This morning I picked up my camera with the intention of taking some pictures as I walked home through Central Park after work. I haven't taken any pictures for several months, for the same reason I haven't been writing as much as I should, and as I cycled through the memory card I came across several photos from my 30th birthday. My girlfriend had taken me to Mohonk in upstate New York, and most of the pictures are of two people very much in love spending a freezing cold November afternoon outside, holding hands and smiling in spite of the weather. There were other pictures too from the year we spent together, pictures of us on my bed finishing a crossword puzzle, biking across the George Washington Bridge. There's one of her rolling the dough of a pizza we made together. There's the first picture we ever took, taken by a stranger in Soho before she left on a business trip.
It was a relationship that, aside from a few brief mentions early on, went entirely unremarked in this blog, and of all the things that have happened in the world and to me since I last wrote anything here -- the election of a black president, turning 30, starting a novel -- it is most surprising to me that this relationship, easily among the most important in my life, left no paper trail. Beyond the pictures there are other mementos, certainly (ticket stub from a Sigur Ros concert, postcard from Budapest), all of which have taken on a terrible new weight whenever I come across them. The relationship was wonderful, and although it has been over for some time, I still find myself stunned in its aftermath.
Like most relationships, it probably would have made for uninteresting conversation. We did the things couples do. We played cards together. We cooked dinner and watched The Wire and did crossword puzzles. We grabbed lunch if I was working near her office. I usually bought her flowers at the bodega around the corner from where she lived. On Christmas we both flew to California to meet each other's families, and in July I ended it.
It's a dirty fucking trick that you can be so in love with someone who isn't right for you. A dirty fucking trick. And it's a dirty trick that you can be the one that ends a relationship and still be reduced to rubble. I loved her very much, and she loved me, and I ended it. On some days the reasons are clear to me, and on others they're so dim and far away that they seem to vanish, but even on the best of days I still feel her there, the way an amputee still feels the fingers of a severed hand.
It's a testament to the easy life I've led that the hardest thing I've ever done is break up with a girl. I've never had to pull a friend out of a pile of brick and metal after and earthquake, or care for a dying family member, or sleep on a vent in the sidewalk to keep from freezing to death. Life is a parade of far worse things happening to far better people than me, just one more asshole who dumped a girl and came to regret it. Yet it is also, I suppose, a testament to the weird emotional and biological impulses that drive us, that even as the world burns down it is love that fills our lives with purpose, and its ending that steals it away again. Part of me believes that. The rest of me just feels bad.
So then, the last few months have been chockablock with first (and inevitably last) dates, irresponsible drinking, a few meaningless one night stands thrown in to force me to realize that, oh shit, this isn't really that fun anymore. And while I've slowly been able to piece myself back together again, every once in a while I'll come across a ticket stub or a post card, a pink sock in the bottom of a drawer, and it all comes crashing back down again. One step forward, two steps back. You know how it goes. All together now.
Will those mementos, those artifacts of such an important time in my life, always haunt me? Will I ever come across one of them and feeling anything other than a sense of longing and regret? In the pictures she's shuffling cards, leaning out over a frozen fountain, walking toward me with a birthday cake, maybe just smiling at the camera. They're just pictures, straightforward and maybe even boring, the way other people's pictures usually are. There's nothing to suggest the intensity of emotion, the love underlying the moments of quiet domesticity caught in the camera's flash, overexposed, a little blurry.
Do I save pictures or delete them? Do I keep the ticket stub in my wallet or tear it up? Do I throw the sock away, or do I wait for the day I can hold it in my hands and feel absolutely nothing?
Monday, February 1, 2010
Thursday, January 22, 2009
the president
Because I've been busy working on my book, it seems that this blog has withered on the vine -- and while I plan on reviving it as part of an inevitably short-lived new year's resolution, I wanted to prime the creative well with this.
For reasons probably interesting only to me, I've make a conscious decision to keep my fiction and my blogging separate. However, in light of recent events, I'd like to share a story I wrote four years ago, a few weeks into George Bush's second term. In light of recent events, it seems to have taken on a whole new meaning.
-bw
The President sits changing the strings of his guitar, drawing the dense jungle of wire into agreement. Around him, people mill about, their arms laden with electrical cords, rolls of duct tape, fill lights, colored gels, planks of wood, amps, switcher boxes, scaffolding, effects processors, make-up kits, hammers, saws. Orders are barked indiscriminately through headsets or hipslung walkie-talkies, coordinating the movements of the chaotic mass as best as can be expected. The President is oblivious to the buzzing hive surrounding him because he is capable of profound concentration. Beyond the dark folds of the curtain, the hum of the crowd’s growing restlessness adds a note of urgency to the manic buzz. But the President takes an inordinate amount of time to tune his guitar. The jangling anemone springing from the neck of his guitar changes its dimensions by degrees as the President listens for changes imperceptible to those around him. His genius affords him his eccentricities.
The hive has been given strict instructions to avoid making eye-contact with the President, if not avoid looking at him altogether. It’s for their own good, as staring at the President has been known to induce hypnotic trances in those foolish enough to steal more than a passing glance. There is a persistent rumor circulating that a young girl of 16 was walking home from school when she caught a glimpse of a poster of the President and was immediately struck blind. Whether or not this is true or merely a cautionary tale is unclear, though certainly it’s true in a metaphorical sense. With all the heavy equipment being lugged about, it’s best not to take any chances. Anyone caught staring at the President for more than three seconds is docked a day’s pay.
The make-up artists, whose very jobs demand exemption from this rule, tend to the various unique features of his face—a face that, they assure him in their faggy, flamboyant lisps, will soon adorn the bedroom walls of brooding, horny teenagers everywhere, burrowing down into the fertile folds of their minds to fuel their first urgent, fumbling discoveries of sexual gratification, staring down from above countless beds to hold court over first kisses, over the first glimpse of a naked breast, over the slowly dawning awareness of an erection prodding desperately into a hip, over awkward and inappropriate confessions of love, over the hasty, slapstick shedding of clothes.
And his music will be the soundtrack to a thousand lost virginities, to a million, forever linked to the joy and panic of the moment, to the jittery cadence of belts being undone, to the awkward geometry of the back seats of cars, to the nervous, seasick swell of a stomach trembling beneath curious, inexperienced fingers. Teenagers will roll wet towels beneath their doors and stare together at his face through dense clouds of smoke, at the weird half-smile, the pensive crease in his brow, and argue for hours about what he must have been thinking at that moment. They’ll look at the way he’s leaning back, the way his head rests casually in the palm of one hand while smoke from what squares assume is a cigarette curls lazily around the fingers of the other, and they will thrill at this secret insight, this accidental window into the inner life of the President.
Pregnant mothers will play his albums and stand with their swollen bellies pressed against the speakers. Marching band instructors will condense his music into challenging but nonetheless playable medleys which, while inevitably sacrificing a level of its sonic complexity, do so in the hope of inspiring a new generation of musicians to reach beyond the vast, blank canvas of their lives, though the flutes and clarinets will warble away obliviously, unable to see how their repetitive, feathery trill fits into the larger picture, unable to detach themselves from the relative plainness of their part enough to recognize the vital role it plays in the President’s plan. After practice they will break their instruments down and walk to class utterly unaffected, cackling about the weather, or some cute boy, or a party one of them has heard about, and they’ll graduate and find good jobs and get married and have well-behaved children and stack issues of People in wicker baskets next to their toilets. In the mornings they’ll drive their children and the children of friends to school in blue minivans, and one day one of the President’s songs will come on over the radio and trigger some dim and untroubled memory.
But the trumpets, trombones and tubas—those poor bastards will wander the field in a shambles for hours, long after the sun has gone down and the lights of the city begin to sparkle in the distance, their hearts racing painfully in their chests, not from the physical exertion of marching, but from the thrill of touching, even in such a debased and impure form, the third rail of the President’s brilliance. They’ll spill blindly into the streets, fingers running over phantom valves, lips drawn instinctively into embouchure, staccato tongues darting against their teeth, and when passersby see them, see their hands fluttering spastically, hear the air hissing violently through their lips, they’ll gather their children close and quicken their step. They’ll leave school and pawn their instruments and use the money to buy motorcycles, and they’ll drop acid and ride into the roaring mouth of the desert, engines revving higher and higher, asphalt singing inches below the scuffed leather of their boots as skeletal desert trees rake the air around their heads and their bikes soar like black eagles beneath them, needles hurtling toward impossible speeds, and when their friends and family beg them for an explanation, beg them to come home in their small, sad voices, they will find themselves at a loss for words so complete and profound that they won’t even be able to say goodbye before hanging up the phone.
Middle-aged fathers and their irritated sons will fight over the radio while stuck in traffic, only to come across one of his songs and settle into a petulant but secretly grateful compromise, their bemused half-frowns masking the desperate fervor with which each clings to it, as one clings to the last disintegrating bridge stretching across a valley that seems to grow deeper and wider every year, and they’ll find themselves singing along despite themselves, singing along with the President and with each other, and for a few moments things will be the way they used to be before the terrifying possibilities of adolescence and the creeping panic of middle age took root like weeds. For a few moments they’ll again be fathers and sons, and only through a great deal of effort will the fathers be able to keep themselves from reaching over and grabbing their boys, to cradle them tight against their chests, to hold them like water in their cupped hands.
*
A final turn of the machine head and the frown of intense concentration melts from the President’s face. He stands. The makeup artists, their work finally finished, flutter away like the foggy halo of a dandelion.
The hive pauses, mesmerized by the unexpected movement, fixed in place around the President like insects trapped in amber. Some of the younger workers laugh nervously at the sudden stillness, the joyless laughter that bubbles up from the oily dark of a blackout in a crowded room. He steps forward into the mass of bodies.
A small-breasted woman with black glasses and bright red lipstick shouts urgently into the rosebud microphone jutting from her headset as she grabs dazed workers by the backs of their necks and shoves them out of the President’s path. The hive goes about its job with renewed urgency, parting around him like a river around a boulder, breaking upon him as waves upon the prow of a ship.
*
The President walks onstage to uproarious applause. If he is affected by it, it’s impossible to tell. The cheers reach a deafening crescendo as he approaches the microphone. The President adjusts the strap of his guitar and turns to face the band. The drummer’s sticks hover above the cymbal and snare. The bassist’s fingers arch over the strings. A quick nod from the President and they tense—the sharp intake of breath before jumping into cold water, the rippling leg of a lion crouched low in the grass. The crowd is a roaring black sea.
The President raises his pick into the air. A hush falls like snow. People cling desperately to one another in the coiled silence. They say to each other, When it falls, everything will change. When it falls we will become the people we want to be. The pick hovers in the air like a promise, like a dark cloud on the horizon, like something so important it doesn’t need to be said.
For reasons probably interesting only to me, I've make a conscious decision to keep my fiction and my blogging separate. However, in light of recent events, I'd like to share a story I wrote four years ago, a few weeks into George Bush's second term. In light of recent events, it seems to have taken on a whole new meaning.
-bw
The President sits changing the strings of his guitar, drawing the dense jungle of wire into agreement. Around him, people mill about, their arms laden with electrical cords, rolls of duct tape, fill lights, colored gels, planks of wood, amps, switcher boxes, scaffolding, effects processors, make-up kits, hammers, saws. Orders are barked indiscriminately through headsets or hipslung walkie-talkies, coordinating the movements of the chaotic mass as best as can be expected. The President is oblivious to the buzzing hive surrounding him because he is capable of profound concentration. Beyond the dark folds of the curtain, the hum of the crowd’s growing restlessness adds a note of urgency to the manic buzz. But the President takes an inordinate amount of time to tune his guitar. The jangling anemone springing from the neck of his guitar changes its dimensions by degrees as the President listens for changes imperceptible to those around him. His genius affords him his eccentricities.
The hive has been given strict instructions to avoid making eye-contact with the President, if not avoid looking at him altogether. It’s for their own good, as staring at the President has been known to induce hypnotic trances in those foolish enough to steal more than a passing glance. There is a persistent rumor circulating that a young girl of 16 was walking home from school when she caught a glimpse of a poster of the President and was immediately struck blind. Whether or not this is true or merely a cautionary tale is unclear, though certainly it’s true in a metaphorical sense. With all the heavy equipment being lugged about, it’s best not to take any chances. Anyone caught staring at the President for more than three seconds is docked a day’s pay.
The make-up artists, whose very jobs demand exemption from this rule, tend to the various unique features of his face—a face that, they assure him in their faggy, flamboyant lisps, will soon adorn the bedroom walls of brooding, horny teenagers everywhere, burrowing down into the fertile folds of their minds to fuel their first urgent, fumbling discoveries of sexual gratification, staring down from above countless beds to hold court over first kisses, over the first glimpse of a naked breast, over the slowly dawning awareness of an erection prodding desperately into a hip, over awkward and inappropriate confessions of love, over the hasty, slapstick shedding of clothes.
And his music will be the soundtrack to a thousand lost virginities, to a million, forever linked to the joy and panic of the moment, to the jittery cadence of belts being undone, to the awkward geometry of the back seats of cars, to the nervous, seasick swell of a stomach trembling beneath curious, inexperienced fingers. Teenagers will roll wet towels beneath their doors and stare together at his face through dense clouds of smoke, at the weird half-smile, the pensive crease in his brow, and argue for hours about what he must have been thinking at that moment. They’ll look at the way he’s leaning back, the way his head rests casually in the palm of one hand while smoke from what squares assume is a cigarette curls lazily around the fingers of the other, and they will thrill at this secret insight, this accidental window into the inner life of the President.
Pregnant mothers will play his albums and stand with their swollen bellies pressed against the speakers. Marching band instructors will condense his music into challenging but nonetheless playable medleys which, while inevitably sacrificing a level of its sonic complexity, do so in the hope of inspiring a new generation of musicians to reach beyond the vast, blank canvas of their lives, though the flutes and clarinets will warble away obliviously, unable to see how their repetitive, feathery trill fits into the larger picture, unable to detach themselves from the relative plainness of their part enough to recognize the vital role it plays in the President’s plan. After practice they will break their instruments down and walk to class utterly unaffected, cackling about the weather, or some cute boy, or a party one of them has heard about, and they’ll graduate and find good jobs and get married and have well-behaved children and stack issues of People in wicker baskets next to their toilets. In the mornings they’ll drive their children and the children of friends to school in blue minivans, and one day one of the President’s songs will come on over the radio and trigger some dim and untroubled memory.
But the trumpets, trombones and tubas—those poor bastards will wander the field in a shambles for hours, long after the sun has gone down and the lights of the city begin to sparkle in the distance, their hearts racing painfully in their chests, not from the physical exertion of marching, but from the thrill of touching, even in such a debased and impure form, the third rail of the President’s brilliance. They’ll spill blindly into the streets, fingers running over phantom valves, lips drawn instinctively into embouchure, staccato tongues darting against their teeth, and when passersby see them, see their hands fluttering spastically, hear the air hissing violently through their lips, they’ll gather their children close and quicken their step. They’ll leave school and pawn their instruments and use the money to buy motorcycles, and they’ll drop acid and ride into the roaring mouth of the desert, engines revving higher and higher, asphalt singing inches below the scuffed leather of their boots as skeletal desert trees rake the air around their heads and their bikes soar like black eagles beneath them, needles hurtling toward impossible speeds, and when their friends and family beg them for an explanation, beg them to come home in their small, sad voices, they will find themselves at a loss for words so complete and profound that they won’t even be able to say goodbye before hanging up the phone.
Middle-aged fathers and their irritated sons will fight over the radio while stuck in traffic, only to come across one of his songs and settle into a petulant but secretly grateful compromise, their bemused half-frowns masking the desperate fervor with which each clings to it, as one clings to the last disintegrating bridge stretching across a valley that seems to grow deeper and wider every year, and they’ll find themselves singing along despite themselves, singing along with the President and with each other, and for a few moments things will be the way they used to be before the terrifying possibilities of adolescence and the creeping panic of middle age took root like weeds. For a few moments they’ll again be fathers and sons, and only through a great deal of effort will the fathers be able to keep themselves from reaching over and grabbing their boys, to cradle them tight against their chests, to hold them like water in their cupped hands.
*
A final turn of the machine head and the frown of intense concentration melts from the President’s face. He stands. The makeup artists, their work finally finished, flutter away like the foggy halo of a dandelion.
The hive pauses, mesmerized by the unexpected movement, fixed in place around the President like insects trapped in amber. Some of the younger workers laugh nervously at the sudden stillness, the joyless laughter that bubbles up from the oily dark of a blackout in a crowded room. He steps forward into the mass of bodies.
A small-breasted woman with black glasses and bright red lipstick shouts urgently into the rosebud microphone jutting from her headset as she grabs dazed workers by the backs of their necks and shoves them out of the President’s path. The hive goes about its job with renewed urgency, parting around him like a river around a boulder, breaking upon him as waves upon the prow of a ship.
*
The President walks onstage to uproarious applause. If he is affected by it, it’s impossible to tell. The cheers reach a deafening crescendo as he approaches the microphone. The President adjusts the strap of his guitar and turns to face the band. The drummer’s sticks hover above the cymbal and snare. The bassist’s fingers arch over the strings. A quick nod from the President and they tense—the sharp intake of breath before jumping into cold water, the rippling leg of a lion crouched low in the grass. The crowd is a roaring black sea.
The President raises his pick into the air. A hush falls like snow. People cling desperately to one another in the coiled silence. They say to each other, When it falls, everything will change. When it falls we will become the people we want to be. The pick hovers in the air like a promise, like a dark cloud on the horizon, like something so important it doesn’t need to be said.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
creasin' the deece
When I was 4, my parents brought me and my at-the-time-only sister Sarah to New York. My memories of the time consist, as early memories often do, of large swathes of color and sound ripped whole-cloth from any meaningful context. Clanking up a twisting staircase made of green metal, until my parents decided to turn us around and fight our way back down through a crowd of jostling elbows and angry looks -- years later my dad told me that that was an unsuccessful attempt to climb to the top of the statue of liberty. Burying my face into my mom's neck while some horrible, growling black shape loomed over me -- top of the empire state building, some guy dressed in a gorilla suit. I remember the brown and orange chevron pattern of carpet, the bang and clatter of a pinball machine with an Indian head staring our from the scoreboard, my grandfather yelling at me for something -- the hotel in Philadelphia where they were holding a Wright family reunion.
When I was 12 I rode the London Underground with my dad. When I was 15 I got what turned out to be a life-altering blowjob from the daughter of my homestay in Osaka. When I was 17 I stumbled home drunk from a pub in Tromso, Norway, at 2 in the morning with the sun still beating down on my head. At 19, I played with the Trojan Marching Band at the opening of the American exhibit at the World Expo in Lisbon, and at 24 I was ordering beer phonetically at an inzakaya in a small fishing village in Japan. Bii-ru o hi-to-tsu ku-da-sai.
But until last year, those disjointed flashes of something too unmoored to be properly called memories were the sum total of my experience of the east coast. It took me nearly a quarter of a century to make it further east than Chicago.
Yet even now that I've lived in New York for a few weeks shy of a year, I haven't strayed too far beyond the five boroughs -- but no, even that's too generous, seeing that I only went to Staten Island for one day to shoot in an abandoned insane asylum (seriously) and the only two times I've been to the Bronx were because I'd passed out on the subway. So, Manhattan then. Brooklyn, parts of Queens. Went upstate once. Played golf with my dad in Connecticut. Couple of trips to drop off people or equipment in Jersey City. That's it.
And so it was with a sense of wonder at how little of my own country I've seen that I came to the Washington, DC, the Big Deece itself. Weeks of sifting through the crazed dregs of New York for roommates who seemed least inclined to cut my throat in my sleep (a process that brought me to the brink honest-to-christ homelessness) -- and that, combined with a worrying bout of semi-employment, left me with no choice but to get the fuck out of there for a couple of days.
So, DC. Staying in a Hilton and suckling at the teat of my girlfriend's meager expense account, nursing something akin to guilt at the idea eating withered strips of bacon and overcooked eggs on a nonprofit organization's dime. Fuck it, writers gots to eat too. So while she busies herself with the problems of the world, my days are free to tool around this strange patchwork city -- a slice of San Francisco here, a sliver of Chicago there, a strip of West Hollywood there -- all the while with an uneasy sense of deja vu scraping at my neck like a loose collar. Walking around Washington is like walking around in an amnesiac daze, snapshots of a familiar world that no longer fits together the way it's supposed to. Throw then the mindfuck of the capitol itself onto the pile of smoldering almost-familiarity, the smooth marble domes, the carved columns and snickering phallic symbolism of the capitol seen nearly every day of our lives on TV, in movies, our money. But then there it is, not framed by banners and curlicues and green text proclaiming our nation's trust in god, but sharing space with some shitty post-modern architectural disaster of an office building, the unmistakable round emblem of a Starbucks, the chattering street vendors selling five-dollar pretzels.
Still, there's a certain giddy thrill at strolling past the halls of power, at seeing firsthand the smooth alabaster walls and knowing that this -- this -- is where we all get fucked. Camera comes out, gawk along with the other tourists. At one point I framed up the Treasury Department and held out a $20 bill in front of the lens before a sighing, visibly annoyed man in a Brooks Brothers suit scoffed that, god, everyone does that. Minutes later a cop on a bike wheeled up to me and demanded to see my ID and my camera, adding under his breath that he was required by law to inform me I was under no legal obligation to show him either one. I gave him my license, but withheld my camera, so he barked at me not to move while he muttered something into his walkie talkie. After a couple of minutes he tells me I won't be detained, then pointed to the trees and told me I was being watched by a lot of very paranoid people. The experience was unsettling, to put it mildly.
I split the rest of the day between various other Washington landmarks. Frowning Lincoln, brow creased nobly in reflection of how awesome it is to be the most slave-freeingest of all the presidents, past the brackish reflecting pool and long lawns that only deepen the sense of this city's country-clubbishness, past the base of the Washington Monyment and a squabble of guffawing fourth graders, and finally to the Smithsonian, holding a retrospective on the work of Jim Henson, where the whole day was given a bizarre coda by the sight of a roomful of adults singing along to a video of the theme song to Fraggle Rock. Dance your cares away. Clap-clap.
And perhaps it's fitting that this image is somehow the most poignant, that this somehow captures the spirit of this town more than any picture or postcard or history book can. Washington is a city of a threatening familiarity too subtle for words, but too deep and omnipresent to go unremarked, because for all of it's dressed-up stateliness, for all of it's marble columns and elegant fountains and monuments to its own greatness, this city is just fucking weird.
Clap-clap, indeed.
Friday, August 8, 2008
8! 8! 8!
Too tired to do much more at the end of the day than make my way home and collapse onto my unmade bed, splitting what scant free time I can cobble together from the scattered remnants of 14 hour days between pecking blindly away at my novel and spending time with the girl who, yeah, yeah, I guess is sorta my girlfriend. Two months of bottom-of-the-barreling it on another show for the Food Network (described in highconcept-ese as Myth-Busters-meets-food so many times that the words have become meaningless) has left me too tired, even, to summon much more than distant, vague indignation at the fact that, when it's all tallied up at the end of the day, I'm making ten dollars an hour. Sorry. A fucking hour.
Ah, there's the indignation. Of the various character defects pointed out to me over the course of my 29 years, being slow to anger has never been one of them, so it should speak to level of my fatigue that being pissed off at the situation in which I currently find myself -- being anything more than blithely accepting of my hours tracking down whole turkeys in July, or fighting midtown traffic while a two hundred pound block of ice slides around the back of the production minivan, or mutely pleading with gawking tourists to move from in front of the camera, to scraping chunks of putrid meat off of plates with a fork and a dribbling faucet that only runs cold -- is far too demanding of what little energy the long day leaves me.
But sigh, it is what it is, and coming to an end soon enough, and so now I find myself enjoying the last few hours of my Friday night and looking forward to two days of not a whole lot. Maybe write a little bit, maybe dim-sum tomorrow, maybe make a phone call, maybe just sitting around and watch DVDs. Friends, the world is my oyster.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
a luddite comes around
Too hot to do much more than sit my darkened apartment and listen to the lady downstairs scream at her bawling kid about-- christ, some shit. Can't quite make out the angry patois above the sound of the shouts and honking horns a couple of streets over, the bass from some reggaeton band playing down-block on a stage sponsored by a spanish radio station. I made it back home to Spanish Harlem today sometime around noon, still wearing the black shirt and black tie that had looked so good the night before but that was now wrinkled and stifling and may as well have been a camel hair coat, and found myself in the middle of the 116th Street Fair, known above 110th Street as Puerto Rico Day and below it (and by the gentrification set) as Oh God, Oh God, Close Up All the Shops.
I've been feeling every bit the shut-in as of late, spending most of my time plugging away at a bottom of the barrel post-production job and then spending the rest chipping away at the first few chapters of a novel, so I walked through the fair for a bit, past food stalls selling chorizo and cheese-filled plantains and mozzarepa and booths offering diabetes counseling alongside free packets of Tide. I grabbed a plate of rice and beans but the heat got to be too much so I came back home and sat in my apartment naked with the windows open and the blinds drawn. Then the woman downstairs started in on her kid, you little motherfucker, so I dragged myself into the living room and stuffed some earplugs into my ears and started a-bloggin'.
No, not exactly. First I checked Facebook. Checking Facebook has, in the two weeks since I semi-reluctantly joined up, already become a shamefully high priority -- and one which, like any of a number of other monkeys on my back, I just can't seem to shake. I have, over the last few weeks, given up with varying degrees of failure coffee, booze, sex, and videogames. The idea was that these things were too great a distraction while I pound away at the book, but the five minutes of Grand Theft Auto that I allowed myself this afternoon (which stretched into a full hour and a half, when the battery in my controller died) marks a colossal failure of will on all fronts -- and the triumph of witty sophistication and raw animal magnetism on one in particular -- within a single 24 hour period. And now Facebook. Jesus.
Ah, but truth told, wasting my time was not the reason I shunned Facebook for so long. No, the reasons for avoiding Facebook -- and social networks in general -- are similar to the reasons I don't like strip clubs. When I was 15, my friends tried to take me to a strip club across the border from Brownsville in Matamoros, Mexico. Octopus or some such, something vaguely pun-based. Octopus was full, or too expensive, or we looked too young, or we weren't dressed well enough, but for whatever reason we were turned away at the door by the chuckling bouncer so we drove through Matamoros until we found another club down some back alley, somewhere we could get into because my friend knew somebody. It was dark and hot and the stage was particle board laid out on top of a bunch of cinder blocks, upon which several women writhed distractedly about to the small tinny sounds of an old boom box. Walk into the sad, empty club and the women flock toward us, sit us down, ask us if we want anything and my friends buy me a lap dance. A woman starts rubbing her tits in my face, but I can't take my eyes off of the track marks running up and down both of her arms, and now I don't go to strip clubs.
My first experience with Friendster, too, left me gun shy. Initially it seemed like a lazy way too keep in touch with people while I was in Japan and would have evolved in due course to drunkenly entering the names of ex-girlfriends into the search engine as per usual, had I one day not typed in the name of my very first girlfriend and been brought to the page of a bald, scowling, tattooed lesbian. So, Friendster account left to die on the vine, Myspace passed up completely, the various life-paths of other ex-girlfriends and old flames unexamined. And you know what? It's better that way.
Then Facebook, and again I'm the guy explaining that he'd rather not go to the strip club, ha ha, see there's this thing that happened, but as the annoying din of talk about super-pokes and Scrabulous grew ever louder, not joining Facebook became in my mind a matter of principle. Then fuck, shit, yeah, one day I signed up. I was probably hungover and drinking a grande iced coffee while playing Burnout Paradise at the time, too. Happy?
And initially it was...well, shit, it was pretty exciting. Haven't talked to so-and-so in years, can't believe such-and-such is married, or divorced, or has kids, or any of the number of things that you come to find out as your social network slowly spiders outward to include people you haven't seen or talked to or thought of since high school. But beyond the voyeuristic thrill of peeking in on the lives of the bank of familiar names in the lower left corner, of glimpsing the faces of your childhood friends, fatter or thinner, or bearded or with different hair, but unmistakably theirs despite bearing the weight of a full decade of adulthood -- beyond all of that, there's the promise of doing more than simply gawking at, say, the fact that Ana's son is now 15, or that Troy owns three companies.
I don't know if it's something unique to Facebook, something fundamentally different from the catch-all clusterfucks of Friendster or Myspace, or if it's merely that I'm now old enough to fully appreciate what it means to have lost contact with people I once cared a great deal for, but the best and most terrifying thing is that it has brought me a poke away from re-establishing contact with people I had no idea I missed so badly. Sappy, yeah, but no less true for it. And yet so far I've balked at actually saying much more to those people than "Friend me," which seems to be the Web 2.0 equivalent of calling up someone you haven't talked to in years and asking them to loan you a couple bucks. Someday soon I'll muster the courage to do something more meaningful than scrawling snark on their wall. Until then, I'll simply marvel at how we've all turned into a bunch of 30 year olds. Not forever, but just for now.
I've been feeling every bit the shut-in as of late, spending most of my time plugging away at a bottom of the barrel post-production job and then spending the rest chipping away at the first few chapters of a novel, so I walked through the fair for a bit, past food stalls selling chorizo and cheese-filled plantains and mozzarepa and booths offering diabetes counseling alongside free packets of Tide. I grabbed a plate of rice and beans but the heat got to be too much so I came back home and sat in my apartment naked with the windows open and the blinds drawn. Then the woman downstairs started in on her kid, you little motherfucker, so I dragged myself into the living room and stuffed some earplugs into my ears and started a-bloggin'.
No, not exactly. First I checked Facebook. Checking Facebook has, in the two weeks since I semi-reluctantly joined up, already become a shamefully high priority -- and one which, like any of a number of other monkeys on my back, I just can't seem to shake. I have, over the last few weeks, given up with varying degrees of failure coffee, booze, sex, and videogames. The idea was that these things were too great a distraction while I pound away at the book, but the five minutes of Grand Theft Auto that I allowed myself this afternoon (which stretched into a full hour and a half, when the battery in my controller died) marks a colossal failure of will on all fronts -- and the triumph of witty sophistication and raw animal magnetism on one in particular -- within a single 24 hour period. And now Facebook. Jesus.
Ah, but truth told, wasting my time was not the reason I shunned Facebook for so long. No, the reasons for avoiding Facebook -- and social networks in general -- are similar to the reasons I don't like strip clubs. When I was 15, my friends tried to take me to a strip club across the border from Brownsville in Matamoros, Mexico. Octopus or some such, something vaguely pun-based. Octopus was full, or too expensive, or we looked too young, or we weren't dressed well enough, but for whatever reason we were turned away at the door by the chuckling bouncer so we drove through Matamoros until we found another club down some back alley, somewhere we could get into because my friend knew somebody. It was dark and hot and the stage was particle board laid out on top of a bunch of cinder blocks, upon which several women writhed distractedly about to the small tinny sounds of an old boom box. Walk into the sad, empty club and the women flock toward us, sit us down, ask us if we want anything and my friends buy me a lap dance. A woman starts rubbing her tits in my face, but I can't take my eyes off of the track marks running up and down both of her arms, and now I don't go to strip clubs.
My first experience with Friendster, too, left me gun shy. Initially it seemed like a lazy way too keep in touch with people while I was in Japan and would have evolved in due course to drunkenly entering the names of ex-girlfriends into the search engine as per usual, had I one day not typed in the name of my very first girlfriend and been brought to the page of a bald, scowling, tattooed lesbian. So, Friendster account left to die on the vine, Myspace passed up completely, the various life-paths of other ex-girlfriends and old flames unexamined. And you know what? It's better that way.
Then Facebook, and again I'm the guy explaining that he'd rather not go to the strip club, ha ha, see there's this thing that happened, but as the annoying din of talk about super-pokes and Scrabulous grew ever louder, not joining Facebook became in my mind a matter of principle. Then fuck, shit, yeah, one day I signed up. I was probably hungover and drinking a grande iced coffee while playing Burnout Paradise at the time, too. Happy?
And initially it was...well, shit, it was pretty exciting. Haven't talked to so-and-so in years, can't believe such-and-such is married, or divorced, or has kids, or any of the number of things that you come to find out as your social network slowly spiders outward to include people you haven't seen or talked to or thought of since high school. But beyond the voyeuristic thrill of peeking in on the lives of the bank of familiar names in the lower left corner, of glimpsing the faces of your childhood friends, fatter or thinner, or bearded or with different hair, but unmistakably theirs despite bearing the weight of a full decade of adulthood -- beyond all of that, there's the promise of doing more than simply gawking at, say, the fact that Ana's son is now 15, or that Troy owns three companies.
I don't know if it's something unique to Facebook, something fundamentally different from the catch-all clusterfucks of Friendster or Myspace, or if it's merely that I'm now old enough to fully appreciate what it means to have lost contact with people I once cared a great deal for, but the best and most terrifying thing is that it has brought me a poke away from re-establishing contact with people I had no idea I missed so badly. Sappy, yeah, but no less true for it. And yet so far I've balked at actually saying much more to those people than "Friend me," which seems to be the Web 2.0 equivalent of calling up someone you haven't talked to in years and asking them to loan you a couple bucks. Someday soon I'll muster the courage to do something more meaningful than scrawling snark on their wall. Until then, I'll simply marvel at how we've all turned into a bunch of 30 year olds. Not forever, but just for now.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
perspective
Busy, but alive. Indeed.
The last couple of months have been quiet here, but just as still waters run deep, so does the seeming stagnation of this blog mark a span of months that have reduced me to a soul-sick, dead eyed shell of my former self. The beauty of working in film -- the terrible, bleak beauty -- is that there are literally hundreds of job for which you are wildly overqualified, and if you bust your ass you can squeeze a lifetime of futility into a few short weeks.
So then, a recap.
There was, as you may recall, my brief tenure as a PA on a Russian feature, the vast majority of which was split between driving a van between Brooklyn and New Jersey and telling tourists and angry truck drivers that they couldn't park there, and which, while it still managed to be an almost entirely a pleasant experience, culminated with me being roped into being an extra in a dinner scene and getting food poisoning when the director demanded, through a translator, that I actually eat the food.
Then there were the two days I spent as a PA on a cooking show shooting in a high-end kitchen showroom near Union Square. My job was, among other things, to stand outside the front of the store in the rain and tell people that no, the store isn't closed, but yes, those are cameras inside so if they could wait for just one second, we'd really etcetera etcetera. Luckily most people shamefully wealthy enough to cover their sink in gold don't like getting their diamond-studded umbrellas wet, so most of my day was spent silently commiserating with the passersby who, for reasons of their own, had been forced outside on such a miserable day. Then the coked-up head of sales stormed onto the showroom floor and accused me of scaring away a six figure deal and demanded that I be fired. Someone, some terrified millionaire, had called the store and said someone, a bearded someone, had scared them away from the front of the store before they could spend one hundred thousand dollars on their kitchen.
Then there was the day I spent with a director "organizing tapes," which, with the benefit of hindsight, turned out to be an obvious euphemism for "spending 14 hours cleaning out a garage for $100 and two slices of cheese pizza."
Then there was the month and a half I spent logging footage for the upcoming Margaret Cho reality show.
Ah, and so now we come down to it.
"Logging footage," it turns out, is also a euphemism. In a literal sense it refers to the act of transcribing the hours upon hours of inane, catty bickering that have been captured on tape. But in another, truer sense, "logging footage" means "seeing how long you can stare into the empty, baleful eyes of the angel of death before realizing that your entire life, every triumph and defeat, every moment of joy or sadness great or small, every time you've ever laughed or cried or hugged someone, the very sum of your existence is this, now, this very moment, typing 'Margaret mimes eating pussy' for the twenty-second time that day, or 'Margaret pretends to finger her asshole while her father tells everyone at the dinner table how proud he is of her success' , or copying down word for word a tearful exchange in which Margaret complains that nobody knows how hard it is growing up looking different to a fucking midget."
And that, sadly, isn't a euphemism for anything at all.
The last couple of months have been quiet here, but just as still waters run deep, so does the seeming stagnation of this blog mark a span of months that have reduced me to a soul-sick, dead eyed shell of my former self. The beauty of working in film -- the terrible, bleak beauty -- is that there are literally hundreds of job for which you are wildly overqualified, and if you bust your ass you can squeeze a lifetime of futility into a few short weeks.
So then, a recap.
There was, as you may recall, my brief tenure as a PA on a Russian feature, the vast majority of which was split between driving a van between Brooklyn and New Jersey and telling tourists and angry truck drivers that they couldn't park there, and which, while it still managed to be an almost entirely a pleasant experience, culminated with me being roped into being an extra in a dinner scene and getting food poisoning when the director demanded, through a translator, that I actually eat the food.
Then there were the two days I spent as a PA on a cooking show shooting in a high-end kitchen showroom near Union Square. My job was, among other things, to stand outside the front of the store in the rain and tell people that no, the store isn't closed, but yes, those are cameras inside so if they could wait for just one second, we'd really etcetera etcetera. Luckily most people shamefully wealthy enough to cover their sink in gold don't like getting their diamond-studded umbrellas wet, so most of my day was spent silently commiserating with the passersby who, for reasons of their own, had been forced outside on such a miserable day. Then the coked-up head of sales stormed onto the showroom floor and accused me of scaring away a six figure deal and demanded that I be fired. Someone, some terrified millionaire, had called the store and said someone, a bearded someone, had scared them away from the front of the store before they could spend one hundred thousand dollars on their kitchen.
Then there was the day I spent with a director "organizing tapes," which, with the benefit of hindsight, turned out to be an obvious euphemism for "spending 14 hours cleaning out a garage for $100 and two slices of cheese pizza."
Then there was the month and a half I spent logging footage for the upcoming Margaret Cho reality show.
Ah, and so now we come down to it.
"Logging footage," it turns out, is also a euphemism. In a literal sense it refers to the act of transcribing the hours upon hours of inane, catty bickering that have been captured on tape. But in another, truer sense, "logging footage" means "seeing how long you can stare into the empty, baleful eyes of the angel of death before realizing that your entire life, every triumph and defeat, every moment of joy or sadness great or small, every time you've ever laughed or cried or hugged someone, the very sum of your existence is this, now, this very moment, typing 'Margaret mimes eating pussy' for the twenty-second time that day, or 'Margaret pretends to finger her asshole while her father tells everyone at the dinner table how proud he is of her success' , or copying down word for word a tearful exchange in which Margaret complains that nobody knows how hard it is growing up looking different to a fucking midget."
And that, sadly, isn't a euphemism for anything at all.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
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