Frivolity at NYU

I finally had my graduation party yesterday, and it went a lot better than I was expecting it to. Basically everyone that I invited was able to come, and I got to see my teachers and gossip with them over AP scores and other fun school related matters. The party really did make the whole “I’m leaving for school in two weeks” matter a lot more pressing. It was nice to see a lot of those kids one last time before we all head off wherever the heck we end up going. 

In other news, I still haven’t done my dorm shopping.

Fuck. 

—–

Several days ago, I watched this documentary that I got from Netflix called Dark Days. It got me thinking about how New York City, especially Manhattan, has so many incredibly different layers to it. 

I suppose the most prominent layer would the Carrie Bradshaw layer of Manhattan. Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte epitomize what the city is generally portrayed as in the movies and on TV; a magical place with high fashion, good looking people, stars, showbiz, and fancy uptown apartments. Unfortunately, none of us will likely ever see anything like this ever unless we have an ivy league education and a nice job on the stock market (or as Sex and the City tells us, a lawyer…or an art dealer…or a PR rep…or even a weekly news columnist!). I’d still love to know how Carrie has enough money to buy tons of $500+ shoes, go out to eat at least two times a week, take cabs everywhere, and live on the Upper East Side when all she does is write a weekly sex column. Oh well, it is a TV show after all. 

After that, we definitely must shift our glance to the hipsters. Oh hipsters, how you upset me. That being said, I am slowly turning into a hipster myself. Hypocritical? Hell yes. Maybe I should take up smoking? I find that this is the other POV that is used in movies to portray the city. Artsy, artsy, artsy. 

I never fully realized the horrifying amount of hipsters that are in the city until my friend dragged me out to Williamsburg in Brooklyn on the L train. I’d been to the Village before, so it’s not like I wasn’t aware of the insane amounts of them on the lower portion of Manhattan, but I simply assumed that they were just in the Village. Nothing more. 

The L train generally spells disaster anyways as it winds through all the parts of Brooklyn that you don’t ever want to go to (East New York and parts of Bushwick come to mind, my friend says the Myrtle-Wyckoff station is particularly nasty) before dumping you off in Canarsie (which supposedly isn’t the most lovely place in the world either, I’ve never been), but I went anyways in promise of ice cream. I can be lured easily. 

Williamsburg is actually quite nice in reality. There isn’t much there (as my friend says, there’s only one street that really has anything worthwhile on it), but it’s a nice neighborhood with some cool shops and things to do. We had to take the G train afterwards to go to another neighborhood in Brooklyn, and that’s another tale in itself. Blech. 

Of course we cannot toss off the large amount of families that make up most of the population of the cities boroughs, but the other main layer that we simply cannot ignore is….

…the homeless. This is what brings me back to Dark Days. The film in question chronicles a group of homeless people who somehow have came to live in an Amtrak tunnel under Penn Station. They lived in almost complete darkness and built houses out of various pieces of scrap metal and wood. Surprisingly, they had electricity and, in some cases, heat and running water. 

The film itself was shot by a previously inexperienced man who actually went down into the tunnel and lived with these people for two years and documented their stories and their day to day existence. The film was shot on grainy black and white 16mm, and the homeless people he filmed helped him build equipment for his camera out of various pieces of trash that they had scattered about in the tunnel. It’s an undeniably unique and amazing experience. 

The film does falter a bit, however, because it doesn’t have a particularly linear tale to tell. The bulk of the film is made up for small vignettes that tell the stories of the people who live in this tunnel squalor and, while they are interesting, I personally could not help but feel that the movie would have improved from a linear plot (of sorts) which would have made it a bit more engaging of a film to watch. Despite this fault (which is not nearly as big of a deal as I am making it out to be), the film’s characters are certainly atypical, and you can’t help but hope that their lives change for the better. The film is also such a visual curiosity that, even if the characters don’t grab you, the camera work and visual style probably will. The DVD also included a really nice extra that tells you where each of the characters is today (well, at least up to when the DVD was authored). It provided a nice amount of closure. 

This week’s Netflix group contains a bunch of probably (a.k.a. 99% chance of the answer being “yes”) totally inappropriate French films. I don’t remember putting them on the top of my queue, but I guess I’ll watch them anyways? Expect an update on the grisly details soon.