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I'm better than you
Wednesday, August 22 2001
I once sat at the head of my class.
My pencil was sharp, my rhymes fast.
But in the basement at night
A distractive delight
Put my dreams in the back of the past.
For years I was doing just fine.
But I have entered a state of decline.
These friends I have met,
They're as good as friends get.
Now they're hanging out with me all the time.
I once owned a place in sunny LA.
My wife was the Queen of Pompeii.
The faults, they stood still, as they for a time will.
But still I had to move far away.
If I was to spend several paragraphs of monologue telling you that I'm actually better than you, how would you feel? At first, of course, you'd sit there and smile uncomfortably and glance around, hoping the subject would change to something more pleasant. "Gus can be sort of a dick, but he usually isn't such an arrogant asshole," you'd tell yourself. "Obviously he's taking awhile to make his point and any moment the punchline will come and, if I'm lucky, I will find it funny."
But imagine me not stopping, going on and on about how superior I am in all the particulars. I'm smarter. I'm better looking. I'm a fucking animal in bed, whereas in bed you are, by comparison, something of a sack of potatoes. And while my addictions are glamorous and conducive to brilliant insights and creativity, yours are banal and serve merely to deaden your mind and occupy your otherwise useless life. My clothing, though limited in scope, is classier than yours.
At what point would you tell me you've had enough? At what point would the possibility, the necessity, of a punchline, something to tell you I was just kidding, no longer be worth the abuse?
After work I joined Gretchen and her friend Mary Purdy at a nearby 14th Street restaurant. The plan was for us to go uptown to Hell's Kitchen (in westside midtown) and attend the Irish Arts Center's so-called "Moviepalooza." Mary Purdy herself would be starring in one of the short films playing tonight.
After we got off the C subway and hit the streets, Mary told us that recently the local homeowners' association renamed Hell's Kitchen "Clinton" in hopes of boosting real estate values. If this was their primary goal, I wonder why they didn't go all the way and name it "Nicetown," "Richville," "Straighton," or, for a more exotic sounding name, "Ciudad Del Gente Rico Blanco." As we walked through Hells Kitchen (which is the neighborhood where Gretchen's therapist operates), Gretchen pointed out how strangely surreal things can be here. You're walking past the patio of a fancy restaurant, watching suited businessmen yack into their cellphones over fancy martinis, and then you look up and see a neon cross threatening "Sin will find you out." A few block from there you come upon a sidewalk sale featuring couches and odds and ends that no one would ever buy. According to Gretchen this "sale" appears to function as something of a performance art installation. But it might also serve as someone's living room.
Both Gretchen and I were amazed at the quality of the short films we saw tonight. Nearly all of them were excellent, and most had at least one or two wickedly clever elements. For Mary Purdy's film, Sadie's Fortune, the overwhelmingly best element was the style: it looked exactly like a silent film from the 1920s. Mary was the star of the movie as she played the role of a silent, mostly asexual tramp girl. Everything was in crisp black and white, movements were exaggerated, and everything seemed to be happening just a little too fast. A lone piano was the only thing on the soundtrack.
One of the key interests of the makers of short films is success, both as an actor and as a film maker. Day Player Blues was the short documentary of the life of an otherwise unknown Hollywood actor hired to play a "scared kid" in a movie about professional wrestling. He got his own dressing room trailer, had to rehearse for his part, and the one brief scene in which he played a pivotal role was shot multiple times. In the end, though, his scene was cut from the movie.
The most entertaining short film of the evening, ...sleeping dogs lie concerned the travails of a two-time loser who appears before a judge after machine gunning his girlfriend's obnoxious (but ailing) dog. Forced to provide a urine sample in one day's time, he hatches a plan to fill his bladder with his girlfriend's urine. Not only was the plot unexpected and clever, but so were the costumes and even the camera angles. There was this one memorable scene where the characters were having a conversation in the background while in the foreground a plastic bottle loomed up from the brickwork walkway. Suddenly, and completely randomly, someone walked by with a small dog, both of them momentarily dominating the screen. In the process the bottle was kicked out of the way.
But for all their ingenuity and freshness, there's something ultimately sad about the good but unfamous short film, especially short films about the quest for success. In their fleeting brilliance, such films remind us that ours is a big pond and there are lots of talented little fishies competing for recognition. Often success boils down to some combination of talent, luck, perseverance, and ass kissing. And then one day you're 40 years old and realize you're never going to make it.
What do you do when you've reached that point in your life when you realize that you're just not going to make it in your quest for acclaim in your art of choice?
When you love to rock and roll, but the gigs are costing more money than they're making. When you love to paint, and everyone says you're a great artist, but they also say they'll have to wait until they become wealthy before they'll be able to afford your paintings?
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