The Book Party

I am at the Neue gallery in cocktail attire, hob-nobbing with the literary elite of the Upper East Side. Well, sort of. By hob-nobbing I mean sitting at a desk attempting to sell Gerald Stern's new book of essays, by “literary elite” I mean a very particular club of New York-based Jewish-American poets who were best known in the 1960s. Mr. Stern is throwing a launch party here at the gallery tonight. I have met the man already, in one of those totally cliché accidentally-meeting-a-famous-person gaffy exchanges; I was reading his book here at my little table and he, unrecognizable from the cover picture, snuck up behind me and asked 'how is it?' before introducing himself as 'Jerry.'

I've made friends with the catering team. They keep lingering by my area on the edge of the party just long enough for me to snatch a salmon pinwheel...or four. A Hector Elizondo-esque gallery manager circles, hawk-like, protective but somehow redundant. I keep thinking I'll see personalities I recognize – Joan Didion, perhaps? Woody Allen? – but typical to the restrictions of 'writer celebrity,' I can't pin a single face down. I may have read some of these people in English classes (it's actually becoming more likely that a lot of folks here helped publish people I read in English classes) but now these men – if these men are those men – walk with canes. They impudently wear their hats inside and bray their Brooklyn drawls out to this austere Austrian stronghold, defying an elitism they have always embodied for me.

For these men (and women, but fewer women) are writers, sitting on comfortable success and comparative acclaim...whoops, G. Stern has come my way to insist I'm sitting on his man purse. I am not. His friends nearby wink in a kind of apology, the matter is laughed off.

Hector Elizondo – his name is Tom in real life – asks if I've gotten a chance to see upstairs yet. I motion to the books, as if they need constant tending. H tells me there are three Klimt, when I get a chance. He seems proud.

I got this gig through my friend Darcy, who is one of those fabulous born and bred New Yorker types who calls me three or four times a year for some really excellent reason: dinner with her family at a LES inoteca, birthday trip to Mohonk Mountain, brother's film premiere launch party at Silvercup. Darce is in charge of The List, because a pushy woman noticed that she was dressed more “weather appropriate” than me and so oughta take the door. It's true, my feathers stick out: when people say cocktail attire I assume the bright lime Diane von Furstenberg wrap-dress from 2000 and my junior green Jackie O coat. D and me wink at one another across the marble lobby. Luckily I don't feel out of place because I wasn't really invited to this party; also, I am ridiculous.

Last week my mom saw Zadie Smith speak at Politics and Prose, and allegedly my favorite teach REMEMBERED me. Quote: “Of course I know Brittany, she's brilliant!” I am bragging this out to you now when clearly Zadie Smith is from England where brilliant doesn't always mean brilliant and of course if a mother asks if you remember her daughter in a book-signing line there is but one clear response, obvi...still. Still! Still, I think! Another sign, for those who mark their lives in signs: Monday I was at the Strand book-shopping with a buddy and a man, a stranger, actually did a double take and said, “I thought you WERE Zadie Smith!” This is a theatrical-seeming coincidence, no? She's not that well-known. Not everyone knows what she looks like. Buddy huffed the stranger's remark off as petty racism – which is what well-meaning caucasian friends sometimes do whenever a person of color is said to look like another person of color , teehee – but I dreamt big for a moment. Maybe I could be Zadie Smith. Maybe I am her. What if I just borrowed her vision one day and slipped into her life and fabulous headwear? Back at the party, I think I see Anne Meara! It is not Anne Meara after all.

People are spilling out of the gallery. The reading is over. This morning I went to brunch with a poet/librarian, and we spoke about the books on our nightstands and that harping rhetorical, “is it possible to really delve into/give your soul to two things at once? Let alone, like, four?” I thought about the renaissance people I know, the janes and jacks of many trades. I thought about discipline. I thought about choice. I thought about which way is “taking it easy on yourself,” vs. which way is “selling out.” I thought about the pragmatics of having only just enough time on the earth, and presumably just enough activity, energy, to squeeze into this big countdown.

This party is the Book World, or a country in it. This party is Eileen Fisher and chunky jewelry and booties and a few patent eccentrics. The reading at the gallery for two hundred of your nearest and dearest is a worthwhile success marker for many writers, maybe most. So dramatic hypothetical: were this the particular life the one I wanted, decided to pursue, I would inevitably find myself at more events like this. Down the road. As opposed to other kinds of parties, for there are as many kinds of parties as there are guests. This one is in a fancy gallery and it's clear we won't be staying too late or speaking too loud. In a very superficial and very reductive sense, in a certain equation of my future this party would be something I'd need to get used to, or become something I'd want.

I drink champagne.

The problem with the scary question (DEARGODWHATDOIDOWITHMYLIFE) when you have a lot of “options” (read:flights of fancy, ardent delusions, overconfidence, earnestness at least) is that there's no point. Asking the question itself is a means of dillydallying; in all the time I spend sighing to you about where will I go Rhett what will I do, I might have written a chapbook OR gone on thirty auditions. A lot of the jacks and janes I know – whose gumption I so admire – are fantastic, talented people, but a little too content with their crappy service jobs. Myself included. And I do believe the world is changing. The goals for the art-maker or the philosopher are no longer tied to money, if they ever were. But there is also such freedom and some romance in this. It seems we have borrowed more time with which to decide on or juggle various projects, and the stakes not being as dire as “make money with this!” WE are free to put our art on the back-burner, or perfect it over years, or tell people we're doing it when we're not howsoever we choose. No one is waiting. We are making no one wait. Yet I think there will come a point when you start dreaming of your own stuffy book party. I think it happened to the men of Gerald Stern's generation. I do not think it's the same as “selling out,” but by 'it' I mean lingering on but one bliss...if you are the kind of person who wants to move and shake. Strike that, reverse it: I do not quite believe that the answer to the scary question is as simple as “you can't do everything, pick one.” Quentin Tarantino is also a successful dude rancher, after all. But I do think some of our serious, semi-delusional energy might be thrown harder behind the things we want to achieve. Take yourself seriously. Do not talk about the work; do the work.

Hector, seeing me scribble, glances over at one point and asks me if I'm a writer. Usually I hem and haw at this question, or give people information they didn't ask for: I am a / and a / and a/, or trying to be. Today I say 'yes,' and while it clicks it also hurts – a selection is an edit after all – but Hector just smiles. He says, “well, you're in the right place.”

Hmm. Maybe I am. 

Kid Science

Guys I have twenty-two pages left of Infinite Jest and I can't do it, won't do it, because when I get to the end it will be over for real. And what then? Because that's all he wrote.

Guys I have twenty-two pages left of this Terra-turning book and I can't do it, won't do it, because after the fall where will all my smug subway not-quite-conversation-starters go? How will I tell the world at large that I talk the talk and walk the walk? Because it's about being lonely, and surely the people who've read this gospel understand all the weird facial machinations I'm making at all times, trying to divert attention quietly in a crowded room. Maybe.

Listlessly listening to a Laura Nyro record that the LP Man on Astor Place said I'd “really dig.” He was right. Plus it's raining in sporadic sheets in this here city of long islands, and the murk of it all lends itself to what is sic transit gloria here and now, that first a phrase I really just grasped the meaning of. The locomotive behind today's clacking language is I think I might want to be a writer, for real, for keeps. I also think that my life is presently like the elves going West in Lord of the Rings in that another lush summer (of long-form experiments in lifestyle) is coming to the end of its heyday. I am always talking and fretting and fuming about getting older and accepting subsequent personal responsibilities, but, like Liz Taylor liked to say, I think now might be the time for guts and guile. One of the times. Just something to draw attention to and name, like the autumn leaves in Central Park.

Like, I need to meet deadlines. Sure. Given. Like, the time has come the walrus said to know certain things for sure like, what kind of person you want to be around, like, how does your ideal morning feel, like, do you really like this thing you do, like, how MUCH? Like, what are you willing to work for? And do you know in your soul what work IS as opposed to ISN'T? And then I keep clutching at this: “We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately – the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it,” (Hal Incandenza).

I think, and so do many other characters in Infinite Jest and presumably the author, that the “something pathetic about it,” is a de facto cop out. Cuz the thing is it does feel awfully pathetic to the boxed-up intellectual who fears small-talk to give it away in a mundane sense, I know for I have seen. It's the end of solipsism, really, it's a total admission that you are not self-sufficient in the universe nor interesting or central enough to affect change by Just Being You, You outside the Chess Club or college or organized sports-related fun. I have always understood you, lackluster non-joiner kids and tattooed hooligans who work in “freelance.” Yet we've all still got to DO something, regardless of how anathema we feel to the Grain. Which is to say, we all have to compromise. And some kinds of DOING and COMPROMISING and BEING IN THE WORLD seem more practically worthwhile than other kinds because certain cults seem to have bigger fanbases: e.g the nuclear family, the democracy, the church, THEATRE! Doing things means you believe in things. Believing in things means you're alive. When other people are following you or leaning on you it gets bigger, this world, it blows right up.

But the beast of burden for the brainiac is that this arrangement is fraught with visible insincerity and suspicious motive, because doesn't this math defy altruism, isn't it after all like what Tennessee Williams says (to debunk ALL your romantic notions): “using people is what we think of as love,” mustn't it be like that if we're only ever doing things to comfort ourselves, at the end of the day? (Exhale) Does this not make everything semi-vapid, semi-fake, and if so why live under such a tacit banner of mediocrity? Or at all? Is this what it is to look for happiness and if so why is this at all okay, much less the Holy Grail in America? Everything becomes but a prop under the cool light of realizing we move around because we find and fear deficiency. And suddenly everyone is an actor, and all the world's a stage, and your armchair philosophy with dubious quotations throughout is the mast on a ship heading anywhere but Pleasure Town because also hell is other people, according to Sartre.

But again, 4pm, here at the end of the day. At the end of the book. I will come back and confirm in twenty-five minutes, but I'm pretty sure that there are some rules, and these are not simply concessions or ways to Get (fleetingly) Happy with abandon and no insight. Maybe 'social contract' is a good term but actually not quite I think the rules are things you owe your brief time on the planet, the rules are actually how to get out of your own map and into the scary mystery of another person's. The rules, I'm finding, SEEM selfish and frighten the armchair philosopher and tattooed hooligan and Hal Incandenza but they aren't a cop-out, are in fact the opposite of a cop-out, are a cop-in, because you know while you're following them that they're pathetic, and to admit to having a flaw and wanting to change it is the bravest thing a person can do, right? Boston AA is corny, but it works. This is a better way to think, I think.

So some rules are: you have to pay the electric bill. You have to go out on blind dates sometimes, and sometimes you have to go to graduate school, and sometimes – the early twenties have become about discerning when, exactly – you have to let people kiss you on early AM corners and not start psychoanalyzing the gesture even before its over. And sometimes you have to stay at the party way too late or leave way too early (you have to go, either way) and sometimes you have to pick a fight, and sometimes you need to flee the state or get a tattoo or let someone hurt you. Sometimes you have to end phone calls and say no! with conviction and sometimes you have to tell lies to best friends and often you have to apologize, other times you have to say Yes! And a lot of these Sometimes' will stick and direct traffic in your autobiography, and how frightening to release into the knowledge that an idiot kid made a lot of the choices whose fruit will be bearing down on your shoulders at fifty and sixty years old, but following the rules is the only way. And not everyone can abide, and I constantly hope for the grace to neither begrudge or judge or occasionally envy these people. This is sink or swim country, and most of us are nowhere near Michael Phelps' but a hilarious universe throws us into the deep end nonetheless and there's nothing for it but to make some kind of attempt and there's no one to blame after a point, just a project, this is breathing, and finishing great books, and being brave. Breathing is pretty brave, you guys, if done with conviction.

Wind is still making music with the trees outside. Laura Nyro's clicked off. Later I'm going to the movies with a good good friend. Yesterday I sat in Union Square with another good good friend and ate dessert and talked about everything, and before that I went to rehearsal, and I talked to my Mom on the phone, and I kissed a person I liked in the very early AM and I worried a little about money and feeling foolish and I danced before that, a lot, to a favorite song, and I laughed until my stomach hurt and I ate an okay sandwich and I saw a great movie and I saw an old friend and--

I don't want a medal, exactly. I'm not sure I even want your full attention. But I do want something else entirely, a TBD kind of to-do, and the fire of this fuels me, always, even while I can't quite seem to hold on to it (It being FIRE and all) and have lost my ability to pronounce its name, while sometimes it has burned deep and other times it has cooled off to near-invisibility, while I've met such a precious, interesting few amount of people who seem to also be burning alive and care about feeding flame rather than putting it out, what I know for certain these days is that it's never going to stop being hungry. It's never going to go out.

What You DO

We're on a rock in Central Park and Dear One's telling me about a subway encounter. A livid woman chased her cheating boyfriend through inter-car doors on the Manhattan bridge. There was the quiet consensus from all early morning commuters aboard that comes when one person does something zany. Out of nowhere, the livid woman started wailing on a bystander teenage girl, calling her 'the other woman.' Dear One acted on a terrified impulse, she rushed to the girl's aid, the livid woman was restrained. The train stopped and caused a big delay. We're talking about people's reactions. We're defining heroes.

Apparently, no men came to the girl's aid while the woman was wailing on her. We think about this in the constellation of gender politics. Maybe lady-lady crime doesn't seem as dangerous to them, we think. But still.

A friend of ours weighs in, an older white buddy: he thinks he might have been afraid to intercede because of, he hates to say it, a kind of racial fear. The livid woman was Latina and the girl was black. But the girl wasn't even connected to the couple fighting, Dear One says. We decide this is a lame excuse but a good limit to recognize in yourself, maybe. But still.

A guy on the subway, a skater-dude type, groaned actively about the wait for the police. The girl seemed fine. She wasn't hurt. He had to get to work. We decide he's a class A dirtbag, after the fact.

We talk about times we've called the police when passing homeless people who seem ill on the street. I've done it twice, I say, and feel I am bragging a little. Both people woke up before help arrived. It's better to be safe than sorry. I do the breathing test, she says, I wait to see if they're okay. Or sometimes if I'm on my way somewhere I'll check for them coming back, if they're still there I'll do something.

We're still on the rock.

Dear One is still visibly shaken from the subway encounter three days ago. She makes a face at the basin below.

We get to talking about the future, how the artists we know are beginning to separate like wheat and chaff. Did you know so and so got a “real job.” We talk about compromises and how difficult it all is, how stupidly hard to schedule things and make rent, how for the time being we wouldn't trade it in. We talk about why we do it, if it's so hard. I forget, we were also talking about the annexation of Hawaii and some disturbing nineteenth century imperialist political rhetoric. I think everything you do, no matter what, you ought to be thinking of it as a gift, she says. She says the people looking to be famous, or leave a legacy or an imprint in a future disconnected to now, to another person that's for the wrong reasons, that impulse. So there is a right way and a wrong way, we dismally conclude. And some things are hard, but often these things are quite clear.

Going home, make certain mistakes: pass beggars, pout at suits, ignore questions. We've talked about the political system, too. How you are manipulated. How it is an engine. How the complicated part comes in when do-you-vote-for-Jill-Stein-and-sleep-tight or understand the pulse of the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, sigh and pray in your little booth voting for Obama, deciding to believe in something, moving the world around in 'bigger pictures' when you yourself are oh-so-small. And give yourself points for voting, because that's much of it. /making the eye contact/ defending the victim, that's much of it.

It isn't enough, though. You, I, we must live with that.  

Where I Live

This morning I walked up Greenpoint Avenue and started introducing myself sheepishly to local business-owners: “Oh no, I'm just looking around. But I love your malt shop. I'm new to the neighborhood.” Most of the local business-owners were hefty-looking veteran types with trace Greek accents, psyche, most of the local business owners were Latina women in blue jeans, psyche, most of the local business owners were thin, bespectacled Korean women who reminded me – improbably – of one of my grandmothers. If you've never been farther into Queens than Astoria, I am here to remind you that if there is a New York melting pot, this might be the place. In Brooklyn, where I have witnessed a few cluttered kinds fighting for resources (this is called diversity) groups of people have seemed less integrated; in Crown Heights there are the entrenched Hasidim, the slightly less-entrenched Afro-Carribbeans, and the new-to-town biracial couples with their children in hemp sweaters. In Sunnyside everyone looks to have been here for years and years, seemingly un-ruffled by what is, to the rest of New York, a housing crisis. All of the 'r's I've heard roll off everyone's tongue the same way.

Which is almost to say, not at all.

When I told my friends I was moving to Queens, a lot of them had strong reactions: long, exasperated 'ugggggghs' were the norm. A dear one told me, “That's great for you, but if I wanted to live in the suburbs I wouldn't live in New York City.” I can't entirely defend this. There is an element of Sunnyside that is decidedly Mayberryan; now I live a block from a public library, and a post office, and many un-ironic diners and playgrounds and schools. There is air and space and generally un-interesting architecture. I can actually feel where this part of the borough stops being cool: riding the 7 train, I pass PS1 and the graffitied walls at Court Square and suddenly the wash of people getting on and off are second tier businessmen, are high school field-hockey players, are greengrocers (one assumes, with the reductive gaze of the starry-eyed transplant). And most of all, there are families: in sneakers and blue jeans, families going to church, families recognizing each other in the street, families running errands for the week. Not bars but pubs. Not cabs but buses. Still I will maintain that this is New York, it is obviously New York, it is only New York. It feels suburban out here in that it's a place where people live who work somewhere else, but people in Queens have chosen to be here, and nothing about it feels anecdotal or aspiring to Manhattan. Lugging groceries back to my apartment, I thought, “I live in a neighborhood now.” I can imagine sticking around.

For the record, my rent is something like $850.00 a month.

II.

I went to the Whitney museum this Thursday, with the same dear one who disdains the whole concept of the suburbs. This was both of our (only) day's off in weeks, and it was designed to be lovely, and I rode the 7 to the 6 and bought bagels and muffins and coffee, and we ate breakfast on a high ledge looking out over Madison Avenue. We talked about art and boys and politics and a little below our ledge we watched unhurried women in David Yurman jewelry walk in and out of Carolina Herrerra. We watched packs of pedigreed dogs vying for sidewalk space, some wearing sweaters. Old men with caps and papers and coffees and elbow patches. Many subtle spins on the navy blue business suit. Gold-braided doormen! People with the best haircuts getting in and out of town cars! Then, on the ledge, we two, munching, wearing battered Tom's shoes, clutching disintegrating tote bags. My friend had cause to interrupt our conversation and say, “I actually feel like a tourist here.”

The Upper East Side is just where you left it, Pierpont Morgan. There are brownstones and sandstones and limestones in the east eighties with Juliet balconies that do actively take my breath away, that fill me with the most peculiar kind of lust. Leaves fall on cobblestones outside the park. I remember visiting New York before I lived here and tooling around the Upper East Side with my family, playing the 'pick your dream house' game on each street. I “remember” the Upper East Side from a fair amount of Woody Allen movies, and from Sex and the City, and if I am honest the Upper East Side is a lot of what I was dreaming of when I picked New York for keeps. “How New York,” people say here. “This is New York!” people say here. This is a part of the vision, the postcard. It is not where I live.

After we walk into and out of Central Park (and past the Plaza hotel...) I have the weirdest little flicker of mania. Dear One and I are strolling down Lexington, passing stores with haute couture children's clothing, and I see a pastry shop. She tugs on my arm, but before I fully realize what I'm doing I go in and purchase three very posh desserts at the St. Ambreuse cafe. A beautiful woman in a deeply fashionable print dress sells these desserts to me, and as she's ringing up the tartelets (there were no prices in the case) and wrapping them up for me (in sheafs and sheafs of paper and stickers) she says something cute like “just the other day, I went home with a whole cake, these are un-resistable.” And I think, someone has to be having a joke somewhere, right? When my eyebrows flinch up to see the purchase total appear on the register, when I try to imagine this 95 pound woman eating even a bite of cake, anywhere, ever? And I get so sad for a second. I think about all the things I may never get to have. I start to feel stupid and incredibly guilty about feeling sad. There is an article in The New Yorker this week about Sudan. A lot of people move through their lives without unchecked hope, and a great deal of them can't even visit the best-looking part of an American metropolis. So deal, Britt, go home to your outer borough.

For the record, the desserts came to something like $35.00. For three.

III.

I'm reading E.L Doctorow's Ragtime, which is a smashing love letter to the American mythos. I say mythos because Doctorow bleeds fiction and fact by putting characters like Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit and JP Morgan side by side with anonymous creations like a family made of Mother, Father and Mother's Brother. I also say mythos because Ragtime reads like a history book while telling big, sweet stories about The Dream: people pull themselves up by their bootstraps (or try to), people confront their prejudices. A lot of the book's about New York, in one way or another. I'm also about to start making a play about America, a rambling folk musical kind of to-do, and have been asked as a part of this process to start pinpointing My America, not yours but MINE.

So in the aftermath of the Roosevelts' and the Wild West and the Empire State Building and Marilyn Monroe and Broadway's Golden Age and Lewis and Clarke and the Civil War, even Woody Allen, the meat of it, history, the fun parts, I am really trying to think about My America, what it is in My America. This is not the same as what's in the newspaper this morning, or even what's in my diary on September 11, 2001. Really thinking about My America has got me dancing between the odd not-quite-nostalgia I chased all the way to the Big City (the Fosse, the Rent, the Carrie Bradshaw, the Upper East Side, all the pertinent fictions) and the day-to-day gristle of what it feels like to actually occupy this place. Modern New York hipster-culture is preoccupied with the past, with the idea of the thing, this we know: vintage clothes, toys, ideas are the coolest kind. And I am an actor. I followed a very particular, well-tested recipe when coming to audition for New York University all by lonesome, with a guitar case full of clothes, in April 2008. Still, I am surprised by how hard it is getting to face that my life does not always measure up to the life I feel I aimed for and engineered, in moving here. I go to the Whitney with a friend I love, I have the most wonderful days, no cause for complaint. Still, it is about money. I cannot afford fancy dessert. I am also not famous yet. My America is married to Me because the country's whole premise is a storybook template for the life I'm seeking. I am testing a hypothesis every day I live in New York. I am paying for it.

Beyond the cold glory of the upper eighties, where I was not welcomed, I turned around and looked for My America in the places where I actually hang out. I was surprised by the elegance and dignity of my new neighbors in Queens, who seem at my first glance to be content outside scrutiny, electing to make homes and lifestyles away from the Manhattan that everyone everywhere else I know is actively trying to get to. And – joke part two – the people in my part of Queens are physically quite close to the Empire State Building and the Great White Way and even the Whitney Museum, they are a Reality next door to the Myth. People in families, who one assumes have sacrificed something at some point, have decided to make homes in Queens. Some water separates them from someone's idea of a glittery paradise. I wonder, the longer I stay here, which myth is shed first.

We are lucky, lucky, lucky.

creeps in this petty pace

 I picked a hard and interesting place to live, and so did everyone else here. Maybe that means we're all hard and interesting. It's already hard and interesting to be human; hard and interesting to go it alone (we're all kind of alone), hard and interesting to be with others.

Maybe you've had this day: Facebook wants my cryptic alt-rock lyrics status updates, and I need things like gummy beard and vodka-soda, and I hate everyone, and I have to walk forty blocks alone and listen to LCD Soundsystem and weep, and when I get home I shall cut my hair, or pierce my ear, that is if I don't get a tattoo before I get home, and no one understands me but you James Mercer, but you, David Foster Wallace. I'm simultaneously enraged and comforted by the bajillion other people riding MY same train home sitting with MY same look on their faces, but none of them will strike up a conversation and change MY life. All while reason, while temperate superego are trying to count the many blessings and remind me of last Wednesday, when it was magic, last Wednesday, the TV movie version of life, when there was brief nameless love I haven't paid for yet and good company and good ideas and sweet, sticky, sexy summer heat. Did I realize it then? How perfect it was? How silly, how temporary and predictable it is today? How it will hurt again. When it rains, it pours. When it rains, everything is still stupid, just advanced stupid, Stupid 201.

In MOODS it is hard to see the ground or the sky. In MOODS it is hard to be selfless and make considered, reasonable decisions. Yet these MOODS! Thank God for them! When I get home on This Day I'll write it all down, I'll call my mom, and still is the persisting wish (probably the most insane part of it all, given...well, given everything) -- someone tomorrow will care even more. It's just around the river bend, or avenue, or month. And pain and magic will collect and from these will emerge fantastic art and I will be praised and adored and important and famous forever and ever, you're not bipolar! Only an eternal optimist! That last seat on the subway is for you, now claim your reward! Someday you will even make the time to make this art, surely. But wait, my cat distracts me, distracted by her shadow.

I haven't found a moral yet. No, I guess the moral is perspective. But it's not that simple. I don't even think it's an English word yet; I like to toss around 'ennui.' I'm already excited to read this when I'm forty, look back and laugh at or pity or believe in this baby who's all about the 'yet.' Sooo, when you've had or have This Day, maybe you'll watch Garden State. Or read something I've already read in a park. And even if I don't talk to you there, hear it now, okay? I'm in it, in it silly, in it right there with you. Now say the same.

It should end here, but there's more-more-alizing to be found: my suggestion is find somebody to text you 'You're great!' (I'll do it) or 'Take a deep breath, remember you're amazing!' or 'Summer called/23 called/it gets better,' (And worse) and I get it! I get the maddening corniness of one day at a time, it is one of those true things too banal to even bandy about. But I gettttt it. Scarlet O'Hara. Alcoholics Anonymous. Rent. Because do you guys realize what's in just twenty-four hours? Too much! Just too too much! Hahaha!

WHAT AN AWESOME STUDENT GRADUATION SPEECH MIGHT HAVE BEEN

Sitting down to write this, I did a lot of research about graduation speeches in pop culture. I'm sure we're all familiar with those particular 90s movies cliches – “together, we can do anything!” or “dreams can overcome!” etc, but I have to say that my studies revealed a personal favorite from Winona Ryder's character in the movie Reality Bites. As a student speaker at her graduation she stands before her entire university with cue cards out of order, and is forced to finish a rallying declaration of independence with the rather lame “The answer is....I don't know.” To be perfectly honest, I don't know, either. And despite what have been four incredible years at this institution, years in which we've all had the wild opportunity to “pursue our dreams,” “become ourselves,” years in which most answers to most questions have been “Yes, go for it!” I'm leaving Tisch so full of “LET'S GO FOR IT!” that I begin to realize this process of becoming a bona fide adult will be about making choices, making sacrifices, editing. I feel so capable and so ready, but what I must find now is the confidence of commitment. CAN I make a perceptive off-off Broadway theatre piece with nine friends and a bucket? Totally! CAN I launch a web-series about a struggling Journey cover band? Absolutely! But will these projects come at the expense of, say, health insurance? At least in the short term future? Will following my present bliss lead me to hardship, occasionally? Maybe. I haven't been thinking about that, I've been painting my feelings. Yikes. It's a very interesting climate we graduate into today. The streets of this city seem awash with the “Mid -Twenties and Somewhat Listless,” the people who support their art work with day jobs because they want to and can and the mainstream world doesn't always reward performance art or experimental filmmaking the way we've been taught to think it should. And I do believe it should, and I do believe all of us in this room have already surmounted great odds to pursue a deep, burrowing passion, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried about balancing what I love to do with what I know I must do, or be willing to do, to survive here. This 'art life' will be a long one, you guys, and it will be rocky, in tandem with what we hear about the world from The Colbert Report each night. The economy is bad, the environment is flagging, social stratification and revolution are happening everywhere, the world is probably ending this December anyways...how are we to reconcile all of that 'no' with the profound acceptance, the YES, we've experienced at Tisch? How is Art to be situated in this modern and ever-changing world? If only twenty people come to see my show, has it succeeded in a large sense? Does what I do even matter? Cue the existential crisis. Then I read an article in New York magazine about your average Williamsburging New York twenty-something, who is maybe auditioning on the side of pet-sitting, or writing a novel in the wee hours of their night shift host job, or trying to hold on to an inflated ego after a brief, thrilling moment of financial and commercial success. The contention of this article was that our generations' standard of measuring a lifetime's success has shifted in this fundamental way – apparently people these days are far more concerned with finding happiness over the course of their lives than reaching one singular, tangible goal. This really heartened me. Anytime the world applauds starry-eyed idealism, I'm on board. But then I took a long look around the Tisch community and thought, “Duh--” For me, this education has been in total a process of self-realization. I've come to believe so fiercely that the creative outlet is one of those things that make humans human. I'm stunned by how brave the people in this room are, and so serious about what they want. Most days at Tisch – even those so popular (at least in the drama department) when you're crying hysterically to a wise mentor about your soul – have been nothing short of transcendental. I feel so fortunate to have met and worked with people in this room through any kind of artistic communion, because less do I take away some concrete formula for success as I graduate, more do I take away an enlarged sense of humanity. And empathy. And courage. I feel I've been granted a heightened insight into all the things one human might contain, and for that I'll always be grateful. For that, for better or worse, I'll always be Brittany, I think. So, to bring this chugging meditation back to Starry-eyed Idealism Station, what I have decided to believe about our future is this: it will be stunningly hard to hold on to these desires in this world, but our sensibility is one engineered to accept challenge with grace, to move forward with nearly un-checked audacity, to seek understanding from and of our fellows way more than we've ever needed to quantify a future with physical gains. Which is not to say that the next Spielbergs' and Andersons' or Lori-Parks' or Streeps' are not sitting in this room, poised to alter the art world forever. On the contrary, we're all here and equipped for a certain kind of success, but we're different, and I believe that willingness to engage with the different and the uncomfortable will make all of our lives rich. That's why we came to this school, really. It's definitely why we graduate now. I wish all of you the best possibly luck on the road to prioritizing and sating your hunger. I know that some of the world's most exciting humans, most exciting artists, are heading out on their lonesome rocky road today. So thank you for being around me, and sharing all of your gifts and questions and growing up for four years. Thanks also to those mentors who have guided and gently nudged what really must be my soul in all different directions, thank you to the teachers who have spent time making me feel my heart can always get bigger. It's been a time. I think that desire is just as much of a choice as we need to have made by these early twenties, I think it can begin a life in 2012. So the future is funny-shaped, oblique, uncertain – we are not.

Solipsism and the City

It occurred to me to wait to post this until I actually saw the premiere of Lena Dunham's 'Girls' on HBO. Then I remembered that a) I'm not exactly an authority, here in the blogosphere; people don't actively queue for my opinions and b) this winning combination of nonchalant defeatism and navel-gazing makes me the exact target audience for this show and de facto a voice to be heard. I've seen Tiny Furniture anyways.

Preface: I love my life. I really do. Its problems are really much closer to TV pratfalls than the actual pain or despair I skirt daily when I'm not giving money to subway panhandlers; in fact this pathological middle-class guilt is probably the circuitous source of any big depressions or lacks I've ever known.
(I already don't like this – everyone knows you don't get to quantify your life's pain. But Lena Dunham is under my skin, and in a weird way I feel I owe her an explanation.) I like to think I kiss the ground I walk on daily, give thanks in my pithy way to not God exactly but something closer to the Force in Star Wars...I give thanks for a fabulous band of witty malcontented friends, and funny, wildly supportive and uniquely amazing family members, my city, this structure-less almost-career plan I'm forging ahead with – we'll call it art, for clarity purposes. I am happy and very, very lucky. That said, buckle up for this here rage against the modern self-referential comedy machine. I feel I get to see colors, reflections, abstractions and aspirations of my entirely pleasant and scarcely dull existence hoisted upon the big and small screen almost every day. And I do have feelings about that.

Lena Dunham's apparently making an HBO series about us, you guys. My guys. My favorites: the listless, lonely, hyper-quick, pretty poor, art brut underemployed Funny Girls in all their meandering, cynical glory. The Me's, the You's, the Everyone We Know.

At first I was excited. The world needs to know! We have a voice, we make a generation! Love us, preach our humor to Middle America, did you know the dream is still alive, only different? It's also occurred to me and some like-minded fellows to be a little repulsed by Lena, for a) the fact that she is getting famous on a reality so tangible to us we didn't think of it first b) we didn't think of it first c) she comes from wild privilege and d) navel-gazing: the aspect of my lifestyle which I simmer in so wretchedly; that useless self-awareness from which I categorically draw most dissatisfaction and unhappiness. The thing about we funny girls in New York's art world is there's an element to US that I'm not sure I want to celebrate yet. That of course could just be the hetero-normative patriarchy striking me where I stand, but I don't really want the terms of my success (which, if you look carefully, I have entirely tied to Lena Dunham's) to be a capitalization on a little of what makes me gross...to myself. And then I have to face the real Ugly in the mirror and wonder...why not?

I'm talking about Lena Dunham's bravery: Lena Dunham is not afraid to be really ugly in super public. A New York magazine writer said it well: she herself can be very lovely, yet seems to actually go out of her way to challenge her viewers with images of a less than perfect body in less than flattering clothes or hair or make-up, often having far less than perfect (and fairly graphic) sex. Of course on one hand this is really laudable (THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW!) but it draws attention to what even we in the club have buried and really ought never to worry aloud: this is no longer escapism at all. This is no longer fiction. Take 'Sex and the City,' my preferred example of “art” (to be sort of generous) as escapism, married to a little bit of female empowerment in the abstract. This show is decidedly not MY LIFE, but me and Carrie share enough similar talismans (love of clothes, feisty girlfriends) to have some sort of aspirational empathy take place: I can feel for her, with her, recognize bits of my self in her, but she's certainly not real. Lena's real. She has terrible sex, and she struggles with money, and she feels purposeless and foolish, and ridiculous, un-glamorous things happen to her. I do a lot of these things in a week. How do I actually like them apples? AND THEN I WONDERED...what's the lesson I should be learning if I am both target audience and source material for this show? Not that TV's some kind of instructional messiah, but, okay, okay, I'm asking, why would I – anyone – really want to watch a show about themselves?

Because, believe it, I do. I think lots of people do. I always want to see theatre made by my friends, all full of winks and mutual references. Movies set in New York, movies that mention my hometown, stories that shed light on my particularities do feel like treats. Only they're fraught treats for the specific kind of fiercely funky cliché I feel I traffic with in public: when my individuality is acknowledged (as an extension of a whole thriving community of individuals living a life that looks like mine) I can somehow feel threatened, even unhappy. Think about how many girls you know with cat's eye glasses who claim to hate Zooey Deschanel, or the number of friends you have from outer boroughs who will look around a bar full of people dressed exactly like them and say, “I hate hipsters.” This is a Cold War, gang. We're in it to win it and oust the challenger: who can be the most unique in this brave New York?

Okay, another disclaimer. I'm not entirely delusional; I don't actually think me and my roommates banter like Zooey Deschanel and her motley dude crew on New Girl. I'm not always mid hi-jinks like the goofy gang in Happy Endings and I didn't come from New York privilege (and I don't have a million dollar contract with Judd Apatow) like Lena Dunham and the supporting cast of her new show. Obviously. But perhaps because I'm a bright young New York twentysomething and becoming hypersensitive to the accurate portrayals of my supposedly coveted existence (thank undergrad English for that last “thought” and insistent vanity) it's struck me recently that TV today seems more interested in self-consciously reflecting its people than, say, Taxi or Mash ever did. Nebulous archetypes still prevail – no one's really friends with a Carrie, Samantha or Charlotte (face it guys, you are all Near Mirandas at best). No one's really got a team of stunted pranksters in their social crew, like Troy and Abed from Community – but doesn't at least the humor of the modern show make a case for a TV Life a whole lot closer to Real Life than the one Ethel and Lucy seemed to know? Some more pennies for your thoughts: reality television, the way Chris Lilley's scathing mockumentary about bottom-feeders makes you feel (somehow sick, not in on the joke), the success of shows like Mad Men that purport to tell a truth, expose a fiction. Cinema verite documentary style television. Growing lack of laugh tracks. If we're no longer watching TV for pure escapism, perhaps there's a little bit of lusty validation mixed in – maybe TV is becoming the new novel, the new anti-lonely. I do get massive kicks from the vaguely mirrored elements of my not-as-glamorous single girls braving the big city day to day, but it also shakes me to my core. I am implicated, somehow.

Jonathan Franzen wrote an essay about privacy in 1998 positing that in one sense the victims of the 'share everything' culture are the people made to unwillingly partake: I don't want to see your presidential penis, hear your graphic conversation about sexual liberation on the subway. To be reductive, he was interested in the loss of reticence as a function of the changing culture, something about politeness, consideration for the other, subtlety. To see yourself in not so much as a gloss of glory is the kicker, I suppose. To see yourself unswaddled, implicated, unglamorous and un-attached (but funny! Quirky! Real!) is, despite my aspirations to self love and deep peace, a surefire B these days.

So thanks for the diagnosis, Lena and ilk. I know from here it's like, 'oh but look! The world's reception! You're not sick at all!' but here's my guilty confession, my intimation, my baby-sized cross to bear: every now and then, I want to keep the unappealing tamped down, the ugly in the bathroom mirror before breakfast. I get ashamed. And maybe I don't like it on television, maybe it will take some time. The irony's not lost on me that my first reaction is jealousy; I would love to make Lena Dunham's kind of theatre if I could – but I'm not sure I would be able to, if I honestly want it done. But hats, jacket, pants off to you, lady. You win this round. Bring in the cheap beer, the dud nights at Union Pool or Ninth Ward, bring in the incidents, the near-misses, the many days that tick by when you're not in love and you haven't finished your novel. Bring in the drunk best friend and the rainy day, the un-enviable shoes, the ringing horror of knowing my own life can look this unremarkable, unkind, so wildly, disturbingly self-involved. Funny business. Getting kicks, kicking, this is how we kids can be; I'll have to reckon with the monster, resurrect, find a new fiction somewhere.

do you ever feel/like the kind of person who wears plastic bags on their head because they're crazy?

So maybe I will move to California and become a jazz singer, maybe I'll find my God on the way there. In the Mojave, probably. In a lime green convertible car. The top will be down, and I will drink mint lemonade and sing Joni Mitchell, and who knows? Maybe it will be 1969.

I've been thinking -- I've been not thinking -- about advice. Here I actually am on the planet, living in Brooklyn, working in "hospitality" (that's a generous blanket), working in Manhattan, struggling to be an artist somehow. I clamber and don't clamber to fill my days, and it all amounts to a very thin veneer of carefully-applied Cool tied over a bursting manic panic, because I am actually quite afraid of the future, now that it is bright and ungoverned and entirely my own. So they say. So I've been asking a lot of people for advice on how to proceed, and regretting the choice almost instantly, because here is what I have decided about advice: if one person is very impressionable and the other person feels foolishly wise for the right set of fifteen seconds in a conversation, no good can come. Because people will tell you things that worked for them, or they will offer vague platitudes, they will gesture towards your particular pain with the wide vocabulary of 'being young' or 'having faith' or 'following your heart' and other messy, upsetting terms, and it turns out these hollow words are not enough to plant a life garden on. Not even a little bit. You must forge your own way, my son. Go West!

Well now I sound like a bitch. It's not that I don't respect my elders, it's not that I don't believe I can learn from other people's mistakes. I like history. But when you are me in 2012 and the world is whirring like a sped-up clock and all you can decipher are the hundreds of wiser, better adjusted, happier, perfectly paired-off voices around your face sagely pressing your palm, kissing your forehead, smirking, suggesting, promising, things really just seem to get worse. The white noise leads in so many directions. Okay, I'll give a concrete example: I'm talking about my quest to figure out what I want. I always thought I knew -- see paragraph one -- but leaving school has functionally become a process of choosing what to follow, which of my nine bizarre, estranged goals I should throw myself into fully. Because this brave new world is not for the half-assed. Will I be an actor, a comedian, a writer, a singer, a hostess? They tell me if I see it in the sun, it's so. They tell me I don't have to choose. They tell me to kiss the ground I walk on, to buy magazine subscriptions. And I do. And of course, I should, but AAAAAH! If I am really going to commit to a flighty lifestyle and a flighty personality, where do I make the first leap into ownership? I want to make mistakes and connections and love that is all my own! I want to be just as stupid as is forgivably possible, and I want to do it in the dark. Sometimes people I know like to seal loose, unfocused rants like this one with a meaningful beat of eye contact and the words, 'Does that make any sense? Do you ever feel that, too?' But that would kill the point! Yikes, it is so scary to be on a ledge and know you're at least 35% idiot but believe so fiercely in your column of misguided emotion anyways! Suddenly, I GET cult psychology. Catholicism.

Okay. So I'm talking about the future and the bright blue beyond of my patchy resume, I'm also talking about Boys, as per usual. These days they are more like Men. The advice I've received lately on this subject has been all over the place: don't call him, act cool, do something better with your hair, just ask him out already!, at least stop waving maniacally whenever you walk by, you seem about fourteen. I have file cabinets filled with this advice, all given in good faith from friends in relationships, or friends who love me enough to idly fan my ego while I behave like Charlize Theron's character in 'Young Adult.' It would be entirely unfair to fault all these well-wishers for years of romantic hang-ups and failures, but I do think there's at least a correlation between these two worlds. When you allow yourself to always be in the subservient position of the advice-seeker, to very rarely venture into misfortune or failure without a safeguard (and I do mean VENTURE; I fall or trip into misfortune and failure regularly) -- well. Well. I think you betray a certain lack of faith in yourself. It's like 'the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves,' (Sparknotes). I must own my instinct, even as these alleged Men move around slowly like anesthetized pets and do not meet my expectations, do not make sense to me, hurt me. I must own my instinct! Even as I overhear people in coffee shops bandying 'trade secrets' to and fro, even as the one agent, manager, project, audition, life plan that can MAKE or BREAK waltzes back and forth beyond my reach. Whatever. This is Dunzo City. I'm getting too old to talk this way.

Common People Like You

Oh, baby. Here we go.
Five or so years ago I bet my kid brother that the world would not end in 2012, contrary to the predictions of an ancient civilization's ancient calendar and also maybe Nicholas Cage. I was giddy with the cheekiness of this – even though kid brother was only ten at the time – and the moment after we shook hands to seal the deal I broke down and told him the joke: best case scenario, the world continues and I make fifty dollars. Worst case scenario: the world ends, my corpse keeps the change.

This still is funny to me. When I am very poor, I think about the fifty bucks I stand to make. My brother (less 'kid' now) has of course since realized his error and now finds himself in the unusual position of defending the apocalypse, because being right is everything in our family. And yesterday it actually became 2012, and it struck me that this stupid bet has lingered into its prescient year while more important promises have eroded in time, and nowadays the President is black and the Middle East is altered and it's good, isn't it grand, isn't it great, isn't it swell, so yes, some things stay put and where you left them. Others move around, the way I still half-believe my toys must do when no one is watching.

To ring in the new year, I threw a familiar party with familiar faces. We drank too much champagne and did not watch the sun rise. In the morning, I made a casual list with two columns: practical resolutions (read the paper, consider this 'gym' everyone's always talking about) and milestones managed in 2011 (none of your business). In the way of these things, all I could think about were the inevitable, cowardly holes in my wishes, the consistencies, the repeats. I went on to not read the paper or exercise for the rest of the day. Instead, I continued a Mad Men marathon now into its grand and (probably) forty-fifth hour.

So come with me! Mad Men is an interesting place to go if you're feeling stationary and the same as usual, because Matthew Weiner has actually done an incredible thing. By all rights, the stories in this series are prescribed: people watch, in part, because they like to marvel at how everyone behaved in a mythic, American 'before.' Look at the cold housewives, the smokers, the philandering, high-functioning-alcoholic businessmen, the closeted gay men living lies. The show is naturally governed by a lot of historical milestones that I remember only from NSL in high school – yet completely not, at the same time. Inside of these very certain cliches are characters who defy reason and emotion alternately, and command my attention because I both can and cannot account for the things they choose, the things they do. What is Don Draper doing, going AWOL in California for a month without so much as calling work? Why is Betty attracted to that lugnut Henry Francis? Why, why, why it's about as unaccountable and ridiculous as my own life, at least when I contemplate It in the callous algebra of 'New Year's Resolutions' and 'Things I've Achieved On Schedule.'

Some more collecting: I went to see the 2010 Tony Award winning Memphis on one of my last days in New York last year (!), and though I got dolled up and put on my Brave Single Woman Seeing a Show Alone garb and attending come hither eyes, I did not experience the catharsis I paid for. And I love Broadway musicals, contrary to whatever I might have told you at a dinner party. Memphis riled me up because it did not defy or expand any cliches or covered ground, it was pure reiteration. Great dancing, great singing, but you saw it before. It was Hairspray. It was Grease. It was South Pacific, and West Side Story and fucking Showboat. If you don't see the sequential similarities I can't explain it, but there was a distinctly familiar feeling throughout the show – seventies kitsch, ballads about racial harmony, predictable plot twists down to the last dance break. But when I did finally get home to write my impassioned review, I looked at a Broadway canon that was in toto only a handful of plots with variably great, par or sub-par music and story. The 'greats' were those ones that transcended a cliché somehow – most often with that same flicker of humanity that only arrives in a paradox. In a minor key. In a love that does not conquer all. (I'm talking about Passing Strange and Rent, if you really want to get to know me.) It's all like Mad Men, it's all like New Year's, it's all like what you learn after your second theme party, it's all been done before, of course it has. Don't try to do it better, Memphis. Try to do it just a little more carefully, and then it will be different, and then the people will remember because they will have seen a new light on an unchanging thing.

This makes me believe in themes and the collective sub-conscious. This makes me want to apologize less for what I feel are the persistent personal cliches of my own ways of finding a new year, my own ways of living through an old one. And here comes the last collection: I wandered through Whole Foods today reading a copy of The Atlantic Monthly that I did not, in the end, pay for. I read an article about a discussion panel on Joan Didion in which two female writers I respect defended her work and her style while a male writer lampooned her for a narcissism in her writing amongst various other personal flaws. Some other facts: 1) the writer of the Atlantic article was a woman, and the article turned into an assertion that to really love Joan Didion one had to be a woman, in all likelihood an adolescent one who had nighttime dreams of becoming a writer. 2) I include no names because I only remember one. 3) It never occurred to me, before this article, that anyone, anywhere, had ever criticized Joan Didion's writing.

I am just such an adolescent woman who it now seems clear to me was designed with Joan Didion in mind. I am one for her details – which the two female panelists asserted as particularly feminine, I mean the way she describes a vapid Malibu evening, what people are wearing, how hotel rooms smell. I am bowled backwards by her essay, 'Goodbye to all That' every time I read it, and it is because I am a narccissist and I am a lot like who I think she was in 1970-something, I am in New York because I am young, that is why I am here. Her writing, to me, is all about catharsis and recognition and thus communion; the feeling that I am, in fact, not alone in the way I am. But Man Panelist – Manelist – was right in some of the things he said about her, and I knew that in a guttural way as soon as I saw it in print. He wrote that some things shouldn't be published because they're written out of habit. If writing is your means of processing your life, then it seems fair to say that some thoughts should stick to the shelf of your nebulous brainspace. Does Joan Didion journal? Does Joan Didion blog? Does Joan Didion perhaps not mean everything forever, is it possible that my as-to-God opinion of her could change, just as my as-to-God opinion of Greenwich Village very probably will? Are we afraid to examine our habits because their desecration might leave us with less soul?

The button being – as I stand online and sacrifice the rest of the Atlantic article to help my mother bag groceries – look at these little circles, spinning importantly over our heads. There is a noble aspect to them. I can trace with my finger what is successful inside this world of rhythms and structures; to me, the most interesting kind of person and the most interesting kind of art comes from that tension between the so familiar and entirely unknowable. It is 2012, and I am growing up and looking at a New Year that I begin to see will actually contain some of the same. The settling sediment of my personality is how I have faced challenges in the past, will continue to face challenges. Is there room for improvement, adventure, change? Absolutely. I believe so. But is there a continent of me, and Mad Men, and Memphis, and Ms. Didion (see what I did there?) that is old like the earth? Containing wisdom and resistance?

Yes. Yes, I think so. At least that's how I plan to proceed. In a world where I can answer some of my own questions. In a world where making the choice is sometimes more important than the path itself. In a world where old jokes and good music leave traces. In a world that feels like the home I love and the magic I always seem to be hunting so yes, this will be a good year, yes, I think so, not-so-kid-a-brother, even if it is our very last one.