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“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”So wrote Christopher Isherwood in his novel Goodbye to Berlin. “I am a camera,” the critical independent clause, became one of the most famous sentences in twentieth-century literature. It also served as the title for both the play and the film versions of Goodbye to Berlin, upon which the musical Cabaret is based in turn. But I am interested in this clause because Isherwood’s narrator declares that he inhabits both the stance of a subjective agent—an “I”—and an objective one, the camera or “eye,” at the same time. With my first book, Dogtown, I eventually found myself wanting to do the same. But I had no idea how to pull this off.