Swans of the Concrete Jungle
Money’s dear this year, which sounds like a Dorothy Parker stanza but is one of the myriad reasons I’m lucky to live in NYC—a miraculous place to live on the cheap if you’re resourceful. Yesterday with ten bucks in my pocket I ferried ($2.50) to the Metropolitan Museum—both Mets!—for one buckarino (1$) and entered an alternate dimension mostly pink and 100 percent fabulous: Camp:Notes on Fashion at 5th Avenue and Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Phenomenal Nature at the 
Breur; then the Chris Ofili show at David Swirner (free) and the nutty gallery that is Madison Ave designer window displays and designer rich-lady faces (free, at least for me).
Altogether it was a rarified world of wedding cake townhouses and mermaids with big cocks and tin-foil goddesses and licentious, lichen-ous trees. I even had enough left over for a pretzel with loads of mustard ($2) in Central Park, so lushly green that Edith Wharton would’ve found the terrain familiar. I felt what I always feel when prowling a NYC jungle not my own: joyfully restored, gratefully inspired.
Taxi Driven at 3 Am
I went to bed so early last night that I was up at 3am watching Taxi Driver, quel meta. One of my first memories is of passing through that ratchet Times Square with my parents; the littlest me fell for its underbelly the way you get hung up on a bad smell. Scorcese captures its neon reds and blues, blurred and bolting–its cheap calories and cheaper sex–with Cadillac cars and a Cadillac score. And then there’s De Niro’s ex-marine outsider wandering and wondering, blood-shot with an ignoramus’s bravado. Which is to say: terror, especially when it comes to his unamused muse Cybill Shepherd and her
very fine, DVF-clad ass.
So loosely adapted from Dostovesky’s Notes from the Underground, this Scorcese-Schrader collab doesn’t endorse the basest attitudes about race, women, sexuality. Rather, it inventories them as evidence of Our General Decline. Herein lies a portrait of a dangerously white male that could be stripped from today’s headlines except the macro-aggression isn’t just garish. It’s gorgeous.
Found and Feral
Rosebud (photo: Jonas Driscoll)
My mother sewed the rosebuds on that leotard; I loved it so much. But what I notice most–and maybe the real reason for this oddbot magic—is how otherwise-unadorned I seem. Even at that age, I was always “on” in the presence of other people-—big grin, big lipstick, big shtick. Yet there I am, no makeup, no “camera-ready” face, just quietly submitting to an older girl’s ministrations. Even my hair is its natural color. In the eye of an eclipse season that’s blowing up the facades in our relationships, this picture makes me weepy. I’ve always been a feral sort of girl, but there I am, lapping up the mommy love. We’re never too old for mommy love.