It's Friday evening and I am sitting inside a small movie theater at the MOMA with my good old friend Hannah who is up here for a visit, and my new friend Carlie who suggested we attend this event. We just finished watching a Brazilian film, and are waiting for the Q and A session with the director to begin. The members of the audience look like New Yorkers, but most importantly, they act like New Yorkers.

So here is an entry were I write about other people.

1) This is what is funny about New Yorkers; while most of us are used to sitting through dumb questions at Q and A’s, their tolerance level is extremely low. One would assume it would be high, given that whoever has ridden a crowded subway in summer with somebody’s armpit stuck to their face must know about tolerance. But this does not apply to cultural events, and here, pretentiousness might just beat tolerance. So when a member of the audience asks a pretty obvious, self-explanatory question, the other majority begin to get irritated. While in other states people are most likely to keep their intolerance to themselves, or slightly roll their eyes; in this city people are somewhat more explicit about their feelings towards a dumb question.

As soon as the first irrelevant, self-explanatory question was addressed to the director of the film, I could hear a crowd of complaints coming from other members of the audience:
"Duh!"

"This is obvious!"

"This question is so irrelevant"

And I swear I even heard an:

"Ass-Hole" uttered by somebody in the crowd.

This is good to know, given that now I will probably never ask a question to the film director if I am at the MOMA again.


2) The other typical New Yorker thing that I noticed is that every time you attend a cultural event in this city, there is always that one dude who goes to an event by himself and takes out his journal. Before the film/performance/reading is about to start he will sit in a reflexive mood, sometimes barefooted, and write on it.

Journal guy always looks contemplative, lost in his own thoughts, and yet there is that slight feeling that he might just be in need of attention, might just want others to think of him as a serious, reflexive, contemplative guy who goes to the MOMA by himself. So although he would not admit this to us, journal guy is lonely and just wants to make friends here in New York.

Sometimes I think that if I didn't blog and if I didn’t know any people up here, I would probably have to carry a journal around with me whenever I attend a film/reading/performance. Which makes me think that if I didn't blog, I would also probably be journal guy...