The early 2000s was the height of Sex & The City. It was sort of appalling. New York was rich, safe and decadent, and the city was in the midst of rapid transformation; it was the Gilded Age of Manhattan where 25-year-old millionaire I-bankers with relatively little life experience were getting drunk in their unbuttoned Turnbull & Asser shirts all over downtown, trying to bed the irritated last-standing cool girl bartender/models/actresses....just because those were the girls that didn't care about millions or banks. Broke people weren't really broke as they were subsidized by their parents in Philadelphia and getting $250 highlights at Frederic Fekkai. People weren't really producing art or music or fashion or culture in the ways that they used to; everyone who did all of those things had agents and connections if they did not have any money. And it all seemed very strange to me, because it's true: I arrived in NYC thirty-five years too late.
I was torn: Was I to follow my dream and just write and just starve (my family and I do not have a low- no-interest lending system or any system as we are not in contact), or was I to get that fashion job and be able to afford my bar tab, Balthazar breakfasts and wear chic (gratis) shoes, and nothing else? Long story short: I have done a little of both in no particular order.
I recently discovered Patti Smith's Horses album; of course, I have always known who she is, but she has become nothing short of an obsession. Horses has been a Holy Grail path to old-school, long-gone New York coolness on my iPod; the very thing I left all stable things in the Midwest for; the very thing that New York sort-of needs...
Rock 'n' Roll skinny doesn't get any cooler or hotter than Robert Mapplethorpe + Patti Smith in their primes and pasts, so present and so now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKOULF922Rs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNg19CH9AwY&feature=related
