Many people in New York seem to hail from the Midwest. A disconcerting quantity are from Ohio, as am I. I’m often curious to discover what draws them here. The answers are often inarticulate, which is perhaps unfair since it’s hard to put a clear sense of purpose on a time of transition. Or, after a spell, we craft a nugget of clever concision that likely better represents our aspirations rather than the actual facts.
That representation is often a shaping of the ideal we concocted for our existence and this city, or, better our existence in this city, one that is inevitably latent, an agglomeration of narratives we learn through films, novels, perhaps if we are diligent, the consumption of periodicals and media from a distance, in the belief that it will allow us to become more authentically a New Yorker more quickly (and without, say, actually having to become Norman Mailer or Fran Lebowitz).
Because moving here, unless you are wealthy, is really fucking hard. And staying here is often worse. Whether that story was fully formed on arrival, or sanded and polished over time, hardening into a amulet we take out in the depths of drunken night and measure our lives, which have become adorned with better clothes, good food, the occasional foray into some cultural consumption that is absolutely superior whatever it was we knew back in Dayton or Lexington or St. Louis, the company of people mostly less interesting than we hoped, and the intractable sense of superiority of having pulled it off, against this ugly little ornament that is still far more arresting than anything we live from day to day. Maybe it’s wrapped in a Voice article from a generation ago when someone said the exact same thing.
It’s terrifying to come across something so incisive that is seems to have be wrenched from your consciousness, or worse, after having known it from years, you find yourself unable to separate your knowledge of the thing from itself, and your subsequent thinking. Maybe none of it is yours, simply a neurotic deja vu repressed to protect your thinning ego.
The first time I saw Simple Men was the day after my most melodramatic college breakup. My last quarter, fumbling for an adult future, fears for my able to trudge through the end of a thesis, nothing exceptional in any way now, but the seeming end of the world back then, punctuated by a film that seemed so fitted for that moment that I would have had to make it were it not there (not say that I could, but still). I hate quoting films, but the lines “Tomorrow. The first good looking woman I see… I’�m not gonna fall in love with her. That’ll show her!” would pretty much sum up the lives of most every male friend I’ve had for the past fifteen years.
And so if Hal Hartley didn’t exist, we would have had to invent him. But because he does, there are times where the scrabbling desire to be relevant to an uninterested universe seems redundant, since time will unveil another hidden nugget that reminds you that anything original you may have thought was rendered better, and earlier.
Moving here just as third wave of Williamsburg settlement was occurring, college graduates from Brown and RISD stumbling upon Metropolitan Avenue as if they were Columbus establishing a beachhead in the Bahamas, I watched witlessly as they brayed about how ‘over’ Manhattan was. A recent import myself, from a place that absolutely qualified as the hinterlands, but even I managed enough knowledge to point to Hartley’s incomparable Theory of Achievement a sketch that predated us by a half decade, and one that dutifully archived the inevitable reality Williamsburg had become (even as those ‘pioneers’ tear at their hair about its demise now) before most of these kids heard of Neil Postman. And I want to ask them: have you seen this? Really. No, really, because if you had, perhaps a wee bit more humilty would be in order.
And today, today I saw the latest sketch from Hartley with more wit and insight than I manage over dozens and hundreds of words. His new production company, Possible Films, just released a collection of mostly hard to get short works from the past decade. One, The Sisters of Mercy, is unreleased. A remix of a video shot for the Red Hot Organization, Iris, Hartley is disarmingly blunt about what impels a filmmaker at times, noting:
I was a little shocked by how consistent I am in my aims and well as my methods: how much I like to make pictures of beautiful young women on almost any pretext, as well as how emphatic I am about pictorial composition.
This is evident in the resulting video, a series of stunning close ups of two stunning women, one who has evolved into one of those avatars of downtown life that we imagine ourselves living, or meeting, Parker Posey.
The content of the re-cut video is enough to give an idea of what the original was like (“Two young women playing out roles associated with the purchasing of real estate. Questions regarding the worries of ownership versus the worries of being un-invested. Intimations of a life filled with effort and debt.”). Made ten years ago, it looks like it was shot last week. And a few minutes of outtakes of his trademark redundant, deadpan cadences while the camera lovingly ogles Posey and Sabrina Lloyd overlays the signature line from an even earlier paean to Manhattan living, Ambition, where the protagonist, after preaching of litany of qualities of world capitals and their appeal (language, culture, love of music, etc.), blurts out “I love New York because the most beautiful women in the world live here.”
Is that all? Beautiful unattainable women parading the streets below the lavish, unattainable real estate? That can’t be it. Hartley himself reflects on what it is like for those of us who has accomplished what it is his protagonist in Ambition wants most: “I want the image I have of myself and myself to become one”:
I have the same problems not as I did when I was answering phones for a living. Things may be different now. I have more money and it’s easier to meet women now that I have my picture in the paper, and being published with my scripts and all. But the fundamental problems of my life are still the same.[‘Interview by Graham Fuller’, Simple Men and Trust]
And so the image of Hartley films haunt and gird me as I walk over the same streets, a series of tired aphorisms in my head: the more things change, best of times, everything is different. As satisfying as it is to see a reflection of who you are (or simply who you want to be), however wry or pointed it may be, is this an adequate substitute? Is it anything other than nonsensical for those outside your narrow slice of experience. As annoying as I find Jon Jost, maybe he is simply the Hal Hartley of the ten years before I got here, perhaps this is simply another one of those tired, obvious cliches that, if I wait long enough, will turn up in a Roz Chast cartoon, the unaccomplished liberal male who fetishes Hartley films as significant, when they are really just an elaborate version of the malformed desires of shy boys who presume that their complex yearning is the same as actually making a fucking film. I’m sure somewhere Hartley has, like, an answering machine message he left that discusses this very point. I”ll just have to wait around for him to release it. In the meantime, go buy the DVD. He’s self-publishing material, and by the look of it, still is working
for distribution on his new features. Let’s try and show that New York doesn’t yet again have to depend upon Europe to support some of its most accomplished artists.
There’s only trouble and desire.
Many people in New York seem to hail from the Midwest. A disconcerting quantity are from Ohio, as am I. I’m often curious to discover what draws them here. The answers are often inarticulate, which is perhaps unfair since it’s hard to put a clear sense of purpose on a time of transition. Or, after a spell, we craft a nugget of clever concision that likely better represents our aspirations rather than the actual facts.
That representation is often a shaping of the ideal we concocted for our existence and this city, or, better our existence in this city, one that is inevitably latent, an agglomeration of narratives we learn through films, novels, perhaps if we are diligent, the consumption of periodicals and media from a distance, in the belief that it will allow us to become more authentically a New Yorker more quickly (and without, say, actually having to become Norman Mailer or Fran Lebowitz).
Because moving here, unless you are wealthy, is really fucking hard. And staying here is often worse. Whether that story was fully formed on arrival, or sanded and polished over time, hardening into a amulet we take out in the depths of drunken night and measure our lives, which have become adorned with better clothes, good food, the occasional foray into some cultural consumption that is absolutely superior whatever it was we knew back in Dayton or Lexington or St. Louis, the company of people mostly less interesting than we hoped, and the intractable sense of superiority of having pulled it off, against this ugly little ornament that is still far more arresting than anything we live from day to day. Maybe it’s wrapped in a Voice article from a generation ago when someone said the exact same thing.
It’s terrifying to come across something so incisive that is seems to have be wrenched from your consciousness, or worse, after having known it from years, you find yourself unable to separate your knowledge of the thing from itself, and your subsequent thinking. Maybe none of it is yours, simply a neurotic deja vu repressed to protect your thinning ego.
The first time I saw Simple Men was the day after my most melodramatic college breakup. My last quarter, fumbling for an adult future, fears for my able to trudge through the end of a thesis, nothing exceptional in any way now, but the seeming end of the world back then, punctuated by a film that seemed so fitted for that moment that I would have had to make it were it not there (not say that I could, but still). I hate quoting films, but the lines “Tomorrow. The first good looking woman I see… I’�m not gonna fall in love with her. That’ll show her!” would pretty much sum up the lives of most every male friend I’ve had for the past fifteen years.
And so if Hal Hartley didn’t exist, we would have had to invent him. But because he does, there are times where the scrabbling desire to be relevant to an uninterested universe seems redundant, since time will unveil another hidden nugget that reminds you that anything original you may have thought was rendered better, and earlier.
Moving here just as third wave of Williamsburg settlement was occurring, college graduates from Brown and RISD stumbling upon Metropolitan Avenue as if they were Columbus establishing a beachhead in the Bahamas, I watched witlessly as they brayed about how ‘over’ Manhattan was. A recent import myself, from a place that absolutely qualified as the hinterlands, but even I managed enough knowledge to point to Hartley’s incomparable Theory of Achievement a sketch that predated us by a half decade, and one that dutifully archived the inevitable reality Williamsburg had become (even as those ‘pioneers’ tear at their hair about its demise now) before most of these kids heard of Neil Postman. And I want to ask them: have you seen this? Really. No, really, because if you had, perhaps a wee bit more humilty would be in order.
And today, today I saw the latest sketch from Hartley with more wit and insight than I manage over dozens and hundreds of words. His new production company, Possible Films, just released a collection of mostly hard to get short works from the past decade. One, The Sisters of Mercy, is unreleased. A remix of a video shot for the Red Hot Organization, Iris, Hartley is disarmingly blunt about what impels a filmmaker at times, noting:
This is evident in the resulting video, a series of stunning close ups of two stunning women, one who has evolved into one of those avatars of downtown life that we imagine ourselves living, or meeting, Parker Posey.
The content of the re-cut video is enough to give an idea of what the original was like (“Two young women playing out roles associated with the purchasing of real estate. Questions regarding the worries of ownership versus the worries of being un-invested. Intimations of a life filled with effort and debt.”). Made ten years ago, it looks like it was shot last week. And a few minutes of outtakes of his trademark redundant, deadpan cadences while the camera lovingly ogles Posey and Sabrina Lloyd overlays the signature line from an even earlier paean to Manhattan living, Ambition, where the protagonist, after preaching of litany of qualities of world capitals and their appeal (language, culture, love of music, etc.), blurts out “I love New York because the most beautiful women in the world live here.”
Is that all? Beautiful unattainable women parading the streets below the lavish, unattainable real estate? That can’t be it. Hartley himself reflects on what it is like for those of us who has accomplished what it is his protagonist in Ambition wants most: “I want the image I have of myself and myself to become one”:
And so the image of Hartley films haunt and gird me as I walk over the same streets, a series of tired aphorisms in my head: the more things change, best of times, everything is different. As satisfying as it is to see a reflection of who you are (or simply who you want to be), however wry or pointed it may be, is this an adequate substitute? Is it anything other than nonsensical for those outside your narrow slice of experience. As annoying as I find Jon Jost, maybe he is simply the Hal Hartley of the ten years before I got here, perhaps this is simply another one of those tired, obvious cliches that, if I wait long enough, will turn up in a Roz Chast cartoon, the unaccomplished liberal male who fetishes Hartley films as significant, when they are really just an elaborate version of the malformed desires of shy boys who presume that their complex yearning is the same as actually making a fucking film. I’m sure somewhere Hartley has, like, an answering machine message he left that discusses this very point. I”ll just have to wait around for him to release it. In the meantime, go buy the DVD. He’s self-publishing material, and by the look of it, still is working
for distribution on his new features. Let’s try and show that New York doesn’t yet again have to depend upon Europe to support some of its most accomplished artists.