In his book of essays Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan laments the fact that he bought the house that served as the exterior for the house belonging to the character Peyton from the show One Tree Hill. Every day people would show up to take pictures of it.
People are so easily amused.
Once I was walking in the West Village when I noticed a group of people on a random street corner taking pictures of a building. I looked at what they were looking at. It was the Friends exterior.
I took a picture of the group of sheep taking pictures just to remind myself of the idiocy of pop culture obsession.
As I said earlier, one of the things that I know about Seattle is the movie Singles. Growing up I thought it was one of the coolest movies I had ever seen. It featured Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam (Stone, Eddie, and Jeff actually played musicians in a band in the movie). It was funny but also sophisticated about adult relationships (or so I thought at the time, basically meaning that, at thirteen, I didn’t understand what Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick were talking about).
Today I discovered that my girlfriend has not seen nor even knows the plot of the movie Singles. That, along with my initial instinct to look at a map in a static state without any assistance from google in order to figure out how to get somewhere, is one of the generational differences that has emerged this trip.
If you have also not seen Singles, it basically centers around a group of twenty-something friends in Seattle, trying to make their way in the world. (According to Cameron Crowe, this movie was a direct influence on the show Friends. These days, that may not be an endorsement for the film but I still like it.) They all live in the same apartment building and as I’ve been walking all over Seattle, I felt like each small, brick apartment building could be it.
Today, as we took an epic journey for ice cream (Frankie and Jo’s – it was preposterously good) I just said screw it, where is this damn apartment building? A quick google search revealed that it wasn’t far from where we were, so we took a little detour.
I knew that it was the right place as I approached because I saw a woman already out front with her iPhone raised. She was taking a pic of her friend in a baggy flannel shirt and dyed hair sitting on the stairs. “Oh, sorry, let me get out of your way.”
“Nope, I’m here for the same reason you are,” I said.
When they were done, I sat on the stairs and had a few pics snapped.
What is this phenomenon? Dana Carvey once said that if there was a cable channel called the Grapefruit Network that just showed one single grapefruit twenty-four hours a day, if you took that grapefruit out in public, people would say, “Hey, hey, check it out, that’s the grapefruit that’s on TV…”
I wanted to see a building that was in a movie that I liked. It was really dumb and I’m glad I did it. It was really cool.
