Art Collapsing into Reality
When art confuses the reality it's imitating
Apologies for these tiny MIXTAPEs but I’m about to take the Series 7 Exam on Wednesday—wish me luck!—so I don’t have a lot of time for anything except studying since this exam covers so much material from municipal securities to options trading and from customer accounts and suitability to debt securities and variable insurance products and treasury bonds and technical/fundamental analysis and everything else in between. Did you fall asleep yet?
Anyway, before I go, I wanted to talk about a classic Hollywood experience I had recently at work. Some readers will smell the unmistakable scent of Umberto Eco’s hyperreality in the following scene sketching and that can’t be avoided (nor should it). So this happened: a production studio has been filming on the Century Park campus all week for some LA-based legal thriller I’m sure (or something like that) and like all the other professionals working in one of the three buildings here, I did my best to ignore the production staff as best I could, though they were everywhere, taking over the park and connected campus like first-world colonizers. It was around half past ten in the morning, I’d been working for two and half hours and was taking my routine walk through the campus to Tilt coffee to get my Vanilla Oat Latte when I was stopped by a production manager. You know the type: they’re the people always dressed in black and always wearing headsets who stop you from walking down your own streets or from walking into your own apartments or getting into your own cars because they think they own public space. Anyway, I looked around and noticed a group of disgruntled businessmen next to me, all dressed up in smart business formal wear, all ready to go to meetings in the adjoining buildings, all of them dressed in clean suits and pressed shirts. They held weathered briefcases that had probably seen too many liquidations to count. Some of them wore tortoise or black plastic frames. They all had full heads of hair. They glanced at their watches nervously. They looked around for confirmation. And there I was, dressed in a suit I bought online from a Brooks Brothers clearance sale, feeling slightly self-conscious because I’d only been at my new job for 2-3 weeks and these men—all men, by the way—looked like they’d been doing hostile takeovers and calculating KPIs for decades. We all stood there for like fifteen minutes and gave each other knowing looks.
Eventually, I started giving the PM dagger eyes because his production studio didn’t own this space and some of us had to go to work and there was no way to walk around the checkpoint. I spoke in the language of impatience: I began tapping my feet. I stared at my watch. I read business emails from my phone, looking at the café in the distance with quiet longing. As I watched the director do twenty out-takes of background scenes, each time shouting, “Background!” which got repeated by the other crew members who also shouted, “Background!”, I considered just walking into scene and telling them “Don’t fuck with a man’s coffee!” But being polite and educated as I am, I waited too long. Maybe, it was the British and the Japanese in me. I’m always too mouthy or too polite at different times. I don’t know. But then, out of the blue, after it felt like the production studio was about to film twenty more out-takes of the exact same scenes with the same extras waving to each other over and over again and the same extras walking across the campus in the same stumbling way and the same extras greeting each other in front of a glass building that actually looks like La Défense in Paris before they entered together as a group and the same extras delivering beverages on the same steel hand-truck, suddenly the director stopped filming, the production manager waved all of us across the square, and then I watched in slow motion as we walked in complete freedom again in the world. And by that, I mean, I watched each of the businessmen walk up a staircase where the PM told them to wait in the holding cell until further notice.
For fuck’s sake! They weren’t businessmen! They were extras dressed up as businessmen. Their job was to act like businessmen and they looked so convincing that they made me question my own appearance as someone new working in the industry. And I was the only guy in finance in that whole group of actors. The only dude who wasn’t an extra. The only person sweating his upcoming exams. And I’d almost walked upstairs with them to become part of the parade of the fake and the real. I almost got a new job pretending to be the person I’m trying to become, which felt like an authentic cultural metaphor of being American.