Thanks to Clayton Patterson, “the great connector,” I met his friend Simon J. Heath the other day. Simon is an Australian-born filmmaker who’s in love with New York City. The latest evidence is “Ten Talk New York,” a fast-moving flick that features interviews with New Yorkers thinking out loud about sex, love, race, and death. They all tell stories, great stories. But for sheer entertainment …
… if I had to pick a favorite in the truth-telling department, I’d go with Kim Harris who identifies herself as “a black Jew from the Upper West Side, or rather a nice black Jewish girl from the Upper West Side.” Here’s some of what she had to say:
You know what New York guys seem to think? First of all, they think they can have a baby when they’re in their seventies. So they’re trying to fuck till they’re fifty-five. And even if they can’t fuck — and believe me, a lot of them can’t fuck — New York guys just sorta think that the world’s at their fingertips. I mean, so what if they piss me off. They can literally leave, go to the bar, and in a New York minute they can find somebody else who’s willing to go home, give them a blow job, and let them sleep on their couch because they’re homeless. I mean, it’s an actual problem. We’re all lonely. The reason why I sometimes fill that void with sex is because we’re out of love and sometimes sex feels close enough to love.Kim Harris in ‘Ten Talk New York’
[…]
This dude fucking pulled out a vial of coke. We’re fucking around, and he pulled out a vial of coke and, y’know, put a line on his dick. He’s like, “There!” And I was like, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?” It was like the craziest — it was actually really kinda funny because I don’t sniff, I’m not a big drug user. But it was just like “What movie did you watch? What New York fantasy did you have that I’m about to do a line on your fucking dick?”
Seems to me she’s as sharp as Fran Liebowitz, no slouch in the truth department.
Thanks for the press Jan!!!
A couple ironies come to mind watching this wonderfully well-made video. We see how freedom for many American artists is defined as being a proud, debt-and-wage slave living a debased life while a tiny fragment of society has uncounted wealth — the people they pay their $4000 rents to.. Put it in black-and-white and make an arty fantasy of it.
The second is the phony idea that New Yorkers are such tough people, even as they continue to howl and moan about 9/11. Compared to the suffering in many other parts of the world, much of it directly or indirectly caused by the USA, they don’t even know what pain is. If the same ratio of Americans, for example, had been killed as during the last assault of Gaza it would come to 384,000 (in a six week period.) The same ratio of children killed would come close to 100,000. Nobody’s pain counts but ours. Such tough guys.
This American preoccupation with the self while harboring such disregard for others is culturally isomorphic with unmitigated capitalism. It creates a kind of psychopathic narcissism, something that informs NYC’s basic character. Do a line on somebody’s “fucking dick”…
Thank you for deepening the item. “unmitigated capitalism creates a kind of psychopathic narcissism” : Noam Chomsky couldn’t have said it better.
Just watched the movie. Maybe I should have had buttered popcorn. I am of the opinion of Mister Osborne. Whenever I bring out my old war stories of childhood and violence I sometimes cringe. Somehow it is a kind of lack of respect. It’s like the idea of finding a body. I once found a dead body. I thought it was really important somehow. Little did I THINK at the time that people have been discovering piles of dead bodies for centuries in just about anywhere you care to look. I also walked past dead bodies in Manhattan. Still somehow, the storyline seems confused as does the film. Most of these people I suspect chose their fate and accepted the price. Maybe it’s the only show in town but there are other towns, other tragedies, other stories. I have to say I was not taken by their stories. Still, all power to the filmmaker for getting it done. I never liked this tough survivor storyline about New Yorkers and their legends. It would mean nothing to just any normal person living in Kiev or Belgrade or Cape Town or just about anywhere. I was sitting in a café yesterday in the old town Heidelberg which is next to Disneyland, and reading a story about Aleppo and how most of the lights have gone out in the rebel-occupied part of the city. And that there are still a few hundred people roughly scavenging in the ruins and sitting all around me in this cafe were nothing but college kids and this morning I wished I could draw … I saw the image of a little girl with a big box and on the box was the name of her city and she opened the box and began putting the city back together with all the historical buildings and people and animals and then she woke up in the ruins of Aleppo and damned myself that I could not draw more than stick figures.