There are 525,600 minutes in a year.

I learned that from watching Rent. It’s the kind of pointless and pedantic break-down that immediately reminds one of the kid in the class who could tell you useless things, like how much Belgium weighs, and who signed his books:

“Joe Schmoe, 123 Main Street, Anytown, Ontario, Canada, North America, Northern Hemisphere, Earth, Solar System, Galaxy, Universe, Cosmos.”

From watching Rent I also learned that the best way for me to mark the passing of these 525,600 minutes would be to measure them out into something Jonathan Larson, the writer of the musical, called

“Seasons of Love.” What does that even mean, Seasons of Love? Maybe you’d keep it in the door of the fridge.

Seasons of Love would come in a foil-wrapped cardboard can with a shaker top.

Dehydrated onion would figure prominently. As would Carnauba wax. Eventually it would be taken off the market when it came to light that the bacon bits were actually chips of heat-treated, highly-salted balsa wood.

But before all that there would be a television commercial showing happy couples sprinkling their Seasons of Love over salads, or laughingly feeding one another bites of baked potato festively speckled with the stuff. Like someone just celebrated New Year’s on your food.

In Rent, the characters live out their Seasons of Love in huge lofts.

AIDS, which is coincidentally also the name of a dreaded global pandemic that is still raging and has killed millions of people worldwide.

In Rent, AIDS seems to render one cuter and cuter.

The characters are artists. Creative types. They have tatterdemalion clothes.

Some of them are homosexual, and the ones that aren’t don’t seem to mind.

They screen their calls and when it is their parents they roll their eyes. They hate their parents. They are never going back to Larchmont, no way. They will stay here, living in their 2,000 square feet of picturesque poverty, being sexually free and creative.

Here are some ways to broadcast creativity in a movie: start plinking out a tune on a piano. Scratch a few notes on some music paper. Plink some more.

Suddenly, crash both hands down on the keyboard, then bring them quickly up to your head and grab the hair at your temples screaming, , “It. Won’t. Work!”

Sit at a typewriter, reading the page you’ve just written. Realize that it’s shit and tear it from the platen and toss it behind you.

Or, if you haven’t picked an art form but just want to convey a more general sense of an easily bruised sensitivity and a deep well of pain, find a sad and beautiful French girl with enviable breasts. Have her go slowly crazy.

How will we the viewers know? See how she looks at herself in the mirror as if gazing at a stranger.

Watch as she puts on her lipstick, gradually smearing ever-wider circles outside the edges of her mouth while fat,

photogenic glycerin tears fall silently down her perfect cheeks.

Here’s what they do in Rent to show us that they are creative. Nothing! They do nothing. The “songwriter” spends fourteen seconds noodling on his guitar. The “filmmaker” shoots a lot of Super 8 footage, which makes him about as much of an artist as everybody’s dad. Otherwise, they hang out. And hanging out can be marvelous. But hanging out does not make you an artist. A second-hand wardrobe does not make you an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV—I hate to say it—none of these make you an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty

So when they sing the anthem of the show—that’s a lie, really; every song in the show is an anthem, delivered with adolescent earnestness,

it’s like being trapped in the pages of a teen diary—so when they sing the title anthem: “We’re not gonna pay this year’s rent.”

Followed by a kind of barked cheer of “Rent rent rent rent rent.” My only question is, Well, why aren’t you going to pay this year’s rent?

It seems they’re not going to pay rent because rent is for losers and uncreative types. Rent is for Suits. By contrast, they are the last bastion of purity. They have not sold out and yet their brilliance goes unacknowledged, so fuck you, Yuppie scum!

I know what it’s like to feel bitter and ignored. I lived in Brooklyn a long time ago, about a block away from a prison. During the day the neighborhood bustled with lawyers, judges, criminals, bail bondsmen and private detectives.

I lived on a block in little two-story building that had once been a coach house. The basement had a dirt floor. On the ground floor below me was an office that did what, exactly. Resumés? I can’t remember.

What I do remember is the man whose office it was: Raul Rivas. Raul was knee-bucklingly handsome.

If my life had been different, like if I were a hot girl with a driver’s license, I could have put on a tube top and gone outside to wash my car in slow motion.

At night, there was no one else on the block, except for the people across the street, a family of drug dealers with pit bulls.

Once during the day, it must have been a weekend because I was home, I could hear Raul having sex in the office downstairs. I skittered around my apartment like a cockroach on a frying pan trying to find a knothole in the crappy floorboards, eventually just lying down flat against the tile on the kitchen floor, listening.

That was my early twenties in a nutshell. I was robbed in that neighborhood twice. It hardly seemed worth it to live in a horrible part of town just so I could go daily to a stupid, soul-crushing, low-paying job. Especially since, as deeply as I yearned to be creative, for years and years I was too scared to even try. So I did nothing. But here’s something I did do:

Jonathan Larson died the day before Rent opened. The show went on to become a huge hit, and it won the Pulitzer. I heard 9/11 jokes long before it felt okay to say that maybe

Rent was an insidious, middlebrow lie. That, even though it was a terrible thing that he died, and that, yes, New York was getting far too expensive and inhospitable to young people who tried to come here with dreams of making art, and indeed AIDS is a devastating, horrible scourge,

was it just me, or was everybody leaving the theater rooting for both the landlords and the virus?

It’s never easy to publicly oppose something that achieves brilliant, unstoppable heights. It can make you seem bitter. I once ran into a friend of mine and his mother at the movies.

The subject of Philip Roth came up. Jews are always talking about Philip Roth. It turns out my friend’s mother knew him growing up in Newark. She wasn’t a fan.

“Pfffff. Philip Roth,” she spat. “He was such a jerk. I always wished him ill.”

We were at The Red Shoes, maybe the best movie ever made. Certainly one of the best movies about what it means to be creative.

Moira Shearer plays Victoria Page, a girl whose single-minded devotion to the ballet makes her a great star. Everyone loves Vickie and everyone want to mold her to his own purposes:

the multi-lingual ballet impresario with the silk dressing gown and pencil moustache; her husband, the composer. Finally, it is all too much for poor Vickie. Moments before she is to take the stage in Monte Carlo,

she snaps, and in full ballet makeup—her mouth a red slash, her eyes darkly rimmed and extended like pointed black leaves –

she runs from the theater, down the broad stone steps of the opera house and flings herself over an ornate balustrade into the path of an oncoming train fifty feet below. The greatest dancer of her time is dead. All is loss and sorrow.

But the ballet of The Red Shoes goes on as scheduled, as it must, and in Victoria Page’s place, a lone spotlight, illuminating the places she would have been dancing. It is a fitting tribute, this bright absence.

After all, without the work, there is nothing.