Note to Self

“It’s just a friend,” came the man’s voice from somewhere, a little hoarse. “It’s just a friend.”

Then the screen went dark and the word FIN appeared. As if from a great distance, the sad strains of an acoustic guitar struggling to stay in tune could be heard. A Will Oldham song. Anna realized that she was crying. She read the credits, which were short and consisted mainly of Gilman. Later she would try many times to explain this Road-to-Damascus moment to herself, but would always come up short. All she knew was it felt as though she’d slipped a hand between the sofa cushions to find a new world among the lost coins and the unsightly crumbs. An underworld you could traverse unencumbered by the opinions of anyone else, where you could just be yourself. The opposite of pop culture. Unpopular culture. A place she might just belong.

It felt like a significant discovery, even though she didn’t really know what it meant. And she was suddenly very tired. The lights were already off. The cars going by on the street below sounded like rain, like waves, like the soundtrack to some Gilman movie about the impossibility of sleep. She pushed the computer out of kicking distance, off to one side, then turned around and shut her eyes.

The laptop battery would die overnight, but she didn’t even care.

4

Anna emerged from the subway to find that a new public art exhibit had been installed in City Hall Park. A tourist stopped in front of the same sculpture that stopped Anna. He was wearing flip-flops and holding a bag from the 9/11 memorial gift shop.

“What kind of fucking shit is this?” the man said, more to himself than anyone else, as he held up his iPhone and took a picture. It was an inadvertently accurate question—the sculpture honestly did look like shit. Anna found a plaque over by the water fountain that explained the installation, which was called Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, and Shitsuke. The artist was a Japanese sculptor by the name of Mitsuri Yagihashi.

“I have always been fascinated by rituals of hygiene,” Yagihashi was quoted as saying, “and the relationship between purity and paranoia. In Japan, one’s cleanliness is considered a reflection of one’s inner state. These five shrines were cast from the dung of macaque monkeys indigenous to Japan, then covered in gold leaf. I consider them ‘taboo’ structures.” Yagihashi’s quote was followed by a lengthy paragraph by Joseph Fierhoff, the director of the New Museum and chairman of the city’s Arts in the Parks Fund, who described Yagihashi’s work as “drawing on his country’s rich folk art traditions” and “a response to Japan’s famous ‘toilet culture.’”

On the whole, Anna had to admit, the sculptures didn’t seem to really transcend the raw materials they came from. They didn’t look much like shrines to her. They looked like enormous gold-colored turd balls grouped in random clusters. Which wasn’t to say that the park didn’t seem kind of cheerful, improbably strewn with golden turd-ball clusters. But what was most impressive here, Anna couldn’t help thinking, was the fact that they had been installed in City Hall Park at all. The sculptures sucked, true, but Joseph Fierhoff found the shitty shrines or whatever impressive and so did the Arts in the Parks commission and a number of other top-tier cultural institutions. They almost became, in a sense, monuments to artistic ambition. Monuments to themselves. This was Gilman and Yagihashi’s great trick, Anna realized. They had figured out how to make a job out of simply being themselves, turned their perverse, narcissistic, possibly enlightened selves into marketable commodities. Maybe this was all art really was—being yourself. Seen in this new light, the turd balls lifted Anna’s spirits considerably as she cut through the park toward J&R, dispelling any final misgivings she still had about buying the camera.

Brandon, had told her it didn’t matter what camera Gilman used, that nowadays it didn’t make sense to invest in anything but HD.

“Why hamstring yourself with technology?” he’d asked. “You think your Gilman guy doesn’t convert all his crap footage to HD before he screens it at Cannes or whatever? Everyone does. That’s why I’m right, right? Look, if you want to go analog, then go all the way. Real film. Super 8. But for fuck’s sake, don’t half-ass it.”

Anna didn’t want to half-ass it. And she trusted Brandon, who had studied film for a year at USC before transferring to Hunter. So she got back online right away after talking to him. The cheapest HD camera she could find on CNET reviews was a Panasonic HDC-TM700 for $794.29, but when she sent the link to Brandon, he’d immediately shot that option down as well.

“A big NO on the HDC-TM700!” Brandon replied in an e-mail. “It does have some nice features. But mostly it’s just a cheap piece of junk. It lacks external audio inputs and all you really need (are you paying attention?) is GOOD AUDIO. It’s amazing what a professional soundtrack can do even for shit footage like Gilman’s. In your case, I would actually recommend a camera with two mic inputs: one for a boom and one for a lavalier. You might try the VIXIA HF S10 or JVC GZ-HD6.”

It made sense. She remembered the jarring sound of the bag rustling whenever the guy in Age of Consent moved his head, how real it sounded and how it seemed to bring you right into the scene. But when Anna went back to CNET, she found that even the VIXIA HF S10 and the JVC GZ-HD6 had only one mic input; all the cameras with two mic inputs were in a different price range altogether. Plus, boom mic and lavalier units were, of course, sold separately, and together added about seven hundred to the total cost. When Anna finished pricing everything out and sent the links to Brandon, he agreed that even with a minimally acceptable package, she was looking at close to $3,200. Or “thirty-two bucks,” as he had put it.

B&H, Brandon had assured her, would give Anna a better deal than J&R, but all the clerks at B&H were Hasids and Anna found this too distracting. The last time she’d gone there (two Christmases ago, to buy a digital camera for her mother) she could think of little else but the Hasids, who seemed so happy and prosperous living under such terrible constraints. The Hasid who had helped her that day had red hair and blue eyes, and, of course, Anna couldn’t help but thinking this was unusual for a Jew. She couldn’t stop herself from wondering how many children he had, or from staring overmuch at his yarmulke. And the salesman’s benign comparison of wide-angle focal lengths did nothing to camouflage his contempt for her lifestyle. She was sure of it, that if all the Hasids at B&H had any say, they would agree that Anna, a woman, shouldn’t be there discussing megapixels and LCD screen resolution in the first place. That her hair should not be dyed. That her dress should not be so low-cut and should instead remind men of Soviet architecture. That she should be at home, making things nice for the husband and children she didn’t (but should) have. She knew Hasids didn’t have sex until they were married, until after they’d had children even, and could only imagine what the red-haired Hasid would think if he knew that she’d had phone sex—regular phone sex, not even the brave video-chat kind—with a man she’d met on the Internet.

No, the winner of this double-consonant-ampersand contest could only be J&R. Even if it was cheaper, B&H was out of the question.

The salesman who ended up helping her at J&R was named Khuleh. He was from Oman and, unlike the Hasids of B&H, who spoke with the clear diction and authoritative tones of asylum attendants, Anna understood none of what Khuleh said. She did understand that he was trying to sell her a different camera, because he had picked up the box for a Kodak Zi8 and started waving it slowly in front of her face.

“Goolex!” Khuleh insisted. “Goolex.” Whatever that meant.

This only made Anna angry, because she knew all about the Kodak Zi8, which didn’t have any mic inputs whatsoever and was just an overpriced pocket cam for tourists. Anna pointed instead at the box for the Panasonic 3MOX AVCCAM.

“I want this one,” she said.

But Khuleh kept waving the Zi8 at her, so she picked up the AVCCAM box and waved it at Khuleh, realizing that now they had become two people waving boxes at each other, executing some complex, consumer form of Butoh in the camcorder aisle of J&R. Finally, Khuleh, conceding which side his bread was buttered on, stopped waving the Zi8 and took the AVCCAM box from Anna. He filled out an order form and Anna went downstairs to the cashiers. With New York sales tax everything came to almost thirty-five hundred. And when Anna handed half of Aunt Clara’s money over to the cashier, she kept reminding herself of the little things she skimped on. I don’t have cable, Anna thought. I’ve never downloaded a ringtone. After running the card, the cashier made a big thing of explaining J&R’s return policy, which was sternly worded and seemed to indict Anna as a money launderer or a pedophile before her goods were even in the bag.

She made it as far as the park, as far as the smiling Chinese family posing for a snapshot in front of Seiso, the tottering turd sculpture that looked not unlike a man on a horse, when she realized the box was too heavy and flagged a cab back to Brooklyn. An additional thirty dollars, Anna could not help but notice.

When she got home, she set the box down in front of the hallway closet and went to fix herself lunch. Brie wouldn’t be home until past seven—on Tuesdays she worked as an intern at Condé Nast’s ad sales department. The rest of the week, Brie had a different internship, at a small music management company downtown. Anna did not really understand how Brie survived when her per diems barely covered lunch and didn’t include a Metrocard. But Brie had told her these internships were highly competitive. They took only five people at Condé Nast per semester, and had it not been for Brie’s prior internship at Women’s Wear Daily, she could never have snagged this one. The music management position was even more exclusive; Brie had to wrangle that one through inside connections. It was amazing to Anna that Brie worked so hard just for the privilege of working hard. But what did Anna know? She was, after all, ten years older than Brie. In her day, people had simply gone out and gotten jobs after college or some kind of paid fellowship. Still, Anna was willing to concede that those were simpler times—before 2007 and the collapse of hope.

She put a frozen saag paneer dinner in the microwave for four minutes on high, and while that was cooking, ate half an avocado. But with a minute and a half still left to go, the avocado was already gone, so Anna got herself a bowl of seedless grapes and sat down to check her Gmail. She had eleven messages, which was good for a Tuesday. But then, heart sinking, she realized only one was real—from Brandon—and the rest were just Flavorpill bulletins, auto reminders about various depressing things she’d pay to forget, and a bulk-mailed greeting from a woman in the contracts department of Pinter, Chinski and Harms, smugly enjoying her overseas “vacay.”

The microwave pinged and Anna, feeling already full, looked over at the box, still sitting by the door. J&R didn’t have a bag big enough for it, so the AVCCAM box sat naked on the floor, its sides splattered with pictures of itself, its features announcing themselves in garish cartoon letters. Next to the AVCCAM box lay a large plastic bag that contained the two smaller boxes with her sound gear: an AV-JEFE CM520 professional lavalier mic with Shure mini 4-pin XLR connector and a Sennheiser MKE 400 compact video camera shotgun microphone.

The microwave pinged again, and Anna got up to fetch the saag paneer. This one didn’t come with rice, so she got herself a roll of sourdough bread. She ate straight from the plastic container while reading The Daily Beast’s “Cheat Sheet” on her laptop. When she finished eating, she clicked over to Daily Intel, then Fishbowl NY, then back over to her e-mail, where there were no new messages in her in-box. She considered checking Newser (though she didn’t much trust Michael Wolff), or PopEater (even though it always made her feel guilty afterward). Then Anna wondered whether The Daily Beast’s “Cheat Sheet” had refreshed in the past half hour, whether it was worth maybe checking back in. But then she caught herself and remembered the box.

She had cleared her entire day for that camera, so why was it that now, after all the hassle and money spent, with the camera finally home, she did not want to open the box? It was because, Anna knew, inside the box, the camera would be broken into its many subcomponents. And each component would have to be assembled according to very specific instructions that would be meticulously outlined in an instructional booklet divided into eight chapters, and translated into French, Japanese, German, and Russian. Annoyingly, there would also be a separate disk with software that might or might not be compatible with her operating system. There would be many small plastic bags inside the box, with little coiled cables inside each bag. Each cable would look exactly the same, but of course their inputs and outputs, their minute, electronic genitalia, would differ ever so slightly. The cables would be molded into perfect little bows and held in place with a single twist tie. Unwrapping them would make Anna feel guilty. Ripping the small plastic bags open would make her feel guilty. Throwing away the cardboard backings would make her feel guilty. She pictured herself with the components and the bags and the cables all spread out in a big, guilt-inducing, Earth-destroying pile before her, and she pictured the tiny font of the instructional booklet, which she would dutifully struggle to follow before tossing it aside to just follow her instincts instead. Inevitably, she would unpack everything only to find that something was missing. Or that she had an extra component left over. She would turn on the camera to find that it wouldn’t turn on. Or that a little red light wouldn’t stop blinking. There would be visits to the “troubleshooting” section of the AVCCAM website, and calls to an 800 call center in Tehran where a man insisting his name was Pierce would walk her through the installation process in lightly accented and unfailingly polite English. And Anna would think overmuch about his fate, and life under an oppressive regime where female circumcision might still be allowed and people were put to death for stealing soccer balls. And she would find herself wondering whether “Pierce” might be able to use his connections at Panasonic to perhaps secure an HIB visa, and bring his family over to the States, so his kids could excel at math and science and brainy sports like squash, and eventually get accepted to an Ivy or at least a good tier-two school like Tufts. But all the while, even as she planned Pierce’s immigration, Anna would be cursing his ineptitude, his inability to figure out why the fucking red light kept blinking and how to please, please, please, just make it stop.

5

From very, very far away, like the tremor of the subway running down Fourth Avenue four stories below her apartment, Anna sensed it. The box, the bags, the responsibility the things inside them imposed upon her, had begun to feel oppressive. Her enthusiasm was already waning. And, realizing this, Anna felt three things at once. The first was an overpowering urge to do nothing, to sit at her computer and surf and surf and surf until she ended up somewhere truly well and gone. Somewhere deep in the eighteenth century, learning about religious motifs in Sorbian military garb or laser-guided excavation techniques used to unearth Pygmy artifacts. The second was to go back to J&R, endure their enhanced interrogation techniques, return the camera, return the mics, and put Aunt Clara’s money back in the bank. And last, of course, was to beat back the weak-willed default of quitting. To at least try to try.

Anna got up and busied herself with the apartment, which was something. She watered the ten-dollar plants from IKEA and shook the crumbs from the fleece blanket covering the couch. She swept the crumbs off the floor, then swept the other parts of the floor that didn’t require moving any furniture. And as she moved her little pile of dirt around the table legs, then around the apartment, Anna considered the Middle Way. This was her thing lately—taking China as an example. She had learned about it while reading an article on Chinese economic reform. The philosophy, as far as Anna understood it, was based on precepts of Buddhism and the idea of “paradoxical integration,” which posited that two completely opposite-seeming states might, in fact, be interdependent. And even though Anna was not in any way endorsing China, which Mediabistro often pointed out was evilly suppressing bloggers, this idea resonated with her on many levels. She considered her own life and decided maybe embracing limitless potential—like being a good drunk—required first building tolerance. Not everyone could be Obama, she reminded herself. Come to think of it, not everyone could even be Gilman. She couldn’t instantly vault to these heights, would instead have to shuffle toward her goals, crab-like. Maybe this is what Leslie meant by Process and Learning?

And it suddenly occurred to Anna that she could solve this problem, the problem of the camera in the box, and what to do now, the same way she had solved so many other problems: on craigslist. Craigslist! Where Anna had found a rare Fiesta teapot in Burnt Caramel and Brie. Where she hadn’t found Ray from Arizona (she preferred OkCupid for that kind of thing) but where she had admittedly, on her horniest days, scrolled through the “casual encounters” section and given herself over to the (surprisingly compelling) fantasy of an anonymous fuck in the back of a Chase ATM lobby. Now that she considered craigslist, it all seemed so obvious. Wouldn’t there be filmmakers there, looking for other filmmakers? Of course the filmmakers will be there, Anna thought. Everyone’s there.

Once Anna was on craigslist, things fell into place. Immediately, she sized up her options and realized there were a number of ways to go. She could start with “tv/film/video” under “jobs” or she could start with “talent” under “gigs.” The pragmatist in her knew it was probably better to dip a toe in the water with a “gig,” but Anna couldn’t help thinking that money wouldn’t hurt. That—hello?—she didn’t have a job. Alternatively, she could get the lay of the land in the “film” section under “discussion forums.” Follow some threads, get a sense for the lingo, and come off sounding more like a pro. Then again, meh? Why waste her time in some pointless forum for loser filmmaker wannabes? Who had time for that stuff, anyway? Anna clicked into the jobs sections and felt that familiar high. The ads fanned down the page in a long, reassuring list.

Right away she got distracted by something that shouldn’t have even been there in the first place. “Pretty Girls Needed for Thursday Foot Fetish Event.” OK, she had to click on that one. Just out of curiosity. “We are looking for very attractive girls with pretty feet,” the ad said, “to have their feet massaged and kissed at our weekly foot fetish events.” Anna looked down at her feet. She slipped off a shoe and, without even thinking about it, began considering her biggish veins. Crap, she thought, jamming her shoe back on. What did that ad even have to do with film? This was how the hours flew by like panicked zebras on the African savanna, how craigslist sucked you in. Then again, these ads were unbelievable. “Tap-Dancing Vagina Needed for Vaudeville Comedy Show”? Shouldn’t someone in Craig’s vast empire be screening these things, weeding out the total nut jobs? Jesus, Brie would love this. And wouldn’t it be funny if she just started texting Brandon these subject lines without any explanation? Anna got up and nuked some frozen spanakopita triangles, which she spent some time arranging on a plate around a crescent of sour cream. She poured herself a glass of Tropicana, and suddenly, as she was putting the carton back in the refrigerator, it struck her that she was doing it again.

OK, when I sit back down, Anna told herself, I will stay on topic. I will only click on entries that relate to film. I will start a separate Word file. I will contact at least five people today. She thought about actually writing these instructions down for herself on a Post-it note. Better yet, she could form an Intention Statement. But even with the helpful list of “continuous action verbs” that Leslie had e-mailed her, Anna somehow balked at forming an Intention Statement without Leslie there.

Once she redoubled her efforts, the obvious problem confronting her was that most of these ads requested that people have very specific skills. People who could “disseminate encoding protocols,” had a “basic understanding of UNIX,” and knew their way around an “MPEG-2 Transport Stream.” What Anna had to offer was a bit more vague. Not many people, admittedly, were looking for an unemployed woman with an AVCCAM in a box who happened to be conversant in the nuances of real estate tax law. But then Anna stumbled on an ad for a “producing partner” that required no professional experience, only a “passion for cinema.” She wrote that one down. And when she extended her search back a few weeks, she found some other possibilities. “Indie Filmmaker Seeks Non-Union Crew.” “Assistant for Film Distribution Company.” “Film Intern—Production/Postproduction.” (Who knows, maybe Brie had the right idea about internships?) She had promised herself five contacts, true, but come to think of it, four was good enough. Anna actually felt kind of invigorated. Not quite ready to tackle the AVCCAM box, perhaps, but ready to at least start unpacking the microphones. She was just about to close the craigslist tab when she saw it:

ARE YOU A REAL PERSON?

Anna had to admit, that was a good one. And hadn’t she admirably resisted clicking on that other funny ad, the one with the subject line “Do you eat chalk?” She deserved a freebie, so she clicked.

As you live life, you film it. Your mind’s eye is a camera. Your life experience is your demo reel. You are full of patience and open to everything. You are any sex or several. You are any ethnicity. You are 19 or 99. Above all else, YOU ARE NOT AFRAID.

You are a creative partner whom I can trust and build a lasting professional relationship with.

I know Craig’s List is an unlikely place to seek communion. You don’t belong here and neither do I.

(Unfortunately, due to the nature of this operation, there is no pay. With that in mind, please only serious inquiries.)

There was no phone number or website listed, just an automatically generated e-mail address: Reply To: job-xrtrtp-13588541609@craigslist.org.

OK, Anna thought as she opened up Gmail, this will be funny.

Dear 13588etcetera, she typed. This is Anna Krestler writing to you. And I am a real person.

6

The phone rang while Anna was eating breakfast in front of the computer, but it was only Leslie.

“Where do you go for a bikini wax?” she asked as soon as Anna picked up.

“Lucky Nails on Fifth Ave. at Fifty-Eighth. Out in Sunset Park.”

“Ugh. Don’t you know any place in the city?”

“Nope.”