Watched the off broadway adaptation of The Toxic Avenger tonight, had a blast. The sound engineer especially was doing a great job. I’m not sure where they found him, but he was absolutely spot on, and I have no doubt that he will go far.
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Speaking Of Not Being Alone…
Apparently, if you start paying attention to that constant crazy, fearful, judgmental, and unintentionally hilarious voice in your head, and come to believe it is okay or even desirable to write down these thoughts, overnight it becomes impossible to stop. I haven’t posted in two days and already I have amassed many thousand manic typed words in a desperate attempt to record this running commentary I didn’t know I contained, which is now self-important and vain with all the attention being paid to it. Incredibly, this makes it even less likable. I feel like the woman who innocently opens the comically overfull closet and is buried in a mountain of junk for her trouble. In addition to deciding to take dictation for the voices of my neuroses, I have commissioned several ambitious essays from myself, and extended my running list of the many things I should but have yet to write about, and in this way I have convinced myself that complete forfeiture of my waking hours to my writing habit is imminent and I may have to give up a few of the hours reserved for sleeping, too.
I took time out of being a crazy person this evening to attend How I Learned, which monthly invites several people to perform personal essays in a bar on the Lower East Side. It was absolutely wonderful and I highly recommend you attend next month’s show, that is, if you are in fact a real person living in the greater metropolitan area and not one of the imaginary readers of this blog who is constantly being bored by and unimpressed with my writing and telling me so in unnecessarily mean ways. I’ll write something about the event and link to the contributors’ individual websites sometime when I don’t need sleep so urgently. For now I’ll say only this: I spoke with one of the men who read tonight, and when I asked if he writes full time these days, he told me that he does, and is primarily working as a writer of The Hardy Boys books. Did you know they still write The Hardy Boys books? I did not. Now, not only do I know this fact, but I have met the guy writing them. He also writes for Nancy Drew when they do crossover stories.
It’s the little things, you know?
Filed under new york city, writing
Not Alone Anymore
When we find out we might be alone in thinking something, we tend to remember the sensation. Surprise, followed quickly by worry, or curiosity, or pride, can overshadow the actual topic of conversation. I remember one moment like this. I had just described to a friend how those unofficial, packed dirt trails that you find curling through every park are fascinating to me.
You see why, right? These trails are created by many people over many months if not years. The finished product looks intentional: there are clean lines between the path and the grass around it, the route confidently heads towards the place most people want to go, and it’s well maintained, routinely reinforced, sometimes in contrast to neglect, very close by, visible in some less popular park features. This is a collaboration, but the collaborators rarely see each other, generally don’t know each other, and never actually communicate about their shared project. It is an accident and unintended consequence of thousands of actions that this path gets made.
What struck me is how path makers are separated not by space but in time. When I walk down one of these paths I imagine all the people I’m following, and all those who will follow me. We influence each other, affect the steps others choose. Unseen, unknowingly, we transmit information across time, coordinating our efforts to produce an inviting little walkway. Membership in this secret, silent club tickles me. No one is aware of having joined or what their contribution was. Our members cannot be gathered by any imaginable technique or technology, because time moves only in the one direction, and the world soon forgets who made the first footfalls and where that person was headed. And without aiming to, we’ve created an informal institution, a monument to decentralized decision making. Dear reader, I give you: the well defined yet unsanctioned path, a whimsical and determined thing, fixture of parklands everywhere.
My unprepared attempt to communicate this and my wonder at it to a friend was halting, but after getting it out I saw immediately that my fascination wasn’t shared. Other people just don’t think like this, I realized, surprised. I was torn between feeling proud of how my clearly insightful observation separated me from the unwashed masses and being disappointed, like when a joke isn’t laughed at, or the personal anecdote you expected to be recognized as embodying something universal, isn’t. It was disappointing to find that the busy, complicated world I lived in was a lonely place. It’s not just paths in parks. I’m often paralyzed by visions of the countless roles we play, the endless connections and interactions between us, the infinite consequences of our smallest actions. I’m not infrequently dumbstruck with awe at the products of our undirected and unplanned efforts, overcome in public places with mute delight. I stare at the city around me like a caveman.
Although I never seriously believed that I was the only person with an active imagination and a ferocious curiosity about the world around me, I did feel separated from fellow awestruck path watchers by my inability to put my wonder into words, and therefore lonely. A path maker might feel the same way were one to become aware of his or her diffuse coworkers and wish to speak with them, if only to share introductions over a beer and pass around congratulations on a job well done. But while there’s no hope of traveling though time (except the usual way), there should be a way to overcome my less fundamental isolation. There must be others in the world with a passion for self organization and its power. Now just how do I meet one?
Podcasts. When it comes to emergent order, I recommend reading The Price of Everything by Russ Roberts, who I first heard as the host of the essential EconTalk and who also writes a great blog, Cafe Hayek. For more, and please trust me on this, it is never a bad idea to read Hayek himself. Discovering that there exists an entire academic discipline devoted to exploring the mechanisms, mediums, properties and consequences of our species’ constant creative interaction has been one of my life’s greatest pleasures. It turns out that not only am I not at all uniquely brilliant, but the men and women who have been thinking, writing, researching and debating about exchange, incentives, and externalities for centuries have so much to teach me that my learning will safely last my lifetime.
To complete this happy ending, I need to develop the ability to communicate my curiosity. A lifelong project to be sure, but one I want to start today. Writing, this past week, has engaged me terrifically, been welcome work of the kind my life recently has been sadly lacking. It’s hard, and for now, feels rewarding. My busy imagination is already telling me that if I really keep at it, by the time I’m sixty-four I might actually publish something valuable. I’m really looking forward to that.
Reading about writing, I ran across this lovely passage in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird:
I remember reading C.S. Lewis for the first time, Surprised by Joy, and how, looking inside himself, he found “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” I felt elated and absolved. I had thought that the people one admired, the kind, smart people of the world, were not like that on the inside, were different from me…
The moments we discover we’re not alone, like the moments when we first fear that we are, get glued in our memories by adrenaline, and then stuck where we’re sure to see them, like favorite pictures on our wall. Remember this. We forget, of course. Like all important lessons in life, we have to learn it again and again. Fear of being the only one like you in the universe is, famously, universal.
Share your stories about the conversation where you discovered that you’re on your own. It’s a familiar beat: talking to a friend, the easy assumption that you’re on the same page is suddenly questioned. This tends to happen most frequently when the topic being discussed is certain superstitions, the status of a relationship, or Israel. The moment tends to be memorable. I can recall a half dozen conversations I’ve had that fit this description.
Alternately, share your stories about the time you suddenly no longer felt alone. Although it has taken me a thousand words to get around to it, the story I had in mind when I started this post falls into this category. Today I was listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe and they were discussing several recent articles in mainstream sources that are big wins for skepticism and evidence that an important campaign in Britain is having an impact. The mood was high. Then Rebecca said this, about the podcast’s audience:
There are 60,000 of you our there right now. I know that right now, like, you’re listening to this and it’s just you, riding the subway, but there are actually 60,000 of you…
The story of how I came to find the SGU, and organized skepticism, and how it felt and what it meant to me is another post entirely, if not a dozen. It’s quite something, discovering how powerful it is to name yourself, to share passions and fears, and to belong. It would be a large, heavy, dreadfully earnest story. Hearing Rebecca’s words this afternoon was different: the moment was delightful, simple, and deliciously specific.
I’ve often imagined that there are others who, like me, ride the subway with earbuds in not to drown out the crowd or zone out to music, but to learn about scientific breakthroughs, technological achievements, the latest paranormal claims, quackery, what is fact and what is, in fact, fiction. Looking around as I ride, however, it never seems like I’m sharing a subway car with one of them. Instead as I listen I feel like there’s an unfortunate chasm between me and my fellow riders, growing wider with every moment I absorb information which I seriously doubt they have, as I sure wouldn’t were I not standing there with the rogues in my ear. Our common ground is thin and our disagreements untowardly deep, my imaginary fellow passengers and I. It’s not a good feeling. Most people separate themselves from the city around them by simply ignoring it, distracting themselves, or through small harmless acts of rudeness, but here I am actually shoving a planet-sized ideological wedge between myself and all those around me. What a sad, bitter old man I will become!
In a species as numerous as ours, a club consisting of sixty thousand is not in the business of setting cultural norms or writing policy. But put sixty thousand people in a room and you’ve got yourself quite a party. A big thank you to Rebecca for a truly neat moment, when I allowed myself to imagine my friends and allies, in hundreds of different subway cars in dozens of cities across the world. I smiled, then, picturing us, we who are excited about the future, we who love and cherish “the Universe as it really is.” At once, we all hear “right now you’re listening to this and it’s just you, but” and look up, all thinking the same thing.
I know podcasts are not listened to simultaneously. I know my habit of inventing visuals to stand in for the intangible things I’m awed by can get more than a little silly. I’ve been known to picture the myriad cell phone conversations going on around me as long strings arcing through the air, attached at the other end to far away towns and other continents, wrapping around the world a dense, tangled ball of string. And ask me sometime about the make believe Kingsbridge Tofu Club. Still. Explaining what’s going on in my head makes me feel elated and absolved, and even if this never reaches the right person, I’m confident someone out there thinks the way I do.
Science is a great path making project, the greatest decentralized collaborative effort there will ever be, with partnerships spanning the globe and reaching across time, accumulating results step by step that shape our emerging understanding of reality. It is the undertaking of the human race, discovery, and no one is truly alone who understands that they belong to this great and curious species. I will never be a scientist, but I long to contribute something to the discussion, if only to stand to the side and remind people how beautiful it all is. I will talk science over dinner and over drinks, inviting more people to share in our collective accomplishments, reminding everyone, you need not be alone, and look at what we can do when we work together.
Filed under economics, science, skepticism, wild speculation, writing
On The Street, Pt. 1
In the short time I’ve actually lived in the city I have had the privilege to work in eight different neighborhoods. There are pages to write about each of them. I’ll start with Wall Street.
I do not work in finance. I make a meager hourly wage standing in a doorway, watching the financial district change. The asphalt in front of me is being ripped up and replaced with paving stones. Real estate brokers are steering dozens of curious young couples through the buildings to either side of me. Sometimes the young prospective tenants are chaperoned by parents, busy and nervous like they’re visiting colleges. These new condos were built as office buildings. The high end boutique I work in was a Starbucks not six months ago.
I have not been familiar with this neighborhood long, and have never done any substantive research into its recent history, so my sense of the street’s demographic and economic shifts is based on anecdotes, stories, and assumptions. What I can do is record the people I see walking past me over the course of a day.
The simplest story is that of the tourists. They flatter me. I charm them. They mistake me for a knowledgeable, native New Yorker, and I do my best to live up to their hopes, simultaneously aiming to convince them that this city is reasonably friendly after all. If you are walking slowly in a subway station hallway, especially if you are answering your phone at the top of the station stairs, you are unforgivable and I will glare at you with all the glare I can muster. If I am not doing anything, and you approach and ask politely for directions, I will forgive you your ignorance, and in fact be grateful for the opportunity to be appear magnanimous and expert.
The Americans I see I automatically assume are from “The Midwest,” wherever that is. I think for our purposes it includes every corner of the country outside of California, New England, Pennsylvania and Jersey. They seem easy to please. They drift, in family groups, leaning back to take pictures of the towers and the church. Everyone loves posing with the Tiffany & Co. sign, which features large golden letters at a height that allows the cheesy smile to be brought right alongside it with only a slightly ridiculous crouch. I’d guess that one out of every three groups that pass it feel compelled to snap the photo.
Our international visitors look to my untrained eye to be largely Germans, Scandinavians, and other broadly blond, odd yet attractive Northern and Central Europeans. We also get a generous sprinkling of Italians, French, Spaniards, and Canadians. The Asians, mostly Chinese and Japanese, are the most likely to be walking down the street with a camcorder recording uninterrupted, a practice that I find slightly less distasteful than boiling children alive. Some pose for still photographs of their companions every few feet without placing any identifiable landmarks, or indeed anything nice to look at, in the background.
They all ask for the bull. American, foreign, embarrassing and savvy, they all came to Wall Street to see the bull. The bull, dear readers, is not on Wall Street. This fact causes endless frustration. I am in charge of directing the travellers to he statue, east two blocks and down three, throwing in hand gestures, directional markers, and occasionally the Spanish word for “left,” izquierda, which I was delighted to discover I still remember from high school.
A diminutive Asian man, in a thick accent it took me a few attempts to decipher, once asked me directions to “the golden cow.” Another time a portly American gentleman (a Midwesterner, I believe), told me he was looking for the bull to punch it. It is strange to watch kids from a dozen countries hang on the horns, fondle the testicles, and generally lap up this oddest of symbols while the Street itself is in such disarray, actively cannibalizing the ancient office space for luxury apartments. Most tourists give no indication that they understand that Wall Street is no longer Wall Street. If they know, it doesn’t seem to affect their behavior. I point the way to the bull a half dozen times a day, closely followed by the stock exchange and the federal reserve. That one I had to look up. It’s an imposing stone building two or three blocks north of the Street, and since I’ve identified it, every time I pass I stare. There’s little hope I’ll learn anything about the confusion, fear, and hubris percolating within by watching the walls. Still. It seems now an ominous, quiet building. The cocky men in flashy suits who still, though their numbers are thinned, strut down Wall like hedonistic teenage Greek gods, would be preferable masters of the world. Their ugliness seems simple, honest, their behavior predictable and sure, compared to inscrutable bureaucrats and civil servants hiding just out of sight up William.
The young men of Wall Street are easy to spot. They are tall, with good posture, broad shoulders, and brute good looks. They wear their hair clipped close against their skull, and they wear their shirts open, no tie, their collars stiff and cut close and angling out instead of down the front of the shirt. Their biceps are large and their dogs are tiny. We see about five or six of them a day. Many of the visibly successful neighborhood regulars work in real estate, which has a more varied fashion palette. The guys in the mesh-back jackets with the branding numbers, who wander out of the stock exchange looking like fat horse jockeys, are mostly middle aged and exhausted looking. They are even fewer than the bright young pricks. The crowd is half tourist, a quarter residents.
Apparently the converted office space is not terribly expensive for Manhattan. Young people rent these apartments, often young adorable couples or absurdly attractive young women. I see the residents with dogs much more often than the rest, because they have a reason to pass by several times a day. Some look like students, most look like young professionals, all seem unconcerned by money, preoccupied by fashion and tiny dogs and whatever exactly it is that they do.
There’s another long essay to be written on what the young of my city is wearing these days. I won’t get into it here. Also awaiting the second installment: a description of the particular street personalities I’ve watched. There are a few so regular I’ve developed cute, judgemental monikers for them. Tune in next week… the adventures of Twitchy!
Filed under economics, new york city
This Is Halloween
Batman or Superman? Kirk or Picard? Would you prefer to have the power of invisibility or of flight? Describe your best Halloween costume. At age ten, who was your favorite fictional character, and why? Who would it be today? Tell us about a time you were fired from a job. Explain in five hundred words what you believe in. If you were a flower, what kind of flower would you be?
If I waited for an original idea to begin working, I think I’d get as far as actually tearing my eyeballs out of my head before I gave up and joined a monastery. Diving right in, then. Batman. Kirk. (In case you weren’t aware, Krik or Spock? is not a question. You’ve completely missed the point.) To be brutally honest? Invisibility. I know. We can talk about it later.
—
What I remember about Halloween, other than how surprising it was every year that I could and did forget that it bumps right up against my birthday, is being disappointed with myself on the costume front. Maybe there is nothing I actually enjoy about dressing up, and my expectations were all unconsciously based on movie montages set to aggressively fun music, but it seemed like something I should be good at, something I should have fun with. My failure to do so was dismaying, and painful.
When it came to costumes, as in my other earthly pursuits, I aim high. None of the standard ghouls for me. Come to think of it, Halloween never really had much to do with fear or fright in my experience, but it’s not just that plastic moulds of Frankenstein’s monster didn’t pass muster. The standard costumes are familiar to everyone, I’m sure, but just to make fresh in your memory the utter inanity of this peculiar cottage industry, let’s review.
There are doctors and nurses, a strangely mythical rendering of a real world profession which may contribute to our love of soap operas set in hospitals and our expensive inability to resist a sales pitch from someone in a white coat. You can purchase superhero clothing that makes you look even less glamorous than you usually do, which is strange because it seems to go the other way on the superheros. You can be a pirate, which in light of the internet and the Indian Ocean makes less and less sense every day.
Bizzare aside: I did hear on EconTalk that the voluntary arrangements among eighteenth century pirate ships were atypically democratic for the times, possibly influencing subsequent governance, but even if we grant them that, it isn’t really what we like about them, is it. Maybe we make protagonists of mobsters, bank robbers and pirates because in our lives we resent the criminalization of victimless acts and therefore admire the balls it takes to disregard a law. Unfortunate then that the crimes we glorify are ones with victims. Pirates, the real ones who stole rivalrous and excludable things, may have occasionally had more fun than other denizens of the eighteenth century, but they did so on the backs of others and therefore don’t deserve our respect or our Halloween tributes.
So: no good options. I was looking for a costume that looked good, referenced something reasonably cool from popular culture, made immediate sense to onlookers, could be assembled from things we had lying around the house, and took about half an hour to take from conception to completion. No real successes, I’m sorry to report. Lest you think my criteria were unreasonable, and look to blame my failure on an unwillingness to purchase something, plan ahead, or otherwise put at my disposal anything other than my usual wardrobe, I’ll have you know it can be done. I had a friend, the one I always ended up trick or treating with, who pulled it off, year after year, making it look silly to do anything else. He appeared to spend no time or effort. He bought nothing, he never dressed in logo-printed polyester, and let me tell you, he looked good.
This was my general impression, but if pressed for specifics I can’t recall many. The costumes that impressed me included my friend throwing on a fedora and a suit jacket and calling himself a gangster. (So effortless! So cool! Why did this never happen to me? Where did he get a suit jacket?) Another year the article of clothing he found lying around his house was a wide, round hat pointed at the top which his father brought home from Vietnam. I think these are used by poor peasants who farm rice and need to keep the sun off their necks, but here, on him, it signified something much sexier and exotic. Were there ninjas in Vietnam? Probably not. It did not matter. No one was reminded of a farmer. He was, if I may, ninjaesque.
As for the embarrassing results of my attempts to replicate his feat, the only one I remember with any clarity was the year I put on my grandfather’s long black wool coat. It is with great difficulty that I reveal to you, in a spirit of openness and honesty, and not letting the past hang over us and all that, that the only thing I found to accessorize the coat with was, wait for it, balloons. Several balloons, I seem to recall, floating along over my head, just begging the question. I answered, with the heavy resignation of someone who is waiting patiently for this night to be over, that I was a balloon seller. You know. A balloon seller.
I’m not enjoying this, but I want to spell it out for you: I did not look good. My already tenuous self esteem was taking body blows every time someone new looked my way. I had no connection to any cool character, past or present. I also was not identifiable, not easily and not ever, not even after I’d done my best to explain, and my best, by that point, had moved past half-hearted and was actively flirting with words like “sulking,” “gloomy,” and “inaudible.” I didn’t know what I was myself. Couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t figure how I had come to be in such a awful position, scrambling the night of Halloween for something, anything, considering that costumes typically appeared, fully formed and awesome, a week before the holiday, after the discovery of some obvious and effortless linchpin garment, preferably one brought from a far away land, by a father, maybe.
That year as we walked through town I remember running into a classmate, a pretty and intimidating blond, surrounded by her friends and looking the opposite of an embarrassment. Not being far removed from elementary school and its automatic intimacy, we knew each other, and said hello, although this girl wouldn’t have considered herself a friend of mine. I was mortified. I think I tried to avoid even mentioning the words “balloon seller,” so tired and disgusted was I with my non-idea for a non-costume, so frustrated by my inability to justify, to myself or anyone else, why I was wearing this stupid coat. I had nothing to say, and bowed out of my social responsibilities, as I often do, with the grace of a log.
She was wearing a red baseball hat, backwards or cocked to the side, and I think her shirt was pulled and tied in a knot at the back. All her friends were dressed the same. The colors were red, maybe black, and white. Someone asked what they were. She said she was nookie. Like that song. Fred Durst’s band, what was their name? I did it all for the nookie. Limp Bizkit.
Limp Bizkit was a popular musical act, circa the earliest of the years I spent being awkward and dressing in oversized black coats. They were loud, dumb, and boorish, and their most popular song featured the refrain, “I did it all for the nookie, yeah! The nookie, yeah! So you can take that cookie, and stick it up your, yeah! Stick it up your, yeah! Stick it up your, yeah! And stick it up your, yeah!”
At the time it was not clear to me exactly what nookie was, and so nagging was my uncertainty that I much later looked it up just to pin it down, but seeing these girls I got the general idea. I now knew with certainty that was not a nonsense word, like those that featured in so many pop hooks of that era, but instead a word that referred to something a little dirty, something a little cheap, something sexual but not sexy, something childish and duchey.
My blond acquaintance was dressed like we had seen Fred Durst, the lead singer, dress in the video for this song. It is an ugly and smug wardrobe, the highlight of which is the aforementioned bright baseball cap, which says simply, I may be stupid, but I’m also mean, so stay the fuck out of my way. On her the outfit was tighter, and seemed sadder, less bullying and more tragic. She was volunteering to be the target of his cat calls, the willing subject of his leering and his arrogant appetite. It skived me out. I had that sense that history would not look kindly on her costume. Limp Bizkit never seemed like a keeper to me, and in my experience grown women did not subject themselves to this sort of thing, so presumably there was a moment when one left that kind of desperation and degradation behind. I hoped there was. Despite my balloons and wanting to disappear, I left feeling embarrassed for her.
I’ve accused myself of being judgemental and prude more times than you’ll ever manage, so don’t think I’m not aware of how I sound. She was young, Pop lust rarely hurts anyone, and playacting the part of a sexually desirable and available woman is often harmless, even charming and pleasantly embarrassing in hindsight. I had my own reasons for reacting the way I did. She was frighteningly confident, glamorous, and inaccessible, and things were much simpler if I could pity her. Her overeager embrace of sex didn’t have to highlight my own nervousness and inability to feel desirable if I could, instead, laugh it off. And of course, my failure of a costume wasn’t so bad once you considered I might have gone as nookie itself.
I hope she’s doing well. There were other things over the years that fed my pity, like her tendency to slavishly follow around a certain bossy alpha girl, and hints of a relationship with a boy who was significantly older and therefore potentially dangerous. Her fragility may have been all in my mind. It’s still a powerful memory. I wanted then to protect her, from the world, from herself. I wanted to be the beautiful and confident one, wanted to take her away, release her from the politics and paranoia of middle school. I would offer instead the serenity and solidity of my maturity, and she would be so grateful, so relieved to take off the nookie costume and leave her stupid friends behind forever. Most importantly, she would see me as I really was, not mumbling and sincerely hoping to vanish, but smiling gregariously, putting everyone at ease, charming, sparkling, shining.
—
I don’t know why but no other costumes, no other Halloweens, come readily to mind. I’ll think about it and try to figure out what else I put together. Somehow the adrenaline coursing through my system in my embarrassment has made that one night my brain’s go to story about the holiday and left no room for others. Some years I may have not attempted anything, figuring (correctly) that dismissing questions about my lack of a costume would be easier than finding something good or suffering something bad. It wasn’t like I got good at it after a while. The costuming was never really my thing.
I know people who are not me have memories of elaborate childhood costumes, and parents working overtime, or that time you had the best idea ever, and whether or not it worked, it was a glorious making the attempt. If you want to share a best or worst costume, explain why you’d rather fly than turn invisible, or talk about being dumped or fired or the songs your father taught you, write me at thisjoyfulnoise@gmail.com. I’d love to hear your stories.
Notes on New York
With many thoughts daily demanding to be remembered, and not being in the habit of taking time to write them down in a serious way, I have gathered a pile of handwritten notes that sits on my desk, reminding me that should I ever decide to sit down and begin my new life as a writer, the task ahead of me will be impossibly huge. Instead, this pile suggests, I should aim for some other line of work, garbage collection, perhaps. I should search for that clerk position in charge of sorting, shuffling, and filing things that no one will ever ask for again. Your strengths, my unruly collection of ink and paper gingerly suggests, lie somewhere else. No offense.
Occasionally I transcribe the phrases scribbled on this paper into a computer file, which I’ve titled Notes on New York and situated at the dead center of my desktop, so that like my desk, my computer thoughtfully reminds me that productivity is not really my thing. Leave that to those ambitious types. Don’t be a fool. There is solitaire to be played. Terry Gross is interviewing Iggy Pop. Relax.
When I open this file I sometimes find mysterious little poems that have no remaining connection to what they were supposed to record. One day, apparently, I intended to write down some thoughts on food, and took this note: “eating, new fruits.” I’m intensely curious as to what fruits I was referring to, but the following line offers no help: “on being too loud.” I think the person being too loud was me. Why I didn’t go with a memory aid more direct or detailed I don’t know. And now you, dear reader, will never know.
Other notes are very clear, if a bit much. One day, presumably after watching the Discovery Channel for a little too long, I wrote this: “the wonders of mass production! holy fuck – toothbrushes! breaker boxes!” I understand your enthusiasm, former me. I really do. But what, beyond delight at the very existence of objects we all take for granted, do you want me to convey? Why toothbrushes? And, let’s be honest, is the profanity really necessary?
I’m not so worried about having misplaced a stunning insight on breaker boxes, but I know for a fact that I loose a lot. They are not the thoughts that I write down and later find less than impressive (“how charismatic, the hudson valley”) or those I don’t fully understand (“Subway. Benneton Ad. Utopia.”). They are the things that never make it even that far.
There are impressions, sensations, and experiences that absolutely fill me up, make me instantly ache for the ability to share my inner life with someone else. I go for a pen and can’t think of anything to say. I try to stay in the moment; tourists passing me with video cameras fixed on outstreached arms are a constant warning not to shortchange the present in service of its preservation. Inevitably when I get around to trying to put words to what happened to me, they’re of no use. The only ones I encounter anywhere in the vicinity describe motion, temperature, color, brightness, viscosity. I’m intensely dissatisfied with them. And without a detailed description of what was happening – every shade, every texture, every point of light – even the best words are impotent. Without knowing everything that happened that day, and the day prior, without precise familiarity of my mental landscape, the life I’ve lived up to this moment, my understandings of the shape of the universe and my place in it, my opinions on politics economics history and culture and the long story of how they came to be what they are – I’m sorry, it’s just a loosing battle.
It surprises me how often the sensations that are most central to the experience of being me, how many of the moments that move me the most, seem completely beyond the reach of writing, indeed of any communication medium. I wonder that the world seems so full of fascinating and worthwhile writing, storytelling, and reporting when this process seems so doomed to miss out on the meat of life. What we manage to stick words to and share, as wonderful as that output is, could this be in reality only a tiny fraction of what is, of the experiences we are? Is that wonderful or terrible?
I’m not sure what it is about the world that inspires this kind of conceptual vertigo. It could be the physical size, although I’m fairly certain I have absolutely no grasp of that, or the numbers of people, on which I can’t imagine I understand any better. It could be this unwise attempt at calculating the possible realationships between our billions of lives, each governed by a good hundred trillion cells, each made of so many atoms, and so on, that my brain keeps making. But there’s more to it than that, bigger things going on. I believe we can identify and describe historical and cultural currents and patterns, which are not well defined and understood things, but neither are they imagined. I believe there really exist, in some nearly intangible way, ideals and ideas and memes, those things that defy quantification but have real effects on the physical universe. In fact, I admit they seem to color all the stars in the sky.
Dizzying numbers feeding impossibly complex relationships within maddeningly inaccessible scales, that’s what this universe is, and it’s high time I admit that it’s not something I can ever hope to write down. I want to sing it, the beauty of what is, the body electric, the noosphere thilling with its existence. It seems unbearable that I cannot understand it, explain it, contain it, and pass it around like a jar of fireflies saying see? Do you see? This is what is. This, this is what is. Is it not beautiful.
I’ll make do with the moments I can capture. I’ll dutifully transcribe the impressions from my notes (“the sweat on my face, the breeze playing over my ear, the black marks on every sidewalk”). I’ll gather them up, toss aside the chaff, and weave the strong ones into something whole, something with a beginning and an end, and before you can blink something new will have come into being, a narrative, a story. It has been carefully assembled here, cultivated, culled and coaxed. Suddenly we are grinning, we are laughing, no longer troubled by our failure to describe the beauty of what is, because here is a new beauty, a thing all our own – a story, built of glottal attacks and serifs, nothing but photons and the firings of neurons, nothing but patterns in darkness. Which is really more than enough.
Filed under beauty, memory, new york city, writing
This Joyful Noise
Wireless at last, my desk overflowing with scribbled notes on tiny scraps of paper, I’m setting out to make this pursuit work. Today all I’ve done is change colors again, though I’m still not happy with them, and add a snazzy picture, which I’m more happy with although I assume by the time this is all over it’ll be gone as well. No matter. I’m looking at websites that offer business cards and reading Apple’s instructions on listing a podcast in iTunes. I’m comparing myself to everyone else again and getting impatient with my findings. Some day soon I will own several magazines and a cable channel, and I’ll finance spinoff television programs featuring my favorite people, the ones I listened to and read for inspiration on my way to the top.
It will undoubtedly be a source of humor and some considerable embarassment years from now to reflect on the great efforts I made branding myself before I had actually produced anything of value. I will tell the story gracefully, fully aware of the absurdity of this period in my life. I’ll recount how late one night, dissatisfied with my progress towards my goal of becoming a world traveler, a well known and widely respected public intellectual, and a brilliant and acclaimed storyteller, I jumped into action and changed the name of my rarely updated web log from A Joyful Noise to This Joyful Noise!
Lest you scoff, this was not the extent of my activity this evening. Oh no. I also set up a gmail account (thisjoyfulnoise@gmail.com), and asked politely for someone named Sharon to give up the blogspot address she’s holding (thisjoyfulnoise.blogspot.com), and then gleefully explored what font I would choose I were to order hundreds of business cards bearing my new brand.
This Joyful Noise, unlike clunky old A Joyful Noise, sports a snappy subtitle, which I have very cleverly (if I do say so myslef) included on the reverse side of my imaginary business cards. My brand’s message – light, heat, sound – is simultaneously too precious to stand and too weighty to bear. If I do what I hope to and all goes very, very well, it will likely be a decade or more before I produce something that lives up to such a portentious and epic signature. Still, I have nothing better. It comes earnestly out of an attempt to explain what it is I want to do. Listening to Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, has me keenly aware of the unimaginable emptiness, darkness, quiet and cold of the vast majority of the universe. Doing yoga at Yoga To The People, a donation based studio in the East Village, has made me keenly aware of life’s incredible capacity for producing heat. Standing in my lake of sweat, watching the windows fog, my chest feels like a coal fueled furnace and my mind turns to the chemistry of energy storage and use in the human body, the wonder of willed work, and, always, the unfathomable context of our efforts. Vast distances, lengths of time, silences. I name the sources of heat in our universe, few and far between, all of them wondrous: nuclear reactions in our stars, gravity’s pressure inside our planet, and in our cells, bonds breaking, decisions being made, life out of lifelessness.
I say we’re a noisy, hot, curious and hard working species, never satisfied, never finished: a stunningly beautiful thing in a still and empty universe. My feelings on the subject of humans are precious and weighty, and I see no way around that. I won’t be transcribing all my dribbling wonder at the world here; those who have encountered one of my rants on this topic will tell you, I’m very enthusiastic but rarely coherent or disciplined enough to be interesting. The blog and the podcast will, however, take as their official subject humans, the human project, the human experience, if only to provide cover for absolutely any story I feel like reproducing. In that sense, I’m aiming at capturing a little of the light, heat and noise made by my fellow wise apes, and it’s such an innocent and gradiose intention that my cuteness feels appropriate.
It makes sense. I have, after all, never been a very cool person. I’m too excited, too earnest and too invested to be cool. I dance at parties. I think economists say more interesting things than any other kind of person. I try to write a blog. I declare this rebranding officially underway. May we soon have some content to fill the empty vessel of This Joyful Noise.
This Joyful Noise 