A while ago I worked in the Locations department of VH1’s Hip Hop Honors. Our job was basically to coordinate the coming and going of various trucks and tour buses so that traffic continued to flow on the street and all our vehicles had places to park and/or unload. This meant that I was outside, sitting on 35th street in New York City for 10 days straight.
As I sat stagnantly and waited for trucks to come or go, the world around me was constantly buzzing. I began to really feel like a part of the city. I began to see the same people coming and going every day, walking to and from work in their own little world. Occasionally, someone would stop and ask what was going on and why we had half the street coned off. Local vendors would stop to chat, some in a vain attempt to befriend us in hopes that we would allow them to park in our section of the street.
Over time, I began to love the constant hum of the passing traffic and almost started longing for that unique brand of New York street stench.
… almost
I felt like a part of the neighorhood, like I was sitting on the stoop with my friends, chatting with my neighbors. For me, New York became a living, breathing being. It had soul, it had character, it was alive. I could see it, I could feel it, I became a part of it.
I was 35th street.
Few cities actually achieve this. I have lived all over the US and have only experienced this in small instances in certain cities before this show. It happens most often while I’m listening to music. I felt it once while listening to Dropkick Murphys in Boston. I felt it again while listening to Tupac in Los Angeles. As cliché as it is, I feel it every time I drive down the Las Vegas strip listening to Frank Sinatra.
Certain cities have it, while others don’t, but I’m not sure what “it” is. I want to call it character, but there’s more to it than just that. What is it about these cities that spawns so many great artists and artistic movements. What about Seattle spawned the grunge movement? Why did gangster rap explode in Los Angeles? Why is East Bay punk different from East Coast punk?
I see it often in local restaurants and shops. They have a certain flare. You can taste it in the food; you can see it in the people. I can’t explain it, but the second I enter these cities I can tell whether they’ve got it or not. Some cities just don’t have it. I’ve decided I will never settle down in one of those cities. I’ve lived in a few of those places before. They seemed to suck the life out of me like some soulless monster trying to fill a deep void.
I’m not sure what the point of this little post is; I have no theories, just thoughts. Maybe it comes with age. Maybe some cities are just too young. I’ve never lived there, only visited, but Austin seems like a city that will have it in force some day. They’ve definitely got at least a part of it. Maybe it comes with art. Maybe a city needs a solid community of artists to truly attain it.
I think that might be it. I think it has to come through the art in the community. If the art is substantial or of any merit, the community it came from will most likely gain the same merit. The only common thing I see in those cities I lived in that just didn’t have it, was a lack of a good art scene. They had very little good music, few galleries, and no cinema worth anything. They did not support their local artists and I’m sure the artists just left, before the city sapped them of any character they may have had. I know artists in some of these cities, and they complain about that very thing almost daily.
This may be some sort of microcosm for any society. This may be the very thing that every society must have in order to survive. Maybe society needs art. Maybe art is what gives a society its life; its soul. I’m sorry to go religious on you, but I’ve heard it said that art is man’s attempt at recreating the divine. Maybe without this connection with the divine, society as a whole will fail.
Maybe I stayed up too late.
Tags: art, Articles, artists, big-cities, film, food, hip-hop-honors, music, new-york-city, people, society, stoop, trucks
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For the first time since I was a child, I spent the entire day reading a book. I forgot what an amazing feeling it was to lose myself for hours at a time inside some world created by someone else. There’s always something just a little bit familiar to these worlds. If there wasn’t, we could not become so lost exploring them. This story, however, seemed more familiar than any story I’ve read in years.
I just finished reading Ender’s Game. I literally closed the book just seconds before I started writing this. I identified personally with little Ender Wiggins. It was strange to watch as he went through these strange worlds in ways that were so familiar to me. In this book, a little boy quickly became isolated because he was different. Many adults would praise him and many worried he was not living up to his potential. His peers mocked him and played tricks on him. Any displays of weakness were quickly snatched up and used against him. So he quickly learned to shield his weaknesses from the view of others.
He began to isolate himself voluntarily. He trusted no one and only let down his shield in the privacy of his own room. He had small pockets of friends here and there, but even they were only allowed to see what he wanted them to see. He was never comfortable in large groups, always sensing their judgment or possible danger, so he sat back and watched them from a distance, observing their interactions, learning more about himself and mankind through the interactions of others than he ever could in any school. Still, he isolated himself, still he watched, still he learned, still he longed for a childhood he could never have; companionship he thought always out of reach.
It’s interesting to me the way a text, such as a book, or a movie, or a song can connect with us on such a personal level that we transcend our own existence. We begin to see our lives from the outside, through the eyes of some character in some story, taking place in some other world. The story is the same. It is our own story, but the characters and the setting are all different. This is what draws me to the art of storytelling. Whether through books, or movies, or music, I am always looking for new versions of the same old story; different perspectives of my own story. I wonder if others are reading the same stories and connecting on such a personal level as I am.
On the flight home from visiting my family for the holidays, I watched a couple episodes of Scrubs. This show is another one of those texts that takes me out of my regular frame of mind. It’s not quite as transcendent an experience as some, but this show always reminds me of my buddy Scott. It’s uncanny the similarities between the interactions of JD and Turk and myself and Scott. It goes all the way down to the mannerisms of the individual characters. It’s like someone took our life and hired a team of writers to make it more interesting and cram it into 30-minute segments. I can never watch an episode of Scrubs without being reminded of Scott, and it never fails to put a smile on my face.
While I was out visiting my family, trying feebly to adjust to the three-hour time difference, I watched Hotel Rwanda. This proved to be a completely different kind of transcendent experience. This was not a reminder of past or present experiences, but a demonstration of what-ifs. It appalled me to watch as these people were stripped from their homes and their loved ones as their country tore itself apart.
In this story, one man comes at first unwillingly to the aid of many of his friends. Over the course of the story, he rises to conquer greater and greater obstacles. But it is not this man that I identified with. This time, I connected with the cameraman played by Joaquin Phoenix. His job was to capture as much of these people’s tragic story as he could so that his superiors at the major news network would get more viewers. His mission, however, was much more noble, and much more tragic than that.
There is a scene in which all the foreign nationals, all the white people, are leaving on a bus, leaving all the Rwandans to deal with the savagery on their own. A group of children then come walking down the street, singing and cheering only to be separated into Rwandan and National, chum and prize fish. Nuns are separated from the orphans they have cared for and come to love, forced to leave them to a grim fate. The cameraman comes out and films it all, but it gives them little hope.
Earlier in the film, the cameraman is talking with Paul, the hero of the story. Paul tells him that he’s glad that the cameraman is filming all the savagery, that now the west will be forced to do something. The cameraman replies simply, “I think, if people see this footage, they’ll say ‘Oh my God, that’s horrible,’ and then go on eating their dinners.”
I couldn’t help but wonder what that would be like if it were me. What would I do if I were there, the only one able to tell these people’s story to the world? What if those were my friends being torn from the orphans they had grown to love, leaving those orphans to uncertain death. Would it all be for naught?
This is the reason I chose film and media as a possible career. I want to tell these stories. I want to tell my story. I want to be a voice for the voiceless; I want to be a tool for the development of some young mind somewhere, destined for greatness; I want to be a speaker for the dead, but will it all be for naught?
All of these transcendent tales end with the hero accomplishing some great feat, or overcoming impossible obstacles. All those trials they overcame, all those lessons they learned all prepared them for that one final battle, where they emerge bruised and battered, victorious, and a completely different person than the one that began the story.
Isn’t this what we’re all trying to do? We’re all learning, we’re all growing, we’re all preparing for some unseen event in the distant future. No one really knows what it will be; it will probably be different for each of us, but maybe that’s the point of all these stories.
Maybe these stories can’t help the victims of the present. Maybe they’re not supposed to. Maybe they’re only supposed to help future societies. Maybe we’re all preparing each other unknowingly for that final battle we’ll all face someday where we’ll emerge bruised and battered, victorious, and a completely different person than the one that began the story, ready to pass our boon on to a society that may or may not be ready.
Tags: Articles, books, Enders-Game, film, growing-up, Hotel-Rwanda, Movies, Orson-Scott-Card, reading, scrubs, transcendence
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