The Observatory
Articles in The Observatory
At U.S. Open, Women Are From Venus, But Men Are the Stars
Taken at face value, the fourth-round match of Marion Bartoli and Sybille Bammer on Aug. 31 had a lot going for it. Both athletes played the grinding, gutsy tennis that New Yorkers adore, and the 3-hour, 3-minute match that ensued was tied for the longest in U.S. Open’s women’s history.
No one cared.
Throughout Louis Armstrong Stadium in Flushing, where the epic match was being played, many—too many—of the attending fans were holding little digital American Express TVs, keeping track of a sleepy Roger Federer-Radek Stepanek third-round match being played next door at Arthur Ashe Stadium. The PA system at the Ashe match dominated the quiet sound-space of Armstrong with songs like “Still the One” and “Welcome to the Jungle” at top volume between the Federer match and the Andy Roddick one that followed. read more »
7 For September
Keira Knightley shimmies herself into the most impressive corsets and hairpieces (seriously, the wigs should get second billing) in the lush and golden-hued The Duchess, directed by Saul Dibb. Based on the book Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, by Amanda Foreman, the movie features Ms.
Knightley as 18th-century Duchess of Devonshire Georgiana Spencer, real-life “original It Girl.” Georgiana grows up in splendid English countryside privilege, and is married off by her mother (the still ravishing Charlotte Rampling) to the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) when she is still a teen. But the Duke turns out to be rather cold and distant and seems to care
only about his dogs and his wife producing a male heir. read more »
Lat’s Field Guide to N.Y. vs. D.C. Lawyers
Coming home has also caused me to think more about the legal cultures of the two cities. What makes someone a New York lawyer rather than a D.C. lawyer? What are the defining characteristics of each? read more »
Aldous Huxley on the G Train
The 7 and L trains may be the best in town, according to the latest State of the Subways report by the Straphangers Campaign, but that’s only if you measure the quality of a ride by such factors as train frequency, crowding, and cleanliness. The Observer’s summer interns decided it was time for a more nuanced assessment of the differences between the nearly two dozen lines that snake throughout the city. To be precise: When the train doors close, what books do people open?
Come on, admit it: You know you are silently judging all those Eat, Pray, Love women. read more »
The Schumer Diaspora
On Facebook, there are pages where former Marines catch up and where Ivy League university graduates connect. And then there is the Chuck Schumer Alumni Group, which is a cross between the two.
Mr. Schumer, New York's famously hard-driving senior senator, is something of a Genghis Khan of politics. Like a particular Y chromosome, his unique imprint can be found in the professional DNA of an improbably high percentage of well-placed political types who served him in various capacities in his Assembly, House and Senate offices; on his campaigns; or on staff at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
"They work long and hard, but they learn a lot," said Mr. read more »
Roll Over, Tom Edison!
Apparently, there are some pet owners who like to read aloud to their pets as a way of spending time together.
The Books of Summer
Racy Rushdie
Want to feel uncomfortable? The Enchantress of Florence (Random House, $26, in stores) inspired the L.A. Times to “wonder how Salman Rushdie’s literary fortunes would have fared without the infamous fatwa.” Ouch! We can’t decide if that’s better or worse than the New York Post’s more subtly erudite observation that “TV mannequin Padma Lakshmi really did a number on Salman Rushdie, who takes their separation out on the women of his new novel.” Does Mr. Rushdie deserve such undignified treatment? Probably. (And does the Post review books? Of course it does, you snob.) Don’t blame the book for any of this: Enchantress is everything a beach read should be—a harlequin romp across the continents and cultures of Renaissance Europe and Asia, with a hot orange book jacket, lots of sex and a five-page bibliography of scholarly sources to make it all seem legitimate. read more »
Eeeek!
Summer in the city. You’re supposed to just looove it. “Oh, we live in Brooklyn and have a backyard—let’s have a barbecue!” “Oh, cool—count us in!” “Yummy, $5 iced coffee!” Slurp. “Lookee, the girls are naked!” Great, right?
Actually, not so much. For some residents, summer in New York is, pardon us, an absolute hotbed of neuroses, and it doesn’t help that our shrinks have fled to Wellfleet or the like, leaving only the chilly promise of phone sessions in their wakes.
Suddenly all baseline fears seem exaggerated, like in some surrealist film noir: not just cockroaches, but giant ones emerging suddenly from the cracks in the pavement on Park Avenue. read more »
Hide the Balls! Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
“Ugh—sooo many horrible things,” replied her friend, who said her name was “Freda,” that she lived in Queens and that her dad was obsessed with the Mets.
“Horrible as in good things,” Ms. Green said, and sighed. “I could marry him!” read more »
A few seats away, an older gentleman who was eavesdropping shook his head and hunched into his New York Post.
60 Months in the Red Zone
“It’s the oft-stated phrase that truth is the first casualty of war,” said Michael Ware, CNN’s Baghdad correspondent, on the telephone from Iraq. “In this war, as in every other conflict, everybody lies to you. Your government is lying to you. The Iraqi government is lying. The insurgents are lying. The militias are lying. The U.S. military is lying. Even the civilians lie. Or in the best case, there’s confusion and exaggeration. The truth is the most elusive thing in war, particularly in an insurgency.”
Sixty-two months into the war, this is the language of the American journalist in Iraq. It’s not the only language; there are others: Cyclical, monotonous, brutal, strategic, hopeful. But slowly, as Iraq slips from the front pages and Web pages, today’s news starts to sound like yesterday’s; violence explodes; a spectacular military success, or failure. Casualty lists grow until they become incomprehensible, and then unreadable, unquantifiable. Against that metronomic numbness, 90 American journalists (according to a November 2007 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism) continue to work a dangerous war that becomes a harder and harder story to sell to Americans. As the American press corps gets older, wearier—and simultaneously younger and more untested as the veterans leave—there are truths that some of the reporters of Baghdad have learned about the war in Iraq. read more »
O Williamsburg! My Alma Mater!
When I came back to New York in 2005, I moved into an apartment in Williamsburg in a house owned by a friend of a friend. It was small—tiny, in fact—and, I thought, overpriced, but I had a dog and I was living in Philadelphia and would be going back to school in New York (which meant I would be even poorer than usual), and the combination of the three meant that I jumped at the chance to live in a fly-infested, aluminum-sided apartment almost an hour away from where I’d be going to school, across from a housing project and behind a gas station, because it meant I could stop looking and didn’t have to pay a broker’s fee.
It would’ve been a typical first-apartment-in-New-York tale, except that this wasn’t my first apartment in New York; I’d lived in a suspiciously similar apartment (at least on the inside) on the Lower East Side just after graduating from college, where the kids upstairs bounced basketballs on the floor at all hours and the bathroom ceiling leaked. Also, the shower did that thing where it gets superhot and then supercold without warning. Hate that. So even though I had already paid my crappy-first-apartment dues, I told myself that since I’d left New York and, years later, returned, that I deserved to be back at square one.
Also: Williamsburg? I had gone to that near-mythical land, “Bedford Avenue,” a couple of times, and vaguely remembered a bar with a reflecting pool named after an ecological paradise in the Pacific, and I had vague memories of going to a party back in the fuzzy days of my early 20s in the neighborhood off the Graham stop on the L, where I was now living. At the time, it had felt like the end of the earth. And now, years later, most of my friends were living in the more grown-up lands of Boerum Hill and Fort Greene and Park Slope, where there were also trees, and they sort of scoffed at my choice of neighborhood, as if they had outgrown it years before and could hardly deign to step foot in it, populated as it was with 22-year-olds in skinny jeans
Well, fine, I thought. There was a White Castle down the street, after all. Can’t get that in Cobble Hill, now can you?
As the months went by, my apartment didn’t get any better (the flies of summer turned into the mice and, outside, rats, of winter), but a funny thing happened: I fell a little bit in love with the neighborhood. There was the nice Korean man across the street who did my laundry for really cheap; the little park down the street with a dog run; the $17 manicure-pedicure place where they would happily use a razor blade on your heels even though it’s technically against the law (but it’s the best way to get all that dried skin off, I swear). Daddy’s on Graham Ave. had cheap beer and a backyard. I bought beans at Gimme! Coffee and ordered in from Cheers Thai at least twice a week. I joined the Greenpoint Y for $40 a month and rode my bike there to work out with the sweaty Poles and skinny tattooed guys who exercised in ratty black Converse.
Then the summer came. I had graduated from school and was interning (I felt like the oldest intern in the world) for $10 an hour while I looked, increasingly desperately, for a job and a new apartment; my roommate moved in with her boyfriend in Philadelphia, and a lesbian who had grown up in the Bronx and worked at a cell phone store, and owned a 10-pound hairless dog who made himself at home by peeing on my bedroom floor, moved in. I had been a serial monogamist of sorts for the previous few years, but since February of that year, I hadn’t been dating anyone, and without the structure of school and built-in camaraderie, I fell apart a little bit. I started telling people I was in a “transition phase.” I knew I had to leave my apartment, and, probably, the neighborhood.
That summer, Williamsburg became the friend I knew I would soon be leaving, kind of like how you always became besties with kids who were moving away at the end of the school year (letters would be written and mixtapes exchanged until, one day, they quietly weren’t). Sometimes I’d find myself on Friday or Saturday nights home alone, too embarrassed to call friends only to be told that they were hanging out with their boyfriends. I suddenly realized I was really bad at making plans because I had always, lazily, assumed that something would materialize.
So I started taking really long walks, alone, at dusk. I liked going over to Kent Avenue, where the condo towers now lining the banks of the East River had yet to go up, and so I could see across to Manhattan. I’d walk under the Williamsburg Bridge and by the empty Domino Sugar plant, where there were still signs on the door with information for workers and always a few random lights on inside. Then I’d hit Broadway and make a left, up the slight hill, and sometimes I would go into Marlow & Sons and sit alone at the bar and have a glass of red wine and, usually, some cheese. Other times I would just get a cup of ice cream to go from the little market in front, and then I’d walk back along Bedford Ave. There were usually men playing dominoes on folding beach chairs outside; sometimes there’d be a dance party that spilled out onto the sidewalk. Or I’d go to Dumont Burger, which had opened earlier that year, and sit at the bar and have a burger and onion rings and a glass of wine, and read a book. It was all a little deliberately melancholy, and it occurred to me that the sane and less dramatic thing to do would be to get delivery so I wouldn’t have to watch couples who, in my mind, were feeling sorry for me, just like I had always felt pity for those poor souls sitting alone at restaurants.
At a barbecue in late July, a friend mentioned that a friend of hers was looking for a tenant to move into her brownstone one-bedroom garden apartment in Fort Greene, and, sure, she’d be happy to put in a good word for me. The apartment was gorgeous and it seemed massive, and the landlord said I could bring my dog. I moved in Sept. 1, and I immediately loved my new neighborhood—what wasn’t there to love? There were trees, and beautiful brownstones, and I was closer to my friends, and a month or so after I moved in, I started dating someone, and then a couple weeks later, I got a job. The summer of transition had turned into the autumn of stability, and for the first time in months, I actually felt content. But sometimes, when I look around at my adorable little neighborhood with its happy children in fancy strollers and organic juice cafe and painfully earnest wine shop, I get just a bit nostalgic for when things were more complicated but, maybe, more interesting.
shafrir@observer.com
Rah-Rah! Campus Life Sweet at Williamsburg College
With that in mind, we thought we’d present this modest introduction to the neighborhood. It’s not much, but it will encourage your natural curiosity and soften the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by directing you to the elements of Williamsburg life that will be the most comfortable to you and that have been developed with you strictly in mind.
Williamsburg hasn’t got a meal plan, but everyone under a certain age eats at all the same places all the time, so it might as well! There are also stores where everyone’s clothes come from—a collective Williamsburg Co-op, if you will. There’s a campus green, and dorms, some of which were built under the present administration in impressive glass and steel that both disgust and impress our alumni. (We even got our own “endowment” to make that happen—but in the real world that’s called a tax abatement.)
Everything’s pretty close to everything else—again, just like campus!—but the B61, the L and the G form a sort of campus shuttle. So lace up those retro Nikes (or Sauconys, if you’re studious!) and start walking!
One thing to keep in mind: Like all college towns, Williamsburg has its share of grown-ups around. These can be bosses, or grumpy old artists who say they’ve been there forever and seem to like dirt and poverty. They like to remind you that once upon a time there were only a few grimy bars, one Thai place, one coffee shop and no boutique clothing stores—just some giant warehouse called Domsey’s that isn’t near the L. Never mind! It’s a race between high rent, death and exasperation to see which will drive them out of the neighborhood first. You won’t have to lift a finger.
>> O Williamsburg, My Alma Mater! Click here to read Doree Shafrir on her sun-dappled days in the Burg.
DORM LIFE
Let’s start with where you live. A key factor is how far you are willing to walk to get to the Bedford Avenue L stop. Like the Student Center, there’s nothing there that doesn’t repeat itself in every micro-neighborhood of Williamsburg: a thrift store, a few bars, a bagel place, a bodega, a pizza joint and someplace to pick up a packet of seitan or C. Howard’s violet-flavored gum. But since it’s right at the first L stop in Williamsburg, it’s sort of the place you have to swoop through if you want to feel like you know what’s going on.
You’ll go there often at first, so you don’t want to be too far away. But then, the further you are, the cheaper the rent.
You might have got one of those railroad apartments—and if you’re lucky, the front room has its own door, which means you and your roommates don’t have to traipse through each others’ bedrooms to get to the bathroom in the back by the kitchen!
Or else you’re in what might have been a pretty little brick townhouse covered in aluminum or plastic siding some decades back. There is no cat in the house, but it sure smells like one!
Fear not. Room draw in Williamsburg (it’s called the Real Estate Market, but it’s just as random) is no worse than anywhere else.
But once you advance a year, where to go? It will say a lot about who you are, and in Williamsburg, neighbors are apt to become the stalwarts of your new New York kinship network. As Evelyn Waugh once said of Oxford, you spend the second year getting rid of all the friends you made your first year. So where to move once your Craigslist roommate finally crosses the fine line between postgrad louche and bona fide meth addict and it’s time to scoot?
On principle, East Williamsburg’s massively shoddy, cramped, hard-partying wonderland, the McKibbin Lofts, is less cool because of last month’s front-page Times profile, but it’s still “an art-school dorm,” says a former neighbor. A local architect in a drone-rock band likes going to parties there, even though he once got an egg thrown at him from a McKibbin rooftop and it hit his “sand-suede Clarks desert boots.” Things could be worse: “Bedbug-central! Chlamydia! It houses a lot of the STDs that come from everywhere,” said another local.
But its geographic location—far from everything but the Morgan L stop—guarantees a certain cachet as well. This is the off-campus apartment, a place to aspire to live your second year in Williamsburg if you haven’t yet hit it big.
But if your parents have got the dosh, you can skip that step and move directly into the Rocket Factory at 100 South Fourth Street. This place is for the arty yuppies, the ones who shun both labels and belong to neither group but can be described no other way. A sign on the front door from a big production company asks for an apartment to feature in a film about an Idaho orphan who “discovers his place in the New York City art world.”
If you’re still in Williamsburg by the time you reach middle management at an arts organization in Chelsea, you might want to consider the Esquire Building at 330 Wythe. Yes, they made shoe polish there once upon a time! And some of the aura must be messing with the feng shui. Residents sustained, for the better part of two years, a bitter squabble over what color to paint their apartment doors; Teal and Dark Charcoal each had its partisans, but the final compromise was a purplish affair called Raisin Torte.
“They’re into the austere, raw look, and they’re very proud of that,” a broker said of the residents, contrasting them with those who live a little farther south in the Gretsch Building.
The Gretsch is that thing way on the south side of Williamsburg that looks like it was built by the firm that brought you Stonehenge. The building was a warren of DIY “lofts” for years before a developer came in and made the building into pretty condo units. While the prices are high, the quantity of Ikea furniture visible from the street will give you an idea of how accessible the Gretsch will be to you if you opt to stay in Williamsburg past your first promotion. Next Page >
Mouth Guards Over Manhattan
Ms. Smallwood, an associate literary editor at The Nation who lives in Greenpoint, was sipping iced coffee at 71 Irving the other day with a lovely, red-lipsticked mouth full of white, straight chompers, describing how a dentist had quickly diagnosed the source of her “debilitating” pain: nighttime teeth grinding, or bruxism.
“I had just moved in with my boyfriend, and they seemed to think that there must have been so much stress or whatever,” she said, with a shrug.
The dentist prescribed a custom-fit hard plastic “nightguard”—essentially, a mouth guard for sleeping, which doesn’t stop the grinding but does prevent enthusiastic grinders from totally eroding their teeth. Ms. Smallwood conceded that the nightguard was “gross,” but said she wears it religiously due to her dentist’s “absolutist scare tactics.” And she’s not alone. “Once you get a nightguard and you start telling people you have a nightguard, you find out that other people you know have nightguards,” she said.
Do they ever.
“It feels a little it’s like the hypoglycemia of our generation,” said teeth grinder and nightguard-wearer Hailey Eber, 27, a freelance researcher, by phone.
Bruxism is associated in the popular consciousness with a related malady, TMJ, an umbrella term for pain or disorders of the temporomandibular joint. (Dentists are quick to point out that we all technically have TMJ joints, and that TMD, or temporomandibular disorder, is the correct term. TMD can cause bruxism, or result from it.)
“If you say the word “TMJ” at a party,” Ms Eber said, “everyone pipes up and starts talking about it, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about—like, ‘Oh, I have TMJ, too!’
“I have neurotic friends,” she admitted.’
BRUXISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
New Yorkers did not invent bruxism—the Journal of the American Dental Association states that the condition has been present throughout all of human history and according to wildly divergent estimates, it afflicts anywhere from 15 to 96 percent of the adult population at some point in their lives—but we might be its most dogged practitioners.“We live in a very high-stress environment,” said a Park Avenue dentist, Dr. Joseph Osipow, who has treated patients here for two decades. “The incidence is much greater in the last, say, 10 years. I never used to see the volume of problem that I see now.” He estimated that 30 percent of his patients grind or clench.
“I’ve seen more grinding in the last 5 to 10 years,” agreed Dr. Madeline Apfel, D.D.S., whose office is in Gramercy Park. “Actually, I noticed it after 9/11, believe it or not.” Currently, she treats “a lot of young people,” for bruxism; she said its primary demographic extends from 20 to 40. “I think it goes on everywhere, but I think we’re more aware of it here,” she said. Next Page >
Mirror, Mirror—Liar,Liar!
She grabbed my arms with a surprising ferocity. “Thanks!” she squealed before scuttling back into her dressing room. The door slammed behind her. read more » Next Page >
Downtown's Worst Dressing Rooms
1. Century 21
Cortlandt Street near Broadway
Doorless dressing rooms make you feel like you’re changing in the high-school locker room.
2. American Apparel
Citywide
Eerie, too-bright lighting illuminates every lump and bump and gives skin a sickening green or radioactive purple tinge.
3. Forever 21
Union Square
You can hear your neighbor’s every move through the cheap canvas curtains. Nobody needs to hear the girl next door screeching into her BlackBerry about last night’s drunken debauchery.
4. Loehmann’s
Seventh Avenue at 18th Street
We could write a novel during the time we spend standing in line, waiting to try on clothes in the legendary disaster that is the communal dressing room, with its piles of clothes, flourescent light and lack of privacy. (The shame is only mitigated by the fact that you sometimes see people in worse shape than you.) If you make it into a stall, expect a heap of clothes left by the previous occupant.
5. Victoria’s Secret
Citywide
Weak lighting and cheesy pink walls force you to search for your inner slut—and then abandon her.
6. Brooklyn Industries
Lafayette Street, south of Houston
Sweatboxes! Heat radiates from the light installations straddling the mirror. Are sweat stains a new part of hipster fashion?
7. Daffy’s
Fifth Avenue at 18th Street
Cold tile floors, flimsy curtains and florescent lighting make you feel like you’re changing in a hospital room.
8. Urban Outfitters
Broadway near East Houston Street
Cruddy rugs are littered with blackened gum, used band-aids and enough string for robins to make a spring nest. One word: ewwww.
9. Henry Lehr
Prince Street at Bowery
Teeny-tiny doors that barely conceal you from your bikini line to your bust are bad, but what’s worse is that you’re forced to come out of the cramped dressing room so the salesgirl can scrutinize your rear.
10. Tokyo 7
East Seventh Street at Second Avenue
The curtain is half the size of a regular human, so any tall person can leer at you in your panties as he walks by. Next Page >
Thank You For Soaking
God willing, at this very moment someone is scrambling eggs on a stove in an apartment overlooking the East River while at the same time gazing up at someone’s buttocks, pressed against a see-through Plexiglas bathtub, sunken, by design, into the floor above.
In the early 1980s, the late Paul Rudolph, noted architect and onetime dean of the Yale School of Architecture, incorporated such a tub into his dream apartment on the top three floors of 23 Beekman Place. The tub was still in working condition a few years ago, when hotelier and noted bathing enthusiast André Balazs had his birthday party there. “Of all the incredible bathtubs I’ve heard of in this city, that one takes it,” Mr. Balazs said. read more » Next Page >
Sacre Bruni!
easy to model as Dior. …
This woman has nothing to hide.’
Until last Thursday, when a nude photograph of Carla Bruni, the 40-year-old model-turned-pop-star-turned-first lady of France, sold at Christie’s for $91,000, more than 20 times its expected price, Ms. Bruni hadn’t been the subject of much conversation among New Yorkers. But over the last week, her name popped out of pursed lips at cocktail lounges and long lunches across the city, as men and women started to catch on that a new icon of fashion, sex and sensibility—a 21st-century amalgam of Jackie O, Lady Di and J-Lo—was emerging across the Atlantic. News of the photo sale even made it onto Saturday Night Live’s weekend update.
Thanks to the Internet, the photograph—taken by Michael Comte in 1993, when Ms. Bruni was working as a model—made the rounds. Her face all wide planes, her small breasts pointing off in two directions, she stands with her hands forming a diamond over her nether regions, a sort of ironic Eve pose, but she doesn’t seem to be covering up for her own sake. Her expression—her lips are parted in a parody of innocence, her eyes are semi-frozen—says she had little need for shelter. Her skin is just the outfit she’s put on for the picture, as easy to model as a Dior suit or an Yves Saint Laurent gown. This woman has nothing to hide.
Indeed, in our own political season, when concealment, attack and counterattack are so rife, there was something Edenic about the photo of a first lady standing naked, unapologetic, challenging the viewer to choose between arousal and admiration. Because frankly, she looks great. The fact that the photo was taken 15 years ago is irrelevant, because Ms. Bruni has continued her full-frontal, forward surge of sex and power to this current day.
And while our own politicians seem to regard carnal passion as a dangerous third rail of politics—which, after all, it’s proved itself to be in the cases of men such as Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer—there is something invigorating about a first lady who told French magazine L’Express last year, “I’m monogamous occasionally, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry.” Just look at any photo of her with her husband, Nicolas Sarkozy—looking at his dumbstruck, grinning, subservient mug, you can tell he can’t believe his luck. Just last October he divorced his second wife, Cécilia, after rumors of affairs on both sides, and immediately he finds himself cheek to cheek with Carla Bruni.
It’s taken the rest of us a bit longer to catch on. The widely circulated paparazzi shots last Christmas of the happy couple cavorting on an Egyptian beach were notable for the contrast of her physical perfection against his tubby, furry tummy. Their quiet February wedding made our papers without much fanfare. But even as Europe has been electrified—the British fell so deeply in love with Ms. Bruni during a recent state visit with her husband that The Daily Mail ran some 17 pictures of her, including close-ups of her hands and feet that, for some, were more erotic than the Comte photo—we’ve remained grounded, inoculated against her charms. Carla Bruni? Wasn’t she a model, a pop singer? Did she date Mick Jagger? Do a Guess campaign?
But while we were distracted by our own former first lady’s vigorous lunge for a return to the White House, Ms. Bruni stealthily installed herself as the most compelling, glamorous and refreshingly bold first lady in many a year. She’s let us know she looks great naked and looks great in clothes. She’s stayed young without chasing youth; she’s stayed sexy without shedding her dignity or her position of power. And that’s what many women, particularly New York women, want.
ON HER RECENT trip to England, much was made over Ms. Bruni’s choice of attire. Dressed head to toe in Dior by John Galliano, Ms. Bruni was described in The Guardian as “two parts Jackie O, one part Lycée girl.” Commenting on the importance of the French couple’s visit to Britain, Andrew Gimson wrote in The Daily Telegraph: “Many of us decided at once that if we were going to be seduced by anyone, we would rather be seduced by her.” Hungry for a woman who could brighten up dowdy, rainy, grannyish England, male and female members of the press swooned, comparing her also to Diana, the last woman to bring glamour to the U.K.
Former French Vogue editor-in-chief Joan Juliet Buck sees Ms. Bruni as little more than an extention of high-end, French consumer products that everyone wants. “Versailles was conceived as a magnificent showroom for French goods, because around 1678, Colbert said to Louis XIV: We have to prove the French do things better than anybody,’” said Ms. Buck. “In 2008, at last, a model is married to the president, which is great PR for the further global extension of French luxury brands.”
Of course, New York women posess their own kind of glamour (and plenty of Louis Vuitton handbags!). But Ms. Bruni, at 40, has more to offer us than the promise of good taste. She’s a popular sophisticate, and an intellectual exhibitionist.
As a powerful woman operating on the international stage as one half of the first family of France, Ms. Bruni begs to be compared to that other first lady, who is hoping to become our president, Hillary Clinton. This isn’t about looks; that contest would be unfair, given Ms. Bruni’s outrageous genetic gifts. The question is which of them stands as a more useful—even more modern—model of feminism, and femininity.
In America, we like our powerful women to be not too beautiful, not too brash, not too brilliant, even. They must be mothers—make that proud mothers—who wear gold jewelry, makeup done just so, and appropriate suits. (Something in red, or cobalt, is as daring a style choice as is made.) They also must admit their vulnerability as women, even if they are tough as nails. Ms. Clinton, who is whip-smart and confident in her debates with Barack Obama, has had some of her most affecting campaign moments when teary, or sentimental. These moments “humanized” her, said the press. But what is it about tears that make a woman a woman? And for some women, those tears seemed as false as so much political posturing that’s come from all sides of this presidential race. We’re constantly being manipulated. Next Page >
Top Co-ops Amid Dismal Economy: No Fear, Still Loathing
When the economy disintegrates and Manhattan bursts into flames, the board of the block-long co-op 765/775 Park Avenue will still be begging the day help and dog walkers to take the service elevator; the co-op board members at 820 Fifth will still be turning away unsatisfactory multibillionaires like Ron Perelman and Steve Wynn; and Ambassador Donald Blinken’s living room at the iron-gated River House will still have five Mark Rothkos.
The city’s most epically exclusive co-ops are the last bastions of old, over-proper, clubby, nice-nosed, perfectly heeled New York. They have values and they’re sticking to them—despite, or maybe because of, the city’s creeping anxiety.
“It’s a special island in the midst of Manhattan,” Mr. Blinken, a co-founder of E. M. Warburg, Pincus & Co, said about his co-op, where he was a board member before becoming President Clinton’s emissary to Hungary.
At Upper East Side buildings like his, where the buyers have tiptop society credentials to go with their immense wealth, a board’s standards are a protective sheath. “I would think that the people at River House, they’re certainly not flash-by-night, recent zillionaires in the last two years. They’re people who have been comfortable,” Mr. Blinken said, “and I don’t think current economic problems on Wall Street will have any impact on River House, will make any difference at all.”
Impenetrability means invincibility. “You find that people at River House are rather serious and not as exposed to the vicissitudes,” he said.
The meticulous, monogram-shirted, Virginia-born broker Edward Lee Cave said the best buildings want buyers with three times the apartment price in liquid assets. “It’s never been more important than today,” he said. “I’ll tell you why! They don’t want you going belly up, they don’t want you, your fabulous company—Bear Stearns, excuse me—all of a sudden going face down, and you have to sell apartments and you can’t pay your maintenance,” Mr. Cave said. “The current crunch doesn’t affect them at all.”
Impenetrability also means whiteness. Most of the godliest co-ops, like 820 Fifth, have exactly zero people of color. “I don’t recall ever hearing of any,” said financier H. Fred Krimendahl II, an 820 board member and a past president of the Philharmonic. “But if Tiger Woods wanted to live here, we’d be happy to talk to him.”
Considering that good co-ops loathe celebrities, Mr. Woods probably wouldn’t get very far at 820 Fifth. But to be fair, there aren’t many minorities applying to these buildings in the first place, although the late Reginald Lewis bought at 834 Fifth, Mr. Krimendahl’s old building. “If a Reg Lewis came along,” he said, “we would certainly entertain that possibility.”
“I don’t have turn-downs, thank God and pray to God,” said another broker, A. Laurance Kaiser IV. “You know before you show who can get into what building. You’re very frank with your own customer.”
When asked to describe the co-op 19 East 72nd, probably the hardest building off Fifth and Park Avenue, one top broker said: “You wouldn’t bring in a rap singer into 19 East 72nd Street—just as you wouldn’t take 19 East 72nd into some rap building. They’re divergent cultures.”
A board president around the corner brought up rappers, too, but said they’d be turned away from his building because of sensitivity about publicity, not skin: Richard Nixon, after all, got chased from that East 72nd castle (afterward, he asked Mr. Cave for help).
EXPOSURE IS SO despised back at River House, Ambassador Blinken’s co-op, that brokers can’t use the building’s name in listings. That fear of hype made things hard on Gloria Vanderbilt, Diane Keaton and Joan Crawford, who all got turned away.
And consider Chicago producer Marty Richards, who first put his $22.7 million duplex there on the market with Brown Harris Stevens’ Kathy Sloane eight years ago. Two weeks ago, the Post reported that the listing had gone to contract, naming fashion-show mogul Elyse Kroll as the buyer. The board probably didn’t appreciate the leak—or the news that Ms. Sloane was under investigation in Albany for tax evasion.
So, of course, the Kroll deal fell through, and the broker no longer has the listing. “I asked Marty to take me off because I’m going to be traveling with my husband,” the broker told The Observer, “and Marty does really need to sell.” Next Page >
What Makes Annie Shoot?
“I look back at it now,” Annie Leibovitz said at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1991, “I realize that one of the things I loved toward the end at Rolling Stone were the conceptual covers.” She had left for Vanity Fair in 1983, in part to follow an art director she admired. There she did little until Tina Brown arrived all bluster and balls in 1984—and then she did a lot.
Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s owner-operator, had become overly concerned about newsstand sales. “He wanted really clean, you know, head shots really. There was a study—they started to do studies, you know,” Ms. Leibovitz said. “And they came up with this study that the conceptual covers didn’t sell well because the person wasn’t recognizable. … For example, the Steve Martin photograph against the Franz Kline painting was the worst-selling cover that year.”
Annie Leibovitz had gotten too rock ’n’ roll for Rolling Stone.
That worst-selling cover—from February 1982—is a real mess, in today’s focus-group-in-a-Chicago-mall terms. Mr. Martin, in a suit, is painted with crude black stripes, and is in mid-campy-dance-step. The black-and-white painting looms beyond him. (Inside you might have learned that he would prefer not to discuss his relationship with Bernadette Peters.)
Then there was her Matt Dillon cover late that year. Mr. Dillon, pouty and incredibly young, is in slacks and shirt and tie, twisted and reclining, one leg up, thereby showing half his ass—and with his crotch placed nearly dead center on the magazine’s cover. What definitely seems to be Mr. Dillon’s extended middle finger rests near his square hairline. It was her last Rolling Stone cover. Now that’s how you say goodbye—to your magazine, your youth, whatever.
Ms. Leibovitz was, for much of the 80’s, an unusual bridge between the fine art world and the commercial world. This meant that in her practice she gathered commerce in one hand and journalism in the other.
Then as magazines went, so went Annie Leibovitz.
“‘Mr. President, wave!’ Annie suddenly called as they ambled toward the residence,” Tina Brown wrote in The Washington Post a few years back of the 1989 Vanity Fair shoot of Ron and Nancy Reagan.
Ms. Leibovitz had the two in Christmas-red cashmere sweaters.
Ms. Brown went on: “‘Whom are we waving at?’ Mrs. Reagan asked. ‘Congress, Nancy,’ said the president.”
It is hard to pinpoint the year and time in which Ms. Leibovitz’s balance collapsed, but it may very well have been 1989, and it may have been right there in the Rose Garden.
But there were so many other opportunities along her path between touring with the Rolling Stones in the mid-70’s to her show of portraits of women, called, handily, “Women.” I caught that one at the Corcoran in D.C., eight years ago.
The larger prints were actually split and mounted on two separate backings, with a vast seam running vertically down the middle. This wasn’t photography as museums know it. It was a collection of cheaply produced touring posters.
By 2003, she was subject to a brutal takedown by Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times. Among the kinder ideas expressed, she described Ms. Leibovitz as being “devoutly committed to portraiture while seeming remarkably uninterested in people.”
In 2006, she was untouched by an attack by Times art critic Roberta Smith, on the occasion of a Brooklyn Museum retrospective. It was a vicious amplification of Ms. Smith’s 1991 opinion of Ms. Leibovitz’s sort-of tautological problem: Her “images are only as interesting as the achievements or public persona of her subjects.”
Ms. Leibovitz was busy shooting Disney campaigns, American Express campaigns, Vogue campaigns, Gap campaigns—and who can forget all her work on behalf of those dairy pimps, the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, which had peaked early with the publication of 1998’s The Milk Mustache Book: A Behind-The-Scenes Look at America’s Favorite Advertising Campaign?
“The truth is, I thought I was doing journalism, but I really wasn’t,” Ms. Leibovitz told Powell’s Books in 1999. “When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that’s what I was doing, but it wasn’t true. What became important was to have a point of view.” Next Page >
World’s Youngest Relic: Master of the New Old Journalism
The summer of 1988, David Samuels was between his junior and senior years at Harvard and decided he wanted to cover the Republican convention in New Orleans.
His journalism experience had been limited to writing parodies of news items for the Harvard Lampoon, and he had little in the way of access set up for the convention.
He stopped in to the offices of the Washington City Paper, where he met Jack Shafer, the editor, and told him he was convinced he could penetrate the event and gain access to the big players there because he owned a tuxedo.
Mr. Samuels remembers Mr. Shafer, better known today as Slate’s media critic, as “this dude with a leather jacket.”
Mr. Shafer remembers Mr. Samuels, too. “David was a bright and bold little fuck.”
Mr. Shafer made Mr. Samuels the kindest offer an editor can make to a fledgling journalist: “We have this thing called spec …”
The tuxedo worked. Mr. Samuels got into the convention and glad-handed George H. W. Bush, his son, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and others. He filed his story—4,000 Hunter S. Thompson-inflected words—and got his spec: Ten thin cents a pop.
“I was like, ‘Huh, I can make 400 dollars at this!’” Mr. Samuels said.
Twenty years later, Mr. Samuels has had the sort of bylines today’s Harvard juniors would give anything for. He’s been nominated for two National Magazine Awards, received prestigious fellowship appointments and been invited to teach at N.Y.U.’s magazine journalism department. He’s also married to New York Times Magazine columnist Virginia Heffernan, with whom he has a 2-year-old son.
Last week, the New Press released two books he wrote: Only Love Can Break Your Heart, which collects some of Mr. Samuels’ articles from The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, among others, and The Runner, an expanded version of a New Yorker story about James Hogue, a highly accomplished runner and less accomplished grifter who scammed his way into Princeton in his late 20’s by claiming to be a self-educated, part Native American teenager named Alexi Indris-Santana.
Kirkus Reviews called The Runner “a dizzying, exhilarating tale of deception”; The New York Times praised Samuels as “an elite narrative journalist” in a Book Review essay.
But a recent visit to Mr. Samuels’ office found the writer despondent, even a little hopeless, and talking about retirement.
“Burnout is inevitable in this profession. It’s inevitable doing this sort of intense, long-form magazine writing,” Mr. Samuels was saying as he sat munching supermarket sushi at his desk in a small, wood-paneled studio he rents on the first floor of a creepy Victorian in Brooklyn Heights.
Aged 41, Mr. Samuels has the soft, rumpled appearance of someone who spends a lot of time alone in a room writing. In one of the essays in Only Love, Mr. Samuels looks at himself through his wife’s eyes and sees “her soft-bellied husband” and compares himself to the “neighborhood characters who tote tattered shopping bags filled with books and periodicals along the Promenade.”
The couple met at a party where Mr. Samuels spent the majority of the night flirting with Ms. Heffernan’s friend, who was “hot and funny and wearing a really nice dress.” But it was Ms. Heffernan who talked to him about his work, and after some insightful criticism and a couple of years of courtship, the two were married in 2003.
“I now have all the trappings of normalcy that I found completely impossible to maintain longer than a month,” Mr. Samuels said.
Between the lines of many of the pieces in Only Love is a loneliness borne of too many weeks spent in hotel rooms in Eugene, Ore., and other less glamorous locales, reporting his stories, for which he insists on face-to-face contact even for minor interviews, and in encounters with complete strangers, during which Mr. Samuels tried “to seem casual and relaxed while concentrating on them really intensely in a way that hopefully doesn’t creep them out.” Now, he says, “I’m very happy and I thank God every day that I have a wife who loves me.
“I have to earn every line I write by actually going somewhere, staying in some horrible hotel—although the hotels have gotten nicer. … I have to write and rewrite these sentences until there’s a world that’s self-contained.” Next Page >
Nerds of Steel
proto-geeks like Conan O’Brien suddenly
super-cut, ripped, pumped?
“Ben looks like Beaker from the Muppets on the outside, but then inexplicably like a guy from Prison Break under his clothes,” said Mindy Kaling, the 28-year-old actress who plays Kelly Kapoor on The Office. “I think if I’m going to have a boyfriend who works out, he better be sort of embarrassed about it, like Ben is. Sheepish fitness is the only tolerable kind.”
Ms. Kaling’s boyfriend, the 30-year-old writer Benjamin Nugent, is the author of American Nerd: The Story of My People, which will be published by Scribner in May. He works out every morning at Crunch in Fort Greene, and the timing of his book seems impeccable; the bespectacled Urkel-esque weakling of yore has, of late, become more concerned with free weights than pocket protectors. Daniel Radcliffe, who can seamlessly switch from playing the nerdy Harry Potter to being naked onstage in Equus, vies with cheesecakey High School Musical star Zac Efron as the object of teenage girls’ affection. Steve Carell shocked audiences (and Catherine Keener) in The 40-Year-Old Virgin with his tight abs. New York actor Justin Theroux, currently starring as John Hancock in the ultra-nerdy HBO miniseries John Adams, has flashed his surprisingly ripped torso on Sex and the City and in the Charlie’s Angels sequel, Full Throttle. Clark Kent, Peter Parker and Bruce Banner are all buff nerds of our imaginations. Slightly closer to reality, there’s Conan O’Brien and, some might say, our former governor, who was famous for his 5 a.m. runs through Central Park.
But today’s nerdy beefcake poster boy would have to be Jason from this season of Beauty and the Geek, the CW sleeper hit that attempts to bring this brain-meets-brawn fantasy to fruition by making the aforementioned geeks more self-aware, if not super-pumped. “My face, hair and personality all scream to the world that I’m a geeky guy who sits behind a desk all day long,” Jason wrote in an e-mail. “However, my body screams that I’m a huge gym rat who only thinks about going to clubs and beaches. This usually leads people to believe my head has been ‘superimposed’ on my body.”
It’s not rocket science to understand that it’s paradoxical for someone to be both nerdy and buff. Perhaps no film has captured this tension better than Revenge of the Nerds, which laid bare the scary aggressiveness of the jocks as they tried to assert their dominance over the nerds—who eventually outwit them thanks to their intellectual skills, not their muscle. In his book, Mr. Nugent argues that this film, among others, highlights the ways in which nerds are seen as embodying technology, whereas jocks embody physical strength; nerds govern through reason, jocks through intuition, and so on.
“The pathos of being a nerd is to feel that because you are comfortable with rational thought, you are cut off from the experience of spontaneous feelings, of romance, of nonrational connection to other people,” Mr. Nugent writes in American Nerd. “A nerd is so often self-loathing because he accepts the thinking/feeling rift, and he knows and cares that other people accept it, too.” So in our popular culture, the male nerd has historically been not only an object of scorn and ridicule from other men, but has been unable to love. That’s why a show like Beauty and the Geek works; it’s unexpected not only for a beautiful woman to be attracted to a nerd, but also for the nerd to be attracted to the beautiful woman.
The buff nerd, however, is a kind of double agent, existing as he (and it is always he; female nerds can be “buff,” but that makes for a sexy librarian/Tina Fey kind of paradigm) does with his geeky exterior and chiseled interior, as Ms. Kaling noted, approvingly, about Mr. Nugent. Indeed, women often see these men as the best of both worlds. Jessica, a 26-year-old writer in Boerum Hill, recalled one college-era ex-boyfriend as a “skinny-jeans-wearing, seemingly emaciated art-school dude.” But he was not, in fact, emaciated. “I was shocked when his shirt came off to reveal washboard abs. I think it was sort of a response to being a total fucking geek in high school and getting picked on a lot.”
Hipster or Ripster?
Meanwhile, editorial assistants, aspiring literary agents and freelance writers crowd the streets of Williamsburg and Carroll Gardens, galley of All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen (who also happens to be a buff nerd) tucked under their arms, Black Lips on their iPods, each one a more underfed mash-up of Elvis Costello, Chuck Klosterman and Stephen Malkmus than the next and trying, ever so valiantly, to appropriate the nerd aesthetic so that they may be Taken Seriously, and not be caught sneaking into the Cobble Hill New York Sports Club or the Greenpoint Y or Absolute Power on Grand Street in Williamsburg.
These are what Gary Shteyngart, in his 2003 novel The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, disparagingly called “glamorous nerds”: “They were a savvy-looking bunch, clothed in the new Glamorous Nerd look that was fast becoming a part of the downtown lexicon. One specimen in a tight, square, wide-collared polka-dotted shirt was shouting above the rest: ‘Did you hear? Safi got a European Community grant to study leeks in Prava.’ … Vladimir looked on sadly. Not only had he spent his entire life without winning a single European Community grant, but every pathetic piece of clothing he had been trying to shed since emigrating was now prêt-à-porter bonanza!”
These aren’t the gym rats of that 1977 Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary Pumping Iron, though today, some of them are secretly taking their cues from Men’s Fitness instead of n+1. In an e-mail to The Observer, Mr. Shteyngart noted that the “glam nerds” have “appropriated everything we real nerds ever had, but they look good too. Classic imperialism.” Next Page >
The Urbane Tomboys
“I dress like a boy because I feel like boys are generally more comfortable than women,” said Ali Tenenbaum the other day, sitting at a West Village coffee shop and wearing a “typical” outfit of black Hudson jeans, blue J. Crew cardigan, yellow T-shirt and designer sneakers. Ms. Tenenbaum, 38 (whose family was the inspiration for the Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums, though she said the actual resemblance is slight), has unfussy brown hair that falls to several inches above her shoulders, and clear, radiant skin. She doesn’t wear makeup. She is a professional photo organizer who meets with her (largely) Upper East Side clientele wearing sneakers. “Sometimes it throws them off a bit, but then I charm them and they’re fine with it!” she said.
It was just a few years ago that everyone was nattering about the metrosexual, the New York man who, though straight, loved his Kiehl’s and Thomas Pink tattersall shirts and is addicted to Grey’s Anatomy. Less discussed has been his female counterpart: gals who, while not lesbians, dress like guys (young guys), well into their 30’s; who leap into games of pickup basketball with male friends while the rest of us watch wanly from the sidelines; who affect a wry detachment from their sex’s conventional concerns of shoe-shopping, man-hunting and family. Think of the comedienne Sarah Silverman, mugging and shrugging and strumming her way through an “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” video, a birthday gift to her boyfriend, ABC talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel. Or matter-of-fact Juno actress Ellen Page. Or surly pop star Avril Lavigne.
And these gals are everywhere in New York. Urbane tomboys in $200 jeans, they wear sneakers to the office or the studio (they probably work in a creative industry). They’ve largely given up on mainstream women’s fashion, with its expensive, often unflattering vicissitudes, finding refuge in an eternal sporty girlhood that may or may not be tied to any real athletic bent. They borrow from men’s wear, which is more constant, comfortable and, lately, focused on well-made basics like jeans and T-shirts, and they profess ignorance of female grooming rituals, even if they have a secret love of eyeliner. Ever self-deprecating, this kind of woman is quick to tell you she “wears the same thing every day,” or that she dresses like her husband or boyfriend.
‘I Like to Keep It Basic’
In between glamorous appearances at awards shows, Ms. Silverman and Ms. Page—as well as more mainstream examples like Jessica Biel, Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz—seem to revel in sneakered, hoodied androgyny, thereby recasting femininity as something you can take off and put on again: an optional, mildly silly act that certainly seems to excite everyone but that one needn’t always make time for.
Ms. Silverman, particularly, whose status as a sex object is partly the product of the tension created by her potty mouth and her JAP-y good looks, dresses like she’s on her way to intramural softball. It’s a look that basically says, I’m too cool for dresses, a direct commentary on an ever-more-exhausting mainstream feminine aesthetic. The urbane tomboy cares without seeming to care. Because she’s hot enough to succeed without the embellishment, and she knows this.
Key to this type is a certain willful naïveté about the baffling stratagems of conventional female life.
“I do try to be more girly,” Ms. Tenenbaum said with a shrug. “I try to buy poufy sleeves, even just a cardigan with a poufy sleeve. And I put it on and I just can’t do it.”
They like to order Scotch at bars, rather than fruity drinks like cosmos; roll their own cigarettes; and profess to not know their way around a powder puff.
“I have my products. But I’m sure I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,” said Gillian Schwartz, 30, co-owner of a brand consulting firm, Parisi, whose high-profile fashion clients includes Vena Cava and Steven Alan. “When they start getting too specialized or tricky. … I guess I don’t like tricky. … Essentially, if you’re a pretty lady, you can just kind of let that …” She trailed off. “Well, I have no idea where I am on that, but I just like to keep it basic.”
Ms. Schwartz, a tall, bare-faced brunette, was drinking cappuccino in Nolita near her office the other day in a monochrome shirt and cardigan combo and slim brown corduroys. “I almost feel clownish when I get dressed up,” she said, echoing Ms. Tenenbaum. “There’s a real apprehension, especially in the creative industries, to not be overdressed. Overdressed is pretty bad. Underdressed is cool.”
To be an urbane tomboy is to have a certain condescension toward feminine adornment (even, or especially, when it’s the source of one’s livelihood). Or at least, a sense that in serious times, we should be thinking about other things. “Maybe people don’t feel as comfortable being all blinged out anymore,” suggested Ms. Schwartz. “There’s some bad stuff going on that we’re responsible for.” Next Page >
The Clash ... Goin’ Up?
On a recent weekend afternoon, he listened to The Jam while flipping through a magazine and Screwdriver while depositing a check at the bank. But when he got to the ’Wichcraft on 20th Street, he pulled those insect-size earbuds out of his ears.
“This is one of the places where I actually like the music they’re playing, it’s not the same stuff you hear everywhere, like R&B, top 40’s, T-Pain or whatever,” he explained between hefty bites of a chicken salad sandwich. The Velvet Underground played in the background. “Sometimes it’s like I never took my [iPod headphones] off.”
What’s the difference? IPod or no, we are perpetually surrounded by music these days, and often by the thumping beat of the Arcade Fire song “Laika” or the insane carnivalesque psychedelia of 60’s Brazilian bizarros Os Mutantes. Our restaurants, retailers, doctors’ waiting rooms and business offices silenced the languid keyboard covers of top 40 tracks or the smooth jazz that misted from their ceiling speakers long ago. Classic rock from Led Zeppelin? Harmless R&B from Mary J. Blige? Electronic blips from Brian Eno? Even pop jazz (blech) from Kenny G? Those are moldy elevator music choices. Now it’s all about obscure electroclash and bass-heavy baile funk. Underground hip-hop and grimy punk. The Kinks. The Clash. Black Sabbath. Even … Minor Threat? This is the new background music, and you can’t get away from it.
In the era of the earbud, businesses are making their own playlists using iTunes or getting custom-made “audio personalities” from music companies and trend-savvy DJ’s. No more gentle piano notes, smooth synthesizers and a string instrument or 20 to help the shopper buy, the client relax, the worker work. Then, background music was meant to literally fade into the background, whispering sweet nothings just out of earshot while the din of consumerism and socializing (couples chatting, plates clinking, cash registers clanging) took the main stage. But now companies are pummeling us frontally, with a half-ironic rock ’n’ roll sneer, slinging music from bands like Sri Lankan beat-mistress M.I.A. and emo-punk pioneers Jawbreaker into our ears.
The original, instrumental elevator music developed by the Muzak Corporation, the 74-year-old company that made so many languid synthesizer covers of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” was, actually, controversial: Angry listeners accused it of deploying mind-controlling, Orwellian tricks. It was, they claimed, formed as an emotional sedative, coaxing consumers into mindlessly and happily conforming to the capitalist society by buying useless things.
But this new background music, these punk, hip-hop and rock bands, made revolutionary sounds that were meant to wake us up. We wonder whether iPods constantly being in everyone’s ears lays a mental fog over the brain. Do we even listen to music anymore? Or is it all just sinking into the background, surrounding us like air-conditioning?
“I can’t help wondering if the incidence of earworms and musical hallucinations is higher now, with background music in every public place,” said Oliver Sacks in a recent interview with Wired about his new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. “The brain is very sensitive to music; you don’t have to attend to it to record it internally and be affected by it. I think we may be exposed to too much loud and repetitive music. One patie