"Low" Countries

I write this, in part, to put to bed some lingering frustrations over the rapid L.A.-ification of Manhattan. Mostly, I want to talk about the "Low" in "High and Low." It's pretty clear what we mean when we say "High"--museums and poems and operas and such. But the ambiguous "Low" is the real driving force here, the texture and spice, the questing (that's another meaning of "High and Low") humour that completes the collage. It is not simply the mainstream information that we impart, the television and music and celebrity schlock. "Low" is where we come from. "Low" is Memphis. "Low," or rather, "High and Low" used to be Manhattan. Not so long ago, in the early and middle aughts, we inhabited that island of Dutch settlers, strings of perfect summers, delicious messes, such trips, such high-flying meals. We were sometimes in Brooklyn, but most nights were for Manahatta. The Lower East Side still felt (dare I say it) gritty and occasionally glitzy (in the most artful way). I was young and starry and in love with someone who was, in Velvets' parlance, "in love with the scene." I had no idea that we were living in twilight days, that everything would soon change and that my love and his cronies would be partially responsible.

Here's an important story: one night, almost by accident, I ended up at Bungalow 8, the Chelsea club that catered most specifically to Hollywood and P.R. and stuff, a club that had been featured on an episode of Sex and the City (if that gives you some notion of its various expense and uncoolness). I found the whole experience laughable. I felt like some princess emissary of the "Low," dressed carelessly, feeling much further from my friends and lover than I actually was (they were at the Passerby, some ten blocks south). The DJ played a manic mess of radio hits, cutting each one short at the minute mark. There were hideous, greasy financial types (they NEVER came around my haunts) throwing dollar bills at gyrating MILFs and Russians. I picked the money up off of the floor and tucked it into my jeans. On the banquette beside us, a sunny Kirsten Dunst and sour Jake Gyllenhaal (clearly a bad match). I recall feeling terribly sorry for her. She was lovely and (shallow as it sounds) dressed much more like me than like those MILFs and Russians. I thought, "Poor thing, she has no idea where to go. She is so programmed with this silly, cosseted Hollywood nightlife stuff of bottles and doors that she hardly knows of the real fun and freedom of life Downtown. If she wanted to come our way, we wouldn't hassle her or gawk, and she could be, you know, authentic by association . . ." Where I came from, there were no lines, lists, or doormen. The system was democratic--if one knew where to go, one was assured a place at that unmarked table. We didn't need some monitor outdoors to assure us that we were hip. Our table seated rich and poor, young and old, known and unknown, any old stranger. The set-up was positively romantic.

Not long after I left the love and scene and city of the above descriptions (for a respite in Memphis), he and his dear friends opened up the Beatrice Inn, a West Village club with a strict door policy and (to this day) a constant rotation of young starlets present—Kirsten (no longer lost at Bungalow) and Lindsay and Mary-Kate. I have not been. I can't quite stomach it. But in this new, unfamiliar Manahatta, the cruel, moneyed exclusivity of Beatrice is welcome relief from the loads of finance and Eurotrash and Greek Row and television star assholes who frequent the Lower East Side and East Village. Worse-er still, Gavin Brown's Passerby on 15th Street, America's most special hole-in-the-wall discotheque, our clubhouse and social sculpture, our school for scandal, closed last year. And why not? All people of taste realize that Manhattan nightlife is a bad, bad business these days. On that silly night at Bungalow, I never could have guessed that Kirsten Dunst would one day chase me out of my lair. Thankfully, I don't want to live in that lair anymore, old or new. I've ceased to be that scrappy nineteen year old with a scenester boyfriend, a fount of energy and an ugly ego (read: habit for drugs). And Manhattan, up and down, has become a graveyard for cultural authenticity, a blank frontier for dizzy, wealthy transplants, a den of closed doors and limitations and malls, a Los Angeles. This did not happen of a moment; it has long been in the works (since the 80s I suppose, or 1870? . . . who can tell). But now, for the first time, it seems that there is no recourse, no fight to keep the island viable for the "Low." (It is still, however, most most viable for the "High"—the exterior of Lincoln Center alone, never mind the hundreds of brilliant performances within.)

MTV's new "reality" vehicle The City with its thin middle school lies, its pose of Uptown and Downtown as Bloods and Crips is the ultimate jumping of the hep-titude shark. Nowadays, Uptown and Downtown are simply cardinal descriptors. The meaningful divide is the East River; the ends of the spectrum are Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Brooklyn is my home. BK is less capable of the stellar, sewery "Lows" of the Manhattan that was (though Bushwick has put in its bid). Instead, we foster a sweet, romantic, "true to your school" neighborhood ethos with locavore restaurants and beer gardens and bourbon bars and curated junk shops. When combined with real houses and beaches and the actual, longstanding chops of a complex, multi-ethnic working class city-over-the-bridge, the whole picture of Brooklyn becomes a pretty fascinating one. It is the home for artists that Manhattan (for obvious economic reasons) cannot be anymore (though grubtastic, nearly-in-Brooklyn Chinatown has put in its bid). (Oh—and, we may soon be voting Williamsburg off of the non-island despite some stellar residents, restaurants, etc., because Peaches Geldoff lives there in some tacky condo.) In Brooklyn, I am at home because I see the "Low," authentic, real, and unstudied around me all of the time, and the inauthentic, studied gentrified stuff has its heart in the right place. I'm at home in Brooklyn because I'm older and healthier than I was before, and I like "home" more than the endless, rough abroadness of my old Manhattan life. Here it's cozy and a little removed and I don't (outside of this achingly long post) need to worry my little head about who has conquered any sort of scene. I am by no means a historian of all this. Those older than me would give a far wiser account of these shifts. I only know the little that I know, and I have not sought much new information.

Have I made "Low" any clearer? I hope so. Maybe I just ought to have attached some pictures of Brooklyn and Memphis, of the uncommon beauty I find here and there. I was back in Memphis last week. On Friday afternoon, Pillow and I stopped by our favorite bar, The Buccaneer, and slipped into a massive vinyl booth that we like to call our office. The Bucc' has been around since the mid-sixties, a gem of an American dive with an unchanged, demi-nautical interior. It smells rather off, and as we sat sipping our bourbon and something-like-ginger-ales, small flies droned around us. The Ole' Miss game was on a television in the opposite corner, and a group of rough-about-the-edges good ole' boys and girls of a certain generation (original regulars) had gathered to watch it. At one point, I went to the bathroom. I closed and locked the door. I sat on the toilet and read a little bit of familiar graffiti about familiar people. I glanced up at the beams on the ceiling. I began to cry, happily and just a little. Sitting on the toilet at the Buccaneer felt like "Low" and home in the most unimpeachable way. And I would never get "High" without it.

Lastly (I promise), a song that is absolutely "Low" and absolutely smart (in what is, I believe, an unintentionally genius non-video video format):