Sounds kind of unclassy, right? But not when my particular worldview has been continually prompted by the pervasiveness of uncaring attitudes that have permeated every aspect of everyday life. Every person in this train car is staring at the screen of their own device only half an hour into our four-hour ride. Almost none of them will speak to one another, unless they’re sitting next to someone they already know. Trust me, I don’t want to be spoken to by any of them either, yet when that sort of behavior extends culture-wide, you know longer have a culture. You have a prison, the type that Jeremy Bentham (and then Michel Foucault) envisioned and predicted. And thanks to individuals like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, that’s the world we live in now. None of us will be escaping it any time soon, and none it will get any better either. It will only get worse. The truth behind all of this is a plain and rock-bottom truth about the endgame of capitalism: turn people into money and the pawns for money, and they will begin and continue to resent one another. I think there in our current era, there are very, very few exceptions to this rule.
I feel it most keenly, of course, in the realm of art. What can you create in the face of a cultural facelessness that’s entirely unprecedented in the scope of human creativity? The dread and depression that this fact provokes in me are of the variety that there’s no possibility of erasing personally, nor of eradicating socially. One can look back to branches of philosophy like existentialism and nihilism, certainly, but it’s hard at those point to take those guys seriously because they were living in a time when the problems hadn’t even yet been compounded nearly to the extent that they are now. I don’t know. Perhaps people always hated each other as much as they do today.
But back to how all of this affects the movies that I see, the music that I listen to, the books that I read, and the theatre that I watch. (It’s so easy to stray away from that focus.) Again, 2025 was the worst year for cinema in my 52-year lifetime, by far. The bottom line of profitability became one that we, collectively, cannot cross back over again. The redemptive qualities of cinema, and the creative forces that craft it (and I’m talking about true cinema, not trash), will exist now only in tiny islands that you will have to work very, very hard to find (not that anybody else really wants to, or even cares at all anymore). And so it will all come down to individually artistic visionaries (even more than collaboration) that somehow endeavor, against every odd, to make their vision seen.
Having a sense of class was also about having a continual interest in the mysterious habits and pleasures of others, when others were still worth having any interest in. That was one aspect that made watching Wall Street at the 92nd Street Y particularly resonant for me. Just downstairs from us on a frigid Saturday afternoon at the end of January, when it was far too cold to be doing anything outside for very long, trained adults were volunteering their time to guide children through arts and crafts projects in neatly ordered, minimalist basement rooms. After the movie, those kids were buzzing around the stairwells and the lobby, the complete antithesis of the energy that we’d just dozed through in that film. If the opposite of greed is giving, why does every form of charity remain “tastefully” hidden, when greed always remains so unabashedly unhidden? The moments of generosity, kindness, and hopefully gratitude persist, but they persist in snatches of time and in silence, because there’s too much to sell, too much money to throw away and to take and to be made, which is, in contemporary life, the baseline of human survival. It’s not a world that’s worth surviving in, and I’ll believe that, staunchly, until the day that I die. My only remaining, ongoing aspiration is to be The Gardener from Jenny Erpenbeck's brilliant novel Visitation, though I very much doubt that I'll ever have the patience to achieve that level of humane and otherworldly equanimity.
Later yesterday evening, I took the subway back to midtown to watch a concert at Radio City Music Hall, singer/songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. It was my first time ever seeing a show at that venue. The gorgeous and sprawling Art Deco lobby was crammed with stanchions for concertgoers to queue up and purchase way overpriced cocktails and mostly pointless merchandise from the artist. There wasn’t a single bench for anybody to sit down on before the show, during the intermission, or afterwards. You’re herded through the metal detectors at the front doors, so that nobody who hates the system as much as I do will have much chance to shoot everybody or blow everybody up, then you’re herded through the benchless rows of stanchions in the lobby, herded to your seat (with some guy’s entitled winter coat already sitting in it, of course), then herded back out onto the frigid street after the show because your money has now been securely taken. You won’t be getting any of it back, but at least you have a bunch of unnecessary photos on your cell phone, the very device that has now replaced your own memory where you used to store your photos. Everything single thing about the past two hours of your life experience had only one singular money-making intention.
Hence, all of the bodies in everybody else’s way, the loud coughing during the show when one could just quietly clear one’s throat instead, and the undimmed cell phone screens held aloft to record songs in their entirety, which are available to purchase in the exact same arrangements on CD and vinyl out at the merch booth in the lobby for one-tenth of the ticket price. The breathtaking performance space and the lobby itself, in terms of its architecture, have clearly changed relatively little over time. The human beings inside that theatre and lobby, in terms of class, could not be more diametically different from those who peopled it nearly a century ago now. What must they have been like, in a more polite time when people were desperately struggling, socioeconoomically (Radio City Music Hall opened in December of 1932, during the Great Depression), without nearly the vast comforts and amenities that nearly all of us today enjoy on a daily basis? Wanting to live then instead of now is the main reason why I always identify specifically as a living suicide. I haven't wanted to be alive at all for well over thirty years now, and the many reasons why every day that I move through the world never fail to make themselves abundanty clear from the moment I step outside of my front door.
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