Depeche Mode & The Writer From New York

So the first thing I did this morning was watch this video and eat toast:

I figured it would cure me of this feeling I woke up with.

It's difficult to explain, but long story short is that I'm beginning to think I hate other writers and maybe I don't want to pursue a career in journalism because the more writers I meet the more I realize what talentless, self-absorbed jerks they are.

Take for example this writer I met yesterday, whose name I've purposefully forgotten. I was introduced to him by a good friend of mine who told me he'd flown in from New York for a couple weeks.

This sort of thing happens all the time. New York artists are always popping up in Berlin, crawling out of the sewers or dropping out of the sky. We're practically being candy bombed with them.

Which is not to say we're the only ones in the NY Artists receiving department. Some other cities on the route include: Paris, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Madrid, San Francisco and, for some reason, Portland, Oregon. I'm not sure why this is. Call it the kuntsler migratory pattern. But for whatever reason the New York kunstlers are the loudest and seem to be the most abundant.

Anyways, I figured I'd be friendly, introduce myself, ask what line of kunstlering he was in, and so on. He answered that he had been working for the Advocate for 3 years and was now freelancing, looking forward to traveling, writing some travel articles for the New York Times, maybe if he had time, and wanted to go into an MFA program in the future. I asked him where and he said Hollins University, which I told him I hadn't heard of. And then, get this, he actually guffawed.

Now, never in my 25 years of life have I seen someone actually guffaw before, though characters in novels seem to guffaw all the time. So I was a little taken aback to see one in real life.

"Oh, you wouldn't know unless you were in THAT kind of circle," he said. "That's where the real writers are."

Now I had already told him by this point that I was a writer, but perhaps he'd forgotten or hadn't listened or didn't care. Or maybe I just wasn't a "real" writer considering I never worked for the Advocate or wrote for the New York Times. But by this point in the conversation I was about ready to toss my drink on the guy and walk away. Instead I asked him if he was planning on moving here.

"Oh I definitely want to. I'd love to do some writing for _____ and ______ and _______. There's probably a lot of money in it."

I politely suggested that Berlin was not a great place to make money, and that if he wanted to move here it would be better to do so when he had a good bit of savings to live off of. He took offense and insisted that I was "crazy" and that any real periodical would pay $2 a word for a 3,000 word feature from him and that would give him $4,000, which was more than enough to live off of in Berlin.

I decided to jump ship and go back to find Carlos at the bar and tell him how much I hated New Yorkers. And even though I did this, at great length, I still felt... annoyed.

Part of it was obviously annoyance that someone in New York had given so much work to a writer who can't even do basic multiplication while the rest of us in Berlin are sitting around starving to death, and part of it was anger at the publication process in general. But along with this there was this anger, this extreme disgust with how much networking has become a part of the art and writing world, and how good ol' fashioned talent has become at best unnecessary and at worst undesirable.

Okay okay, I'm not that naive. I know networking has ALWAYS been important. I suppose I've only been saved from it up till now because I only recently started to write for cold, hard cash. In the end this is probably why I settled on Berlin, hoping to avoid the constant, necessary mingling that occurs in busy cities like San Francisco and New York.

But in truth networking probably happens here more among the expats than it did back home. After all, as an artist you have a smaller potential audience here so you have to make every person (who speaks English) love you and want to come to your next show, see your next film, read your next article, etc. etc.

Lately I've begun to feel used. And, simultaneously, ignored. I'm really worried I'll be forced to become a smarmy, self-absorbed jerk in order to make a name for myself, make a living doing what I want to do instead of teaching Business English to the kind Leute at Deutsch Bahn. I hope this isn't the case, but the deeper I get into the business of writing the more I find myself wanting to run away screaming or stay and chew off my own fingers.