"Those who can, do. Those who can’t, bitch about it on the Internet." -Simon, from The Book of Simon
Some bios list credentials, such as: Education BFA in Illustration, Massachusetts College of Art Occupation Former Production Slave, Ballantine Books Comics Credits Columnist, Writer, Artist, Editor Etc…
And some bios tell a story, such as: I can remember sitting in front of my television one morning, watching the old Batman show, when Julie Newmar appeared in that skintight black leather outfit as Catwoman. It was my first boy/girl thing. >A year later I was in kindergarten telling Katherine Burke that I loved her. It’s pretty much been a string of stupid mistakes ever since…
Still other bios state an intent, such as: This is a series of essays illustrating the life of one particular struggling artist as he plods through the world and occasionally bumps into some interesting shit.
But most bios just sit to the right of the column and are never looked at. So ignore this space and just read the damn column already…
The prospect of having one of my lifelong dreams fulfilled has sent my brain racing in a number of directions. Running the risk of counting my chickens before they hatch, I’ve been looking to the possible future and considering what life success would allow me to lead. Part of this has had me wondering about my future as a New Yorker. I’ve been in this town for just over two years without many complaints. But now that a potential book deal is looming, I begin to wonder if I really want to stay here once the goal of my move is achieved.
The People On The Street New York, on the most basic level, is made up of two different types of people: Natives and Transplants. Each of these groups are divided into much more complex groups, which I won’t entirely go into. But there seems to be an overwhelming philosophy to each major division.
The Natives were born here, obviously. They don’t have a romanticized image of ‘New York’ (note the quotes). Not to say they don’t love their city. What they do have is a certain degree of civic pride. These are the people, the construction workers and longshoremen, who you see doing soundbites on television about how great it is here and other inflated propaganda about the people of the city. The thing is, they’ve lived here so long that they tend to believe what they’re saying because of the sheer isolation. There’s a joke map on the Internet that goes around every so often showing how New Yorker’s view the world. Basically the joke is that New York is the only place that exists as a specific and everything else is a vague notion of reality.
The thing about Natives is that they know New York as FIVE buroughs. This is a major distinction between the Natives and the Transplants. At the end of the day the Native goes home to the Bronx or Queens and watches television. On the weekends they stay in their neighborhood and hit the local bar with some friends. Probably sounds much like the way you spend your weekend.
The Transplant has a totally different attitude. When the Transplant thinks of New York they think of one place, Manhattan (maybe Brooklyn, but only really the Williamsburg neighborhood). For them the entire purpose of New York’s existence is the one island in the center of the other four buroughs.
Of the Transplants there are two types. The first are those who dreamt of moving to New York and refuse to live anywhere but the main island. These people tend to live in tiny closets on the Lower East Side, for which they pay enormous rent. But they get to say they live in Manhattan, and that’s all they care about. The other group has made the compromise of living out in Queens, or preferably Brooklyn, where they pay less rent and have more space. But you can be sure that these people have jobs that take them across the river every morning. And when the day ends or the weekend comes, this breed of Transplant spends as much time as possible away from home. Their apartment is really just that place with a bed where they sleep. The thing these two types have in common is their fanatical infatuation with Manhattan. They can’t even fathom the idea of staying in their own neighborhood and having a drink at a local bar when they could be in the East Village playing New Yorker.
I’m not a Native. I’m also not a Transplant that has any great love for New York. So how do I fit in?
Escape From New York When I moved here it wasn’t with stars in my eyes. Sure, my career as a writer and artist wasn’t going anywhere living in the suburbs and I figured New York would be a good place to defibrillate it. But the primary reason I came here was to escape. My family situation had become unbearable and I needed to get far enough away that they couldn’t influence me anymore. I had friends in this city and it seemed to make sense at the time. But I never fell into the typical Transplant behavior.
I can remember those friends I used to have, my roommate included, thinking they were big shot actors of the New York stage. I’d have brunch with them and they’d wave their coffee cups around like they were already famous and people might be trying to overhear their golden words. My roommate would be out every night drinking with his Off-off-off-off-off Broadway theater buddies and then have to call his mom to get money for the rent. The whole lot of them were legends in their own minds. They were the epitome of the Transplant.
Meanwhile I was content to stay home and watch Boston Public or Smackdown on a weeknight. Yeah, I worked in the city, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do at first. But when that clock hit six I wasn’t hanging around to play Cosmopolitan. I headed home to Queens like any other working schlub. That’s just the way I am.
Now, before you go thinking New York doesn’t have anything I love, let me just say that it is a night owl’s paradise. For someone like me, who is more comfortable being awake at four a.m., being able to go out and get pizza around the corner while the folks in the suburbs are sleeping is fantastic. I love that the bars are open later than two o’clock, like they are in Boston. And I love that everything I could ever need is within a three-block radius of my apartment. It’s the convenience of New York that I’m enamored of. But that’s really about it.
I don’t need to be out every night of the week and I don’t care for the trendy bar scene. I hate taking the subway, having been raised an automobile person. And, in the summer, the entire city smells of roasted nuts. The only stench I’ve ever encountered worse than that is the last time I went to DisneyWorld and found them serving turkey legs from vending carts in ninety degree Orlando heat.
Overall I’m a homebody. I go out about once or twice a week. But mostly I stay at home and write and watch television. It’s not an exciting life by some people’s standards, but it suits me just fine. And so, I don’t really see why I need to live in New York to do that. Hell, they have Store 24’s in the suburbs.
When I moved here I set a time limit of five years for how long I wanted to stay in this city. That was the autumn of 2000. If all goes well, my first book could be coming out in the summer of 2004, with my second book to follow by early 2005 at the latest. That makes it around four years as a New Yorker. Considering the way I’m losing my interest in the city now, I can imagine that another two years and I’ll be ready to go. The city served its purpose and I will always appreciate it for that. I just can’t see myself at age forty wandering around the East Village on a Saturday night trying to pretend I’m still young and edgy.
So, where to go? I used to say I wanted to end up in San Francisco. But after a trip to the Left Coast for San Diego 2001, I found the whole California thing to be less appealing than I remembered from when I was twelve. From what I hear there is a vast difference between SoCal and the Bay Area. But I just don’t know that I care that much anymore.
One of the places my mind has been wandering lately is to what I’m calling ‘The Dream House’. The week of Halloween I was watching a lot of Haunted Hotels on the Travel Channel. All those secret passageways got my brain itching. Then I saw a few episodes of MTV’s Cribs and I really started thinking of what I’d want in a home if I could build it any way I wanted. I compiled a list and then, on an exceptional night of procrastination, I put the Architectural Drawing class I took in college to use and sketched out a floor plan for the ‘The Dream House’. Since then it’s become something of an obsession, a new goal to strive for now that my creative goals are starting to pan out.
But where to build ‘The Dream House’? I gotta say, I’m a New England boy. I love everything about the geographic location I grew up in. It’s just too bad that the people living there have to screw it up. Moving back there would be calamitous to everything I’ve been trying to achieve. So I had to come up with an alternative. Now I’m thinking Upstate New York. Watts and I have made a couple trips up there and it seems like a nice place. I’m not a great fan of nature, but I wouldn’t want to live out on Long Island, where you can find grand expanses of the same exact house ad nauseum. From what Moby tells me, Pennsylvania is no place to live a life. And I just don’t think I could ever be happy telling anyone I live in New Jersey.
So I guess Upstate is my destiny. I wonder how late the pizza places are open up there.
From The Monkey House a/k/a Simon Writer because he’s not polished enough to be a movie star
The Random: Saw James Robinson’s Comic Book Villains on DVD this past weekend. Made me think about the Internet movement that’s been going on the past couple of years to put a new, ‘cool’ face on the American comic book reader. Even as I tried to deny it, eventually I had to admit that the raging nerds who end up dead over a collection of long boxes is closer to the reality than the alterna-hipster image of Ben Affleck and Jason Lee in Chasing Amy. Oh well, I still dig Donal Logue better than Mr. J-Lo any day.
