What happened in New York - finally...
So I'll have a chance to post on the Hurricane about to swipe across my state I need to get out the way my little notes on last weekend in New York:1. For I don't know how many years in a row New York is getting less and less cool. It obviously still has an immense amount to offer but though it may be a melting pot or tossed salad of races and
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Hot Dead Zone: New York City
By Choire Sicha
Remember when the Big Apple was the center of the universe?
What happened to New York? The Big Apple used to be Liza and Bianca and Gloria and large earthwork-scale mounds of cocaine at Studio 54. It was Donald Trump, flanked by models, tromping down Broadway like the Jolly Green Giant. It was Debbie Harry, looking like a sexy Pepto-Bismol Popsicle in hot-pink pants while she rocked the world.
New York really was deliciously replusive once upon a time. A dozen years ago, it seemed everyone was an empire builder, escorted by a wife and a mistress and a gay houseboy and a pack of purebred dogs, each clad in luxurious fur. New York was the world's capital, the center of the universe.
But now, fabled high society is dead, gone with the legendary socialite Nan Kempner. Our i-bankers deliver us no flashy satisfactions. Where are Sherman McCoy and Patrick Bateman when you really need them?
Even our mayor is boring, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Koch, even dapper old John Lindsay were characters, each ruling like a medieval lord. But Bloomberg? He may actually wear spats. Not that it helped us land the Olympics.
Our once-starving artists now all have places in the Hamptons. At night, the cool kids used to flock to the Mudd Club, Area and Limelight, places with personality. Now New York nightlife is all about soulless, hangar-sized enormo-domes like Marquis and Crobar, full of gelled-up guidos and khaki-clad tools.
Strokes singer Julian Casablancas, former king of downtown debauchery, has grown into Ward Cleaver: newly wed and off the sauce. Hell, even the Yeah Yeah Yeahs moved to New Jersey.
And where once the real-life prototypes of the cast of Rent slithered and fornicated(to be seen in this fall's upcoming film, which was shot in...San Francisco!), now all of downtown is blanketed in thousands of red Netflix envelopes. They swarm the high-rise luxury apartment buildings and ever-expanding NYU dorms in the once-edgy neighborhooods, just one of the suburban conveniences geared to the lazy, lifeless, TV-obsessed residents of Manhattan's new vertical post-college frat houses.
Maybe, just maybe, New York will get interesting again next time we get bombed. Because, like a first-world immune system coddled with years of vaccinations and anitbiotics, it seems most of today's pale and frail New Yorkers might just drop dead at the first sign of confrontation. And maybe that'd be for the best.
Ouch, various thorns in one side it would seem, anyhow, did you chance the new Babyshambles album? been hovering about newly leaked, i find myself liking more than maybe i should, still drawn to that beautiful mess.
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