In 1981 it was a very good year

But now the days are short....

In reading a transcript from that piece of fine cinema My Dinner With Andre, I had forgotten completely this scene below about New York. Made me think about a great escape from San Francisco when the stars align and my great American SF novel is published. I recall my first trip to NYC in 1982. Stayed in Astoria. Enjoyed wandering around. I was 25. Best part of the visit was the Brooklyn Museum where I discovered Max Roach performing free in the sculpture garden. Coming from Sacramento cow town this big city was much more exciting than LA. Wanted to move on the spot. My next visit was in 2001. A few months before September. Amusingly once again Brooklyn was the high point. Managed to see the Royal Academy of Sweden directed by Ingmar Bergman perform the “Ghost Sonata” by Strindberg. This in BAM’s theater.

From the movie:

Andre: Okay. Yes. We’re bored. We’re all bored now. But has it every occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks. And it’s not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep? And somebody who’s asleep will not say “no”?

Andre: See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire, he’s a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand, and he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn’t read newspapers, and he doesn’t read magazines. He’s completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot.

Andre: And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. Just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods, he’s 84 years old, and he always travels with a backpack cause he never knows where he’s gonna be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn, he said to me, “Where are you from?” and I said, “New York.” He said, “Ah, New York. Yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” I gave him different banal theories. He said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.”

Andre: He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built. They’ve built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners, and as a result, they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or to even see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree and he said, “This is a pine tree.” He put it in my hand and he said, “Escape before it’s too late.”

Andre: See, actually, for two or three years now, Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. That we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here. Of course, the problem is where to go, cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. See, I think it’s quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that, from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there’ll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts, and that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.