I Could Catch a Monkey

With responsibility comes harsh things.

I now own a camcorder. Becoming a filmmaker is really hard. My old boss just tried to show me how iMovie works. My brain began to fog up early on in the tutorial. "Then you can do this. Then you can do this!" she kept saying, showing me new possibilities. I need to learn one thing a day. That's all I can absorb.

I met an old friend for dinner last night. There's this weird phenomenon where someone comes to New York from out of town, stays at a fancy uptown hotel, asks to know good restaurants and seems exhilarated about being in the city.

My friend and I were crossing the street and he looked down Park Avenue and said "those canyons ... somehow they enthrall me." "Really?" I said in amazement. The canyons of upper midtown seem like crushing slabs of gray nothingness to me. Or they crush me into gray nothingness.

I'm often shocked when people don't feel exactly the same way I do.

My friend is a successful writer. I asked him, "As an artist, do you feel obliged to report on the deadness of life right now?" I'd recently read in a review of an avant garde play here that art has an obligation to report on deadness, plus wake up a sleeping audience, shake them right out of their daze.

He said, "What deadness?" I explained how conformist life feels with a Starbucks every two feet and a shrill daily lifestyle that never addresses the terrible wrongs like the war. He said, "Well, there is more conformity in an urban center. I think the American way of life will end. Other powers, like China, are threatening it." I said, "But while we live in it, while it sputters out, if it does, it's like a horrible sick deadness." He said, "But America has what other countries like China absolutely do not -- a capacity for self-criticism." We do? I thought. "Plus they will do things. I was for the war in Iraq when it started. I had friends I'd met in Syria who had been tortured by Saddam. I was all for his removal. No one else would have done it. France wouldn't do it -- they couldn't care less."

His ideas caromed around in my brain. Was any of it true? It was so different. As Americans, we've learned to hate ourselves these last six years.

France wouldn't do it, but was it something that should have been done?

"Anyway, America is going to rejuvenate," my friend said buoyantly. He's in town for four days.

I guess I have an obligation to report on the deadness of life in America right now. Clumsily. Jerkily. With a choppy soundtrack from the Mountain Goats.