Yesterday I walked to Rockefeller Center and back, a round trip trek I have not attempted in a while on account of the cold. It was not balmy up on the bridge yesterday but I got through it with just a jacket and no head gear or gloves. I recorded myself talking much of the way, thinking it was probably too damn noisy up there for my voice to be heard clearly. The same thing happened on the RFK/Triborough. I am just not a yeller. I’ve heard some people whose voices work in that way, shouting to be heard above a din of noise, but my voice sounds scary when the need to raise it occurs. It evokes that deathly sound of attempting to scream when one is not quite able to wake up from a nightmare or weird dream. The body goes into a sort of rigor mortis state, as a defense mechanism, and this state of iciness extends to the vocal cords. I’ve heard my voice as it tries to break out of that state, and it is similar to the sound of my voice raised in anger or fear. It sounds alien. It sounds like death.
At Rockefeller Center I made what turned out to be a disappearing phone call. I do not understand what happened to it, but of more concern is the fact that I don’t remember part of the incident at all. It’s blacked out of my memory what happened when I initiated the call, though I recall the substance of what I said once the call connected. It should have been sent to the magicJack voicemail but it never landed there and I have no idea why.
It’s too bad that call disappeared because it was pretty good stuff. I was going off on a rant I had started earlier in the day. The earlier rant was in reference to people I see online but it extends to those I see in person.
I don’t understand who anybody is. I see strangers pass and I note their body language, their demeanor, the look on their face or the way their arms dangle from their body. I want to ask every single one of them “Who are you? How did you get here?” I wouldn’t be asking how they got from their home to the concourse at Rockefeller Center, where I made this call. I wanted to know how they reached this plateau in their life.
I wanted to ask “What decision you made or what incident that occurred half your lifetime ago has brought you here to this moment in which you are moving toward achieving goals and fulfilling ambitions you might not even know you possess?”
They might respond that this moment in their life was no plateau, to which I would respond that every moment is a summit, every hour the climax of some ambition or path through life.
Yesterday more than other days I saw the faces passing by and could not comprehend how or why any of them existed. Who are these people talking to on their phones? How much is there to talk about that some people must keep the phone affixed to the side of their head? I say nothing but silently insist that the world is not so complicated or confusing that it needs to be discussed in relentless and repetitive detail. I wanted everybody to stop talking and to recognize that there is very little we humans need to talk about.
The buzz of activity swirling around me there and around midtown reminded me, not that it was ever lost on me, that there is so much of New York and of this world I will never understand or know.
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The purpose of the semi-epic round trip (tracking app says I walked 11 miles) was to pick up a Moviepass card that I for some reason had sent to the 181. I am not much of a movie buff but I am giving it a try for the hell of it. For $9.95 a month you can go to one movie a day at any of a few dozen theaters around town. You have to go to the theater within a ½ hour of showtime and hope the movie is not sold out, which I don’t think will be a problem for me. I’m just going to be there and, if I don’t care for the film, I can leave without feeling like I wasted money.
I tried it today just to see how it works. You have to install a Moviepass app that determines your location using GPS. That means you have to have a smartphone to do this. When you get to the theater you choose a movie and check in using the app. At that point you have a ½ hour to actually purchase the ticket. You can change your mind and uncheck in, and you can also change your mind about which movie you want to see. But if you don’t purchase the ticket within the ½ hour then you burned your one movie for the day.
You have to be within 100 yards of the theater before you can check in. There is no line ticketing, though they claim that might be coming soon.
I had trouble with the concept that I was purchasing the ticket until I saw that the Moviepass card is actually a credit card with its payment gateway programmed so it can only be used at selected movie theaters.
After checking in I found a ticketing kiosk and went through the ticket-buying process as I normally would, just using the Moviepass card. The receipt said I paid $12.95 for the ticket but lo, that price is all covered under the $9.95/month I pay for use of the card. The price of future movie tickets I purchase through Moviepass in the coming month will also be covered by the $9.95/month fee.
There are some limitations but on balance I’d say this Moviepass thing is everything it says it is. You can only see 2D movies using this card, no 3D, which is fine with me. The theater today did not have reserved seating, so I’m not sure how that might work, but I do wonder if Moviepass people are put in the worst seats. That would be amusing in a way. I used the ticketing kiosk even as an able-bodied human was standing nearby in the ticketing booth, asking myself in so doing if there might be some kind of stigma associated with using this card, like there is said to be with an able-bodied person using food stamps at the supermarket. Hard to imagine why this would be in the case of Moviepass but as an analogy I remember detecting a certain unappreciative attitude from some of the people who handled my registrations for free museum memberships using the IDNYC card a couple of years ago. Maybe, like I suspect was true of those museum employees, movie theater people think Moviepass users are a bunch of freeloaders?
Probably not. The attitude I detected from the museum workers I think stemmed not so much from a freeloader stigma but from their presumption that most people signing up for the free memberships would simply never use them, causing a lot of pesky paperwork for the staff handling the avalanche of registrations that came in through the IDNYC program.
I had no intention of staying for the show today. I just wanted to see how Moviepass worked and see for myself if it’s what it has been made out to be. On instinct it seemed a little gluttonous of me to buy a ticket and just leave, but with only two other people in attendance for the few minutes I was there it’s not like I was preventing anyone else from getting in. It’s also not like I was consuming some kind of resource by purchasing a ticket without really using it. If I had stayed then you could talk about the wear and tear of my ass sitting on one of those seats incurring financial consequences, but really the cost to the theater of admitting me and of me simply sitting there for a couple of hours is infinitesimal.
Maybe I don’t understand the finances of it all, but for Moviepass to survive there has to be more to it than there appears. As subscription products go it struck me at first as pretty cynical in its assumption that costs will be covered on account of most people simply never using it. That is the promise of subscription business plans, where people’s laziness is leveraged to create what is essentially a passive income.
The program, from what I read, is being subsidized by venture capital money, and there appear to be no real partnerships with any of the theaters. I had assumed there were some business partnerships and that the program was moving forward with a belief that “free” admission will lead to greater concession sales. But the theaters are paid in full for the ticket prices, and with no partnerships Moviepass would not benefit from any shared concession revenue.
I suspect they intend to mine the data they are inevitably collecting so they can stick “relevant” ads in your face and sell data to movie makers with clues about their audience demographics. For that latter pursuit to be relevant there would need to be a lot of people using Moviepass.
The $9.95 membership fee is paid for with my credit card. My single gripe so far is that during the registration process I was led to believe that no charge would appear on my credit card until I actually used the Moviepass. In fact I was billed $9.95 the day I ordered the card. It took two weeks for the card to arrive, meaning that ½ of my first month’s membership was gone before I ever got the card. I submitted a complaint about that but have not heard back.
So, I signed on just for the hell of it, but also because I don’t think it’s going to survive, so I figured I should get in on it while I can. Tomorrow I might try to catch the latest Star Wars, which is still playing at the same theater where I saw Man On Wire. The latest Star Wars was described as “horrible” by a friend whose opinions I trust, while anyone else I know who saw it says it was great. I had seen that Mark Hamill is not happy with how the role of Luke Skywalker has evolved, and someone said he thought there was too much Disney in this one, but overall reviews have been positive, save for this one individual.
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I am awaiting delivery of a new mechanical keyboard. I bought one a few months ago but have been let down by how it just stops working at random. A correspondence with tech support resulted in them emailing me an updated driver, but it just looked shady as hell to me. Maybe it shouldn’t matter but the fact that the company that makes the keyboard does not even have a website makes me think it’s not altogether credible. And the executable file they sent me could have been anything, so I never clicked on it.
Still, for as much as it worked it was a lot of fun, as I think this new one will be. Everything you type sounds like a stampede on one of those things.
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So yesterday’s walk to and from midtown ended with a strange and amusing controversy. A few years ago a friend of mine who is vegan made a claim that I never thought to verify, but that stuck in my mind as something to look into. He said that vegans do not have to wipe their asses, but that most of them do anyway just to be sure. About a year or so ago I passed along this comment to a bartender who is a mutual friend of this person. Yesterday the bartender mentioned to the vegan that I had said this. The vegan friend took vehement umbrage, saying there was no way in hell he ever said that. So the bartender texted me about this while I was up on the Ed Koch/Queensboro Bridge. I responded saying there was no way I came up with concept on my own, and that this person is the only vegan I know (as far as I can tell) and so who else would have told me that? The bartender responded “I believe you.” As he should, that memory is clear as any in my mind, though I cannot remember where this conversation occurred. I looked into it online and found a few people here or there making almost the exact same comment, saying that since turning vegan they did not have to wipe but they do anyway, just in case.
The discussion veered off toward the idea that vegans consider non-vegans to be “wipers”, and a lower class of human because of it. Yet they begrudgingly keep a roll of Charmin around for when wipers come to visit.
