Week 6: Cultural Events
This idea of blogging each week, á la my first blog, has really gotten away from me. Let me try to bring it back.
About a month ago, I decided to start going to more cultural events. I’d gotten to feeling like a real freelance hermit, like I wasn’t meeting any new people, like I wasn’t ‘taking advantage of New York,’ blah blah. So one day right after New Year’s I sat down with the internet and the Nonsense List and the current L Magazine and, like the geek I am, worked out a tentative program of cultural enrichment for myself.
This is an elliptical report on how it’s going, and how enriched I’ve gotten.
DUMBO, January 9. Doesn’t it look cold? (Photo by Sergiocapitano)
Friday, January 9: ‘Nerd Nite’ at Galapagos Artspace. I was going to go to a reading at the KGB Bar instead (I noticed, half encouraging and half disconcerting, that a person about my age who worked for a publishing house in California and for whom I very, very briefly read and rated manuscripts from the house’s slush pile, on a freelance basis, has published a novel which seems to be getting a good amount of marketing traction, at least it’s featured in the window of the hipster bookshop here in Greenpoint. So he was reading with some others at KGB. Fine I’ll name names: it’s Karan Mahajan, and the book is called Family Planning.) I was all set to do that but this French woman who works at the writing space, and whom I’ve been wanting to hang out with, said that she was going to go to this Nerd Nite thing with some of her friends from a big advertising agency. I was swayed!
After many trains I got down to DUMBO and reached the door of Galapagos at about 7:40pm. It was bitterly cold and there was a suspiciously long line of people waiting outside. A man with plentiful dreadlocks, wearing a shin-length white lab coat, kept emerging to tell people that the event might be sold out…might be sold out…finally he came back to tell us that we were out of luck. The French woman showed up around this time. We ended up going around the corner to a weird place that couldn’t figure out if it wanted to be a sports bar or a fancy restaurant, and talking about our writing lives and our love lives.
As the evening wore on, some people left Nerd Nite, and we were able to get in for the last 15 minutes of the last presentation, and a little milling around. The crowd was cute, en masse, and seemed to be having a good time. A friend of the French woman’s had showed up. We pledged to return the next month for the first ever Nerd Nite Speed Dating event, which alas, has already sold out. What’s up with all the romantic desperation in this town?
The new Galapagos is lovely inside, though the circular metal seating booths, set like islands in a reflecting pool, accommodate very few people considering the size of the space. Whatever. Speed dating or not, I’m sure I’ll be back, and earlier next time.
Tuesday, January 13: Trivia at the Black Rabbit in Greenpoint. I discovered the Black Rabbit on New Year’s Eve, and I love it. I want to work there. It is one of the most beautiful rooms, one of the most perfect bar-looking bars (classy yet laddish version) that I have ever seen. I’m thinking about having my birthday party there in the garden this summer. M— and I went to this trivia night the week previous, and had a magical time, despite getting our asses handed to us by another team of just two women sitting in the adjoining snug. This time, we returned with backup: three more friends. Trivia was better-attended this time, and I still had fun, but maybe that’s the problem with trying to replicate a magical experience. So far, Black Rabbit trivia doesn’t seem like a great format for meeting people, maybe because of the way that the bar is laid out, though it’s a great format for bonding with the team that you bring. I ended up, as is so often the case in this life, drinking a few drinks and then wondering, the next morning, what I did that for. You know the feeling that’s not a hangover, it’s just a faint scum on your brain and a disinclination to get out of bed? It’s a hazard of being as cultural as I am.
Thursday, January 15: Handmade Music at 3rd Ward. (Bookended by hanging out with fellow frightened media professionals.) I wanted to go to this “Part party, part mixer, part Science Fair, and part performance;” this “informal chance for geeksters and the geek-curious to come together, relax, and discover new sounds. Never mind that I don’t understand music and that, as such, the people who make it are a scary mystery to me. But I do like 3rd Ward. I was going to go by myself (the better to mix, I thought), but then I invited N— (because who really wants to go to a party alone?), and then it turned out that D and E wanted to come too, and J showed up while we were there. A bounty of friends! It was bitterly cold, again. Even colder. I was wearing long johns. I met N— and D and E at a restaurant in Williamsburg where they were finishing up dinner. We got to 3rd Ward just as the promised free Pabst was running out. The gallery was smaller than I remembered, and it was full of people. Horrible sounds were coming from it. We went in. I think that N— put it best when he said, “Does anyone else feel like they’re trapped inside a cell phone?” We stayed for a while, though, amid the bleeping and blooping and whinging. I didn’t exactly mix with ayone, but we did stop to play for a few minutes with a theramin that a guy had constructed out of a purple female torso mannequin, having replaced the mannequin’s nipples with large, shiny chrome knobs. Tweaking and manipulating your hands around the nipples produced a variety of crackling and eerie piping tones. It was fun and sexy for a minute, and then just strange, looking at this self-identified nerd guy and the uncomplaining female he’d built for himself. He stood there, flapping his hands, explaining things enthusiastically, as another guy caressed her chromed breasts.
Pretty soon, our party adjourned to Clem’s in Williamsburg for some liquid refreshments. There, a feeling of sadness stole over me. It wasn’t due to the relative failure of mixing, though that may have had something to do with it. Consciously, though, it was about the economy. When I got to dinner, my friends were all talking about updating their websites and fixing up their resumés. N— was laid off recently from his magazine job; the magazine that D proofread for, as his bread and butter, folded this week, and E, who is a visual artist, is feeling the pinch, too. As for me, I am living in fear that the smallish media entity that’s my bread and butter will fail suddenly, too. This year was supposed to be about deepening and broadening my abilities as a freelancer: figuring out what I really want to write, whom I really want to be writing it for, making relationships with some new editors, moving things in that direction. It’s not that it can’t happen, still, but the deck seems stacked against me. I learned this week that a magazine I love, where I have a long relationship with the editor, a magazine where I’d just made the leap into full-fledged feature writing, has been virtually shut down in a hostile and nasty fashion that has everything to do with the economy. Another magazine for which I wrote a short front of the book piece last year, where the editor liked me, where I was looking forward to placing longer stories this year, has fallen on hard times of its own and isn’t paying for any freelance work for the foreseeable future. So, I don’t know, I stood there at the bar with my friend around me thinking, shit, these hardships are real, for all of us. In some abstract, scholarly way, I think it’s fascinating and even neat when grand socio-historical forces, like the contraction of an economy, or a technological sea-change, knit their way into the lives and choices of real individual people. Like, when you can see that happening, it’s sort of amazing, like observing the division of a cell, or something—this process that you KNOW happens, but don’t generally get to see. So I stood there in the bar–I remember I was looking at D’s hands, lit by the barlight, near a glass of whiskey–and I was able to kind of rapid-shift in my brain between abstract appreciation for the fact that we’re all here, at this moment in history, that history is affecting us (wow! cool! our grandkids will remember that we lived through this!), and a more prosaic feeling of envy and disappointment and thwarted-ness. (These are the only late twenties and early thirties that we’ll get–if it’s an impossible time to excel at our chosen careers, well then, there that goes.)
I got into a bit of a discussion with J’s girlfriend about different ways to make money at writing; she was talking about doing policy papers and annual reports; and that sounded sort of interesting except, who am I kidding? No. It didn’t sound interesting, and that made me feel guilty and like a snob, but it’s true. It was one of those conversations where, to fall black on the split-consciousness thing again, half your brain is thinking Hey, this is great! Where can I find one of these corporations that needs an annual report?, and the other half of your brain is reeling, thinking, Wait, what is it that I do? What is it I wanted to accomplish in this world again? Why;’d I get into this business? Because writing annual reports does not seem like it.
I guess that, eventually, the liquid refreshments blotted out the more soul-searching aspects of the evening. But not before I reiterated to myself my growing determination to leave New York City in a year or two, and began to wonder what I could do for a living, an identity, etc., in another town. Briefly I fantasized about teaching at a private high school. I don’t know. I’ll come back to this later. Let’s return to the events.
Friday, January 16: ‘Yella’ at the Neue Galerie. The L Magazine listed a film for free on Friday evening at 6:30, at New York’s finest gilded Austro-German art museum. Specifically, it said:
“Yella [Christian Petzold, 2007] 100 min. Global postindustrial capitalism as fugue state, in one of last year’s more elusive releases. Free screening.”
Global postindustrial capitalism as fugue state?!, I thought. SIGN ME UP!
I got to the museum half an hour late. It was bitterly cold, again. I was wearing my long underwear, again. The café upstairs throbbed with well-dressed, well-heeled people. Women in furs and dangling earrings. The pulse of well modulated voices. Very low light. The movie seemed to be screening downstairs, in the Fledermaus Café. I slipped down there. A dozen low tables. A movie on screen. Only one other person, a woman, sitting at a central table.
The film turned out to be eerie but soothing, slow-paced, narrative. The camera angles were all carefully composed and there wasn’t much to look at, but in an intentional way, so that the heroine’s frumpy yet sometimes sexy mulberry-colored silk shirt, or the swaying of some pine boughs, or the interior of a car, really took over and made you concentrate on that thing. I hadn’t seen a movie in months. The heroine was beautiful but had a line between her eyes, quite appropriate to her age, but which you’d never see on a heroine in an American movie. I liked that. Having come in late, I had no idea what was happening, but I relaxed into it. When the film ended (I wanted to say, “when the lights came up,” but they didn’t come up, we just stood up in the dark and gathered our coats), I asked the woman what had happened at the beginning, and she tried to tell me–the whole film was a flashback or a dream the heroine dreamed, at her moment of dyng…it still didn’t make that much sense, but I liked looking at the woman. She too was wearing a fur coat, and dark red lipstick; her gray hair was piled on her head in an elaborate bun. She exuded wealth and had a soothing, mild foreign accent that was hard to place. “My knees are bad,” she said, as I started to ascend the stairs. I waited for the elevator with her and on the next floor we bade each other a sincere good night.
Then I got on the express train and went to meet M— and M— and a Danish friend of theirs at Old Town. I devoured a burger, a couple of lagers, and best and worst of all, part of a bag of real candy-store candy that M— had bought earlier that day and shared with all of us.
Later, my sister told me that all the cute European boys had been at the MoMA.
In conclusion: If there’s a take-home lesson here, I don’t think I know what it is. I like going to things. I like talking to my friends, and it appears that I will do so with great preference if it’s an option. If there’s a trick to meeting people at these cultural events, I’m not sure I’ve figured out what it is, yet, but maybe it’s enough for a while to just go and be part of my city. Hmm.
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