Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Spare us wine lovers, horse lovers and bunny slopes, today the preserves of lower middle class rock stars and movie stars and soi disant "socialites".......from New Jersey.

Sunday, November 28, 2004

In Chicago you could fake being Cafe Society, or "socially prominent"; in New York you can't. Here you have to be Very Very Rich, sugar baron rich or Very Very Famous. In Chicago self-styled society mavens and mini-Capote walkers lived in SROs and were salesmen in Marshall Fields.

Graydon Carter divides Americans into Wal-Mart people and Blue Blazer people and there is little doubt where he sees himself. He reminds me of the passionately upwardly mobile Paul Fussell from grad study years at Rutgers.

Thursday, November 25, 2004

The New York Times is almost always dignified as in a smart note by Alan Riding in today's Arts section: world leaders have little interest in culture, except when convenient. That we knew but wish to add there is no distinction between class and culture, rich and poor consuming the same dreadful fare. The Queen watches Coronation Street and eats on a tray in front of the telly and .......oh never mind, it is all so obvious.

Alistair Cooke's collected essays just appeared. He and my father were born in 1908 a fact that is haunting since they looked almost identical. Today is Thanksgiving and rather than eating I will read Elizabeth David's Is There A Nutmeg in the House. Now diabetes is more of a national health risk than drinking and smoking. Americans are bored out of their minds and simply eat too much.

Sunday, November 21, 2004

Jonathon and I executed a preview day walk through the new MoMA. All my old favorites there- Twittering Machine, Cezanne's Bather, Matisse's The Piano but everything overcome by the vertiginous interior which threatened to hurl you into space at every turn. Such pretension too! Sort of illiterate architecture.

Thursday, November 18, 2004

You have to love Prince Charles and his mindlessly candid comments, which ultimately contain true and accurate observations, which is why one follows his career at all. The 'be all that you can be' culture is brainwashing of the masses, a nitwit's soma, and he has the courage (actually the economic freedom) to say it.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Conservation concerns and environmental "issues" are so beside-the-point, no doubt a hangover from my 70s radicalism when these were seen as political deflections from real problems. Who says conservatism and radicalism aren't cut from the same cloth?

The Sun reports information other newspapers do not. Thus today the Pacific Research Institute's study ranking New York as last in the national economic freedom ranking. I always suspected, now I know, that you really can't make it in New York in 2004. Maybe there was a time you could--or it was probably just the lyrics of a song.

Monday, November 15, 2004

Yesterday at the Modernism Show at the Armory a tiny Yoko Ono in head of us in line, cap pulled down over her eyes, scurrying in to look at Deco jewelry and scurrying out with men on intercoms detailing her movements. In an era of the Revenge of Democracy she is another victim.

New York is claustrophobic in the extreme; all these exhibitions featuring the junk of the past, all the Sunday brunchers crammed into miniscule, boiling hot eateries. It makes you want to fly away into the fresh air and breathe. I know I can never live here forever.

Friday, November 12, 2004

The Paris Review Foundation held a party at Cipriani's last night and they trotted out the old warhorses Vonnegut, Styron, Guare (who?) grinning like........oh never mind.......at least Updike doesn't hungrily lap up the attention of Ivanka Trump. I spent some time with George P. whenever he came to Chicago and he was an Upper East Side snob, only he wasn't aware of it. New York is the city of Names.

Saw a frowning Bianca Jagger trudging up Madison last night and a frowning, tired Sirio Maccioni at Le Cirque. I am sure his face lights up like a Christmas tree for Nan Kempner or ......whomever.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

A Happy Veteran's Day Parade in cynical olde New York. A few out of towners cheering the vets and the denizens rushing by as if on another planet. In every war since the Revolutionary my family has fought, that includes Civil, Spanish American, I and II, Vietnam, Gulf. Voila!

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Last week I saw on old con Larry King's show (ever seen his mug shots?) an "interview" with Charles Spencer whose insouciance and false modesty staggering. He sloughed off his earldom as something to do with some relative long ago....fooling no one except maybe the char ladies.

Oh no--Hollywood has discovered Kinsey and will make him into a fool the way they did John Nash. I was a board member of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana when wacky June Reinishe was director and even wackier Bob Ganchiff enlisted all his friends to drive five hours to party in Hoagy Carmichael's bar. All I remember was all the erotic art, mostly fakes or copies.

En route to my research of Berenson-Clark and Fry relationship, I feel a little protective of BB-- these upper class English obviously were anti- mercantile, i.e. anti-Semitic and deeply anti-American. In my many rendezvous with Quentin Bell, even as a 24 year old, I detected identical sympathies.

Friday, November 05, 2004

As if by a miracle out of the blue yonder the clouds part and comes word there are 300,000 plus jobs -- the press was hiding that information until after the election!

I never read fiction (who has the time or imagination?) having been ruined by Middlemarch as an undergrad. Anyway still adore Tom Wolfe--he is right about politics, right about "modern" art (so stupid) and right about the state of nature status seeking of homo sapiens.

Thursday, November 04, 2004

Old Norm Sherry gets a justifiable English drubbing for his Greene finale; no wonder! I emailed him in San Antonio and probably shouldn't have mentioned I thought the sex life of a writer largely irrelevant--he didn't respond. I remember Sherry in Lancaster -- a fiercely focused egotist whom all the junior lecturers like Lee mocked. But then again we mocked everything in the 70s!


Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Thank God the election over; the differences between the candidates cosmetic and only the naive think otherwise. It is a relief not to have to see Teresa Kerry's smirk.

Glad the airwaves have shrunk and we won't have to see those homely Heinz and Kerry children in the press; I was more interested in contacting The Burlington Magazine Foundation yesterday than voting.

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

I forgot how snotty the English are: tried to volunteer (for Chrissakes) to raise funds for Burlington Mag. and my resume not good enough....

For decades in Chicago Veuve Cliquot or Taittinger were on the almost- daily menu but today so-called society seems less innane than the way the media feeds it to the masses who can't afford to make endowments or take another day off from work.Society columnists seem like so many pandering sad sacks.

Monday, November 01, 2004

The New York of my youth had totally disappeared by 1960. There is no charm left. It is dismal both culturally, structurally and socially. Loony actors have replaced the 400 -- who have vaporized out of an innate survival instinct. It is pure H.G. Wells.