Anger and Tribute

I had the oddest (most odd?) experience yesterday. I mean, the day itself was pretty okay, but on three separate subway trains yesterday I was witness to three instances of people nearly coming to blows. And each time it was because one of the parties was upset that another person had allegedly pushed them. It was weird and unsettling, because it's the first time I've seen that sort of repressed anger popping out since I've moved to New York.

I mean, I know that New Yorkers are an angry lot. I find myself pissed off a lot here, too. It's a hard city, and a hard city to live in - unless of course, you're rich and don't need to ride subways. But I suspect that even the rich people have their own peculiar brand of New York Hardships, which frankly I wouldn't mind being in position to sample. Just for contrast and comparison reasons, mind you.

But despite what you might see on TV or read in the aftermath of September 11th, it can still be a cold, uncaring place. I've described the city on more than one occasion as a cold-hearted bitch who would happily chew you up and spit you out with nary a second thought (with apologies to you feminists out there - I don't really think of the city as exclusively feminine). And while it's true that many of New York's (and New Yorkers') best sides have been on display since the attacks - and I should point out too that these good traits were on display before all this happened... they just didn't get as much press - the common folk here tend to go around focused on the act of survival, which can be pretty hard, here. So I suppose I shouldn't have been upset or disturbed to see that frustration and anger come to the surface.

But I was. The result is that I stayed up too late contemplating the state of the world, finding no comfort, and looking like shit. See photo to the right.

All I could think about was the fact that 25,000 people die around the world each day for stupid reasons - of starvation, in conflicts, of disease that might have been cured. Twenty-five thousand. If I had a dollar for each one of the people in a single day, it would totally eliminate my debt and leave me spending money. That number is astounding to me. And yet, instead of thinking about that, and spending a little energy contemplating a solution for that, people would rather spend their energy threatening violence over a perceived slight when some poor schmoe tries to crowd onto a subway car when it would in the long run be more comfortable and convenient for others if he waited two minutes for the next train to arrive.

I'm generally an optimist, I think. But I see shit like that and I despair that we'll ever be anything more than a barbaric race of animals. I don't see the worth in splitting the atom when we can't treat each other with a little compassion.

So I stopped of on the way home last night (and amazingly enough, the third pushing incident happened on a train at 7:30 at night, when the evening commute on a Friday should have been mostly over), and stopped off at The Brooklyn Promenade in the hopes of getting a shot or two of the "Tribute in Light."

I discovered two things.

First, from the angle of the Promenade, you can really only see one of the shafts of light. And second, I'm not very good at using my camera to capture images in low light with no flash. It's the curse of the point-and-shoot generation. I need to take a photography class when I'm rich. Anyway, here are some of the images.

As a post-script, I should also note that I've been experimenting with the "Save for Web" option in Adobe's Photoshop, so let me know if you can see a difference in the quality of these images... supposedly (if I'm using it right), they should be faster loading and not lose too much of their quality. [Fingers crossed.]

Musings About Which You Couldn't Care Less

I had the oddest (most odd?) experience yesterday.  I mean, the day itself was pretty okay, but on three separate subway trains yesterday I was witness to three instances of people nearly coming to blows.  And each time it was because one of the parties was upset that another person had allegedly pushed them.  It was weird and unsettling, because it's the first time I've seen that sort of repressed anger popping out since I've moved to New York.

I mean, I know that New Yorkers are an angry lot.  I find myself pissed off a lot here, too.  It's a hard city, and a hard city to live in - unless of course, you're rich and don't need to ride subways.  But I suspect that even the rich people have their own peculiar brand of New York Hardships, which frankly I wouldn't mind being in position to sample. Just for contrast and comparison reasons, mind you.

But despite what you might see on TV or read in the aftermath of September 11th, it can still be a cold, uncaring place.  I've described the city on more than one occasion as a cold-hearted bitch who would happily chew you up and spit you out with nary a second thought (with apologies to you feminists out there - I don't really think of the city as exclusively feminine).  And while it's true that many of New York's (and New Yorkers') best sides have been on display since the attacks - and I should point out too that these good traits were on display before all this happened... they just didn't get as much press - the common folk here tend to go around focused on the act of survival, which can be pretty hard, here.  So I suppose I shouldn't have been upset or disturbed to see that frustration and anger come to the surface.

But I was.  The result is that I stayed up too late contemplating the state of the world, finding no comfort, and looking like shit.

All I could think about was the fact that 25,000 people die around the world each day for stupid reasons - of starvation, in conflicts, of disease that might have been cured.  Twenty-five thousand.  If I had a dollar for each one of the people in a single day, it would totally eliminate my debt and leave me spending money.  That number is astounding to me.  And yet, instead of thinking about that, and spending a little energy contemplating a solution for that, people would rather spend their energy threatening violence over a perceived slight when some poor schmoe tries to crowd onto a subway car when it would in the long run be more comfortable and convenient for others if he waited two minutes for the next train to arrive.

I'm generally an optimist, I think.  But I see shit like that and I despair that we'll ever be anything more than a barbaric race of animals.  I don't see the worth in splitting the atom when we can't treat each other with a little compassion.

---

So I stopped of on the way home last night (and amazingly enough, the third pushing incident happened on a train at 7:30 at night, when the evening commute on a Friday should have been mostly over), and stopped off at The Brooklyn Promenade in the hopes of getting a shot or two of the "Tribute in Light."

I discovered two things.

First, from the angle of the Promenade, you can really only see one of the shafts of light.  And second, I'm not very good at using my camera to capture images in low light with no flash.  It's the curse of the point-and-shoot generation.  I need to take a photography class when I'm rich.  Anyway, here are some of the images.

As a post-script, I should also note that I've been experimenting with the "Save for Web" option in Adobe's Photoshop, so let me know if you can see a difference in the quality of these images... supposedly (if I'm using it right), they should be faster loading and not lose too much of their quality.  [Fingers crossed.]

It's kinda a toss up between this one and the last one on the bottom right as to which is my favorite.	I liked the way the beams nicked the clouds in this one.	All of 'em turned out a bit fuzzy for my tastes, but I think it has more to do with my camera skills than anything else.
I took a number of landscape-oriented shots... this is the best of them, I think.	In the end, I think this is my favorite. I like that you can see the Brooklyn riverfront in the foreground, and the heavier clouds pick up the beams better.

Before the Fall...

Sometimes I'm worried that living in this city has hardened me more than I would like.

Sometimes I'm afraid that I'm not really as nice a person as I'd like to think I am. I've been awful to people in my life. I've been mean-spirited.

I think about this because I've been in a position lately to sit and listen, unobserved, while someone I know is all of these things, and I have to sit and ask myself: Am I this way?

There's an old saying - I don't even know where I first heard it, though I'm pretty sure this one didn't come from my mother (that font of what little wisdom I've managed to absorb), and it's one I've believed very firmly all of my life. And that's this: "The things you like least about other people are the things you like least about yourself."

And it's true. I hate judgmental people. I hate gossips. I hate people who need to make others feel inferior to make themselves feel good. And I well and truly hate smart people - people who're most aware of the power of words - who use words to wound others.

Okay, truth be told, I don't hate these people... I reserve "hate" for pretty heinous stuff, stuff I'm not entirely sure I've come across yet. But I really, really don't like to see people engaging in these behaviors, and I tend afterward to be less than kindly disposed toward them.

But it gives rise to some serious thoughts, doesn't it, that I react so strongly to these people? Because just as surely as I don't like other people engaging in these behaviors, I don't like it when I do, as well. And I do. I find myself, God help me, wanting to say to homeless guys, "Get a job!" I find myself thinking hateful things about tourists moving slowly along the sidewalks and peering up at Manhattan's impressive architectural legacy. I find myself making fun of odd characters that abundantly populate this city. And I wonder, "Where's the line?" What's the difference between bemusement at the vast, odd assortment of characters who roam the city in which I live, and ridicule of them; feeling superior to them?

The thing I like most about myself has always been my humility. Am I in danger of losing that?

PS: By the way, does pride in your own humility cancel it out? It's a line of reasoning I'm not sure I want to follow. }8o(

Time's Ungentle Arrow.

My God, but Time, she is a fickle bitch!

You know the old saying, "A watched pot never boils?" Well, I'm here to tell you that a watched clock never moves, either.

I didn't get much sleep last night, and I was in no mood to be at work today, which made the experience torturous enough. On top of that, every time I looked at my watch (which, granted, was probably every five minutes) it seemed like only a few moments had passed since the last time I'd looked.

Einstein had it right, man. Everything's relative. Especially time. I usually hate those fucking forwarded crap e-mail things like "don't realize the value of a second? ask the Olympic athlete in fourth place" or whatever, but that shit came home righteously today.

And all I can say is, "Happy St. Joseph's day." Let's hear it for my patron saint.

Good Question for the day:

"What for you bury me in the cold, cold ground?"
- Tasmanian Devil to Bugs Bunny

Starbucks, 16th Street & 8th Avenue, Manhattan

The coffee shop has a different dynamic of a Saturday night. I somehow didn't think that it would be crowded on a Saturday night in Manhattan. After all, you would think this would be the night when everyone in Manhattan was out partying or meeting with friends. Ah, but then you wouldn't be considering that everyone in Manhattan needs somewhere to meet those friends, would you? Well, I didn't.

Everyone in the coffee shop has a story. Like that really rather cute young guy I was writing about yesterday, who I had a whole fantasy affair with before his boyfriend and his real life arrived to tear it to shreds. The thing about fantasy is that no one can hurt you in your fantasies - unless they're my fantasies, where I allow people to hurt me, but I always have a great comeback.

There are all sorts of people here - all sorts of people who have all sorts of stories. Like the cute guy, whose boyfriend came in complaining about his health club - something having to do with the shampoo and conditioner combo they offered. And the cute guy responded that the boyfriend was lucky, 'cuz at Bally's, the shampoo and conditioner were one and the same.

This is what I aspire to... the banal. I think the banal is seriously underrated. I think that there's a joy to be taken in the ordinary, the unexciting. The Sunday morning spent wrapped up in each other's arms, not wanting to get out of bed. The quiet moment sharing coffee at the kitchen table. Those are the things I wish for. I don't miss the constant round of friends together, or the dates - not that Gavan and I ever really had the chance to date, with him off on the road and our relationship developing long distance - but the quiet moments we got to share... the time watching television when the television wasn't an excuse for not talking, but was just a diversion we shared quietly.

I think, when I see and talk to Gavan and I have the sort of achey nostalgia I have, it's that that I'm missing - not Gavan himself. For it only takes a little contemplation of Gavan himself to remember that our relationship was flawed, and I still have a lot of unresolved anger - nothing serious, nothing that isn't lessening with time. It's the idea of being in love with which I'm in love - which can't bode well for future loves. 'Cuz they're going to be real people as well. They're going to be flesh and blood and flawed... and that's something I'm going to have to deal with.

Happy Birthday, Dad

Today is my father's birthday. He's 73. Like many men of my generation - hell, of any generation - my relationship with my father has been rocky. True to all the cliches, my relationship with my dad has improved as I've gotten older. I've come to recognize that he's something so much more than I ever thought he was as a child. Isn't that kinda funny? I think that most kids are shocked to find out that their parents are somehow less than they imagined as children, but as I've gotten older I've developed an appreciation for so many of the qualities my dad displayed that I could never have recognized as a child, or even as a selfish teenager.

Mostly I think about his self-sacrifice. How must his life, as it ended up, differed from what he wanted when he was a young man, I wonder? What dreams did he give up to be a good father, to help support and raise a growing brood he probably never suspected he'd have? A few years ago, I turned 35, and I remember being taken aback at the thought that by the time he was my age, my dad was responsible for a family of eight children (not alone, certainly, but with my mother), and I remember thinking that some how I didn't compare favorably.

In many ways, though, I think my dad would disagree. I've never actually sat down and talked to him about this, but I've always gotten the sense that my father, who is a pretty simple man in many ways (and I mean that in the "uncomplicated" sense, as opposed to the "dumb as a post" sense), ended up happy, for the most part. Or maybe not so much happy, since I don't think he dwells on those sorts of concepts, but content, at least, with the feeling that his life is what it is - there's no going back and starting over. I get the impression that my dad is okay with the choices he made.

I hope that when I'm 73, I feel the same way. Happy birthday, Dad. I love you.

I had a bit of a computer crash earlier this week - well, not exactly a computer crash... more like a computer fender-bender - and lost a number of files that I'd had open and was working on when it happened. Sadly many of them were journal entries that I was going back over. The short version of this story is that as a result, there are only three entries since February 22nd, instead of, say six.

We'll all get over it, I'm sure. Though my bitterness is likely to linger a bit longer than yours, since I'm the poor son of a bitch who not only lost his fleeting impressions of a specific (or several specific) day(s) in his life, he also had to type them. And some of them were bitch-ass long, my friends.

But life is fleeting, isn't it? Better that my computer should crash than, say, a bus should crash into me, right?

Aside from the demise of my brilliant observations on the world at large, it's been a pretty good week. I've been working steadily at The Population Council, a non-profit organization that's involved in population research and women's reproductive health issues around the world. They're keeping me pretty busy, and money's getting back on track. I'm finally getting my act together again, after the hit I took to do Father Figures back in Pittsburgh. The show was a great experience, but it didn't pay much, and I've been struggling to get caught up with money ever since. Ah well... it's the price of being a starving artist.

So lately, I've been re-reading one of my favorite books, Emma Who Saved My Life. It's one of my favorite books because I think it's the quintessential actor-trying-to-make-it- in-New-York story. The author, Wilton Barnhardt, went on to write another of my favorite books, Gospel. But this is his first book, and it's really wonderful. I'm gonna risk copyright infringement imprisonment to share this passage with you, which I think captures perfectly the experience of feeling alone in New York City...

"...and there I was chewing bland flavorless pizza looking fat and washed out in the fluorescent light of Baldo's window reflection and I was all alone while everyone else in the world was out on a date or laughing or dancing or having fun or experience love in some form somewhere - wait, focus on the thought: making love somewhere, in each other's arms, touching, another human being's face and lips just THAT far away before you kissed them, and this wasn't some special occasion but what some people, MOST people did every night, and there I was fat and older chewing on pizza all alone, and instead of a simple I am very lonely, which would have sufficed, the mind burst through some kind of previously untried barrier and it told me: I have been lonely all my life."

I've felt like that before... only for me, it was my reflection in a subway car window. The lighting on subway cars is just as bad, and makes you look every bit as shitty and more as described above. And that's what I love so much about this book; that it captures not just the universal qualities of struggling as an actor here, but the universal qualities of what it is to be human and to find your place in the world.

The best fiction always makes it easy to recognize yourself in a character and his struggles, but still manages to surprise you when you do.

Another Adventure

I can't believe it's been like a week already, but last weekend, Amy and I had another adventure. Well, Amy had even more of an adventure than I did, actually. We made plans to go to Liberty and Ellis Islands, as I'd never been to the Statue of Liberty and she'd never been to Ellis Island. Our little trip, however, was postponed for much of the morning, 'cuz poor Amy lost her bank card, and had to go through the hassle of getting that straightened out.

Eventually, we made it down to Battery Park and bought our tickets for the ferry. I got to Bowling Green first and had to wait for Amy, so I hung out in the park for a while, watching the people go by. It wasn't a terribly cold day, but being right there on the water made for some cold wind, so I was pretty bundled up while I was waiting. I know I've said this before, but it never stops amazing me how beautiful and wonderful and crass this city can be. There I was sitting in this lovely landscaped park with tons of history everywhere I turned, and swarming all around me were the street vendors trying to sell watches and sunglasses out of briefcases. Absolutely amazing. This is a little shot I snapped while I was waiting for Amy... there happened to be a wrought-iron rail right next to this bench, so I put the camera on it, set the timer, and looked away. Directly afterward, a very nice young man came up to me and gave me a tract of bible passages designed to inform me that, unless I very quickly asked Jesus Christ to be my personal lord and savior, that I was going to have a rough time of it in the afterlife.

Proselytizing by way of handing out tracts is beyond tacky, it's pathetic. Look, if you're gonna take the bible seriously and go out and try to convert people, do it the way it's meant to be done: Sway the uninitiated with the passion in your words, and the example in your actions. Don't hand me some crappy-ass piece of paper with bible quotes taken out of context just to prove a silly point. Save some trees along with those souls, shall we?

Anywho, as I said, Amy eventually arrived, and we got on line to get to the ferry. By the way, when Amy saw the picture of the building above, she looked at the light flare and said, "Dude, that's a cross." It freaked her out. I elected not to tell her about Proselytizing Boy.

Eventually, we made it on to the ferry and headed out to Liberty Island. I took, you can imagine, copious shots of our approach to Lady Liberty, but I'm only uploading this one... it's not even my favorite, but it's one of the clearest, and I do like all the shades of blue in this photo.

Because of the big bank card embrolio earlier, we were on the last ferry to make the circuit of Liberty and Ellis Islands, so we had to choose between the two... we couldn't get off at both and still get back on the last ferry. So we opted to forego Liberty Island (the statue itself still isn't open to the public, so we figured we come back when they finally do open her), and both of us were kinda itching to see Ellis Island, so we chose that. I took a lot of shots on Ellis Island, too, but a lot of them just didn't turn out, or turned out too fuzzy, 'cuz I still haven't mastered the art of working without a flash indoors. We did, however, get a couple of nice shots of lower Manhattan from across the harbor:

To the left, Amy in her "I'm a crack addict trying to look sexy" pose.
To the right, the expanse of lower Manhattan from Ellis Island.

As days out go, it was a pretty good one. The bank card trauma kept it from being a great one, but take one look that the kind of day it was in these photos, and you'll know that, all things being relative, it was a good day to be alive, and to live in New York City.

Making an Effort

I've been making more of an effort to get to know people in town - to cultivate new friendships. David, for instance, the guy who responded to my personals ad. We went out a few times but it became apparent that there wasn't really going to be anything romantic about it, so we decided we could still hang out and be friends, since we enjoyed each others' company.

We went to the movies this week, and saw Iris.

I can understand why it's gotten the critical praise that it's gotten, and all four of the lead actors were just incredible, but for some reason it left me feeling a little flat. And I think that had more to do with the movie's editing and production design than anything else. It resembled nothing so much as a really well-made TV film - which might be explained by the fact that it was made for BBC Films.

I'm frankly agog that it's March already. Where the hell is the year going? In a short thirty-one days the first quarter of 2002 will be over.

Maybe I shouldn't be dwelling on that information. Maybe that's just the reverse of wishing your life away or living for the future. We'll call it the "Living in Shock That the Past is Gone" Syndrome. Sound good?