ongoing hearings of former Trump officials.

At some point in the future, the history of this pandemic, when viewed as such, will be one block of a certain number of years, much the way we now characterize World War 2 as starting sometime in the 1930's, depending on who you're asking, and lasting until 1945. At the beginning of 2022, we may be only a third of the way into this pandemic, which may not really have a concrete end point at all. But for those of us living through it, the prior year began with hope and ended with Omicron.

In the middle of 2021, despite the Delta variant, life went more or less back to normal in a number of countries, such as Denmark, where I had a great tour last August. But then came Omicron, and any artists with tours booked began canceling gigs again, as venues shut down, out of caution or by order of the local authorities.

Or in some cases because the venue owner was busy dying of Covid-19, such as Skin at the Squirrel Bar in Glasgow, Scotland. Skin died last November, an example of how being fully vaccinated won't necessarily protect you, especially when you're running a crowded bar and you have health issues. Less than a year before Skin's death, just before the vaccines went online, my friend and touring partner, Anne Feeney succumbed to the virus in Pennsylvania, as did one of the grandfathers of my extended family, Ed Volpintesta, along with his brother, in Connecticut.

Not being a clairvoyant, but understanding that Trump was engaged in a stunt meant to overturn the election results, having written a couple of songs on the subject already, I published an open letter to the far right a few days before the siege, and, seeking to understand what was happening, I interviewed a former organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, who was also falsely accused of having been at the Capitol on January 6th.

It was a fateful week for me, because I spent a significant part of the following eleven months being targeted by anonymous actors, mostly online, at least one of whom seems to dedicate all their waking hours to destroying my career in whatever ways possible. Whoever they are, they seem to have taken the winter holidays off. But they usually get more active when I'm getting more attention for one reason or another, or when I'm on tour, and they smell an opportunity to scare or threaten unprepared gig organizers in one way or another.

For me and so many others, 2021 began with an experience of basking in the generosity of the very temporary American welfare state, and the year ended with all that generosity fizzling out, with even the drastically reduced version of the Build Back Better bill looking doubtful.

As this is a personal reflection, albeit about a life in a world we're all experiencing in one way or another, by the end of 2021, for this particular artist, crowdfunded patronage, combined with food stamps, has made life possible for me and my family at this point, even with the total uncertainty of touring in the future, and it would be hard to overstate how good it is to know each month we got the rent covered. But the similarity between how reality was at this stage in 2021 compared to the present, in terms of total uncertainty, is pretty uncanny.

At the beginning of 2021, although the vaccines were rolling out, no one knew when it might be possible to gather indoors together safely again and such. The epidemiologists were warning that if the vaccines didn't cover the whole world they'd be useless, because wherever the weak links in the chain were was where new variants would develop. But there seemed to be reason to hope that the international efforts to get vaccines out would bear fruit.  What happened instead was a complete disaster, with the western countries producing much more vaccine than they needed and letting it expire, while Biden continually attacked and sanctioned other countries that were trying to distribute vaccine, like Russia, China, and Cuba.

In the summer of 2021, though, borders opened, venues opened, and in some countries, things appeared to go back to normal, even as Delta was spreading. But with so much of the world being so unvaccinated, Omicron or a cousin thereof was only a matter of time, and here we are.

When 2021 was beginning, the campaign of solidarity and civil disobedience around what has become known as the Red House in north Portland came to some kind of successful conclusion, with the evicted family un-evicted. Direct action got the goods, as it does.

A year later, perhaps with the fear of such a response to evictions happening again, the Oregon legislature has so far continued to extend the eviction moratorium whenever its expiration nears, generally waiting until it's just about to expire before renewing it. The only ones protected now are those who are still waiting for a rental assistance claim to be processed.

Once that money's gone, no one has any reason to doubt that the housing crisis will continue to worsen, with real estate and rents continuing to skyrocket across the country, as they were before the pandemic.

For my family, the corporate landlord entity has seen fit to raise the rent by $100 once again, bringing our two-bedroom apartment up to $1,275 a month, as of April 1st -- a dramatic increase on the $500 a month it was when we first moved in to this dilapidated Class C apartment complex in southeast Portland in 2007. For us, this will mean a greater percentage of the crowdfunded patronage going towards rent, and less for everything else. For others, it will be the final straw that forced them to move into the exurbs, or wherever it is that people go when they leave, as most of the people I used to identify with Portland have long ago done.

As a new year begins, the traditional thing for me for many years has been to try to patiently wait for the Europeans to get home from their vacations and start thinking, along with me, about making plans for the spring. In pre-pandemic years, I'd already have some kind of a tour plan for Europe worked out by now, with a few gigs confirmed, and the rest getting booked over the course of the next few weeks.

As it is, of course, in most of the countries where I'd want to book gigs, the venues where I'd play are closed, and gatherings of more than a few people are discouraged. Not in England, Florida, or Texas -- but the idea of taking advantage of the fact that these places are governed by idiots and touring in them anyway, while places with slightly more competent authorities were all shut down, seems really wrong, even if I weren't concerned about anyone's health.

So, as with any other business dealing with supply chain issues, I wait and see what's the last moment I can leave things hanging before I have to call plans off.   If I wait to buy the plane ticket until one month before I hope to leave, what is the sign that says I should buy the ticket, or cancel the tour plan? It's one or the other.  When the venues open up again in Denmark, in my case, seems like a good deciding factor.  At least until the next variant comes along.