“This sounds a bit elitist,” said Andy Humm, editor of Social Policy magazine. “But in some ways, living in the boroughs doesn’t fit with what attracted me to Manhattan in the first place.”
So they hacked out an existence, rehabbed a tenement apartment in Chelsea, fought for a local park, did battle with the landlord and agitated for better schools for their children. To those hardy souls willing to go to such ends to live here, Manhattan offered something in return: shelter from the whims of its notoriously profit-hungry real-estate speculators. Now, it seems, the deal is off.
Illustrated by Robert Grossman
MAY 5, 1997 BY LORNE MANLY
OFF THE RECORD: AFTER DECLARING DEATH OF DOWNTOWN, JAMES TRUMAN OUSTS DETAILS EDITOR
DETAILS EDITOR JOE DOLCE kept hearing rumors that a head-hunter was offering his job to a number of magazine editors in town. So on the afternoon of April 28, the editor put in a phone call to his boss, Condé Nast Publications editorial director James Truman.
By the end of the phone call, Mr. Dolce was out of a job.
“I just hear the rumors one too many times, so I called James on his vacation in Brazil—and I resigned,” Mr. Dolce said. “I guess I ruined his vacation. Or maybe not. Maybe I made it good.”
Back in February, Mr. Truman said he wanted to remake Details, changing it from a magazine aimed at ultra-hip young men into a more mainstream publication catering to would-be executives. “I have an intuition that downtown is dead as a subject,” Mr. Truman said at the time. He added that Mr. Dolce would be keeping his job.
MAY 12, 1997 BY GEORGE GURLEY
BLUEBLOOD BELLES, LOST IN NEW YORK
A GROUP OF YOUNG WOMEN with one foot in Vogue and one foot in the Social Register is now coming of age. These modern-day belles of the Manhattan blueblood set still shell out big money to attend black-tie fund raisers for diseases and museums, and they still hang out at such exclusive enclaves as the Colony Club and the River Club, but they’re also trying to make names for themselves outside of their own sphere.
Some of the blueblood belles recently found themselves in a rented space in the garment district. The occasion was a press fashion show held for one of their own, Alexandra Lind, and her line of clothing.
At a Madison Avenue bistro one night soon after her small triumph, Alexandra Lind spoke for her clan: “We all share a common interest in making our own statement about who we are instead of who our family is,” she said. “I don’t think any of us would use our last names.”
What if the family name opened a door that might otherwise be shut?
“I think it can help,” Ms. Lind said. “If my father is a good friend of an editor in chief of some magazine, my God! All the more power to me. Or if I found other private investors through friends of my parents, that’s a great advantage. Or your parents supporting you financially to start up a company, that’s something that’s really valuable.”
But you and your friends don’t fall back on that?
“Exactly.”
Illustrated by Philip Burke
Senator Moynihan enters Penn Station
Illustrated by Philip Burke
MAY 12, 1997 BY ALEX KUCZYNSKI
NEW YORK WORLD: Botulism Becomes You, My Dear—But Get Ready to Lose That Scowl
HERE’S AN IDEA. GET YOURSELF INJECTED WITH BOTULINUM TOXIN A, the neurotoxin that causes botulism, to smooth out those wrinkles in your face.
It may sound gruesome, but dermatologists and plastic surgeons across the city have lately been luring hundred of patients into their chairs with this novel use of the deadly toxin. A shot of Botox, as it’s known commercially, paralyzes the muscles that cause wrinkles, leaving those who receive the treatment with faces as smooth as carved soap.
New Yorkers endure a lot to earn those scowl lines and laugh lines—but in their panicky battle against the all-too-visible effects of aging, men and women as young as 30 have gone to the extreme of having themselves injected with the botulism toxin. One bizarre side effect of the treatment leaves patients unable to make certain expressions, lending the Botoxified face a “Stepford wife” quality. Strangely, the typical patient who goes in for the botulism treatment comes to like having a face with a permanently blasé appearance.
“A scowl is a totally unnecessary expression,” said Dr. Pat Wexler, a dermatologist with an office on East 32nd Street who says she injects two dozen people a week with the toxin. “Scowls are negative. And who needs a squint? It’s not the most positive thing in the world.”
Senator Chuck Schumer as Scrooge McDuck
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
MAY 19, 1997 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO
THE OBSERVATORY: BISTRO OF BURDEN
KEITH MCNALLY HUNCHED over Table No. 70 at Balthazar and methodically began to shred the paper placemat. “I’m not wishing for this to be over,” he said, “but I can’t appreciate something until it’s finished.” The dark pouches under his eyes complemented the skinny black tie that hung loosely beneath his open shirt collar. “I can really enjoy things afterwards, but right now, I’m too wrapped up in the things that aren’t quite right.”
At 4 p.m. on May 9, a Friday, Balthazar, the brasserie that Mr. McNally opened on April 21, looked well under control. A number of people dallied over their lunches; an expensively dressed elderly woman sat alone savoring a cup of coffee. But Mr. McNally was nursing a look that suggested disaster would be arriving with the dinner crowd.
“I’m really anxious about tonight. There are too many reservations,” Mr. McNally said. As a result, he had had to deny the art dealer Mary Boone a table, and she had been a regular customer at his other ventures. There was more. “I’m anxious now because the music’s not on at all. It should be on a little bit in the afternoon. The lighting’s a little bit too bright now.” Mr. McNally stopped and coughed a nervous cough. “I’m worried about a lot of things right now,” he said.
Keith McNally has walked this tightrope of neuroses before, but never at this height and never alone. Yes, there is Pravda, the Russian-themed vodka bar and cafe that Mr. McNally opened last year, but as the financier and Balthazar regular Steven Greenberg said, “Pravda was a paragraph in the book of Keith’s life. Balthazar is an entire chapter.”
In the three weeks since it had opened, Balthazar had generated instant heat. With no advance publicity, the brasserie’s red awnings and interior sienna glow seemed to materialize overnight on a piece of Spring Street that had never before merited a second glance. The socialite Brooke Hayward remembered walking by the restaurant at noon on the first day that Balthazar served lunch and seeing a largely empty restaurant. “I thought, ‘This looks interesting,’” she said, “But when I came back at 1, I couldn’t get a table. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The buzz right now is that Balthazar is a downtown institution-in-the-making, one that could eventually eclipse the Odeon, the seminal TriBeCa hangout that Mr. McNally, his wife, Lyn Wagenknecht, and his older brother, Brian McNally, opened in 1980. But Keith McNally knows all too well that the frenzy and the media coverage that has greeted the opening of Balthazar will not mean a whole lot a year from now if he doesn’t worry about the details. The danger of instant heat is that is can dissipate just as instantly.
“I don’t want to roll the dice again or whatever they say. This is it for me,” Mr. McNally said as he took the shredded strips of paper he had torn from the tablemat and began to crumple them into little balls.
Illustrated by Drew Friedman
MAY 26, 1997 BY JIM WINDOLF
AGENTS! BABES! SUITS! NEW YORK IS TV TOWN
ABC INC. PRESIDENT ROBERT Iger assumed his position behind the podium on the Radio City Music Hall stage and started flagellating himself and his network for the benefit of the advertising executives in the audience.
“It’s nice to be here in Radio City Music Hall,” he said in a staccato delivery. “I think it’s the closest I’ve been to NBC all season. A few years ago, A European politician sa
id, ‘Today we stand on the brink of a great precipice, tomorrow we will take one step forward.’ I decided not to use a speechwriter for my remarks today.”
Toward the end of his quick statement, he offered a tepid endorsement of the head of ABC Entertainment, 33-year-old Jamie Tarses. “We realize we can’t solve all of our problems at once, but the ABC television network and the company stand behind Jamie Tarses and the people responsible for our prime-time programming,” he said, still reading his lines off the teleprompter in a rapid-fire monotone.
Mr. Iger’s straightforward words were in violent contrast to the mad spectacle to come.
OCTOBER 13, 1997 BY SVEN BIRKERTS
TWILIGHT OF THE GREAT LITERARY BEASTS ROTH, MAILER, BELLOW RUNNING OUT OF GAS
HOW TO SAY THIS? HOW TO BE TACTFUL AND PROPERLY grateful for everything they have given us—we have scarcely had time to reckon the gift yet—but also how to say what needs saying and preserve one’s sense of honor as a reader and critic. I mean—out with it!—that our giants, our art-bemedaled senior male novelists (and this will only deal with males) are not connecting. Not the way they did. Once they seemed to shape the very cultural ectoplasm with the force and daring of their presentations. Their books had, in any publishing season, the status of events. Now they don’t. They have been writing manifestly second-rate novels in recent years and they are not—much—getting called onto the carpet for it.
I’m talking now about Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer and, to a degree, Saul Bellow, though one wouldn’t need a shoehorn to get a few others on the list. There have been other changes, granted. The publishing world has been ravaged by corporate greed and has, in recent years, suffered a deep crisis of confidence. But that can’t account for the books. The latest novels are weak, makeshift and gravely disappointing to all who believed that these novelists had a special line on the truth(s) of late modernity. Not one of the books can stand in the vicinity of their author’s finest work.
Oddly (or not, depending on how jaundiced is your view of the backstage machinations of the literary world), with the exception of Mr. Updike’s newest, which has been K.O.’d right at the starting bell, the critical community has been kind to the grandees.
But when this body of recent work is viewed alongside the writing of the younger brothers—Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Robert Stone and John Edgar Wideman, to name several—the contrast is striking. These authors seem to be looking at the larger world, assessing the twin claims of politics and spirit. We feel in their books, certainly in Mason & Dixon and Underworld, some of the pressure of seriousness that we were once so sparked by in their elders. But these elders are no longer spinning the stuff of our times into lasting art. The once-thrilling researches into the self have proved exhaustible. No less important, they are not holding themselves to the literary standards they did so much to establish.
I’m talking about narcissism now, the male variety, with its attendant exalted belief that one is in some way co-terminous with the world, steering it with will and desire. The pathology that in one version at least, needs over and over to gain the admiring (as in ad mirare: “to reflect back”) love of women, that struts pridefully forth holding sexuality—the penis—aloft as its talisman.
But the story doesn’t end here with the male eternally rampant. Youth declines into maturity, maturity sinks toward dreaded old age. The lion paces a weary circle and lies down. No one would reasonably expect the artist to carry on in his former style. Opportunities for quiet recusal, for edging from the race, abound. But—Mr. Bellow excepted—these writers have kept on drilling out roughly a book a year—each, for as long as anyone can remember, holding the spotlight on himself by main force. Surely they are no longer striving to keep the wolf from the door. What gives?
The narcissist is no more immune to time than anyone else. As my wife, my therapist, formulates for me: “Aging is a narcissistic injury.” When the narcissist faces the loss of the self and its reflected glory, he reacts with rage. And indeed, checking in on some of the works of later years by our masters, we are overwhelmed by dissonant music from the downside of the artists: Mr. Bellow’s Dean Corde in The Dean’s December snarling at the underclass; the cataracting vituperations of Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath’s Theater…We see anger at promises not kept, at prerogatives usurped, and deep bitterness about an America that has betrayed its youthful innocent promise. But also, with scorching vindictiveness at times—especially in Messrs. Updike and Roth—comes the lashing out at women. Women, the supposed adoring ones, whose job it was to keep the illusion of perpetual youth and power intact. Dare we tie this, as Mr. Updike seems to in his new book, to the failure in age of the sexual fix? Could the whole business really have been driven by the say-so of an upstanding phallus? A frightening thought.
OCTOBER 13, 1997 BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
BOOK REVIEW: TWILIGHT OF THE GREAT LITERARY BEASTS: JOHN UPDIKE, CHAMPION LITERARY PHALLOCRAT, DROPS ONE; IS THIS FINALLY THE END FOR THE MAGNIFICENT NARCISSIST?
“Of nothing but me…I sing, lacking another song.”
—John Updike, Midpoint, 1969
TOWARD THE END OF TIME CONCERNS an incredibly erudite, articulate, successful, narcissistic and sex-obsessed retired guy who’s keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death. It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.
Mr. Updike has for years been constructing protagonists who are basically all the same guy and who are all clearly stand-ins for the author himself. They always live in either Pennsylvania or New England, are unhappily married/divorced, are roughly Mr. Updike’s age.
Always either the narrator or the point-of-view character, they all have the author’s astounding perceptual gifts; they all think and speak in the same effortlessly lush, synesthetic way Mr. Updike does. They are also always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying…and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone. Though usually family men, they never really love anybody—and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women. The very world around them, as beautiful as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.
The clunky bathos of this novel seems to have infected even the prose, John Updike’s great strength for almost 40 years. Toward the End of Time has occasional flashes of beautiful writing—deer described as “tender-faced ruminants,” leaves as “chewed to lace by Japanese beetles,” a car’s tight turn as a “slur.” But a horrific percentage of the book consists of stuff like “Why indeed do women weep? They weep, it seemed to my wandering mind, for the world itself, in its beauty and waste, its mingled cruelty and tenderness” and “How much of summer is over before it begins! Its beginning marks its end, as our birth entails our death” and “This development seems remote, however, among the many more urgent issues of survival on our blasted, depopulated planet.” Not to mention whole reams of sentences with so many modifiers—“The insouciance and innocence of our independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled or honey-colored or mahogany limbs”—or so much subordination—“As our species, having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted out, moved in”—and such heavy alliteration—“The broad sea blares a blue I would not have believed obtainable without a tinted filter”—that they seem less like John Updike than like somebody doing a mean parody of John Updike.
Besides distracting us with worries about whether Mr. Updike might be injured or ill, the turgidity of the prose also increases our dislike of the novel’s narrator (it’s hard to like a guy whose way of saying his wife doesn’t like going to bed before him is “She hated it when I crept into bed and disturbed in her the fragile succession of steps whereby consciousness dissolves�
�). This dislike absolutely torpedoes Toward the End of Time, a novel whose tragic climax (in a late chapter called “The Deaths”) is a prostate operation that leaves Turnbull impotent and extremely bummed. It is made very clear that the author expects us to sympathize with and even share Turnbull’s grief at “the pathetic shrunken wreck the procedures [have] made of my beloved genitals.” These demands on our compassion echo the major crisis of the book’s first half, described in a flashback, where we are supposed to empathize not only with the textbookish existential dread that hits Turnbull at 30 as he’s in his basement building a dollhouse for his daughter—“I would die, but also the little girl I was making this for would die. There was no God, each detail of the rusting, moldering cellar made clear, just Nature, which would consume my life as carelessly and relentlessly as it would a dung-beetle corpse in a compost pile”—but also with Turnbull’s relief at discovering a remedy for this dread—“an affair, my first. Its colorful weave of carnal revelation and intoxicating risk and craven guilt eclipsed the devouring gray sensation of time.”
Maybe the only thing the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he’s such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps us figure out what’s been so unpleasant and frustrating about this gifted author’s recent characters. It’s not that Turnbull is stupid—he can quote Kierkegaard and Pascal on angst and allude to the deaths of Schubert and Mozart and distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It’s that he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair. And so, it appears, does Mr. Updike—he makes it plain that he views the narrator’s impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I’m not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it. Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the book’s first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.
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