Scribblings from recent trip to New York City, in part for book-related research. & in part to confirm that what happened on November 4 actually did happen. balloon alley image by Lisa K.

Thursday, November 6
Two days after Obama’s election and there remains a palpable cloud of euphoria that glides above Manhattan streets like a giant happy soap bubble, delivering a sloppy kiss to every citizen it bumps into. The president-elect’s face on banners, T-shirts, stenciled graffiti, buttons, his name even dotted out in red light bulbs against the face of an apartment building facing the Williamsburg Bridge, each bulb occupying the window slot of a different unit (talk about unanimity).

Wall Street, and the fresh troubles it has sired, feels temporarily walled or moated off from the rest of Manhattan. Until it’s quitting time and all those glum, anxious faces take to the subway for parts uptown and suburbia.

A weird, bi-polar moment.

Friday, November 7
The image above is but one of the many signs here that Americans can, for this passing moment, attach any and all hopes or aspirations to the Obama image. What’s your wish? Personally, I’m pulling for more banjo, smoked meat and that the outdoor ice rinks stay open longer this year.

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Lisa K. and I take in the large Elizabeth Peyton show at the New Museum (the new building for which is amazing—minimal white boxes tiered haphazardly atop one another). Peyton is an American portraitist whose paintings typically feature her hipster friends, romantic historical figures or pop celebrities as her subjects. Her style, most conspicuously influenced by David Hockney, is quite fetching—sensual, borderline androgynous figures done in colourful, heavy oils, showing the deft hand of a fashion illustrator. But the uncritical nature of her practice, with its seeming adoration for fancy pop cutey boys, feels very one-note and betrays a certain shallowness that wears after a while. Too much of it is the familiar youth, celebrity and beauty stuff: Live Fast, Die Young & Leave a Beautiful Corpse Whatnot. Having said that, the show is hugely entertaining and the pictures themselves are beautiful and often intimately tiny.

Most promising, her recent paintings do show in an interest in age beyond the beautiful corpse, including one of septauganarian poet John Giorno and another of a weary-looking Matthew Barney perhaps doing his best Van Gogh impersonation (above). And a new one added to the show only yesterday: a portrait of Michelle Obama with her daughters.

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Walking past Grand Central late at night, we encounter an angry white male, youth category, bedecked in the hip-hop stylee exclaiming “Obama! Obama!” with more aggression than glee.

Saturday, November 8
Much of the day is spent gallery-hopping in Chelsea. Most notable: Julian Faulhaber’s exhibition Lowdensitypolyethylene at Hasted Hunt (image above). At first glance his hyper-real, supersaturated depictions of austere, geometric, unpeopled modern environments seem like fabrications or reconstructions—but they are actual images of recently completed spaces, yet to be fully turned over to human usage, lit only with available ambient/artificial light. There has been no post-production work on the photos. The images are abstractly gorgeous, luminous, unearthly and more than a little creepy. Like sets for a Kubrick movie imagined, but never made.

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Today, I learn belatedly that Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal has died. You will know Rosenthal best as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s Casino, in which Robert DeNiro starred as Las Vegas casino mogul Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein. Rosenthal was a low-level East Coast hoodlum before bringing his chutzpah to Vegas and the gambling scene. He eventually ran four major casinos simultaneously, hosted his own television variety show, wrote newspaper columns, and, most importantly, revolutionized the gambling industry’s business model by demonstrating just how much money could be from sports betting.

He was also one of America’s luckiest men: Casino’s final scene, in which Rothstein/Rosenthal survives a car bombing, is true to the facts. He walked away only lightly charred thanks to a metal plate installed beneath the driver’s seat for reasons that had nothing to do with his own protection, and the fact he hadn’t fully closed his door before keying the ignition.

Rosenthal’s passing seems apropos now, as we endure the long denouement of that elaborate shell game known as the Credit Economy Death Cycle. He was famous for ensuring the customers of the casinos he ran were surrounded in decadent luxury and treated to a good show—even as they lost their shirts. And he knew his maths: Sports Illustrated called him the “greatest living expert on sports handicapping.” On his own website (which you must check out, it’s so American! of a certain vintage), he unabashedly described himself as both a “Game Theorist” and a “Las Vegas gangster”… Shall I resist making a crack about how appealing his C.V. would have looked on pre-bailout Wall Street?

Sunday, November 9
Window shopping & day dreaming. In Soho we pop into the Moss design store where I encounter, for the first time, the Buildings of Disaster series by Constantin and Laurene Boym—architectural miniatures of landmarks famous for the tragic or catastrophic events that occurred therein. The Watergate Hotel, the Dakota in front of which John Lennon was assassinated, Three Mile Island, Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, Chornobyl, the Ford Theatre, the Paris underpass where Princess Diana’s speeding limo crashed…

From the Boyms’s website: “Some of these buildings may have been prized architectural landmarks, others – non-descript anonymous structures. But disaster changes everything. The images of burning or exploded buildings make a different, populist history of architecture, one based on emotional involvement rather than on scholarly appreciation. In our media-saturated time, the world disasters stand as people’s measure of history, and the sites of tragic events become involuntary tourist destinations.”

Which doesn’t sound entirely implausible or pomo-stupid. Except some of the pieces have now been re-issued in limited gold-plated editions that retail for thousands of dollars apiece. And that seems to me more purposefully tacky than subversive, a cynical rather than playful critique of event collectibles. Especially as the retailer brags of the many celebrities who possess items from the collection.

Pictured above from the gold-edition BoD collection, clockwise from top left: World Trade Center, Neverland Ranch, Watergate Hotel, OJ Simpson Car Chase, The Pentagon, Oklahoma City Federal Building, Waco, Unabomber Shack.

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I head off on a long stroll, trawling eastward along East 4th to Alphabet City. The closer you get to Avenue D, the more Puerto Rican and Dominican becomes the neighborhood. Colourful murals dedicated to deceased young people adorn several walls. There are some lovely and wild community parks and gardens, mostly tended by volunteers. It’s a relief to discover there are still some scrappy Manhattan neighborhoods such as this, as the rest of the island is reupholstered into a high-priced theme park or mall.