“I don’t think there’s any people like me in a young generation. Because they wouldn’t be allowed to be like me.” - Fran Leibowitz, Pretend It’s a City”
Just in case, based on my opening quote, that you think I’m about to tell you that I think I’m a young generation’s Fran Leibowitz - stop. Stop having that thought right now. There is no other like Fran, and there most certainly never will be. Nothing is more evident when watching Martin Scorsese’s new 7-part docuseries on Fran and New York than the fact that she is unique; she is a singular entity, never to be replicated.
What was surprising for me when watching Pretend It’s a City was the way Ms. Leibowitz reminded me of other people - my mother, my mother’s best friend, an aunt, a former co-worker - while still being completely and utterly herself. She is a larger-than-life stand in for Women of the Boomer Generation in many ways. Watching her talk about New York and music and sports and family all made me realize: I might be something like a Boomer who was born far too late.
Do I think I am some strange twist of fate, anachronistically born out of time? No. I think I am a product of my own upbringing, of parents and family members and family-friends who shared a deep love for having been born Baby Boomers themselves, and whose nostalgia obsession seeped into every aspect of their lives. My parents are from the first generation where they could re-experience much of their youth well into adulthood. Music, films, TV, family occasions, memories - everything existed on a piece of media that could be returned to, again and again. There were pictures of first days of school and dances and family parties; home movies of graduations and weddings. Suddenly a person’s whole life had been captured in one way or another and could be put on like an old sweater that smells like an ex-boyfriend and instantaneously transports you back to your youth.
What they all seemed to long for even more than the entertainment or the clothes or the food (that will never taste the same again) was the togetherness. How many stories did I hear about the cousins who all grew up together, or the gang of kids who would be sent out to play in the dog days of summer? “If only we lived closer,” my great-aunt had sighed to my grandmother, and their daughters had repeated to one another. Any time you sit down to watch documentaries about people from the Boomer generation who made things it is positively astonishing how together they all were, in groups, talking to one another and creating art (or, more often, utter nonsense, but still creating something.) What were the chances that all of those minds, aching for something more, would collide in bars and dingy apartments?
By the time I came along, it’s only natural that I thought these things were what youth actually was: records, VHS tapes, dinner parties where you talked about the state of the world and yourself. I wasn’t ready for the insane rate at which the world would evolve. I remember saying to my Uncle who was complaining once about how fast things had changed, “if we could plot out how fast the world has changed in your 65-year lifetime, the steepest part of that curve would have happened in the last 25 years.” While Boomers cried for the world of their lost childhood, Millennials were nursing whiplash.
Now as an “Elder Millennial” (a fairly ridiculous phrase only furthering the cause that the 18-year gap we use to delineate generations isn’t quite appropriate anymore) I find myself averse to much of the technology that is usually associated with people my age. Social media has so intensely ruined my mental health that I have taken to leaving my iPhone in a drawer for most of the day. When I’m done with my workday, I read books - actual ones made from paper and not ones beaming up at me from a tiny computer. And yes, I listen to records (especially when it comes to music that was recorded at a time when the mass production and sale of that music was done via records.) Does this make me a curmudgeon? I don’t think so. I don’t lament people who do read books on Kindles or prefer to buy their music from iTunes.
What I do lament is how incredibly hard it is to get people to talk to one another anymore. In another scene from Pretend It’s a City, Fran explains that art used to be discussed in cafes and bars (she’s using this statement to rage over the smoking ban in NYC, but I’m choosing to ignore that because it’s ridiculous.) Now, where do people discuss art? On Instagram in their DMs? In a thread on Twitter? No, of COURSE not. The internet is not where people go to discuss art, the internet is where people go to YELL AT EACH OTHER. So where is the real conversation happening - particularly during a pandemic where nobody is going out to socialize. (NOTE: if you are going out to socialize, fuck you.)
I accept that I am never going to get my favorite bands to only release high-quality vinyl versions of their albums. I accept (though it is horrible) that brick-and-mortar bookstores are going out of business. What I cannot accept is that my own generation, one I thought was made up of my comrades who had been raised by people who loved their youth and longed for it, don’t want to talk to each other anymore; not really and not honestly. It makes me feel sad more than anything else to know that I send letters out to my friends and most of them will never write back. It makes me sad when I call a friend to have a genuine catch-up they do not answer because somehow we’ve all become afraid of hearing another person’s voice. Truly, it makes me sad to think of all the incredibly talented artists, musicians, writers, and poets who will never sit together and talk about the things that move them, the world around them, and inspire one another because we just can’t bring ourselves to experience genuine interaction anymore.
One day the pandemic will be over and we’ll be released from our quarantine prisons. I’m sure everyone is making their list of things they want to do like “get trip-and-skin-your-knees drunk in public and fall asleep with vomit in my hair” or something. If you want to find me, I’ll be in my car, listening to the radio and driving to a friend’s house for that other Boomer tradition: dropping in on someone unannounced. Surprise!