hotel de love

I signed off for my beach week, but the house has Wi-Fi and I can't be quiet for (over)long spells.

Here (on The North Fork with my family) everyday is like dreaded Sunday, where the Times is passed around section by section and no one will listen to me (or--that's inaccurate--they break from listening to me).

Wednesday's has a "Dining" section (but you knew that), which is nice I guess but...

I've addressed my NY Times problems here before, griped its booming cultural deafness and that. It's like how I started to try to talk to everyone (out here) about my problems with The (present day) South Fork (full of Jill Zarin and Chase Crawford), but realized they'd have to get on my OH MY G_D MANHATTAN (AND PORTIONS OF BROOKLYN WHERE I DON'T LIVE) IS SUCH GARBAGE NOW bandwagon in order to get on my OH MY G_D THE HAMPTONS IS A TRASH BIN bandwagon. It's like that because Times fluff reportage and 'Hamptons Living' are equally certain that New York is especially sofizzticated in exclusion of everybody else, a graceless, elbowing money(and publicity)-brained (Neo-Puritanical?) sofizztication (that is obviously a BATHROOM HAM PARTY [in Pillow parlance]). And my family is a New York one (who reads The Times daily, mostly for the serious bits [non-'Styles'-styled sections]), and I feel guilty for looking askance at whole regions and populations of the place where I was born and now live (but did not grow up...). It can't be helped.

The thing is

on the front of "Dining" there's an article about beer gardens (again), which is mostly about the beer garden at The Standard Hotel (in two lifelike, color reproductions) and then a smattering of BK and L.E.S. visions/versions that run on twee empty—citizen's taste for demi-authenticities, materials run by/through "like-minded folk" (for us by us/slimy, misplaced snobbery for blocks and blocks). I've known about the set-up at The Standard for a cold minute, found it irritating from a remove; but someway, it turned my stomach extra this week.

A few years back (two-ish), when "when will the high line open?!" buzz was peaking, I was totally enchanted by The (near-complete) Standard, which I assumed was a residence. It's damn good-looking in an East German typa' way (and because of that Block-ness and its stilts, made all the more lovely by proximity to the Highway—imagine!). I was feeling Soviet-looks (always have). And I love new buildings in New York; I'm ever-ready to get excited about them (and poo-poo those gnarly, staid architecture critics). However, finding the building was the next in Andre Balasz's line of products (one [Chateau] appropriated, the rest [Mercer, Sunset, Standards] invented) got me icy.

I de-love hotels. Of course I do. I de-hate most (all?) of a generation (90s to now?) of New York hotels, the Boutiques, intended as hipper-than. Hipper-than the old hotels, the great old hotels. In these last decades, in Manhattan, the Boutiques have served to prove (to me, to me) just how combustible the pairing of hipness and luxury is. Time-based industries, like fay-shun, like music, like (um...?) art, can bear, can benefit from, this combustion, can at least re-group, re-coup (and eventually benefit). A hotel, a whole, heavy, slow, solid building, a still-point, an Institution, should be treated as such, should not be conceived on/for a 5-year plan (and a 5-year plan alone).

Luxury is a bulwark. It does shift; Hipness, politics, the Industrial Revolution, the concept of "concepts" have all made our luxuries different from those enjoyed by...17th century Dutch merchants of our same neighborhood. But much (most) is the same between us and them, then and now. Luxury is a matter of fineness (whether hand-worked or brain-worked) and rarity, splendor, comfort, safety and self-aggrandizement (hope for La Futura) in things (furs, gems, impeccable service). How wonderful.

Hipness must move. It is defined by its own rapid pace. It is best "contained" by people; it utterly wrecks places, any standing thing that attempts to capture and hold it. Hipness can be recorded, but those records are subject to phases of unHipness, the pronouncements of the moving, breathing (thankless) Hip.

Hipness cannot build an Institution (to do so is ultimately unHip). People who are Hip, who strive to be Hip, must either rove forever, or, settle down and give up Hipness (Hipness may [likely will] once again return to their doorstep, but then it will, must leave for elsewhere). In settling down, one establishes an earnest set of habits, a personal taste—not Hip taste, the taste that is "to be feared and revered," but personal taste, take it or leave it.

In conceiving a hotel, a house, a post-Youth uniform (an Institution), one honestly (not simply, but honestly) puts forth what one finds beautiful, smart, exciting, appealing, comfortable, memorable, special, good—what one LOVES for life, for afterlife (a legacy of LOVE, permanent affirmations drawn up from History, from Holy places).

****

Ian Schrager is the first stand-out hotelier-developer of "The Boutiques Period" in New York (the boss).

(Of course,) Before hotels, he partnered with Steve Rubell to open Studio 54 in 1977.

Studio was a "perfect nightclub," because it was a progenitor of mucho with a music to match, but mostly because:

it (or its Schrager and Rubell attributed first-era) died at the age of four.

Then (we'll skip Palladium), hotels, The Morgans....everything after—

a style of decorating (luxury) that was heavy, thick, lined...but lacking much detail, stuff

"Sexy" quips like unfrosted glass showers

Fusion foods

Nightclubs everywhere, Nightclubs (and their publicists) that inevitably ran aground before five years were out

When Shrager up and left The Morgans Group in 2005 (whatta lynch-pin year) to start The Ian Shrager Company (and ultimately team with Marriot to brand a Shrager hotel chain), he set upon refurbishing (gutting) The Gramercy Park Hotel with Julian Schnabel as skipper. Oh boy.

This was The Boutique colonizing exactly the sort of great, old (fuddy-duddy) hotel it was borned in opposition to.

I stayed at The Gramercy for a weekend with friends in high school. It was shabby round about. The two lobby bars, one Deco, one 'teens Baroque, were incredible. Handsome, preserved old spaces that weren't treated with the kiddest gloves; they were there to be wandered into, to spend an afternoon anonymous, happy, making one's own way in the funny Old/New...(humid, but I mean it). The guests were mostly budget-conscious Euros. The rooms were musty and dusty pink. Breakfast was served in a sunny, stained "conference room." You could obtain one of several keys to the Park on big fobs from the front desk, which took the traditional dark wood mailboxes and key-compartments as its backdrop. I recall thinking the joint could use a refurbishment, a restoration (but not a bulldozing and [ooof] rebranding).

Two years later I did a friend a favor by showing up to an "event" he was "promoting" at the Sky Bar up top of it. The place was downright seedy. The bar only served screwdrivers. I (mostly my mens) got into an altercation with a young lawyer who had the wrong idea about me. We had to take the service elevator up and down (the other was broke), some 25 sardines. It was fun.

Then it was shuttered.

Then, reopened.

And nothing was recognizable. I had guessed at it in the shuttering phase, but come to see it, I was shocked (and heart-sick) about those lobby bars. They were dunz. They were smoke. There had been no auction, and no attempt to preserve those wallpapers (the best parts). The New Gramercy Park Hotel (and its...slick?...neighboring residences) was like any number of places anywhere else. And that would have been fine (I guess) if it hadn't necessitated the clumsy snuffing of a singular place, a real place (where many far more important scenes than the silly ones I've spun were set)—an Institution.

I've been a little kind in posing just this Hipness+Luxury=Potentially Dangerous Combustion idea. Because, about these hotels (and the stuff of Times fluff), there is nothing I (I) deem Hip. The places are absorbed in efforts toward Hipness, sorting the structures (anarchies) of Hipness. And their effort (try-hard-ing), in-the-money-ness, their Hollywooder pandering make them utterly square (loserly) from inception.

Regardless, as written, the focus on Hip, holding and containing it, makes all goals short-term. There is no Hip long-term. There is only realness (realness!) long-term, an Institution, a still point (a Home!).

****

I had a blissed out afternoon in Midtown with PMC last spring. We started by playing hooky for lunch at The Four Seasons (restaurant, not hotel), an Institution among Institutions (so handsome! and a Dover sole). We (not as an end [the end was cops in Central Park] but as a middle) also had drinks at The Beekman Tower Hotel, on the roof with the U.N. and the Pepsi sign and that (second best to the Verrazano Narrows) 59th St. Bridge. Perhaps, we were flashing Hip (...we were). But none of the places we paused were, which is part of why we were....if Hip must needs move, the Hippest is the Hip that can go secret, soft, lite. The Hip that is a sylph, that is not being mined and drawn out/on and fawned-over by its hosts...

****

Someone told me about how in the 70s and 80s, during The Armory weekend, a few artists (and their representatives) would set up sexy, gypsy booths at a slight distance from the Big Tent, in rooms at The Gramercy Park Hotel, paintings on beds, doors ajar. Just so.

They were visiting, passing Hip, checking in and out.

You don't have to say you're sorry.

We love Rex Ryan and his storied 7,000 calories a day; and why does anybody have to apologize for acting up at a mixed martial arts event in Florida?

Trial Time

So this is as pointless a venture as last week's lampooning of New York Magazine's Snooki-hating fashion blogger--

Today's New York Times travel section includes a feature (and mostly painful slideshow) on 'hip Memphis,' and I feel the need to address some probs-lems/the naff whole.

Times' staffer, Melena Ryzik, author of a Times' blog called--OH MY G-D--The Carpetbagger (it's about red carpets and people but still), flew down to Memphis to perform/report her awkward, condescending cultural carpetbagging. Yuck.

I am pleased that our friend Dwayne Butcher's blog is linked. And it's a damn trip to read about that warty troll who glares from behind her pitchers of PBR at The Lamplighter (which we call by its full name, btw) in any newspaper, let alone the "of-record" one (and, just to clarify my name-calling, she's only a troll to girls, actually smiles at boys, which might explain the pins at Goner, though really, who are we to guess at the motives of Goner employees [c'est impossible]).

The article begins with Elvis, or a stated attempt to avoid him (which is probably why she never mentions that Elvis lost his virginity at Ernestine & Hazel's). The title of the piece starts: "Roll Over Elvis." This is nuts. And telling. Ryzik leads with the assertion that she is "cool" (in the most cloying, deaf Gen-Xer-y way) and down-with-locals because she wants to look beyond Elvis, or ignore him altogether. It's true that Elvis is "the lead" for most tourists to the Bluffs, the reaction most folks have to my volunteered hometown--

"Where are you from?"
"Memphis, Tennessee."
"Oh....Elvis!"

--For good reason. Elvis is the tops. She writes,

IT’S hard to shake Elvis in Memphis. His pompadoured, crooning visage peers out from all corners, from jukeboxes to diner counters. But the King was nowhere to be found at Electrocity, a semi-legal warehouse party that was recently held in an unheated garage in the city’s energetic Midtown neighborhood.

Jesus. I grew up in Midtown, a large swathe of the city that contains multiple neighborhoods, some quite sleepy. (And I can't touch that rave party. Y'all know how ridiculous its inclusion is. And Nocturnal [joke/hell]?! And Mollie Fontaine [yuppie downtown lifestylze mess]?! And Odessa [iffy amoeba of an art space that throws parties...I can't].)

Anyway, in Memphis, I saw Elvis everywhere. When I drove to and from the airport. When I, as stated, had a beer at Ernestine's second floor; I felt him most of all in one of their particularly creepy, cokey bathrooms (claw-footed tub rusting in the corner). When I went to school each morning in Overton Park. When I headed downtown past Baptist Memorial (now, regretfully, demolished). This list will get dull fast....the thing is, he permeates wonderfully, not through kitsch so much as ghostly imprint.
I've been to Graceland some 12 or 13 times, and cried too, in the Beautiful Meditation Garden or in front of Gladys' lavender poodle-motifed bedroom, cried for a folk hero whose story is so much about America (Egg got it).

And a lot of what Ryzik talks about, dives and juke joints, existed before Elvis, alongside Elvis. He might beef with a contemporary ambivalence toward sharp-dressing, but that's about it. He knew all about Memphis' soul and strangeness, its scrappy accessibility. Other stuff, The Cove and the Hi-Tone and Deli, new or newish spots, contain very little to provoke. They serve fried food and booze and bands play. What's this article about again?

The Bucc (opened a decade+ before Elvis passed), I've mentioned here before. It's my most favorite bar in the world, mine and Pillow's Friday afternoon office. It is incredibly loose and warm, uniquely so. And gross and rough too. What Melena Ryzik and her paper did not comprehend, beyond the peeling paint and torn up vinyl booths, is what a visiting friend once summed up with a buzzed, thrilling declaration, "There's no rules here!" It's a thing I've felt in New York as well, though NY's version is about a chilled carelessness, the BIG and LOST of the place. In Memphis, unbounded sensations spring from a dangerous slowness, a haze, a shared state of drunkeness and decrepitude and empty lots, plenty violence happening "someplace else" (preoccupying our law enforcement), death impending (no joke).

Of course, this is all selective, there are manicured blocks and nice schools, churches and shops too.

It's just that Memphis is my home of homes, home of hearts, and it is very beautiful and very difficult. I take it seriously, and nothing sounds as grave or complicated as it ought to in a foolish Times puff piece. I wish they wouldn't bother blundering all over stuff.

Tekiaaahhhh

I got bored and sad talking about Fashion Week. Even before I could write-up Calvin Klein and Oscar and those beautiful, light and peachy warm-weather furs at Dennis Basso and Queen of Los 90's, Isaac Mizrahi's, decade-delayed return to the Tents.

It wasn't the clothes. I really love to think and write about clothes. It's how the Fay-shun business, a fat, airy planet (and it's moons and its satellites), is spangly and aggressive and (mostly) dumb. It's bi-annual (and sometimes tri-annual) stomping and performing rites are meant, I suppose, to sell and be...pleasurable. But--despite what I said at the outset-- the consumerist "violence" fell/felt flat this year. I'm not some Recession Puritan, who eschews all gross displays of wealth in these hard times. It's just, the New York factions looked to be pretending there wasn't a Recession on at all. Instead they might have, with a bit of bravado, used the dingy economic circ's to be subversive with their brand of excess...also, it's just quite apparent that NYC lags behind Paris and Milan (and Belgium). At the end of the last century, Europe was dogged by tradition, a certain narrowness, while, in attractive opposition, America was an open expanse, ungoverned, candid, audacious. These days, the tables have turned MAJORLY. We are the stiff-necked and delusional population, the ones with some great blockage.

However, I have been feeling pretty dedicated to America lately. And so have my friends. I'm pleased to look American ("unsophisticated" though it may be...?). And travel American. I'm pleased to think about American history, both proud and dismal. I can no longer pretend an America. All I can see is the actual. Though this does not leave off sentiment...

I'm getting particularly sentimental about hometowns (Memphis and the NYC) and "representation." And though I've tried to be sour about his new effort (ahem), I seem to be liking Jay-Z's single, "Empire State of Mind." It's merit is entirely due to Alicia Keys's solid, rallying cry hook--

New York!!!! Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, There's nothing you can’t do, Now you're in New York!!! These streets will make you feel brand new, the lights will inspire you, Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York!

So, it's corny for sure. And thank G-d. This is a great moment for corny. And if anyone can get away with singing baldly about things like "inspiration" and "dreams" (with exclamation marks) it's Alicia Keys, a not always stylish, but certainly earnest artist. The refrain at once uplifts, as intended, and deflates with it's exuberance, a quality made real in the song, but not necessarily abundant in this listener, in many of us, at the close of a trying, oft creepy summer. I like this push and pull. I like the conflicting emotions it draws out.

Jay's voice is one I've been feeling less and less comfortable with. I love his story and his wife, their upper upper echelon. But, over time, I've been able to read what a businessman he is, ever-cool, relatively soulless. I've said for a while (and so have others) that Jay-Z's first huge summer-jam pop single, "Hard Knock Life," was aimed straight at me and peers, bourgeois, preteen girls (as of 1998), with its sample from the musical Annie. In this new single, Jay speaks to us, now aged (alongside his subsequent Blueprints and Black Album) directly, with a verse about post-collegiate party girls errantly "addicted to the high life" (the very 'high life' he and like-others sold us?). As Alicia "uplifts," Jay declares "8 million stories out there in the Naked City/It's a pity half of y’all won’t make it." The crosspurposes persist. And Alicia's voice begins to sound desperate, as if she's trying to wail Gospel with no air left in her lungs. Our town's greatest poet (I think I'm allowed to say that) wrote, "I contradict myself. So, I contradict myself." This (teehee) high/low, up/down, brave/despondent, open/limited stuff is pretty quintessentially New York (American...human). The song may achieve far more than it set out to...

Among D.J. A.M.'s last communications before his August suicide was (sadly enough) a Twitter post that went something like "New York City ain't all it's cracked up to be." And he was right. This town reneges on promises. It is the Omni-American capital, the seat of our Big Commercial Empire, Empire of Capitalist teasing, illusions, smoke, mirrors. New York is extraordinary, handsome, tough, varied, rich, "naked," FAST. The dashing of hope, met handily by its constant renewal, marks the New York Experience. It is never what "it's cracked up to be," because the place has already shifted as a summation of it is made. These revolutions can dazzle, and they can also terrify, make one miserable. New York is one thing to a visitor (a glittering, sleepless mecca), and another to a citizen (your house, your block, your long walk to and from the grocery store). It is our home. For us, it must needs be average or below-average, at least some of the time. The mythology of the place, the thrill of the tourist, the interloper, can either boost our prodigious egos or make us smart with bitterness. It depends on one's luck, on the weather.

Here is "Empire State of Mind" and the song that accompanies it on my current favorite playlist, bang--

Verses

"Ten Cents A Dance"
Lorenz Hart
1930

I work at the Palace Ballroom,
but, gee that Palace is cheap;
when I get back to my chilly hall room
I'm much to tired to sleep.
I'm one of those lady teachers,
a beautiful hostess, you know,
the kind the Palace features
for only a dime a throw.

Ten cents a dance
that's what they pay me,
gosh, how they weigh me down!
Ten cents a dance
pansies and rough guys
tough guys who tear my gown!
Seven to midnight I hear drums.
Loudly the saxophone blows.
Trumpets are tearing my eardrums.
Customers crush my toes.
Sometimes I think
I've found my hero,
but it's a queer romance.
All that you need is a ticket
Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance.

Fighters and sailors and bowlegged tailors
can pay for their ticket and rent me!
Butchers and barbers and rats from the harbors
are sweethearts my good luck has sent me.
Though I've a chorus of elderly beaux,
stockings are porous with holes in the toes.
I'm here till closing time.
Dance and be merry, it's only a dime.

Sometimes I think
I've found my hero,
but it's a queer romance.
All that you need is a ticket
Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance.