New york

Thursday

Taki

High life | 29 October 2015

To Cleveland, Ohio, where middle America’s middle class begins its great Midwest sprawl. I’ve always wanted to visit Cleveland because the so-called sophisticates poke fun at it. And the place did not disappoint. Beautiful municipal buildings of fascist Roman style line the shores of Lake Erie — public libraries, city halls, opera house, large public spaces, you get my drift. The people are friendly, unlike the aggressive slobs that pass for Noo Yawkers nowadays. The purpose of the visit was to moderate a debate, visit Chronicles magazine staff and rub elbows with Chronicles readers, who showed up in force. Among the numerous speakers was the great Pat Buchanan, three-time presidential

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 29 October 2015

The Metropolitan Club in Washington is so close to the White House that President Obama chose to walk there for lunch on Tuesday through Lafayette Park while his motorcade followed behind. The lunch was described in the media as ‘secret’, and American reporters were frustrated by the refusal of the White House and the club’s staff to divulge anything whatsoever about it. But nothing the President does is really secret, and his visit was certainly not secret to me, since I was staying in the club at the time under a reciprocal arrangement between the Metropolitan and the Garrick in London, of which I’m a member. As I had been

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

To tip or not to tip

As I grow older, I find myself increasingly reluctant to travel, which is why it’s been a few years now since I last visited New York. I like New York, but there are few nastier experiences than going there. The usual horrors associated with modern air travel are bad enough, but the passengers on transatlantic flights tend to be especially uncongenial — harassed mothers with screaming babies, tattooed, pot-bellied men bursting out of their jeans. By the time I reached the check-in desk at Gatwick Airport I had become so alarmed at the thought that I might be put next to one of the scarily obese women who’d been in

Thursday

Diana Hendry

Is City on Fire just a box set masquerading as a novel?

Ninety pages into the juggernaut that is City on Fire, I begin to think that this is really a box set masquerading as a novel. As such it will be great. A New York setting, a cast that’s a Noah’s Ark migrant mix (from Afro to Vietnamese), a gripping crime investigation and a historical and dramatic time-frame running from the New Year’s celebrations for the American bicentennial in 1976 to the nightmare of the 1977 New York blackout. A box set is a distinct possibility. Hallberg has already sold the film rights. The plot’s got everything: poverty versuswealth, power and corruption, racial tension, drugs, punk anarchy, sex and, above all,

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

I’ve never thought much of John Lennon’s music – until now

It’s probably blasphemous to admit that I’ve never thought very much of John Lennon’s music. Common sense tells me it must be good but it’s never made much of an impact on me no matter how hard I’ve tried to appreciate it. If I like a Beatles song, I usually discover it’s by George. But the discovery from a radio trailer (reluctantly, I’ll have to admit they do sometimes work) that Lennon would have been 75 this week was shocking enough (how could he ever be that old?) to make me tune in on Thursday night to John Lennon’s Last Day. Stephen Kennedy’s docudrama for Radio 2 (produced by James

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Cruising

By the end of my ten-day Atlantic crossing to New York, a new wellbeing seemed to radiate from me. Lulled by the motion and murmurings of the rocking sea, I slept like a baby. I was never bored. Queen Mary 2, the Cunard Line’s flagship, has everything from a ballroom, planetarium and library to an art-deco Titanic-style dining hall. Passengers do not want for anything: there’s even a mortuary. The last time I shipped out to New York from Southampton was in 1961, when I was a baby. We stayed in New York for more than a year while my father worked for a Wall Street investment bank. During our

Thursday

Digby Warde-Aldam

If only they were a bit less cool: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons at the Guggenheim Bilbao

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time Guggenheim Bilbao, until 1 November Jeff Koons: Retrospective Guggenheim Bilbao, until 27 September Manhattan in the late 1970s early 1980s was, by all accounts, a pretty scary place. It was caked in graffiti, lawless, and in certain areas, almost emptied by the so-called ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. It was, in other words, a perfect stomping ground for artists and musicians. This is the romantic notion, anyway. It’s what someone will tell you when trying to justify Jean-Michel Basquiat’s posthumous superstar status and its accompanying price tag. His work is supposed to evoke not just the hip-hop heavy whirl of pre-Aids New York, but if

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Could a row with Uber be taxi for a London mayoral candidate?

One of the striking things about the contest in Labour for the mayoral candidacy is how many of the candidates are keen to admonish private taxi firm Uber. Sadiq Khan has described it as a ‘problem’ and said he is ‘on the side of the back cab driver’, Tessa Jowell is ‘enormously concerned’ and doesn’t have an Uber account, while David Lammy wants to ‘protect the institution that is the black cab’ and wishes there had been a confrontation between the Mayor and Uber as there had been in Paris. But perhaps these candidates should take heed of what has happened to another mayor who confronted Uber. Bill De Blasio

Thursday

Stephen Smith

I reshot Andy Warhol

It’s one thing to make the most boring film in cinema history — at least you can kid yourself at the outset that it might turn out differently. It’s quite another to lovingly recreate the same film half a century later, shot by eye-bleeding shot, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’m proud to say. I say shot by shot, but since Andy Warhol’s Empire consists of a single locked-off shot of the Empire State Building running to 8 hours 5 minutes in black-and-white yawn-o-vision, that’s not much to write home about. Nor is the rest of the movie, from almost any popcorn-munching perspective you can think of. With

Emily Rhodes

Idolising Ida

Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old days’ of the publishing industry is palpable: a time when books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers, with beautiful or not-so-beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell … their contents, the magic words, their poetry and prose, were liquor, perfume, sex, and glory to their devotees. The halcyon days of print publishing were not, in fact, so very long ago, with the first e-reader going on sale only in 2004 and Amazon’s Kindle in 2007; it is astonishing that the digital revolution has

Kate Webb

The lonely struggle of Jude the obscure

Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist Hanya Yanagihara has announced a new shift in consciousness. Jude, the lead character in A Little Life, is known to his friends as the Postman, ‘post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past’. The obscurity of his origins (left at birth in a rubbish bin) and a childhood of horrific abuse mean he is determined to draw a veil over his past, making him the most mysterious of the four male New York friends at the heart of Yanagihara’s story. However, his condition is only an extreme — and negative — version of the

Sunday

Ella Whelan

The internet is eroding the presumption of innocence

Last week, New York magazine ran a front-cover photo of 35 of the 46 women who have accused actor Bill Cosby of sexual assault. The feature inside includes individual interviews with each woman, but argues that ‘the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience’. The collation of these women’s accusations follows intense public interest in Cosby’s alleged misconduct, triggered last year when the comedian Hannibal Buress declared ‘you raped women, Bill Cosby’ during a routine. The New York feature is not an attempt to bring Cosby to justice, or even to challenge the statute of limitations that impedes any potential legal

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Dedicated follower of fashion

Iris is a documentary portrait of Iris Apfel, the nonagenarian New York fashion icon. Nope, me neither, but that’s irrelevant, as all you truly need know is she is a joy, a wonder, and terrific, as is this film. It’s the final work of documentary film-maker Albert Maysles, who died last year, at 88, and although Iris obviously loves the camera, and plays to the camera, and it is often Iris doing Iris, as Iris does Iris so brilliantly, who cares? Also, you just can’t take your eyes off her. You can’t. The opening shots show Iris, who is 93, in her Park Avenue apartment, in all her glory. Accessories

Thursday

Philip Clark

The London ear

The opening bars of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony (1914) are scooped out from the gloopy bedrock of the city. Vaughan Williams was dredging through the same mud, silt, slime and ooze as those scene-setting paragraphs of Our Mutual Friend (1865), where Charles Dickens shows that the real glue binding his book together will be the River Thames. Dickens’s famed ‘boat of dirty and disreputable appearance’ berths Our Mutual Friend in the earth and experience of London. Similarly, Vaughan Williams’s cellos and double basses, which launch his symphony, plod out from the sludge of the river. But, by the time his bucolic Scherzo waddles into view, you could be

Vicky Ward

The rich are a different species

The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway through his brother’s eulogy and brazenly strolls down to the front pew, ignoring the scandalised glances. He’s late, a whisper spreads, because he had a meeting with director James Toback. Wait. James Toback? Lame! The hearse leaves, and the congregants assemble on the street. An attractive brunette in her late forties weeps desolately. Did she know the deceased well? Not at all: she has discovered that someone at the service walked off with her Christian Dior trench and left her with a shabbier coat from a chainstore. All this happened

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Thinking inside the box

Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question to put to a man who numbered Piet Mondrian, as well as other masters of modernism, among his acquaintance. But, characteristically, Cornell veered off at a tangent. ‘What’, he replied, ‘do you mean “my time”?’ In its way it’s a good response, as the exhibition at the Royal Academy, Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, makes clear. The subtitle of the show refers to travel in mental space. In mundane reality, Cornell (1903– 72) seldom left New York City, and never ventured further afield than Maine. But in his imagination, he journeyed across

John R. MacArthur

The man who wrecked New York

It is something of a mystery why the Bodley Head has decided to publish Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in Britain more than 40 years after the initial appearance in the US of this classic work — but better late than never. Caro’s remarkable portrait of New York City’s master planner Robert Moses merits publication in any language, at any moment in time. For its scope extends beyond Moses, fascinating though he was as a person, builder, wrecker, and manipulator of men and money. Caro’s ambition — in a journalistic sense equal to Moses’s ambition in architecture, park creation, and road and bridge construction — is greater than conventional biography.

Thursday

Taki

High life | 4 June 2015

The last week in Gotham was exceptional fun. I saw a Broadway play, Finding Neverland, compliments of the producer, my NBF Harvey Weinstein.It had me clapping with one hand due to the operation, and standing with the packed theatre for the ovation. Shows how much the critics who panned it know. The audience loved it, as did I. It’s an uplifting, wonderful play about J.M. Barrie and the children. Then there was the blind black guy in Brooklyn who told me, ‘You’re too pale for this neighbourhood.’ Go figure, as they say in that part of town. I’m always sad to leave the city, especially with the end of spring.

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Degrees of bureaucracy

It took Oxford 40 years to catch up with Cambridge in appointing a woman vice-chancellor, but Louise Richardson — ex-St Andrews, Irish, Catholic, terrorism expert — is to take over from the chemist Andrew Hamilton. He is leaving early to head New York University for an eye-watering £950,000 a year. His successor will inherit a more modest but still whopping £442,000 a year. That’s what happens when a university is run like a biggish corporation — the head is paid like a chief executive. (A professor gets around £65,000 a year: once, Louise Richardson would have been on something similar.) Chief of the problems Richardson has to get to grips

Thursday

Taki

High life | 21 May 2015

This is as good as it gets. A light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking north on a silent Park Avenue hoping to get into trouble. Fourteen thousand yellow taxis have turned Manhattan into a Bengali hellhole, blasting their horns non-stop, picking up or disgorging passengers in the middle of traffic-clogged streets, speeding and failing to yield to pedestrians as Big Bagel law requires. But on the Upper East Side, on a balmy evening, the yellow devils are causing havoc downtown, so I almost find myself singing in the rain as I head north far from the madding crowd.(Puns unintended.) Nicola’s is an Italian restaurant