Tag Archives: reflections

Discipline and Discomfort

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Still firmly infirm and formidably un-formed, in this NPR interview with Louis C.K. there are two ideas pushing their way to the surface that may define my focus in 2015. I don’t do resolutions as a general rule, but I do reflect. I revisit. I dismantle and re-assemble. All the time.

“I thought, ‘I want to do something that’s compelling and really a good monologue, but the crowd might not be there for it.’ It may not be their thing, so I trained for that monologue. I did a lot of sets in town and I did a lot of clubs where there was no audience really, or places where I knew I would do poorly because I wanted to be sure that the monologue would go well whether the audience likes me or not.”

So smart. That’s true dedication, skill, talent, even. It’s knowing yourself: your abilities, your limitations, your appeal, well enough that you see clearly the gap between where you are and where you want to be, then you span it by working hard and working smart.

“I was in trouble a lot when I was a kid, so I got used to it. Like, when you’re never in trouble, you can never go to places like that. But if you’re in trouble all the time, it’s like, why not? I mean, I know what this feels like. I know I can survive everybody being pissed off at me.”

This has always been difficult for me. I was not in trouble a lot as a kid (I still fucked up but was good at hiding it), so disrupting the status quo, risking disapproval or the possibility that I might not be sufficiently armed to respond to criticism, feels scary, out of my depth. I am no pushover, but left to my own devices I would just as soon sit and watch others tell their stories, speak uncomfortable truths, than tell my own. If I am to feel any kind of satisfaction in my creative accomplishments, that needs to end.

Small Change

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Constant talk about how New York City has changed. Listen to it: “This isn’t the city I grew up in”, “It’s not what it used to be”, “The chain stores have drained all its character”.

All of those things are true. I know it’s different from when I first came here. Do I miss how it used to be – 20 years ago, or even 10? Moments stick out, stay sticky, won’t let go. They imbue buildings, cross-streets with emotion, nostalgia, unspeakable attachment. But when someone says “New York has changed so much” I can’t feel it – I stretch out my arms, reach my fingers wide, try to receive it on my skin. Nothing.

Still, I agree. I say, “New York has changed.” But seen through the lenses of 16 million eyes, New York has changed us too. In increments it changed and we adjusted, without ever noticing. Suddenly these arms I stretch out, these eyes I squeeze closed, aren’t the same ones I had then. My body has forgotten how to thrill at the constellation of possibilities the city lays out before me. More than anything, I want to remember.

So when I say “New York has changed” and shake my head, and sigh, what I really mean is, “I have changed.” Isn’t that why I came here? To jump into the fray and be transfigured?

We are the sentient infrastructure, not the concrete or the taxi tires grinding through potholes. We shift the painted firmament, tug at the traffic tides, influence subway karma. It comes with the territory.

Twenty Stories

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It’s nice to acknowledge milestones, whether they’re anniversaries, month-iversaries, how-long-has-it-been-since-you-smoked-iversaries. But simply marking a date doesn’t mean anything in and of itself, unless you take a moment to reflect on how far you’ve come – the same way a ritual only takes on meaning when you repeat it, remember where you were the last time, and notice what has changed.

Rituals are puzzles, or the slow and deliberate solving of puzzles. They’re what we use to look at the broken pieces we’ve been dealt and try to form them into some kind of picture, arrange the sounds into sheet music. Repetition helps us see the picture when we step back far enough, hear the song when we close our eyes.

This fall will mark my twentieth year living in New York City. I came here in August of 1993 for college, and except for a few months in the summer of 1994, I never left.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to have lived somewhere for that long, to have racked up that much experience on one place. Without any kind of reflection, twenty years doesn’t mean anything. It’s just time. And since time is a made-up concept, it’s really more like just…aging. (Oh good MORTALITY TALK.)

So I’m going to try and distill this time into something sharp, distinct, meaningful, by writing up twenty stories from my twenty years – one story each week between now and the end of August. The stories will come from any and all points along the timeline of the last twenty years. They will be of varying length, style, and quality.

The challenge: for a writer, I’m not a terribly strong storyteller; I have a hard time knowing where to begin and end a particular sequence of events, because those are the hard choices that stamp an experience with meaning. But in this case, isn’t that the point? I want to trace lines through the stream of my memory, set up signposts so I know where and who I am. Because if it’s one thing I envy when I hear other peoples’ Archetypical New York Stories™ it’s the indelible sense of identity they carry. And I feel like I lack that. Despite all the time spent here, I’ve managed to retain quite a… “portable” sense of self. I definitely feel marked, influenced by the city, but I don’t think of myself as anchored here.

…which is an utterly ridiculous idea. I mean, I’ve spent my entire adult life here; I’m a creature of New York in ways that would be laughably apparent if you shoved me out of a van in another city. But instead of knowing that in a vague, abstract sense, I want to KNOW it. IN CAPS. I want to understand my particular brand of New Yorkness and be able to point to it with words.

So here we go. Story #1 will post by April 8th.

 

Nora

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Nora Ephron’s death made me unexpectedly sad. Not because I expected to feel some other way when she died – it wasn’t something I thought about. Though I had some inkling she was ill, I didn’t know how ill and honestly I felt ambivalent about her work. For the most part I associate her with rom-coms – the girly, ingratiating kind that I’m not particularly fond of. But upon reading several obits, I reconsidered. Nora Ephron was much more than a “women’s author”; she was capable of complex, deeply personal work that presented a female point of view on film and on the page without apology. She was among a select group of women who could write, direct, or produce a film with A-list actors that was backed by a major studio. In that respect Nora Ephron was a household name; she not only paved the way for an entire generation of female humorists, she also ushered in the trend of chatty, observational comedy that popularized Seinfeld and Will & Grace, which in turn yielded huge influence over American popular culture.

But in the scope of my own life, her most important contribution was When Harry Met Sally…, a movie I fell in love with so hard as a teenager that I wanted to be in it. I watched it over and over with my best friend, we quoted it endlessly in every context, and on any given day I could identify with Harry or Sally or Jess or even Mr. Zero. The characters’ experience served as a backdrop to understanding relationships, and the plot was my blueprint for what I thought being an adult would be like. I wanted to have a funny, cute, close male friend like Harry who appreciated my quirks and shared my vocabulary, and who maaaaaybe would develop into something more as the years rolled by. I wanted to have a long-term marriage – or at least a successful living-in-sin arrangement – with a guy like the ones in the couples interviews peppered throughout WHMS, who finished my sentences and thought I was just as beautiful 50 years in as the day we met. And despite the “Can men and women really be friends?” debate that provides a key plot thread, it was one of the first films I ever saw that presented male-female relationships as an even playing field, one in which men could be needy and emotional and women could be witty and independent.

So in spite of my eye-rolling dismissal of most of the “women’s entertainment” that emerged from Nora’s influence, for me her legacy will always include some of the most treasured moments I ever spent in a cinema – moments in which I inevitably wished that life would imitate art.