BEING A TOURIST, HATING SARAH PALIN. PLUS: THE BRIGHT SIDE.
Your Senior Editor spent New York Fashion Week floating around in a blissful bubble that had very little to do with couture. All right, I confess: absolutely nothing whatsoever, in any way, shape, or form, to do with it. What started as modest disinterest grew into an unofficial boycott—I spit on Bryant Park!—that perhaps started last week, when rumors of the hotter-than-hot-shit Interview mag party began (very belatedly) wafting my way. Like 94.5% of media-connected New York, I tried to weasel my way onto the RSVP list about five hours before the doors opened. No dice. I was bruised, then subsumed by a fit of self-directed rage. Wasn’t the whole point of parties like this one—over-stuffed, basted in free top-shelf vodka, packed with people who carried their boredom like particularly cumbersome, weighty Lous Vuitton suitcases—to be let in the doors, only so that you could, after twenty minutes of meandering and mingling and free-drink chugging, declare the place “totally dead anyway” (still quoting Swingers after all these years, and feeling somewhat of a douche bag for doing so)?
Which lead me to consider, for the thirtieth time this month, the much flapped about New York magazine story about people leaving our fair metropolis for Buffalo and other supposed dead-end shitholes. Take a peek; chew it over.
Your Senior Editor experienced Fashion Week from a distance—and by that I mean, in the case of This Evening, from the top deck of a Grey Line tourist bus cruising up 6th Avenue. Let me explain: it relates to Sarah Palin, smiling here in my Totally True Documentary Film, and also to some very deep familial shit. All will make sense: promise.
I was riding a Grey Line tourist bus because my parents were in town. My parents were in town because, this week, we have some German visitors. We have some German visitors this week because one of them, four years ago, was a perfect bone marrow match for my father, who had leukemia at the time. Thanks to modern science, technological process, luck, and the general kindness of total strangers, my father is still alive and kicking, now powered by the transplanted immune system of a perfectly amazing 30-something woman who lives on the outskirts of Leipzig. Hence: there we are, happy family and guests, playing Manhattan tourists (minus fanny packs) and floating past the tents in Bryant Park.
What does this have to do with Sarah Palin? Well, let’s see. Our Republican VP candidate, aside from being a moosehunting, Bridge to Nowhere-supporting, neo-con cheerleader, is also opposed to stem cell research. (Things she’s not opposed to: teaching creationism in schools, because we should never "be afraid of information," right?) Now, I won’t begin to understand the bulk of the hard science that goes into blood cancers and stem cells—it’s beyond my pay grade, to paraphrase Sir Obama. But what I do know is that it’s people like Sarah Palin who are, in heartless increments, making the world a more terrible place, gleefully lacquering it with a third and fourth coat of ignorance, and struggling to undo scientific progress in the name of religious fundamentalism and we-thought-the-90s-were-over culture wars. (All of which, in any case, is just a shell game designed to get the heartland to vote for top-1%-of-the-nation tax cuts. Don’t you love how this works?) So: a big, smiling middle finger to Sarah Palin, John McCain, and the entire Republican Party. May a particularly heartless blood cancer strike your body politic; may they let you know, while you’re wheezing like a spastic bellows, that you legislated against the cure. Merry Christmas!
Oh, and speaking of those tents in Bryant Park: who approved the dastardly “politics and fashion” campaign that’s plastered all over the entrance? Are we that debased that we can look at signs saying “ELECT STYLE” and “HOPE. CHANGE. SHOES.” and not want to barf all over ourselves?
To end on a cheery note, though. A few things that don’t make me want to chuck: the upcoming Viking Moses record. Burn After Reading, especially Brad Pitt as a fantastically dorky gym rat. The nine-zillion page, forthcoming Robert Bolano novel (2666) that I am planning on attacking as if it were a wild bison and I were, you know, a bison-eating feral dog. The almost-here New York Film Festival, which will include Steven Soderbergh’s excellent, 4+ hour Che film, among many others.
It’s a beautiful world: Kittens! Rainbows! Etceteras! No amount of lipstick-wearing pigs or vapid fashion parties can get us down. Right? Right?
