Who's Controling the Copy Machine?
At what point does life go from being reality into the realm of musical about the reality and then into the realm of the collective unconscious and then back to reality?
Written quickly in bed on a Sunday Night in January of 2024
I grew up watching so much TV, so many 80s sit coms, it was a huge part of how I coped with not being a very happy kid. The TV was the most stable thing in my life, the characters on the shows were there for me more than my friends, and even though I switched apartments every week the TV shows were the same.
I was the generation that went straight from Sesame Street to MTV and the first one paved the way for the second, it was the downfall of our attention spans in the mid 80s, me and a whole lot of people. I don't know how many people had this experience but I was so needful and sensitive and the characters on the TV shows felt like real people to me, they worked their way into my dreams.
Then this thing happened that changed my relationship to television: my dad died when I turned 13 and I got really, really serious. I remember very little of year 13 but I know that when I turned 14 I was a freshman at Bronx High School of Science and I met these punk girls in my class in the spring of 1989 and one Friday afternoon they brought me down on the subway to the East Village and we went to this anarchist meeting in a basement on 9th street off of Tompkins Square Park.
That experience changed my life because I met all these punks and squatters and fucking weirdos and that neighborhood, in 1989, was a wild place for a 14 year old with a dead father. By the next Fall I was cutting school and hanging out with my new squatter friends, and going to punk shows and hanging out in Tompkins Square Park, which had a tent city full of people who were living in makeshift structures. I ended up in the middle of the 1989 riots and after that my life was never the same. It’s hard to go through something like that and now change a bunch, and I was so impressionable.
And, somewhere around then I stopped watching television. In fact, it was this punk rock thing to not watch television, and to even smash televisions in the park. And remember this was years before the internet so television was still what everyone was watching. It was a really big deal to not watch televisions, it was going against the grain of society.
I’m not really sure what was happening in that stage of my brain development when I was a teenager, but back then, and for many years, I really didn’t remember a whole lot about my childhood. In fact, when I thought about my childhood, I was more likely to remember TV shows I watched rather than my actually life as a child. The first time I watched Blade Runner when I was 16 I so related to the androids who had other people’s memories implanted in them.
Maybe it was all the weed I was smoking or the periodic psychedelics, or maybe it was that I grew up on the island of Manhattan and like every single fucking street I walked or biked was in a million movies, but by the time I was 20 years old I developed this thing where I just started to feel like my life was a movie and I was the main character. I didn’t need to watch movies about anyone else adventures, my friends and I had the wildest adventures I knew, and I was writing them down and more importantly I was actually living them. I felt really alive when I was 20 and dropped out of college and lived very much in the moment after a lifetime of having all this pressure on me to go to school which I was never very good at.
Anyway, all that was a long time ago, and I’ve seen a bunch of TV since then. I’m not a snob about it like I used to be. There’s a way that the punks can be such snobs. Recently, Alice and I have been watching episodes of that 90s sitcom Friends because that guy died of a drug overdose and Alice watched it in high school. The show is really silly, but sometimes it’s nice to just turn your brain off and watch pretty people crack jokes.
Then, inspired by watching Friends, which supposedly takes place in New York, tonight we watched RENT, the movie, or at least the first 90 minutes of it. I had seen it once before in like 2006. It was really eerie watching RENT. Have you seen it? It takes place in the East Village in 1989, which is when I was 14 years old. It’s a musical portrayal of so many of the things my friends and I were grappling with, I mean I was living with my mom on the Upper West Side and I was not strung out on heroin or fighting my landlord or dying of AIDS, but when I was a teenager plenty of people around me were.
Alice was explaining to me that RENT is based on an opera called La Boheme, which takes place in Paris in the 19th century. Anyway, I’m sitting there watching the cast of RENT in Life Cafe (where a bunch of my friends worked when I was 16) sing this cheesy song about being part of the counterculture, and remembering how serious I was when I was 16, just so convinced that me and my friends were doing such Important and Exciting things, and trying to wrap my head around that a. I was part of a piece of history that is now long gone, b. History repeats itself over and over again in new forms, c. None of it is partially original, and d. Maybe it really is like we’re the androids in Blade Runner and we can’t really know who we are when we’re the actors in the drama because then we wouldn’t take it so seriously, f. I am definitely at a different point in my life writing these words as a father lying in bed with my partner and sleeping kids in the next room than any other time I lived. I’m kind of filled with wonder about the whole thing.
after many facebook comments from adored and far away friends and strangers:
Thanks for all these great comments, everyone. After I posted it I was thinking about how I played a Jet in West Side Story in 1986 in my elementary school what it must have been like for the kids who grew up around that now Lincoln Center neighborhood to have a bunch of little kids playing gang members pretending stabbing each other. At what point does life go from being reality into the realm of musical about the reality and then into the realm of the collective unconscious and then back to reality? And what do the portrayals of actual people have to do with the people who really lived? I think the humans are constant mimickers, and we make copies of copies of copies. But who’s controlling the copy machine?