Years ago, I shared a large apartment in New York with four roommates. One of my roommates, the sister of my then-girlfriend, was dating Avi, a stocky Israeli who used to sit on the couch all day long watching Financial News Network and phoning buy and sell orders into his broker.
Avi was my opposite. He an extrovert, me an introvert. He was round, I was slim. He was impetuous, I was a planner. He acted from the gut, I acted from the head. Together, we cancelled each other out.
Avi called me the "Analyst" (as he said it, the "Ana-LEEST"), mocking my tendency to gather all relevant data, weigh both sides, develop a critical framework and then analyze and apply before making a decision. Avi had a point, but only to a point. I could never rapidly trade in-and-out of stocks on rumors and innuendo, as he did very successfully, but then I lived for deep understanding, of which he had none.
I was thinking of Avi today, wondering how he would react to my homage to Saturday Night Fever. When it came to culture, Avi's theme was "if it feels good, do it," while my theme was "if it is good, do it." I tried to be a discriminating consumer of culture, Avi wallowed in everything, enjoying it all in a happy confluence of high and low.
It took me a few months to realize that Avi enjoyed himself a lot more than I did. He had surprisingly refined tastes, turning me onto rarified strains of music, art and other cultural pursuits that I had never been exposed to. He had no idea why this stuff was good; he just sampled everything and pursued whatever he liked. I'd sit there, debating whether or not this was Art, wondering what my friends would think, trying to fit this experience into a canon of some sort, ordering it within whatever subgenre or movement I'd matched it to. He'd be lost in rapture while my furrowed brow revealed the mainframe cranking away inside.
Avi was born with an innate appreciation for Art, but without any understanding of it. I was born without any innate appreciation for Art, but a yearning to understand it. The key to my happiness, I decided, would be to cultivate Avi's catholic tastes while continuing to feed my need to understand it.
So today I'm more willing to lose myself in stuff that appeals to me, like Saturday Night Fever, even if I don't understand (1) why it appeals to me, (2) whether it's Art and (3) what others will think.
I am still an analyst, though, so I can't stop myself from evaluating, classifying, analyzing and thinking everything to death. This explains why it took me almost 900 words to explain my affection for the move, and another 500 words to explain why I felt the need to explain my affection for the movie.
Avi would have just said "it's fun -- see it!" You have to admire his economy.
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