I have received the city's official itinerary of mandatory July distractions, and I can confirm that the relentless march of orchestrated joy is nothing less than a spiritual siege.
To gaze upon this slate of municipal delights—a schedule that casually conflates the international hysteria of the World Cup final with the bicentennial-and-a-half of the American experiment—is to recognize the modern metropolis not as a locus of spontaneous creation, but as a disciplinary apparatus; it is a mechanism designed to crush the interior life beneath the unbearable weight of a scheduled good time. One is reminded, inevitably, of the paralyzing ennui that permeates Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, wherein Frédéric Moreau’s passive drift through a decaying nineteenth-century society perfectly mirrors our own forced march toward the summer performances of the Mark Morris Dance Group.
The most spiritually violent of these civic demands is undoubtedly the nine-night Bon Jovi residency, an endurance performance of such staggering, repetitive bleakness that one must look to Béla Tarr’s muddy, seven-and-a-half-hour Hungarian cinematic dirge Sátántangó to find a comparable exploration of human attrition. The sheer scale of the residency suggests an active hostility toward the silence necessary for contemplation, replacing the fragile human soul with a stadium-amplified guitar solo that will ring out across the boroughs until well past the middle of the month.
The nine consecutive nights of Bon Jovi were programmed specifically to break down the ego until the populace simply surrenders to the sheer attrition of the stadium rock format.
Meanwhile, the group chat has already begun its sinister machinations, attempting to orchestrate a collective descent upon Yankee Stadium for Jay-Z; this outing demands a display of uncritical, mindless loyalty rivaled only by the golden retriever who learns to play wide receiver in the 1998 cinematic vehicle Air Bud: Golden Receiver. To sit in the bleachers in the sweltering July heat, pretending that the spectacle of extreme wealth brings us closer to the sublime, is to participate in a profound and willing degradation of the intellect.
Ultimately, to survive this month-long gauntlet—to stand cheering beneath the obligatory fireworks of the nation’s 250th birthday bash before submitting to yet another barricade-storming in the perennial revival of Les Misérables—is to surrender one's dignity to the machinery of mass consensus. I shall remain indoors, drawing the heavy velvet curtains against the blinding glare of the stadium lights, finding a small joy in the quiet, absolute refusal to be entertained by my own country.