This Is New York

The first person I spoke to when I arrived in the city on Monday night was Dave’s girlfriend Elaine, who was lugging boxes from the house on 113th Street to her car. In a nimble bit of symmetry, it turned out that she was leaving the city for Los Angeles, while I was just returning. The weather was disconcertingly warm that day, not all that different from winter in Hollywood, and I had to remind myself that, “Yes, I am back in New York,” as though I was trying to wake from a nightmare.

When I awoke the next morning – in my old bedroom, where, as it happened, everything was pretty much exactly as I’d left it – I drove the rental car down to 34th Street. It was like my days in LA, waking up and jumping into the car before I’d eaten anything and then getting pummeled by an onslaught of traffic. Only this time, after I ditched the car, I stepped underground and onto a waiting train. And there is nothing quite like a subway car – with its noise, its smell, and the stoic, unimpressed faces packed inside – to determine one’s location as unmistakably New York. You could be nowhere else. For that reason, when I got on the Downtown One the other morning – my first subway ride in over two months – the feeling was an unexpected sense of relief.

Yesterday I painted my “study,” as I like to call it - the small room which precedes my bedroom – and I assembled a cheap, but great, desk which I purchased at the Reston, VA Target. May God bless this desk. I am so happy with it. In all the time I’ve lived in New York, I’ve never been pleased with the desks I’ve had. The last one was a shoddy, cramped piece of furniture that was made out of pine and was in a steady process of reconstituting itself as sawdust. My parents and I found it at a crappy resale outfit in a part of Astoria that a girl I was seeing had told me was a great place for furniture. Ah, the naïveté of the young.

And speaking of the young, has anyone noticed that it’s 2008 and therefore the year that I turn 28? Has anyone taken note of this fact? My younger self certainly did. There is a document somewhere in my parents’ house in which, as a ten year-old, I predicted not only fame and fortune, but also marriage, children, and “a TV show” by the time I hit 28. Well, it couldn’t come at a better time. And with that in mind, I say to you, 2008: hit me with your best shot.

It’s good to be back in New York, where no one can relax and nothing is easy. It is, as I am now grimly certain, better for me.

Sound and Fury

Driving through Tennessee the other day, I was suddenly aware of a curious smell. Moments later, I was shocked to find smoke pluming from the steering column. While the auto was being tended by some helpful gents at the Nashville Cadillac dealer I took the chance to catch up on Writer’s Strike gossip. Best of the lot so far is a testy HuffPo post by Brothers & Sisters scribe and producer Jon Robin Baitz. Baitz responds to an “interesting essay” (his words) by NY Times theatre critic Charles Isherwood, in which Isherwood suggests that striking Hollywood writers “return to the fold” and use the strike as a chance to come back to their “first love,” the theatre. While conceding that “one would have to be insane to disagree with this admirable exhortation,” Baitz resents the tone and context of Isherwood’s plea. In short, he finds it a little hypocritical that a theatre critic who is known for his chilly reception of new work should exhort writers to resubmit themselves to his evaluation.

Some background before we plunge into the sniping. Isherwood is the lieutenant to Ben Brantley’s police chief in the all-powerful Times culture pages. Brantley’s seniority means that he reviews most Broadway (and UK) openings, while Isherwood usually passes judgment on off-, and occasionally off-off-, Broadway offerings. In this position Isherwood has the reputation for being, in Baitz’s words, “dismissive, cool, and brittle.” For example, the first paragraph of a recent Isherwood review – of Adam Rapp’s play Essential Self-Defense – consists of the following swipe: “If you are not interested in human behavior, why write plays?” Then the review’s brutal conclusion: “I left the theater feeling more than bored,” Isherwood writes. “I felt assaulted by empty artifice.” Take that, Mr. Rapp, for even daring to think that you could write a play.

Isherwood does not pan shows across the board, of course. In fact, his most notorious review was a rave. In 2005, Isherwood took to calling the obscure Will Eno off-Broadway one-man show Thom Pain (based on nothing) “a masterpiece,” puzzling the many Times readers who dutifully followed his demand that they “run, don’t walk” to see the play, where they found, as Baitz puts it, little more than “an inscrutable monologue.” More recently, in an eccentric article extolling the virtues of YouTube, Isherwood delighted in discovering clips of the Broadway flop Carrie: The Musical, a show that former Times critic Frank Rich compared to watching the Hindenberg expire. Isherwood, on the other hand, liked what he saw. “It’s kind of fabulous,” Isherwood writes. “My suspicion grows that Carrie: The Musical has been unjustly maligned.”

Batiz fumes at the underlying hypocrisy of an influential Times theatre critic who has the temerity to suggest that former playwrights who have gone Hollywood to return to their “first love.” He submits that critics like Isherwood “do not necessarily add incentive to the already tendentious struggle that playwrights face in trying to make a life in the theater.” While noting that Isherwood “has been respectful of my work, even when critical,” Baitz contends that “there is a slight whiff of disconnection in Charles’ essay.”

This disconnection – between the artist who risks everything in creating and the critic who risks nothing in evaluating – has been the case since the first Athenian panned the new Aristophanes. However, the conundrum is rarely directly addressed by artists, at least in print. Furthermore, while Baitz’s HuffPo snit may seem a bit outsized, so is the sway of the Times’s theatre critics. Their ability to topple a show with a single swipe of the pen is legendary and entirely unmatched by reviewers in other mediums. As Baitz somewhat petulantly points out, “There are no other critics that matter in New York.” When theatre folk say Brantley or Isherwood is “The Critic,” this is what they mean.

It reeks of unfairness, of course, that one individual – especially an individual who himself professes no skill in what he purports to evaluate – should have such influence over the critical and economic reception of a play. At the same time, this is not a dynamic that Brantley, Isherwood, Rich or any of the Times’s critics created themselves. Rather, they are the beneficiaries of a society that has ratified the Newspaper of Record’s authority not only in current events but in cultural events as well. Isherwood, in other words, didn’t start the fire.

Nor does Baitz accuse him of doing so. Instead, he takes issue with, as he calls it, the critic’s “coldness” and hypocrisy. Baitz writes: “The serious young playwright could use less of what makes Mr. Isherwood a lesser critic than he could be: namely, coldness and a rather shocking lack of humility.” The attack against Isherwood’s humility probably refers to the first paragraph of his article which he directs to “all those writers lying on the couch in Hollywood perfecting their video-game scores or weeding the backyards of their Laurel Canyon haciendas, or whatever it is television and movie writers do when they are not cooking up dialogue for detectives, superheroes, or nerdy, horny teenagers.” That “whatever it is” is pretty callously dismissive of the writers who, Baitz reminds us, “are currently unemployed” because of the strike, and trying to “figure out what to do about [their] mortgages.”

How will this all shake out? Well, it won’t, of course. Charles Isherwood has his job and Jon Robin Baitz has his, and the irony is that, while Isherwood’s job is entirely dependent on the existence of people like Baitz – and their ability to produce work – it is Baitz who lacks job security and Baitz who has to worry about someone like Isherwood – not the other way around. This relationship echoes the problem that writers are currently having in their negotiations with the AMPTP, by the way, and one of the many indications that we are in for a long strike.

The Search For American Freedom

There is a massive hole in the middle of the Arizona desert and I’m not talking about the Grand Canyon. The hole is south of Winslow and can be reached by a short detour off Interstate 40 where its approach is proclaimed by a series of increasingly importunate road signs that remind one more of the cardboard placards painted by panhandlers rather than directions to the site of a serious scientific oddity.

For it is a meteor crater which we’re talking about here, not the biggest ball of yarn, or the tallest cross in the western hemisphere (which I drove past today in the Texas panhandle; it looked like unusually thick telephone pole). The Barringer Crater, as it’s called (named for mining engineer Daniel Barringer, whose family still owns the site), was formed by a piece of intergalactic rock that managed to plummet to earth about 50,000. It's supposed to be pretty impressive and, if you want its stats, here they are: it is approximately 4,000 feet in diameter and 570 feet deep. Moreover, it rises dramatically above the surrounding desert by about 150 feet. On the other hand, it costs $15 just to take a peek and for that amount of money I could purchase about 70 miles worth of gas, so I drove on, choosing, as I have done most of this trip, to view America at a speed of 70 miles per hour, stopping only as necessary to refuel and sleep.

I just did this two months ago, so please view the archives for an account of the more leisurely and, it has to be said, optimistic drive west. Now the car is in reverse – not literally, of course – and I find myself retracing my steps and assuring myself that what must seem to the world like a retreat is really an advance, a renewal of sorts, a more determined settlement in New York after some sort of western epiphany. There is, however, the distinct possibility that I am returning simply because I am tired of driving.

I am typing this post, by the way, in a surprisingly pleasant Starbucks near Oklahoma City. The Cadillac sits outside, loaded with everything I brought to California and more. This morning I greeted 2008 in a motel room in Amarillo, Texas, wondering at the old face I encountered in the bathroom mirror. I have not been carded by any of the gas station attendants who’ve bagged the 40s I’ve bought and brought back to the motels to numb my evenings. It is amusing to reflect that I once fervently desired the cessation of the intrusive practice asking for identification for the purchase of alcoholic beverages. Now its occurrence is pleasant and reassuring.

So, what’s next? A thousand or so miles back to Virginia to pick up the rest of my things and then a swift resettlement back at 113th Street, followed by unpacking and perhaps some repainting and recarpeting. When I left Santa Barbara on Sunday morning, I removed my sweater at a gas station and drove all the way to Flagstaff, Arizona in shirt-sleeves. But there was snow on the ground in Flagstaff and the temperature plunged that night to a low of nine degrees. I put on my sweater again and added a jacket and unpacked my suitcase. If the past few months have provided anything, they have inured me to almost any displacement.

The photo above was taken on Monday morning, as I left Flagstaff.