Work and the City

To Whom It May Concern:

New York is a place.  It is a bustle.  It is a constancy.  It is a beast.  It asks coping.  It is a roiling swamp of concrete and activity and hustle and humanity.  It is unending.  It is a confined infinity of time and space and sights.  It is loaded.  It has necessary softness.  And necessary meanness.  The sun still shines here.

Though not in my work.  In my work, imagination and the creative potential of hundreds of minds is fostered like a strange cave for dark and gorgeous creatures – bats with a love of noir and sweat and wonder and possession.  We let the gathering group into the lair each night and we strive with body and might and conviction and abandon to give them story.  We wear tuxedos.  We wear dresses and bow ties, and cover ourselves in blood.  We lurk around corners.  We bury bones.  We tell them secrets.  We wrestle curses and each other.  We command the world.  Sometimes the visitors care; sometimes they do not.  Sometimes they lose themselves and their desire lives in their chasing feet and their eager chests and voracious seeing.  This is a kind of sharing.  It is a most-distant cousin to other kinds of performance sharing and sometimes it works.  Sometimes it only confuses.  Sometimes it excludes.  Sometimes it transforms.

And that happens in New York City.  A bit like the city itself, and we at work are like the gnarly people on the subway, on the corner, trying to tell you a story.  But the pedestrians with masks on in here have chosen to enter this forest; this micro city of fog and bird screeches and vintage crooners and dancing royalty.  There is enough roiling and surprises and humanity and activity in this city to support our wood-paneled cave.  There is enough in this city to support anything – to support the gnarly, to support the aristocracy, to support the striving and the surprises and the advertising and the every stream of intention that flows here every second of the day.

There is also stillness.  But the city does not support stillness.  It steals it most often; though occasionally you find a pocket it has overlooked.

And so New York is a place.  Among many places.

There is much to see.

Sincerely,

Timothy