Shrinking Manhattan - New York, USA
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Stumble It!The cinematic island of Manhattan, magnetic dream center of wannabee troubadors, tourists, touts, and transients, is the smallest big-bedroom-community town on the planet - and the largest circulation base for the incestuous readers of New York Magazine (hack writer John M. Edwards included).
They say it’s not what you know but whom you know. Oh? Not so. It’s really “where” you know. Living in Manhattan is actually being “on location". With so many well-heeled hopefuls in every field erasing their rubber soles on the concrete stumbling blocks - high finance and high rolling, low comedy and serious acting, hack writing and abstract painting, legalalized crime and petty thievery - it’s no wonder that worlds collide. With numerous faces here, Manhattan still operates basically on the premise of a small town.
When I step outside the door from my million-dollar industrial SoHo loft (which has displaced the Village brownstone as the ultimate symbol of success in our hardscrabble hump to the top), I’m bound to run in to somebody I know, or know of. A trip to the local deli includes vaguely recognizing Val Kilmer: “Hey, are you Val Kilmer?” I ask vapidly, slapping down a Jackson for a liter of Sprite, a sack of Fritos and a pack of Orbit. Val is not laughing. He gives me a quasi-comical look of attrition that conveys, "sorry, pal". By far one of the best Batmans responds with a lugubrious. “Yawp", and juggles his bags lackadaisically while elbow-ushering his good-looking actress friend (Meg Ryan?) out the door and onto the cobblestones, perchance for a dash of dindin and bubbling crude.
Even though I’m not gay, I feel like kissing him. With so many cultured and sophisticated Manhattaners about, loudly voicing their temporary “intelligencer” opinions on their BlackBerries or space-age Spazzes, I’m not quite sure what I should talk about in public. I don’t really know what “Zeitgeist” means. I always misuse the terms “vis-à-vis” and “mise en scene". And I’m just pretending that I’ve heard of Frank Gehry and Jean-George.
At museums I’m looking less at the paintings and more at the wandering profiles of fully clothed nudes. I come up with a poetic line: “In the galleries, the women are looking so posh/wondering who in the hay is Hieronymous Bosch?” Still, cultural caché comes in an attaché. If you want to look cool at the pickup-paradise Pastis (in the so-called Meatpacking District [yuck]), you’d better pull out the right magazine from your Manhattan Portage computer bag. No one would be caught dead reading The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Time Out, or New York (the magazine everyone loves to hate, but reads on the sly, with good-looking restaurant reviewers with variant names like “Gael”.
The only literature that would cross the runway without tripping are thick fashion magazines, resembling coffee table books, euphemistically referred to under the designation of “design". There isn’t much text in them, aside from experimental blurbs in German, Italian and French, but there are a lot of airbrushed photos of elegant leggy models wandering wanly through the corridors of the science-fiction writer’s worst nightmare: urban utopias and cornucopias of plenty. Then in walks Drew Barrymore carefully disguised in a wooly mugger’s hat. I walk over and say hi, before a GQ bouncer with well-defined biceps begins orbiting around me with clenched teeth, a gold crown flashing under the fluorescents.
One day I bumbled into a discreet salon in SoHo that serves crepes and hot chocolate, and ordered an “Aztec". There, right in front of me at an adjoining table was one of my favorite actors, Gabriel Byrne. Trying to be casual about it, I pulled out my Walkman and shoved in a Beck CD. After studying him talking to his friend for a while, sort of like watching the Archangel Michael chatting amiably with Satan himself, I abruptly stood up and foisted a faux pas: “I’m a big fan of your work. I liked Gothic!” (Byrne plays Lord Byron in this diverting Ken Russell tale.) I sensed that I should have mentioned The Usual Suspects or Miller’s Crossing instead.
I realized that mentioning a real actor’s earlier film efforts is tantamount to pigeonholing Jack Nicholson about his very dire debut (Crybaby Killer). Anyway, he treated me with kid gloves, but as he left, with evident hilarity, he couldn’t resist cracking, “Edwards is fooked"! Similarly one night at the Bryant Park Hotel, I tried hitting up a gorgeous blonde, with a bag emblazoned with the logo of a famous investment firm, carefully pointing out that we might have the same financial advisors. What I didn’t know was that this pants-popping young lovely had just played a concert across the street in the park (the closest thing to the Tuilleries in culturally inferior Tinsel Town East), and was just a tad too famous for me to even talk to. Boy did I feel stupid when I found out later that she was - you guessed it - Britney Spears.
Likewise, I made the mistake of tabloiding Tim Roth and Sean Penn on separate occasions when they were just out with their entourages, obviously not wanting to be recognized in public, dressing as it were “incognito", wolves in sheep’s clothing. They reacted like I was an escapee from a mental hospital, which, of course, everyone is in the end. “I’m sorry, but we’re having a private conversation", Sean Penn said, all smiles - diplomatic enough.
Cheeks flushed with embarrassment, I lingered for a few seconds too long before finding my beer at the bar. I took a prurient departure sip. Ouch, ashtray! (How could that be when we were in a No Smoking bar described by Zagat’s as being a haunt of the “Beautiful People”).
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