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January 25, 2006

Luxhastion. A recent post over at Polis called to mind an occasional discussion that creeps up as exhaustion from real estate vampirism sets in: the pervasiveness of luxury. Well, not luxury per se, but the presumption of, the claim of, the advertising of luxury. A luxury that is often not actually evident in the subsequent viewings, but in a town that never fails to develop new ways to adjectivize a 300 square foot space with a sliver jutting out into a “one-bedroom”, the marker at which a space is converted into luxury is a slippery one: a four burner stove? A functional door separating where you sleep from where you don’t? Hot water? A $2,000 studio? The list is endless.

The yardsticks one might conventionally use are hard to apply; real estate valuations are so out of whack that spending $2,500 a month for a walk up one bedroom may still be more economical than the mortgage that same space would require. Try telling someone that you spend $30 large on a one bedroom -- they will start looking at you like a luxury fellow no doubt.

No, the luxury appellation is particularly grating because it is both a logical fallacy and an insult to the discriminating attitude of a town full of people who sneer at a $3,000 suit because it is still off the rack. Is every new apartment in New York luxurious? It’s like the old Steven Wright joke: somewhere out there is the worst doctor in the world -- and someone has an appointment with them today (I try to be more diplomatic -- I’ve always wanted to go into a meeting and announce that half the people in the room were the stupid people, and the meeting would be far more successful if they stayed quiet). Somewhere in this town is an apartment that isn't 'luxury' -- and I'm probably in it.

Beyond that, the particulars of luxury smack of the most inane of marketing gambits. Since we are all only a half-step from some version of the professional services monster (lawyer, consultant, broker, etc.), we are far too used to looking askance at the mindless repetition of phrases of “best of breed”, “mission critical” and “taking things off-line.” So not only are the pronouncements from brokers deceitful, but we are insulted by their simplistic construction.

It’s a style problem. How many brokers have you met that didn’t make you think that the only job qualification one needs is a certain oiliness? A willingness to lie relentlessly and untrammeled greed seem to be their only skills. Given that this, absent any other details, would describe most of the people living on Manhattan, what grinds is our belief that even if we are all just that, we’re at least smarter and better dressed than the hordes of greedy urbanites that gather in Dallas or Phoenix.

No, the most galling thing about luxury housing is the fact that we think it reflects badly on our own discretion. I don’t want anyone thinking I walked knowingly into some hack rehab or Costas Kondylis kit job because I believed it was somehow superior to the rest of the apartments listed, but rather, find myself again squoze by the mutiple vertices of time, available funds and expediency. I don’t even care so much that I can’t afford what might actually qualify as superior. Well, okay, I mind a little, but considering the time and effort I’ve put into attaining discernment and aesthetic superiority, this democratizing of design is not distressing because the presumption that everyone can have it, but that it can be had through simple effort of declaration.

So what out there would qualify? That’s the worst part. Tropolism is still building out a short list of what might qualify. It is woefully small, relative to any measure: other cities, number of new buildings going up. And they are, at the very least, qualifying of the unctuous luxury descriptor, at least on price. Step down the scale, it becomes a barren place.

Rather than sing the praises of these buildings, the majority of which could be far better, I’m just going to issue a very short list, some speculative, some assumed, of what might truly break into the territory pissy New Yorkers (like me) might acknowledge:

Leading the list, oddly, since very few people actually know what it looks like, is the 40 Bond Street project, from Herzog & de Meuron, picked solely for the most recent description, which sounds like exactly what you expect: a fascinating interrogation of materials based on the historical precedents in the immediate context.

And there’s Meier, who, aside from stealing views (hey, you want to insure your view, buy on the beach), turned out some of the best buildings of his career (You didn’t realize you couldn’t relocate the bathroom? What did you think would was possible with those poured concrete floors?), turning out an almost academic (in the best possible sense) exercise in type and plan resolution. And using every ounce of his reputation to force his vision on a developer (it may have been more collaborative, but I suspect ill of the entire lot).

After that, it turns into a lot of some of this versus some of that. One Kenmare Square has its moments, contrary to my original opinion (the best of which is the seam on the north façade that breaks the brick and introduces a color shift). The Dubbeldam project (is that building occupied yet -- going on what, five years of construction?) on Greenwich is interesting if only because is it seems to the have the highest aspirations (and the most compliant developer) in terms of interior and exterior design.

But if you aren’t willing to wait three years for luxury, or don’t happen to have a few spare millions sloshing around, what does this city have for you? Design-wise, well, it’s tenements and Targets for most. Over the past couple months I’ve visited a handful of projects. My delinquency in writing anything has made it convenient to collect these observations into a mini feature. So over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing in-depth discussions of housing for the rest of us. That 'rest' may scale up towards a slightly higher end, depending on where I end up between now and when I'm through with this exercise, which will address over several days neighborhood, context, even construction details. Soup to nuts. More than you probably wanted to know. Enjoy.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

January 22, 2006

The closest this blog gets to breaking news. It’s all of six and no one has bothered to post this, so here’s my bit of service blogging and news breaking. The Synagogue on Rivington Street -- directly opposite Teany -- has partially collapsed. Or so said a number of standers-by.

I was leaving Alias (which has an excellent brunch, a fact that seems to be consistently lost on the hordes of people waiting eons at Clinton Street Baking), and considered getting some baked goods at the hipster cupcake palace (or, at the very least, to try and ingratiate myself into the hottest apartment scene since Felix left 203) when I noticed a couple NYPD Emergency Service trucks parked on Essex. When the Emergency Service people show up, it’s usually worth the trip, particularly in this neighborhood. Back in the day they usually signaled some type of East Villagey social unrest. Given the current economic and political climate these days, I thought perhaps there would be an anti-noise demonstration (which is a bit of an oxymoron, I know), or perhaps someone had gone the direct action route and firebombed Pianos. First Prada, now this. Could the weekend be rougher for hyper-obvious downtown identity? Walking over there revealed what seemed to be every vehicle the FDNY owns. They had a bus. Who knew they had a bus?

The center of activity was Ludlow and Rivington, which likely sent all those new parent hipsters into paroxysms of anger, given that 4PM on a Sunday is probably the only time they get some quiet. Fire trucks in every direction, and camera phones pointed every which way (the only D70 spotted was in the possession of a guy wearing a Prada knitted cap, who must have wanted to publicly declare his grief). So there will be plenty of photos tomorrow (UPDATE: or, today -- to be entirely meta, I am in this photo).

Emergencies are always interesting because crowd control seems to be lackadaisical, when it really is just really difficult. Unless there are meteors crashing into Ludlow Street (and wouldn’t that be sweet?), no one wants to be responsible for wholesale evacuation that gets probably forty business owners screaming (people were still eating at Paul’s Boutique and Inoteca), to say nothing of bringing down the ire of Moby. So there were fireman going every which way. I do believe the owners were being interviewed by the Wubbie just as I walked up. That’s about all I got for detail. Concerns about further collapse were being talked about here and there, and some people even brought chairs into the street. It was, well, a little festive. No one seemed to be in direct danger, we were all half hoping for a little demolition porn, and the firemen were exuding really top notch style performance. Having watched such elaborate rituals as training the fresh fish how to properly wash the fire truck or, far more importantly, how to back into a fire house, I really appreciate the loving, long-term effort that must go into helmet accessorizing. I’m not saying I wouldn’t do the exact same thing, and today was a fine time to observe it all, since there was plenty of standing around and beard pulling, with very little evident danger.

But building collapses aren’t real exciting events -- the initial moments, yes, but a turn of the century post and beam, mostly brick structure doesn’t go down all that easy. The front façade looked pretty solid when I left for my confectionery. I do hope they will be able to forestall any further damage. The presence of LES Synagogues is an interesting social and architectural characteristic of the area. Many of them aren't that compelling visually, but they are an interesting building type, the large congregation space the only thing that interrupts what is blocks of tenements and current and former school buildings.

UPDATE: Gothamist does five more minutes of research than me.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

January 16, 2006

Do it to her. I saw a cockroach last night. Not an unusual occurrence, right? Well, it was on my pillow. Given that my pillow sits on a futon that sits directly on my floor, this incursion isn’t wholly unexpected. It’s New York. Cockroaches. But how do you squash one when it’s on the damn pillow?

This was worked out, in due course. I assure myself that each time I see one that it is ‘rare.’ I guess. Someone needs to make a little javalet deal where we all log our roach sightings on a web site (a new Google Maps mashup, perhaps?) so we can aggregate some wide distribution notion of ‘normal’ (yeah, all you suburban types chuckling at our having to calculate how many roach sightings are normal -- I can go find a drunk and oily Ryan Adams slouched over an East Village bar any night of the week!). It was a little logy, as most of them are when exposed to light, my mammalian, soft, intellect rationalizing that the nonexistent spraying from my entirely absent management company is having an effect, rather than a far more primitive insect mind realizing I was just catching the very rare example of the laggard, gimped up and failing.

Because that’s what we all don’t want to be someday. It’s a fear of exposure -- the light comes on, and we are cast as the fraud, the failure. The sound of the claws scurrying down the lath I excuse as gurgling pipes is another form of present mind delusion. I have a rodent problem, as we all do, here in New York (one in four homes, we are cheerfully informed!), and, as we all do in the meantime, we pretend, or live in anxious détente. I have a rodent problem -- but as long as it is contained by the scurrying up and down the chases, I can live in denial. Even though I have been here months, I’m still expecting exposure -- to turn an impossible corner of an apartment that I inhabit almost obsessively, to find myself staring into the beady eyes of an alien and dominant culture, a squadron of vermin waiting to evict me, not so much forcibly; instead, I simply turn and run in fear, not wanting to imagine the scope off the battle I am about to engage, since I doubt I can triumph.

I live in a rental, a term of derision and futility, wedged in the dense agglutination of million dollar homes, nothing I do seeming to make headway. We’re just waiting for that light, waiting to be squashed. So what is it that makes living here so unique, so special? It is the relentless pounding fear that never abates. You see it at the edges of everyone’s eyes, in the smiles that aren’t really smiles, but a fractured rictus, shadowing the gleam behind the eyes, a desperate wanting to reach out, wanting any sliver of reassurance. And we guard against that, oh, we hoard that bit of kindness, dangling it just out of reach and dance merrily away, floating on our moment of superiority, all while looking about omni-presently, grabbing every which way for the same.

This is our sport, this is our distraction. We gird ourselves with layers of irony and intellectual pabulum, tearing at every story, dissecting it and reassembling so it coordinates with our manic self-interest, wrapped in a smile and carefully deposited bon mot.

Except this city -- and sure, it’s just not this city, we sit atop such a stinking mess of hatred that here we only get to see the most elegantly constructed horrors, those with Lifetime-ready narratives. We have no time for the workaday indignities; we demand more. And this city. This city teaches its children to turn on each other. This city has taught a child a lesson that thousands of years of civilizing effort and labor sought to repress, to create what we hoped was an unimaginable gap, one closed so quickly, as awfully as the effective rodents on Winston, who came so dearly to understand what betrayal was, what the absolute diminution of care is: “Do it to her.”

Do it to her. We have taught children that the means to survival is by sacrificing the weaker among us, a lesson that some smart fuck holding a bottle of Cristal at Bungalow 8 is likely rhapsodizing about this very instant, conflating his pushing of buttons on a keyboard with the acts of heroes, and entirely unawares of the distant suffering it causes, or, as we learned so thoroughly this week, what this grinding battle does to the minds less able. And what, then, happens to their children.

Do it to her. And now the wringing of hands, the rending of garments, breasts will be beaten on the pages of tabloids, our $84 million mayor will gravidly intone reform, some sad sack who has spent the past twenty years trying to stop something just like this but chose to pick the wrong sheet of paper to worry about while the rest of us were distracting ourselves with that useless fuck James Frey, who, had he a thousand fucking years to think about it, couldn’t actually understand what suffering is, that person will get fired, and maybe a few others who deserve it no more than any of us, who look at the strollers littering our hallways with an inward disgust that the nuisance parenthood has brought down on our drinking schedules.

We will try to excuse our ghoulish retelling of facts, wherein details are doled out, necessary to salt the story with just enough Law & Order-quality detail, so we can make certain we have the correct degree of outrage. We won’t think too hard about how quickly the person, the tiny life that we are condemned to rationalizing is finally safe, has become flattened into a useful narrative of many parts. No, we a protecting her, finally, right? After months. Months. Years. Try that. Try remembering this story tomorrow. And the day after that. And the one after that. Do that for a hundred days. Two. Then, then if the tabloid vampires were really acting because they care about people, and were willing to post the same image over and over, again and again, for two hundred days, we could get a sense of how long this city stood by. Idly? Maliciously? It’s all true.

But instead, we try to paint the image of evil on a single person. Make that the final betrayal. To declaim loudly that it wasn’t my fault. It was someone’s, to be sure. But not mine. I sure do want to take the steps necessary to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It wasn’t my fault, but I want to do what I can. How can I help? Just tell me what I need to do; the perfect phrase of the self-absorbed New Yorker who mouths fealty to humanism.

Do it to her. I saw a cockroach on my pillow last night. I will rest my head on it tonight, fortunate in ways I can’t begin to imagine.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

January 3, 2006

Contempt in a Teapot. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Moby. Purveyor of insipid and treacly music predestined to shill products targeted at the wallpaper-reading set (though that might be shooting a little high). Proprietor of insipid and self-consciously cutesy food establishments (I’m surprised we haven’t be subjected to McTeaney’s, a meat-free sandwich shoppe staffed by earnest underprivileged youths, or those that simply self-identify as such). Self-indulgent rich kid from Connecticut who transplants himself and postures downtown chic as badly as Liz Phair used to (at least she decided to make no bones about her reality). Highly public and doctrinaire vegan. Hell, vegan, period.

Today we can add ruthless businessman to that list, if reports are to be believed. I don’t -- or, more particularly, don’t care, and the energy invested in not caring, somewhat equal to the effort required to skirt his officious Rivington Street mini-empire (as it juts further out into the sidewalk than any other business on what is a fairly narrow street), is a source of resentment itself. So something happened at some organ in the Moby empire. Wringing of hands, deployment of snark, blogged rebuttals. The makings of a sitcom plot based on bloggers courtesy the wubbie, circa 2007.

But if being intentionally twee, ‘stylish’ or willfully obscurant got you banished from the Lower East Side, it would be pretty desolate relative to the rich tapestry we have today. So revamp or no, mass firings of communal love-in, what Moby does is of little concern to me, but the episode certainly underscores how much blogging has become like the news crawl at the bottom of CNN. Sure, you in the back row, you’re saying “What, you just noticed?”

Well, no, but the Gawker standard of 12 posts a days seems to have infected other outlets. Add to the proliferation of real estate blogs (the Times weighs in, a Browstoner party gets written up in Talk of the Town -- maybe my second anniversary party, comprising me having a glass of rye on the couch and generally hating, which, believe it or not, is distinct from most other nights, which involve bourbon and a desk, will get covered as well) and a story like this suddenly has legs. Well, 30 minutes thereof.

Why this is a perfect squall situation is because later in the afternoon I noticed that Jack Abramoff pled guilty in return for an agreement to testify. And even though most of our well-known blogs take a pass on politics, there would be, one assumes, enough related interest for it to turn up somewhere. Getting my information through RSS, NPR streams, and a couple newspaper sites, I knew about the Terror at Teany (which occurred roughly contemporaneously with the Abramoff announcement) several hours earlier. If I subscribed to the right blogs, I doubt there would have been a gap.

But it rankled because, aside from being the easy target of just about everyone, Moby is ostensibly (like the other LES celebrity bar owner, Tim Robbins) a political ‘activist’. But I couldn’t think of a single thing he’s done (aside from turning up at some part for Outfoxed -- a fact I gather from some dusty remnants of an Observer article). Not like Ralph Reed, the conservative charlatan who seems to pop up just about everywhere (and, I found out today, is running for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia). Granted, Reed is a political operative and Moby is a bad singer, but his coffee shop contretemps is what holds our attention? When they say grass roots organizing is how political change is achieved, this is not what they are referring to.

This isn’t some clarion call for blogging standards. I’ll leave that to the more capable. But even as we all stand in thrall of real estate prices, either drunk on the direct benefit it brings us, seething at the good fortune of others, or simply overwhelmed at the absurdity at all, it is crucial we don’t lose site of the fact that macro and micro economic and political events still have the power to interrelate and change things.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about this year. Scope out an editorial calendar, try and make this a more rigorous enterprise. I haven’t come to any good conclusions. But I know I’m not going to write about Teany. At all. Except this once.

Found always via this Permanent Link.