Gritty City
2014
tourist with a typewriter…
“Barton Fink” continues to be a sentimental favorite from college days. Outlasting “Altered States”; “Unbearable Lightness of Being”; “Wings of Desire” and even “In the Mood for Love”. Up there with “Glengarry Glen Ross” in the personal pantheon… but I digress before I have even started.
Among the many great scenes and lines - Charlie ‘Madman’ Mundt admonishes Barton for the vicarious nature of his writing:
“You think I made your life hell? Take a look around this dump. You’re just a tourist with a typewriter, Barton, I live here.”
Inevitable, almost inescapable is that role. Want to write a gritty, slice of life, you need lowlifes. You need your junkies, petty thieves and street walkers… But you don’t need them to speak as they will be somewhat random, perhaps depressing. You just need them for the local color. They are badges of authenticity…
I don’t think I ever noticed this before following a number of sex workers and sw advocates on twitter. There was a shock of recognition that I fell prey to this distancing.
It is in everyhting from classic 60’s music: “But I get no offers, / Just a come-on from the whores / On Seventh Avenue / I do declare, / There were times when I was so lonesome / I took some comfort there.”
to yesterday’s Moth podcast where the backdrop of an initial romanitic connection is a junkie ODing at a Lower East Side bar in NYC.
You need that in the middle distance - or else it is not real.
I have lived in or a handful of miles from NYC my whole life. There are days where it can shock me and reduce me to that most inauthentic state of being a tourist. A new neighborhood or a new find in a neighborhood I thought I knew… or new levels of grittiness and the ‘authentic’. Watching a dying man shot through the eye on a Chinatown sidewalk which interrupted a meal of snail with black beans…
There is almost no way I can phrase that without sounding incredibly self-centered and touristic
Tom Waits, William Burroughs, Henry Miller