"We may not eat it, but it must be marvelous."--Trouble in Paradise (1932)

If you're looking for a place where you have to make an effort not to be entertained, you should really go to New York City, where arts listings are like phone books. After spending the past two weeks in the city that never bathes, I'm pleased to report that every possible thing you could ever want to be doing, buying, watching, or listening to remains aggressively available, at any hour of the night or day, and for another hundred bucks you can sit near the front and eat spaghetti. The problem with visiting (gusts of human-waste-scented breeze aside) is not so much finding something to do; it's tearing yourself away from all the other, better things you could always be doing.

The corollary to having so much culture at one's disposal at all times is the risk of being so overwhelmed by options for stimulation that you wind up spending a perfectly good weekend night in a small room in your underwear, smoking cigarettes and changing channels on the TV till the sun comes up. Guilty as charged. It's not like it was a slow couple of weeks, either. Among the things I didn't see while I was in New York are the Matthew Barney exhibit at the Guggenheim (lines too long) and the Cremaster films at the Screening Room (why see the films if you're not seeing the show?), rooftop films at OfficeOps in Brooklyn (looks like rain), an evening with Abel Ferrara at Arlene's Grocery (life's too short), and the literal thousands of movies and rock shows and plays--including Radiohead (too far away) and Long Day's Journey Into Night, which I had cheap tickets for (four hours + standing room only = not going).

The one film I did see, Ernst Lubitsch's unimpeachable Trouble in Paradise, inaugurating the Film Forum's Lubitsch retrospective, was exactly the right choice. But even as I was being nourished by the film's heroic drollness, I couldn't help remembering that I could have seen it months ago in Seattle at SAM, or before that at our own Film Forum, and didn't--probably because I was too busy reviewing Adam Sandler Goes to Fart School for work. It felt like a proper penance, then, after a healthy dose of Lubitsch, to wind up in a cheap hotel room, exhausted, flipping incessantly between Fatal Attraction, Absolute Power, Lethal Weapon 2, The Client, and other such fruits of the entertainment-industrial complex.

I mention all this apropos of the fact that I just missed every second of SIFF--Seattle's best microcosmic approximation of the too-many-options dynamic--for the second year in a row. Seeing the Lubitsch film offered a tiny, gratifying reminder that people who leave Seattle for the real city (a phrase I heard from two recent transplants) are fooling themselves. Why move to New York in search of too much to do when there's too much going on right in your own backyard?