(no subject)
Dec. 17th, 2003 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbJoan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That," about falling in love with New York in her twenties and falling back out by her thirties, has a line about "those of us who came from places... where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions," and I know exactly what she means because I came to New York in my twenties from a place where all those streets were just ideas, and I'd add Broadway to the list, because it means "Theater" the way those others mean, per Didion, "'Money' and 'High Fashion' and 'The Hucksters.'"
It wasn't just the abstractions, but the bewildering fact that all these fictional settings from movies and books were real. I read The Cricket in Times Square before I had any other idea what Times Square was, and I read about hiding in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and later I saw the United Nations in North by Northwest and Central Park in Annie Hall. And there are so many other pieces of New York that I don't even remember where I first saw them but it wasn't in real life, that's for sure.
One day in midtown I walked by one of those weird urban developments where they've taken the idea of a shopping mall and tried to cram it into the bottom of an office building, and I saw a plaque on the building and it said Empire State something, and I thought, how sad, they've named this shopping center to give it a cheap psychological association with the Empire State Building. but aren't they infringing on a trademark? but no, Empire State can't be trademarked, it's the state motto, pretty clever how they got away with that and that's about when I realized OH. It's THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING.
This is part of why I love Los Angeles, too: Because I cruise past Grauman's Chinese Theater, and Hollywood and Vine, and Hollywood, and Beverly Hills and Sunset Boulevard and Warner Brothers and Mulholland Drive and Ventura Highway in the sunshine, and it's not like being in a place, it's like being in a song or a movie or a book I read, but it's real, too, and there are people walking from shop to shop or photographing famous footprints or making a left turn from the right lane, and the combination of all these imaginary memories with this humming reality makes my brain buzz.
It's not about fiction, but something similar happens when I drive around Silicon Valley. I first noticed it when I was driving around lost and passed by Yahoo on the other side of the street. Yahoo? It had been a web site, an idea of a web site, for years and it had never occurred to me that there was any physical representation of it.
And later I drove past Excite every day on my commute to work, and I walked by Google on my way to a movie, and I watched Netscape gradually crumble into AOL and Verisign, and just this afternoon on my way from the post office to the library I noticed PayPal for the first time. PayPal! Seeing web sites made real isn't exciting the way my first walk through Grand Central Station was, or following the signs to the Griffith Observatory, but it still has something of that feeling, like I'm seeing multiple layers of reality superimposed on each other.
Are there other places that work like this for other people?
It wasn't just the abstractions, but the bewildering fact that all these fictional settings from movies and books were real. I read The Cricket in Times Square before I had any other idea what Times Square was, and I read about hiding in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and later I saw the United Nations in North by Northwest and Central Park in Annie Hall. And there are so many other pieces of New York that I don't even remember where I first saw them but it wasn't in real life, that's for sure.
One day in midtown I walked by one of those weird urban developments where they've taken the idea of a shopping mall and tried to cram it into the bottom of an office building, and I saw a plaque on the building and it said Empire State something, and I thought, how sad, they've named this shopping center to give it a cheap psychological association with the Empire State Building. but aren't they infringing on a trademark? but no, Empire State can't be trademarked, it's the state motto, pretty clever how they got away with that and that's about when I realized OH. It's THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING.
This is part of why I love Los Angeles, too: Because I cruise past Grauman's Chinese Theater, and Hollywood and Vine, and Hollywood, and Beverly Hills and Sunset Boulevard and Warner Brothers and Mulholland Drive and Ventura Highway in the sunshine, and it's not like being in a place, it's like being in a song or a movie or a book I read, but it's real, too, and there are people walking from shop to shop or photographing famous footprints or making a left turn from the right lane, and the combination of all these imaginary memories with this humming reality makes my brain buzz.
It's not about fiction, but something similar happens when I drive around Silicon Valley. I first noticed it when I was driving around lost and passed by Yahoo on the other side of the street. Yahoo? It had been a web site, an idea of a web site, for years and it had never occurred to me that there was any physical representation of it.
And later I drove past Excite every day on my commute to work, and I walked by Google on my way to a movie, and I watched Netscape gradually crumble into AOL and Verisign, and just this afternoon on my way from the post office to the library I noticed PayPal for the first time. PayPal! Seeing web sites made real isn't exciting the way my first walk through Grand Central Station was, or following the signs to the Griffith Observatory, but it still has something of that feeling, like I'm seeing multiple layers of reality superimposed on each other.
Are there other places that work like this for other people?
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found money
Date: 2003-12-17 10:41 pm (UTC)Central Park was even more enjoyable due to having listened to the Simon and Garfunkel 1981 (on cassette) ad nauseum during my early adolescence. Having spent the night -albeit vicariously- in the Met with the protagonist of From The Mixed Up Files...added personal meaning to all the incredible art from different centuries and continents! I could go on and on. Now I'm curious as to why she 'fell out of love' with NY in her thirties. I haven't yet...even after visiting in winter, my LEAST favorite time to do so!
Re: found money
Date: 2003-12-18 10:10 am (UTC)Actually, I just found the whole essay (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~zkurmus/html/didion.html) online, you can read it and see what you think.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 03:52 am (UTC)The only thing in Boston I can think of that was like that was driving past the real Cheers. I never had that feeling about Harvard, I guess because it's never particularly looked like it's looked in movies. Maybe I haven't stood in the right spot, or maybe they didn't actually use Harvard when filming. (Actually, now I can't even think of a movie set in Harvard, so maybe it's just that the movies weren't memorable.) Oh, and living one block from Lotus was kind of cool (but also kind of sad, since by then they had been swallowed up by IBM).
A more common feeling these days is seeing or reading something set somewhere that I'm already familiar with. Like recognizing the Au Bon Pain in Good Will Hunting, or reading Microserfs or something set in Berkeley, or watching a car chase through the streets of San Francisco.
Actually, probably the closest I've come to what you're describing is visiting Washington, DC, and seeing buildings I'd seen on coins and bills. It still always feels like a social studies theme park when I'm there.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 10:13 am (UTC)While I was writing the last post I did a little reading about "famous" movie locations in San Francisco, but that feels a little different--you have to work to find, say, the place where Kim Novak jumped in Vertigo, and then you have to work again to see it that way. In New York you're constantly just stumbling on things.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 08:55 am (UTC)What's so great about there
It's all damn tunnels
Newspapers and skin
And meanwhile you know
I'll be here and you there
With crackheads
And assassins
And burn victims
And millionaires' sons
--The For Carnation
no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 10:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-19 08:02 am (UTC)