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Ochlophobia, Plus Famous On YouTube
Dec. 14th, 2014 11:25 amBB is out of town for a few days and so has very kindly given me the run of his Greenpoint apartment, which, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is like my dream apartment – one enormous living space with skylights, plants, ropes of twinkle lights, a beautiful Bechstein piano, and a heated toilet seat!!!
I’d come into the city with the ostensible plan of participating in the Eric Garner protest march, but I chickened out when I hit Washington Square Park – there were just too many people. I haven’t been able to do crowds since I attended the infamous Altamont concert stoned on acid at the age of 17. (Altogether now: Just shoot me if I ever say, ‘Why, Sonny, when I was your age…' ) Crowds just panic me. Might have been able to do it if I was marching with someone else, but alone? No, no, no.
So I fought my way back uptown – every subway station was mobbed – and eventually found my way to Times Square, which was overrun with people dressed up in Santa Claus costumes:
It was just very, very, very, very strange. The juxtaposition as much as anything else.
Honestly, it makes me go into complete overdrive, it makes me freak to think that every single one of these people – protestors and Santa enthusiasts alike – has an inner life that’s just as complex as my own.
And not just the protestors and the Santa clones, but also the holiday shoppers mobbing Grand Central Station and the Avenues east of Park, and the rich old ladies walking skinny dogs in sweaters on the upper East Side, and the skaters in the Woolman rink, and the tourists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the homeless beggers huddling with their shopping carts in the subway entrances, and the inhabitants of the outer boroughs – and of course, New York City is only one tiny blip in the sea of consciousnesses swarming over the globe, nine billion consciousnesses with nary a bridge between them because, of course, you can never know what another person’s inner life is like; I mean, you can infer, yes, but, really, that’s all projection –
I suppose that’s why I feel this consuming passion to create –
Yeah, yeah. Part of it is ego, Here! Lemme take you on a guided tour of my inner life.
But part of it is this need to forge symbols that can somehow bridge the separateness between human beings –
In Hong Kong, the last protestors in the two-month standoff between the pro-democracy activists and the Chinese government flashed the District 12 three-finger salute from The Hunger Games to one another as their last camp was being dismantled. The District 12 salute bridged the moat between separate consciousnesses!
And reading about that, I thought, Wow! This instantly elevates The Hunger Games into the realm of great literature.
Although, it’s more than likely the protestors did not read the books but saw the movies.
###
I was pretty badly shaken up when I finally got back to the subdued bustle of Greenpoint where most of the conversations along Manhattan Avenue, the main drag, still take place in Polish. I wandered into a Polish botanica and whaddiya know? There were four boxes of the hair dye that turns my hair into a lovely shade of eggplant purple! They don’t manufacture this particular hair dye anymore, so I felt like the Universe was rewarding me for at least considering taking part in the Eric Garner protest! I bought them all.
I was much too unnerved to follow up on my evening plans or do any creative work for that matter, so I spent the evening dying my hair and reading The New Yorker.
My hair is now the lovely shade of aubergine that God intended!
The New Yorker had a fascinating article on YouTube and a video app called Vine. Vine is an entertainment medium where every unit of entertainment lasts exactly six seconds. It’s very, very popular among adolescents – who really don’t need any reinforcement for having short attention spans. It strikes me that Vine is actually rather dangerous – because, of course, we retain the thinking habits of our youth, so Vine is essentially breeding a group of trendsetters – who will one day grow up to become policy makers – who can’t sustain a thought for more than six seconds.
It also strikes me that while this may be an acceptable state of affairs for identity politics, it’s a very bad thing for anyone who’s interested in changing the underlying, oppressive economics of supply and demand.
So, I don’t know about the future…
Plus, you know, the kids who are doing these six-second videos don’t seem to realize that if they’re being written up in an old-guard publication like The New Yorker, they’re already on the downward slope of the trend. They might as well pack it in. The rest of their lives will be spent in the psychic equivalent of some bar at four o’clock in the afternoon, trying to cadge drinks by telling people, I was famous once on YouTube.
I’d come into the city with the ostensible plan of participating in the Eric Garner protest march, but I chickened out when I hit Washington Square Park – there were just too many people. I haven’t been able to do crowds since I attended the infamous Altamont concert stoned on acid at the age of 17. (Altogether now: Just shoot me if I ever say, ‘Why, Sonny, when I was your age…' ) Crowds just panic me. Might have been able to do it if I was marching with someone else, but alone? No, no, no.
So I fought my way back uptown – every subway station was mobbed – and eventually found my way to Times Square, which was overrun with people dressed up in Santa Claus costumes:
It was just very, very, very, very strange. The juxtaposition as much as anything else.
Honestly, it makes me go into complete overdrive, it makes me freak to think that every single one of these people – protestors and Santa enthusiasts alike – has an inner life that’s just as complex as my own.
And not just the protestors and the Santa clones, but also the holiday shoppers mobbing Grand Central Station and the Avenues east of Park, and the rich old ladies walking skinny dogs in sweaters on the upper East Side, and the skaters in the Woolman rink, and the tourists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the homeless beggers huddling with their shopping carts in the subway entrances, and the inhabitants of the outer boroughs – and of course, New York City is only one tiny blip in the sea of consciousnesses swarming over the globe, nine billion consciousnesses with nary a bridge between them because, of course, you can never know what another person’s inner life is like; I mean, you can infer, yes, but, really, that’s all projection –
I suppose that’s why I feel this consuming passion to create –
Yeah, yeah. Part of it is ego, Here! Lemme take you on a guided tour of my inner life.
But part of it is this need to forge symbols that can somehow bridge the separateness between human beings –
In Hong Kong, the last protestors in the two-month standoff between the pro-democracy activists and the Chinese government flashed the District 12 three-finger salute from The Hunger Games to one another as their last camp was being dismantled. The District 12 salute bridged the moat between separate consciousnesses!
And reading about that, I thought, Wow! This instantly elevates The Hunger Games into the realm of great literature.
Although, it’s more than likely the protestors did not read the books but saw the movies.
###
I was pretty badly shaken up when I finally got back to the subdued bustle of Greenpoint where most of the conversations along Manhattan Avenue, the main drag, still take place in Polish. I wandered into a Polish botanica and whaddiya know? There were four boxes of the hair dye that turns my hair into a lovely shade of eggplant purple! They don’t manufacture this particular hair dye anymore, so I felt like the Universe was rewarding me for at least considering taking part in the Eric Garner protest! I bought them all.
I was much too unnerved to follow up on my evening plans or do any creative work for that matter, so I spent the evening dying my hair and reading The New Yorker.
My hair is now the lovely shade of aubergine that God intended!
The New Yorker had a fascinating article on YouTube and a video app called Vine. Vine is an entertainment medium where every unit of entertainment lasts exactly six seconds. It’s very, very popular among adolescents – who really don’t need any reinforcement for having short attention spans. It strikes me that Vine is actually rather dangerous – because, of course, we retain the thinking habits of our youth, so Vine is essentially breeding a group of trendsetters – who will one day grow up to become policy makers – who can’t sustain a thought for more than six seconds.
It also strikes me that while this may be an acceptable state of affairs for identity politics, it’s a very bad thing for anyone who’s interested in changing the underlying, oppressive economics of supply and demand.
So, I don’t know about the future…
Plus, you know, the kids who are doing these six-second videos don’t seem to realize that if they’re being written up in an old-guard publication like The New Yorker, they’re already on the downward slope of the trend. They might as well pack it in. The rest of their lives will be spent in the psychic equivalent of some bar at four o’clock in the afternoon, trying to cadge drinks by telling people, I was famous once on YouTube.
