Another great "recurring conversation" took place tonight between Tessa, Rick Gradone and myself: basically the Where Can We Find Our Utopia discussion that comes up every month or so. The plain fact is that we're getting to the age when cultural analysis leaves us all feeling desperate and bankrupt for some other time when the world was filled with artists and intellectuals all striving for some greater truth, whatever that means to you. For Tessa, it's the West Village in the 1950s; for me, it's probably Paris from about 1918 to 1928 (although I could have done without the influenza that killed everybody).
Both eras featured strict societies, homogeneity, and corrupt, big-business governments and yet these seemingly infertile conditions inspired some of the best work of the 20th century (Stravinsky, Dali, Picasso and Hemingway in the '20s; the beat poets and Pollock in the 1950s). What we have now is a homogenous society fed identical fashions by catalogs (like Tessa says, everyone in college is wearing the same fucking thing); we have a corrupt, scary government; and a society full of unbelievable inequity – but absolutely no great art, or movements, or masterpieces to show for it this time. Rick said that shithole apartments are going for $1400/month in Williamsburg, and that, my friends, is part of the problem. I've lamented it before, but there is just no fucking way to make enough money to be an artist and live in New York. By definition, we are forced to take jobs we don't like (Rick = hairdressing, Tessa = legal videos, me = moronic Web work) in order to be in the town that inspires us, but there's never any time to actually be an artist.
Now, perhaps I'm overstating that a little: Sean's friends to an exceptional job of getting plays off the ground. Lindsay has an unswerving commitment to the 24-hour plays. And we did make a movie last year, and that is pretty much our job right now. But all anyone does is raise money, that's it. Movies cost so damn much that it can't help but be a huge business proposition. We're gearing up to do re-shoots in Columbia County this weekend, and it will be the first creative decisions any of us have made in over a year. I know, I know, we're incredibly lucky to be making a movie at all (most screenwriters masturbate furiously at the thought of being able to shoot their own film), but to us, the whole thing sometimes looks like a giant pile of cash we don't have. Yet.
One surefire way to guarantee an art-free society besides making sure they'll never be able to afford rent – is to take away any hope for teen rebellion. Today's teens have nothing but their own ennui to rebel against; fetishized by Baby Boomer parents, they have more air time on MTV and full-page spreads in bad magazines than they know what to do with. They're even more boring than we were back in the early '80s, and that was pretty fucking boring. Sure, the Gen-X revolution came along in 1993 and ruined Schoolhouse Rock, "Take on Me," and Atari by selling every memory we ever had back to ourselves in a fecal blast of irony - but today's teens will have precious little to remember, at least culturally. Our crap, as crap goes, was better. I loathed Eddy Grant, but I'll take "Electric Avenue" over "Hot in Herre"[sic] by Nelly any day of the fucking week.
And don't give me any of the usual horseshit about "rock songs are supposed to be stupid" or "you just don't understand the primal glory of youth" or whatever. I have danced to shitty bands until 4am, downed Prairie Fire shots and howled at the moon for years. I have been an irresponsible jackass and had sex with freshman sorority girls in the backs of Hondas without a condom. I went to college for about twelve years simply because I enjoyed being young and irresponsible, and yet through all that time, I STILL could tell a bad pop song from another. "Hot in Herre"[sic] is a fucking stupid, stupid song that is funny for one verse, and thereafter becomes another excuse for terrorists to hate America.
Anyway...
...the question remains: what do we do specifically? We live in one of the most amazing towns on earth, but none of us have the money to take advantage of it, really. And when there's no lasting art, poetry, sculpture, songs or novels being created by our peer group, just what are we doing here? We could divest ourselves of the whole damn thing, move upstate with a few like-minded friends and create our own wildly intellectual, asshole-free commune and grow pumpkins but if you're not engaged in a thriving community of people you don't necessarily know, your brain eventually turns to oatmeal. So we opt to stay here, but we're spending more and more money and feeling lost on a raft, with naught but a few people drifting around thinking the way we do.
Does anyone out there have something profound to say?
Is everyone embarrassed?
Does anyone care?
Where the hell IS everybody?
Posted by at August 28, 2002 08:32 PM