Those of us who have been living in New York for decades associate our beloved city with a certain amount of grime, grit, and neglect. That’s what makes the city feel familiar, and thus authentic.
Some of us have started to take photographs of our favorite neighborhoods, so that in the decades to come we will remember what they once looked like.
Others remonstrate: [that they've "paved paradise and put up a parking lot"? ---ed]
It was a drowsy neighborhood where one could smell the harbor, a close-knit community where people signed for one another’s mail. Ms. Carson tended a small garden on the sidewalk near her building.
Today, the graving dock and many of the cobblestones are paved over, and from her garden, Ms. Carson sees something else: an enormous blue and yellow Ikea superstore, all 346,000 square feet of it, rising along the waterfront. The old warehouse is now a Fairway supermarket, with luxury rentals above.
Still others demonstrate … against “yuppie scum”:
Friday night signified the opening of the East Village summer social season as 100 people gathered on East First Street to protest what they said was the sterilization and overdevelopment of the Bowery and the nearby streets, once one of the seedier districts in the city.
Others fight back:
Mr. Boyd and Mr. Economakis live in a building at war, a century-old five-story tenement torn by the peculiarities of New York real estate. Mr. Economakis is the landlord, and since 2003 has been trying to convert the building’s 15 rent-stabilized apartments into an 11,000-square-foot home for himself, his wife, their two children and a British bulldog named Leo. Mr. Boyd is one of nine remaining tenants, who pay $675 to $1,200 per month for one-bedroom apartments; his is on the third floor, sandwiched between spaces that the Economakis family currently occupies. …
But these dreams have turned into a five-year nightmare including three court rulings, the most recent from the State Court of Appeals this month; countless letters written by lawyers; dueling Web sites; and dozens of skirmishes over the use of air-conditioners and the positioning of flowerpots. The Economakises reached financial settlements with six of the original occupants, turning those units into a three-story space for themselves and a duplex for guests. Now that the Court of Appeals has sent the case back to housing court, lawyers estimate a resolution could still be two years away.
New York, New York—it’s a hell of a town.
[updated (twice) with some missing links]
As the writer of a blog called Infotainment Rules I’m in no position to criticize lowbrow culture—indeed, I defend it as the right of the people to choose their own entertainment (though I believe there’s a lot of room for improvement in the realm of pop culture, including its ability to inform while it entertains), and note that the long history of “lowbrow” entertainment (i.e., that which is created for the masses) includes many cultural products that evolved, over time, to become the highest-of-the-highbrow culture.
But new media emperor Nick Denton carries things a little too far when he defends a nasty gossip-and-vengeance campaign he has been running on Gawker ever since his nasty but addictive website was eviscerated in New York magazine and in n+1 in the fall of 2007 (the latter evisceration carried out after a long Gawker campaign against n+1 and its most prominent and vocal defender, co-founder and co-editor Keith Gessen).
Word of the end of Gawker (by the New York Times here and by me here) turns out to have been premature. Its nasty crab antics continue unabated.
Before its prematurely announced demise, in April 2007, Emily Gould (then a Gawker writer and at the time a good [read: viciously-anti-celebrity and anti-elitist] ideological fit with Choire Sicha and head honcho Denton) went on Larry King Live (hosted by Jimmy Kimmel that night) to defend the “Gawker Stalker” feature (which encourages people to write in with their celebrity sightings) as “citizen journalism”; she stated that celebrities were rich enough to defend themselves against unwanted scrutiny, and in any case, she suggested, they had invited exactly such scrutiny because they had wanted to be famous and become celebrities).
Gould was very young (25 or so), and she has since recanted (sorta; she hasn’t really been deprogrammed. Now that she herself has become a target of the crab antics she herself once practiced at Gawker, she seems to regret her participation but doesn’t ever apologize; indeed, some in the media accused her of continuing to malign people in order to build herself up. Others tried to explain to long-suffering “women writers” why Emily Gould (the wrong person, and role model) became famous while they continued to suffer in unpublished silence and while they witnessed the reputation of “bloggers”—all of them—being tarnished by this little exhibitionist.
So, no: Gould didn’t apologize. Instead, she tried to move on. She decided, it seems, to embrace her past as just that—the past—as she notes in this article recently published in the NYT Magazine. My take? She’s still waaaay too into herself. But she’s a good writer (no small thing, since writing is her career), and even something of a literary heroine to some of the commenters on her blog).***
[T]he piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since.
For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it. At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits.
And, most interesting from my point of view, Gould has developed her own internet ethics:
If you wouldn’t associate your real name with a comment or you wouldn’t express those same ideas in person, given the opportunity, chances are you’re a cowardly asshole who should keep his or her thoughts to him or herself.
So that’s a good bit of the backstory, if you’re still following along. (It’s trying, I know.)
Now, some months later, Nick Denton defends his relentless and personal attacks on Gould—(a 26-year-old freelance writer now formerly of Gawker) and on her personal life, which includes Gessen, whom she once attacked from her Gawker perch).
Denton asserts (in not so many words) that his vicious attempted takedowns of a new “media elite” are the essence of journalism: the public’s right to know [e.a.]:
Now: I have written before about gossip as the ultimate weapon of the powerless against the powerful.
Here:
[[See Joshua Gamson’s book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I’m coming from with my celebrity obsession. It’s the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]
And here:
[G]ossip has traditionally been a weapon of the powerless against the powerful [which is one reason I do not criticize infotainment–i.e., institutionalized gossip–but rather accept it; in the media age, gossip may be even a more potent weapon than ever against the powerful] , as Gail Collins wrote in her entertaining and informative book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics [e.a.]:
For much of human history, [gossip] was one of the few weapons available to the powerless: servants who spread stories about their masters, peasants who irreverently speculated about the most private aspects of life in the manor. … In American history, gossip has sometimes been a reaction against heavily marketed politicians who voters might suspect were being thrust upon them against their will.
But minor media and literary celebrities like Emily Gould and Keith Gessen do not exactly pose the same threat to the people (who do indeed have a right to know) as do “heavily marketed politicians” (who may eventually assume positions from which they can perpetrate much harm on the electorate, and the country). So: invective about such minor celebrities under the guise of “media gossip”—even if it’s confined to the minuscule world of people who wish they too could be similarly celebrated—is hardly in service of the right of the people to know.
It’s “only”gossip—hurtful to those gossiped about and delightful to those who love gossip. The perfect gossip item, as Denton was quoted by the NYT as saying, is:
something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.
New-media “gossip” is (formerly private but amusing and Schadenfreude-laced) dinner-party conversation released into the bloodstream of the internet, where it lives forever, as David Frum noted four years ago for New York magazine:
Frum was merely working with the rumors [about John Kerry] that everyone else was spreading around. That’s how opinion culture has evolved, and it’s been enabled by the Internet. Who cares if you’re wrong? As it happens, Frum says he does.
“I regret it,” he says now. “I read it in the paper, I heard it gossiped about, but I didn’t do anything like reporting. I joked about it on the Internet in a way I would at dinner. Then I learned the Net is like print, not like dinner.”
The “Net is like print, not like dinner [conversation].” Those sound like immortal words, right? Four years later, tell them to Mayhill Fowler, or to Arianna Huffington, both of whom have had an impact on the political campaigns of presidential hopefuls with their passing on of “dinner party” gossip.
For his part—and damn the consequences—Gessen is fighting back. He’s not fighting the gossip, mind you; he seems inured to that. He’s fighting for his literary reputation, and against ad-hominem invective (masquerading as literary criticism) written by cretins:
Nick Denton, you fucking ninny: Everyone went to the same six schools. Everyone has dated everyone. Now what? What have you got now? Because once we grant you that, you actually have to start making aesthetic and moral distinctions between actual written texts. And you don’t know how to do that anymore. Because you’re a pissy little gossip. Your brain was once trained to think and write, and you’ve gone and turned it to mush. You don’t even put commas in the right places, much less think straight.
And Choire—I like you, I think you’re a good guy, you have a good written style—and yet I’m afraid the same goes for you. Choire, the trouble is not that Gawker makes insinuations. The trouble is that Gawker doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Just like you, when you write about books you haven’t read [he's referring to this "review" ---ed.]
Interesting times indeed.
update: Bloggers attack Gessen in ad hominem rants.
Choire Sicha pounds him, too, in a Radar posted tagged “catfights.”
———————–
*** And she has performed a public service for readers of the New York Times like my elderly mother, who keep hearing about blogs and blogging. In her immortal words: “I don’t understand why anyone would publish their private thoughts like that, and I don’t know who cares about this silly girl’s story. But now I finally understand what this blogging is all about!”)
Something’s gonna have to be done about Tina Fey, who was profiled in the NYT about her surprising hit show 30 Rock. She admitted that America’s Mayor is her weakness:
In writing for Liz, Ms. Fey said, she drew somewhat on her own experiences in television. In one episode Liz is called a vulgar name by a subordinate, an incident that Ms. Fey said was based on something that happened to her.
In another episode, in which Liz reflects on things about herself that others wouldn’t know, she says, “There is an 80 percent chance” that she will “tell all my friends I’m voting for Barack Obama, but I will secretly vote for John McCain.”
Ms. Fey, who wrote that line, said it was semi-autobiographical, a way of “admitting I have a lot of liberal feelings, but I also live in New York, and I want to feel safe, and I secretly kind of want Giuliani.”
As I was saying just recently …
The Democrats in general, and MoveOn specifically, seem not to realize that in order to deliver politically correct votes, you need to do a lot more than kneecap people into spouting politically correct attitudes in the public square. You can lead a horse to water, etc.
My point about Rudy Giuliani was that he knows a lot about the kind of public political correctness that elects a “fascist” to a second term in a huge victory in decidedly not-”fascist” New York City.
Anybody paying attention?
Nah, I didn’t think so.
Students of the New York Times know that Saturday’s paper tends to be rich with stories rather than hard news (and that it’s often a great read for that reason). This past Saturday was no different.
My favorite story was about Sue Hancock, an idle-rich nouveau riche “nobody” and former resident of Ohio and Orlando, Florida, whom the Times celebrates as the new breed of art collector:
“When I first started out, none of the galleries would sell to me because they’d never heard of me and I lived in Orlando,” Ms. Hancock says. “They won’t sell to you if they think you’re just trying to flip the pieces to make money.”
She has also hired a series of art consultants — often people who are curators and collectors themselves — to whom she pays a commission based on what she buys.
“Right now we have the convergence of a buoyant market for luxury goods and a heightened mass interest in contemporary art,” said Jeffrey Deitch, who owns the Deitch Projects galleries in Manhattan, and who sold Ms. Hancock some of her first paintings. “A little while ago someone like Sue Hancock wouldn’t have been interested in this.” He went on, “Collecting has allowed her to enter a rarefied social scene and I’m sure it’s been a good investment.” But at the same time, he said, “She really does seem to have connected with the art.”
Maybe so. She’s certain to have connected with a PR professional or two, however—because (what a coincidence!) the unknown nobody Sue Hancock went on to make an appearance in Sunday’s New York Times too.
Jeremy Kost, the photographer behind [a new] show, “Not a Play Area,” described one shot that was removed after the opening on Feb. 2, which attracted hundreds of people. “It was of a guy who had his hand in his underwear, and his face was contorted and he was covered in raw red meat,” he said.
Mr. Kost mingled with the 40 guests who attended his cocktail party Monday night, among them Susan Hancock, an art collector dotted with diamonds,
Maybe I’ll sign up for a Times alert to see how Ms. Hancock does in her collecting-climbing
