THE RAKE PERSONIFIED
As much as I detest cigarettes, I miss the time when New York City was one big smoking section. This has less to do with the glorification of a smoke-based nicotine delivery system than coinciding with the last time New York City was actually cool. That’s right. And I get to say that because I am that rare anomaly: someone who was born and raised on the island of Manhattan. Let me explain. There is no place on Earth I will ever love more than New York. I drop to my Neapolitan-trousered knees and thank Yahweh, Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha, the Lord Krishna, the Prophet Muhammad, and all the various gods worshipped in this magnificent multicultural palimpsest that I grew up there. But since Mayor Bloomberg banned indoor smoking, since they gentrified the Meatpacking District, turned Times Square into a theme park, the birthplace of punk into a clothing boutique, and the Velvet Underground’s former tenement into a hipster members’ club, no one cool can afford to live in New York City. And as a result you’ve got the young people with big balls and bigger hearts all living in Red Hook, having made a mass exodus from scenic Williamsburg in all its artisanal-pizza glory when its per-square-foot prices exceeded those of the
Upper East Side. As a result there is no coolness critical mass in Manhattan any more. There is no more Studio 54 and the Mudd Club co-existing within a few miles of each other. And without the dynamic tension of high and low, without the push and pull of noble and macabre, without the tantalising combination of the divine and obscene, New York has, culturally speaking, lost its edge in contrast to other European cities like Berlin or Budapest.
In the end it seems that New York City is still cool. It has to be. Because Jay McInerney lives there.
It used to be that if you had hustle, the Nietzschean Übermensch-like ability to trade whatever assets God gave you — a sense of style, a Mensa-shaming IQ, the gift of the gab, a silver tongue, a beautiful face, conspicuous hotness (and hopefully all of the above) — you would make a light-speed beeline to the big, bad, beautiful city. But that’s done. Over. Throughout the better part of the new millennium it’s been China and its dynamically shape-shifting cities like Beijing and
