Yearly Archives: 2016

The streets of New York and me

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I’d been awake for 24 hours when I got my first taste of the Big Apple.

I was in one of those other-worldly states that only people who fly long-haul – almost literally from one side of the globe to the other – can truly understand.

Your exhaustion is mixed with a jaded, surreal sense of excitement, not unlike waking up after a very big night, still a little pissed and wondering where the fuck you are and possibly who is lying next to you.

I checked into my hotel, which I was soon to learn (later that night at 2am precisely) would be the recipient of road-works outside its front door that involved an actual steamroller and a quasi-psychotic, sleep-deprived Kiwi/Aussie who’d been “upgraded” to a room on the second floor and who slept her first-ever night in New York with five pillows on her head.

That first night, with only a few hours to kill before my fateful night of unrest, I took the short stroll to Times Square and like so many before marvelled at the light so bright it seemed like it was 9am and not 9pm as well as all the people – who were bloody everywhere.

Only a few days before I’d written a blog about the loneliness of being a self-employed writer and so I was perhaps a little unprepared for being thrust into an environment that screams at every single one of your senses at maximum volume, every single moment of every single day. It really is the city that never sleeps and the one that never, ever shuts up.

In those eight days I walked 85 kilometres or 53 miles around the streets of New York City. In hindsight, this may have been a tad excessive but my feet seemed possessed – but I did come home a kilo lighter than when I’d left and I’d eaten every bad food choice imaginable (how good are chilli dogs?)

But, if I’m honest, one of the reasons why I walked and walked – from 10th to 89th Street and everywhere in-between – was partly because the subway scared me shitless. And it wasn’t because I’d heard particularly bad stories about it because I did live in London for a number of years and rode the Tube (usually drunk) with no qualms whatsoever. The only reason I can think of was that I’d morphed into a scared old 40-something lady and hadn’t actually noticed. I mean, what other explanation could there be for walking those rock-hard streets so much I was exhausted almost every night?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my two solitary nights out in New York (which strangely were a Tuesday and a Thursday) were at the very beginning of my trip. My one and only weekend there involved more killer kilometres of solitary sauntering as well as people watching and side-stepping, and which culminated in me curled up at my hotel with two slices of bona fide New York pizza watching a movie on a Saturday night. Party Fucken Central.

That’s not to say I was completely nana-like during my sojourn. My two nights on the town were punctuated by a revolving door of curious Americans who couldn’t believe that I was a) a woman travelling by myself, b) not married, even though (in the quote of the trip) I was “pretty enough to be married”, c) could drink them under the table, of which they offered to pay for time and time again, which was rather charitable if you think about it. They sure were a friendly, generous bunch.

I’m not going to list the notable sights that I saw as I walked those streets, because that’s just boring. But ask me what’s on the corner of 34th and ninth or 48th and Broadway and I can quite possibly tell you.

I paced and prowled around that crazy “I think I love and hate you” city for hour after hour. And it’s only now that I understand that I was looking for my mojo, because I know I’d lost it somewhere along the way these past few weeks, months or years. But with each kilometre, as my calves ached and my hips creaked with age, weariness and hope, I knew I was getting closer to finding it. And so I kept on walking. Mile after Manhattan mile.

I strutted to Central Park, then traipsed through it and around it often. I meandered down Fifth Ave more than once and hung out in Hell’s Kitchen most of all. And each night as I lay listening to the non-stop noise and humanity happening right outside my hotel window, I tried to sleep while simultaneously fighting the urge to leave the safety of my room so I could walk some more.

And so it was on my final day in New York that I walked down the dark steps on 42nd and, with much anxiousness, took the subway downtown. I looked around at the heaving hordes doing the same and wondered if they could tell I was a subway virgin. If they did, they sure didn’t show it and I sure wasn’t going to give the game away, so I just clutched onto my ticket tighter and pretended I knew where I was going and what I was doing with my life.

A few hours later, I bravely took the journey back again and something in me notably shifted. All of the “life shit” of recent years let go of me and I knew there was nothing to fear. No more than walking the streets of New York alone, but far from lonely, because you’re amidst the masses who can make you feel very small but also sometimes very big. No wonder people come to this place to follow their dreams, I thought. It made me feel like anything was possible – even if in the end, it was a visual and aural overload that I partly wanted to run away from.

But a few days later, while horrendously sick in DC (that’s a blog for another time), I found myself searching online for where I’d stay on my next visit to the Big Apple. I think that city creeps up on you like that. Too much all at once but once you’re gone, you want to go back and do it all over again. A bit like good drugs or a mind-blowing one-night-only lover, now I come to think of it.

And so it was that part of that research was how close my future NYC hotel was to the subway, because maybe my aimless days of wandering might be done for a little while. I think I strode those streets of New York and perhaps somewhere around 47th I found myself.

This solitary life

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It was at the moment when I caught myself eagerly engaging in an overly long convo with a checkout operator that I knew something in my life had to change.

Before I begin, I must confess that deciding to leave the security blanket of being an employee to work as a self-employed, full-time writer is one of the smartest moves I’ve ever made (although, my life hasn’t been littered with too many smart decisions, let’s be honest).

Every morning now, after a quick breakfast and daily dose of news, I head into my writing room to start the day dressed in my new “work uniform” of shorts, t-shirts and bed socks. I can’t remember the last time I brushed my hair. Today I have an open door policy that no one walks through.

A life lived outside of usual nine-to-five constraints, plus being single and a writer, means it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a Tuesday or a Sunday. I mostly work whenever I feel like it as long as I meet my deadlines. Ah what “freedom”!

Lately I’ve noticed I’ve been breaking up my days by taking leisurely strolls for lunch or coffee or (so I thought) for no reason at all. Alas, the aforementioned, supermarket situ made me realise my motivations were far from unconscious.

You see, I’m a writer who likes other people’s company as much as I like my own. But the craft requires solitude of such magnitude that it’s a fine line between inspirational and suicidal thinking.

In my past life as a journo in newsrooms, I got to fulfil both parts of my personality with the opportunity to write as well as to be involved in some of the most vulgar conversations imaginable – those were the days.

Today, I work on my own, every single day. Sure, I have a few phone calls and interviews most days but nothing beats being with other human beings in the flesh. One of my contacts and friends offered to meet me yesterday in real life, instead of just doing an interview by phone, and he will never know (until he reads this blog) what a highlight of my week that was. I may have dragged the get-together on too long in hindsight but I did introduce him to Colombian cheese bread to make up for it.

I’ve also been trying to increase my human contact (it sounds like I’m in a prison of my own design) by looking after my godson more, which I joke “gives my life purpose”. I even earnestly look forward to visiting mum, which is natural and right of course, but I usually forget that these days I have to attend a dementia ward to do so, which if truth sadly be told, is a bit of a buzz kill.

These past three months of solitude, however, have been beneficial because my screenplay finally became much more tangible than just a conversational fire-starter used when one was trying to impress people and/or trying to get in to their pants.

But I now know that something has to change. I’m not made of the right ilk to spend hour upon hour “cooped up” in my writing room, no matter how ridiculously wonderful and inspiring its view.

To write about life and about people, and to be the best version of me, I need more human connection but I’m not advocating going back to work “for the man”. Hell no. That’s because it seems I’m not the only lonely, self-employed, house-bound soul out there and hot desking is these days a “thing” that’s totally on my radar, at least for a couple of days a week.

I can only hope that the “hot” part refers to the quality of the people inside these mythical modern places, because my stories would become so much more interesting almost overnight, don’t you think?

Film sex

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I’ve just finished writing my first feature film screenplay and no one gets naked in it. Whether this will impact its saleability remains to be seen, but one thing I do know is that lately I’ve been thinking a lot about film sex. And it’s not just because I’m single.

I was at a screenwriters conference last month and there were a number of big names there. But most of them were men, you see, because until relatively recently the disparity between women and men working in film wasn’t seen as a very big deal.

One of major drawcards, however, was an American female screenwriter who has written for some of the biggest sitcoms in history, within writing rooms in which she was usually the only woman. And in some rooms, she told attendees, during her long career, she’d often be asked whether the female characters she’d written could perhaps be topless, or at least be partially naked, when it had nothing at all to do with the story.

Since going to the conference, I must admit I’ve been watching film and TV with a more critical eye and I don’t really like what I see. Just this week, one of the main entertainment stories online was about a new TV series starring Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, Riley Keough, in which she plays a “high-class call girl”.

It made me think of the many, many TV shows and movies I’ve seen that feature prostitutes when, you know, I’ve never actually met one in real life but seemingly they’re bloody everywhere and their lives are so very interesting that they deserve to be on screen more often than, say, female doctors, lawyers or politicians.

Not that there is anything wrong with being a sex worker, of course, but they do seem to be disproportionately portrayed in cinema and television. No doubt because they are regularly naked. Ditto with so many business meetings that happen in strip clubs. I mean does that actually happen in real life or do we just put up with it because film and TV are still seen as nothing more “harmless” than make believe?

One thing I did begin to notice was that TV shows that I thought I’d enjoy, like Vinyl and Mad Men for example, began looking like nostalgia pieces produced by rich, old, white dudes wanting to relive their glory days when they were young, virile, coke-addled chain smokers who fucked anything with big tits and no conversation skills.

A 2014 study on the representation of women in film backs up my observation with its findings showing that female characters are more than twice as likely to be either partially or fully naked (24.2 per cent vs. 11.5 per cent) and comments made by characters that refer to appearance are directed at women at a rate of five times that of comments directed at men.

Female characters are also more than twice as likely to be wearing sexy and sexualizing clothes (24.8 per cent vs. 9.4 per cent) and more than twice as likely to be skinny (38.5 per cent vs. 15.7 per cent). Also, out of all speaking characters in film, usually only 30 per cent are female with less than a quarter having a woman as the lead or the co-lead of the story. Last time I looked, women were 50 per cent of the population but I suppose that’s just in the real world not the imaginary one.

But, I guess, when we consider that the study found that only seven per cent of directors, 19.7 per cent of writers, and 22.7 per cent of producers are female, well, then it makes sense that the representation of sex, or gender, on screen has been biased for a very long time but the tide does seem to be slowly turning.

It made me consider my own film, which has equal numbers of strong male and female (fully-clothed) characters but I did come to the realisation that the main protagonist (by a small margin I believe) is a man. Someone at the conference suggested I change the story so the lead was a female to address this long-held gender bias and I must admit I did consider it.

The problem I have is the story is the story (and it kind of wrote itself around two particular male and female actors I have in mind) and I also don’t believe that something should be written in a certain way to fulfil a political agenda – no matter how worthy I believe that cause to be.

The story always has to come first, but maybe my own writing experience was impacted by the hundreds of films I’ve seen since I was a child when it was usually the man who saved the day, while the woman looked pretty and mostly silent. Not that any of my characters are overly heroic or good looking for that matter. Shit… it’ll probably never get made, now I come to think of it.

So, that said (perhaps on a soapbox and possibly to the detriment of my future career), surely in 2016 , it’s time that more women were given opportunities behind the camera and not just in front of it? Then they can write and direct truthful stories about their own lives, experiences and imaginations, using a more realistic equilibrium of both sexes – and remain fully clothed while they’re doing it. I can only hope I am one of them.