The Night Life

I enjoy going out in New York. Sitting with friends talking over food about our lives or the issues of the day -- sex and politics, the parentheses of most New York conversations. We had just left a reading at Bluestocking, a benefit for the Audre Lord Project. One of my friends was a reader, and we all retired afterwards to Pere Pinard on Ludlow to revive him post-performance.

I missed casual conversation when I lived in Los Angeles. There, almost any social exchange seemed like a business transaction, no words wasted that didn't achieve an end or ingratiate you to someone who could help you achieve it. In New York, conversation is its own reward. If any barter's involved, it's in the exchange of ideas. It's not that we don't do business as well, we just get it out of the way up front or at the end so we can enjoy the rest.

Last night, within a few hours we'd covered everything from the candidacy of Barack Obama to whether or not "Their Eyes Were Watching God" was a literary classic or trashy pulp romance. In between, we veered around updates in academia and the arts, in and out of a few near fights, raised and had to lower our volume many times.

I've been reading up on the Harlem Renaissance for the new novel, and the more I take in, the more I see them as we are today, a ring around a table at a bar, drinking, eating and smoking their way into ideas to change the world. Lately, as rents rise and brownstones give way to luxury towers, I've wondered how New York will stay a city of ideas, where those who discard the box will meet and mingle. Today it's down down downtown, below Houston and into an area on the Lower East Side overlooked in the 80s. As the city changes, so will the focus.

The youngest member of our party left to go home the greatest distance, out to Greenpoint. One day, as the Lower East Side continues to grow into midtown, he may find himself living in the heart of the art scene, and we may all have to commute out there to keep hope alive.

Life in a Dream

For the last three weeks they've been demolishing two buildings behind my home, so they can build more luxury condos in Brooklyn, because we have so few. I woke almost every morning at 7:30 or 8 in the morning to the sound of heavy machinery tearing down brick and cinderblock, digging up concrete floors. My cable was ripped out as a wall fell, despite calls to Time-Warner to warn them. I spent four days without internet or cable TV, and found myself floundering.

I read books, I listened to music, but realized that we live in a sea of media distraction that hooks us like a drug. Deprived of it I fell into a kind of dream state, lost in time without my shows to tell me when I was, cut off from e-mail and the web. After a few days I withdrew enough to remember that there had been a time when I'd lived without any of these things, with a 12" Sony and only broadcast channels turned on only when something I REALLY NEEDED TO SEE was on, not just because it was there.

They finished tearing down the wall and Time-Warner finally came out and reconnected me. I turned in my old standard box I was told wouldn't work after February 28th, and when I hooked up my new digital box I got hundreds of options I hadn't had before. I spent a day locked to the screen like a baby to a teat, sucked in the clean new imagery like a man who had recently regained his sight and wanted to see as much as possible in case he lost it again.

In the next few days, I found myself more and more annoyed by the intrusion. The days without seemed like a distant dream once the cable was back up, but once I had it for a while, I found myself returning to my days of deprivation, now seen as freedom. I turned the TV off instead of desperately grazing for something, anything worth more than five minutes of my attention. I listened to music, wrote and read. In writing this I realize I don't need the TV, much as I love pop culture. I tasted a freedom I'd lost and am looking to regain. The writer's strike had stopped me from watching my two soaps, as they were reduced to hollow puppetry and wooden words. Now I see that bad scab writing and months of reality shows and reruns have soured me on my milk, and I seek nutrition elsewhere.

Where better to look than within? I fall back into my new book, I read my research and find that Zora Neale Hurston's collections of folk tales are far more entertaining than syndicated sitcoms and reality shows. I take them and other research and play with the pieces, assembling them into my own entertainment. Like warm water, it envelopes me and I float in a dream of my own making. I remember the name of a band -- "Kill Your Television" -- and suddenly I get it.