Errands, conversations, bank visits, meetings, chance encounters, crosstown hikes and the constant Starbucks filings. Today is one of those Manhattan catch-as-catch-can days. 23rd Street and above. No downtown, no Brooklyn, no nothing. I always take pics and videos on days like this — partly just to do it, partly so I can look back and say “this is what it felt like that day,” and partly so I can post them so I can get back outside and take more pics and videos.
Everybody always looks grim and stern and mildly pissed on the streets, but that’s not a reflection of where they’re at. It’s a kind of performance, really. Because they’re all just walking around with their New York street faces. I’m steady and cool and so are you (or so it seems at a glance) but don’t even think of trying to fuck with me. I do it too. In fact I’m having a pretty great time. Isn’t everybody? This is one of the greatest…I was going to say it’s one of the greatest walking-around, face-watching, never-a-dull-moment cities in the world. It is that, I guess, but there are many, many other cities that can make that claim. Paris, Hanoi, London, Rome, Prague, Toronto.
What a drab and mortifying finish for one of the most innovative and delicious and beautifully photographed and superbly choreographed and exceptionally well acted films of 2012 — to end up in a video parlor on 8th Avenue in the mid ’40s with a yellow sticker on the jacket.
