Circles of Fire

"And I want to be in New York for a while before it’s too late. People who think it’s never too late are optimists and wrong. It’s always too late to do something yesterday. And I feel like I’m in love with two women but they’re just cities set in different landscapes and temperate zones. Places unfriendly to cars with fantastic public transportation. San Francisco is the easiest place to live in the world. Everything is a short bike ride away and even on the worst days the weather’s not terrible. And I want to make movies and in New York there are cinematographers who sleep with their cameras. To make movies you need a team of people filled with unhealthy ambition. Those people exist in LA as well but I can’t live in LA. I arrived in LA in the middle of last year to edit my film and we immediately turned our backs on each other. I tried to make up with her, I even bought a car, but she called me a fool. LA kept making dates with me and not showing up. She’d tell me what she was going to wear and what we were going to do together and then she’d cancel when I was already on my way to Burbank, a small fire beginning under my hood, as much smoke as a cigarette curling its way toward my windshield. LA has no respect for time or space because LA has too much of both. It’s a great place to not get anything done. And so there’s New York. And then there’s San Francisco. And it’s a little heart-breaking. I’m going to New York, but I still live here."

Stephen Elliot, in the January 23, 2012 Daily Rumpus.

This actually sums up a major conundrum in my life right now (and for the last ten years), only I already live in New York and sleep with my camera and my computer and my iPhone and occasionally my sweetie and burn my heart out with an unhealthy amount of labor and ambition. I don’t know if I want a city to be easy, and then I wonder if I’m just too neurotic to know what’s good for me. Probably.

This reminds me of Penelope Trunk’s article Do You Belong in NYC? Take the Test. You have to answer two out of three of these questions as a yes to qualify as a “good fit” for NYC:

1. Are you a maximizer? (That is, do you seek the best of everything, and after finding it, seek what’s better than that?)

2. Do you want to be at the top of your field (or marry someone who is)?

3. Do you value an interesting life over a happy life?

It’s that last question that gets me every time — not because I have any doubt that I would choose an interesting life over a happy life — but because having my aim be something other than happiness often makes me feel like an alien. “Knowing what’s good for you” is basically a synonym for knowing what makes you happy, at least to most people. For me, knowing what’s good for me is knowing that I like a city that kicks my ass and has me working all the time and won’t let me forget the suffering of all beings.

And then I think about San Francisco, or Los Angeles, and I think my whole life could be different. Maybe that’s the New York optimizer in me — different, sure, but would it be better? Probably not.