Find a New City...or a Planet

I've been just recently thinking about all that stuff about moving into a foreign city with no one who you'd known before and starting a living on your own and stuff. I've been thinking how easy and simple it seems to do it from all the stories I've read, heard or seen in a movie. Like for example all the artists coming to New York City in the 40's, 50's, 60's or 70's whether they were poets, painters, junkies, lost souls or whoever. Or like the musicians coming to London Camden Town or to Berlin later in the 20th century. How simple it is to just come and get to know all those people...like standing by the doors of Chelsea Hotel for days and nights and then suddenly bumping into Jimi Hendrix who actually starts to talk to you or San Francisco and smoking a joint with Allen Ginsberg or stuff. It just sounds so easy. Almost like a fairy tale. But I'm not sure it's that way now. Nor it was that way years ago. Of course it wasn't. People just tend to glorify past. Anyway, New York or London is certainly not that kind of city that would gladly welcome any searching person right now.

During a recent panel discussion and audience Q&A discussion in New York, someone asked Patti Smith if it was still possible for a young artist to move to New York City and live a similar life to the one that Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and other artists did years ago. Patti responded by recalling her move to Manhattan during the 1967 "Summer of Love," when one could still rent a cheap apartment and "build a whole community of transvestites or artists or writers.'" As for today, however: "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."

All in all, although I really would like to believe what Patti says, I'm kind of sceptical on this. In this age of the internet and all that globalisation, glocalisation, etc. getting more personal on the social networks and the internet in whole just means getting more alienated with other people. It may sound quite contradictionary but to me it makes sense: getting more personal = getting more drift away. One personally doesn't want to share every single thing about one's privacy with 200+ so called friends on facebook. Although of course there might be also some real friends (or we can say all of them are real but are just don't interested in all that stuff). However, the amount of time spent on these sites - eventhough it doesn't have to be that enormous in the end - is big enough to make one feel tired of sharing something about one's self. Not just sharing, but it might make you feel more alone, lonely even. Now it reminds me of the urbanisation and industrialisation impacts and effects on individuals. By all those changes a man felt alienated. Everyone else was alienated. The work he did was alienated from him. And now this feels like another level. I can't imagine how this will develop and where it will take us. It certainly is an exciting time, everything is changing more and more faster. Though, it's a bit scary too.

Anyway, back to the topic that I started with. I'm really not sure if it is possible to start something like the artists did in the last century. To live a life like they did...I don't know. It seems like finding a new city is not enough. Finding a new planet - maybe. Haha. Though now I'm not thinking of the "invaders nature" of (the western/?/) human race at all. There are a lot of issues that are not solved (that's a bad word in fact - "being solved" is not the intention anyway). Intolerance, homophobia and fear of everything that's not "yours" - those are the things that are still present eventhough I would have thought they are actually not the case now when we live in this new modern tolerant democratic and FREE society (let me smile at this). It is here. And I'm not going to reveal any solution, any suggestion how to improve the actual state to end this blog with some stupid MAKE LOVE NOT WAR statement. I don't have a clue. I just don't know.