|
|
|
snuff entertainment
Tuesday, January 22 2008
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
The plan today was to attend an evening at the Moth in Manhattan with Penny, David, and our friend Susan (the author of the New York Times bestseller, not the German translator). Simplifying parking and return logistics, we rode down on a Greyhound bus, which ranks as one of the more pleasant ways to go (and no, I know what you're thinking, but I'm not being sarcastic; the Greyhound system in the Hudson Valley is an order of magnitude more pleasant than the neglected cattle ride it is in other parts of the country).
We took a cab from Port Authority to Chennai Garden, a vegetarian Indian restaurant in the Gramercy neighborhood (between Midtown and the East Village; I'd never had occasion to go there before). Susan was already there and we were soon joined by Penny. Gretchen ordered for everyone, which was best for all concerned. The food was delicious and surprisingly inexpensive.
From Chennai Garden we walked to the venue hosting the Moth, The Players Club overlooking Gramercy Park (a gated private park roughly two acres in size). The Players Club descends from a gentlemen's club founded by Edwin Booth (the brother of the assassin of Abraham Lincoln) and still has the grand (but intimate) charm of a fancy 19th Century hangout. The only thing it lacks are clouds of cigar smoke.
The scene in the Players Club this evening was as Manhattan as these things get, with a claustrophobic crowd of sharply-dressed young hipsters holding glasses and chatting. Colors ranged from grey to olive green, but mostly everyone wore black. Overweight people were few and far between and there appeared to be only one black person, though it turned out that he was one of the evening's five storytellers. (Three of the stories of the five stories to be told tonight would deal directly with issues of race.)
Gretchen and I wandered upstairs, investigated a tiny phone-booth-sized elevator, and watched a group of fashionable older people socializing around a coffee table behind a windowed door. Later these people disbanded and I heard one of them, a distinguished woman with flowing grey locks, observe, "These people are all here for 'the Moth.' I don't know what it is, but all the people are young and good-looking."
Somehow the Moth had arranged to furnish its seating area with incredibly uncomfortable chairs. They looked good, but they were unusually narrow (for anyone but a ten year old boy), and both stiff and wobbly. Near the stage were a number of tables seating four people each, but the price for one of those tables was $500 (by contrast, our uncomfortable chairs cost $20/each). The place where we took our seats was far from the ventilation system. Suffice it to say, the first three stories that preceded intermission seemed to take a very very long time. Two of the stories were good, though not great. The last one was an incoherent tale of a therapeutic vacation to Peru taken by a tiny older woman who spoke in a self-caricaturizing flamboyant Upper East Side WASP style, the one wherein the last syllable of every word is greatly extended, as if to allow the speaker to collect her martini-addled thoughts.
In the second half, Gretchen and I commandeered a pair of empty seats directly under an air conditioning vent and sat in creature comfort for the final two stories. We could have happily sat there for a couple more.
After the Moth, Gretchen and Susan went off together (Susan is in the City most of the time these days to check in on her hospitalized husband, and Gretchen had come to offer moral support). I went with Penny and David back to there place, though we stopped on the way at a bar and grill kind of place.
Stephen Colbert was back on tonight, though without a staff of writers (all of whom are still on strike) the show was more Andy Kaufman Dadaism performance than comedy. At the end Colbert had his largely-white audience singing "We Shall Overcome" while his large group of guests (all of whom were at least partially black, including the ubiquitous Malcom Gladwell) swayed back and forth, some more rhythmically than others.
Later I watched most of an episode of To Catch a Predator, the show where actors posing as children lure adults into sexual encounters through chat rooms. These encounters are intercepted at a safe house full of hidden cameras, where our host Chris Hansen comes out of hiding to publicly shame the would-be sexual predators on national television. And after the shaming the fun continues; we're treated to a scene of criminal arrest out in the yard. If we're lucky they'll be an attempt at escape and the tasing of a bro. Think what you want to about scourge of internet predation, but this is the systematic destruction of a person's life for televison. It's snuff entertainment, and I found it so shocking and appalling and horrible I couldn't find the will to turn it off.
I slept on the couch in the living room of Penny and David's Greenwich Village apartment. They used to have separate apartments, but a couple months ago Penny moved in with David and subletted out her old place in Chelsea. It had been a tasteful apartment before but after moving in with David, Penny completely redecorated, buying new furniture and what not. To my style-agnostic eye, though, it didn't look all that different from before.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?080122 feedback
previous | next |
