This is a complex weekend. Passover for some, Easter for others. Good Friday was a holiday and yet plenty are working and many are taking Monday off. Accountants are working straight through. For an expatriate under-employed lapsed Catholic, however, this weekend is not much different than all others. Nothing applies, as Joan Didion would say.

Noon spin class on Friday was filled with the usual array of bored-looking ectomorphs and chiseled men prepping for summer at Fire Island. The instructor surprised us with a special Good Friday edition of Studio Cycling™ (all the classes here are trademarked)—the Jesus Christ Super Spin. Yeah! I never imagined a dance version of Mary Magdalene’s “I Don’t Know How to Love Him”, but it makes so much sense. Okay, so we didn’t make it to the obligatory three hour mass this afternoon, but the body is a temple, no?

Formerly known as “the gym”, the membership-only unemployment drop-in centre is full all day, every day. This should come as little surprise, with 663,000 more jobs lost last month here in the US and unemployment spiking at 8.5 per cent—the highest level since 1983. Frankly, I think it’s great to see so many people revving up their dopamine levels and getting buff while they linger in the bread lines.

For others, a more classic tool of escapism and procrastination prevails. Online video gaming is up 27 per cent versus a year ago, with visitors spending an average 42 per cent more time on the sites. A new game called “Layoff” gives players the chance to rightsize their own workforce, hitting the bank bailout option to start over.

Nevertheless, there is a certain coolness in numbers. At a park in the Lower East side, the Unemployed Olympics provided a recent afternoon of frivolity. The purpose was “just to get unemployed people psyched that they’re unemployed.” As one participant put it: “all the cool people in New York are unemployed right now.”

These days are a blessing and a curse. More time to go to the gym, spend with your kids, read books. No income to pay the membership fees, send those kids to private school or enroll in that creative writing symposium at, ahem, Columbia in June, for example. Aye, there’s the rub. Only the lucky few ever have both time and money simultaneously.

Meanwhile chocolate bunnies are on the market, which is reason enough to get psyched… happy Easter, happy Passover and a big Obama-style shout out to the atheists this weekend.

More 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. (Pics from Lisa K.)

November 10, 2008
Paying sporadic attention to the news one item stands out: Gun and ammo sales are booming surging (insert your own punning headline here). It would appear some folks are afraid that the new socialist president is intent on stripping the citizenry of their armaments, so they’re stock-piling. A store in Houston reported that sales on the Saturday preceding election day were seven times higher than for a typically healthy one.

We hit a few more galleries and the trip’s art highlight ends up being the exhibition DOWN by Kehinde Wiley at Deitch Projects. Seven monumentally-scaled paintings that riff on historical images of fallen religious and warrior icons by situating urban black men in heroic poses—sacrificial, ecstatic, sanctified while often tricked out in bling and hip hop gear. The colours vibrate and the scenes are startling for being both so modern graphic and yet classical; epochal mashups enhanced by the floating latticework of textile patterning (patterns based on the kind of designs once found on African-produced textiles for the European market). They’re subversive but seem to have a sense of humour about themselves. And their scale is overwhelming; the largest painting is 24 feet across.

We also check out shows by Andreas Gursky, Phillipe Parreno, Zak Smith and Bill Jacobson.

Which has me wondering: how goeth the art market? Not well I discover by perusing the previous day’s New York Times.

“Works by a wide range of artists failed to sell at a Christie’s auction in New York [on November 5], and items that did go fetched disappointing prices… The contagion has infected the art world. Collections from the estates of two New York philanthropists were expected to generate at least $104 million in sales; they brought in $47 million.”

Tuesday, November 11
President George Bush is in town for Veteran’s Day.

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It’s estimated that New York has already lost 45,000 finance-related jobs. Those terminated can console themselves at one of the now hot & happening Pink Slip Parties, which function as both networking events and drunken gripe-fests. Beer comes cheap at only $2 for a Bud. Former hedge-fund manager Mike Grimm said farewell to a $500,000 annual salary only a couple weeks ago. Mike tells the New York Post: “No one is an investor anymore. Everyone’s a speculator.”

Wednesday, November 12
Several interviews today, but the one most pertinent to current events is with William Easterly, an economist at New York University who specializes in development and foreign aid. In his book The White Man’s Burden he gamely takes on the many failings of not only traditional development models and big-letter aid agencies, but also the overly ambitious and technology-centred solutions proposed by Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Development Goals. He’s not saying the Goals are themselves are unworthy, only that the methods we keep employing to get there don’t work. Easterly pushes for a more modest, flexible, bottom-up, trial-and-error approach that considers what works in one political, cultural and economic context may not necessarily work in another.

But Easterly doesn’t restrict his criticism to well-meaning NGOs and international development agencies. He’s pointing out all the ways in which our interventions have gone awry in the developing world, which includes the sorts of policies forced upon countries by the IMF and World Bank, through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and the like. Which brings us to the current moment—the IMF had been struggling to overcome its bad reputation and make itself relevant again when the financial crisis landed its lap. Now it’s suddenly an active lender again, to Iceland, Pakistan, Hungary, Ukraine, and others. I asked Easterly what he thought about the return of the IMF.

“I’m afraid they’re going to go back to the old models—the course of conditionalities. The anti-globalization types who talk about neo-liberal economic policies as such a bad thing, I sympathize with them a lot but disagree at the same time. On one hand I believe that a lot of neo-liberal economics is common sense, time-tested stuff that works in the long-run to promote prosperity… But it’s not some kind of ideological dogma that you rigidly apply, and it’s certainly not something to be coercively imposed by outsiders. Because the moment something goes wrong, and things always go wrong along the way, you get a wave of xenophobic populists come to power who say it’s all the fault of evil foreigners and their ideas. You’ve just set back the cause of trying to find sensible ideas for economic management. Instead you get this pendulum of extremes.”

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Afterward, I make the move from hotel to home, relocating myself and travelling things to a friend’s place on the Upper West Side. But there is bad news: Her husband was laid off today from the company where he had worked for ten years. The economy in general, and slumping sales in particular, were cited as the reasons why. Over dinner he’s distracted and not very hungry; he keeps migrating to his laptop as he’s sent out some messages to friends and family, and, I suppose, is seeking some comfort or counsel in their replies. As he’s a foreign national, there is also the matter of his soon-to-be cancelled work visa. And they have a one-year-old baby.

Thursday, November 13
George Bush is still in New York. As if to say: you won’t be rid of me so easily! He’s making a speech to a forum hosted by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which I’m watching simulcast on a local television station. It takes a vigorous bout of arm pinching for me to again re-affirm the utter meltdown of the past couple months. And there’s Bush delivering his dispatch from bizarro world: on the one hand he’s justifying his administration’s de facto nationalization of many major U.S. banks while advising against any new substantive measures to regulate global financial markets.

He insists that the crisis “was not a failure of the free market system,” but, presumably, some greedy, loose nuts operating inside of it. Which sounds something like the argument that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” while neglecting to mention the regulatory conditions and business culture that enabled/encouraged the reckless behaviour.

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.