10,339. RUDIMENTS pt. 176

RUDIMENTS, pt. 176

Making Cars

One thing I never, ever, liked

was manufactured emotion  -

pretty much the kind of stuff

you'd see back then, 1960's

TV. It was, and still is, really

miserable. And not only is it

miserable but it's also

responsible for much of

the resultant problems we

face now; all sorts of things

just now coming home to roost.

The results of sexist violence,

abuse, use of women as sex

objects and men as walking

lust-buckets. That's the paradigm

as it was drawn, and guess who

drew it? The same breed of snipe

who still draw it. And their

vulgarity and abuse of others

is well-rewarded. It's a real

dilemma, and one marked and

made much worse by the

validation given to it by the

millions who sit through and

watch it, attend it, ask for it.

So, I guess there's nothing

to do.

-

I used to wonder anyway

about people who'd be

interested in that line of work.

It all seemed so forced and

so artificial. In the seminary,

incredibly enough, I got mixed

up with that myself but it was

restricted. Obviously, out of

bounds for us was anything

dealing with the normal angst,

sorrow, flames of love and

passion, and any of the other

human emotions that go into

real life. An insipid, de-salinized

version of all this was on par

for them anyway  -  having

stripped their 'religion' of

anything of value they all

basically walked backwards

through life to be sure that

everything behind them had

been cleansed. I think the

only reason 'Mary' was a

'Virgin' was because in any

other, normal, format they'd

neither understand it nor know

how to handle it. Thus, justice.

-

A lot of New York City, at 

heart, was an actor's city. They 

came and went, they had entire 

districts set up for them  -  there 

was Actor's Studio, Actor's School,

and on and on it went. Schubert 

Alley, Sniffen Court, all these lit 

out-of-the-way theatres and 

performance spaces where 

actors lived. Drama schools, 

drama bookstores, playwright 

bookstores and music racks.

The historic premise of 

everything was everywhere -   

The Golden Swan (lived on), 

Eugene O'Neill, Provincetown 

Playhouse  -  all sorts of vanguard 

and guerrilla theaters. I mingled 

around all that, plus the cabarets 

and the burlesque houses, and 

all those nascent gay places too. 

It was part of my signature to 

be everywhere, taking it all in. 

Some old, grizzly guys drove 

cabs just so that they could 

be constantly amidst the raw

material of writing and stories 

that they could record, re-write 

and steal.  All those stories, 

gotten for free, later turned into 

a million bucks. There was a 

great crossover where all these 

things had paths that converged  

-  the wiry, evil decibel level of 

'Taxi Driver' and 'Mean Street's 

to the Cactus Flower fluff and 

'Prisoner of Second Avenue' 

half  comedy but always half 

serious too. There was trouble 

everywhere and out along the 

streets, if you played it correctly, 

there were tales and stories 

worth performance, worth the 

retelling. But the strange 

difference was, as I saw it, 

as follows : none of these 

people were New York people. 

They'd all come from somewhere 

else on that crazy romantic notion 

of maybe hitting the big time 

while at some undiscovered 

stage-role in NYC, the Great 

White Way, under the lights, 

as it were. A huge pastiche 

of BS, it all was. The best 

stuff going on was in the 

cavernous little hovels with 

dark, glossy painted stages 

and one bad microphone; 

it was all visions of something 

else  -  I was never sure what, 

except that it was always 

insincere, broad emotions 

with not real people playing 

roles, but 'type' written into 

script, each 'type' never real, 

just instead representing 

some lead-in to a desired 

emotion. It was all fake. 

The best thing I ever saw, 

actually, was at Circle in 

the Square Theater, down 

in the village, when Circle 

in the Square was around, 

and it was Al Pacino, live on

this tiny little round stage ten 

feet from us, in 'American 

Buffalo.' Pretty much 

about these two city losers 

trying to cash in on a 

buffalo-head nickel one of 

them got, thinking it was 

worth a bunch. It was pretty

intense, and probably 

overplayed. But they got the 

point across, and the cool 

thing was the spittle flying 

out of Pacino's mouth, and 

allover us in the first two 

rows eight there. He sure 

was a wet emoter.

-

Al Pacino though was at least a

New Yorker, in that consummate

sense they usually otherwise try 

to get across by type-casting some

mug-faced, crooked-looking guy

who mutters in a bad mood all the

time. By that they assume that you 

will subliminally read the 'assumed'

character out of the face they supply

you. It works, but it's never authentic,

and, mostly in  New York anyway,

nothing else ever is either. Mostly

because of all that acting veneer

on everything. People there are

always pretending to be richer 

and more hip than they really are.

The falseness and the pretense is 

crazy and legendary, and it's 

compensated for in the stark and 

blunt outlooks most people

carry. Who else in the world 

could be happy and content once 

realizing that, by living there they 

are, by definition, (and by my 

present-day calculations), probably 

using up, that is wasting, I'd

say 3 dollars dollars an hour. 

Just for being there : living 

expenses, food, transportation, 

fees, rents, taxes, and all the rest, 

plus the added expense tacked 

onto everything you buy. That's

just so to SAY you're cool and 

hip, by living there. That's like 

$70 extra dollars a day, which by 

the end of an average month is

$2100. I always figured that to

be a heck of a lot of overhead,

and why bother when you can

live somewhere else, and still be

as close as needed, for 1/3 that.

Anyway, that's eventually became

my thinking  -  living in the outer

swamps and reeds and who cares.

-

It was the other people, the guys 
and the girls who hit it big, who 
managed to find these multi-million 
dollar brownstones and apartment 
places and all  -  cars, horse-stables, 
private gardens. I used to gape at a
lot of that whenever I saw it. There's
one street, not much of anything really, 
but a collection of old estate kind of 
brownstones and all, facing a crummy
little library and a playing field and an old 
1900's school on the corner later turned 
into a shelter and then a community pool 
site in the depression and now back to 
being a school again:(St Luke's Place).
For a while, all these new-money types, 
like Gwyneth Paltrow and that ilk, they 
kept buying places here. Coming. Staying 
a while. And then going. I never could 
figure how anyone could make that much
money, that quickly, and just throw
it down. Ah, you know those
new-money types.