Wednesday, March 06, 2013

I allowed myself to watch another movie about New York's once gritty party life, Last Days of Disco.  I don't know why I torture myself with the past reflection of something gritty, real, when New York's ancient architecture was filled with something meaningful.  Luc Sante refuses to live here now.  The bygone exclusive, artistic, dangerous party era means little to most of my friends, they romanticize other things and understand but don't relate.  Actual New Yorkers say, "Yes it's gone, I miss it, you missed it, it ain't coming back... New York is always changing."  And I say, "Very well, when will my movement come?"  These movies are typically not set in New York, but in Vancouver or blurred.  Fashion continues a certain creative edge and apparently women like Cat still have enough connections to smoke angel dust on some Union Square roof.  I used to more be in the right place at the right time, catch different parties, be part of a mock version of a quickening current, the feeling of a new time beginning.  The stagnant hipster pool of 2006 to 2008 felt never ending, New York becoming more gentrified, sanitized, appearing not to the adventurous life, but the adventurous palette, I thought it would never end.  A slow decay as what is happening now, when the edgiest goings on are the weather and the economy, I wait for artistic talents and circles to emerge and find a way to be part of what I skipped for most generations.  We were raised in a cushioned world, a decent economic era and find ourselves both without a real scene and unable to deal.  The real things I want now seem to preclude nightlife, a real career, a real job, a real relationship, etc.  And men tend not to romanticize night music.  The real things I want seem to preclude catching and flowing with the electrified current, which depends on looks, finding the right friends, and power in numbers.  The Wackness is a movie most people hate, but it is a crossroads between the sanitizing and gentrifying New York and the emerging golden age of hip hop which would beautifully memorialize the real danger and sexuality of parts of New York still too gritty for people with small children like me at the time to visit.

I drank my dose of that music, as a child I saw mesmerized by it, I was too little to seek the scene of the mysterious dark music, but I loved to follow the rap and alternative going on.  I am resentful of going through a place whose buildings both are the memory of innumerable recent changes and have nothing now going on, slowly scaling a cliff until the penury and difficulty will force us to band together, form a community, and become more creative, or maybe I'm snoozing on movements already going on.