Since I moved to New York City three years ago, I have become increasingly agitated with life. Now, the City is good at breeding a certain amount of guilt and compulsiveness as the have nots rub shoulders with the have-a-lots. There has been a particular itch that has been festering in my mind for a long time and now it has grown to tumor-size- ageism. I first beheld the warning signs of this impending storm many years ago. When I reached 26, I realized that I was now the exact age of Orson Welles, but I unlike him, I was not going to be directing my Citizen Kane that year. In addition, I was never going to be an NBA point guard or the next 'young phenom' of Hollywood - Steven Spielberg. As the years passed, I found myself measuring my progress through life relative to others. Having nothing in common with these people except my age, I decided to use that as the yardstick. In addition, this was a very natural progression because L.A., where I was living at the time, is perhaps the most age-ist city on the planet. My parents had me when they were in their mid-to-late 20s. George Lucas directed Star Wars at the 'ancient' age of 32. Now, the the only perceivable reference points I have in my future appear to be Robert Altman (M*A*S*H at age 44) and Grandma Moses (began painting at age 75).
Of course, there's always the dream of being a creater of "outsider art" which, according to CBS Sunday Morning, is all the rage in the art world. I could be one of those people with no training, no concept of the exploitation being performed by gallery owners at their expense, and (for street cred) a history of mental illness. I watched this show and I cannot communicate how depressing it is to feel that the $25,000 I currently owe in student loans, for the SOLE purpose of learning craft, has no value in the New York art world. Hey, I'm not wholly-ignorant about how the arts work in America, but DAMN... I didn't need to see that.
Unfortunately, I have to admit that it isn't age or the lack of a propogative drive or the nauseating trends in film, television and art that's really led to this depressed wreck of a man - it's my goal-oriented, guilt mentality. I have ceased to enjoy my journey and now the goal is the "thing" and all my actions are hot-wired into them. I am always focused on reaching Ithaca - a distant land where I hope all my happiness will lie. I have ceased to enjoy the journey. I have become a person fixated upon some abstract idea of success and any enjoyment along the way is considered to be a distraction from the goal. My measurement relative to others has become absolutely poisonous to me. There's something very American about how I have to compare myself to winners and never consider myself to be one until I've clearly won.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Friday, January 28, 2005
beneath the resin-scented darkness of the Trees
I'm reading The Lord of the Rings for the fourth time in my life. After I complete it, I suspect that I'll stop trying to keep count. It's a tremendous series and one of the greatest influences of my adolescence. I never became one of those freaky Renaissance fair folks who talk in Olde English at home, but I might have been guilty of making maps of my own little world and writing hideously-derivative tales of dragon-slaying and wizardry. I went on to read a whole slew good-to-lousy fantasy novels, always hoping to recapture some shred of newness and wonder I felt the first time I read a Tolkien novel. Raymond E. Feist, David Eddings, Orson Scott Card - oh yeah, I read books like Zorachus and even made the mistake of checking out a few Forgotten Realms books. It was never the same, though. There's nothing quite like genre fiction after you get 1 or 2 generations away from the original.
Something far more profound about Tolkien grabs me as I turned one page upon another. Tolkien's rendering of scene is absolutely stunning. The descriptions and feeling of hill, dell, river and season rendered images of my imagination that that the movie could never hope to touch. In single, almost throwaway lines, Tolkien rendered a feel wiith all the thrift of Hemingway at the height of his powers.
Something far more profound about Tolkien grabs me as I turned one page upon another. Tolkien's rendering of scene is absolutely stunning. The descriptions and feeling of hill, dell, river and season rendered images of my imagination that that the movie could never hope to touch. In single, almost throwaway lines, Tolkien rendered a feel wiith all the thrift of Hemingway at the height of his powers.
Away eastward the sun was rising red out of the mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing rootless in a shadowy sea.The land of Middle Earth has a physicality that feels very removed from the world of today. With electricity, industrialization and gas-powered vehicles, we can hurl ourselves from one space to another with little thought to the weather, time of day or time of season. Instant gratification allows us to eat a strawberry or eat a hamburger any day of the year. It has taken a girlfriend who knows far more about plants than I to tell me the names of plants and their seasons of flowering. I've never known because I've never had to know.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
the Fall of my cathedral
A couple of months ago, my girlfriend and I went to Thailand. I was 2 months into my unemployment and about to crawl out of my skin. My cave was looking darker than usual. It felt as if the earth was slowly pinching me off from the rest of the world and then suddenly, one day, I might wake up and realize that I had been cut off from all reality and forever lost in a world of depression and paranoia. I stopped working on things and began to stall for time. I had to get out. Only days before a national election I couldn't avoid and a Halloween that would once-again find me without a costume or party, I got on a plane, lost 12 hours worth of time zones, then stepped off a plane in Bangkok.
In Thailand, anyone who even remotely looks like a tourist has to expect a little hassle. There is always someone willing to take your money if you are sucker enough to part with it. Tuk-tuk drivers (the motor-scootery mosquitos of SE Asian transportation) regularly stand within a block of every tourist destination so they can tell you that the Palace/post office/train station/holy shrine is closed (Buddhist holiday) and offer transportation to the opposite end of the city. As a 6' 3" white male, I was not only a target, but one that could be easily spotted a block away. My blonde girlfriend only served to underscore our intense need to be hustled. The only place (for the most part) where a tourist could catch a break was in a wat. A wat is a Buddhist, temple complex. They are beautiful, quiet and mercifully-free of tuk-tuk drivers... inside the gates. As an added bonus, like a Starbucks in urban America, there are wats EVERYWHERE. They quickly became effective bunkers where I could take a drink of water, pull out my Nancy Chandler map and plan my assault on the next tourist attraction in the city, without the chaos of traffic jams and smiley glad-handers interrupting me every 30 seconds to ask me where I was going.
About a week into the trip, I was sitting in a Wat Suan Dok, in the northern city of Chiang Mai, when I realized that these wats were more than simply escapes where I was 'tagging up' before jumping into the fray of aggressive tourism - it was a place where I was settling my mind and re-centering myself. I was a first-time visitor to Thailand who was being hustled endlessly and who spoke very little of the language. My escapes were tangible and my escape route clear, but this escape was taking on a deeper aspect. The rules that govern wats are universal - wear modest clothing that covers your shoulders and legs, take off your shoes when you enter a bot (ceremonial building), sit on the floor, be quiet, and don't point your feet at the Buddha. By this time, I was watching others and becoming more thorough in my behavior. I burned candles and nodded in respect before the Buddhas before standing and leaving a bot. I am not Buddhist, but there was a respect and reverence that I found myself admiring in those spaces. For the first time, I was beginning to recognize that these rituals weren't simply perfunctory motions to be followed, but actions that contributed to these spaces through the respect they gave. In all my summers of Bible Camp, Sunday school and endless sermons of my youth, I had never understood the importance of ritual, and especially that ritual was an opportunity for me to take responsibility for my actions and contribute to these spiritual spaces. It was at this moment that I reached an epiphany - my cathedral in Mahhattan had fallen.
In northern Manhattan, there are very few places where one can escape the car alarms, beeping horns, and bellowing speak of the community. My experiences with christianity have not been the most affirming moments in my life. I have a significant amount of personalized baggage with churches, so those spiritual spaces offer little respite. The park, however, was such a place. Inwood Hill Park is the most beautiful park in New York. Prospect Park has beautiful lawns and wooden gazeebos and Central Park has... well, it's Central Park. Inwood's park, however, doesn't have the man-made feel of other city parks. The forest (or what is left of it) is old. The trees aren't simply look old - it FEELS old. The park's caves (unlike my own) are nestled against a beautiful horseshoe-shaped rim that gazes into the midst of a solemn mass of trees. There it is. My cathedral. I would walk into that nestled dell, sit down and gaze up into those stunning pillars of living wood and feel that I was living on another world. Even the distant rumble of a Metro North train heading to Poughkeepsie or a jet that just left La Guardia only added to the transporting feeling of sitting among those trees. Without ever consciously realizing it, I was sitting in my spiritual space. My silence, my respect and even the shoes I chose to wear whenever I visit that park, were all part of a reverence I offered to my cathedral.
Then, there was Sarah Fox. Last summer, a Julliard student was jogging through the park when she was abducted and murdered. To date, the murder hasn't been solved. The occassional poster dots the 207th St. subway station and bulletin boards, but there is still no indictment. For weeks after the murder, I didn't return to the park. I didn't think of why except that it had disappeared from my plans, like a spot of white-out on a page of 'Things to Do'. Later, I would take short walks along the remote paths with friends, firing off a dark stare upon every man we saw. I wouldn't walk alone anymore, unless it was along the outer rim, to peek into the dog park or sit along the salt marsh. I didn't fear for my safety, but my mind restlessly wandered with discomfort to the desecration of my cathedral. It was gone. It had a history that could be neither undone nor unforgotten . Other fell deeds have certainly been performed beneath the canopy of my spiritual santuary, but they were never a part of my experiences and this event weighs endlessly upon my mind... and it was at the feet of a Buddha in Wat Suan Dok, in a northern city in Thailand, 13 hours of flight time from my cave and my fallen cathedral where I could finally see what I had, what I'd lost and perhaps a glimpse of the road I'd been blindly travelling.
In Thailand, anyone who even remotely looks like a tourist has to expect a little hassle. There is always someone willing to take your money if you are sucker enough to part with it. Tuk-tuk drivers (the motor-scootery mosquitos of SE Asian transportation) regularly stand within a block of every tourist destination so they can tell you that the Palace/post office/train station/holy shrine is closed (Buddhist holiday) and offer transportation to the opposite end of the city. As a 6' 3" white male, I was not only a target, but one that could be easily spotted a block away. My blonde girlfriend only served to underscore our intense need to be hustled. The only place (for the most part) where a tourist could catch a break was in a wat. A wat is a Buddhist, temple complex. They are beautiful, quiet and mercifully-free of tuk-tuk drivers... inside the gates. As an added bonus, like a Starbucks in urban America, there are wats EVERYWHERE. They quickly became effective bunkers where I could take a drink of water, pull out my Nancy Chandler map and plan my assault on the next tourist attraction in the city, without the chaos of traffic jams and smiley glad-handers interrupting me every 30 seconds to ask me where I was going.
About a week into the trip, I was sitting in a Wat Suan Dok, in the northern city of Chiang Mai, when I realized that these wats were more than simply escapes where I was 'tagging up' before jumping into the fray of aggressive tourism - it was a place where I was settling my mind and re-centering myself. I was a first-time visitor to Thailand who was being hustled endlessly and who spoke very little of the language. My escapes were tangible and my escape route clear, but this escape was taking on a deeper aspect. The rules that govern wats are universal - wear modest clothing that covers your shoulders and legs, take off your shoes when you enter a bot (ceremonial building), sit on the floor, be quiet, and don't point your feet at the Buddha. By this time, I was watching others and becoming more thorough in my behavior. I burned candles and nodded in respect before the Buddhas before standing and leaving a bot. I am not Buddhist, but there was a respect and reverence that I found myself admiring in those spaces. For the first time, I was beginning to recognize that these rituals weren't simply perfunctory motions to be followed, but actions that contributed to these spaces through the respect they gave. In all my summers of Bible Camp, Sunday school and endless sermons of my youth, I had never understood the importance of ritual, and especially that ritual was an opportunity for me to take responsibility for my actions and contribute to these spiritual spaces. It was at this moment that I reached an epiphany - my cathedral in Mahhattan had fallen.In northern Manhattan, there are very few places where one can escape the car alarms, beeping horns, and bellowing speak of the community. My experiences with christianity have not been the most affirming moments in my life. I have a significant amount of personalized baggage with churches, so those spiritual spaces offer little respite. The park, however, was such a place. Inwood Hill Park is the most beautiful park in New York. Prospect Park has beautiful lawns and wooden gazeebos and Central Park has... well, it's Central Park. Inwood's park, however, doesn't have the man-made feel of other city parks. The forest (or what is left of it) is old. The trees aren't simply look old - it FEELS old. The park's caves (unlike my own) are nestled against a beautiful horseshoe-shaped rim that gazes into the midst of a solemn mass of trees. There it is. My cathedral. I would walk into that nestled dell, sit down and gaze up into those stunning pillars of living wood and feel that I was living on another world. Even the distant rumble of a Metro North train heading to Poughkeepsie or a jet that just left La Guardia only added to the transporting feeling of sitting among those trees. Without ever consciously realizing it, I was sitting in my spiritual space. My silence, my respect and even the shoes I chose to wear whenever I visit that park, were all part of a reverence I offered to my cathedral.Then, there was Sarah Fox. Last summer, a Julliard student was jogging through the park when she was abducted and murdered. To date, the murder hasn't been solved. The occassional poster dots the 207th St. subway station and bulletin boards, but there is still no indictment. For weeks after the murder, I didn't return to the park. I didn't think of why except that it had disappeared from my plans, like a spot of white-out on a page of 'Things to Do'. Later, I would take short walks along the remote paths with friends, firing off a dark stare upon every man we saw. I wouldn't walk alone anymore, unless it was along the outer rim, to peek into the dog park or sit along the salt marsh. I didn't fear for my safety, but my mind restlessly wandered with discomfort to the desecration of my cathedral. It was gone. It had a history that could be neither undone nor unforgotten . Other fell deeds have certainly been performed beneath the canopy of my spiritual santuary, but they were never a part of my experiences and this event weighs endlessly upon my mind... and it was at the feet of a Buddha in Wat Suan Dok, in a northern city in Thailand, 13 hours of flight time from my cave and my fallen cathedral where I could finally see what I had, what I'd lost and perhaps a glimpse of the road I'd been blindly travelling.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
baby steps to the street
I left the cave yesterday. I didn't want to go. I had, in fact, spent the better part of the morning telling myself that I didn't need to go out. I had promised myself that I would get out of the cave every day this week. The cave had begun to take the shape of an very large bell jar and I didn't want two straight weeks of the same old thing.
Last week, I suffered another one of my occupational whiteouts where panic attacks tag-team with gutteral depression to render me essentially inoperable. These incidents usually begin with food cravings. After one or two days, I realize that my comfort foodsare not fulfilling their namesake. As the storm advances on my position, I become disgruntled with my career and where it is headed. I sit down and make sweeping plans for my future as well as all the important modifications that must be made to my personality/body image/personal finances in order for these plans to be realized. With renewed vigor (as well as some Clash or Nirvana for theme music), I sit down and begin to write the first few descriptions of a screenplay that will be sold this summer on my way to winning the Tribeca Film Festival two years from now. Of course, I hate everything I write because I'm not writing like Hemingway or Steinbeck so I jump to my stacks of unpublished poetry and my 2004 Edition of Poet's Market and begin to hammer out where and when I will be sending my poems so that I can win some festivals, gain literary credibility, then get an advance on my first novel that will be written and published in the next year. After 2 hours of editing my poetry and raging about how it has all the depth of the love songs I wrote in 9th grade, I quickly switch gears, squeeze out a little vermillion and yellow ochre, then settle down with the still life oil painting that I've been working on for 2 weeks. After mixing paint for 30 minutes in the fruitless attempt to match the color on my pallette knife with the beer bottle in my composition, I wash my brushes, change out of my turpentine-flavored clothes, and dive into the obtuse life of an Irish Catholic lad in James Joyce's Ulysses. Hmmm... maybe I'll just put that down for a sec and read the "Fables & Reflections" book of the Sandman graphic novels I've got on my shelf. An hour later, I am strumming my accoustic guitar and working on getting that smooth transition from the 'A' chord to the 'D' chord so I can master that David Bowie song, then compose an album that will revolutionize the music world and bring alternative rock back into the mainstream.
Some people might call this a Renaissance Man lifestyle. I think a therapist back in college called it manic-depression.
So, I got out of the cave yesterday. Just when I'd talked myself into playing 4 straight hours of Civilization 3 or Madden 2005, my girlfriend had to call me up and bully me into leaving the apartment. Well, to be fair, all she did was asking me when I was going out and I couldn't think of any of the great rationalizations I'd put together in my head. So, in the end, I took the 'A' train cave to Pearl Paints, bought a few items for my manic needs, took a swing by the East Village to thumb through a few LPs and cruised on over to Avenue A for a few happy hour libations. Ahh! Nothing like alcohol to cure depression, huh? It's good to be cruising along the old career track.
I need a day job.
Last week, I suffered another one of my occupational whiteouts where panic attacks tag-team with gutteral depression to render me essentially inoperable. These incidents usually begin with food cravings. After one or two days, I realize that my comfort foodsare not fulfilling their namesake. As the storm advances on my position, I become disgruntled with my career and where it is headed. I sit down and make sweeping plans for my future as well as all the important modifications that must be made to my personality/body image/personal finances in order for these plans to be realized. With renewed vigor (as well as some Clash or Nirvana for theme music), I sit down and begin to write the first few descriptions of a screenplay that will be sold this summer on my way to winning the Tribeca Film Festival two years from now. Of course, I hate everything I write because I'm not writing like Hemingway or Steinbeck so I jump to my stacks of unpublished poetry and my 2004 Edition of Poet's Market and begin to hammer out where and when I will be sending my poems so that I can win some festivals, gain literary credibility, then get an advance on my first novel that will be written and published in the next year. After 2 hours of editing my poetry and raging about how it has all the depth of the love songs I wrote in 9th grade, I quickly switch gears, squeeze out a little vermillion and yellow ochre, then settle down with the still life oil painting that I've been working on for 2 weeks. After mixing paint for 30 minutes in the fruitless attempt to match the color on my pallette knife with the beer bottle in my composition, I wash my brushes, change out of my turpentine-flavored clothes, and dive into the obtuse life of an Irish Catholic lad in James Joyce's Ulysses. Hmmm... maybe I'll just put that down for a sec and read the "Fables & Reflections" book of the Sandman graphic novels I've got on my shelf. An hour later, I am strumming my accoustic guitar and working on getting that smooth transition from the 'A' chord to the 'D' chord so I can master that David Bowie song, then compose an album that will revolutionize the music world and bring alternative rock back into the mainstream.
Some people might call this a Renaissance Man lifestyle. I think a therapist back in college called it manic-depression.
So, I got out of the cave yesterday. Just when I'd talked myself into playing 4 straight hours of Civilization 3 or Madden 2005, my girlfriend had to call me up and bully me into leaving the apartment. Well, to be fair, all she did was asking me when I was going out and I couldn't think of any of the great rationalizations I'd put together in my head. So, in the end, I took the 'A' train cave to Pearl Paints, bought a few items for my manic needs, took a swing by the East Village to thumb through a few LPs and cruised on over to Avenue A for a few happy hour libations. Ahh! Nothing like alcohol to cure depression, huh? It's good to be cruising along the old career track.
I need a day job.
Monday, January 24, 2005
the collective experience of snow
Though it was touch-and-go for a while, I have miraculously survived the cataclysmic event known as BLIZZARD 2005. For hour upon hour, New Yorkers (as well as virtually everyone in the northeast) had the ability to watch the snow come down on no less than 6 network stations. It just feels so much more real when you can watch the white stuff coming down on network (and cable) television in addition to the event happening only feet away. Every channel had roving 'reporters' who pointed out the fact that it wasn't JUST snowing outside our window, but all over the New York/New Jersey area. I watched one reporter as he took a plastic ruler, walked over to a snow-plowed drift and announced that the snow was so deep he could lose his ruler trying to measure it... Then he stuck it in the snowbank and lost it.
A news report on the weather is the easiest slam-dunk-of-a-news-report on TV. Older people love to obsess over the weather both because the risk of falling is greatly heightened and... well, they just love it. My grandmother saved all of her calendars because she liked to record the high and low temperatures every day. For outdoors men, the weather is a big deal. My dad hunts and is constantly buzzing around his rural property so knowing the next day's weather can be a good idea. In addition, my parents live in the the middle of nowhere so a moderate snow storm can mean 24 (perhaps even 36) hours of inconvenience. People who might live on a remote mountaintop in Colorado can get stuck for weeks. Hey, I've seen The Shining - I know that extended snow storms can result in a dangerous bout of cabin fever. This, however, is NYC. Doing an investigate report in Chelsea to report on how 'disrupted' people feel is a management choice that, from a reporter's standpoint, should be reserved for public-access television (along with extended diatribes regarding Star Wars memorabilia and/or corporate police-states).
As the hours of live, satellite coverage began to pile upon one another, it became evident to me that something far different than the average news report was being conducted. I wanted to call it narcissism, but that felt simplistic. It isn't solely about being seen on the tube. If a neighborhood robbery, murder, or fire makes it to the local news, the entire neighborhood can feel validated. Events gain a reality. There's something about being near an event that gains attention outside the community. A person might show up for work the next day and when somebody mentions that they saw it on the news, an immediate street credibility goes to anybody who can claim relations. He can can say that he was there (or at least in the vicinity of 'there'), present during or around the time of the event. When a local event reaches the national news, you hit the Big Time on the Validity List. Friends and enemies from across the country learn of the event and relate it to you because you were THERE... or at least in the vicinity of 'there'.
What an inane report like the Chelsea incovenience report does is give a significance to life. That restaurant you went to 3 months ago is sitting in the background of the shot. That weird guy who works at the newspaper stand gets 2 sentences of fame as he talks about how pretty the snow looks. Your life experiences connect up with some larger, macro-experience that every schlump watching the local news might relate to and, thus, confirm.
I'm as guilty as any other American. When a student shooting happened in my college, science building, I raced home like every other soul and glued myself to the local and national news to see my moment in time get validated all across the country. I would sit in those dorm hall groups, talking about the incident and try to manufacture some story that might put myself somehow closer to the danger of the event. 'I just saw that student in the hall the week before.' 'I was supposed to have a discussion class on the second floor that night but our T.A. cancelled it at the last minute.' Never mind that I had never met the student in my life or that my discussion class was on Thursday and not Tuesday, when the incident occurred. The important thing was that I was CLOSE to it.
Why do we do it? Why do we watch ourselves? Is it because we just can't get enough of the things we've seen before or which never directly affect us? I keep thinking of a quote from Joseph Campbell on his PBS series The Power of Myth.
For those of us not listening to ourselves our fulfilling our needs, how unnatural is it to need our experiences to be confirmed and re-lived on T.V. - perhaps the primary place of our simulated raptures?
A news report on the weather is the easiest slam-dunk-of-a-news-report on TV. Older people love to obsess over the weather both because the risk of falling is greatly heightened and... well, they just love it. My grandmother saved all of her calendars because she liked to record the high and low temperatures every day. For outdoors men, the weather is a big deal. My dad hunts and is constantly buzzing around his rural property so knowing the next day's weather can be a good idea. In addition, my parents live in the the middle of nowhere so a moderate snow storm can mean 24 (perhaps even 36) hours of inconvenience. People who might live on a remote mountaintop in Colorado can get stuck for weeks. Hey, I've seen The Shining - I know that extended snow storms can result in a dangerous bout of cabin fever. This, however, is NYC. Doing an investigate report in Chelsea to report on how 'disrupted' people feel is a management choice that, from a reporter's standpoint, should be reserved for public-access television (along with extended diatribes regarding Star Wars memorabilia and/or corporate police-states).
As the hours of live, satellite coverage began to pile upon one another, it became evident to me that something far different than the average news report was being conducted. I wanted to call it narcissism, but that felt simplistic. It isn't solely about being seen on the tube. If a neighborhood robbery, murder, or fire makes it to the local news, the entire neighborhood can feel validated. Events gain a reality. There's something about being near an event that gains attention outside the community. A person might show up for work the next day and when somebody mentions that they saw it on the news, an immediate street credibility goes to anybody who can claim relations. He can can say that he was there (or at least in the vicinity of 'there'), present during or around the time of the event. When a local event reaches the national news, you hit the Big Time on the Validity List. Friends and enemies from across the country learn of the event and relate it to you because you were THERE... or at least in the vicinity of 'there'.
What an inane report like the Chelsea incovenience report does is give a significance to life. That restaurant you went to 3 months ago is sitting in the background of the shot. That weird guy who works at the newspaper stand gets 2 sentences of fame as he talks about how pretty the snow looks. Your life experiences connect up with some larger, macro-experience that every schlump watching the local news might relate to and, thus, confirm.
I'm as guilty as any other American. When a student shooting happened in my college, science building, I raced home like every other soul and glued myself to the local and national news to see my moment in time get validated all across the country. I would sit in those dorm hall groups, talking about the incident and try to manufacture some story that might put myself somehow closer to the danger of the event. 'I just saw that student in the hall the week before.' 'I was supposed to have a discussion class on the second floor that night but our T.A. cancelled it at the last minute.' Never mind that I had never met the student in my life or that my discussion class was on Thursday and not Tuesday, when the incident occurred. The important thing was that I was CLOSE to it.
Why do we do it? Why do we watch ourselves? Is it because we just can't get enough of the things we've seen before or which never directly affect us? I keep thinking of a quote from Joseph Campbell on his PBS series The Power of Myth.
With all the media I take in every day, I feel as if I am swimming through an manufactured reality. I have this constructed atmosphere of music I carry around with me. My computer games render abstracted realities of sports and first-person shooters. Film and television allow me to watch other people engage life in clearly-defined, tangible trails of narration. How can a person expect to process events of his/her life in any sort of present fashion? With jobs, debts, expectations, career tracks, and relationship commitments, how many rapturous moments of life do I experience? On the other hand, hundreds of times a year I vicariously experience it through rock n' roll, movies, games, and televised sporting events.
People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive... so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
For those of us not listening to ourselves our fulfilling our needs, how unnatural is it to need our experiences to be confirmed and re-lived on T.V. - perhaps the primary place of our simulated raptures?
Pippin enjoys his First Snow
Friday, January 21, 2005
more static for the white noise
After years of wasting my workdays, reading blogs and diatribing in reply posts and the darkness of my own cave, I have decided to prick my finger and do a few cave drawings of my own. Having seen The New York Times devote many pages to the fabulous world of blogging, I am certain that I can finally declare the entire community 'uncool' and join the huddled masses of despondent writers and self-proclaimed fringe and see if there are any brave (or bored) enough to venture into my subterranean hovel of rent-stabilized angst.
For those of you who know New York City from the movies (via Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet and/or John Cassavetes), let me be the most recent to tell you that those days are long gone. New York City is holding onto the tattered remains of hipness with bloody fingernails. When I moved to the City 3 1/2 years ago, I envisioned a day where I'd be talking like Serpico, churning out dangerous, provocative plays in East Village basements and doing loads of speed, all the while fending off hustlers and lowlifes with my honed street smarts. Instead, I've been introduced to the $7 minimum drink price and three years of achingly-dull marketing work at Lincoln Center.
Now, I am unemployed and living at the far northern tip of an island called Inwood. Up here, the only cultural advantage is that I can scrawl "New York, NY" on my return mail address... well, that, and a fantastic park. This neighborhood is considered to be up-and-coming because it's the last affordable place technically on the island and the nearest coffee house is 20+ blocks away so its air of desperation is taken for aloofness. I have been hibernating in my cave for the last 5 months, watching Final Draft cursors blink and planning exactly how early in the day one has to crack open a bottle of wine before he/she is considered to be in full posession of a drinking problem. Ten pages of my spectacular screenplay-in-waiting have been hammered out. That averages out to about 2 pages per month. At this rate, a 120 page screenplay will take me 60 months to write. Unless I'm churning out a fantastic adaptation of The Silmarillion (which, unfortunately, I am not), there is a major car wreck around the next bend of my ol' career track.
And now here I am, fantasizing that I am the new Hunter S. Thompson of the blogging world (or at least a Lester Bangs) and dreaming that there are others out there others with a similar taste in music, movies and ideas who are as mindlessly searching the internet as I did only months ago. Being very much my typical self, I am starting yet another project because, unlike finishing a project, I am REALLY good at starting something new.
For those of you who know New York City from the movies (via Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet and/or John Cassavetes), let me be the most recent to tell you that those days are long gone. New York City is holding onto the tattered remains of hipness with bloody fingernails. When I moved to the City 3 1/2 years ago, I envisioned a day where I'd be talking like Serpico, churning out dangerous, provocative plays in East Village basements and doing loads of speed, all the while fending off hustlers and lowlifes with my honed street smarts. Instead, I've been introduced to the $7 minimum drink price and three years of achingly-dull marketing work at Lincoln Center.
Now, I am unemployed and living at the far northern tip of an island called Inwood. Up here, the only cultural advantage is that I can scrawl "New York, NY" on my return mail address... well, that, and a fantastic park. This neighborhood is considered to be up-and-coming because it's the last affordable place technically on the island and the nearest coffee house is 20+ blocks away so its air of desperation is taken for aloofness. I have been hibernating in my cave for the last 5 months, watching Final Draft cursors blink and planning exactly how early in the day one has to crack open a bottle of wine before he/she is considered to be in full posession of a drinking problem. Ten pages of my spectacular screenplay-in-waiting have been hammered out. That averages out to about 2 pages per month. At this rate, a 120 page screenplay will take me 60 months to write. Unless I'm churning out a fantastic adaptation of The Silmarillion (which, unfortunately, I am not), there is a major car wreck around the next bend of my ol' career track.
And now here I am, fantasizing that I am the new Hunter S. Thompson of the blogging world (or at least a Lester Bangs) and dreaming that there are others out there others with a similar taste in music, movies and ideas who are as mindlessly searching the internet as I did only months ago. Being very much my typical self, I am starting yet another project because, unlike finishing a project, I am REALLY good at starting something new.
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