One of my favorite columns in New York magazine is 21 Questions, where they ask random New Yorkers of varying degrees of fame and recognition the same set of 21 questions. After they gather the person's name, age, neighborhood, and occupation, they ask:
1. Who's your favorite New Yorker, living or dead, real or fictional?
2. What's the best meal you've eaten in New York?
3. In one sentence, what do you actually do all day in your job?
4. Would you still live here on a $35,000 salary?
5. What's the last thing you saw on Broadway?
6. Do you give money to panhandlers?
7. What's your drink?
8. How often do you prepare your own meals?
9. What's your favorite medication?
10. What's hanging above your sofa?
11. How much is too much to spend on a haircut?
12. When's bedtime?
13. Which do you prefer, the old Times Square or the new Times Square?
14. What do you think of Donald Trump?
15. What do you hate most about living in New York?
16. Who is your mortal enemy?
17. When's the last time you drove a car?
18. Who should be the next president?
19. Times, Post, or Daily News?
20. Where do you go to be alone?
21. What makes someone a New Yorker?
Anyway, I love reading it. Especially when someone like Itamar Moses says, in response to "What do you hate most about living in New York?",
The knowledge that, because it is impossible to conquer New York, you either have to die here or leave defeated. You cannot leave in triumph. Or, I mean, maybe you can, if you reach some kind of "emotional maturity," but good luck with that, everybody.
Which is what I spent my entire last post trying to say, and mr moses here says it in one pithy little response to a questionnaire. I guess this is why he is a playwright (untested and young, but still, a playwright), and I am not. Not that I want to be a playwright.
I think I might want to fall in love with Itamar Moses. He thinks "someone who could never get elected, like Joseph Biden," should be our next President. "Have you ever seen that guy yelling at generals about torture?" he says. "I want a president who is as apoplectically outraged as I am about the last eight years."
Yes, he used the word apoplectically to describe how he was feeling, which was outraged. Apoplectically. I love him.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
New York, I love you but you're bringing me down...
You know that song by LCD Soundsystem? New York I love you... but you're bringing me dooown... Like a rat in a caaaage pulling minimum waaaaage... New York you're safer and you're wasting my time... Our records all show you're filthy but fine... New York you're perfect so don't change a thing... New York I love you but you're freaking me out... Like a death in the haaaall that you hear through your waaaall... Like a death of the heart Jesus where do I start? But you're still the one pool I'd happily drown...
A little dramatic, fine. (Great song by the way.) But point well taken. It's how I describe this place I pseudo-call home now to friends who ask from way out west - I sing them the chorus to the song.
I've got to say, New York City is a heavy place, in all the good and bad ways. It's not a city that just lets you be, lets you breathe. It assaults you from every angle, every direction. The frenetic pace with which this skinny island of concrete, ambition, vice, and traffic moves and gathers energy is altogether intensely tiring and inexplicably uplifting. Because New York is not a city that uplifts its tired, its poor, its lonely. There is no cajoling, no gentle cushion, no steady word of encouragement. There is no break, no retreat. The city stares you straight in the face and knocks you out if you flinch, if your eyes flicker over to something warm and soft for a second too long. It is a hard city in every regard, its spirit born of immigrants' tenacity and fearlessness and sewn deep into the DNA of the millions of lives here. This is the city people flock to to escape, to be lost, to be rich, to be someone. It is not a city for the fainthearted, or for the meek, or for the lover of thoreau. This is a city that forces you to play your hand, get involved, because if you don't, you just kind of disappear. I haven't decided yet if I'm okay with disappearing.
And in the harshness of this city's reality, where the insanely rich live admist the insanely poor, where there is no pausing or breathing, and where you sense this empty, dense weight just crushing you at times, you can feel, very clearly, yourself. You can feel yourself as a very singular, very intact being, full of all the complexities and contradictions that make people people. No where else I've lived have I ever felt so strongly the conflict between my many sides, my personalities, my dreams. I question who I am and what is it that I am willing to live for more deeply here and more naturally here than anywhere else I have called home. Because there is infinitely more to see and hear and touch and feel here than anywhere else. The congestion and the collision of too much (too much of everything, of choices, of races, of bars, of buildings, of wealth, of poverty, of vice, of nations, of religions) makes this place intensely tiring, but it also breeds the kind of energy that uplifts, even in moments of doubt or melancholy. The familiar is never truly familiar, and this is exciting, energizing. Everything you can see for the first time, including yourself. And you figure it out, you are forced to come to terms with your life and to understand your mettle. You make yourself, or you disappear. I think.
A little dramatic, fine. But this is where I am in my life right now, and when I struggle to explain to my friends or even to myself if I am really happy here (because I think I am), I just don't really know how to put it. I'm tongue-tied, a little dizzy. But I can sense something deeper and more profound that lies just below the surface, and maybe I will live here until I can wrap my mind around that thing, that feeling. Until I can explain it. Or don't want to anymore. And maybe that will take six months, or six years. Until then, I suppose I'll do my best to stay sane in the big city.
A little dramatic, fine. (Great song by the way.) But point well taken. It's how I describe this place I pseudo-call home now to friends who ask from way out west - I sing them the chorus to the song.
I've got to say, New York City is a heavy place, in all the good and bad ways. It's not a city that just lets you be, lets you breathe. It assaults you from every angle, every direction. The frenetic pace with which this skinny island of concrete, ambition, vice, and traffic moves and gathers energy is altogether intensely tiring and inexplicably uplifting. Because New York is not a city that uplifts its tired, its poor, its lonely. There is no cajoling, no gentle cushion, no steady word of encouragement. There is no break, no retreat. The city stares you straight in the face and knocks you out if you flinch, if your eyes flicker over to something warm and soft for a second too long. It is a hard city in every regard, its spirit born of immigrants' tenacity and fearlessness and sewn deep into the DNA of the millions of lives here. This is the city people flock to to escape, to be lost, to be rich, to be someone. It is not a city for the fainthearted, or for the meek, or for the lover of thoreau. This is a city that forces you to play your hand, get involved, because if you don't, you just kind of disappear. I haven't decided yet if I'm okay with disappearing.
And in the harshness of this city's reality, where the insanely rich live admist the insanely poor, where there is no pausing or breathing, and where you sense this empty, dense weight just crushing you at times, you can feel, very clearly, yourself. You can feel yourself as a very singular, very intact being, full of all the complexities and contradictions that make people people. No where else I've lived have I ever felt so strongly the conflict between my many sides, my personalities, my dreams. I question who I am and what is it that I am willing to live for more deeply here and more naturally here than anywhere else I have called home. Because there is infinitely more to see and hear and touch and feel here than anywhere else. The congestion and the collision of too much (too much of everything, of choices, of races, of bars, of buildings, of wealth, of poverty, of vice, of nations, of religions) makes this place intensely tiring, but it also breeds the kind of energy that uplifts, even in moments of doubt or melancholy. The familiar is never truly familiar, and this is exciting, energizing. Everything you can see for the first time, including yourself. And you figure it out, you are forced to come to terms with your life and to understand your mettle. You make yourself, or you disappear. I think.
A little dramatic, fine. But this is where I am in my life right now, and when I struggle to explain to my friends or even to myself if I am really happy here (because I think I am), I just don't really know how to put it. I'm tongue-tied, a little dizzy. But I can sense something deeper and more profound that lies just below the surface, and maybe I will live here until I can wrap my mind around that thing, that feeling. Until I can explain it. Or don't want to anymore. And maybe that will take six months, or six years. Until then, I suppose I'll do my best to stay sane in the big city.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
And...I'm in
Here I am! Throwing my bet into the virtual ring, though not so much to be spread all around the intertubes.
More because I used to think I had a lot of ambition, but I'm learning that 'ambition' is perhaps too ambitious of a word for me to claim.
It's there, just I think it's more like curiosity, or maybe an undiminishing pleasure in the novel -
And I do like to write.
Used to love buying journals, blank, unlined
But I could never write fast enough to keep up with everything I thought, before I sort of forgot or before I lost the urge.
Typing is better, faster.
And you can always be productive, then delete, or move things around, which is important but hard on paper.
More because I used to think I had a lot of ambition, but I'm learning that 'ambition' is perhaps too ambitious of a word for me to claim.
It's there, just I think it's more like curiosity, or maybe an undiminishing pleasure in the novel -
And I do like to write.
Used to love buying journals, blank, unlined
But I could never write fast enough to keep up with everything I thought, before I sort of forgot or before I lost the urge.
Typing is better, faster.
And you can always be productive, then delete, or move things around, which is important but hard on paper.
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