True Stories of Apathy: a Life Spent Sitting

Wow - it's been a while since I posted. And I can't claim I did much in the interim, although my spankin' new electric guitar has been getting a workout and I ascended a Valkyrie in Nethack. Watched my first film in a cinema this year, Scorsese's Gangs of New York - a sprawl of a film, but what a sprawl. And early New York history fascinates me. Still, I'm not sure about the film's insistence on the idea that these were the hands that built America, as the U2 song on the soundtrack would have it - why do we need to glorify them anymore than what's already up there on celluloid? New York, perhaps America's most cosmopolitan city, can also be, and has always been, intensely parochial, and the film does a good job of depicting that. Why make these people out to be any greater than just who they were?

Incidentally, it was really good seeing Luc Sante's name as historical consultant in the credits for Gangs - Low Life is the book that made me interested in the Five Points area in the first place.

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