Oh, I Wish That I Could Be Richard Cory
One of my favorite songs is “Richard Cory” by Simon & Garfunkel. The song’s narrator is a man who works in one of Richard Cory’s factories. He curses the life he is living, curses his poverty, and returns again and again to the same refrain: “I wish that I could be / Oh, I wish that I could be / Oh, I wish that I could be Richard Cory.” Richard Cory is one of the most envied men of his day. By all appearances, “he had everything a man could want.” He is rich, famous, powerful, graceful, and stylish. People everywhere love him. The newspapers print his picture constantly, documenting his every coming and going—“Richard Cory at the opera, Richard Cory at a show.” And he, his exclusive parties, and whatever supposedly happens aboard his yacht are the talk of every town. “Oh,” the narrator figures, “he surely must be happy with everything he’s got.” So the narrator can’t comprehend it when, one night, it was all over the news: Richard Cory had taken his own life.
To me, the song is a reminder that what appears enviable from a distance is very often just the few visible fragments of a much larger, more complicated reality—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
What Was It Like?
As a young aspiring playwright and composer, Lin-Manuel Miranda revered the musical West Side Story. He held it up as a flawless masterpiece and regarded Stephen Sondheim, the man who wrote its impossibly brilliant lyrics, as an artistic god. Those lyrics became the standard against which Miranda measured his own early writing efforts—and beside Sondheim’s work, his own always looked like a hopeless mess, filled with flaws. Then, in high school, he met the artistic god himself. As it happened, a fellow student was the daughter of one of Sondheim’s longtime collaborators. Miranda asked her to ask her father to ask Sondheim if he would ever consider coming to speak to the school’s drama club. Improbably, the ask traveled the entire chain to Sondheim, who said he’d be happy to speak with the students. During the visit, Miranda got the chance to ask a question. “All I could come up with,” he said, “was, What was it like?” Sondheim was confused. “What was it like?” he repeated. “Yeah,” Miranda managed. “What—what was it like making West Side Story?” “Oh,” Sondheim said, “I see.” And for the next forty-five minutes, he told them. He sang lyrics that had been cut. He pointed out verses he came to realize could have been better. He explained that the show’s celebrated wordless opening dance sequence emerged after the choreographer cut every lyric Sondheim had written for the scene. And he revealed that Riff (the leader of the Jets, one of the musical’s two rival street gangs) was so named because Sondheim originally had the character carrying a trumpet everywhere—another of his ideas killed by a collaborator who asked, When was the last time you saw a gang member carrying around a brass wind instrument?Sondheim had “pulled back the curtain,” as Miranda later put it, on the complicated reality behind that apparently flawless masterpiece. “What he taught me,” Miranda said, “was that the process was always messy.”
It Takes A Lot Of Wondering Why I’m Doing This
The director Greta Gerwig was asked about the directors she looks up to. “I’ve always been envious of the directors who are native speakers of cinema,” she said, “who just understand the language of filmmaking in such a deep way. Like Steven Spielberg is obviously one of them—he basically invented modern cinematic language, whereas I always feel slightly like I am translating a foreign language.” Coincidentally, not long before listening to this interview with Gerwig, I had just finished reading a collection of Spielberg interviews in which he described his own insecurities about his filmmaking fluency in remarkably similar terms. Unlike the directors he looked up to, John Ford and Orson Welles, Spielberg said, “I don’t have command of the language of filmmaking. It’s like I’m learning French, and I can’t go over to France and talk to people without them saying, ‘You’re an American, let me speak English to you. I can speak better English to you than you can speak French to me.’ … The language of filmmaking is not something that comes that easily, that instinctively to me. It takes a lot of thought, a lot of walking in circles, a lot of wondering why I’m doing this.”
The Coffee Beans Procedure
The psychologist and writer Adam Mastroianni meets a lot of people who are unhappy with the complicated realities of their own jobs and find themselves envying other kinds of work from a distance. When he asks them what they think they’d be happier doing, many of them say something like, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.“If I’m feeling mischievous that day,” Mastroianni writes, “I ask them…Where would you get the coffee beans? Which kind of coffee mug is best? How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost? Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party? What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system? What about for scheduling shifts? What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?” The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is to look beyond the most appealing fragments of running a little coffee shop and confront its actual day-to-day details and challenges. If those less visible parts of running a coffee shop don’t sound appealing, Mastroianni continues, “you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina.”
A Meticulously Assembled Illusion
In an interview with Jerry Seinfeld, the actor Dax Shepard talked at length about the comedian Richard Pryor as a master of the kind of off-the-cuff, improvisational style Shepard had always envied. “It wasn’t super mapped out,” he said of Pryor’s stand-up performances. “It was just getting beamed into his mouth.” Given that Seinfeld is “a very methodical comedian,” Shepard said, he wondered if Seinfeld could appreciate Pryor’s seemingly opposite, improvisational style of comedy. “It’s an illusion,” Seinfeld said. “I watched him put these things together in the ‘70s. Every line, every beat, every move, the physical part, the facial part, the vocal part—he assembled it meticulously.” “It appeared,” Shepard replied, “to have this looseness and this fluidity to it.” Seinfeld said, “There was a tremendous amount of work done under the surface to make it appear that way.”
The Real Life Beneath All Appearances
“There is an undercurrent,” Robert Henri writes in The Art Spirit, “the real life, beneath all appearances everywhere.”